Landing Party: A Dinosaur Thriller (2 page)

Chapter 3
Two days later
Montreal, Canada

Skylar Hanson wasn’t sure when the idea first came to her, only that it was a good one. Well, perhaps “good” wasn’t the right word. It was the “right” one, and she was content to leave it at that. As a volcanologist for the Canadian government, Skylar studied volcanoes for a living. Earning a Ph.D. at the age of 25 meant that she had been an academic star, had done an awful lot of reading about geological processes and how the Earth was and continues to be formed.

And somewhere along the way, those same processes came to shape how she was formed, as well. Skylar, at the age of thirty-three, was aware that though she was a respected member of society, one who would likely never want for a job and therefore be financially secure the rest of her natural life as long as she didn’t do anything really foolhardy, she was still not truly happy. All she did was work, for one thing. Day in and day out, unraveling the mysteries of the Earth’s innermost workings in order to explain them to policymakers—people who, for the most part, made a lot more money than she did—yet who she saw as much less intelligent.

Skylar was relatively young to reach such a jaded outlook, but then again, she’d always been ahead of the curve, skipping a grade in school and flying through one honors class to the next, shrugging them off like water off the proverbial duck’s back. Good going, kid, keep it up, was all she ever heard. Now, only eight years of full-time employment into her professional career, she’d decided she’d had enough…or at least, that she
knew
enough.

Knew enough to get out of it, that is.

A thin smile formed on Skylar’s lips as she eyeballed the aerial photographs of a new volcanic island forming in the South Pacific. The photos were taken by NOAA and not yet made public; she had received them because they came as part of an invitation from the United Nations to participate in an expedition to the newly formed island. She couldn’t fault them in their choice to reach out to her. She was one of probably a dozen people on the planet best suited to characterize what was going on with the geological forces at work to create this new land.

But what they couldn’t know was that the more she studied the island, the more she came to be convinced that she had before her a once in a lifetime opportunity—a perfect storm of physical, political, and financial factors that would never be presented to her again. She was ready to make a move, but first, she had to be sure.

Skylar got up from her laptop and moved to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf overflowing with volumes, all of them non-fiction, including every textbook she’d ever had throughout her scholastic career. She had no need for fiction, no time for anything that was not wholly real and could tell her how the natural world worked. She found the shelf she had created with books about gemstones and the physical and chemical processes that create them.

Sometime later, she moved to another shelf with tome after tome written on volcanic processes. She knew what she was looking for, and it didn’t take long for her to find. Unlike most of her peers in her generation, when it came to her areas of expertise, she rarely needed the internet, preferring instead to consult books, many of which were written decades before she was born. In geological terms, after all, that was not even the blink of an eye, so how much could things have changed? She secretly looked down on her colleagues who clung to the internet like it was the only bastion of reliable information out there, reading each new journal article the second it came out. Skylar knew how to do that, had jumped through every hoop put in front of her during her ascent to becoming a professional scientist, but she was so very sick of it all.

She knew enough already, enough to…what was that old American country song?
Take This Job and Shove It
.

Skylar went back to her laptop and reread the email from the U.N. again, the part with the description of the new island. It was cobbled together from Pacific Islander eyewitnesses and meteorologists, therefore a laypersons’ account, but it was nevertheless sufficient for Dr. Skylar Hanson to conclude that there must be gemstone inclusions in this new land. Lots of them. Diamonds in particular. She closed the email window and called up the images of the new isle again.

Yes…definitely…there can be no doubt…
But this certainty raised new concerns, new fears. There had already been one landing party. It wouldn’t be long before others made landfall, too, each seeking to make their own mark on the island in some way. And even Skylar’s own opportunity to visit Earth’s newest waterfront property was as part of a group—an entire expedition under the auspices of the U.N. for the purposes of keeping the peace.

Her eyes narrowed as she stared a picture of an active lava flow, the ocean waves exploding around it. Even worse than being part of an eight-person team was that one of the other members would also be a geologist. Skylar closed out of the image. She’d done enough research. She knew all she needed to about the island. As far as she could tell from this distance, it should be positively chock full of precious gems, especially diamonds.

The only thing that remained was her decision. Was she going to go? She briefly entertained various alternatives to participating in the official expedition while still allowing her to make off with a pile of diamonds.

