Death Wave (52 page)

“So much for rescuing damsels in distress.”

“Roger that.”

Another shadow appeared, and Dean shot it down.

Lia was well on her way up the 160-foot-high slope. Somewhere out there in the smoke, someone had a small nuclear weapon, but there was no way Dean could find him, or do anything about the nuke. That job was best left to Firestorm, now … six minutes out.

It was time for him to start climbing.

HELICOPTER
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1541 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Feng Jiu Zhu, still a major of the
Guóānbù
despite his current technical status as a civilian, senior vice president of the China Ocean Shipping Company and, most recently, international terrorist, ran for his life.

It was that foreign woman, damn her. It
had
to be. The CIA must have planted her, must have organized an attack on the La Palma operation when she disappeared. Azhar had been right. He should have shot her yesterday—should have left the island and detonated the nine nuclear weapons already in place, rather than waiting for the final borehole to be complete. Nine weapons, surely, would have caused as powerful and as destructive a wave as ten.

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 Aérospatiale 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!
Now!
”

The pilot flicked a switch, and the main rotors began to turn. …

CALDERA TABURIENTE
NORTH END OF LA PALMA
MONDAY, 1542 HOURS LOCAL TIME

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
are
civilians up there,” she told him as she drove the rental car into the Taburiente overlook parking lot. “We may be a bit conspicuous carrying guns around.”

“If anybody asks,” Castelano told her, “we’re
policía
here on official business.”

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.
“Alto! Zona restringida.”

Castelano flashed an ID.
“Investigador especial,”
he said.

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
línea policía
tape. A bearded man in a
guardia
uniform and holding an H&K submachine gun stood guard in front of it; three men were on the platform behind him, one with what looked like a small remote control unit, two with binoculars raised to their eyes.

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

NORTHEAST RIM
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia reached the top of the crater slope and looked around wildly. Ilya was
supposed
to be up here, but …

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.
“Charlie’s still down there!”

INNER SLOPE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Charlie Dean ducked as rifle bullets plowed into loose cinders just above him. The smoke screen was dissipating rapidly, and he was now in clear view of gunmen down on the crater floor. He could see several armed men kneeling or standing near the drilling rig, aiming their weapons at him as they tried to pick him off the inside wall of the bowl.

If the air strike was on schedule, the bombs were already on the way. He needed to get out of the crater, and quickly, or a laser-guided JDAM was going to sweep him off this slope like a broom.

The trouble was, he’d moved around the inside of the crater counterclockwise, hoping to lead the bad guys below away from the gully where Lia was climbing. He didn’t have the gully’s rough ground to aid his scramble up the hill. The ground here was bare rock, too steep even for the cinders that covered everything on the lower slopes, and he had to pick his way along carefully or risk sliding all the way back down into the pit.

Another burst of full-auto rounds whined off the rock just ahead, making him flinch back.

Bracing himself against the slope, taking aim, he loosed several bursts at the gunmen below. He didn’t wait to see if he’d hit anything; he just wanted to make them keep their heads down, giving him a chance to move a bit farther up. The ground was so steep here that he couldn’t move straight up but was having to navigate along the northern slope toward the west, trying to work his way uphill a few feet for every dozen yards that he traversed the inside of the crater rim. The top was still a long way above him.

“Charlie! Ilya!” sounded on his tactical radio. “Lia’s here with me.”

“Good.” He didn’t have the breath for extended conversations at the moment.

“You’ve got about two minutes before it gets very noisy down there.”

“I know. See if you can distract those guys near the drill rig.”

“I’m on it.”

“No smoke. The bombs are probably already locked on.”

“Copy that. Forty mike-mike HE on the way.”

A few seconds later, an explosion thundered in the bottom of the crater, spewing a geyser of cinder, rock, and smoke.

He began climbing faster.

HELICOPTER
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

At last, the helicopter began to lift from the ground. Almost immediately, bullets started striking the aircraft, sounding like rocks thrown against a tin roof.

“Get us up!” Feng screamed. “Get us up!”

The helicopter rose faster …

NORTHEAST RIM
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Akulinin heard the roar of the helicopter’s rotors, saw the brightly painted civilian aircraft begin to rise above its makeshift landing pad.

He didn’t know who or what was aboard that Puma. It might be Tango leaders trying to make an escape, gunmen getting airborne to try to find the Marines at the crater rim, or even someone with a nuclear weapon trying to get clear of the combat zone.

Whatever the case, it wouldn’t be good for the mission, and he wasn’t going to let them get clear of the crater.

The range to the helicopter was about 250 yards, well within his weapon’s maximum range, but farther than its effective range of 150 meters for a point target. He should be able to hit an area target at that range, though, and the general area of a helicopter was all he needed.

Snapping home another 40 mm grenade, he took aim and squeezed the trigger.

INNER SLOPE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Charlie Dean was almost at the top, racing along the inner slope. He went to ground again, though, when he heard the helicopter taking off. Bullets kept snapping and whining past him, but Ilya’s grenade barrage had driven the Tangos to seek shelter, and their fire was now sporadic and confused.

He considered trying to take the helicopter under fire but decided that the Marines and Ilya would have that problem covered.

Dean continued making his way upslope, loose rocks and gravel spraying from beneath his boots with each step and avalanching down into the bowl. He braced himself with his right hand against the slope as he continued to move, cutting across the face of the slope to the east as he gained height.

How much time was left? He couldn’t know for sure. He wasn’t certain if the “ten minutes” Marie had mentioned eight minutes ago was how far the incoming aircraft were from releasing their weapons or how far out the bombs themselves were. He knew he could call the Art Room, but at the moment he needed all his wind for running.