Death Wave

rear.

What James was suggesting, though, went far beyond the scope of platoon-level operations in Vietnam.

“It’s our careers on the line, you know,” James added. “If you’ve guessed wrong, they’re going to hang us out to dry.”

“If I’ve guessed wrong, at least we won’t get wet,” Rubens replied. “But if I’ve guessed right and we don’t act, we’d all better be able to tread water for a long time.”

“Sometimes,” General James replied, “I think treading water is what I do for a living.”

Rubens knew exactly what he meant.

He’d considered bringing up Operation White Horse with James — a plan, still in development, to get a small team onto La Palma with the explicit purpose of rescuing Lia DeFrancesca. The thought of just leaving her there, to be interrogated and killed by the terrorists, was simply beyond the pale.

However, he also knew that while such a plan could be subsumed into the larger op easily enough, it would be very hard to get approval for a rescue op if his request for an amphibious invasion of La Palma was down-checked.

And he was not going to leave his people behind, even if it meant circumventing directives from the White House.

21

OBSERVATORIO DEL ROQUE DE LOS MUCHACHOS

LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS

MONDAY, 1115 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Damn it, I never should have left her behind.

Carolyn Howorth stood on the rampart of the tourist observation deck, precariously perched on the edge of the dizzying overlook at the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente. The crater wall fell away beneath her feet, a precipitous fall of over a mile, virtually straight down.

The caldera was a vast mountain ring more than four miles across. Despite what it looked like, Taburiente was not the result of some ancient, colossal volcanic explosion. The formation had begun as a shield volcano, some millions of years in the past, but water erosion had eventually carved it into its current shape. To the southwest, the caldera had been torn open by a river valley, the Barranco de las Augustias, a gap in the mountain wall leading to the Atlantic at the village of Puerto.

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,