Chapter 84
There had to be well over a hundred military people scurrying around three large cargo planes on the tarmac of Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey when we landed in the helicopter ten minutes later.
And it wasn’t just men being moved in and out of the C-130s. As we landed, I watched a Jeep drive up a ramp into the plane’s belly, followed quickly by a small tractor towing in a Black Hawk helicopter with its rotors folded back.
“The US military is truly incredible, isn’t it?” I said to Emily. “I mean, the mayor made the call—what? Four hours ago? Now look at this! It’s unbelievable how quickly this thing is being mobilized.”
“Let’s just hope it’s fast enough,” Emily said.
We asked around, then met up with Lieutenant Commander Nate Gardner, the leader of the SEALs team that had been assigned to head up the mission. Nate was a tall, fit, clean-cut guy around thirty, with light-blue eyes and black hair. He was sitting on a four-wheeler under the wing of one of the planes eating pizza with his team of commandos.
He and his thirty or so SEALs were sitting beside their weapons and kit bags talking quietly with one another or napping. They seemed to be the only still and calm people in the whole airport.
Make that the tristate area, I thought as we walked up.
“NYPD!” Nate said, smiling and wiping pizza grease on the thighs of his olive-drab desert-camo uniform before standing up to shake our hands. “Now we’re talking. I love you guys. I’m from Rochester, but I lived in a shit hole in Alphabet City with my friends after college and saw up close how you guys operate. I was actually on the cop list before deciding to join the navy.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant Commander,” Emily jumped in. “But what are we supposed to do now?”
“Please, it’s Nate,” the soldier said, grinning. “Or Commander Nate, if you must. Basically, ma’am, we’ll board after the toys are packed. You got my two teams as well as five of the army’s explosive ordnance disposal teams en route.”
“Right, but how are we going to play this?” she said. “What’s the strategy? Just head to Árvore Preta and start looking?”
“The US ambassador to Cape Verde will meet us at the airport on the other side to smooth things out with the locals,” Nate said. “They will provide us with island guides, and we’ll locate these bombs. Once we find them, we let the EOD teams do their thing disarming them. My team will provide security for everybody. I recommend you guys try to get some sleep on the flight.”
“That’s it?” said Dr. Bower.
“That’s all she wrote, ma’am,” Nate said, winking one of his baby blues.
“How to save the world in three easy steps,” Emily said as the tall, energetic SEAL rejoined his men. “I admire his confidence. If only I shared it.”
“You and me both,” I said as I took out my phone to check on my guys for the eleven billionth time.
Chapter 85
Coming on six hours later, I woke up sweating as someone two or three seats down along the vibrating metal wall of the loudly buzzing cargo plane started coughing uncontrollably.
More than seventy people were strapped into the benches along both walls of the military plane. There were SEALs, army explosives techs, a fully staffed medical unit, several plane refueling techs, and pilots and crew from the 160th.
I didn’t know what the weight limit for the C-130 was, but it had to be massive, since between the rows of soldiers, tied down with heavy canvas straps in the middle of the plane, was a Black Hawk helicopter bookended by a couple of Jeeps.
It was the same deal in the two other planes flying alongside us. More than a hundred highly trained men and women along with who knows how many millions of dollars’ worth of equipment.
When the US military went for it, they apparently went all the way.
I glanced over at a wired-looking Emily beside me. She was reading the Cape Verde info packet the CIA had provided for the hundredth time. She looked like she hadn’t slept at all. She glanced at her watch, then back at me uneasily. I checked the time on my phone and joined her in wincing.
We had just eight hours left before the 1:00 p.m. deadline, and we hadn’t even landed yet.
I checked my phone for any messages from Robertson or Brooklyn. About an hour into the flight, they had contacted me with the great idea to cross-reference our suspects with the manifests from any and all flights from the New York City area to Cape Verde over the previous six months.
It only made sense. If the bombs were on Cape Verde, that is.
