Carlylse looked at her curiously but didn’t say anything.
“CJ just called us. There’s … a complication.”
“What complication?”
“Flight Twelve, the commuter flight to Madrid. It went down about half an hour ago off the coast of Morocco.”
“My God!”
“What is it, Lia?” Carlylse asked.
She waved him to silence. “A bomb?”
“No details yet. Officially, the flight is missing. Miss Howorth is in the La Palma Airport tower, however, and tells us the plane went out of radio contact with Agadir Traffic Control at fourteen hundred hours, your time. Until we hear more, we must assume that hostiles have attempted to take out Mr. Carlylse.”
“Understood, sir.” She grabbed Carlylse’s elbow, pulling him forward.
“What?” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Shut up,” she told him, “and
17
The bike ride up from Fatima to the crest of the towering ridge had been both exhausting and exhilarating. The view, certainly, was spectacular, with pine-clad mountains thrusting into the sky ahead, with a panorama of impossibly blue ocean and sweeping green and black coastline at their backs. They’d been pumping away with their bikes in the lowest possible gear for the last mile or so, their legs circling steadily as they barely made headway up the slope.
“We never got much of this sort of thing in Yorkshire,” CJ gasped. “I think I’ve been behind a desk for
“Then it’s time you got out and got some exercise,” Lia told her. Her own legs were burning, however, with the unaccustomed exertion. She’d passed her physical quals at the CIA’s Farm near Williamsburg, an endurance- fitness test that included running for four miles — but that had been two months ago, and she hadn’t been doing anything nearly this strenuous since.
“I thought you James Bond types were supposed to be in peak physical shape,” Carlylse said. He was panting hard himself, though, and sweating heavily.
“That’ll be enough out of you, mister,” Lia told him. “You’re here strictly on sufferance — and until we figure out what to do with you.”
“I can think of several possibilities,” he said.
Lia ignored him. He’d been flirting heavily with her, or trying to, since yesterday. She wondered if he was capable of taking anything seriously at all.
CJ was in the lead. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Up ahead.”
“That’s the roadblock,” Carlylse confirmed.
“Same guards?”
“I don’t think so. Hard to tell.”
“Chances are they’re a different two. I imagine all tourists look alike to them anyway.”
The three cyclists brought their rented bikes to a halt as one of the sentries stepped out in front of them, hand waving them off. Carlylse had been right; they were carrying AK-74s, the updated 5.45 mm version of the older 7.62 mm AK-47. They wore a dirty mix of civilian clothing and army surplus cast-offs, and the beards gave them a less than military appearance. She couldn’t see any sign of an identifying badge or patch, and they certainly didn’t look like members of a private or corporate security firm.
“We’re meeting friends,” CJ said, also in Spanish. She pointed toward the left, toward the rugged skyline of the caldera on the north end of the island. “Over there. Can’t you just let us ride up that way, instead of having to go all the way around?”
“No. The road is closed.”
As CJ argued with the guards, Lia looked around, making mental notes. The sign was there, nailed to the trunk of a tree, proclaiming in English and in Spanish that the area was off- limits to tourists, courtesy of the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.
CJ was getting nowhere with the guards. “Come on, CJ,” Lia told her. “At least going back it’s all downhill.”
They turned their bikes and began walking them down the road. Lia heard one of the men make a guttural comment in what sounded like Arabic. The other snickered, then said,
Down the road and around a curve, they hid their bicycles behind a tumble of massive blocks of volcanic rock. Carlylse pointed up the steep slope. “That’s where I went, up there. That’s where I saw the helicopter.”
“Let’s do it,” Lia said.
The climb took them about five hundred feet up a steep slope of loose gravel. At first, they had trees and shrubs to grab hold of and help their ascent, but then they emerged into the open. “Keep low,” Lia warned the others, “and when you reach the top, stay flat on the ground. Don’t show your silhouette against the sky.”
They crawled the last thirty feet, reaching the rim of the crater at last. The crest was topped by scattered boulders and rocks, and they were able to find a spot from which they could peer down into the crater without being seen.
The landscape stretched out below and around them was utterly alien and other-worldly, sere and convoluted, a maze of boulders and broken ground. The crater looked like a tiny piece of the surface of the moon, a perfectly formed bowl of dark gray cinders. A few isolated pines grew inside the crater, but for the most part the caldera below was barren. At the bottom, however, a helicopter rested on a cleared patch of ground off to one side. Nearby were several tents, and at the center of the depression a black derrick jutted forty feet high. Even at a distance of over six hundred feet, the noise was jarring — the roar of a gasoline-powered generator, the pounding of a heavy mud pump, the grinding rasp of the turning drill string.
Lia extracted her binoculars from their case and switched the device on. “Okay, Art Room,” she said quietly, raising the eyepieces to her face. “Are you getting a picture?”
“It’s coming through perfectly, Lia,” Marie Telach replied. “What are we looking at?”
“This is the largest of the three craters that make up the top of Rejada Mountain, the one in the center. I’d estimate the floor at about a hundred and twenty feet below the crater rim.” Raising the binoculars, she focused on the opposite rim and checked the numbers appearing at the lower right of the image. “The crater is just over twelve hundred feet across, rim to rim. Siege? What’s our altitude?”
CJ was examining a small handheld unit. “Fifty-seven hundred feet.”
“Weather is clear, with a low layer of clouds off to the north, at the north end of the island …”
Lia continued reading off measurements and observations to the Art Room while panning the electronic binoculars back and forth, transmitting the images through the antenna in her belt. After showing the overall panorama, she zoomed in on the activity on the crater floor.
The helicopter was a Eurocopter EC145, a light utility aircraft used for transporting personnel or small cargos. Lia could see neither markings on its dark-olive fuselage nor weapons.
The drilling tower was positioned at the exact center of the crater. Lia could see half a dozen men working at the tower’s base, barechested and covered in grime. She wondered if Chatel was among them, then decided the Frenchman was a bit too aristocratic to get his hands that dirty.
Another paramilitary guard with an AK stood a few dozen feet away, watching the work.
“Get us a closer look at the drill pipe, will you?” Telach asked.
“Here you go.” Lia pressed a button on the side of the binoculars, zooming in even more. She held it on the
