He was Middle Eastern. He had chocolate-brown hair and penetrating nut-brown eyes. He took in the scene at a glance, reached into his windbreaker, removed a double-action Jericho 941, and aimed it a Decker’s head.
Decker and Swenson both winced and closed their eyes. They heard the shot and looked in panic at each other. The bullet had severed the chain. The cufflinks separated. They were free.
“You must be Agent Decker,” said the stranger. “And Emily Swenson, of Woods Hole.” He held a hand out and helped them to their feet. “Acting Chief Seiden, Mossad. Warhaftig told me you were somewhere on La Palma. I tried to link up with you at the Parador in Santa Cruz but you left in quite a hurry.”
Decker pointed at the silver attaché case on the crate behind them. “Unless you also happen to be a nuclear technician,” he added, “I think we should get the hell out of here.”
They started running at a furious pace back toward the entrance to the cave. They made it through the tunnel, into the lava tube and stumbled across the golf cart Decker had abandoned earlier, on the way in. It was just sitting there next to that boulder in the path. The key was still in the ignition. Obviously, El Aqrab had not anticipated their release.
They jumped in, Decker floored the accelerator, and the small battery-powered engine whined. The golf cart began to move. After about twenty yards, they picked up steam, and — even with the headlights — it became difficult to see. The lave tube seemed to curl this way and that, to turn at the oddest angles, to rise and drop at will. But as fast as they were driving, the journey still seemed to take forever. At one point they passed another tunnel to the left and Decker had to stop, and try and orient himself. He hadn’t noticed it before, on the way in. It joined the lava tube at a sharp angle. Without hesitating, Decker turned right and kept on driving. After another ten minutes, just as he was about to turn around and try the other tunnel, he saw a faint light up ahead, pale as a lost firefly. He hugged the steering wheel. The light seemed to be growing brighter by the second. “Do you see that?” he asked Swenson, just to be sure.
“I’m not blind.”
“We’re almost out,” said Seiden.
They barreled through the tunnel, mindless of the bumps and curves, and suddenly the tube expanded, widened up into a cave, and they were in the open… and taking heavy fire. Decker jammed his foot on the breaks. The golf cart skidded and began to roll. He reached for Swenson’s hand and pulled her to him, just as the cart went over. They skidded across the ground into a stand of green banana palms.
“Hold your fire,” someone said.
Decker was lying on top of Swenson, covering her body. She was barely dressed, still wrapped in strands of gun-gray metal ribbon. Seiden had disappeared into the brush.
“Don’t move,” somebody else said. “Freeze!”
Decker looked up. A U.S. Special Forces soldier approached them through the trees. Behind him, another dozen men materialized out of the grass and jungle. They were wearing camouflage fatigues and their faces were blotched with green paint. Then he heard the helicopter. It hovered overhead — a Seahawk, and she was gradually descending, straight down on top of them! Decker covered his head.
The helicopter fell. The wind almost carried them away. Then it was down.
A soldier grabbed Decker by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Another approached Swenson. He picked her up as if she were a bag of laundry and threw her deftly through the open hatch. A second later, Decker was hoisted up into the helicopter. Then, as the landscape dropped away, Ben Seiden suddenly appeared. He was running in their shadow. He leapt into the open hatch and rolled across the deck.
The helicopter climbed. Somebody put a blanket on top of Swenson’s naked form. Decker looked up to thank him when he noticed, with a start, that he was dressed in a dark gray business suit. It was Warhaftig.
The CIA operative smiled and said, “You sure go for those dramatic exits, don’t you, John? I see you’ve met Ben Seiden.”
“I’m glad to see you, Otto.” Decker turned toward Seiden. “You too, Chief Seiden. You saved our lives.”
“Perhaps not. How long do we have?”
Decker glanced at his watch. He shrugged and looked down through the open hatch. He could see the island of La Palma gradually receding, a green mound in a deep blue sea. He could see the various volcanoes, including the Cumbre Vieja to the south. Wet verdant mountains glistened in the sun.
“We don’t.”
Just then there was a thunderous roar. It was so loud, so omnipresent, that it seemed to lift the helicopter up, to flip her over for an instant. Decker rolled directly into Swenson, who rolled against Warhaftig, who rolled against Seiden and the bulkhead with a bang. Only the weight of a hundred billion tons of rock prevented them from being incinerated instantly by the nuclear explosion.
Then, the helicopter righted. She settled down. Warhaftig and Seiden pulled themselves to their feet. Decker was lying on top of Swenson. She opened her eyes and realized, looking down, that she was almost naked, exposed, her breasts pressed up against his chest. “Excuse me,” she said, just as the Electro-Magnetic Pulse shot through them.
The helicopter veered to port, flipped over on her back, and began to plummet toward the earth. She fell and fell. The pilot wrestled with the stick but it was useless. The EMP had disabled every instrument on the ship. They were being sucked down by the funnel of the Cumbre Vieja, and there was nothing they could do.
Chapter 41
Giles Pickings was proofreading the first draft of his Passion of Pius II when he felt the earth move underneath his feet.
He had just finished the manuscript the night before. It had taken him almost five years, but he was finally done. And, more importantly, he felt good about it. It was a worthy contribution to the literature. One day, perhaps, his name would be remembered. Not as a giant in the field, of course; he could not hope for that. But as a worthy squire or a page, attendant to the Hamlets of the age. A Prufrock.
He sighed. He put the manuscript aside and glanced outside the window by his writing desk. A rain had swept across the mountains in the morning and the palm trees glistened like blown glass.
That’s odd, he thought. A moment earlier he’d been harassed by songbirds as he had tried to concentrate on his review. Now, they were silent as the grave.
He looked up. A cloud of daffodil-colored canaries commingled with another, and another, and yet another still when Pickings was blown backwards over his chair. A deafening explosion rocked the earth.
He landed on his back somehow, but turned the other way, with his feet propped up against the far wall. For a moment he couldn’t see. Everything went blurry. Then he noticed his bookcase tipping over, right on top of him! He rolled out of the way. It shattered across the floor, sending books in all directions. The window tinkled as it cracked. No, it wasn’t the window.
Pickings turned and stared wild-eyed beyond his desk. It was the wall. It was still cracking. It was being ripped apart, as if by giant hands.
Far, far below, in the vast subterranean reservoirs of the Cumbre Vieja, lava cascaded into steam, into water that had been accumulating for millennia in soft permeable streams. Slowly, the reservoirs began to heat, like radiator foils wrapped in impermeable stone, to roil and bubble, charged by the furious energy of the exploded bomb, nursed by the lava streams that followed. Each reservoir was several thousand meters deep, and each was stacked against another of its size for countless kilometers, like Titan tombstones. The waters boiled between these dense impenetrable towers, desperate to be free.