She was already having second thoughts about the wisdom of this. If they wanted to, they could pick her off with a single shot. If they let her get to the bottom alive, her survival depended, she realized, on Herve Chatel’s goodwill—and, just possibly, on how much influence he had with Ibrahim Azhar, a known terrorist, hijacker, and murderer.
The hell of it was, there was no way for her to change her mind. She couldn’t scramble up and out of this crater if those people down there decided that she wasn’t going to leave.
The San Martin crater was oddly shaped, an oval a third of a mile long, northwest to southeast, and two-tenths of a mile wide. The crater ridge rose only about fifty meters above the surrounding black, moon-surface terrain; the deepest parts of the crater’s interior, however, plunged into shadow over a hundred meters below. The crater’s floor was broken and uneven, some places much deeper than others. The helipad and tents had been set up on a relatively shallow, level stretch to the southeast; the drilling derrick rose from the very deepest part of the crater, in the northwest. To Lia’s untrained eye, it looked as if the crater was the product of two eruptions, creating a single oblong caldera but, most likely, occurring many years apart.
The guards came up to meet her as she neared the bottom of the cinder slope. “You are not permitted here!” one barked in accented Spanish, then repeated himself in even worse English. “You no come here!”
One guard grabbed her arm and yanked her forward. “Hey!” she shouted, playing the outraged tourist role. “Get your hands off of me!”
“What you do, restricted area?” one of them demanded.
Lia turned and looked at Herve Chatel, watching from perhaps fifty yards away. “Herve!” she called. “Herve! It’s me, Diane! Call off your dogs, will you?”
One of the guards snarled something in Arabic and struck her in the back with the butt of his rifle, sending her sprawling to the ground. Too late, she remembered that the term “dog” was a deadly insult among Muslims in general and Arabs in particular. She’d meant the phrase colloquially, not as invective.
Shit. A fine cultural liaison I turned out to be, she thought.
Rough hands grabbed her by either arm and hoisted her to her feet, dragging her toward Chatel and Azhar.
“Lia, are you okay?” Rubens’ voice said in her ear.
“Yeah,” she said through clenched teeth. “Language difficulties.”
“Silence, whore!” the guard on her right growled. They dropped her in an untidy heap on the ground.
“Diane!” Chatel said, hurrying forward. “What are you doing here?”
“I was out biking,” she told him. She started to rise, and Chatel reached out and helped her stand, brushing the volcanic dust off of her shirt in entirely too familiar a manner. She ignored it. “I was just out biking … and I saw this cinder cone above the trail. I was up there.” She pointed to the rim of the caldera, carefully avoiding that part of the crest where she knew CJ and Carlylse were still watching from under cover. “I was interested in the drilling … wondering what they were drilling for. And I saw you.” She patted the binoculars, now in their case and slung over her shoulder. “I hadn’t seen you since we got here, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I came down to say hi!”
Azhar joined them, his face dark but otherwise unreadable. “You know this woman?”
“Yes,” Chatel said. “She came with me from Spain. She is … a friend.”
Azhar smirked at that. “I know about your ‘friends.’ “ He looked at Lia. “Didn’t you see the postings on the trails? No trespassing.”
“I saw one north of here,” she said. “At Montaña Rejada. After that, I stayed on the bike trails below the crest of the ridge. Those weren’t blocked off.”
“You needed to be on the crest trail to get here,” Azhar told her.
“I went off-trail,” she replied. “I crossed a flat, open stretch of cinders and pine trees, and ended up on the ridge trail. I didn’t see any roadblocks.”
All of that was the exact truth. They couldn’t possibly block off all those miles of twisting bike trail and footpath, not without bringing in an army.
“Are you alone?” Chatel asked her.
“I was riding with a couple of other tourists for a while, but that was a few hours ago.” That would explain the presence of her companions if Chatel checked with the sentries that had turned them back at Rejada.
