Death Wave (34 page)

“We’ll need to check the airline schedules first—and I want to see what this geological research institute is, where it’s headquartered. But … maybe. If you’re still here tomorrow morning.”

“It’s a date!” He grinned, then saw her expression. “Um, it’s a deal, I mean,” he amended.

“That’s better. Let’s get back to the hotel.”

“Lia?” a familiar voice said over her implant. “This is Bill Rubens.”

She stopped. “Yes? What do you have?”

Carlylse looked at her curiously but didn’t say anything.

“CJ just called us. There’s … a complication.”

“What complication?”

“Flight Twelve, the commuter flight to Madrid. It went down about half an hour ago off the coast of Morocco.”

“My God!”

“What is it, Lia?” Carlylse asked.

She waved him to silence. “A bomb?”

“No details yet. Officially, the flight is missing. Miss Howorth is in the La Palma Airport tower, however, and tells us the plane went out of radio contact with Agadir Traffic Control at fourteen hundred hours, your time. Until we hear more, we must assume that hostiles have attempted to take out Mr. Carlylse.”

“Understood, sir.” She grabbed Carlylse’s elbow, pulling him forward.

“What?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Shut up,” she told him, “and
move
!”

17

CUMBRE VIEJA
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
SUNDAY, 1115 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The bike ride up from Fatima to the crest of the towering ridge had been both exhausting and exhilarating. The view, certainly, was spectacular, with pine-clad mountains thrusting into the sky ahead, with a panorama of impossibly blue ocean and sweeping green and black coastline at their backs. They’d been pumping away with their bikes in the lowest possible gear for the last mile or so, their legs circling steadily as they barely made headway up the slope.

“We never got much of this sort of thing in Yorkshire,” CJ gasped. “I think I’ve been behind a desk for
way
too long.”

“Then it’s time you got out and got some exercise,” Lia told her. Her own legs were burning, however, with the unaccustomed exertion. She’d passed her physical quals at the CIA’s Farm near Williamsburg, an endurance-fitness test that included running for four miles—but that had been two months ago, and she hadn’t been doing anything nearly this strenuous since.

“I thought you James Bond types were supposed to be in peak physical shape,” Carlylse said. He was panting hard himself, though, and sweating heavily.

“That’ll be enough out of you, mister,” Lia told him. “You’re here strictly on sufferance—and until we figure out what to do with you.”

“I can think of several possibilities,” he said.

Lia ignored him. He’d been flirting heavily with her, or trying to, since yesterday. She wondered if he was capable of taking anything seriously at all.

CJ was in the lead. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Up ahead.”

“That’s the roadblock,” Carlylse confirmed.

“Same guards?”

“I don’t think so. Hard to tell.”

“Chances are they’re a different two. I imagine all tourists look alike to them anyway.”

The three cyclists brought their rented bikes to a halt as one of the sentries stepped out in front of them, hand waving them off. Carlylse had been right; they were carrying AK-74s, the updated 5.45 mm version of the older 7.62 mm AK-47. They wore a dirty mix of civilian clothing and army surplus cast-offs, and the beards gave them a less than military appearance. She couldn’t see any sign of an identifying badge or patch, and they certainly didn’t look like members of a private or corporate security firm.

“Alto,”
the nearest of them said.
“El camino está cerrado.”

“We’re meeting friends,” CJ said, also in Spanish. She pointed toward the left, toward the rugged skyline of the caldera on the north end of the island. “Over there. Can’t you just let us ride up that way, instead of having to go all the way around?”

“No. The road is closed.”

As CJ argued with the guards, Lia looked around, making mental notes. The sign was there, nailed to the trunk of a tree, proclaiming in English and in Spanish that the area was off- limits to tourists, courtesy of the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.

CJ was getting nowhere with the guards. “Come on, CJ,” Lia told her. “At least going back it’s all downhill.”

They turned their bikes and began walking them down the road. Lia heard one of the men make a guttural comment in what sounded like Arabic. The other snickered, then said,
“Bintilkha-ta!”

Down the road and around a curve, they hid their bicycles behind a tumble of massive blocks of volcanic rock. Carlylse pointed up the steep slope. “That’s where I went, up there. That’s where I saw the helicopter.”

“Let’s do it,” Lia said.

The climb took them about five hundred feet up a steep slope of loose gravel. At first, they had trees and shrubs to grab hold of and help their ascent, but then they emerged into the open. “Keep low,” Lia warned the others, “and when you reach the top, stay flat on the ground. Don’t show your silhouette against the sky.”

They crawled the last thirty feet, reaching the rim of the crater at last. The crest was topped by scattered boulders and rocks, and they were able to find a spot from which they could peer down into the crater without being seen.

The landscape stretched out below and around them was utterly alien and other-worldly, sere and convoluted, a maze of boulders and broken ground. The crater looked like a tiny piece of the surface of the moon, a perfectly formed bowl of dark gray cinders. A few isolated pines grew inside the crater, but for the most part the caldera below was barren. At the bottom, however, a helicopter rested on a cleared patch of ground off to one side. Nearby were several tents, and at the center of the depression a black derrick jutted forty feet high. Even at a distance of over six hundred feet, the noise was jarring—the roar of a gasoline-powered generator, the pounding of a heavy mud pump, the grinding rasp of the turning drill string.

Lia extracted her binoculars from their case and switched the device on. “Okay, Art Room,” she said quietly, raising the eyepieces to her face. “Are you getting a picture?”

“It’s coming through perfectly, Lia,” Marie Telach replied. “What are we looking at?”