In the front of the plane, past the nose of the Black Hawk, daylight was spilling into the cabin through the open door of the cockpit. I unclipped my belt and decided to join SEAL commander Nate, who was standing by the cockpit door.
As I got to the doorway, the plane swung left, then down below, through the windshield, islands suddenly appeared—small oblong islands with rims of beach standing very white against the dark teal of the Atlantic.
“Fifteen minutes!” the female pilot called back.
I stared down at the bright, sandy flat strips of land. I’d already read the info packet. It said that, like a lot of the islands in the eastern Atlantic near Africa, Cape Verde had originally been settled in the 1500s by the Portuguese. Once an important hub of the African slave trade and a notorious haunt of pirates, it had gained its national independence in the early 1970s, when a Marxist revolutionary—a Fidel Castro–like figure named Amilcar Cabral—had fought for its independence.
Now, with all that in its rearview, the packet said Cape Verde was actually thriving. It was an up-and-coming, laid-back, beachy island vacation destination with microclimate vineyards and eco tours.
Too bad I didn’t feel that laid-back as the plane began its descent. The video showing all those bombs in the cave wouldn’t stop replaying in my head.
Maybe the pirates had come back, I thought.
We received permission to land at Amilcar Cabral International Airport on an island called Sal ten minutes later. It certainly looked like a vacation destination, I thought as we came in low over whitewashed stucco houses and colorful fishing boats in an ultramarine bay. As we touched down, I spotted a small passenger plane on a distant runway—bright green, yellow, and red, like a parrot.
Too bad the cheery welcome-to-the-Bahamas feeling lasted about a New York minute. When we were walking down the plane’s ramp into the bright glare, several vehicles shot out from around the terminal building.
There were three pickup trucks with a dozen or more armed uniformed men standing in the beds. The long stretch Mercedes limo that followed the trucks had Cape Verde flags flying from each corner.
“Is it the ambassador?” one of the SEALs said to Nate Gardner.
Nate suddenly frowned as the cars came right at us.
“Olender, get Colorado on the horn,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of this. These guys look pissed. Something must have gotten screwed up. Find out what.”
“I am Vice President Basilio Rivera!” yelled a short and sleekly handsome brown man with a little mustache as he leaped from the Benz. “What the hell is going on here? Why are those men armed? You are US military, yes? Who gave you permission to land? I demand to know what you are doing here!”
“Mr. Vice President,” Nate said, smiling warmly at the little tin-pot dictator and his soldiers. “My name is Lieutenant Commander Nate Gardner of the US Navy. There must have been a mix-up, sir. Everything is okay. We have permission to be here from your government. It was very last-minute, though, so perhaps not everyone was informed. I’m calling my people right now to get confirmation. I encourage you to do the same, sir.”
The tense, silent soldiers hopped down, palming their automatic rifles. They flanked the limo as Nate and Vice President Rivera walked back toward its open door. Emily and I stood next to each other in the sweltering wind, sweating as the small man spoke in Portuguese into his phone.
“This is all we need,” I said, checking my
phone to see exactly zero messages from my kids. “I wasn’t expecting mai tais with little umbrellas in them, but this is ridiculous.”
The VP hung up, and he and Nate spoke tensely for a minute. Then suddenly they were laughing.
“What are you waiting for?” Nate yelled to his guys as he jogged back. “Don’t just stand there. Let’s get these planes unpacked.”
Chapter 86
Outside the tilted-open door of the Black Hawk, the sun glittered off the flat sapphire surface of the Atlantic, blurring by less than fifty feet below.
It had been a little more than an hour since we had landed, and we were twenty miles south of Sal, heading in two Black Hawks for Árvore Preta. The choppers were packed. The SEALs sat clipped by safety harnesses to the aircraft’s deck, their feet dangling out the open door, while everyone else had to sit on one another’s laps. It was dead silent but for the whirring whine of the rotor. I saw a SEAL check his watch, so I decided to check my own. We had seven hours to the deadline, I saw.
