Chapter 4 - The Northern Trajectory
Twenty-four hours later, Dubai was a distant, burning memory.
Elias sat in the co-pilot seat of a heavily modified, long-range Gulfstream jet, watching the endless expanse of the Arctic Ocean appear on the horizon. The sky was a bruised purple, heavy with the promise of a violent storm.
Next to him sat Dr. Elena Rostova. She was a glaciologist, a brilliant and fiercely uncompromising scientist that Magnus had assigned to the mission. She wore a thick wool sweater, her dark hair pulled back into a severe braid, and she had spent the entire flight analyzing the thermal data from the Bugatti attack.
"It’s a parasitic endothermic reaction," Elena said, pointing a slender finger at the tablet screen. "The organism doesn't freeze the water in the human body; it structurally rewrites the molecular bonds of the blood. It turns the victim's circulatory system into a super-cooled lattice. It essentially sculpts them into ice from the inside out."
"How do you stop something that eats heat?" Elias asked, checking the action on his sidearm for the fifth time.
"You can't burn it," Elena replied grimly. "Fire only feeds it. To kill an endothermic parasite, you have to overload it. Give it more thermal energy than its cellular structure can contain until it bursts. But we don't have the equipment for that. Our mission is to reach the Bering Station, dive into the trench, and retrieve the primary core sample before Project Leviathan can extract the rest of the colony."
"A smash and grab at the bottom of the ocean," Elias muttered, looking out the window. "What could possibly go wrong?"
May you like
The jet began its descent, banking sharply toward a jagged, ice-covered peak jutting out of the freezing ocean. Hidden beneath the snow was Outpost Echo, a clandestine deep-sea launch facility built into the side of a glacier.
As the landing gear touched down on the reinforced ice runway, Elias felt a deep, primal chill settle in his bones. He was a man who thrived in the heat of combat, in the deserts of the Middle East, in the concrete jungles of the city. Down here, in the eternal white, he was entirely out of his element. And the ice was waiting.
