Minutes to Burn (2001) (2 page)

Cameron found she missed the order of the military, the rules and codes she'd kept around herself like armor. With civilian life came much more freedom, and she found herself unraveling without the imposed pressure holding her together. Justin was having an easier time with the transition, but then he'd never been the soldier she was.

They'd started looking for other work this week, and both had been startled by how useless their skills were in the real world. They'd return from days full of interviews, spent and discouraged, and sit side by side on the couch sipping beer in the dark. She'd stopped opening the bank statements.

The timing was less than perfect.

Last week, a day care building had collapsed in Oakland after only a

4.2. Cracks in the foundation from previous tremors that no one could even see. Would've gone down in a strong wind, the structural engineer had said. Seventeen kids had died, and four more were in intensive care. The photograph in the Bee focused on a bright yellow jump rope on the front lawn, framed by the majestic ruin of the building in the back-ground.

And they were only catching the secondary quakes here, the spent distant rumbles of the East Pacific Rise, which grew shallower and quieter as it twisted its way north into San Andreas, sending ripples up to Sacramento. In South America, riots followed the seismic activity up the coast from Ecuador into Colombia, but UN troops had quelled the outbreaks.

A siren blared, so piercing Cameron could feel its vibration in her teeth. Kids scrambled off the jungle gyms and swings, off the monkey bars and tetherball courts. They hit the ground, curled up in balls, hands laced over the backs of their necks. They stayed like that for a few moments, frozen little animals. The siren stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the children resumed their activities.

Cameron glanced down at the small wand of the pregnancy test on the passenger seat, the "+" sign glaring at her in red. The timing was less than perfect.

Chapter
2

T
he barking bulldog woke him up, just as it had every morning that week. William Savage groaned and shifted in bed, releasing his death-grip on the empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. It clattered on the concrete floor, momentarily drowning out the dog. Mumbling angrily, Savage pulled the pillow over his head, fighting the onslaught of light from the window.

Savage was fully clothed from the night before, though one of his boots was missing. His reddish-brown hair was amply streaked with gray, held off his face with a blue bandanna he kept tied around his forehead. His long hair, in concert with his thick beard and ripped navy cammies, made him look as if he'd just stumbled in from a tour of duty. Strapped to his calf was his favored knife--a Lile "Death Wind."

The apartment was little more than a room, a small box on the third floor of a run-down building. The ceiling was buckled with water damage and cracked on the north side from a recent earthquake. When the wind was strong, drafts through the closed window stirred the paper shooting-range targets on the floor. A wooden gun cabinet, the only piece of furniture in the apartment aside from the small bed, leaned against the far wall. A Congressional Medal of Honor served as a coaster for a half-drunk cup of coffee on the kitchen counter.

The bulldog's barks continued, adding to the pounding in Savage's head.

"Shut the fuck up!" he yelled, his voice still glazed with sleep.

A truck rumbled by down on the street. The dog let loose with a fresh flurry of barks. With a grunt, Savage swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. The room swam around him, but he fought it back into focus. It felt as though the bulldog were inside his head, each bark echoing against the walls of his skull.

Savage rose and stumbled to the window. He tried to slide it open, but it wouldn't budge. Outside, the wind sucked at the pane. The street and buildings were drab gray, as if bled dry. To the sides of the road rose drifts of snow sheathed in ice, spotted with mud and brown splashes of road water. The joys of Billings, Montana, in the winter.

Standing guard on a porch three houses up the block, the bulldog stared at Savage, tongue lolling. Savage eyed the dog angrily. "That's right. Just shut up. Lemme go back to sleep."

The dog bolted forward, straining against its metal chain and howling.

"Goddamnit!" Savage yelled. He banged the sash, but that only caused the dog to bark even louder. "YOU GET THAT DOG TO SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

A beefy man strode through the front door of the house, stopping just behind the frenzied bulldog. "What's your problem, pal?"

Savage yanked the window, but it slid up only a few inches. He leaned over so he could shout through the small gap. "That fuckin' dog has woken me up every morning this week! You'd better--" He threw his weight against the window, but it refused to budge any further.

The beefy man threw his arms up in the air. "It's eleven-thirty!" he shouted.

Savage leaned over and dug through the pile of clothes beside his bed until he unearthed his alarm clock. It read 11:17 A.M. He threw the clock against the wall and returned to the window. The dog was practically bouncing up and down at the guy's feet.

"I don't give a shit what time it is!" Savage yelled. "Get your dog a muzzle or I'll shoot the thing!"

The beefy man held out his arm and slowly extended his middle finger, then turned and headed back inside his house. Angrily, Savage returned to bed, pulling the pillow back over his head. A wave of nausea swept his stomach, and he realized he desperately had to piss. The bull-dog's barks were even louder now that the window was edged open. They penetrated the pillow, his head. He tried pressing his hands over his ears, tried humming loudly, tried tying an old sweatshirt around his head.

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

R
ex 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."