Death Wave

21

Damn it, I never should have left her behind.

Carolyn Howorth stood on the rampart of the tourist observation deck, precariously perched on the edge of the dizzying overlook at the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente. The crater wall fell away beneath her feet, a precipitous fall of over a mile, virtually straight down.

The caldera was a vast mountain ring more than four miles across. Despite what it looked like, Taburiente was not the result of some ancient, colossal volcanic explosion. The formation had begun as a shield volcano, some millions of years in the past, but water erosion had eventually carved it into its current shape. To the southwest, the caldera had been torn open by a river valley, the Barranco de las Augustias, a gap in the mountain wall leading to the Atlantic at the village of Puerto.

The crater-pocked length of the Cumbre Vieja began at the caldera’s rim on the far side from where she was standing and ran south from there. Lia was off that way, somewhere …

She was beginning to think Rubens and the Art Room had sent her up here as an exercise in busy-work, to keep her out of the way.

To keep her from trying to help Lia.

Carlylse was with her, leaning on the rail and chattering about … something, she wasn’t sure what.

“… and the Guanches are obviously descendents of the ancient inhabitants of Atlantis. They’re supposed to be related to the Berbers of North Africa, but lots of them had red or blond hair, you know. Of course, all the Guanches are gone now, extinct. The Spanish wiped them out, enslaving them or killing them with smallpox. The last holdout here on La Palma was King Tanausa, who retreated into the Taburiente Caldera in the early 1490s and turned it into an impregnable fortress. The Spanish got him by pretending to offer a truce, then ambushing him when he came out.”

CJ blinked. “What? Who are you talking about?”

“The Guanches … the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands.” He grinned at her. “Where were you?”

“Wishing I could get back there and help Lia.”

“Ah. Is Lia her real name?”

CJ wasn’t sure which of several aliases Lia had been using with this guy. She shrugged and said, “One of them.”

“Have you two been working together long?”

“Not really. But … she’s a good friend.”

Officially, CJ was still in training — she didn’t have a communications implant yet — but she’d worked closely enough with Lia and Charlie Dean and some of the others to become quite close to them. The camaraderie shared by people who worked in the field together could be incredibly intense.

Watching through binoculars as those guards had dragged Lia into a tent had been one of the hardest moments of her life.

Even harder had been moments later, when the Art Room called on her cell phone and ordered her to get herself and Carlylse out of there.

She’d followed orders, leading the American back down the blackcinder slope to the spot where they’d hidden their bikes. There was nothing she could do. She wasn’t even armed, but it hurt like hell to abandon her friend.

Safely back at the Hotel Sol later that evening, she’d had an argument with Rubens on the phone, an argument she lost. He ordered her to come up to La Roque de los Muchachos this morning and talk to the observatory’s public affairs people.

La Roque de los Muchachos — the Rock of the Boys — was a pinnacle of the Taburiente Caldera that was home to some fourteen observatories operated by various nations, a part of the European Northern Observatory. The observatory domes were scattered across the northwestern slope of the mountain just below the caldera’s rim, looking from here like so many bright white golf balls sitting on the outer slope. The sight had almost made her homesick for Menwith Hill and its cluster of gigantic, spherical white domes housing the ELINT and communications antennae.

Her orders were to talk to the person in charge of the scientific installations on the island, but that proved to be a wild-goose chase. She found a visitors center that supervised tours of the facility, but the observatory headquarters for the Instituto Astrofisica de Canarias, she was told, was located on Tenerife, another island in the Canaries some eighty miles to the southwest.

No one at La Roque de los Muchachos, apparently, knew anything about La Palma’s volcanos, or about a scientific institute blocking them off or drilling holes in them. The receptionist at the visitors center suggested she check with park headquarters, which was located in Santa Cruz, north of La Palma’s airport. A phone call to a number provided by the visitors center yielded a message in Spanish, telling her the park office was closed.

Dead end.

“You should try to relax, Ms. Howorth,” Carlylse told her. “Look at that view!”

Across the gulf of the caldera, an endless sea of white engulfed the eastern side of the island. These were the clouds coming up the ring-wall slopes and spilling over into the crater like a waterfall of white mist. The view was awe-inspiring, strikingly beautiful, a spectacular display of nature … and utterly useless to CJ at the moment.

“Relax, hell,” she told Carlylse.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he replied.

