Lopez grabbed Katherine’s shirt and hauled her upward, forcing the lawyer to climb further up until one of her hands could reach the dense tangle of roots from which Lopez dangled.
With a last desperate effort, Lopez pushed Katherine in the right direction and finally she grasped the roots and clambered up onto what remained of the track above them. Lopez span in mid-air and grabbed the tree roots with both hands, a brief respite from the pain aching through her arm and shoulders. But now she was spent, and knew without a doubt that she did not have the strength remaining to pull herself up from the ledge.
She heard Katherine call to her, but could not hear what she was saying above the deafening noise of the earthquake that still rolled across the hillside. The cascade of dirt falling around her intensified, the shaking earth swinging her from the tree roots, and she knew that her precarious handhold was about to fail.
‘Katherine!’ she yelled. ‘Get away from the edge!’
A weakened voice called back to Lopez from above, but she couldn’t make out what it said. Lopez looked down at the forest canopy below and made her decision. There was no point in hanging on any longer, and if she was lucky the forest might just break her fall enough for her to survive. Either way, if she waited much longer the hillside would make the decision for her, and there wouldn’t be much of her left to climb out from under a hundred tons of mountain dirt.
She heard the sound of a motorbike engine starting up on the track above her, and guessed that Katherine was making a run for it. With her safe, Lopez could concentrate on saving her own skin. She looked down.
All or nothing. Do it.
Lopez took one hand off the tree roots, timing her swaying motion and using her free arm to spin herself outward, trying to aim for one of the denser-looking trees below, with thicker branches. She was about to let go of the roots entirely when something slapped across her face.
Lopez blinked and saw the sleeve of a shirt dangling before her. She looked up, and Katherine waved down at her.
‘Grab hold!’
Lopez grabbed the shirt. As she did so she swung out over the ravine and noticed that the shirt was tied to another shirt, which was tied to what looked like one leg of a pair of jeans.
The sound of a motorbike engine revved above the terrifying din of the earthquake and Lopez was suddenly hauled upward. She managed to get one boot onto the hillside as she was dragged up onto the damaged track, Bryson riding the motorbike bare-legged and with the other leg of his jeans tied to the frame.
Lopez stumbled onto the track and collapsed forward onto her knees, her exhausted arms dangling uselessly by her sides as she swayed with the churning ground. Katherine dropped down alongside her and wrapped her arms around Lopez’s body, crouching down as the earthquake roared around them. Bryson let the bike fall over as he staggered back to Lopez’s side and dropped onto one knee in front of her.
‘Are you okay?’ he shouted.
Lopez nodded, unexpectedly cold and shivering. ‘I’ll live.’
Bryson wrapped his arms around them both and waited for the quake to subside.
The roaring of torn earth receded after a few minutes, the swaying trees falling still around them. Lopez looked up and blinked away the grit scratching the surface of her eyes as she surveyed the battered landscape.
Dozens of trees lay across the road, which itself was rent at regular intervals by gaping chasms where the earthquake had cleaved the land in two. Beyond, she could see columns of ugly gray smoke rising from the densely packed buildings of Puerto Plata into the flawless blue sky. Sirens wailed from fire trucks and ambulances as they struggled to make their way through the carnage to those areas most affected by the devastation.
Lopez looked at Katherine, who was also caked in mud and shivering with cold.
‘You still going to live in denial about this?’ she challenged.
Katherine trembled as tears spilled from her eyes through the dirt staining her cheeks.
‘He’s ruined everything,’ she whispered. ‘Ruined our lives, our reputation, our future. What am I going to tell our children? That their father is a mass murderer?’ She shook her head. ‘He never deserved the fortune he inherited. I should have watched him more closely, should have taken control when I still could.’
‘This is who Joaquin Abell really is,’ Lopez said. ‘Is it who you are?’
Katherine stared at the terrible carnage before them and shook her head.
‘I don’t want anybody’s family to suffer like this, to see their loved ones vanish into an early grave.’