“This is the largest of the three craters that make up the top of Rejada Mountain, the one in the center. I’d estimate the floor at about a hundred and twenty feet below the crater rim.” Raising the binoculars, she focused on the opposite rim and checked the numbers appearing at the lower right of the image. “The crater is just over twelve hundred feet across, rim to rim. Siege? What’s our altitude?”

CJ was examining a small handheld unit. “Fifty-seven hundred feet.”

“Weather is clear, with a low layer of clouds off to the north, at the north end of the island …”

Lia continued reading off measurements and observations to the Art Room while panning the electronic binoculars back and forth, transmitting the images through the antenna in her belt. After showing the overall panorama, she zoomed in on the activity on the crater floor.

The helicopter was a Eurocopter EC145, a light utility aircraft used for transporting personnel or small cargos. Lia could see neither markings on its dark-olive fuselage nor weapons.

The drilling tower was positioned at the exact center of the crater. Lia could see half a dozen men working at the tower’s base, barechested and covered in grime. She wondered if Chatel was among them, then decided the Frenchman was a bit too aristocratic to get his hands that dirty.

Another paramilitary guard with an AK stood a few dozen feet away, watching the work.

“Get us a closer look at the drill pipe, will you?” Telach asked.

“Here you go.” Lia pressed a button on the side of the binoculars, zooming in even more. She held it on the central mechanism inside the derrick. The tubing appeared to be hexagonal rather than a cylinder, which surprised her.

“Okay,” Telach told her. “That’s fine. We need to see the approaches now, if you could manage it.”

“I don’t see any easy way down there,” Lia said over the radio link as she pulled back on the zoom and panned across the crater. “The inner slopes of the bowl are bare gravel, rock, and cinders. I can see one more … no,
two
more armed guards on the crater rim opposite from our position. There are poles set up around the drill site perimeter, with what look like floodlights. I suspect the crater walls are pretty brightly lit at night.”

She continued describing what she could see for another few minutes. Then CJ tapped her arm and pointed. Another guard was walking along the crater rim, three hundred feet away, but moving slowly in their direction. He was taking his time, his weapon slung, and he appeared bored. They hadn’t been seen yet.

“Okay,” she told the Art Room. “There’s a sentry coming. We’re going to move back downslope.”

Staying flat against the slope, they alternately slid and crawled down the side of the volcanic cone until they were again within the shelter of the pines. From there, they made their way farther down the hill until they returned to the place where they’d left their bikes.

“What now?” Carlylse asked. “Back to Fatima?”

“No,” Lia said. “I think we can follow some of these lower trails along the west flank of the ridge south. I want to see where else they have roadblocks—and to see if they have any more drill sites.”

“More pedaling?”

“More pedaling.”

“You know,” Carlylse said, “you spies are supposed to run around in souped-up Aston Martins and high-tech aircraft, not goddamned
bicycles
, for Christ’s sake.”

“We’ll take that under advisement, Mr. Carlylse. But the agency has had to cut back a lot lately. Budget constraints, you know.”

They mounted up and started back down the road.

CIC, USS
LAKE ERIE
NORTH OF SOCOTRA
GULF OF ADEN
SUNDAY, 1605 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“Good picture,” Dean said.

“Ought to be,” Captain Morrisey replied. “The hardware cost enough.”

Dean and Akulinin stood inside the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of the Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser
Lake Erie
, a darkened shipboard compartment every bit as high-tech as the Art Room back at Fort Meade. Large-screen monitors were everywhere, watched intently by Navy enlisted personnel, both men and women, seated at workstation consoles. Captain Morrisey had brought them down a few minutes ago, their security classifications taking them past several checkpoints manned by no-nonsense Marine guards.

The largest monitor display showed a high-def television image, an aerial view of a rust-streaked cargo ship. Her name,
Yakutsk
, could be read on her prow.

“I thought you’d want to see,” Morrisey said. He pointed. “It’s begun.”

Two small wooden boats were approaching the
Yakutsk
from astern, their outboard motors churning up frothing wakes. A crewman on the
Yakutsk
’s fantail appeared to be shouting, though there was no sound with the picture. He was holding an automatic rifle.

“Can we get a closer view?” Dean asked.

“Nothing easier.” Morrisey spoke with a technician at a nearby console, and the image zoomed in, focusing on the man on the
Yakutsk
’s fantail.

“What’s the range?” Akulinin wanted to know.

“Three miles,” Morrisey said.

“Do they know we’re watching?”

“I doubt it very much,” Morrisey replied. “The Fire Scout is small, and it’s stealthy. We could be a lot closer and they’d never see us.”

The remarkably high-quality pictures were being relayed from a MQ-8B Fire Scout, a Navy UAV. Dean had watched them launch the craft from the
Erie
’s helicopter deck earlier. The unmanned aircraft looked like an odd mix of helicopter and submarine, with a teardrop-shaped body and the rotors attached to what looked like a submarine’s conning tower. The craft was twenty-three feet long with a rotor diameter of just over twenty-seven feet, painted gray and weighing a ton and a half. It carried a sophisticated array of sensors and cameras that let it see in the dark or in bad weather, and was said to be able to zero in on the glowing tip of a man’s cigarette from five miles away.

The Fire Scout was the smartest robot in the Navy’s inventory, with the ability to take off, patrol, and land on the pitching deck of a ship at sea without help from a human teleoperator. Stealth characteristics gave it a tiny radar profile, and its engine and rotor noise had been suppressed to a fluttering whisper. Wth an endurance of over eight hours, it could silently stalk its assigned target without the enemy even knowing it was there.