Deep Fire Rising

ABOARD THE PETROMAX ANGEL EIGHTEEN MILES EAST OF LA PALMA

They’d come under the cover of the eruption and storm on a sleek powerboat they’d stolen in Santa Cruz. Luc had brought only three men with him, but he hadn’t needed more. The Angel carried a skeleton complement of twenty-five, and only a handful of others were aboard, including Jim McKenzie and his assistant, Ken Bowers, both of whom were armed, both of whom were part of the Order.

Trying to reach the service boat had been a desperate gamble, a last role of the dice for Luc Nguyen. With the Order’s sanctuary in ruin and the oracle destroyed, his only hope of achieving anything was to see the Cumbre Vieja destroy much of the civilized world and hope the Order’s well-protected financial resources would give him power to rule in the chaos to follow.

It had taken just a few moments to hijack the Petromax Angel. As soon as they tied up to the rig tender, one man had gone to the bridge, another to the engine room, and the third scoured the crew accommodations, herding everyone he found to the mess hall, where technicians from the Sea Surveyor were already being guarded on Mercer’s orders. Luc had been able to secure the deck spaces with help from Jim and Ken.

They’d been too late to prevent Mercer from diving with the weapon, although Jim had been confident the damage he’d caused to his NewtSuit would prevent him from even reaching much past where the ROV was blocking the tunnel.

So it came as a numbing surprise when Mercer had radioed that he was on the end of the towline Luc’s soldier had started reeling up from the bottom. No sooner had the call come through than Charlie Williams, pale and still weak, staggered into the control van. The Order soldier who’d rounded up the crew had left him unconscious in his cabin. He raged at Ken Bowers, accusing him of attempted murder for smashing a wrench over his head. Jim had remained calm, coaxing Mercer to the surface so they could use his ADS to retrieve the bomb and at the same time trying to maintain his façade of innocence.

It all fell apart when Spirit realized that Jim had personally vouched for Bowers. They were on deck then, waiting for Mercer to be hauled over the rail. As soon as Jim knew they had the suit, he’d ended C.W.’s rants with the pistol he’d kept with him since he first left California on the Sea Surveyor.

Now Mercer was gone, pushed over the side by Spirit in her last act of defiance. All that remained for the surviving members of the Order was to run and hope the nuclear bomb failed to prevent the catastrophe.

Luc, Jim McKenzie and Tisa stayed in the confines of the control van as the workboat raced from the weapon’s epicenter. Jim maintained contact with the navy and fed bogus updates to Admiral Lasko, buying them the time they needed. Tisa hadn’t said a word since Mercer fell from the stern and made no protests when her brother tried to console her by touching her hair or her shoulder or hip. Her only movements were to gently rub the place where once she wore the watch he had given her.

“How far have we come?” Luc asked.

McKenzie checked the GPS readout on one of the multiple computer screens. “Almost twenty miles.”

“Is that far enough?”

“To avoid the fallout, yes, but we need to keep going. There’s going to be a pretty big wave following the blast and we’re still inside the navy quarantine zone. Once we make it to the nearby island of La Gomera, we’ll hide there until things calm down. We still have two weeks to make our escape if the bomb fails and the main eruption splits La Palma.”

“How much more time?”

“I estimate ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Do you think they will ever stop hunting you?” Tisa asked, breaking her hour-long silence.

“They don’t know we’re running,” Jim countered. “They don’t know they have to hunt us.”

Luc smiled at her. “My dear sister can speak after all. I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

“I doubt that. I think you feed off destruction. You need it the way others need love.”

“I need love too, you know.”

“And even that is something you’ve managed to pervert.”

Jim shifted in his padded seat. He’d known of Luc Nguyen’s incestuous feelings toward his sister and the thought made him uncomfortable.

“Not pervert, Tisa. Purify. Think of it. The two children of the Order’s last lama. Think what we could create.”

“A monster for the monstrous new world you want to build on the ashes of the old.”

He looked at her sadly, but also with the knowledge that he would have what he wanted.

