Beside the computer was a framed picture I couldn’t stop staring at. Two coltish girls and a tall blond mom smiling as they waded among the rocks of a river.
It looked like it was taken in New England somewhere, with autumn-yellow leaves on the trees. The girls were adorable, with braces, and the smile on the mom’s face was room-brightening. It looked like an old Coca-Cola ad or something. Americans being happy. It was time to say sayonara to that now?
Squinting angrily at the photo, I suddenly didn’t want to just catch the sons of bitches responsible anymore. I wanted to hunt them down and kill them with my bare hands.
When I called Martin for the twentieth time in the last twenty minutes, it kicked into voice mail. Martin was on the road now. Everyone was with him except Brian. They were in northern Manhattan, trying to get across the Harlem River to meet up with Brian at Fordham Prep. The problem was that Brian wasn’t picking up his phone, which meant he had forgotten to charge it. But Martin had called the school and left word to have Brian stay there for pickup, so maybe all was still good.
I balled my hands into fists as they started to shake.
Who was I kidding? I felt completely helpless.
I looked up as Emily came in.
“Did you get your kids out?” she said.
“Almost. How about you? Are you near the coast in Virginia?”
“No, thank God. My brother got Olivia out of school, and they’re at Costco stocking up,” she said glumly.
Emily’s face lit up suddenly as she got a text.
“Mike, get up! C’mon!” she said, grabbing my hand.
“What?”
“Arturo and Doyle are at the scientist meeting on six. They say they might have something.”
CHAPTER 81
“THEY KNOW WHERE the bombs are!” said a wide-eyed Arturo, grabbing my shoulders as I stepped into the doorway of the sixth-floor conference room.
“Where?” I said.
“árvore Preta,” said Doyle, looking every bit as pumped as Arturo. “It’s Portuguese for ‘black tree.’ It’s a volcanic island just south of the Cape Verde archipelican.”
“Archipelago, you mean, moron,” said Arturo.
We all backed out into the hallway.
“Slow down, fellas,” said Emily. “Where is this island?”
“The Cape Verde island chain is off the coast of Africa,” said Doyle. “They said it’s roughly three hundred and fifty miles to the west.”
“Why do they think this particular island is where the bombs are?” I said. “Didn’t they say there’s a bunch of different island chains in the area?”
“Well, these two rock scientists were in there arguing endlessly,” said Arturo. “They kept looking at the video, and this guy from UC Berkeley—”
“Cut to the chase, Arturo,” I said, trying to be patient.
“All of a sudden, this little guy, a Brit, in the corner of the room stands up and points at the screen and says, ‘Excuse me, but are those petrels?’”
“Petrels?” I said.
“They’re freaking birds!” said Doyle. “Those little birds you see in the video when the guy pans the camera down the cliff. They’re an endangered seabird that nests on this Cape Verde island, árvore Preta.”
“That’s when Larry Duke and Dr. Bower went bonkers,” said Arturo. “árvore Preta has an active volcano that last erupted in 1963. They actually knew all about it. They’d listed árvore Preta in a paper they did in the late eighties about potentially unstable volcanoes.”
“Bottom line is they think this is it, Mike,” said Doyle. “We know where the bombs are.”
CHAPTER 82
FOUR HOURS LATER, at a little after 11:00 p.m., Emily and I came out the OEM building’s side entrance alongside the dark Hudson River with Larry Duke and Dr. Bower. A moment later, a loud roaring sound drew our eyes upward, and we watched as a huge helicopter appeared over the lip of the building.
“Oh, my! It’s like from that movie. What’s it called? Black Hawk Down?” said Dr. Bower as we ducked back from the whining turbo-rotor wash.
“Yeah, well, let’s hope this one stays up,” I said as it touched down on the concrete pad twenty feet in front of us.
The imposing military chopper, bearing an emblem of a rearing winged white centaur, was from the army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers. The 160th worked hand in glove with the Navy SEALs and had actually been on the mission that had killed Osama bin Laden.
All stops were now officially pulled out. After a tense closed-door teleconference with the US president himself, the mayor had pulled the trigger. We had only one option left on the table, and the mayor was taking it.
The Night Stalkers were here to give us a ride to the airport. We were heading to Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, with the military to find the explosives.
Though it was probably a buzzer-beating long shot that we would find them before the terrorists’ deadline, it was definitely the right move, I felt.