Mercer climbed for the bridge. Third Officer Rourke stood at the windscreen, binoculars pressed to his eyes. “Get on the radio, Seamus. See if you can get a signal. We need to know what’s going on.” Mercer tried his cell again but there was no signal.
“Your little girlfriend said we had two more weeks,” Spirit accused.
“Go find Jim,” Mercer ordered. “And your husband. We have to push up the dive.”
“Dr. Mercer, I have someone onshore.” The watch stander handed him the radiophone handset.
“This is Philip Mercer. Who is this and where are you?”
“Bill Farley, Doctor. I’m an assistant supervisor for the drilling crews. I’m about eight miles south of the volcano.”
“What’s the situation?”
“Chaos. I don’t know what’s happening. There were three crews up near the summit and another two farther down. I haven’t heard from them and from what I can see here I don’t think they made it.”
That news wasn’t unexpected but still hit like a body blow. “What about the fault?” Mercer asked. “Has it slipped?”
“If it had I wouldn’t be here. I’m standing on it now.”
“Bill, I want you to reach as many of your people as you can. Evacuate everyone. I don’t know why San Juan erupted early, but you need to get everyone off the island any way you can.” Mercer’s cell vibrated. The atmospheric disturbances must have abated enough for the signal to reach him from the towers on the island. “Keep this line open.” He passed the phone to the officer and flipped open the little Nokia. “Mercer.”
“It’s Ira. What the hell happened? I just got a call from the USGS. They’re recording a massive eruption on La Palma.”
“The San Juan volcano just lit off. I just talked to a guy in the field. He says the fault hasn’t slipped so we may have time.”
“It doesn’t matter. As soon as the president hears about this he’s going to order the evacuation.”
Mercer was forced to agree. “I would too.”
How had Tisa been so wrong? That question had hidden in his subconscious since the first instant of the eruption and now stood at the forefront of his mind. On Santorini she’d predicted the earthquake to the minute. How could she miss this by three weeks?
“Where’s the warhead?” he asked the admiral.
“Still at Livermore Labs.”
“How fast can you get it here?”
“Four hours.”
Even the SR-71 Blackbird couldn’t travel the thousands of miles from California to Spain that fast. Mercer suspected that the world was about to get their first look at the SR-1 Wraith, the secret hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft mistakenly called Aurora.
“Get me that bomb, Ira. There’s still a chance.”
“Mercer, if that mountain goes it won’t matter that you’re on the other side of the island. The wave’s going to nail you. Maybe you should get out of there.”
“I’ve ordered everyone off La Palma, but we’re not running. I have to make a try with the nuke.”
“If you’re wrong, that’s a death sentence for the crew with you.”
“I don’t need you telling me the obvious.” Mercer tried to calm himself. Snapping at his friend wasn’t going to help. “Ira, can you buy me twelve hours with the president? We both know if that evacuation order comes, thousands are going to die in the panic.”
“And millions would be saved if the island collapses. There’s no way he’s going to take the chance.”
“What if this wasn’t the main eruption? What if we still have time? Tisa hasn’t been wrong before. I don’t think she’s wrong now.”
“Then tell me why that volcano’s erupting as we speak.”
“I can’t,” Mercer admitted. “Not until I talk to her.”
“And if Tisa can’t explain it either?” Mercer had no reply. “I’m sorry. He’s not going to have a choice about ordering the evacuation tonight. And I think I back him on this one.”
“All right, do what you have to, but get me that bomb.”
“That I can promise.”
“I’ll be in touch.” Mercer folded the phone into his pocket. Jim and Tisa stood at the back of the bridge. Tisa’s face reflected anguish as she looked at the towering ash cloud spreading over the dark island. Yet her voice was resolute when she said, “This isn’t the eruption from the prophecy. This is just a prelude.”
“I believe you.” Mercer touched her shoulder. “Unfortunately no one else does.”
“They’re going to try to evacuate the East Coast?” Jim asked.
“The president will probably make the announcement tonight.”
“What are we going to do?”
