THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (41 page)

After a painful three minutes, she was about to give up when – with a great sigh – she tried to rip the hairpin from the hole.
Great! Now, it’s stuck
, she thought. She cursed and yanked it free. Decker rolled over. Swenson tried to catch him but he banged his face against the crate, exactly where he’d been struck with the gun.

“Oops,” she said. “Sorry!” She pulled him upright once again, and slipped the hairpin back into the lock. “Decker,” she said as she worked. “Decker, wake up. We’ve got to get out of here. John, wake up!”

He moaned. He started to move.

She let him gradually recline into her lap. She stroked his face and said, “John, if you don’t wake up, we’re both going to die. And I really don’t want to do that.”

Decker’s eyes fluttered open. He stared up at Swenson and smiled. “Where am I?” he said.

“Don’t you remember? We’re in a cavern, at the heart of an active volcano, in the middle of the Atlantic, handcuffed to a nuclear bomb.”

“Oh, right. I thought for a minute there that we were in trouble.” He laughed and sat up. “That’s an interesting ensemble you’re wearing.”

She handed him the hairpin. He turned it first one way, and then the other. Then he tried again. And again. And again, when – out of nowhere – the patter of desperate footsteps echoed through the cave. Someone was running toward them. Decker tried to stand but the handcuffs kept him huddled over, and the sudden jerking of the chain caused Swenson to cry out. He peered over the crate. “It’s him,” he said.

“Who?” Swenson strained to get a better view.

“One of the men who chased us back at the hotel. I recognize him.” Then Decker paused, and listened, and added in a tone of quiet desperation, “He’s coming this way.”

They squatted down behind the crate, both absolutely still. Swenson’s thighs began to shake. She watched as a thin rivulet of blood ran past Decker’s temple, down his neck, and into his shirt. The footsteps grew louder and louder as the man drew near. He was almost upon them. And then he was there, right there, beside them, towering overhead, casting a shadow over Decker, who still held the hairpin in his hand.

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.

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.

Thursday, February 3 – 2:59 PM

La Palma
, The Canary Islands

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.

* * *

Pickings got up slowly. He had twisted his right knee. It felt like someone were pushing needles into him. He hobbled over to the wall. The crack had stopped expanding. The earthquake, or whatever it had been, seemed to have finally settled down. He could see his prize flower garden in the back, the birds of paradise and codeso, the colorful hibiscus. He made his way carefully toward the rear door, keeping an eye out for falling plaster. It was already strewn across the floor. The crack stretched to the ceiling.

The kitchen was a disaster. Every plate he owned, it seemed, each bowl and every glass was on the floor, smashed in a million pieces, including his most precious china. The refrigerator had fallen on its side, and milk and juice were puddling up beside it.

He crossed the floor with care, picking his feet up to avoid the shards. When he finally reached the other side, Pickings hesitated for a moment in the open doorway and gasped. He had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t some sort of optical illusion, trompe l’oeil. His garden had been cut in half!

A huge hole, the size of a city bus, or larger, had opened up between his fuchsia rum runners and lavender eyes of the storm. He shuffled as fast as he could down the path. He stopped at the precipice, by the lip of the ditch, and looked down – then instantly pulled back.

He couldn’t look over the edge. It was too hot! It felt like it would melt his face. The ground quivered and a vast tower of steam and stone and dust shot out of the crevasse.

Pickings was thrown backwards to the ground. The volcano was erupting! And, just as this completely terrifying thought had settled in his mind, he was assaulted with the bleak, bone-chilling certitude that he was going to die.

The ground continued to tremble violently, shaking his stunted stand of gnarled Canary Pine. His house began to groan, to wobble and finally bend and fall. Pickings ran over to his jeep. Miraculously it had been parked in front, not in the carport, beside the shattered house. He had been too lazy to walk down to his mailbox earlier that morning. He leapt into the vehicle. He turned the ignition key and the engine came to life. He put the jeep in gear and screamed out of the driveway. He turned the corner, banked. He accelerated down the straightaway. Then he breathed a deep sigh of relief, until he suddenly recalled his manuscript, the way that it had looked there on his writing desk as he had run out of the house, all stacked and neatly typed, unabashedly dense, the labor of five years, when the mountain road gave way. The tarmac started to melt. There was no way to negotiate the road. Then, there was no road.

Pickings leapt out of the jeep. He felt as if he were descending into a Pieter Bruegel mindscape, a hectare of the
Triumph of Hell
. He walked a dozen paces when the earth opened up before him, spewing steam and fire. He turned the other way. Another fissure blocked his path. It didn’t matter, he thought. It was too hot to move anyway. The last thing that he thought of was his missing wife, his Layla, and his two children back in England. They were probably sitting down to tea right now. He wanted desperately to move. He wanted to reach out to them. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do anything . . . but boil.

Thursday, February 3 – 3:02 PM

La Palma
, The Canary Islands

The Seahawk tumbled from the sky. The downdraft following the detonation of the bomb continued to suck the helicopter downwards toward the waiting funnel of the Cumbre Vieja. Then, without warning, the vacuum created by the shock wave filled. The instrumentation settled. The helicopter flipped, righted herself and started rising once again.