Minutes to Burn (2001)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Finally, he snapped upright again, hurling the pillow at the wall. He crossed the room quickly, throwing open the doors of his gun cabinet and removing an air rifle. The ammo drawers were stuffed with different rounds. He started digging. A bunch of .22s clattered to the floor like brass rainfall. Buried beneath a stack of Sig Sauer cartridges was a box of tranquilizer darts, left over from an elaborate prank he had pulled during downtime on a tour of duty.

  He slid a dart in the chamber, stormed to the window, and smashed the left lower pane with the end of the air rifle. He took careful aim. The bulldog snarled and growled, bounced and barked. Savage sank the dart into its neck and waited. The bulldog swayed on its feet, then collapsed flat on its stomach, the bloom of the dart waggling in the breeze.

  A moment later, the beefy guy came out to investigate. He crouched, leaning over the fallen dog. Savage couldn't resist a smirk.

  When the guy rose to his feet, his eyes were lit with rage. "You motherfucker!" he screamed. "I'll rip your fuckin' eyes out, you stupid--"

  With a grimace, Savage slid a second dart into the chamber. He snapped the rifle up against his shoulder, eyed the sites, and fired. Beefy guy looked down at the dart in his thigh with shock. He stepped forward once, paused, and stepped forward once more. He fell to his knees, then slumped over next to his dog.

  Savage returned the gun to the cabinet, relishing the silence of his apartment. After a satisfying piss, he stuffed a sweatshirt in the broken pane, filled a coffeepot with water and drank from it, then fell back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. The peace was divine.

  He was just drifting off when he heard the sirens.

  Chapter 3

  22 DEC 07

  Rex Williams banged through the screen door into his front yard with his white pajama pants aflutter, a mobile satellite phone pressed to one ear, and a nine-foot rainbow boa constrictor wrapped around his left leg. "Do you really think we need that many people?" he barked into the phone. "Three, four, maybe, but I mean, seven soldiers! What am I, Salman Rushdie?"

  His lank, jet-black hair hung medium-length, darting down to the back of his shirt collar, and swept hastily to one side in the front. His eyes were almost hypnotically intense, a dark brown that looked black in dim lighting. As usual, he was unshaven, an even sprawl of stubble covering his cheeks and his too-strong chin.

  Donald Denton chuckled on the other end of the phone. "They only travel in groups. I guess it's a half platoon, the smallest unit they use for international outings. I still can't believe we're getting you down there at all."

  Rex was the preeminent complex plate margin ecotectonicist specializing in South American sites. The New Center for Ecotectonic Studies, of which Rex and Donald were Co-Chiefs of Research, focused on the interaction of tectonic movements and ecology, examining how earthquakes impacted flora and fauna. It had been established to contend with environmental fallout from the Initial Event, a massive earthquake that had occurred on March 3, 2002. Registering 9.2 on the moment magnitude scale, the quake had ruptured the tectonic plates near the Ecuadorian coast along a 307-kilometer length. The resultant high rates of plate motion, unprecedented since the Precambrian era more than six hundred million years ago, accounted for massive and recurrent after-shocks.

  For the last five years, the region had been plagued with earthquakes in excess of the usual frequency and intensity, perturbing other stress fields and causing rumblings for thousands of miles in every direction. In Ecuador, an earthquake registering approximately six on the moment

  WW

  magnitude scale occurred on average once a week, with M=3 or M=4 events registering almost daily. This scale, which measures both the energy release and amplitude of earthquakes, replaced the Richter in the early 1990s.

  The fourteen large islands, six small islands, and forty-some islets that compose the Galapagos Archipelago--Rex's principal area of expertise--could not have been more precariously located given the increase in seismic activity. Nine hundred and sixty kilometers off the coast of Ecuador, the Galapagos sit dangerously close to the triple junction of three tectonic plates. Perched high on the north edge of the Nazca plate a mere one hundred kilometers beneath its junction with the Cocos plate, the islands had been regularly rattled by the earthquakes that accompanied the upwelling magma from the rift. The sea floor continued to spread along this seam, the Galapagos Fracture Zone, driving the Nazca plate southward. To further complicate the tectonic regime, a north-south running chain of undersea mountains, the East Pacific Rise, spread the ocean floor in similar fashion one thousand kilometers west of the Galapagos, pushing the Nazca and Pacific plates apart and shoving the Nazca plate east beneath the South American continent. There had been six centimeters of eastward displacement in November alone.