Mercer’s reply was never in doubt. “Finish what we started.” Jim nodded. “The bomb will be here in four hours. We need to pull Conseil from the vent so we can set it as soon as it arrives. We have to implode the mountain and stabilize the ridge in the next few hours. Where are C.W. and Scott?”
“I saw Scott heading for the control van,” Tisa said. “I haven’t seen Charlie.”
Spirit raced onto the bridge at that moment. She was nearly hysterical, sobbing and trying to catch her breath at the same time. She hadn’t yet put on anything to cover her near-naked body. “C.W.’s hurt. His head is bleeding bad and he won’t wake up.”
The pieces fell into place. “Jim, get down to the van and prep for the dive,” Mercer snapped the order. “Tisa, stay with him.” He addressed Seamus Rourke. “Are there any firearms on this ship?”
“Firearms? Why?” And then Rourke had the same thought as Mercer. The saboteur. “No, nothing. I’ll call the crew together and sweep the ship.”
“Good. Lock up everyone who came aboard with the Surveyor team except Jim here and Scott Glass. Put them in the mess hall.”
“What are you doing?” Jim protested.
“C.W. was attacked.”
“What?!” Spirit and McKenzie cried.
“The signal to turn on the turbines when we were on the Sea Surveyor, the glitch in the GPS yesterday that cut the cable to the ROV and now C.W., the best diver we’ve got, is hurt. It’s not a coincidence. Someone you brought with you has been sabotaging our work.”
“It could have been . . .” Jim’s voice trailed off as he made the connection, and came to the same conclusion. “Son of a bitch!”
“Tisa warned me that the Order had thousands of members and potentially millions of sympathizers. There’s no way we could have known they already had an agent in place.”
“I left him alone,” Spirit wailed, making no attempt to wipe at the tears pouring down her cheeks. “They could come back to attack him again.”
“Come on,” Mercer pulled her along as he rushed from the bridge, calling over his shoulder to Jim, “Prep both suits. Maybe C.W.’s okay.”
They ran down to the second deck. Mercer threw open the door to C.W.’s cabin. The young diver lay on the floor at the foot of their bunk, wearing jeans and shoes but no shirt. Around his upper body was a pool of his own blood. His blond hair was matted to his head, and his normal tan had faded to a ghostly white.
Spirit couldn’t enter the room. She stood at the door, her fist jammed against her mouth to keep from crying out. Her whole body trembled. Mercer knelt next to C.W. and felt for a pulse. It was there, but weak. Next he felt along Charlie’s head until his fingers sank into a sticky dent above his temple. Bits of bone grated as he pulled his fingers from the wound.
“Is he—?”
“He’s alive, but this is serious.” Mercer checked Charlie’s eyes. One pupil was dilated, the other just a black point. “His skull is fractured and he has a concussion. He needs medical attention.” There were twenty Ph.D.’s on the ship but not one medical doctor. “I don’t want to move him, but we have to cover him up. Give me a hand.”
Together Mercer and Spirit stripped the bed and tucked the blankets under and around Charlie so he wasn’t lying on the linoleum floor. Mercer turned up the cabin’s
heat and found more blankets in a storage closet.
By the time they finished, the ship’s second engineer arrived with a hard plastic medical chest. “What happened?”
“It looks like someone hit him over the head,” Mercer said, kneeling back to let the engineer, who obviously knew what he was doing, make his own examination. “Good job with the blankets,” he said in a rich Scottish accent. “He’s in shock. Hold this.” He handed Mercer a plasma bag and inserted the needle into Charlie’s muscled arm. “Blood loss is just as dangerous as the head trauma.”
“Are you a doctor?” Spirit asked, heartened by the man’s efficient manner.