Out of nowhere, the thunderous roar of a helicopter shattered the relative quiet of the control van. Jim launched himself out of his chair and looked out the open container doors. A gray SH-60 Seahawk hovered over the Angel’s fantail. Its side door was open and a soldier covered the workboat’s stern deck with an M-16. Behind him was the shadowy outline of another man. McKenzie was dumbstruck when the chopper turned slightly and the shadow passed. The other man was Philip Mercer.

Mercer saw Jim McKenzie standing just outside the container box, tapped the PJ on the shoulder and pointed. The M-16 spat and bullets sparked across the ship’s steel deck.

Jim dove back into the van. “It’s Mercer!”

“I told you they’d hunt you down.” Tisa never doubted that Mercer would come back for her.

Luc glanced out of the container and was driven back by fire from the Seahawk. He grabbed a walkie-talkie from his shirt pocket. “Everyone, get on deck! We’re under attack.” He checked the holster around his waist and racked a round in the chamber of the machine pistol he’d brought. As soon as his men appeared, they’d shoot the chopper from the sky.

He looked out again. The American helicopter remained over the stern, flying sideways so the gunman in the doorframe could cover the entire aft of the service boat.

“Paul, Pran, where are you?” he radioed.

“I’m on the bridge,” Paul Thierry replied. He was a boyhood friend from Paris who’d gone to Rinpoche-La with Luc when he’d returned to his father’s side. “As soon as I run to the wing I will have them.”

“I’ve just reached an exterior door on the main deck of the superstructure,” Pran, a Vietnamese cousin, answered. “I’m ready.”

“Gerhard?”

The young German had been recruited into the Order while in Nepal seeking life’s answers among the mountains and the opium. “On the port side making my way aft. A lifeboat is blocking their view. Give me a moment longer. Ja, okay, I am ready.”

“On my mark we all fire at once.” Luc jacked the slide again, mistakenly ejecting a live round. Tisa smirked at his nervousness.

“Now!”

He rounded the corner of the container again and fired as soon as his rifle barrel was clear. He’d cooked off half a magazine before realizing the helicopter had peeled off and paced the workboat fifty yards to starboard. “Damn it. Hold your fire. Wait until they return.”

From cover behind the drum of tow cable Mercer watched Luc shouting into the walkie-talkie. He’d leapt from the helicopter to the Angel in the few seconds between Jim’s frantic retreat into the container and the first time Luc Nguyen surveyed the scene. He cradled the second M-16 carried on the Seahawk and two spare magazines. He had no idea how many men Luc had brought.

When Luc gave the order to fire, Mercer counted four separate muzzle flashes: Luc’s, a gunman on the bridge wing, another on the starboard-side main deck near the superstructure and the fourth one deck up hiding behind the port-side lifeboat. He called in their positions with the tactical radio the PJ had given him.

“I can take the guy on the bridge wing even if he ducks inside. The guy by the container’s just going to hide again. Same with the guy at the door into the superstructure. I advise you take the one by the lifeboat. We’ll come in from the bow.”

“Affirmative.”

“Beginning our run, now. Hot guns!”

Mercer paused a beat as the chopper dove in on the workboat. As soon as the PJ opened up and Luc vanished into the van, Mercer rose from his position and dashed forward to get a better angle on the gunman under the port-side lifeboat. The man had spun so he could watch the helo rake the opposite side of the ship, concentrating its fire on the bridge.

Just as the Seahawk shot along the length of the vessel, breaking wide in case Luc or Pran counterfired, Mercer put two rounds into the back of Gerhard’s head. The German pitched over the rail, hit the top of the main deck railing and tumbled into the water. Mercer reached cover beside the container they’d used to store the NewtSuits.

“One down,” Mercer reported.

“Call it two,” the parajumper corrected. “And we’ve got six minutes.”

Mercer looked at his watch. The nuke.

“Roger. Give me cover fire on the control van. I need to reach the superstructure.”

“You got it.”

The chopper wheeled again and came back at the Angel, carefully aimed shots plinking around the container, sparking off the roof and keeping those inside pinned.