“Except watch you,” she said with disgust. The crash of Flight 12 had gone a long way toward proving that someone wanted Carlylse as dead as his coauthor. Rubens had told CJ not to let him out of her sight, and they’d ended up spending the night together in her hotel room, with him in the bed and her uncomfortably on the couch.

Maybe that was why she was feeling so cranky today; she hadn’t gotten much sleep. Carlylse snored.

After her futile questioning of the receptionist, she and Carlylse drove up here in a green Fiat Panda, parking at the overlook lot and coming, at Carlylse’s insistence, to the tourist observation deck. The overlook, arguably La Palma’s most popular tourist site, was fairly crowded, with several dozen tourists either on the sightseeing platform itself or on the path between the platform and the parking lot. She and Carlylse leaned against the railing side by side, watching the spectacular cloud-fall in the distance. Carlylse kept running on about his books on lost Atlantis, past and future, and didn’t seem to pick up on CJ’s broadly dropped hints that she would really rather have a bit of peace and quiet, time to think about what she should do next, about what Desk Three might let her try.

The problem was that her thoroughly old-school British upbringing demanded that she be polite to the twit, that she listen and be attentive, that she— oh, hell!

A dark, bearded man dressed like a tourist had just come up behind Carlylse, bumping against him sharply from behind, grabbing his belt, and lifting hard.

It happened in an instant; the attacker was bigger and taller than Carlylse, much bigger than CJ, likely outweighing her by eighty pounds.

CJ whirled to her right, her elbow coming up. Taller the man might be, but her elbow connected with his nose with a satisfying crunch. Carlylse’s attacker staggered back at the blow, still holding Carlylse’s belt, dragging him back a step from the precipice before releasing him. As nearby tourists turned to face the commotion, CJ pointed at the man and screamed in Spanish,

“He tried to push me over the edge!”

Several nearby men in the crowd began closing in on the attacker, who was holding his nose now, his face streaming blood. CJ grabbed Carlylse’s hand and ran, dragging him off the sightseeing platform and back up the path toward the car.

“He tried to push you over the edge?” Carlylse panted as they slammed the Panda’s doors.

She turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the parking space. “There were all those macho Spaniards around. I thought they’d be more likely to help a girl than you.”

“Good thinking.”

“It seemed—” She was interrupted by a loud crack and the thunk of metal striking metal. Thirty feet away, another bearded man was aiming a handgun at them.

“Get down!” CJ hit the accelerator and spun the wheel, slammed on the brakes, then put the car into drive and floored it once more, tires squealing. A second shot shattered the rear window in a spray of milky shards.

“He’s … he’s shooting at us!” Carlylse cried.

“No shit! What was your first clue?”

She turned left out of the parking lot and started down the hill. A glimpse in her rearview mirror showed the gunman sprinting for one of the parked cars.

This could get interesting. The observatory grounds were at the top of a long and zigzagging series of sharp switchbacks up the side of the mountain.

Coming up was the cylindrical Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, the Italian contribution to the ENO. A hairpin to the right took them past the telescope’s downhill side, between the Italian facility and the massive silver dome of the Gran Telescopio Canarias. CJ risked a look back over her shoulder. Other observatory domes were strung across the top of the ridge behind them; a single car, a blue Ford Mondeo, hurtled at reckless speed along the road in pursuit.

The road twisted back and forth down the face of the mountain. Ahead, it came to a T-intersection with the main highway. Left was LP-4, the way they’d come hours earlier, leading back to the western side of La Palma; right was LP-1032, which looped around the north side of Taburiente and down to the island’s east coast.

Which way? Both roads were treacherous chains of switchbacks down the mountain, but she’d been on the eastern road, didn’t know the western circuit at all. Hauling the wheel over, she blew through the stop sign and to the left. Another car coming up the hill swerved off the road, horn blaring.

“Never a cop when you need one,” she said conversationally. If she could attract the attention of a local guardia or Park Patrol vehicle …

Carlylse was clinging to the safety handle above the door with a white-knuckled grip. “My God, lady!”

“Would you rather they caught us?”

“I’d rather that you drove on the right side of the road!”

CJ swore at herself. In the excitement she’d reverted to her British driving habits, even though the Panda had a left-side steering wheel. She wrenched the car back to the right. “In a civilized country we drive on the left,” she said.