“No, ma’am. I cross-trained as a corpsman in the Royal Navy.” He used scissors and a razor to get rid of the hair around Charlie’s wound. Then he cleared away the blood with a lavage of warm saline. “Okay, let’s see here. It’s deep and the bone is broken, but this part of the skull’s pretty lean so that doesn’t mean anything.” He removed some of the bone chips with a pair of tweezers. He looked at Mercer then Spirit, noticing for the first time she was barely dressed. She quickly wrapped one of Charlie’s corduroy shirts around her torso. “I’ll bandage his noggin and it’s just wait and see. He’s young, and looks fitter than an ox, so I think he’ll be okay. He’ll have a hell of a headache when he wakes and will be more than a wee bit tired for a few days. Keep an eye on him and I’ll check back in an hour or two.”
Spirit threw her arms around the engineer. “Thank you.”
“I’m going to ask if a crewman can keep watch on your door, if that’s all right,” Mercer said to Spirit after the engineer had left.
“Bit fucking late, isn’t it? His head’s already bashed in.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would go this far.”
“Didn’t think it would go this far?” she shouted back. “It went this far when someone tried to kill him on the Sea Surveyor. And what would have happened if he’d been in that lava tube when the ship drifted? You really are a conceited bastard, you know that? You don’t care about anyone or anything so long as you get the glory.” She began to sob. “Just leave.”
Mercer backed out of the cabin, knowing in his heart this wasn’t about glory. Maybe Tisa had gotten her wrong.
On deck, a blizzard of ash swept the ship in unending waves. Even with all the lights ablaze, the workboat was nearly blacked out by the ashfall. A resourceful officer had ordered the vessel’s water cannons to sweep the upperworks and deck, turning the ash into mud that drained from the scuppers. The rain that had begun to fall stung when it touched Mercer’s skin, made acidic by sulfur belching from the volcano.
He found Jim, Scott Glass and Tisa in the control van. “How’s Charlie?”
“Someone hit him over the head,” Mercer said, wiping the grime from his face with the towel Tisa had handed him. “He has a concussion, but the ship’s engineer was a corpsman and seems to think he’ll be fine.”
“What about the dive?” Scott asked. He was younger than Charlie, dark-haired and sporting a goatee and a nearly shaved head. Where C.W. was laid back and casual, Glass had an intensity and an attentiveness that Mercer appreciated. “One man can’t tow the line in alone.”
“Do any of the Petromax people have experience in the ADS?”
“No. There’s only the one pilot for their minisub. He might be able to do it, but he’s only five two. The suit’s too big.”
Jim added, “Most of the work Petromax does in the North Sea is done with saturation divers.”
“Can we use them?”
“It would take days just to set the diving bell and allow the divers enough time for their pre-breath on gas.” Jim shook his head. “Conseil’s stuck more than five hundred feet inside the vent and we have to go even deeper to place the bomb. It’s the suits or nothing.”
“I don’t know if he was bragging,” Scott put in, “but C.W. says that Mercer was pretty good in the suit when you were together a few weeks ago. If you’re willing to risk it, I’ll dive with you as my backup.”
Mercer hesitated. “Look, we only made a couple of dives. I have maybe three hours in the suit. And that was in open water. Forget it. What about you, Jim?”
“It’s ironic, but I’ve never even snorkeled.” Another resounding explosion echoed across the water. “We don’t have time to get someone else. We have to do this in one dive as soon as the bomb arrives.”
Mercer knew this was too important to risk on his limited skills. He would jeopardize everything if he made even a simple mistake. He shouldn’t do it, but what were the alternatives? He looked to Tisa. She understood how the decision tore at him. She gave him an imperceptible nod, not of consent but of compassion.
Scott would lead. Mercer’s role would be support if Scott needed something. All he’d really have to do is hang back and not be in the way. He could handle that, he thought. But what if he messed up? Mercer couldn’t let himself think about it. Glass needed someone to help haul the tow cable into the vent and there was no one else and no time to find someone.
“Okay. We’ll go as soon as the bomb’s delivered. That gives Scott four hours or so to teach me everything C.W. missed.” Mercer gave Glass a lopsided smile. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”
“I was about to say the same to you.”
Before heading for the suits, Jim convinced Mercer that he needed at least one of his technicians with him to monitor the dive and personally vouched for the man.
“Just him,” Mercer agreed, but not liking it. “I don’t want the others released from the mess hall until they can be vetted.”