She could charter a private seaplane, she supposed, from Samoa or Tonga and ask to be taken to the island by herself. But that would no doubt raise too many suspicions. Especially in light of the fact that she recently turned down an invitation to join the U.N. expedition. No, way too many questions would come out of that. But if she were to join the expedition and take home a few souvenirs… Diamonds didn’t have to be very big to be worth an awful lot, after all…

Couldn’t she just pocket a few stones and come home wealthy, quietly leave her government post and retire somewhere warm and tropical instead of being snow and ice-bound for the rest of her life? Skylar grinned as her gaze lingered on a book open to an illustration of diamonds forming deep within the Earth…

Sure, you can. Those diamonds will be there, waiting for you. You just have to go get them. You’ve studied them all your life, they’re yours…take them…

But then what? How would she sell a bunch of raw, uncut gemstones? She thought back to various field locations she’d worked at over the years, all the way back to her undergraduate days. She could think of at least a couple of places, far from her home, where there wouldn’t be too many questions asked. Besides, she mused, opening the U.N. email to reply in the affirmative, it wasn’t like she was stealing them from a jewelry store or anything like that. She would simply be collecting rocks out of the Earth—land as yet unaffiliated with any nation, at that—and then trading them for money.

It would represent professional suicide, no doubt. A scientist being paid to investigate a site as part of a sponsored, neutral organization would be prohibited from harvesting any sort of natural resources from that place for personal gain. But at the same time, Skylar knew she would have a lot of leeway. No one would have any reason to watch her closely, and it was perfectly within her bounds to collect a small amount of samples to bring back for laboratory study…

She nodded to herself, her resolve hardened as she composed the email that would make her a part of U.N. Expedition Gaia.

#

London, England

Richard Eavesley used a cigar cutter to snip the end off a Cuban, then applied the flame of his gold-plated butane lighter to the tip. He inhaled and puffed until smoke wafted from the tip, and then sat back in the leather upholstered chair to wait. He set the cutter and lighter on a small table next to a perfectly crafted mojito. He’d just returned from an “expedition” of sorts to Cuba, sponsored by a travel company with the goal of identifying the most travel-ready destinations and “adventure” ready packages for American tourists, now that Cuban-American relations had finally relaxed some.

The trip was a lucrative one for Eavesley, to be sure, but he would be the first to admit it was not the stuff of true adventure, the life-and-death derring-do that had made him a member of the prestigious British Explorers Club, not to mention a National Geographic Explorer-In-Residence, in the first place.

Richard looked around at the club, at the ornate furnishings, the taxidermy trophies on the wall, the old photographs of white men in foreign lands, killing animals, fording streams, driving vintage jeeps over rough terrain. A massive, old wooden canoe built by Amazon tribesmen hung from the ceiling. As usual, the club was not crowded, being a strict members-only affair. A few others from his recent Cuba trip were here, also celebrating a successful outing, sharing anecdotes over a laugh and a drink. This was an old boys’ network, with Richard one of its most entrenched members. But while most of those here were discussing the Cuban trip or fantasizing about future adventures, Richard’s thoughts wandered to a proposition he’d received earlier in the day. He’d come here curious to see if everyone would be talking about it—if the entire club had been invited—but from the utter lack of talk, it seemed he was the only one, which of course made it all the more interesting.

A real adventure. That’s how he thought of it—one of those rare, larger-than-life explorations that would stand out in a career full of globe-spanning voyages of discovery. He hadn’t responded yet—the email had just come in over his smartphone, and he didn’t want to seem too eager, but he intended to apply in the affirmative as soon as he got home from the club. By the time he had polished off most of his drink and engaged in a little more small talk with the other members, he was preparing to leave when a well-dressed gentleman Richard had never seen before pulled up a chair and engaged him in conversation.

Being an exclusive club, it was a rare enough thing for Richard not to recognize someone here, as he’d been a member for decades. So it was with genuine interest that he listened to what the man had to say.

“Afternoon, Mr. Eavesley. Sir Eavesley, in due time, I expect, yes?”

Richard laughed good-naturedly at the reference to someday being knighted for his service to the Queen in exploring new lands. “Time will tell, Mr.…?”

The man extended a hand that protruded from a silk jacket sleeve decorated with gold cuff links. A matching gold Rolex watch adorned his wrist. “Just call me Baxter, Mr. Eavesley.”

