Dean saw a Tango leap up from cover and dash forward up the hill, racing toward his position. He raised his rifle, but the man dropped again behind cover before Dean could squeeze off a round. There were several bad guys down there among the pine trees and boulders, and they had him pinned here, unable to move. That helicopter wasn’t going to be able to come in to dust him off if hostiles were firing at it from a hot LZ.
Then the earth moved.
It started as a vast and powerful, deep rumble, an eruption from far, far below the surface that became louder and more powerful moment by thunderous moment. The boulder was actually trembling, and loose stones and cinders on the ground were dancing about wildly as the earthquake grew in strength.
The side of the mountain was
The helicopter lurched suddenly as though swatted by a giant hand, tipping wildly to starboard. Lia clung to a handhold as several of the Marines around her cursed, some of them pitched to the deck.
“What the hell is going on?” one demanded.
Sparks burst from a bundle of electrical wiring attached to the overhead, spilling foul-smelling smoke into the compartment. The Navy crewman yanked a fire extinguisher from a wall bracket and doused the fire with CO2.
Below, half of the mountain appeared to be rising, pushing upward atop a pillar of black debris, rising and falling outward, toward the west.
“Hang on, everyone!” the pilot yelled above ongoing thunder and shouting Marines.
The helicopter began climbing.
He tried to stand up but couldn’t. The boulder that had been his cover shifted suddenly, then began rolling and bouncing down the hill. The Tangos, fortunately, were too busy hanging on to take advantage of Dean’s sudden exposure.
All he could do was hang on. Above and behind, the top of the mountain appeared to be exploding into the sky, a pillar of smoke and blackness that must have been a mile high, perhaps higher, and
The side of the mountain to which Charlie Dean was clinging continued to rise … and then it was falling, dropping back again, slaming against the ground, but the ground itself was no longer solid but a fast-flowing avalanche of rock and gravel and dirt.
Dean guessed that he was riding a single block of stone, a chunk of mountainside perhaps a hundred yards long and fifty wide. The nearest edge, toward the north, was crumbling away as he watched, bringing the edge closer and yet closer. Beyond, the ground was a hellish churning of tumbling rock and debris, an avalanche hurtling down the western side of Volcan de San Martin, racing toward the sea.
A lone Tango a dozen yards away made it to his feet, swaying as he rode the mass of basalt, and then the rock lurched and pitched and he fell over the side and into the thunderous slide. As bigger and bigger chunks broke from the northern edge of the rock, Dean managed to get to his feet and scramble south, putting some distance between himself and the edge.
The rock slab was pitched forward nearly forty-five degrees. Dean could look down the slope at green pine forest and banana plantations, at sheer cliffs and, beyond, the sparkling blue of the Atlantic. There was nothing to stop the landslide now,
Charlie Dean was falling with it.
“There he is!” Lia cried, pointing. “In the middle of that big rock!”
The helicopter swung around out of the north, descending. Somehow,
“Ain’t no way I can land on that, miss!” he yelled.
“Just get us fucking closer!” Lia yelled back.
Dean was staring at the fast-approaching ocean. There was no way he could survive falling off those cliffs ahead, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the sea.
“Charlie!” Marie Telach yelled in his skull. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you!” He had to yell, too, just to hear himself above the roar.
“Turn around! Look up!”
He did so. The light gray belly of a Navy helicopter was pacing the sliding rock, twenty feet above him and a little to one side. He could see someone leaning out of the open cargo door, pointing at him.
It was Lia.
“Ilya just patched a call through to the Art Room,” Marie told him. “You weren’t answering your radio!”
His tactical radio, he realized, had been lost in either the first explosion or this second, far vaster blast. His implant was still working, though, and his link with the Art Room.
A length of rope came looping and falling toward him, uncoiling as it dropped. It wasn’t
The huge slab of rock struck something, jolted hard, and it began fragmenting, falling to pieces beneath Dean’s feet, lurching again skyward, and hurling him with it. Desperately, he reached out and snagged the trailing rope one-handed. The wind tore at him, but he managed to grab it with both hands, clinging to the end of a twenty-foot line as the helicopter began rising, rising, hauling Dean up and away from the deadly torrent of crumbling, hurtling, thundering rock.
Then he was out over the ocean as the landslide spewed out over a hundred-foot cliff. He saw the mass of rock, half a mountain’s worth of basalt, strike the sea in a titanic explosion of whitewater and spray.
He was far too weak to climb. All he could do was cling to the rope, his lifeline, as the Marines on board the helicopter used a winch to haul him up.
Among those who grabbed hold of him moments later, arms clutching him and dragging him up and over and onto the Knighthawk’s cargo deck, were Lia and Ilya.
Behind them, a volcano erupted beneath a black umbrella of smoke, sending gouts of molten rock, glowing orange-hot, roiling high into the tropical sky.
Sand beaches are uncommon along the rocky coast of Maine. On the entire island of Mount Desert, within the boundaries of Acadia National Park, there is exactly one, a 350-yard stretch of white sand facing south into the Atlantic. The chill waters of the Gulf of Maine are too cold to tempt any but the hardiest souls, even in late summer, but tourists flock to the beach to watch the waves, to hike the nearby trails, to play in the sand and photograph the picturesque headlands, the rocky islands along the coast, the lobster boats plying their trade just offshore.
The La Palma Landslip, as geologists would later refer to it, had indeed raised a tidal wave as it slid into the sea three thousand miles from New England, creating a swell within the ocean that raced out across the Atlantic at five hundred miles per hour. Unseen in the open ocean, it was a wave in the physics sense, a transmission of energy rather than a visible moving crest. Only as it passed into shallower water did the physics begin to manifest
