Minutes to Burn

Chapter 19

Even compared to Guayaquil's, the airport at Baltra was in bad shape. One of the runways was decimated with cracks and fissures. Cameron stretched her legs as the C-130 came in evenly on the one remaining strip of intact pavement and eased to a halt.

The flight had been smooth. Difficult getting out of Guayaquil, but once they'd been airborne, it had been an easy hour-and-a-half glide over miles of blue ocean. The pilot would rest, fly back to Guayaquil, and return to pick them up in five days.

The tension within the squad seemed to be even worse. Szabla was furious that Derek had breached protocol by ordering Cameron to bunk in with her and Justin, and Justin had made things worse by cracking threesome jokes all night. At four-thirty in the morning, Savage had woken the entire hall screaming from the depths of some nightmare, and Derek had had to kick in the door to see what was wrong. It had taken two of them to awaken Savage. Tucker had gotten the sweats in the middle of breakfast, and after one look at him, Justin had removed the morphine Syrettes from his trauma bag, wrapped them in a sock, and hid them at the bottom of the weapons box.

At least Juan seemed to be getting along with everyone-at the Guayaquil airport, he'd greeted the squad with a half bow, telling them how pleased he was to be along on their mission. Szabla had scooted over, letting Juan sit beside her for the flight.

Derek had been quiet since takeoff, standing by one of the windows and gazing out across the water. He looked as if he hadn't slept at all.

Rex had filled the uncomfortable silences on the flight, providing a geology lesson and pointing out the window at the islands as they passed. Born of volcanic eruptions-fierce plumes of magma shot through the earth's crust-the Galapagos, he said, had spent much of its ten-million-year existence in flux, its islands undergoing a continual process of reshaping and reforming through eruptions and earthquakes. Rising from the Galapagos Platform, a basaltic submarine plateau some two hundred to five hundred fathoms beneath the sea, the islands were arranged chronologically, aging as they moved east. The shadowy ghosts of islands past lurked beneath the waters east of the current island chain, victims of erosion and the erratic movement of the earth's crust.

Espanola and Santa Fe, the oldest existing islands at 3.25 million years, were less volcanically active than their westernmost cousins, Fer-nandina, Isabela, and Sangre de Dios, which at seven hundred thousand years still experienced marked fits and growing pains. Because the islands were formed of basalt, a low viscosity magma that flowed and spread easily, the volcanic peaks rose less steeply than their continental counterparts, whose silica-laden andesite magma permitted more conical protrusions. The product of gentle, effusive eruptions, the Galapa-gos were broad and mildly sloping islands that resembled the domed backs of the tortoises for which the archipelago was named.

The islands floated amidst seven oceanic currents, which carried with them marine life from as far away as Antarctica and Panama. The conflu-ence of these currents, warm and cold, northern and southern, gave the archipelago a climate uncharacteristic of the equator. In most aspects, Rex pointed out, the Galapagos were anomalous: the lumbering reptiles; the smattering of penguins and flamingos among the more traditional pelagic birds; the albatross that clattered their way through their elabo-rate mating dance and threw themselves from cliffs to become airborne.

Cameron had listened to Rex intently, but she'd thought the others seemed bored.

The sun in Baltra was much more intense than in Guayaquil. Their faces slick with sunblock, the soldiers exited the plane. Cameron felt the heat of the concrete through her boots. A Minutes to Burn electronic bill-board flashed 2:50 on the runway. Two Kfirs were parked on the far edge of the apron, where they sat in the hot sun, still linked to tow trac-tors-Israel had been kind to the Ecuadorian army.

Two French soldiers met them on the tarmac, their uniforms adorned with UN trimmings. One of them jogged out to direct the taxiing plane. Szabla conversed with the other in French and gestured to the squad to follow them inside.

The terminal was all but deserted. A flat open building with visible rafters and three-quarter-height walls composed of large porous brown slabs. The west wall had fallen over, but since it wasn't directly connected to the ceiling, it had dragged nothing else down with it. It left an open block of air, looking out over low, scrubby vegetation. Dirt had blown in, scattering across the concrete floor. The emptiness, in addition to the barren landscape and abandoned souvenir shacks, made the place seem haunted. The squad walked silently through the building. A wooden sign with grooved white lettering hung on the nearest wall: Bienvenidos, Parque Nacional Galapagos, Ecuador. To its left was a crudely painted blue map of the archipelago. Poorly drawn pictures of turtles, iguanas, and an impos-sibly elongated flamingo hung on the walls. A thin film of red dust cov-ered everything.

Cameron stepped forward, kit bag slung over one shoulder. An enor-mous cardboard cutout of a short, stubby penguin lay on the ground, the beady black eyes staring up at her dumbly. Savage put his foot on its beak. Setting a boot on one of the dilapidated benches, Cameron glanced at the old jitney terminal behind the airport. Just beyond it, a metal dolphin with chipped blue paint had fallen on top of a tortoise sculpture, giving the distinct impression that it was humping it.

Savage flipped a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, taking in the scene around them. "This place is a fucking zoo," he grumbled.

The French soldiers went behind the disused TAME ticket counter and Szabla waved the squad over. "Let's get our shit down on the mani-fest and head out of here."

The soldiers lined up and filled out the information, each listing name, rank, and company, completing a Park form, and showing the French soldiers military ID. Savage dawdled over by the wall, gazing at the cardboard cutouts. He put his cigarette out in a tortoise's eye. Tank and Derek loaded the gear onto a dolly they'd found in a back closet.

The two-mile road to the Itabaca Channel was split with scarps, earth-quake wounds where the ground had cracked and then clamped shut again. They'd have to heft their gear over felled telephone poles and wires to get to the dock. Cameron gazed at the strip of water. It was apparent that the channel had been created by water filling the crack of a seismic fault.

Rex tapped her shoulder with the clipboard, and she took it from him. He pointed to a small, flat-bottomed panga moored at the dock. Stretched out on the pontoon, a man slept in the shade afforded by the makeshift ramada of palm fronds that he'd propped overhead using two fishing poles. His hat was over his face, Huck Finn style. "The seismolo-gists at the Station said they'd have someone waiting," Rex said. "I arranged it a few weeks ago." He smiled, pleased with himself. "The roads across the channel are a mess, so we're going to have to take the panga around the island to Puerto Ayora."

He noticed Tucker mishandling a comms box and scurried off. The others had already headed out behind the airport and circled up, waiting for them. Cameron finished at the clipboard and handed it off to Sav-age, the last one left. He took it with some hesitation, and when Cameron glanced back, he was still standing over it, an uncomfortable expression on his face. He stared at the form, chewing the end of the pen. He set the pen down and followed Cameron, but the French soldier called out in heavily accented English, "This not eez complete."

Cameron backtracked and checked the forms. Though he'd written his basic information in the manifest, Savage had left the complicated Park form blank. He took out another cigarette, coughed into his fist, and put the cigarette away.

"You gotta do this shit," Cameron said. "We don't want a hassle."

Savage shrugged. "Fuck it." He raised a hand and ran it over his ban-danna. His face softened a touch, and Cameron thought she caught a glimmer of vulnerability in it.

"Move it!" Derek yelled from outside.

Savage cleared his throat. "Just a touch rusty, that's all," he said.

Cameron looked at his handwriting more closely. She glanced from his dyslexic scrawl to his face and picked up the pen. "Come here," she said. "I'll help you."