Death Wave (49 page)

“But those tidal waves weren’t caused by the impact of all of that rock in the ocean, but by something more subtle. Those island-sized masses of rock moved, and they moved fast, sliding for hundreds of kilometers across the sea floor before coming to rest. It was the movement that displaced the water, generating the waves, not the splash.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That there very well might be a danger to the U.S. East Coast if part of La Palma does break off and fall into the sea.”

“How certain are you of the data?”

“Not very.” He could hear the frustration in her voice. “The things are totally unpredictable. The size and strength of the wave would depend on the actual mass of the rock and on how fast it was moving. You might get a wave a hundred meters tall hitting the United States. Or it might be ten meters. Or less.”

“Okay, Katie. I appreciate knowing.”

“I’m sorry to give you bad news.”

“Look at the bright side. I didn’t just lie through my teeth to the President of the United States.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He laughed. “Never mind. Thanks, Katie. I need to get off and make another call.” He hesitated. “Are you thinking of leaving the area?”

“No, Bill. Too much to do here. And too many good friends.”

“I understand. I’ll keep you informed, okay?”

“Okay, Bill.”

“Later.” He switched off, then hit the speed dial button for the secure line to the Art Room.

He needed to let them know of the President’s decision.

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO, NORTH CRATER
MONDAY, 1535 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia’s ears were ringing, blood drooled from her mouth and nose, and her left eye was swollen almost shut. After he’d spent all of that time showing her the nightmarish implements of torture in his bag, the beating the smiling man had given her with his bare fists had been brutal, direct, and startlingly unexpected. She’d thought she’d been beginning to understand Feng’s interrogator, but his savage response to her defiance had left her shaken and uncertain, as well as hurting.

Then, after the beating, he’d begun puttering about the chamber, smiling, chatting pleasantly, attaching straps to the four corners of the table, and finally showing her once again each implement in his bag, carefully explaining what each was for.

The stress, the sheer terror, was building in Lia to a near-unbearable point, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath coming in sharp, short gasps, her teeth chattering in her bruised jaw.

“Now this … this is one of my favorites,” the man said, holding up a lancet with a long, slightly curving blade that gleamed like oil in the light. He brought it to within a couple of inches of her eyes, turning it slowly in front of her. “A flensing blade … you understand? For skinning the subject. For example, I can use it to slice through your skin just … here …” Reaching down, he dragged his fingertip lightly across her upper thigh, from groin to hip. She flinched at the touch, and his smile broadened.

“I cut all the way around your leg, you see,” he continued, “and then use just the tip of blade to
tease
the skin from the underlaying fascia. I work my way down your leg, peeling back the skin as I go, around and around, until I roll it in one piece from your leg, just like removing a stocking.

“The entire process lasts, oh, perhaps an hour, an hour and a half. The time depends on how often you pass out from the pain, and on how long it takes to revive you each time. And then, of course, we go to the other leg … and your arms … eventually we get to your face. It’s necessary to proceed slowly to avoid having you lose too much blood …”

Her own pulse thundered in Lia’s ears as the nightmare monologue dragged on, louder, it seemed, even than the sounds of drilling from outside. She told herself that this was part of the actual torture, a psychological softening up that would leave her more vulnerable to drugs or to the actual touch of a scalpel when it finally came.

Her training had emphasized going along with an interrogator, giving him what he wanted, if necessary. The important thing was to keep her wits about her, to resist going into shock, to keep alert for the possibility,
any
possibility, of escape …

“Please …” she said. Her lips were dry and cracked, despite the sweat drenching her face. “Please don’t …”

“You have something you wish to tell me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Your name, for a start.” With precise, businesslike movements he replaced the lancet in the canvas carrier. “We’ve not been properly introduced, you see. I am Dr. Taysir al-Dahabi. Oh, yes! I am a medical doctor. The University of Cairo. It helps to be able to monitor my subject’s condition as I work. And you are?”

“C-Cathy Chung,” she said. Her voice cracked with the effort.

“Ah, yes. The name on your ID card we found in among your things. And you work for?”

“The U.S. State Department.”

“I see, I see.” He extracted a notebook and pen from the bag and wrote something with quick, flowing scribbles. “That matches the fact of the ID itself, of course. But why should I believe you? If, as my employers believe, you are CIA, that would all be part of an internally consistent story, a legend, as I believe spies call it.”

“I … I
told
you I’d talk!”

“Yes, but you are nowhere close to being broken yet. Broken to the point where you are
begging
me to be allowed to tell me everything you know. So we will need to test those statements.”

An inarticulate whimper escaped Lia’s lips; she did it for effect, but she didn’t have to reach down far to find it.

“I’ll tell you what, Cathy. I’ll call you Cathy for now, anyway, until we learn more about you … about the
real
you. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. How well you do this will tell me how willing you are to cooperate with me right now. Okay?”

“Anything …”

“Very well. I’m going to have one of the guards untie you and remove the handcuffs. You will then remove your hiking boots and place them under the chair. The other guard will have very specific orders. If you try to escape, if you so much as
look
as though you’re going to try to attack me or them, the other guard will shoot you in the knees. The wounds will leave you helplessly crippled and in a
very
great deal of pain. Do you understand me?”

Lia nodded.

“Say ‘Yes, Doctor.’ ”

“Y-yes, Doctor.”