Mercer raced forward, keeping to the port side of the ship, and found an open hatchway. He could see clear across the ship and hoped to have outflanked the third gunman, but the man had changed positions. Instead of hunting the soldier, Mercer went for the mess hall. The door had been secured with a chain around a standpipe. He shot off the padlock and whirled, making sure the three-round burst hadn’t drawn the missing gunman.

The door to the mess flew open. The first man out was the third officer, Seamus Rourke. “Mercer! What the hell is going on?”

“No time. The bomb goes off in four minutes. The men who took over your ship stupidly headed due east. You have to turn us about. When this side of the island collapses it’s going to produce some monster waves and we’re right in their path. If we’re not facing them, we don’t have a chance.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“There are two men outside with machine pistols. One in the control van. I don’t know where the other is. Also, Jim McKenzie is part of the hijacking and I suspect his assistant is too.”

“Gawd.”

“I need volunteers to distract them.”

“I’ll get one of the lads to handle the ship. Oy, mates,” he called into the mess. “We need a hand getting this scum off our boat. Who’s with me?”

A dozen voices joined in a resounding chorus of rebellion.

Mercer led them back out the way he’d come. There was still no sign of the third gunman. “Seahawk, this is Mercer. What’s happening?”

“No movement,” the pilot reported. “The container doors are closed. The jumper saw at least three people inside. One he swears is the woman you told us about.”

Mercer wasn’t surprised. Luc would want to keep his sister close. The third person was Jim, so that meant Ken Bowers was still lurking around too. “Roger. Keep them pinned. I just released the crew. A helmsman is going to turn the ship around to face the blast. The rest are with me. We have to flush out the third soldier and I believe one more hijacker who was already on the ship.”

“Just so you know, we’re down to our last two magazines. Then it’s pistols, which are about as worthless as shooting dirty looks.”

A dozen sailors crowded the hall just inside the exterior door, waiting for Mercer to give the word. All of them were facing out so none saw Paul Thierry sneak up from a stairwell leading to the engineering spaces. He laid down a scathing wall of fire, mowing down men like wheat with a scythe. It only ended when his clip ran dry.

Four sailors were dead, three wounded, and the others went after the Frenchman with the savagery of attack dogs. They caught him halfway down the metal stairs and helped him the rest of the way by pushing him headfirst into the steel decking. The blow was enough to kill the hijacker, but not enough to satisfy the crewmen. When they were finished, Thierry’s corpse was a bloody ruin that was nearly unrecognizable as having been human.

Mercer stood at the top of the companionway. Seamus Rourke climbed up from the dim engine room, blood smeared across his face and dripping from his hands. “You get your woman and get yourself clear.” His voice was eerily calm. “We’ll look after our own on the ship.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Aye. If the Angel can take the worst of what the North Sea serves, she can take anything.”

Mercer shook his hand. “Good luck.”

He retreated back outside, feeling a small measure of sympathy for what would happen to Ken Bowers when the crew caught up to him.

The control van sat squarely in the middle of the deck, a small fortress immune to fire from Mercer’s M-16. He had two minutes before the blast and five before the tsunami. He also had no idea how to get Tisa out of the box.

Then he’d take the whole thing with him. “Seahawk, what’s your lifting capacity?”

“Forget it,” the pilot radioed. “I know what you’re thinking. That container weighs a couple of tons empty. No way we can lift it if it’s full.”

But with the door tightly closed, Luc and Jim didn’t know what was happening. “Lower your safety basket and hover directly over the container anyway.”

“I told you we can’t lift it.”

“You don’t need to.”

Mercer ran for the stern and the A-frame crane that towered over the fantail. The controls were on a seat mounted a few feet up one of the steel supports. Mercer climbed into the seat and quickly recognized the function of the knobs and joystick. The diesel generator that gave the crane power chugged away softly. He increased the power and dropped the crane’s arm back over the ship, paying out line as it descended. He halted the arm above the container and paid out more cable until the steel hook lay on the top of the box. With the chopper thundering overhead there was no way anyone inside could hear what he’d done.

Keeping the M-16 at the ready, Mercer reached the side of the container and climbed its integrated ladder. The top of the box was flat steel, but eyebolts had been welded to the four corners so it could be lifted on and off the ship if necessary. Mercer dragged the heavy hook to one of the lifting points at the back of the container and snapped it through.