Lopez nodded, and then stared into the middle distance as a realization thundered through the field of her awareness. Purcell’s dying words drifted ghostly through her mind. My father took his secrets to the grave, as shall I. Time will tell, Nicola.
‘You okay?’ Bryson asked, looking at her seriously.
Lopez nodded, and got to her feet.
‘I know how to crack Purcell’s last code,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to get back to Miami.’
They staggered to their feet and walked the last few hundred yards down the ruined road, clambering over fallen trunks and skirting enormous upturned slabs of asphalt until they reached the edge of the town. Dirty, soaking wet and with their clothes ripped and torn, they stopped walking as Bryson listened.
‘You hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Lopez asked him.
They looked as the sound of screaming engines suddenly roared toward them. Bryson grabbed her arm as he turned them away from the town.
‘Tsunami!’
Dozens of cars and mopeds burst out from alleys and roads, all swerving to avoid each other as they raced at breakneck pace out of the town toward the hills. Behind them, a seething wall of white water surged from the ocean across the beaches and into the rows of hotels with tremendous force, battering aside everything in its path. A chorus of grotesque screams and cries soared from the town, only to be drowned out by the crash of timber and metal as the tsunami ploughed through everything before it.
Lopez scrambled with Katherine as a roaring wall of filthy, churning water packed with debris thundered toward them.
53
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
June 28: 17.26
‘The quake struck one hour, seven minutes and eight seconds ago, magnitude 6.8.’
Thomas Ryker’s monotone delivery seemed painfully inadequate, as Ethan considered the force of the seismic disaster that had slammed into the Dominican Republic’s shores. A vision flashed into his mind of Lopez being swallowed by churning tectonic plates, or crushed beneath tumbling masonry. He closed his eyes and swallowed an acidic glob that had lodged in his throat.
‘She’ll be fine.’
Jarvis’s hand rested on Ethan’s shoulder. Ethan opened his eyes and sucked in a deep lungful of air.
‘Anything we can get on the source of the seismic waves?’
‘We’re on it,’ Ryker replied, having been brought down to Project Watchman to oversee the GOCE satellite’s data, ‘but it’ll take a while for the computers to crunch the data streams and get a clearly defined picture of what happened.’
‘And no word from either Lopez or Bryson?’ Ethan asked Jarvis.
‘Nothing yet,’ the old man admitted, ‘but they may well be in transit as we speak. The nearest airport is on fairly high ground, so it should have escaped the worst of the damage. If they got to it.’
Ethan nodded vaguely, staring into the distance. An image of Joanna infiltrated his thoughts once again. He had lost her and it had damned-near ruined him. Yet now, even though he might just be able to pick up the threads of his search for her, the thought of losing Lopez filled him with the same cold dread he had felt all those years ago in Palestine. Jarvis’s words reached him from afar.
‘Tom and I did some digging into the background of the fathers of Charles Purcell and Joaquin Abell. Interesting stuff.’
Ethan blinked himself back into the here and now. ‘In what way?�
�
‘Their connections are undeniable. They worked together on the Manhattan Project back in 1945, and afterward were effectively in direct competition with each other for government funding.’
Ethan made a swift calculation. ‘So there was motive for a murder.’
‘Reason enough,’ Thomas Ryker said, ‘depending on how seriously they took their research.’
‘And there were no two more serious scientists than Abell and Purcell senior,’ Jarvis went on. ‘Both were committed to their causes: Purcell to the development of nuclear weapons and Abell to the development of benign nuclear power through fusion.’
‘You make it sound like Montgomery Purcell was the enemy,’ Ethan said.
‘Perhaps he wasn’t,’ said another voice. Ethan turned to see Mitch Hannah stride into the room and toss his leather flying jacket across a nearby table. ‘Everybody’s assuming that because Charles Purcell’s father wanted to develop nuclear weapons, he must be the bad guy of the story.’
‘Nuclear weapons generally aren’t something that good guys pursue,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘At least Isaac Abell was trying to do something helpful with the technology.’