A bemused look occupied Richard’s countenance. “All right, Baxter. Is that your first name or your last?”

“It really doesn’t matter. You mind?” The visitor plucked a cigar from the table, cut it, and lit it up using his own lighter.

“Be my guest… Speaking of which, I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before. Are you a new member?”

Baxter smiled easily. “I’m not a member, Mr. Eavesley.”

“Ah, so then whose guest are you?” Richard looked around as if he would be able to spot someone lurking nearby, perhaps about to join the conversation, but there was no one in the immediate vicinity.

“I’m not a guest either, Richard.”

Richard guffawed loudly, emitting a cloud of bluish smoke. “Oh really, then? So you just waltzed in here past the security guards? Or—no, let me guess—you scaled the brick wall to the fourth floor here and used a torch on the wrought iron bars. Do tell, if that is how you got in, I’d buy you a drink myself, that would be quite impress—“

“This is what got me through the door, Richard.” Baxter held up a member ID, the club’s coat of arms with Baxter’s picture. The words NOVICE EXPLORER were stamped beneath his picture, a designation meaning he’d been a member for less than one year. Richard’s own ID read ULTIMATE ADVENTURER.

“I thought you said you weren’t a member?”

Baxter produced a different credential, this one bearing the seal of the American Central Intelligence Agency. “I’m not. I’m a case officer with the CIA, Mr. Eavesley, and I’d like to talk to you about the offer you received this morning to join the United Nations Expedition Gaia. Hear me out, and I assure you that I’ll make it worth your while.”

Chapter 4
Four days later
South Pacific Ocean

A never-ending expanse of blue water gave way to a blemish, a pimple on the face of the ocean. The eight members of the U.N. expedition occupied the rear seats of the Bell 412 helicopter as the pilot, a retired U.S. Navy aviator hired as a contractor by the U.N. for this expedition, pointed out of his window.

“There’s your first look.”

Their gazes followed the trail of smoke—light and wispy at this altitude—down to the open volcano from which it vented. One of the team’s two geologists, a 37-year-old South African by the name of George Meyer, was the first to comment after an appreciable silence. His red hair and freckles with a high forehead that seemed to be perpetually sweaty gave him a nerdy, academic look.

“Classic cinder cone formation.” He quickly pulled a pair of binoculars that hung around his neck up to his eyes, focused the lenses, and continued his commentary. “Looks like a slope of between thirty to forty degrees. Bowl-shaped crater at the peak.” He spoke to everyone but his eyes focused on the expedition’s only other scientist, 33-year-old Canadian, Skylar Hanson, also a geologist. In stark contrast to her fellow geologist, Skylar was used to lingering stares from the opposite sex. A brunette with shoulder-length, stylishly cropped hair, her trim figure was testament to her regular workout routine. She nodded without taking her eyes off of the volcano.

“I can’t wait to collect some cinder samples and analyze the gas bubbles.”

George nodded at this. “Top notch idea.” While they were both geologists by training, he at Oxford because he had studied abroad there and she at the University of Toronto, George specialized in mining and land stability while Skylar was a volcanologist, specializing in volcanoes.

Skylar went on while the rest of the team stared out the window at the forbidding landscape that awaited them below. “Also, I’d really like to get a look at the crater infill.” She leaned forward to address the pilot. “Is it safe to do a flyover of the summit so we can look down into it?”

He nodded while leaning back in the cockpit. “Sure, we can drop down a little lower and zip across. Not too much lower, though. Tricky updrafts, and this thing hasn’t settled down completely by the looks of it, but you’re the expert.”

“I agree, not too low!”

The pilot leveled out the craft and aimed for the center of the summit on a course that would take them about five hundred feet over the peak. As they neared the oceanic mountain, rivers of orange could be seen coursing through parts of its rock mantle. One man clicked away furiously with a camera aimed out the window.

Ethan Jones, the expedition’s official “imaging expert,” was a 35-year-old Australian who was a renowned nature photographer. A head of thick, dark curly hair framed a pair of sea green eyes.

“Getting some good aerials, Ethan?” the pilot asked.

He gave him a thumbs up in return without removing his eye from the lens. “Awesome shots, mate! You fly, I’ll spy!”