He climbed back to the deck, cursing the seconds lost by not being able to jump. He was operating on nothing but adrenaline now. At the crane controls he brought his radio to his lips. “Okay, take yourself up a few feet, change the pitch of your rotors. Make it sound like you’re working.”

He pulled back on a control lever. The diesel bellowed as the crane hoisted the back corner of the container off the deck. Mercer rotated the A-frame, lifting the box even farther. He locked the controls and jumped from the crane, the M-16 pulled tight to his shoulder.

The van’s door swung open, rocking in time with the roll of the ship.

The first person to stumble out was Jim McKenzie. He dove for the deck as if certain the container would be snatched off the ship at any moment. Mercer kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back and sending his revolver sailing. As much as Mercer wanted to put a bullet between his eyes, he didn’t. He pressed himself to the side of the container and waved his hand over his head for the pilot to lower the safety basket right to the deck.

Luc Nguyen exploded from the van, firing his machine pistol in a wild spray. He vanished around a winch housing before Mercer could fire. The two traded bursts, neither able to get an angle. Ricochets filled the air. One struck McKenzie in the leg as he lay sprawled. Jim screamed as blood erupted from his severed femoral artery. He’d bleed out in minutes without treatment.

Twenty miles to the west, two hundred feet under the sea, the vent was nearly choked with lava that spurted from rents in the tunnel’s walls. Enough water remained in the shaft to prevent the molten rock from flowing so the whole chamber was simply being sealed off.

None of the tremendous heat or increased pressure affected the suitcase-sized box so meticulously placed inside the mountain. The timer clicked to zero.

The trigger for the bomb was a complex ball of shaped high-explosives charges. They went off with nanosecond precision. At the center of the blast wave was a sphere of refined plutonium. There wasn’t enough of the deadly material to form a critical mass and create the self-sustaining chain reaction of a nuclear blast — until the trigger charges compressed the sphere. In a burst as bright as the surface of the sun, the plutonium went critical and mass became energy according to Einstein’s famous theory.

The explosion bloomed at nearly the speed of light for the first few fractions of a second, vaporizing everything in its path — rock, soil, and most importantly the western supports of the natural dikes inside La Palma.

At the surface the light pulse was a flash capable of blinding even miles away, and when it faded, a giant mushroom cloud had appeared, a glowing seething column of plasma and debris equal to the volcanic eruption the day before. At its base tens of thousands of tons of rock had been pulverized, releasing a million years’ worth of trapped rain. A mile-long, mile-deep chunk of La Palma slid into the sea, washed away in a deluge of trapped water.

On the southern part of the island, the Teneguia volcano suddenly ceased spewing lava as internal pressure deep under the island shifted. Magma and boiling water poured from the tear in the island in a seemingly never-ending gush.

Ahead of this surge, a wall of seawater grew, born of the nuclear blast and nourished by the release of the dikes. While nowhere near the size of the mega-tsunami that threatened the United States had the eastern part of the island collapsed, the wave reached eighty feet in a minute and sped outward at a hundred miles per hour.

Mercer and Luc both paused as the horizon bloomed a fiery purple. And then movement on the deck broke both from their awe. They wheeled at the same time. Mercer held his fire. Luc did not. Tisa had finally freed herself from the container.

She’d come out on deck, unknowingly standing between her brother and Mercer. Luc’s burst caught her in the stomach, blowing her body back against the container. Her blood trickled down the side of the steel box.

Luc dropped his weapon, wailing as he raced for his sister. Mercer tightened his grip on his M-16 and put Luc’s head right in the crosshairs. He pulled the trigger on an empty magazine. Luc reached his sister’s side, cradling her limp body in his arms.

Mercer’s rage boiled. As he rushed to them, the safety basket skittered by as the chopper pilot fought a crosswind. Mercer grabbed the edge of the mesh litter and dragged it with him. He slammed the heavy stretcher into Luc’s shoulder, spinning him away from Tisa. She fell back to the deck.

Luc held up his hands. “No. We must save her. Help me to get her out of here.”

