Marco Alvarez: White Silence
Chapter 1 — Preflight
The cold bit at Marco Alvarez’s fingers, even through the gloves.
He cursed under his breath as he zipped up the flight suit and pulled the hood tighter around his ears. It was 06:47 local time at Teniente Rodolfo Marsh Martin Base, and the Antarctic sky was still an iron-gray bruise.
He crossed the snow-dusted tarmac to his Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, parked just beside the wind shelter. The plane looked small and solitary in the endless white, its engine cowling frostbitten, but faithful. Just like him.
Inside the mission office, the base’s senior meteorologist, a Chilean lieutenant named Ramírez, looked up from his screen.
“Visibility’s holding,” Ramírez said, sipping from a chipped mug. “Low winds. Not much shear. You’ve got a clean window until 14:00. Then it drops off hard.”
Marco nodded. “Time to Marambio?”
“One hour, twenty. If you don’t dawdle.”
He didn’t plan to.
Marco walked back out to the hangar, where two silhouettes waited by the cargo sled: Dr. Javier Ortega, a glaciologist with a dry wit and perpetually fogged-up glasses, and Dr. Lena Moretti, a volcanologist with a sharp tongue and a sharper sense of direction.
“Hope you fly better than you talk,” she said as he approached.
“I hope your equipment doesn’t weigh more than your ego,” Marco replied.
Their crates were already labeled: seismographs, gas sensors, ice core storage, and something heavier Marco wasn’t allowed to ask about.
The flight plan had already been filed an hour ago with SCRM Operations, and confirmation had come through from Marambio (SAWB). Fuel tanks topped. Emergency beacons double-checked. And inside his cockpit bag, tucked between the maps and satellite phone, sat the .40-caliber pistol he never logged on the manifest.
Just in case.
To be continued…
(if you like..
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