“I really wish you hadn’t come up here, Diane,” Chatel told her. “It makes things … complicated.”
“Why not? You were gone so long! I missed you!”
“I would have been back to the hotel tonight. I’ll be flying back to Spain tomorrow.”
“So … what are you doing here, anyway? Drilling for oil?”
“Not inside a volcanic crater,” he told her. He seemed uneasy. “This island, these volcanoes, they’re all igneous rock, not sedimentary. Not a good place to prospect for petroleum.”
“This is part of a research project,” Azhar told her. “There is a … a danger of the volcanoes on this ridge exploding, of them possibly triggering a massive tidal wave.”
“I’ve heard the theory,” Lia told him. “Why all the security? Roadblocks, armed guards …”
“These things can be … misunderstood by the general public,” Chatel said. “It could even cause a panic. People might think that an eruption is imminent if they see us drilling up here.”
The explanation actually made sense.
“I was reading a book just the other day about La Palma blowing up and causing a big tidal wave. Death Wave: 2012, or something like that.”
Chatel made a face. “That nonsense again. A bit too sensationalist for my taste.”
As they talked, Lia looked around the floor of the crater. In the deeper part, to her left, the drilling derrick ground and chugged. Nearby, she noticed more enormous wooden spools of insulated electrical wire. What the hell was that for?
“So long as I’m here,” she said brightly, “can you show me around? I love science.” She said it in that perky and airheaded singsong that suggested that she probably didn’t know the difference between astronomy and astrology.
Chatel exchanged glances with Azhar. “Perhaps later. But you will stay with us for a bit, chère.”
She looked at her watch. “Just so I’m back at the hotel by seven.”
“We’ll see what we can do.” He turned at the sound of rock scraping. Another figure was coming toward them from the direction of the workers’ tents.
Lia followed Chatel’s glance, her eyes widened, and she bit off a curse. Shit!
“Well, well,” a familiar voice said. “The elusive Ms. Lau. I was wondering what had become of you.”
Feng Jiu Zhu, formerly of Chinese military intelligence, had the cold stare of a venomous snake as he joined them, and he was holding an ugly little semiautomatic pistol.
20
ART ROOM
NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, 1140 HOURS EDT
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and Rubens fished it from his jacket. The only person who would call him on that phone was his secretary.
“What is it, Ann?”
“You have a one-thirty appointment with ANSA, sir,” she told him. “White House basement.”
Rubens groaned inwardly. He made a serious error letting Lia descend into that crater, and he didn’t want to leave the Art Room. Feng might kill her at any moment.
“I hate to ask it of you, Ann, but is there any chance in hell General James can see me later in the day?”
“I doubt it, sir. He was tight for time as it was, and told me it had ‘fucking well better be about Armageddon or worse,’ his words, sir. I gather he’s going to be flying to London this afternoon.”
“Right.” Rubens thought hard for a moment. There was nothing he could do for Lia if Feng decided to pull a trigger. He also needed to keep his eyes on the bigger situation. He needed the President to si
gn off on sending Marines into La Palma, and he wasn’t going to get it without ANSA.
He’d already flagged his request to James as Yankee White urgent. You did not use such a high-level code without very good and immediate reason. Worse, if he delayed, he would end up talking to Wehrum, James’ chief aide, and Wehrum was a political enemy who would block Rubens just for the hell of it.
“Mr. Rubens?” Ann Sawyer asked. “Can I confirm?”
“Yes, Ann. Confirm me for one thirty, WHB.” He snapped the phone shut and checked a wall clock. He would have to leave within the next few minutes to be sure he was there on time. “Marie!”
Marie Telach looked up from her console, startled. “Yes, sir?”
“Status on Black CAT Bravo, please.”
“They’re at Sigonella, sir.”
