Inside the laboratory, Stuart Gibbs twitched. He was not yet dead and somehow through the pain and the blood, he realized it. With great effort he managed to push the gurney away, get to his knees, and begin to crawl. He was beyond hope now, but hate drove him on. He would not let them survive. He would curse the world that had rejected him.
He reached the table beneath the beakers, pulled himself up, and stretched for the pump switch. The pain was incredible and the agony coursing through his body caused him to scream aloud as he stretched for it. He flicked the switch and fell back to the floor.
Lying in an awkward heap, Stuart Gibbs heard the pumps engage. He felt the vibration throughout the room as they drew the viral suspensions into the driplines.
Through his failing eyes, he saw the levels in each beaker begin to drop. He would die but his last act would bring hell to the world one way or another.
Kicking hard, Hawker made it back to the surface. The body armor weighed him down; he slipped free of it. As he came up, powerful hands yanked him out of the water and into the speedboat.
He heard Keegan shout “Go!” as he sprawled out onto the deck.
At the driver’s console, Danielle shoved the throttle to full. The boat leapt forward, accelerated away from the freighter, and raced south at top speed.
Hawker lay in the back, exhausted, barely able to breathe and facing the sky. Overhead he saw the cormorants circling like dragons in the dark. And then they suddenly veered off and dove toward the island en masse.
No, he thought. It can’t be.
Seconds later the sound of whistling death shot over their heads, as the first of the Tomahawks raced past them on its way to the island. Two others followed, converging from different angles.
The cormorants swarmed over their feeding places, jostling and pushing against one another to get at the free buffet they’d grown used to finding. Liquid oozed from the thin black tubes. They squawked and flapped, stretching their beaks down, snatching the line from one another and then fighting to keep it.
And then they looked up and turned to the south in unison. A strange whistling sound came toward them. Thunder boomed a second later and a concussion wave blasted through them, ripping their feathers and wings apart. Some of the birds tumbled, others tried to fly, but even as they flapped their wings, a wave of thousand-degree flames crashed over them, engulfing them from every direction and incinerating them on the ground and in midair.
Aboard the powerboat Hawker stared back at the conflagration. A half mile off, the explosions were still deafening. In the moments after each impact, chunks of rock and flaming debris rained down like small meteors.
At one point, three or four missiles hit simultaneously. A blinding explosion stretched across the island like a halo before rising skyward like a mushroom cloud.
Behind him, Keegan held the little girl, who was now fully conscious and confused. “Sonia?” she asked. “Where’s Sonia?”
Hawker felt his heart break even more. He continued to stare at the island behind them as another round of Tomahawks hammered it, once again raising fire to the sky.
CHAPTER 55
In the shade of some trees, fifty yards back from a white sand beach and the warm waters of the Aegean, Danielle Laidlaw sat on an old stone wall. The wall wasn’t ancient enough to be from the classical Greek era or from Roman times, but she guessed a few generations had passed since its construction.
Enough time for the world to change and the height of technology to go from steam engines to spacecraft, from vacuum tubes to computers, from penicillin as the only miracle drug to the manipulation of DNA and the very building blocks of life.
All paths of growing knowledge that might lead to either paradise or perdition.
She wasn’t sure they’d ever know the truth about the place they’d found, whether it was connected to the biblical Garden of Eden or not. She wasn’t even sure if such a fact could be determined. But with the Iranians fuming over the incursion and the bombing of the cormorant island, and the American government trying to explain why they’d unleashed twenty-four missiles on a flyspeck in the middle the Gulf, she doubted anyone, particularly an American like McCarter, would get the chance to try.
In the end, it probably didn’t matter. Those who wanted to believe it would, and those who wanted to believe something else would believe that something else. Like all things connected to religion and spirituality, it wouldn’t require faith if you could prove it one way or another.
She looked out to the beach where Hawker sat, shoes off, shirt open, watching the waves as his skin grew darker in the sun. For reasons known only to him, he’d insisted they come here and avoid hooking up with the authorities of any country or any representatives of the U.S. government, including the NRI.
After what he’d been through, what he’d lost and what he’d already done for her in his life, she didn’t question it, even as the days passed.
They were staying in Keegan’s place, a decent-sized chalet on the beach. But Keegan wasn’t there. He’d gone out on some mission for Hawker.
Since then life had been a model of consistency.
Every day Hawker would check in with Keegan by phone and then he’d bring Nadia to the beach and let her play, watching over her as if she were his own. Every day Moore would call Danielle on the satellite line and ask when she and Hawker would be returning for debriefing. And every day Danielle would say “maybe tomorrow.”
Truth was, she didn’t know. Even as Hawker’s physical wounds healed — helped on by a local surgeon — his mental anguish only seemed to deepen. Watching him, as he watched Nadia, Danielle felt a tremendous need to protect and shelter him. But he wouldn’t let her in, and so she had to do it from afar.
Back in Washington, Moore was doing the same, deflecting and redirecting the thousand questions that were probably pounding down his door. In a way, it felt good to raise their shields around Hawker. After all, he was one of their tribe.
Sliding the satellite phone into her pocket, Danielle started across the beach, walking across the warm sand until she’d reached a spot beside him. She sat, brought her knees up toward her chest, and rested her arms on them, leaning forward.
Ahead of them, a small wave swept in and over the sand castle Nadia was building. The young child, looking like a tiny old woman, shrieked with delight as the foamy water swirled around and then slid back into the ocean.
“She wants to know where Sonia is,” Hawker said. “Where Savi is. And when her father is coming back.”
He looked down at the sand and then over at Danielle. “How do you tell a little girl that everyone she loved is gone?”
“What about her mother?” Danielle asked.
“She died giving birth to Nadia.”
“Cousins? Uncles?”
“No one yet,” he said. “She’s all alone.”
Danielle turned toward him, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Is that why we’re still here?”
“I don’t know where else to go,” he said, sounding lost.
As long as she’d known him, Hawker had always been sure of himself. Even when he was wrong he made his mistakes at a thousand miles an hour. To be suddenly uncertain about things might feel worse than being wrong.
“You can’t keep her here,” she said. “You can’t stay here forever, even if Keegan says you can.”
For the first time he looked at her. “I know that. But where do we go?”
“We?” she said. “There are agencies. I’m sure with our influence—”
“A child with her problems?” he said. “You’re going to put her in foster care?”