  Rex and Donald's colleague, Dr. Frank Friedman, had gone to Sangre de Dios, the westernmost island of the Galapagos, at the end of October, prompted by troubling reports of increased microseismicity from the island.

  He had not been heard from since.

  Due to the elevated earthquakes in the area and the resultant social unrest, travel to Ecuador and the Galapagos had since become restricted by the U.S. military, the airports closed off to civilians. The scientists, like everyone else, were fleeing the Galapagos, leaving behind antiquated equipment that yielded low resolution data. What little information the New Center now received came in from what remained of the Charles Darwin Station in Puerto Ayora.

  As the New Center's remaining field ecotectonicist, Rex needed to lead an expedition to Sangre de Dios, to complete the survey Frank had presumably begun, and to outfit the island with Global Positioning Satellite units. These would allow the New Center to monitor coseismic and crustal deformation on Sangre de Dios from afar.

  As the westernmost island in the archipelago, Sangre de Dios held a vital geographic position--it stood to be the first and most accurate bearer of bad news concerning earthquakes along the East Pacific Rise. Getting the proper geodetic equipment in place to measure its surface deformation would enable the New Center to predict earthquakes within the entire tectonic regime--both on the mainland and the islands--sometimes as much as forty-eight hours in advance. Rex and Donald could alert the government leaders down there, evacuate communities, and save lives.

  However, without a trained military team to escort and protect him, Rex couldn't so much as board a plane headed for Ecuador. He'd spent weeks sifting through mountains of red tape, trying to secure military support before the December 24 departure. A few days ago, realizing he'd been making little progress, he'd finally forgone the bureaucratic route and called in an enormous favor from Secretary of the Navy Andrew Benneton.

  "I told you I could get it done," Rex said as he crossed the front lawn, heading for his mailbox. "Did you doubt me?"

  "Well, our correspondence with that captain last week wasn't so promising."

  It was true. The Commander of Naval Special Warfare Group One had rejected their request in an e-mail, describing the new riots sweeping through Quito, the organized crime in Guayaquil, and how American troops were already overextended dealing with social deterioration and natural destruction throughout South America and domestically. He'd closed by stating he saw little reason "to drop everything to lend out a squad of highly trained, high-demand operators to transport scientists interested in secondhand reports about minor rumblings on a barely populated island in the middle of the Pacific."

  "He changed his tune rather quickly once Benneton got involved." The boa nosed its way up into Rex's crotch, and he shoved its head away. His was one of the larger boas around, even bigger than the behemoth the receptionist kept in her desk drawer at the vivarium in Quito. "'Preemptive' is a term largely missing from jarhead terminology. The military gives no consideration to how we could alleviate potential political or social problems down there. Always running around expending all their energy on secondary effects."

  In the house across the street, a middle-aged
woman watched Rex through the kitchen window, one soapy dish frozen midway to the sink. Rex waved and she turned away in horror. He glanced down and noticed that the boa's head was protruding from between his legs like a living penis. He opened the mailbox, but it was empty. The boa tightened around Rex's leg until it started to tingle. "How do you like those myths coming back from Sangre?"

  Donald laughed. "I suppose it makes sense. In hectic times, people are more prone to project the uncertainties of the world onto something tangible."

  "Monsters."

  "Indeed. The Galapagos are a land of strange creatures to begin with. It's already in the cultural unconscious."

  "Darwin's backyard," Rex proclaimed melodramatically.

  "Indeed. Don't underestimate how much people love to believe that creatures dark and dreadful evolve there on a daily basis."

  Rex snorted. "What we shouldn't underestimate is people's ignorance."

  Donald sighed. "You rarely do."