She wrenched the car around the next hairpin turn, still racing downhill. The vista ahead and to the left was magnificent, an unending expanse of blue-violet ocean beneath puffy white cumulus clouds and, seemingly directly below the left side of the road, the pine-tree-clad wrinkles of the mountain slope, gradually flattening as they reached out toward the coast. In her rearview, she caught a quick flash of the Ford as it negotiated a twist in the road several turns back.

Calling the Art Room would be useless. There was no help for her out here. Worse, the Ford Mondeo was a heavier, more powerful car than the little Fiat. That might be an advantage for her, since more mass meant the driver would have more trouble negotiating the turns at high speed down the mountain. On the other hand, it also meant the other driver could accelerate faster on the straight parts, and if he caught up with them, he would have little trouble ramming them from behind and plowing them off the side of the road.

It was a long way down, and their deaths would look like an accident.

The Ford was still far enough behind them, though, that it was only intermittently in view. When she couldn’t see it, thanks to intervening terrain, the other driver probably couldn’t see them. If she tried to race him all the way to the bottom of the hill, she would lose. If she was going to try to change the equation of the chase, she had to do something now.

Up ahead, she thought she saw a possibility.

She tromped down harder on the gas …

Charlie Dean sat in the cargo compartment of the big Marine Corps transport as it droned southwest across the ocean. Earplugs and his helmet held the thunder of the four big Allison turboprops at bay, and should have given him quiet enough to gather his thoughts — but the truth was he was exhausted and kept drifting off. He’d been on the go now for … how long? The last time he’d really slept had been on board the Lake Erie Saturday night, and reveille had sounded at 0600 Sunday. So thirty-some hours, depending on time zone differences.

He and Ilya had been grabbing catnaps on various aircraft since they’d flown off the

Constellation in a C-2 Greyhound last night after leaving the Yakutsk. The COD — for “carrier onboard delivery”—had flown them from the carrier group to Djibouti, then northwest up the Red Sea to Haifa. From there, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III had flown them the entire length of the Mediterranean, setting down at the naval air station at Rota at just past ten that morning, after over twelve hours in the air altogether. They’d gained a free hour flying west from Israel to Spain; they would gain another hour flying to the Canary Islands, which were on Greenwich Mean Time.

Now they were airborne again, an hour out of Rota on board the big C-130 Hercules. They would reach the La Palma drop zone at 1215, local time.

How he was supposed to conduct a parachute drop into enemy territory and carry out a mission on next to no sleep was something of a mystery to Dean — but he knew he would do it. He had to.

The bastards had Lia.

Rubens had filled him and Akulinin in during the COD flight north from Djibouti last night. The missing suitcase nukes had almost certainly been flown out of Karachi on board a Pakistan International Airlines cargo flight which had reached Mogador Airport in Morocco sometime on Saturday. From there, privately chartered helicopters had probably flown them out to La Palma, some 460 miles farther to the southwest. The JeM terrorist leader called the Jackal was drilling boreholes down the throats of volcanos on La Palma. Detonate ten small nuclear warheads buried deep beneath the crater-pocked ridge of the Cumbre Vieja, and there was a chance — according to some — that the resultant tidal wave would scour the eastern seaboard from Canada to Brazil.

“Most scientists say that won’t happen,” Rubens had told him as the Greyhound droned through the night above the Red Sea, “but, then, no one’s ever tried setting off nuclear warheads inside a string of volcanos to see what will happen. If those blasts serve as a trigger, I’m told they might penetrate the magma chamber beneath the island and generate a megatsunami. Even if they don’t, thousands of people are at risk on La Palma itself.”

Among those thousands, Rubens had told him, was Lia.

Dean and Lia had kept their relationship discreet over the years, but he knew that Rubens was aware of it, knew he might have guessed, at least, that they were lovers. Such relationships among field officers weren’t forbidden, exactly, but neither were they encouraged.

Dean was surprised — and pleased — that Rubens had brought him in on the ad hoc op to rescue Lia. Dean hadn’t even known that Lia was on La Palma. Rubens could easily have brought him back to Fort Meade and broken the news to him then.

Then again, maybe Rubens figured that if he did that, Dean would take the Puzzle Palace apart chip by chip.

Akulinin said something, shouting to be heard over the engine roar. Dean still couldn’t hear. He removed his helmet and pulled out an earplug. “What?”

“I said … we’ll get her!”

So Akulinin knew as well. That figured. Dean had kept quiet about his liaison with the Alekseyevna woman.

“I know,” Dean shouted back.

