Death Wave (42 page)

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 …

GREEN AMBER
C-130 HERCULES
300 NMI SOUTHWEST OF ROTA
MONDAY, 1145 HOURS LOCAL TIME

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.