  The boa eased around Rex's stomach, sliding its tail up over one shoulder. It tensed and relaxed, an orange-spotted band of black moving about him like a pulse. Rex stopped in the middle of his lawn, turning his face to the rising sun. The boa wrapped a coil around his throat, and he felt the firm edges of its skeleton beneath the sleek surface. A minivan drove by, five faces peering at the window. It drifted to the side of the road, then veered sharply to avoid hitting a telephone pole. Rex did not notice.

  "I'm just eager to throw down permanent benchmarks and get the continuous GPS units up around Sangre," Rex said. "It's about time we got more concise data on the rates of deformation and reduced the guesswork. In fact, that's what Frank should've been doing down there--scouting equipment locations. I bet he wasted his time collecting butterflies. Like when he spent two days observing that strain of mutated frogs outside Cuyabeno. He was so distracted he barely got the geochemical sensors in place."

  "The ecos versus the tectos. Like the raging geology-geophysics rivalry when I was coming up. And I thought the Center was too young to be divided by factions."

  "It's no longer divided," Rex said, "now that Frank has been sensible enough to pass on." There was a long silence and Rex glanced at the phone to make sure it hadn't cut out. "Just a little humor, Donald. Don't be a bore."

  "Frank is a great loss," Donald replied defensively. "Aside from you, he was the nation's most prominent field ecotectonicist."

  "Oh, come on, Donald. Frank wasn't prominent. Just loud and fortuitously published."

  Donald heaved another deep sigh. "Some things..."

  "And all that referring to himself in the third person. God that was awful. 'In attempting to witness the tireless mastications of the Rhicnogryllus lepidus, the author found himself in the middle of a magnificent rain forest glade.'" Rex groaned. "His phrasing was second only to that stupid Gilligan's Island fishing cap he wore everywhere like a yarmulke."

  "Well," Donald said, a note of offense in his voice, "he's gone now."

  "The fact that he's dead does not raise him in my professional estimation. But that's neither here nor there. What time are we meeting with the GI Joes Monday?"

  "Nine o'clock."

  The boa stretched itself out in the air, then swooped back toward Rex. He kissed it on the face. "I'll be there with bells on."

  Chapter 4

  Cameron regarded the large wicker cornucopia bulging with plastic fruit that sat on the glass table smack in the middle of the waiting room. The cornucopia had stubbornly remained through her six years of checkups, gathering dust, the reds and oranges fading on the waxy peels. Particularly unsubtle decor for an OB/GYN's office, she mused.

  Spread on a stand to her left were all the magazines that people only read in doctors' offices--Redbook, Psychology Today, Prevention. And on the lowest part of the rack, accessible to little hands, a neat row of Highlights for Children. How she hated that magazine. Along with crayons, decorative Band-Aids, and minivans, Highlights for Children was beyond Cameron's domain; it belonged to that vast and clanish group of people she had always regarded with something more than curiosity, something bordering on irritation. Some envy as well, perhaps.

  The clicking of a woman's footsteps approached, and Cameron waited to see which door concealed them. Justin leaned forward and coughed uncomfortably as the door to the right of the waiting room opened. A girl, who couldn't have been older than sixteen, came out, a nurse trailing her by a few steps.

  The nurse was a short, stocky Italian woman with the darkest rings around her eyes Cameron had ever seen. She was always there, that nurse, behind the door, escorting them in, escorting them out. Her back was humped with age, and when she smiled, her teeth protruded at all angles.

  Though Cameron had never seen her up close, she would have bet the woman had wisps of facial hair. She recalled the street lady from that Tennessee Williams play with all the sex in it, the one who kept muttering, "flores para los muertos." Cameron cleared her throat softly and shifted in her chair. She would be seeing the woman up close soon enough.

  In hands curled like talons, the girl clutched a cheap leather purse in front of her, as if concerned that someone might snatch it right in the waiting room. She looked shaken, her cheeks a puffy red that suggested she'd been crying a short time ago.