‘So was Monty Purcell,’ Hannah replied. ‘Just because he wanted to develop weapons doesn’t mean that he wanted to see them used. Most everybody involved in the nuclear programs of the fifties and sixties knew how horrible the weapons were. But their purpose was mutually assured destruction as a deterrent. The Russians were building huge weapons and the only way to ensure the safety of the United States was to build an equivalent arsenal, so that neither side could fire without initiating a global nuclear exchange that would destroy everything and everyone. Essentially, there would be no point in firing as there would be nothing left to gain afterward.’
‘So maybe Monty Purcell wasn’t a warmonger,’ Ethan said. ‘That much I get. But Isaac Abell was the ultimate philanthropist. He turned down major offers of work on government weapons programs to concentrate on nuclear-power generation. It makes him even less of a suspect when it comes to Monty’s mysterious death.’
‘True,’ Mitch Hannah admitted. ‘We know from the witness statements of other people at the meeting on Bimini Island that Isaac Abell went nowhere near Monty Purcell’s aircraft on the day of the meeting, and so could not have tampered with it in any way.’
‘And Purcell was also the first to leave,’ Jarvis said, ‘at about eight in the evening. But that doesn’t mean that Abell couldn’t have hired somebody else to damage the airplane for him, maybe somebody at the airfield?’
‘Unlikely,’ Mitch Hannah said. ‘Purcell maintained his own airplane and was a seasoned pilot. It’s hard to tamper with an aircraft and get away with it, because of all the checks a pilot does before committing to flight. He would have spotted anything wrong with his airplane either before or during take-off.’
‘What then?’ Ethan asked. ‘How could Isaac Abell have possibly had anything to do with the crash?’
Mitch Hannah opened a map of the Florida Straits and set it down on the table between them, jabbing a finger at Bimini Island.
‘Purcell takes off from here, and only has to fly to here.’ Mitch pointed at Miami. ‘About sixty nautical miles away, which in a light aircraft means a flight time of maybe thirty to forty minutes at his logged cruise-height of five thousand feet. The big clue, and what ties his death in with Isaac Abell, is the time that he took off: 8:41in the evening, on October 9, 1964.’
Ethan thought for a moment.
‘He’d be flying at night.’
‘On instruments,’ Mitch confirmed, ‘over the ocean. I checked the weather records for that night, and Monty Purcell would have been flying either in or above solid cloud, with no horizon.’
Ethan looked at Jarvis, whose face was shining with intrigue.
‘So he’s entirely reliant upon his instruments, and if they were to somehow go wrong . . . ?’ the old man suggested.
Ethan looked at Mitch Hannah.
‘When did Isaac Abell get his undersea laboratory operational?’
Thomas Ryker answered.
‘October 4, 1964,’ he said. ‘And he’d scheduled a test of the topamak magnetic field generator at . . .’ The kid’s voice trailed off as he realized the connection. ‘I’ll be damned – nine o’clock on October 9.’
Ethan ran a hand through his hair.
‘Isaac Abell deliberately schedules a test of his fusion chamber the same evening that Purcell is flying overhead. All he needed to do was keep him on Bimini late enough that his flight would coincide with the test.’
Mitch Hannah tapped his finger on the map.
‘A test of a device that powerful would have almost certainly produced fields sufficient to completely destroy or otherwise render useless all of the analogue instruments in a Cessna 150B of that era, Purcell’s airplane. Monty Purcell wouldn’t have stood a chance – without visual references to keep his airplane in level flight, he would have lost spatial orientation within seconds and probably hit the ocean within a couple of minutes.’
Ethan looked at the map.
‘You said that the test of Abell’s device was at nine o’clock in the evening,’ he said to Ryker, who nodded. ‘And he took off at 8:41?’
‘Yes,’ Mitch said, immediately catching on to Ethan’s train of thought. ‘Assuming an average speed of maybe ninety knots over twenty-one minutes . . .’
‘. . . He’d have covered about thirty nautical miles,’ Ethan finished, and pressed his finger onto a spot on the map that marked the edge of the Miami Terrace reef. ‘And gone down right about here.’
The four men stared at the map for a long moment.
