State Of Fear

State Of Fear Page 53

"Those are new," Sanjong said. "They went up in the last twenty-four hours."

"They look old."

"Yes, but they're not. Close inspection suggests that they are artificial. They may be made out of plastic instead of wood. The largest one appears to be a residence, and the other three house equipment."

"What kind of equipment?" Kenner said.

"Nothing has been visible in the photographs. The equipment was probably offloaded at night. But I went back and got a decent description from Hong Kong customs. The equipment consists of three hypersonic cavitation generators. Mounted in carbon matrix resonant impact assembly frames."

"Hypersonic cavitation equipment is for sale?"

"They got it. I don't know how."

Kenner and Sanjong were huddled together, speaking in low tones. Evans drifted over, leaned in close. "What's a hypersonic whatever-it-is?" he said quietly.

"Cavitation generator," Kenner said. "It's a high-energy acoustic device the size of a small truck that produces a radially symmetric cavitation field."

Evans looked blank.

"Cavitation," Sanjong explained, "refers to the formation of bubbles in a substance. When you boil water, that's cavitation. You can boil water with sound, too, but in this case the generators are designed to induce cavitation fields in a solid."

Evans said, "What solid?"

"The earth," Kenner said.

"I don't get it," Evans said. "They're going to make bubbles in the ground, like boiling water?"

"Something like that, yes."

"Why?"

They were interrupted by the arrival of Ann Garner. "Is this a boys-only meeting?" she said. "Or can anyone sit in?"

"Of course," Sanjong said, tapping the keyboard. The screen showed a dense array of graphs. "We were just reviewing the carbon dioxide levels of ice cores taken from Vostok and from North GRIP in Greenland."

"You guys can't keep me in the dark forever, you know," Ann said. "Sooner or later we will land this plane. And then I'm going to find out what you're really up to."

"That's true," Kenner said.

"Why not tell me now?"

Kenner just shook his head.

The pilot clicked the radio. "Check your seat belts, please," he said. "Prepare for landing in Honolulu."

Ann said, "Honolulu!"

"Where did you think we were going?"

"I thought"

And then she broke off.

Sarah thought: She knows where we are going.

While they refueled at Honolulu, a customs inspector came onboard and asked to see their passports. He seemed amused by the presence of Ted Bradley, whom he referred to as "Mr. President"; Bradley in turn was pleased by the attention from a man in uniform.

After the customs officer checked their passports, he said to the group, "Your destination is filed as Gareda in the Solomon Islands. I just want to make sure you're aware of the travel advisory for Gareda. Most embassies have warned visitors against going there in view of the current conditions."

"What current conditions?" Ann said.

"There are rebels active on the island. There have been a number of murders. The Australian army went in last year and captured most of the rebels, but not all. There have been three murders in the last week, including two foreigners. One of the corpses was, uh, mutilated. And the head was taken."

"What?"

"The head was taken. Not while he was alive."

Ann turned to Kenner. "That's where we are going? Gareda?"

Kenner nodded slowly.

"What do you mean, the head was taken?"

"Presumably, it was for the skull."

"The skull," she repeated. "So amp;you're talking about head-hunters amp;"

Kenner nodded.

"I'm getting off this plane," she said, and gathering up her hand bag, walked down the stairs.

Jennifer was just waking up. "What's her problem?"

"She doesn't like good-byes," Sanjong said.

Ted Bradley was stroking his chin in what he imagined was a thoughtful manner. He said, "A foreigner had his head cut off?"

"Apparently, it was worse than that," the customs officer said.

"Jesus. What's worse than that?" Bradley said, laughing.

The customs officer said, "The situation on the ground is not entirely clear. The reports are conflicting."

Bradley stopped laughing. "No. Seriously: I want to know. What's worse than beheading?"

There was a brief silence.

"They ate him," Sanjong said.

Bradley rocked back in his chair. "They ate him?"

