African Ice
Authors: Jeff Buick
LETHAL DOSE
“Full of action and danger . . . The author keeps the reader turning the pages long into the night.”
âDetective Mystery Stories
“Lethal Dose
is a fast-paced, energetic, and relevant read.”
âFresh Fiction
“. . . a thought-provoking, suspense-filled novel.”
âThe Midwest Book Review
“Buick has created an intense, gut-twisting thriller with his brilliant debut. With characters modeled from real-life headlines, he gives the book depth and a life of its own.”
âThe Best Reviews
A scream from behind them, deep in the brush, stopped McNeil mid-sentence. With a reflexive motion, a gun appeared in his hand. He held the other up to silence the porters. The scream came again, this time the location more identifiable. McNeil counted the porters and silently indicated to Sam that one was missing. He held up his fist, a sign for them to stay put, and moved stealthily into the underbrush. All was quiet for a minute, then he reappeared with a shaking porter in tow. He motioned for Sam to follow him.
“I don't think you're going to like this,” he said. They broke into a small clearing and Sam gasped, horrified. Before her lay a massacre. Skulls littered the clearing, at least fifteen, perhaps more. Bones, gnawed on by jungle carnivores and partially covered with lichens, interspersed the hollow skulls. McNeil knelt down and picked up a skull, then another, and another. He looked back at Sam and stuck his finger through a round hole in one of the skulls. A bullet hole.
“They were executed,” he said. “Each one shot in the head once.” He gingerly held up a long bone with a loop of nylon rope hanging off it. “Their hands were tied. They didn't stand a chance.”
He kicked at something with the toe of his boot, then bent down and retrieved the object from the moss. He held it out to her. “Do you know what this is?”
“Yes, of course. It's a geological hammer. Standard gear for a field geologist. We all carry them.” She stopped and stared at him. “It's them, isn't it?”
He nodded. “It's the expedition that went in a couple of months ago. The bones are reasonably fresh.”
Leisure
books by Jeff Buick:
LETHAL DOSE
BLOODLINE
DORCHESTER PUBLISHING
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2006 by Jeff Buick
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Trade ISBN: 978-1-4285-1809-4
E-book ISBN: 978-1-4285-0114-0
First Dorchester Publishing, Co., Inc. edition: April 2006
The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us online at
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Dianne Young
A woman of incredible
courage and strength and moral character.
Who tracked the silverback gorillas through the
darkest and most dangerous jungles of the
Ruwenzori Mountains in Africa
.
NE
Springtime in New York City.
The promise of summer just around the corner. Winter laid to rest for another year. For Samantha Carlson, spring meant New York at its finest. Trees sprouting green, their new leaves softening the harsh lines of the apartment and office buildings that surrounded Central Park. And the early-morning smells. Pretzels, freshly brewed coffee, and dough rising in the bakeries. And with the longer days came mild temperatures. When the mercury rose to a sensible level, Samantha dug her jogging shoes out and brought them back into active duty. Today was day one of the new year.
She entered Central Park from East Sixtieth Street and began to runâslowly at first, her long blond hair swaying in the breezeâthen faster as she settled into a rhythm. She had the park mostly to herself, with only a few other intrepid souls braving the early-morning chill. She checked her watch as she ranâsix minutes after five. Her breath misted as she exhaled, then disappeared behind her. She kept an even pace for the better part of twenty minutes.
She rounded the pond and cut north until she hit the Transverse. Then east toward the park boundary. She picked up the pace as Fifth Avenue came into view, and then slowed to a marginal jog as she hit the sidewalk. By the time Samantha reached her apartment building on East Sixty-third, she was breathing normally. The doorman eased the door open as she approached. She slid effortlessly through, and made for the elevators.
“Morning, Miss Carlson,” the building employee said as she passed.
She turned, still moving. “Ernie, I keep telling you, it's Samantha.”
“Yes, ma'am.” He smiled. They had had this same conversation at least two hundred times. There was no way he would ever call her by her first name. They both knew it. She disappeared into the elevator, and he looked back to the empty street.
The elevator slid open on the eighteenth floor, and Sam exited into the deserted hallway. Her apartment was the third on the left. She unlocked the door and let herself in. She added a bit more hot water to her shower than usual, to take off the chill from her jog. Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom, housecoat on, hair wrapped in a white towel. She stared at the telephone for a moment, then checked her watch.
Six twenty-four, and her voice-mail light was flashing. Someone had called while she was in the shower. Early for a call, she thought. She punched in her code and hit the speakerphone button. A baritone voice enveloped the room.
“This is Patrick Kerrigan calling for Samantha Carlson. Please call me at my office when you get this message. The number isâ”
She grabbed a notepad from the end table and jotted down the number. It was local, somewhere in Manhattan. She considered calling it immediately, to see if he was actually up and at work yet, then changed her mind. The coffee was brewed, and Samantha settled into her favorite couch with the daily
Times.
She skimmed the headlines, then flipped to the business section. The Dow-Jones was up, the Nasdaq was up, but the American dollar was down against the euro. She shrugged, and wondered why she bothered; economics baffled her.
She finished her coffee and stretched. Across the room, a bank of glass overlooked Central Park. She lifted herself off the couch, moved to the windows, slid open the door, and walked out onto the balcony. The view was awesome. She found herself thinking about where she was in her life. For some reason, staring out over the park was a catalyst that triggered memories, and the balcony had become her place for quiet reflection. At thirty-two years old, she held a doctorate in geologyâa piece of paper she had used to carve out a remarkable career. Her exploits in some of the most dangerous countries on the planet had earned her the reputation as the female Indiana Jones of the Geological Society. She was no stranger to the ice floes of the Canadian arctic or the steaming rain forests that bordered the Amazon River. Her trips to Africa were too many and too varied to remember. The newspapers and television stations were quick to run a story if it involved Samantha Carlson hunting down a new geological find. She was attractive, athletic, intelligent and accomplished. She was newsworthy.
Her love-hate relationship with the media had started three years ago, when she had discovered a new anticline loaded with oil in northern Texas. The skeptics insisted that the area had been exploited and a large find was impossible. She had responded by throwing the algorithm for her computer program on the table, and letting it go public. The program, she contended, was the crux of her discovery. It allowed the previously unnoticed bulge to be seen through geophysics. She recommended they punch an eight-thousand-foot hole in the ground, and they did.
The anomaly gave way to three million barrels of light Texas crude. Two million dollars to drill the well and almost two hundred million in return. The bonus they had lavished on her had paid for half the penthouse in which she now stood. She winced as she thought about where the other half had come from.
Her parents' estate. It was almost two years to the day since their plane had crashed into the sea just after liftoff from Casablanca. They had been en route to London, to meet her and spend a week traveling through Europe. The news had devastated her. Her mother and father had been young, in their early fifties, and in excellent health. She had never entertained the thought that they wouldn't be there, and the void their deaths left was still unfilled. Her mind relived the memorial service, and once the all-too-familiar tape played through, she let it go.
She'd tried to stop the images for the first year, but her subconscious was too strong. The sight of the two coffins, side by side, being lowered into the ground was indelibly etched into her mind. She watched as the two handfuls of dirt left her hand and splayed across the tops of the coffins as they sat beneath ground level. Empty caskets, lined with a few trinkets and pictures of her with her parents, their bodies never found. She closed her eyes and the picture stopped.