‘That’s where the underwater facility must be,’ Jarvis said finally.
Thomas Ryker nodded.
‘If it matches the data we get from the seismic-monitoring stations and GOCE, then we’ve found the IRIS base.’
Ethan was about to speak when the door to the room opened and a soldier popped his head through to speak to Jarvis.
‘We’ve had contact, sir,’ the soldier said. ‘A transport left Puerto Plata just over an hour ago.’
‘Is Nicola Lopez aboard?’ Ethan demanded, as though he’d never left the Corps.
‘Unknown, sir,’ the marine replied. ‘American survivors of the quake are due at the airport in Miami in just over an hour.’
Ethan was walking for the door before he’d even realized it.
54
MIAMI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, FLORIDA
June 28, 18:32
Ethan watched as the US Navy Gulfstream C-20D jet taxied in from the runway, silhouetted against the low sun streaming in beams across the ragged clouds in the sky. Dozens of television crews were amassed near the boarding gates, restricted from getting too close to the aircraft but able to get shots using their powerful zoom lenses.
Ethan glanced at the camera crews as they filmed the aircraft’s arrival, and slowly an idea formed in his head. There was no way that he could predict which news broadcasts Joaquin Abell was using to predict the future, but it seemed likely that all of the major networks would be among them. Ethan realized that, for once, there might be a way to turn the tables on the megalomaniac.
Ethan stood with Jarvis as the Gulfstream braked to a halt just fifty yards from where they stood, its engines whining deafeningly before the pilots shut them down. Ethan had no idea how many people were aboard or how seriously injured they might be. Early reports were that the area where Lopez and Bryson had been working had been ravaged. Casualties, from multiple nations, would be in the thousands.
‘She’ll be okay.’
Jarvis stood alongside him, clearly aware of Ethan’s agitation.
‘The place got leveled,’ Ethan hissed. ‘That bastard Abell has killed thousands to feed his own ego and ambition. Right now, I want his throat in my hands.’
‘This is not a revenge mission,’ Jarvis cautioned, as the airplane’s main door opened. He reached out and stopped Ethan f
rom approaching the aircraft. ‘The moment you make it personal, you become ineffective. Keep your cool, Ethan, or this’ll blow up in your face.’
Forcing himself not to run toward the Gulfstream, Ethan watched as crewmen began helping people down the steps, some of them hoisted down on stretchers with saline bags held aloft. Others hobbled down onto the asphalt, their hands resting on the shoulders of the pilots or paramedics. Then three bedraggled figures, wrapped in thermal blankets, clambered out into the low sunlight.
Ethan felt a weight lift from his shoulders as he saw Lopez’s thick tangle of black hair. Katherine Abell and Scott Bryson accompanied her, the big man’s arm across her shoulder as they shuffled across the landing area to where Ethan was standing with Jarvis. Ethan forgot himself and strode toward Lopez, who squinted up at him in the bright sunlight and smiled.
‘Enjoy your vacation, cowboy?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been busy whilst you’ve been sitting on your ass drinking coffee.’
A broad grin spread across Ethan’s face as he wrapped his arms around her. Lopez returned the embrace and looked up at him.
‘No use getting cute with me,’ she said.
‘Just glad you got out okay.’
‘Thanks to this guy,’ Lopez said, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘Rescued us from drowning when the tsunami hit. Only a SEAL could improvise a boat out of a floating garbage dumpster. I’ve never see him move so fast.
Ethan looked at Bryson, whose jaw twisted into a crooked grin as he shrugged.
‘What can I say? I’m a hero.’
Ethan released Lopez and strode up to him, then stuck his hand out. The big man gripped it.
‘I owe you,’ Ethan said without fuss, and then he leaned in close and wrapped one arm across his broad shoulder. Bryson’s single eye flickered curiously as Ethan whispered quietly enough for nobody else to hear. ‘I need you to leave, Scott, and make a damned fuss about it.’
Ethan released Bryson before he could respond, while Doug Jarvis gently took Katherine Abell’s arm.
Apocalypse Page 32