Mercer wanted an update on the bomb’s ETA and tried Ira on the cell phone but couldn’t get a signal again. He was able to radio Bill Farley, the supervisor over on the eastern side of the volcanic ridge.
The evacuation had been ordered, but no one was leaving their posts. In fact, Farley reported that the first- and second-shift workers were showing up by the hundreds, eager for an all-out assault to keep the Cumbre Vieja from slipping. He said the men would only leave the danger zone and head to the north of the island when the bomb was in the ground and the clock was ticking.
Mercer couldn’t have been more proud.
Crossing from the amidships control van on the Petromax Angel to where the NewtSuits were housed in a container at the Angel’s stern was like a walk across a newly turned field in the middle of a cyclone. Wind and rain lashed the ship, and the best efforts of the crew couldn’t keep up with the swampy mud that had grown a couple of feet thick in some areas. Layers of ash and sizzling bits of pumice blanketed the sea.
The bright yellow NewtSuits stood on their wire-frame lifting cradles and were cracked open ready for the men. They resembled the discarded carapace of some science fiction insect. The technician Jim had vouched for was installing extra lights to the shoulders and forearms and a secondary battery pack.
“We’ll be hauling in a tow rope to pull the ROV from the tunnel so we can’t be on tethers,” Scott explained. “Too much risk of getting everything tangled. You and I will be able to communicate but once we’re in the tunnel we may lose the acoustical phone from the surface.”
“How will they know when to pull Conseil back out?”
Scott patted his suit’s steel claw. “Once we’ve got the line attached, just smack it with this. Jim can pick up the vibrations on his monitors. One tap for go, two to stop.”
“That easy?”
“K-I-S-S. Now, tell me everything you did with C.W. when you were together and I’ll take it from there.”
Over the next three hours the men went over the suits, Mercer absorbing as much as he could of what Scott told him. He remembered a great deal of what Charlie had taught him, but Glass had a way of imparting even more. They worked for an hour inside the suits, taking power off the ship’s mains so as not to drain the batteries. Although it was a dry run and would differ dramatically from when they were underwater, Mercer was grateful for the practice.
&nb
sp; The only change they made from their original plan was that Scott would use Charlie’s suit, while Mercer operated the spare, the one he’d toyed with aboard the Sea Surveyor. Scott felt he’d be better able to handle the idiosyncracies of Charlie’s suit.
They took a break when Ira’s four-hour promise approached. Mercer tried to raise the admiral on his cell phone but still couldn’t get through. Jim had been able to use the ship’s radiophone to contact an official on the island of Tenerife who’d been told the bomb had been delivered to Lisbon, Portugal, and was now en route to La Palma. The man didn’t know how.
“There’s no way they can get a chopper to us in this soup,” Scott said as they looked out into the storm from the cargo container.
Dawn was just a gray promise. The San Juan volcano had stopped spewing ash several hours earlier but the sky was choked with it. It would remain the color of lead even if the rain clouds passed. There was barely enough light to see the outline of the island a mile away.
“Hey, Mercer!” Jim’s shout came from the control van. “I think I have something.”
Mercer dashed through the filthy rain to the van. “What have you got?”
McKenzie handed him a headset. “Hello?” Mercer said into the mouthpiece.
“That you, Snow?”
There was too much interference to recognize the voice and it took Mercer a moment to remember the nickname. “Sykes?”
“Roger that.” The Delta commandos hadn’t stayed in La Palma for even an hour when they flew here with Mercer. Lasko and others in Washington needed a mission debrief and Mercer hadn’t been able to spare the time to give it. They’d been flown straight to Washington on the same Citation they’d borrowed to get to La Palma from Katmandu. “The Monkey Bombers have gone nuclear.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m about ten miles up-range of your position. The warhead was loaded into an MMU in Portugal and we’re about to drop it.”
“Don’t tell me you’re coming in too.”
“Sorry, not this time. I’m sitting behind the two pilots of the stealth that plopped us into Tibet. The least they could do was give me a ringside seat.”
Deep Fire Rising Page 41
