His ears were ringing loudly, but Dean could still hear. “Art Room!” he called. His own voice sounded distant, almost muffled, and it cracked as he spoke. His mouth was parched and felt like it was coated with dust.
“We copy, Charlie,” Jeff Rockman said.
“The strike went down. I don’t know about the other targets, but this one missed. The derrick is still standing. I can’t see it, but I think the borehole must still be open.”
“That’s okay, Charlie.” Rockman’s voice, too, sounded distant. Dean had to work to pick the words out from behind the auditory ringing. “Marines from the
Dean was standing on the northwestern slope of the crater, a good 280 yards from the top of the gully where Ilya and Lia were sheltering. He couldn’t see them, and hoped they’d found cover on the outside slope of the cone. They were close over there to the spot where the bomb had struck.
Turning, he looked northwest and saw the helicopters coming in.
The helo in the lead was an MH-60S Knighthawk, painted pale gray and sporting Navy markings.
“The Recon Marines will be in soon to secure the area,” Rockman was telling him. “That lead helicopter is there to pick up you and the Green Amber Marines.”
“Roger that.”
He could see Ilya and Lia now across the crater, standing side by side, waving. He saw Rodriguez and Dulaney as well, farther south, their forms barely glimpsed, shimmering, through the haze of smoke filling the caldera. The helicopter flew past Ilya and Lia, vectoring in on the Marines.
Dean was feeling a bit exposed on the crest of the ridge, so he moved over the top and started down the western flank. A bike path was there, winding its way from crater to crater along the top of the ridge.
The rifle shot ricocheted off a boulder two feet to his left, and Dean hit the ground. Lia’s report had mentioned Tangos manning roadblocks along those bike paths; some of the bad guys must still be out there.
Crawling around behind the boulder, he tried to see where the enemy fire was coming from.
Another shot struck the rock close by his face, close enough that fragments stung his cheek.
The massive explosion had thrown Azhar to the floor of the lava tube and showered him with rock breaking loose from the ceiling, but he was still alive. He’d dropped his flashlight, saw it yet gleaming in the dusty air nearby.
The bomb was intact, thanks be to Allah.
This, he thought, was deep enough. The Cumbre Vieja, he knew, was riddled with lava tubes like this, some of them winding through the depths of these mountains for miles. He didn’t know how deep this one ran, wasn’t even sure how far down he’d come. At one point during the planning for Wrath of God, they’d considered using this lava tube, and others, rather than drilling boreholes. The far more costly expedient of drilling wells into the throats of these volcanos had been adopted in the end for the simple reason that doing so guaranteed placement of the bombs as deep beneath the mountains as possible, to lift the maximum mass of rock from the flanks of the Cumbre Vieja and hurl it into the sea.
This would do, though. The explosion moments earlier
There was still a chance, however. One bomb was not ten, and a lava tube some hundreds of meters in length was not a borehole sunk four hundred meters directly down into solid rock, but it was
At the very least, he would blow the top off of this mountain and wreak a measure of revenge against the enemy forces that had brought his plan for Islamic unity to ruin.
He still needed to connect the battery. Holding the flashlight between his teeth, he began working on the final steps to arm the device.
Lia watched as the Navy helicopter came closer. It had picked up the two Marines on the west flank of the crater, and now the aircraft was coming after her and Akulinin. Four more Marines from the FORECON Green Amber team were arriving as well from nearby craters. As the helicopter touched down, rotors still turning, they formed up in an orderly line and began filing aboard, clambering into the side cargo hatch.
The Marines were brisk and businesslike; Lia had expected that they would have been jubilant at their success, bringing in nine out of ten blockbuster bombs to annihilate the terrorist threat on La Palma. A nuclear holocaust had been averted, as had a potential doomsday threat to the U.S. East Coast. She’d have thought they’d all be whooping it up.
Maybe they were as numb as she was.
Maybe the celebrations would come later.
Ilya helped her up into the helicopter. “Is that all of you?” a crewman yelled at her over the clatter of the rotors as the last Marine came on board.
Her hearing had been gone for a moment or two there, but the ringing in her ears had been steadily growing louder over the past couple of minutes. She realized she could hear again, though the ringing made it touch and go.
She shook her head and pointed west. “One more!” she yelled. “Other side of the mountain somewhere!”
The roar of the rotors increased, and the helicopter lifted off again.
In the darkness far below, Ibrahim Azhar looked up toward the ceiling of the tunnel.
He believed in Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. He believed that God had spoken through His Prophet, bless his name, and that God would judge the universe. That belief, of course, was as much a part of the image of radical fundamentalist Islam as was hating the Jews and demanding an end to the Jewish state. Yet … sometimes the faith wavered, something he rarely admitted even to himself. What just and merciful God would allow the injustice and poverty of so many people, while their rulers enjoyed such opulence?
Though God alone was what united a billion Muslims, He seemed curiously unwilling to assist His people in regaining their rightful place in this world.
So, if God refused to show Himself, what remained was only …
Operation Wrath of God yet might work.
It was possible. God might act after all. Azhar could yet be that God’s avenging right arm. Perhaps God had brought him here to this darkness for exactly that purpose.
He brought the bare end of one wire down on a battery contact.
And darkness turned to Light …