The customs officer nodded. "Parts of him," he said. "At least, that's the report."

"Holy shit," Bradley said. "Which parts? Never mind, I don't want to know. Jesus Christ. They ate the guy."

Kenner looked at him. "You don't have to go, Ted," he said. "You can leave, too."

"I have to admit, I'm thinking about it," he said, in his judicious, presidential tone. "Getting eaten is not a distinguished end to a career. Think of any of the greats. Think of Elviseaten. John Lennoneaten. I mean, it's not how we want to be remembered." He fell silent, lowering his chin to his chest, sunk deep in thought, then raising it again. It was a gesture he'd done a hundred times on television. "But, no," he said finally. "I'll accept the danger. If you're going, I'm going."

"We're going," Kenner said.

Chapter 75

TO GAREDA

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13

9:30 P.M.

It was nine hours flight time to Kontag Airport in Gareda. The cabin was dark; most of them slept. Kenner as usual stayed awake, sitting in the back with Sanjong, talking quietly.

Peter Evans woke up about four hours into the flight. His toes still burned from the Antarctic episode and his back was very sore from his being bounced around in the flash flood. But the pain in his toes reminded him that he was supposed to check them daily, to see if they were becoming infected. He got up and went to the back of the plane, where Kenner was sitting. He pulled off his socks and inspected his toes.

"Sniff 'em," Kenner said.

"What?"

"Smell them. You have any gangrene, you'll smell it first. They hurt?"

"Burn. Mostly just at night."

Kenner nodded. "You'll be all right. I think you'll keep them all."

Evans sat back, thinking how strange it was to have a conversation about losing his toes. Somehow it made his back hurt more. He went into the bathroom at the back of the plane and rummaged through the drawers looking for painkillers. All they had was Advil, so he took that, then came back.

"That was a clever story you arranged in Honolulu," he said. "Too bad it didn't work on Ted."

Kenner just stared.

"It's not a story," Sanjong said. "There were three murders yesterday."

"Oh. And they ate somebody?"

"That was the report."

"Oh," Evans said.

Going forward into the dark cabin, Evans saw Sarah sitting up. She whispered, "Can't sleep?"

"No. A little achy. You?"

"Yeah. Toes hurt. From the frostbite."

"Me, too."

She nodded toward the galley. "Any food back there?"

"I think so."

She got up, headed back. He trailed after her. She said, "The tops of my ears hurt, too."

"Mine are okay," he said.

She rummaged around, found some cold pasta. She held a plate out to him. He shook his head. She spooned out a plate for herself and began to eat. "So, how long have you known Jennifer?"

"I don't really know her," he said. "I just met her recently, at the law office."

"Why is she coming with us?"

"I think she knows Kenner."

"She does," Kenner said, from his chair.

"How?"

"She's my niece."

"Really?" Sarah said. "How long has she been your nienever mind. I'm sorry. It's late."

"She's my sister's kid. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was eleven."

"Oh."

"She's been on her own a lot."

"Oh."

Evans looked at Sarah and thought once again that it was a kind of trick, how she could get up from sleeping and appear beautiful, and perfect. And she had on that perfume that had driven him quietly crazy from the moment he first smelled it.

"Well," Sarah said. "She seems very nice."

"I don't, uh, there's nothing amp;"

"It's fine," she said. "You don't have to pretend with me, Peter."

"I'm not pretending," he said, leaning slightly closer, smelling her perfume.

"Yes, you are." She moved away from him, and sat down opposite Kenner. "What happens when we get to Gareda?" she said.

The thing about her, Evans thought, was that she had the most chilling ability to instantly behave as if he did not exist. Right now she was not looking at him; she was focusing all her attention on Kenner, talking with apparent concentration to Kenner and behaving as if no one else were there.

Was that supposed to be provocative? he thought. Was that supposed to be a turn-on, to get him excited and start the chase? Because it didn't make him feel that way at all. It pissed him off.

