It was time for him to start climbing.
Feng Jiu Zhu, still a major of the
It was that foreign woman, damn her. It
His pistol in one hand, the remote control in the other, he reached the upper level of the crater floor and raced toward the helicopter. Feng couldn’t fly the thing; he needed to find the pilot.
He spotted him, standing with his copilot near the fuel tank.
The Aerospatiale Puma had a range of 580 kilometers. The airport at Tan-Tan in southern Morocco was 650 kilometers from La Palma, which meant that with each helicopter flight between the islands and the mainland, they had to touch down at Lanzarote or Fuerteventura to refuel. As a safety measure, though, the operation planners had brought in a small store of aviation gasoline at each crater — about a thousand liters’ worth for each — to give helicopters flying out of the craters a safety margin.
The pilot looked at Feng with wild eyes. “What is going on?” he demanded in Arabic. “We heard gunshots! And all of that smoke …”
Feng gestured with his pistol. “We’re leaving! Now!”
The pilot seemed more than happy to leave the crater. He was a civilian employee of Marrakech Air Transport and knew nothing about the operation save that his company had been hired by foreign petroleum engineers to fly equipment and personnel in and out of the Canary Islands from Morocco. Gun battles had not been part of the contract. He and his copilot were in the aircraft’s cockpit in seconds, as Feng scrambled on board behind them. Taking his position in the right-hand seat, the pilot began going through preflight.
Feng pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the side of the man’s neck. “Go!
The pilot flicked a switch, and the main rotors began to turn. …
CJ and Castelano drove back up to the Taburiente Caldera from the Santa Cruz Airport as soon as Carlysle and Damlier were safely in the air. She’d originally planned to go back to the Hotel Sol at Puerto Naos, but the Art Room had pointed out that if the nuclear charges actually went off and the western half of the Cumbre Vieja did slide into the sea, the Hotel Sol lay directly in the landslip’s path.
“Shouldn’t we try to warn someone?” CJ had asked.
“To what purpose?” Jeff Rockman had told her over the phone. “If anything’s gong to happen, it’ll happen within the next couple of hours. The local police and military wouldn’t even be able to begin to evacuate thousands of people — and that’s assuming we could get in touch with the right people quickly enough, and that they believed us. No, we’re just going to have to pray that the nukes don’t go off.”
It seemed damned cold to CJ. There were dozens of small towns, villages, and resorts along the coast between the southern tip of the island and Puerto Naos, with as many as twenty thousand people in the potential landslide’s path.
Castelano, however, had agreed with the Art Room. “There’s nothing we can do for them,” he’d said as they drove up the mountain, “except make sure it doesn’t happen.”
During the entire drive, there was no sign whatsoever that a major military insertion was under way. Even so, she was conscious of the fact that the assassins who’d tried to kill Carlylse earlier might well have returned to the Taburiente overlook, and that they might have friends.
This time, though, there was a difference. James Castelano was a former U.S. Navy SEAL with combat training and experience, and he was carrying an aluminum case with an H&K MP5SD3 9 mm submachine gun tucked into the foam cutouts inside. He’d asked CJ if she could shoot and she’d told him yes; he’d given her a pistol, a SIG SAUER P226 with a muzzle modified to take a screw-on sound suppressor.
“There
“If anybody asks,” Castelano told her, “we’re
The parking lot was considerably less crowded than it had been a while ago, and she noticed that there were police cars parked in two of the spaces — summoned, no doubt, by the reports an hour and a half earlier of attempted murder and gunfire. They got out of the car and walked up the path toward the overlook, Castelano carrying his weapon inside the aluminum case, CJ with hers tucked into the waistband of her pants at the small of her back and covered by a tug on the hem of her sweater.
A police officer stopped them halfway to the overlook.
Castelano flashed an ID.
But CJ had already seen something farther up the path that turned her cold. The overlook tourist platform, where the assassin had tried to push Carlylse over into the caldera earlier, had been cordoned off with yellow
They were studying the mountainous vista toward the south.
Toward the Cumbre Vieja, where a small patch of white cloud appeared to be caught on the ridge top.
26
Lia reached the top of the crater slope and looked around wildly. Ilya was
A patch of brick red ground a few feet away suddenly moved. “Get down, Lia! They’ll see you!”
She dropped to the ground. “Ilya?”
A lumpy camoflaged sheet of material rolled back, exposing Akulinin’s face, his M203, and a bandolier of 40 mm grenades. “The one and only. You okay?”
“Yeah.” Her whole body was sore from the beating al-Dahabi had given her, and she was having trouble breathing through her bloodied nose, but … yeah, she was all right. The realization was only just now sinking in, and it left her as weak and trembling as the terror had earlier.
In the bowl below, the smoke was rapidly clearing, though tendrils of white fog remained in the deepest recesses of the lower crater. “What’s happening?” she asked. “I’ve kind of been out of the loop.”
“Two Marines down that way,” Akulinin said, pointing south. “They have the drilling rig illuminated with a target designator, a laser. We jumped with a whole string of Marines. By now, there are two perched above every crater you and CJ identified, pointing their lasers at the drill sites. An air strike left the U.S. a few hours ago and ought to be on final approach. Thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. They should be arriving any minute.”
“Ilya,” Lia said with a dawning cold horror.