Sigonella was a joint Italian-NATO air base in Sicily, the location of a U.S. naval air station, NASSIG, which served as the hub of U.S. military operations in the Mediterranean. Yesterday, Rubens had ordered a Close Assault Team to fly from Pax River to Sigonella, where it would be closer—about three thousand miles—to the scene of the pirate hijacking in the Gulf of Aden. If something had happened to shut down the SEAL assault on the Yakutsk, he’d wanted a second force ready to go in.
Sigonella was also about two thousand miles from La Palma.
The situation on board the Yakutsk was well in hand. They wouldn’t need CAT Bravo there. “Okay. Tell the CO of CAT Bravo I want his team to deploy to Rota immediately. Have them stay at Readiness Green-One. Second, see what we can do about getting Dean and Akulinin to Rota as well.”
“Right away, sir.”
“Third, I want your best people monitoring Ms. DeFrancesca at all times. I want to know exactly where she is, who she’s with, and what’s happening. Support her every way you can.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Next, check whatever records we can snag on flights out of Karachi, Tuesday through Thursday. I want to know how they might have gotten ten suitcase nukes to La Palma, and when.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Raise Ms. Howorth.”
“She doesn’t have a comm implant, sir.”
“No, but she has a cell phone, and La Palma has a cell network for European tourists. I want her and Carlylse out of there. They can’t help Lia, and if the Jackal picks them up they become tactical liabilities.”
“Right.”
He thought for a moment more. “Okay. There’s a major observatory on La Palma, isn’t there? Some sort of big scientific facility?”
“Yes, sir. La Roque, up on the north end of the island.”
“Have Ms. Howorth see about getting in touch with the public affairs people there, at least for a start. If the JeM is pretending to be a scientific research expedition of some kind, the Jackal might have talked with someone official there—getting permission to put up those roadblocks, to shut down park trails, that sort of thing. She might also talk with the island’s guardia. I want to know how extensive this thing is—how many people the Jackal has on the island, where they’re located, whether they’ve infiltrated local organizations like the guardia or the observatory. Find out who on the island is responsible for watching those volcanoes, and where they’re based. La Roque? Or someplace else?”
“Yes, sir.”
Was there anything else he could do? There was not, he decided. Everything rested now with ANSA and, ultimately, with the President.
If he could get permission to deploy the CAT to La Palma, he would, but Rota would do for now. Rota was another U.S. naval air station, located across the bay from Cádiz, sixty miles north of the Straits of Gibraltar and just 850 miles from La Palma. That was a two-and-a-half hour flight for a C-130 Hercules.
However, the CAT Bravo team numbered just forty men, too few for a simultaneous assault on all ten drilling sites on La Palma.
For this job, Rubens needed U.S. Marines.
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
CUMBRE VIEJA
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
SUNDAY, 1658 HOURS LOCAL TIME
Lia’s knee shot up, catching the guard in the crotch. He doubled over, white teeth bared by his grimace, but the other guard, standing behind her, placed his hands on Lia’s shoulders and slammed her down onto the folding metal chair.
“Let me go, you bastards!” she screamed, still playing the role of outraged tourist. “You have no right—”
“Excuse me, but we have all the right we need,” Feng told her. He patted the pistol, now resting in the leather holster on his hip. “So sit still and behave yourself while we decide what to do with you.”
Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. The guard kept his hands heavy on her shoulders, pinning her to the chair.
They’d taken her to one of the tents near the parked helicopter. It appeared to be used for storage, with a number of large crates stacked up in the back and along both sides of the interior. Feng was examining the items they’d just taken from her—a compass, her BlackBerry, the binoculars in their case, her wallet—all laid out on a folding card table. He pulled her ID card from the wallet and looked at it.
“Cathy Chung, U.S. State Department, GS-14,” he said, reading it. He flipped it over to check the back. “At this point, I think we can assume this is a false ID.”
“You’d better pray it’s false,” she snarled. “When State gets through with you—”
Feng smiled. “They’ll what? Slap me with sanctions?” He dropped card and wallet on the folding card table in front of him, picked up her BlackBerry, and thumbed through several apps. Finding nothing of interest, he opened the binoculars case.