“Very well.” Al-Dahabi turned and spoke rapidly to the guards in Arabic, too rapidly for her to understand most of it, though she caught the words for “shoot,” “knees,” and “be watchful.”

Al-Dahabi stepped back from the chair and moved his black bag well out of reach. One guard leaned his AK against the tunnel wall and walked slowly toward her, keeping to one side so that he did not at any time block the other guard’s line of fire.

The remaining man, smiling as broadly as al-Dahabi, raised his weapon and took aim at her legs.

SAN MARTIN CALDERA
MONDAY, 1537 HOURS LOCAL TIME

It had taken Charlie Dean more than twenty minutes to work his way down the gully, a crawl of perhaps fifty yards, made with exacting, slow, and painstaking caution. His eventual objective, the mouth of the cave, was still over a hundred yards away—and that was a straight-line distance, not the length of the twists and turns he would need to make to stay behind boulders and within eroded gullies in the crater floor.

There were those two sentries ahead as well, still perched on a rock. One faced the cave, his back toward Dean; the other, beside the first, was facing Dean. The two were chatting with one another, but every so often the guard on the right would look up and scan the ridgetop, the gully, and the bare slopes of the crater’s interior.

Another guard, Dean noticed, was on top of the crater rim, over on the opposite side of the bowl. He was sitting on the ground, smoking a cigarette.

So far, the tech-Ghillie had worked as advertised, its photo-reactive surface darkening to the same tone as the shadows in the gully and at the crater floor. Dean, his face only partially exposed beneath the blanket, watched the guard on the right carefully, timing his movements for those moments when the man was talking to his friend, freezing motionless when he began scanning the hillside.

The two were perhaps a hundred yards away now, just ten yards in front of the cave mouth. The racket from the drilling rig, more or less muted up at the top of the hill, was in full voice down here, and the air was filled with a haze of minute particles of dust thrown up by the pounding.

They certainly weren’t going to hear him with all that noise close by.

He began moving forward once more. The ground here was still broken and offered decent cover. Drawing on his old Marine sniper’s training, he picked each new piece of cover before moving, then made his way toward it with slow, steady progress, stopping every few yards to check around him. He could see the drilling rig now off to his right. Two of the men he’d watched earlier were with them now—he thought they were Feng and al-Wawi, though he couldn’t be sure with all of the dust in the air.

“Charlie?” Marie said over his implant. Even with her voice bone-conducted into his ear, it was hard to hear her over the pounding of the drill. “Charlie, do you copy?”

“I’m here, Marie.”

“The boss just called! Mountain Storm is on! Firestorm is en route, ETA ten minutes!”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He pressed his fingers into his ears, and said, “Art Room, say again, please!”

“I said, Mountain Storm is on. Firestorm is en route, ETA ten minutes!”

Dean almost laughed aloud. “Now
that’s
what I call good timing,” he said.

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO, NORTH CRATER
MONDAY, 1537 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia sat barefoot in front of al-Dahabi, rubbing life back into her sore wrists.

“Very good, Cathy,” he told her. “
Very
good. Now, stand up.”

Awkwardly, she did so. Terror still gibbered at the back of her mind, and she was trembling. She
hated
appearing weak like this, but the obscenely smiling interrogator, she realized, was having an almost overpowering, mesmerizing effect on her, on her will.

The fact that she
knew
it was all part of the interrogation process didn’t help one bit.

“Good,” al-Dahabi said. He was still standing well back from her, too far for her to kick, even if she’d had the strength. One of the guards, ten feet away, continued to aim his assault rifle at her legs. “Next, you will remove all of your clothing, fold it neatly, and place it on the chair.”

“What?”

Al-Dahabi sighed. “If you were a man, I would simply have my friends here rip the clothing from your body, a somewhat brutal demonstration that you are helpless. But working with a woman is different. You
know
you are weaker physically than a man, so the demonstration must prove that you are helpless psychologically.
Vulnerable
. Mine to command. You
will
do what I tell you, without argument, without hesitation. If you do not, I will find another and more unpleasant way to demonstrate your helplessness. Do you understand me?”

At that moment, Lia couldn’t tell which emotion was stronger as it churned in stomach and chest and throat—fear or fury. Women, in this bastard’s world, were
things
to be manipulated, toys, objects for psychological manipulation.

Several possible replies flashed through her thoughts, ranging from profanity to laughing in the little creep’s face. His prejudice was a weakness, she told himself. There had to be a way to use it to her advantage.

Her eyes locked with his, she began peeling off her T-shirt.

SAN MARTIN CALDERA
MONDAY, 1537 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The noise of the drill stopped, the silence startlingly sudden. Dean froze in place, lifting his head above the edge of the gully just enough to see what was happening. All the pumps and generators, a line of blue metal boxes to one side of the drill site, appeared to have been switched off at once.

A moment later, a single diesel engine fired up again, and a heavy winch began grinding away as the workers started removing the drill stack section by section. Metal clashed on metal with clanks and shrill chirps, and he could hear the men shouting at one another in Arabic.

Dean saw movement beyond and to the left of the drilling rig and pulled out his binoculars for a better look. Two of the paramilitary types were coming down the path from the upper crater. One carried an AK; the other lugged something very much like a large, heavy suitcase.