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There had been some pines at the southern end of the island near the water, but up here there was nothing. In every direction was a dusky lunar landscape of black rock and black ash on which nothing moved.
“These are the four caves that I know about,” Rezende said as he knelt and began drawing a crude outline of their locations in the dirt with his finger.
We decided to split up into four teams. Emily and I and Mr. Duke went with Nate’s team west, up a slope of loose, black, sandlike volcanic dust. When we arrived at the top of a ridge, we climbed up an outcropping and looked down into the caldera of the volcano itself.
Mr. Duke had just pointed out what looked like a cave opening in the dried lava bed a couple of hundred feet below when Nate’s radio started popping, chattering frantically.
“Commander Nate! Nate!” came over the radio.
“What is it?”
“The island guide, Rezende. He just went nuts or something! He tried to shove Olender off a cliff, and now he’s running up the hill! He’s almost near the top. What do I do?”
“Drop his ass!” said Nate without hesitation. “In the legs if you can, but drop him. He could be going for the explosives!”
We heard the crackle of gunfire as we quickly headed for the eastern slope. When we got to its top, we saw a cluster of SEALs about a football field away, standing near the edge of a cliff, looking down. When I got to the edge of the cliff, I was hit with vertigo. It was insanely high up, a sheer hundred stories or so straight down to the sea.
“Mike! Look! This is it! This looks like the still from the video!” Emily said.
“What the f happened?” Nate said to his guys.
“I did like you said, Commander,” one of them said. “I put two in him, one in the back of each knee, but then he crawled to the edge and just rolled off.”
“He committed suicide, sir,” said another SEAL. “I swear on a stack of Bibles. It was completely deliberate.”
“But why?” said Mr. Duke.
“He must have been in on it is why,” I said, looking around. “He was one of only two licensed guides, right? He had the run of the island basically to himself. He must have been paid to help the bombers. Damn it, I didn’t even think of it.”
Then I saw it. Off to the left, down the ledge of the cliff, about a hundred feet away was a fissure in the rock wall. A familiar one.
I stared at the almost circular opening in the wrinkled black rock, then way down the cliff, where petrels were flying this way and that like confetti. Emily was right. This was the place from the video. We’d actually found it.
The needle in the haystack.
Chapter 87
The swirling lines in the rock at the mouth of the volcanic cave reminded me of the mouth of the weird-looking guy in that famous painting The Scream. I felt like doing some screaming myself as we sat on our hands waiting and waiting.
We’d found the bombs.
One of the army bomb techs had done a recon, and there they were, just as the video had shown. Fifteen individual twenty-pound charges of Semtex had been found down the sloping three-hundred-yard channel of the cave. A three-football-field-long daisy chain of death and destruction connected with detcord and a shitload of wires and cables and who knew what else. Trip wires? Motion detectors?
Or maybe something new. With these bombers, if we’d learned one thing, it was to expect the unexpected. Anything could happen now.
I stared down the cliff and imagined an explosion, the ground sliding as we rode half the mountain into the sea.
“You know, you really shouldn’t be here,” said Commander Nate, crouching down next to me.
“I know,” I said as I stared at the silent radio in my hand. “I should be home making pancakes.”
“No—I mean right here. We should get back.”
“Nate, if those bombs in there go off, this whole mountain is coming down. Here is as good a place as anywhere to be blown into the bottom of the sea.”
I stared at the mouth of the cave again. It was up to the army bomb squad guys now. Into that mouth thirty minutes before had gone five three-man army EOD teams with their spaceman bomb suits and remote-controlled robots known as wheelbarrows.
The wheelbarrows were armed with cameras, sensors, and microphones along with a “pigstick” device that could shoot an explosive jet of water to disable a bomb’s firing-train circuitry. They’d even set up a cell-phone-jamming device connected to one of their Toughbook laptops to thwart any cell-phone triggers.