  Smiling her sickening smile, the nurse pulled the door shut behind the girl, leaving her to face Justin and Cameron uncomfortably for a moment before she scurried from the waiting room. Cameron realized she was tense through her shoulders and neck.

  Justin caught her eye and smiled. Reaching over, he pulled the clasp of her necklace around to the back so that it wasn't visible. A calming ritual. The ring dangled out of view beneath her shirt, a small bump in the fabric.

  The thick wooden door to the right led back to the abortion suite. Cameron had always found it shocking that day surgery emptied into the same room where women waited for their postpartum checkups. It seemed wrong.

  She'd spent enough time in the waiting room to be able to predict which door the other women were going to be beckoned through for their appointments. The doors even looked different. The door to the "proper" OB/GYN suite was painted a cheerful yellow, a large smudge-free window taking up most of the top half. The door that led into the dilation and curettage rooms was dark, solid, ominous. It didn't even have a peephole.

  Younger girls in the waiting room, with dark half-moons under their eyes, were a shoo-in for the wooden door, especially when they were alone, or with only their mothers. When accompanied by both parents, they often headed through the happy yellow door, disappearing into the stream of light behind the window. Women who looked like teachers went through the yellow door, as did women with baby barf crusting on old sweatshirts proclaiming the names of cities and vacation spots. Women in smart navy blue business suits always went through the dark door. For these last women there were, to date, no exceptions. Navy blue was the color of death.

  Feeling Justin's thigh pressed against hers, Cameron leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and studied the individual strands of the orange carpet. The navy blue suit women always seemed calm and assured while they waited; Cameron felt neither.

  She suddenly felt her transmitter vibrate, a gentle tugging beneath the flesh of her deltoid. Turning her head, she spoke into her shoulder through her shirt, activating the unit.

  In '04, subcutaneous transmitters had replaced saber radios, which had headsets that allowed soldiers actually to listen through their jaws. The transmitters were better protected than the bone phones and impossible to lose. The soldiers' day-to-day movements powered the units, kicking a tumbler back and forth and recharging a minuscule battery--self-winding watch style.

  Cameron disliked using her transmitter in public; often it drew strange looks from people who thought she was talking to herself. It had been some time since she'd been paged.

  Justin glanced over, eyebrows raised, then whispered a command to activate his transmitter as well. A click sounded in the room, indicating
that the transmitter had switched from silent mode to audio. "Kates," Justin said. "Public."

  Lieutenant John Mako had called in on the primary channel so that he could speak to them both at the same time. His disembodied voice issued through their transmitters. "Cam and Kates, Mako. I think I got you kids an assignment. You with Cam?"

  Justin rested his hand on Cameron's knee. "No, sir, a redhead about five seven with a vacant smile."

  "What do you mean, 'you kids'?" Cameron asked. "We're working together?"

  "Do I have a speech impediment of which I'm not aware?"

  "No, sir. It just seems a little . . . odd. Isn't that breach of--"

  "I need bodies," Mako said. "And I need them quickly."

  "What kind of time frame are we looking at here?"

  "Briefing Monday, depart Monday night. I need you to babysit a scientist, take him down to Ecuador and make sure nothing gets his tape measure in a tangle. He's an earthquake guy, wants to check out an island down there. It's a short, easy mission. You'll be back in a week."

  Justin groaned. "Sounds thrilling."

  "You'll be surprised how much things have deteriorated down there. Might rustle up some excitement after all."

  Justin leaned back in his chair. "I'll be sure to wear my spurs."

  "How big's the platoon?" Cameron asked.

  "It's a half. Seven, eight."

  "Isn't that a bit vague given we're lifting out Monday?"

  "You know how things are right now. Besides, this is hardly a black op."

  "Who's the LT?" Justin asked.

  Mako paused for a moment before answering. "Derek Mitchell."

  Justin looked at Cameron nervously. "Do you really think that's a good idea, sir?"

  "Do you really think you want to question my judgment?"

  "Is Derek active again?" Cameron asked.

  "He'll come off emergency leave. I'm pulling the rest from reserves."

  Justin cleared his throat nervously. "But has he . . . recovered?"