Cold War - Jerome Preisler [133]
Nimec nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’d be an equal disadvantage. The other side would run into the same complications.”
She shook her head. “Still . . .”
“I’m no world-beater,” Nimec said. “I wouldn’t take anybody out there to the Valleys without a solid plan.”
“I’m not implying that. I trust you. But it’s my job to measure the risks. Make the final decision. Nobody else can do it. I can’t unload the responsibility. I own it. . . .”
She trailed off, her features tight with concentration.
Nimec watched her a moment. Then he stepped away from the map and softly rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Meg, listen,” he said. “One thing I learned from the boss . . . from Gord . . . is that part of owning it is knowing when to trust somebody enough to let go.”
Silence in the room.
Megan sat with her face turned up toward Nimec’s as that silence spooled out between them like an invisible thread. Then she took a deep breath, seemed to hold it a moment, and released a long, deep sigh.
Nimec could feel her muscles loosen under his palm.
“You said you’ve come up with a plan?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Not me.”
She looked at him.
“Who?” she said.
Waylon thumbed his chest, moved his shaved head up and down in a single nod.
“You,” she said.
He nodded again, his long-sword earrings gleaming softly under the fluorescent lights.
Megan half smiled.
“Tell it to me, Ron,” she said.
“Sure,” he said, “I was just waiting for you to ask.”
And then he told her.
Bull Pass
Burkhart did not decide upon a conclusive plan of action until several hours after Granger failed to report—convincing him the pilot’s true failure was more critical than that.
The plan’s crucial elements, however, had germinated in his mind much earlier. In fact, its rough contours had emerged after his return to Bull Pass. He had known that even Granger’s success—his elimination of UpLink’s head of security—would only forestall the inevitable.
Looking backward, Burkhart could see the road to his fall so clearly. With all veils of conceit and ambition lifted from his eyes, now he could see. The destruction of UpLink’s robotic probe, his taking of its recovery team, his exposed sabotage attempt and the bloodletting that followed, and at last, his hastily necessitated reliance on Granger to do what Burkhart had recognized was far beyond the pilot’s competence . . . from the day he’d set foot on that road, and perhaps onto the many forking junctures he had walked along the way, it now seemed there had been something almost deterministic about where he was headed.
Gabriel Morgan was dead. The Albedo Consortium’s vast and elaborate underpinnings were on the verge of complete breakdown, a thunderous crash that would send legal and political ground quakes through scores of nations.
What options remained before him then? What roads on which to push toward success . . . or if not that, then some little measure of self-redemption? There was no way to erase—or substantially reduce—the evidence of the uranium digging and transshipping operation in whatever scant time was left to him. Not even if the mines were razed would that evidence be concealed for long. He could, perhaps, physically remove himself from it, arrange to be carried off in a small plane from one of the South American gateways . . . but that would mean abandoning all or most of his men.
They were men who had fought bravely beside him. Men who had been loyal and true to him in the darkest face of his own failure.
He would not do it.
Would not desert them.
Deep beneath the frozen earth, Burkhart had decided to make his stand in the pass above, and hold the high ground where he was certain the enemy would show his own resolute face.
Cold Corners Base
“These ATVs were shipped from Kaliningrad a few months back, when they ordered and got themselves updated models,” Waylon was saying. “They’re two-passenger, fully automatic, and have noise-dampened engines. Our field researchers love