This elicited a chuckle from Richard Eavesley, one of the team’s two professional explorers, both National Geographic Explorers-In-Residence. Dubbed the expedition’s “elder statesman,” a light-hearted nod to his 52 years of age, Richard hailed from England, though his round-the-world travels kept him away from home much of the time. By far the most seasoned explorer of the bunch, he was noted for having summited the highest peak on all seven continents. His thinning, white hair was confined to the sides of his head, but even so, his facial features still somehow imparted a youthful look to him.

“Those aerials might come in handy later when it comes to finding our way around. Not like there’s any charts of this place yet, am I right?”

The first to answer him was the youngest member of the outfit, 29-year-old Lara Cantrel. As the expedition’s Communications Technician and an M.I.T. grad from Connecticut, Lara was the most technically savvy of the group. She kept her sandy blonde hair in a ponytail that stuck through the back of a ball cap. “I’m taking GPS points as well, so that we’ll be able to map accurate distances once we’re on the ground by overlaying my points on Ethan’s photos.”

The photographer looked away from his camera, a devilish grin overtaking his features. “Sweetheart, you can overlay your points on my photo anytime, all right?” He gave an exaggerated wink along with a good-natured laugh and turned back to his image capturing. Lara rolled her eyes, but couldn’t help but smile.

“Go ahead and smack him, I would.” Richard’s counterpoint, the other National Geographic Explorer-In-residence, one Anita Clarkson of California, weighed in. At 31 years old, she was an accomplished blue water sailor and most noted for being the youngest female to sail solo around the globe, at age sixteen. Her sky blue eyes hid behind disheveled, blonde bangs. Though she was Richard’s peer, that didn’t necessarily endear her to him.

“Remind me again what your expertise is, dear? I get that if we were sailing to the island your skills would come in handy, but seeing as we flew here…”

Anita shot him a look to kill. “We both have the same sponsor, Richard. The same people who deemed you suitable for the expedition felt the same way about me. So get over it.”

A peanut gallery of “ooohs” echoed throughout the cabin as the helicopter approached the mouth of the volcano. Joystna Chandahar, a 39-year-old Indian-American and the team’s medical doctor, raised her voice above the fray. She was all of four-foot-eleven inches, but her diminutive stature belied her quiet intensity. She wore her long, black hair parted in the middle, pausing often to sweep it back from her face, as she did now.

“C’mon, people, we’ve got to work together. I figured I would be here to help with field injuries, not cat-fights.” Joystna possessed extensive experience in providing emergency aid in disaster-affected areas including India and Southeast Asia. She generally put out a serious demeanor and was not much for small talk.

“Okay, everybody. Here we are—take a look down there!” Kai Nguyen, the team’s foreign language translator, pointed excitedly. A 42-year-old born in Hawaii but now living in Washington, D.C., Kai was brought into the fold because he was an expert on Pacific island languages. If the team did manage to locate any of the Tongan landing party still alive, they would need to communicate. Kai’s wavy black hair and classic Polynesian features made him look more at home in this part of the world than the rest of the team, but the truth was that while he spent his childhood in Hawaii, he now passed most of his time in D.C., where many of his translation jobs were conducted via video chat, Internet or telephone. This was his first trip to the South Pacific in many years.

The craft flew directly over the middle of the volcano’s peak, and those on either side of the helo looked directly down into it.

“There’s a lake!” George pointed but the gesture was wholly unnecessary since it was easy to see that the entire bottom portion of the volcano was flooded with water.

“Seawater coming up from below or perhaps trapped inside during formation. Will be interesting to find out,” Skylar said.

“What’s not so interesting about it,” Richard pointed out, “is that it means there’s nowhere flat for us to put down in there.”

At this, the pilot nodded. “After we fly across, we’ll circle the perimeter and see if we can find a level enough spot there.”

No one disagreed, and they flew over the yawning opening in silence. When they were about halfway across, Lara pointed excitedly.

“Look! I see something, something orange.” She raised binoculars to her eyes and focused. “Looks like it could be a life jacket.”

Ethan clicked off a few photos. “Definitely a good place to start looking, then.”

When they reached the other side, the pilot made a right turn and began following the curve of the island’s roughly circular form.

“Not a whole lot of optimal landing spots here, either. Maybe we should have come by boat after all.” Anita glared at Richard, who shrugged as he looked down at the rugged new landscape.

“We’ll see. We have yet to go all the way around.”