He wanted to slap his hand down on the counter, make a big noise, and say, "Hel-lo! Earth to Sarah!" Or something like that.

But somehow he thought that that would make things worse. He could imagine her annoyed glance. You're such a baby. Something like that. It made him long for somebody uncomplicated, the way Janis was uncomplicated. Just a great body and a voice you could tune out. That was exactly what he needed now.

He gave a long sigh.

She heard it, glanced up at him, and then patted the seat beside her. "Come sit here, Peter," she said, "and join the conversation." And she gave him a big, dazzling smile.

He thought: I am very confused.

"This is Resolution Bay," Sanjong said, holding out his computer screen. It showed the bay, then zoomed back to show a map of the entire island. "It's on the northeast side of the island. The airport is on the west coast. It's about twenty-five miles away."

The island of Gareda looked like a big avocado immersed in the water, with jagged edges along the shore. "There is a mountain spine running along the center of the island," Sanjong said. "In places, it's three thousand feet high. The jungle in the interior of the island is very dense, essentially impenetrable, unless you follow the roads or one of the footpaths through the jungle. But we can't make our way cross country."

"So we take a road," Sarah said.

"Maybe," Sanjong said. "But the rebels are known to be in this area here" he circled the center of the island with his finger "and they have split up in two or possibly three groups. Their exact locations are not known. They have taken over this small village here, Pavutu, near the north coast. That seems to be their headquarters. And they presumably have roadblocks up, and probably patrols on the jungle paths."

"Then how do we get to Resolution Bay?"

Kenner said, "By helicopter, if we can. I've arranged for one, but this is not the most reliable part of the world. If we can't do that, we'll head out by car. See how far we can get. But at this point we just don't know how we're going to do it."

Evans said, "And when we get to Resolution Bay?"

"There are four new structures on the beach. We have to take them down and dismantle the machinery inside. Make them inoperable. We also have to find their submarine tender and dismantle the submarine."

"What submarine?" Sarah said.

"They leased a small two-man research sub. It's been in the region for the last two weeks."

"Doing what?"

"We're pretty sure we know now. The whole Solomon Island chain of more than nine hundred islands is located within a very active geological part of the world in terms of plate tectonics. The Solomons are a part of the world where plates crunch together. That's why they have many volcanoes there, and so many earthquakes. It's a very unstable region. The Pacific Plate collides and slides under the Oldowan Java Plateau. The result is the Solomon Trench, a huge undersea feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain. It's very deep, between two thousand and six thousand feet. The trench is just north of Resolution Bay, too."

"So it's an active geological region with a deep trench," Evans said. "I still don't see the game."

"Lot of undersea volcanoes, lot of slope debris, and therefore the potential for landslides," Kenner said.

"Landslides." Evans rubbed his eyes. It was late.

"Undersea landslides," Kenner said.

Sarah said, "They're trying to cause an undersea landslide?"

"We think so. Somewhere along the slope of the Solomon Trench. Probably at the five-hundred- to one-thousand-foot depth."

Evans said, "And what would that do? An undersea landslide?"

Kenner said to Sanjong, "Show them the big map." Sanjong brought up a map of the entire Pacific basin, from Siberia to Chile, Australia to Alaska.

"Okay," Kenner said. "Now draw a straight line out from Resolution Bay and see where it takes you."

"California!"

"Right. In about eleven hours."

Evans frowned. "An undersea landslide amp;"

"Displaces an enormous volume of water very quickly. That is the most common way a tsunami is formed. Once propagated, the wave front will travel right across the Pacific at five hundred miles an hour."

"Holy shit," Evans said. "How big a wave are we talking?"

"Actually, it's a series, what's called a wave train. The undersea landslide in Alaska in 1952 generated a wave forty-seven feet high. But the height of this one is impossible to anticipate because wave height is a function of the shoreline it hits. In parts of California it could be up to sixty feet high. A six-story building."