Mercer hooked the corner of the basket under the edge of the shipping container and threw three coils of the wire line around Luc’s chest. Luc didn’t understand; perhaps he even thought Mercer was going to save him too. Mercer didn’t take his eyes off the madman as he spiraled his hand over his head, a universal sign to take up slack on a cable.

The pilot heaved back on his controls, tightening the wire around Luc’s chest until he could not scream. Mercer’s face was an inhuman mask as he repeated the gesture.

The chopper heaved again. The coils sliced into Luc Nguyen’s chest, and as they cut through to his spine and snapped his backbone the recoil sent his legs skittering across the deck like a crab. He flopped sideways, trying to reach out for the severed limbs as they came to rest a few feet away.

His eyes swiveled to Mercer. “At least you won’t have her.” And he was dead.

Those words drained everything from Mercer. He could barely see through the tears as he freed the safety basket from under the container. “Hold on,” he cried. “Hold on.”

Tisa was alive, but barely. She’d taken three rounds, two in the abdomen and one in the chest that leaked frothy blood. A lung shot. “Mercer?” Her voice came as a soft whisper.

“I’m here, darling. Hold on.”

She was so deeply in shock she hardly reacted as he rolled her into the litter. Mercer placed himself over her, keeping his weight off her body, and felt the stretcher lift from the Petromax Angel.

The wave bore down on the ship in an unchecked rampage, a wall of water stretching across the breadth of the sea. True to his word Seamus Rourke had gotten the ship turned so she faced the wave that towered over the ship. She started to scale the front of the tsunami as the Seahawk began to winch Mercer and Tisa from the deck. The litter remained rooted as angry black water foamed around the ship’s bows and covered the deck.

Mercer and Tisa were soaked and the litter began to skid toward the stern. An instant before it slammed into the NewtSuit garage, it flew up and off the deck, lifting clear of the watery frenzy.

The Angel rose ever higher, her inclinometer pegged at ninety degrees as the wave’s momentum kept her pinned to the wall of water. And then her bow reached the crest, cleaving a fat wedge from the wave’s apex, and she vanished into the trough, dropping as fast as a runaway roller coaster. She should have been driven straight under the surface when she reached the bottom. Or at least snapped in two. But the Angel buried her prow deep, then fought her way back. Her deck had been scoured clean. The garage, the control van, and the cranes had all been torn away. Not a single piece of glass, from her windscreen to her smallest porthole, was left intact. But she fought it off, pouring water off her deck as though she were a surfacing submarine. The next wave was half the size of the first and she met it almost contemptuously. The ship was safe.

Tisa kept her eyes open as they were winched into the helicopter, a smile on her lips as she stared up at Mercer. “Hold on,” he kept repeating, although his words were lost in the noise of the rotors and the wind that buffeted the stretcher.

When they reached the chopper, strong hands hauled the basket into the cargo hold and the side door was slammed closed. The PJ helped Mercer out and then cut away Tisa’s shirt and assessed her wounds.

“How is she?” Mercer shouted.

The PJ continued to work as if he hadn’t heard.

“I said how is she?”

A minute passed before the man slumped away from her. His arms were bloody to the elbows. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Mercer shoved him aside and knelt next to Tisa. He took her hand. It was cold, much colder than anything he’d ever felt.

“Mercer?” He put his ear close to her mouth. “Mercer, what time is it?”

That’s when he finally understood. Her request was a plea, an attempt to find her place in a future she’d always known. She’d lived at a lonely crossroads between the past and inevitability. She’d been denied the promise of the unknown, the sense of wonder each new day could bring because she knew somewhere how it would end.

He’d worn the TAG Heuer for almost two decades. It was almost a part of him. He unsnapped it and fit its steel band over her wrist. “You tell me,” he sobbed gently.

She touched the watch and smiled up at him again. “It’s my time.”

“I know.”

“I wish…”

“So do I.”

“Say it once,” said Tisa. “We will never be able to experience it, but please at least let me hear it.”

Mercer couldn’t see her through his tears. “I love you, Tisa.”

She never heard. She was already gone.