37

“You safe, Sean?” Will asked. “Shouldn’t you—”

“I’m fine,” Sean said. “And no, I’m not leaving.”

“But Mom and Sarah are a mess, worrying—”

“They’d worry no matter what. I’ve got a job to do.”

Their phone call kept cutting in and out, due to the hurricane Sean said was blowing in. Each time it did, Will’s heart rate sped up. Sean always took risks . . . too many risks. But a hurricane?

And that wasn’t the only storm brewing. Everything was going to hit the fan at the next AF meeting. He’d know the results of that storm very fast, as soon as the meeting concluded.

But there was still another storm lurking in the background. If Will’s suspicions were true about the bombing, then more about AF might eventually come to light. However, unless the Polar Bear Bomber crawled out from whatever rock he was under and got captured or turned himself in, there might never be proof one way or the other. Still, Will’s gut told him he was on target.

But no reasoning changed the stark fact that Sean was doubly in harm’s way. Will couldn’t help one reason for that. The other, though . . .

It’s because of me that Sean is directly in the line of fire.

If Sandstrom indeed had hired a bomber to dress up as an eco-crazy and to bomb his own office building—just to turn public support his direction—what kind of lengths would the man go to in order to cover up anything that happened in the Arctic?

Suddenly Will felt sick. He’d learned the hard way that desperate people would do desperate things. The rich ones would never get their own hands dirty, but hired guns like Jason Carson had no conscience.

Sean’s irritated voice broke in. “Are you listening to me, Will?”

Will snapped his focus back to the phone call. “Sorry.”

“This is a bad one, and the captain says it’s almost certain to do some damage, if not cripple the oil platform on the surface.”

The Arctic Ocean was notorious for unpredictable, fast-moving hurricanes whose course couldn’t be charted as easily as those that swept through the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Hurricanes in the Arctic had never really been studied that much, largely because there weren’t very many people impacted by them.

“I just got a text from Elizabeth. She’s really worried,” Sean continued. “Something about methane mixing with the water. She didn’t fully explain. I could tell she was in a rush. Add that to the hurricane ripping through here and making the platform potentially shaky, and we might be in for a rough ride.”

This type of one-two punch was precisely what Will had warned the company of in his early memos about the perils of trying to drill in deep water in the Arctic before they’d perfected things like movable domes or platforms that could withstand unusual weather, ice, or windy conditions. But in the end, the board had made a decision, and AF moved into action.

An AF team had created a modern miracle of engineering—a new kind of platform that could drill through rock and handle crippling winter conditions at the same time. The combined subsea structure linked by graphene pillars to the platform at the surface was the combined work of can-do ex-NASA types and field-tested oil engineers.

But Will had worried and argued—until there was no more time or room for argument—that the platform simply might not be able to handle the subsea fracture and then still keep itself upright if a level 4 hurricane hit it.

He’d then called in a favor with a respected crew chief he knew. Adam Blunt had seen it all in his 30 years in the business—from the same sort of wildcatting days that Sandstrom liked to brag about until now, the heady days when the great oil companies straddled the world, influenced the rise and fall of governments, and settled the fate of compassionate, democratic rulers and despots alike.

Blunt had made his seasoned opinion clear. He concurred with Will. And he’d said that there was even further danger—of methane leaks and subsequent blowouts, like what had happened with the BP spill. If American Frontier guessed wrong about how much methane actually mixed in with the oil once they’d tapped the reservoir in the Arctic Ocean . . .

And my own brother is right there in the midst of the worst scenario I’d worried about.

When the BP crisis hit, people had tended to focus on the death of thousands of birds with oily feathers, or oil balls washing up on white beaches. But 11 people had died in the BP platform explosion.

His heart rate sped up. American Frontier was also gambling with all the people’s lives on the platform. But if pride won the coin toss and Sandstrom wouldn’t allow his people to move out, they’d be trapped.

Will understood the oil business—and the Worthington fortunes—had been built on exploration and risk. But his brother’s life wasn’t a risk he wanted to take.

“Sean, you’ve got to get out of there.”

“I know, but—”

The line went dead.