“Very fancy,” he said. He held the device to his eyes and pressed several of the buttons on the small control panel on top. “CIA issue?”
“You can get them in any good electronics store back in the States.”
“Electronic binoculars? I think not. As a senior executive for COSCO, I have a good understanding of what’s available to consumers. Is this how you turn them on?” He stepped to the entrance of the tent and aimed them up at the crater rim. “Yes. Zoom control … and is it also a video recorder?”
He continued playing with the button controls. Lia watched him in silence. He was looking at the crater’s north rim, not the west, where she’d left CJ and Carlylse, and she hadn’t been so amateurish as to have left data in the device’s memory. He turned and came back into the tent. “Quite ingenious. Does it let you transmit your recordings to a remote site? Possibly by satellite?”
“To my laptop with a cable connection, yes,” she lied.
“I assume that’s in your room. We’ll send someone down there later to retrieve it.” He set the binoculars on the table. “So … what is it you expected to learn, coming up here like this?”
“I already told you. I was looking for Herve.”
“Your taste in men is deplorable. I was most upset when you simply left me in Spain. I thought we’d come to an understanding.”
“I got cold feet.”
“That … or your handlers decided to send you after Mr. Chatel. What did you see in him?”
She thought she saw an opportunity. “Look … my name is Cathy Chung, and I am with the U.S. State Department. COSCO is on our watch list, you know … because of the Empress Phoenix affair. My bosses were curious about you, and they did plant me on you in order to find out if COSCO was up to no good.”
“Indeed? And what did you learn?”
“Nothing. After I met you in Spain, they decided you weren’t important. They told me to come home.”
“You live in the Canary Islands?”
“No. I decided to take a bit of vacation as long as I was over here, and Herve offered to let me tag along with him to the Canaries.” She managed a shrug, despite the weight of the guard’s hands still pressing down on her shoulders. “I thought he would be fun, but he disappeared on me as soon as we got to the hotel.”
“Mm.” He turned and raised his voice. “Mr. Chate
l! Would you come in here a moment?”
Chatel entered the tent a moment later. He must have been standing just outside the tent’s entrance. “Yes, sir?”
“Ms. Chung here told me she came to these islands with you. Is that true?”
“She was on my flight out of Alicante.” A Gallic shrug. “I assumed you’d sent her here on some errand that was none of my business. She didn’t come with me, however. We didn’t even speak—”
“He’s lying,” Lia said, snarling the words through clenched teeth. If she could get the two of them squabbling with one another, there might be an opening for her, at least a chance to cause confusion enough to help her escape.
“She suggests that the two of you have a relationship. Is that true?”
“Absolutely not.” He cocked his head to one side. “She is pretty … but definitely not my type.”
“She is female, which makes her your type,” Feng said. “But I believe you. You may go.”
Chatel left the tent. Feng leaned over her, pinning her with cold eyes.
“I believe you to be CIA, Ms. Chung … or whatever your real name is.”
“I am not CIA—”
“And we will learn the truth, soon enough. What your real name is. Who you work for. What you know about our … our operation here. Everything.”
“Go to hell! I’m telling you the truth!”
“Perhaps you are. We’ll soon know for certain, however, one way or another. I have a … a specialist flying in. He’ll be here tomorrow, and then we will learn everything about you that we wish to know.”
An interrogation, then, and a professional one if they were bringing in a specialist. With torture? Drugs?
Lia felt very cold, and very much alone.
“Tie her to the chair,” Feng told the guard. Reaching out casually, he lightly stroked her cheek. She snapped her head back, pulling away from the touch. He smiled. “And keep a very close eye on her. I want two guards in here with her at all times, watching her, two more outside the tent, and two more at a distance, watching them. If there is one mouse in the woodpile, there are almost certainly more.”
09.Deep Black: Death Wave Page 28