They were fitted out for a specops HALO jump — Gore-Tex jump suits and gloves, oxygen tanks and masks, helmets, MA2-30 altimeter, and MC-5 Ram Air Parachutes. Dean carried an M4A1 close-quarters battle weapon with its SOPMOD kit strapped to his right leg. On his left leg was a Marine-modified laptop computer, with a solid-state hard drive that would survive a slam into the ground, or almost anything else short of a direct hit by a 9 mm round. All told, he was lugging nearly eighty extra pounds of gear, including ammo, most of it in a release bag strapped to his harness. It made moving awkward, so the two and a half hours on board the Herky Bird would be spent sitting on the hard, narrow fold-up seat.

Dean glanced at the others in their team — twenty Marines from FORECON, the 2nd Reconnaisance Battalion of the 2nd Marine Division, deployed out of Camp Lejeune. They’d flown off the USS Iwo Jima somewhere in the mid-Atlantic yesterday and touched down in Rota hours ahead of Dean and Akulinin. Two Marines would approach each of ten volcanic craters; Dean and Akulinin would be traveling with Gunnery Sergeant Rodriguez and Sergeant Dulaney to the southernmost of the calderas.

“Remember,” Rubens had told Dean as they approached Rota earlier. “You get to the crater, you look around, but you will not attack, and you will not attempt to rescue Ms. DeFrancesca until you get specific word from me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Charlie Dean had said — but he hadn’t understood, not really.

“If you go into that crater too soon,” Rubens had gone on, “you could spook the bad guys, make them run or, worse, trigger those nukes prematurely. We don’t want that to happen.”

“No, sir.”

“Those Recon Marines will be there to help play this game out in any of several ways, depending on what goes down. They can lasertag the drilling rigs for a smart-bomb strike. They can pin down the enemy while a larger Marine force gets ashore. Or they can spot for air assets or artillery. We’re not sure yet just what we’re going to be able to bring in.”

Which meant that they were making this op-plan up as they went along, still unsure of presidential support, unsure even if they would be allowed to deploy a small, surgical strike.

A helluva note. One thing was certain, though. He was going to go in and get Lia, one way or another.

And not even nuclear-armed terrorists were going to stop him.

Ahead lay the tree line. The upper reaches of the Caldera de Taburiente were naked and exposed, but at around two thousand meters altitude and below, the slope became thickly forested, mostly with growths of weirdly surreal Canary Island Pine. CJ took another look over her shoulder. The pursuing blue Ford was hidden for the moment by the hillside.

On the way up this road earlier that morning, she’d noticed that many of the switchbacks were short-circuited by dirt tracks. Evidently, tourists with Jeeps or other four-wheel-drive vehicles liked to take short cuts. Just where LP-4 entered the tree line, one of these tracks left the right side of the road and plunged down a precipitous embankment, cutting a straight but terrifying path down the slope to connect with the lower arm of the switchback.

Howorth slowed slightly, then turned the wheel, swerving off the paved road.

“What the fuck!” Carlylse screamed. The Panda lurched and jounced over eroded ditches in the track, slowing now until it was inching ahead and down.

The track ran at about a forty-five-degree slope, steep enough that in moments the Panda was well below the edge of the upper arm of the switchback and out of sight of the road. Below, the lower bend in the road ran along the base of the track. CJ edged forward enough to be sure she was out of the line of sight of a driver coming down the road above, and too high up to be seen by a driver around the sharp bend below. A clump of oddly shaped pine trees and several boulders as big as houses provided some additional cover. She was tempted to try to tuck in behind the boulders but decided against that. The ground dropped away in a sheer cliff to the left, near the boulders, and it would be all too easy to strand the Panda — which, unlike the vehicles that had made this track, did not have four-wheel drive. Her biggest worry was that leaving the paved road had raised a considerable cloud of dust. It was possible that the assassin would see it and figure out what had happened.

It was too late to back out now, even if she could back up that slope. She eased the little two-door vehicle to a stop, pulled up the parking brake, and held the handle tightly as she gingerly took her foot from the brake pedal on the floor.

The car rocked slightly but then held firm.

“You … you’re hoping they go past us?”

“They shouldn’t be able to see us here,” she told him, “but just in case, watch out the back, will you?”

“For what?”

“A blue Ford. A man coming down that hill with a gun.”

