He made it clear he wasn't forcing anyone to sign anything. They were welcome to find another open airfield if one still existed anywhere within reach tonight. Inside the aircraft, the flight crew watched their remaining fuel margin shrink with a kind of quiet dread that no amount of training fully prepared anyone for. Running fresh calculations every few minutes as the storm pushed them further off their original course. The equipment secured in the cargo hold represented months of engineering work and a substantial portion of the demonstration Kingsley needed to prove to federal evaluators the following morning, and losing it to a forced landing in open farmland would have been catastrophic in ways far beyond simple.
Dollars and cents. Every minute of hesitation on the ground in Dry Creek burned through options the crew no longer had the luxury of wasting. Delaney confirmed over the radio that operating conditions on runway two remained fully valid and safe for immediate use. The Kingsley pilot pressed urgently over the channel warning that fuel reserves were dropping into dangerous territory with every passing minute of hesitation. Board members listened through a speakerphone in the operations center, and Cassandra suddenly found herself trapped inside the exact ultimatum she had once used against Owen.
Sign now or lose everything that mattered. Cassandra tried one last time to talk him down, reminding him that $10 million was an enormous figure for a single night's use of a runway most people in the industry had never even heard of before this storm. Owen agreed that it was a large number, then reminded her calmly that her own company had spent the last several weeks trying to strip away his operating certificate, mislead federal regulators about his field's condition, and pressure the local bank into calling in his loan early, all. So she could acquire his father's life's work for the price of a vending machine snack. "The $10 million," he explained, "wasn't a runway fee so much as it was the cost of everything her company had already tried to take from him without paying for it at all." Somewhere behind.
Cassandra, a junior board member on the speaker phone muttered that the number, however uncomfort able, was still a fraction of what the company stood to lose if the contract collapsed entirely. Blythe Harrington's silence on the line spoke louder than any objection could have, a silence Cassandra understood as tacit permission to do whatever was necessary to save the flight, the contract, and by extension her own position at the company. She exhaled once, sharply, and told Owen to send the paperwork. Owen added three additional conditions before finalizing anything. Kingsley would formally withdraw every filing falsely claiming Rusk Field lacked operational capability.