But as the circumnavigation of the island continued, it became clear that the topography varied little. Steep, rocky sides thrust up from the open ocean with very few exceptions, and none of those were sufficient to land a helicopter. By the time they had gone all the way around, a sullen silence had fallen over the cabin as they all pondered the unspoken question: where to land?

At length, that silence was broken by Richard, the explorer who had figured out many a route into inhospitable places over the decades. “Look, the Tongans must have found a way either inside it or up onto it, right? And they came by boat…”

Anita, the sailor, was quick to reply. “Unless their boat sank on the way there—who knows, maybe they never even got here. There hasn’t been any proof one way or the other.”

The pilot interrupted them by leaning back and saying, “It’s up to you, but we do have options. Let me lay them out. One: we can fly around a little more to try and find a nice flat landing zone, but when I reach my low fuel point, we’ll have to head back to Samoa.” He continued on over the groans in response. “Two: we can abort now and head back after seeing the place up close.”

“Anything else?” Richard asked.

“Yeah, or three: We can try having Steve, here, lower you down wherever you want to go by winched cable.” He patted his co-pilot on the shoulder, and Steve nodded.

“Then we’d pick you up the same way in reverse—lower it down, you grab hold of the basket, and I reel you back in.”

“Just remember to ground ourselves first before we touch the cable, right, or zap!” Richard mimicked convulsions induced by electrocution.

The co-pilot grinned. “I see you’ve done this before.”

Richard nodded. “More than once, I’m afraid. Somehow, it’s always worked out for me so far.”

“Let’s hope that luck holds out, because I think at this point that’s our best option.”

“So where to lower us down?”

“All business as usual, eh, Dr. Chandahar?” Richard smiled in her direction. “I like it. I say we split up, if it’s okay with our good pilot.”

The pilot’s brow furrowed. “Split up how? I don’t have all day.” He tapped his fuel gauge.

Richard was quick to reply, as he could see others about to protest as well. “Two groups of four. One dropped somewhere up on the outside slope, wherever you think you can pull it off. And the other to be dropped along with the inflatable boat down into the lake, near where we spotted that life jacket or whatever it is. That’ll give us a chance to cover the most ground possible. This is considered a search-and-rescue mission, let’s not forget. We should cover as much area as we possibly can.”

The pilot pointed up and to the right. “Let’s check out the outer slope up near the top. This side looked a little better to me, and then from there, we can drop in for the lake shot.”

No one voiced an argument, although there were no actual agreements, either. Everyone still mulled over the ramifications of the plan, which had them suddenly from a comfortable helicopter ride to confronting the reality that they were going to
get out of the aircraft
and step onto a highly active volcano. This was not some inviting tropical island with a sugary sand beach and palm trees swaying in the breeze. There was no way to walk onto the isle at all. Or off of it.

The pilot ascended, and the team watched the pastiche of brown lava rock stripe vertically past their window, where spotty patches of molten lava bubbled up every so often. George pointed out the first traces of new plant life, already taking root in the rocky substrate, eking out a living on this harsh terrain.

They were jolted from their thoughts by the pilot waving to get their attention. “I can’t land here, but I can hover a few feet off the ground until you can jump out.”

“I’m game.” Richard raised his hand like an eager school kid.

“Same here, mate.” Ethan was grinning ear to ear, like this was the best thing he could possibly be doing.

A couple of seconds ticked by during which the noise of the rotors holding their position over the scorched ground was the only sound. “C’mon, who’s next?”

Anita raised her hand and Richard frowned. “Really, dear, don’t you think you ought to be on the boat team so we can at least make use of the narrow range of experience you do have?”

“Perhaps you should try the boat, Richard. Get out of your mountain climbing comfort zone.”

“Enough!” Joystna, the M.D., raised her voice to a sharp trill, silencing the team. “I would have thought that the team’s two professional explorers, both from the same organization no less, would at least have a working rapport.”

“I don’t mind being on the boat team,” Anita offered.

George Meyer nodded. “If we’re splitting up, we should probably split the expertise as well. We have two professional explorers, so one on each team.” He looked at Skylar. “Two geologists, so one on each team.” Skylar was quick to nod her agreement to this.

“Make sure we split up the sat-phones, as well,” Kai suggested. Every member of the team carried a two-way radio, which would keep them in touch with each other over short distances on the island, but for contact with the outside world, only satellite phones would do. The team had two of them, so it was decided that one would go to each sub-team.