“Most scientists say that won’t happen,” Rubens had told him as the Greyhound droned through the night above the Red Sea, “but, then, no one’s ever tried setting off nuclear warheads inside a string of volcanos to see what
Among those thousands, Rubens had told him, was Lia.
Dean and Lia had kept their relationship discreet over the years, but he knew that Rubens was aware of it, knew he might have guessed, at least, that they were lovers. Such relationships among field officers weren’t forbidden, exactly, but neither were they encouraged.
Dean was surprised — and pleased — that Rubens had brought him in on the ad hoc op to rescue Lia. Dean hadn’t even known that Lia was on La Palma. Rubens could easily have brought him back to Fort Meade and broken the news to him then.
Then again, maybe Rubens figured that if he did that, Dean would take the Puzzle Palace apart chip by chip.
Akulinin said something, shouting to be heard over the engine roar. Dean still couldn’t hear. He removed his helmet and pulled out an earplug. “What?”
“I said … we’ll get her!”
So Akulinin knew as well. That figured. Dean had kept quiet about his liaison with the Alekseyevna woman.
“I know,” Dean shouted back.
They were fitted out for a specops HALO jump — Gore-Tex jump suits and gloves, oxygen tanks and masks, helmets, MA2-30 altimeter, and MC-5 Ram Air Parachutes. Dean carried an M4A1 close-quarters battle weapon with its SOPMOD kit strapped to his right leg. On his left leg was a Marine-modified laptop computer, with a solid- state hard drive that would survive a slam into the ground, or almost anything else short of a direct hit by a 9 mm round. All told, he was lugging nearly eighty extra pounds of gear, including ammo, most of it in a release bag strapped to his harness. It made moving awkward, so the two and a half hours on board the Herky Bird would be spent sitting on the hard, narrow fold-up seat.
Dean glanced at the others in their team — twenty Marines from FORECON, the 2nd Reconnaisance Battalion of the 2nd Marine Division, deployed out of Camp Lejeune. They’d flown off the USS
“Remember,” Rubens had told Dean as they approached Rota earlier. “You get to the crater, you look around, but you will
“Yes, sir,” Charlie Dean had said — but he hadn’t understood, not really.
“If you go into that crater too soon,” Rubens had gone on, “you could spook the bad guys, make them run or, worse, trigger those nukes prematurely. We don’t want that to happen.”
“No, sir.”
“Those Recon Marines will be there to help play this game out in any of several ways, depending on what goes down. They can lasertag the drilling rigs for a smart-bomb strike. They can pin down the enemy while a larger Marine force gets ashore. Or they can spot for air assets or artillery. We’re not sure yet just what we’re going to be able to bring in.”
Which meant that they were making this op-plan up as they went along, still unsure of presidential support, unsure even if they would be allowed to deploy a small, surgical strike.
A helluva note. One thing was certain, though. He was going to go in and get Lia, one way or another.
And not even nuclear-armed terrorists were going to stop him.
Ahead lay the tree line. The upper reaches of the Caldera de Taburiente were naked and exposed, but at around two thousand meters altitude and below, the slope became thickly forested, mostly with growths of weirdly surreal Canary Island Pine. CJ took another look over her shoulder. The pursuing blue Ford was hidden for the moment by the hillside.
On the way up this road earlier that morning, she’d noticed that many of the switchbacks were short- circuited by dirt tracks. Evidently, tourists with Jeeps or other four-wheel-drive vehicles liked to take short cuts. Just where LP-4 entered the tree line, one of these tracks left the right side of the road and plunged down a precipitous embankment, cutting a straight but terrifying path down the slope to connect with the lower arm of the switchback.
Howorth slowed slightly, then turned the wheel, swerving off the paved road.
The track ran at about a forty-five-degree slope, steep enough that in moments the Panda was well below the edge of the upper arm of the switchback and out of sight of the road. Below, the lower bend in the road ran along the base of the track. CJ edged forward enough to be sure she was out of the line of sight of a driver coming down the road above, and too high up to be seen by a driver around the sharp bend below. A clump of oddly shaped pine trees and several boulders as big as houses provided some additional cover. She was tempted to try to tuck in behind the boulders but decided against that. The ground dropped away in a sheer cliff to the left, near the boulders, and it would be all too easy to strand the Panda — which, unlike the vehicles that had made this track, did
It was too late to back out now, even if she could back up that slope. She eased the little two-door vehicle to a stop, pulled up the parking brake, and held the handle tightly as she gingerly took her foot from the brake pedal on the floor.
The car rocked slightly but then held firm.
“You … you’re hoping they go past us?”
“They shouldn’t be able to see us here,” she told him, “but just in case, watch out the back, will you?”
“For what?”
“A blue Ford. A man coming down that hill with a gun.”
Actually, that last wouldn’t be so bad. If the assassin got out of his car to come down the track, she could roll forward and gain some ground while he scrambled back to the car. But she was hoping—
“There he is!”
“Where?”
Carlylse pointed past her nose, out the left side of the car. She turned her head and glimpsed the blue car flickering intermittently beyond the pines and at the bottom of the escarpment. A moment later, the Ford rounded the last bend and raced past the dirt track below them, accelerating hard out of the turn.
“He didn’t see us!” Carlylse said.
“No — but we’ll still wait for a moment.” Much depended on how observant the assassin was. If he got a clear look at the road in front of him and realized the Panda had vanished, he might put two and two together, turn around, and come back up the hill after it.
A minute passed … and then another. CJ put her foot on the brake pedal again and slowly eased off on the parking brake. Carefully, carefully, she started the Panda rolling forward. Rocks skidded and slipped beneath the tires; the car bounced hard and started moving faster than she wanted … but then they bottomed hard on the narrow road shoulder below, turned left, and began driving up the hill, headed back toward the observatory entrance.
Ten minutes later, they passed the entrance and started descending once more, now on LP-1032, heading toward the east coast. On the maps she’d seen, the road in this direction was even steeper and more tortuous than the other, but eventually it would bring them out at the coast road just north of Santa Cruz.
After that? She wasn’t sure.