Seven hours to find the needle, I thought as I slowly let out a breath, and we haven’t even arrived at the haystack yet.
Vice President Rivera actually turned out to be extremely agreeable and helpful once he was brought up to speed on the threat. He had his men race off in one of the trucks and bring us back a man named Armenio Rezende.
Rezende, one of only two government-licensed nature guides on Árvore Preta, readily agreed to show us around the island. The happy-seeming middle-aged black man with dyed blond dreads told us he hadn’t seen any suspicious activity on Árvore Preta but confirmed that there were several vent caves very high up on the ocean side of the unstable northern rim of the volcano’s caldera.
I looked over at Rezende, sweating across from me in the Black Hawk’s jam-packed cabin, then out at the water as a hopeless, horrible thought occurred to me.
What if we’re wrong? What if this is just another head fake and the threat is coming from somewhere else altogether?
Bursts of white water exploded off jagged black rocks as we finally drew alongside Árvore Preta’s desolate shore. It got a little cooler as we began to fly higher up the slope of the volcano toward the summit. Our two Black Hawks seemed tiny against the immensity of the volcanic black-rock mountain, like flies attempting the ascent of a cathedral roof.
Rezende directed the pilot over one of the jagged peaks near the summit, and we landed in a clearing of dull, light-brown dust at the bottom of a shaded gorge.
I closed my eyes against the pebbles and grit that stung my face as we piled out, and when I opened them, I just stood there gaping.
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.
But even with all their high-tech gear, they had their work cut out for them and then some.
I stared at my radio, which had been completely silent for the last ten minutes, then I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood and walked over to the cave and stuck my head in. Inside the entrance, it began to slope sharply down. It was oddly uniform. It looked almost man-made, like a subway tunnel to hell. Mr. Duke had explained that the cave, known as a lava tube, was a channel in the rock formed during a previous eruption. There was a raised stringy pattern in the floor and benchlike ledges along both walls where the explosives had been placed.
The radio I’d left behind me finally crackled for the first time, and I ran over to it.
“Render safe one. I repeat, render safe one. We got the first one,” came over the radio.
“Two. Render safe charge two.”
&nbs
p; I looked up at a smiling Nate as he arrived.
“We got three. Three is down,” said a voice as Nate gave me an amped-up high five.
“Mattie, this is Alpo,” came an urgent voice over the radio a moment later. “We see something smoking up the cave to our left. I repeat. We see something smoking over by you along the wall.”
There was a pause, then a one-word reply.
“Down!” screamed a voice as the rumble of an explosion went off deep inside the cave.
In super slow motion, I turned toward the mouth of the cave as I felt the shudder through the rock around me. It was the same shudder I felt when 26 Fed had come down, and I stared up at the blue of the sky waiting for the world to end.
Chapter 88
Great. Just great, Martin thought, looking out the van’s windshield as he woke up.
It was 6:00 a.m., and, no bones about it, his Escape from New York bid with the kids had failed spectacularly.
He was on I-95, but not outside the city, as per the plan. No, he was heading the wrong way—back into the city—in the East Bronx, parked off the side of the road, pointing south.
How it had happened he couldn’t say. He had tried valiantly to get upstate, like Mike had told him, but everywhere they had gone the roads had been blocked by accidents or police. All night long he kept getting shunted this way and that. Bottom line, he’d been forced back in exactly the wrong direction.
It got worse. They were now on a concrete bridge above a body of water, an inlet of some sort. The last sign they had passed before he had gone to sleep said CITY ISLAND.
He didn’t know too much about the Bronx, but even an Irishman knew that City Island was a place where there were seafood restaurants and fishing boats you could charter. Things really couldn’t be more dire. They were now stuck in the Bronx right by the not-so-beautiful sea.
He looked in the rearview mirror at the sleeping kids. At least they had finally zonked out. They were fed and watered after a stop at a gas station around three. There was no gas at the station, of course, as all the tanks were empty, but he’d let them go to town on sweets in the store.