Actually, that last wouldn’t be so bad. If the assassin got out of his car to come down the track, she could roll forward and gain some ground while he scrambled back to the car. But she was hoping—

“There he is!”

“Where?”

Carlylse pointed past her nose, out the left side of the car. She turned her head and glimpsed the blue car flickering intermittently beyond the pines and at the bottom of the escarpment. A moment later, the Ford rounded the last bend and raced past the dirt track below them, accelerating hard out of the turn.

“He didn’t see us!” Carlylse said.

“No — but we’ll still wait for a moment.” Much depended on how observant the assassin was. If he got a clear look at the road in front of him and realized the Panda had vanished, he might put two and two together, turn around, and come back up the hill after it.

A minute passed … and then another. CJ put her foot on the brake pedal again and slowly eased off on the parking brake. Carefully, carefully, she started the Panda rolling forward. Rocks skidded and slipped beneath the tires; the car bounced hard and started moving faster than she wanted … but then they bottomed hard on the narrow road shoulder below, turned left, and began driving up the hill, headed back toward the observatory entrance.

Ten minutes later, they passed the entrance and started descending once more, now on LP-1032, heading toward the east coast. On the maps she’d seen, the road in this direction was even steeper and more tortuous than the other, but eventually it would bring them out at the coast road just north of Santa Cruz.

After that? She wasn’t sure.

She was sure that more than anything else, she wanted to get Carlylse safely onto a plane and off this damned island.

She reached for her cell phone.

They left Lia tied to the folding metal chair all night, releasing her once in the morning to use the facilities — a bright blue portable construction john positioned a few yards away from the tents. There was nothing in the narrow plastic box that would serve as a weapon, no pieces of wire that she could hide as a lockpick for later, no odds and ends with which she could MacGyver her way out. She stepped out of the john; they led her back to the tent and again handcuffed her before tying her to the chair.

Later, they’d brought her a plate of scrambled eggs and watched her while she ate. At least they weren’t going to let her starve.

“What time is it?” she murmured. The two guards were still there, sitting on chairs on the far side of the tent, watching. Always watching. Every few hours they were replaced by two others.

“Just past twelve, where you are,” Marie Telach whispered in her ear. Back at the Art Room, it would be five hours earlier — about seven in the morning.

She wondered if Charlie was still in south Asia, or if he’d wrapped up his part of the op and flown home.

The interior of the tent was stiflingly hot, with the tropical sun beating down from directly overhead. Would they give her water if she asked for it?

With startling suddenness, Feng threw back the tent flap and barked something in Arabic at the two. They leaped to their feet, slung their weapons and hurried to untie her.

“He told them to take you to the tube,” another voice said in Lia’s ear. Dr. Fahd al-Naimi was one of Desk Three’s language specialists, fluent in both Arabic and Urdu.

Still handcuffed, she was led out of the tent and into the dazzling midday sun.

The small tent city was set up on the floor of the higher and shallower of the two partially merged craters. Walking her between them, the guards led her along a well-worn footpath through cinders and red sand, taking her over a low lip, then down a much steeper path into the deeper, northern crater. The drill was still in operation — she’d heard its grinding all through the long night, punctuated by the clang and clash of metal when the workers swapped out a cutting head or added more drill pipe.

At the floor of the deeper crater, she was led around to the right. In front of her, a round and very black opening gaped in the rock, a tunnel entrance leading down into the rock beneath the higher, southern caldera.

“They’re taking me into a cave or tunnel of some sort,” she murmured. “South wall of the northern crater.”

“Quiet, whore,” one of her captors growled. “You talk all you want … later.”

“We copy you, Lia,” Marie whispered. “They’re taking you into a tunnel entrance near the drilling rig in the deeper crater.”

They walked her out of the sun and into deep shade. The difference in temperature was startling, and she suppressed a small shiver.

“The island is riddled with tunnels and ancient lava tubes,” Marie continued, talking, perhaps, just to reassure Lia, to maintain contact with her. “Up in the northern part of the island, they use them to channel rainwater down to—”

Marie’s voice faltered, then broke off. Lia caught a few garbled words after that, and then there was nothing but silence.

The walls of the cave were blocking the signals between her belt antenna and the NSA communications satellite overhead.

Lia hadn’t realized how much comfort she’d been drawing from the periodic, reassuring voices from the Art Room. As the guards led her deeper into the cool and echoing stone throat of the tunnel, Lia DeFrancesca felt more alone than she’d ever felt before in her life.