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.”
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.