Death Wave

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.