The helicopter approached from the west, rising several hundred feet, moving over the rocky cliffs to reveal the interior of Isla Gemido. It appeared just like the others: volcanic ridges and ravines, heavily overgrown with dense jungle. It was beautiful from the air, but Thorne knew it would be dauntingly difficult to move through that terrain. He stared down, looking for roads.
The helicopter thumped lower, circling the central area of the island. Thorne saw no buildings, no roads. The helicopter descended toward the jungle. The pilot said, "Because of the cliffs, the winds here are very bad. Many gusts and updrafts. There is only one place on the island where it is safe to land." He peered out the window. "Ah. Yes. There."
Thorne saw an open clearing, overgrown with tall grass.
"We land there," the pilot said.
Isla Sorna
Eddie Carr stood in the tail grass of the clearing, turned away from the flying dust as the two helicopters lifted off the ground and rose into the sky. In a few moments they were small specks, their sound fading. Eddie shaded his eyes as he looked upward. In a forlorn voice he said, "When're they coming back?"
"Tomorrow morning," Thorne said. "We'll have found Levine by then."
"At least, we'd better," Malcolm said.
And then the helicopters were gone, disappearing over the high rim of the crater. Carr stood with Thorne and Malcolm in the clearing, enveloped in morning heat, and deep silence on the island.
"Kind of creepy here," Eddie said, pulling his baseball cap down lower over his eyes.
Eddie Carr was twenty-four years old, raised in Daly City. Physically, he was dark-haired, compact and strong. His body was thick, the muscles bunched, but his hands were elegant, the fingers long and tapered. Eddie had a talent - Thorne would have said, a genius - for mechanical things. Eddie could build anything, and fix anything. He could see how things worked, just by looking at them. Thorne had hired him three years earlier, his first job out of community college. It was supposed to be a temporary job, earning money so he could go back to school and get an advanced degree. But Thorne had long since become dependent on Eddie. And Eddie, for his part, wasn't much interested in going back to the books.
At the same time, he hadn't counted on anything like this, he thought, looking around him at the clearing. Eddie was an urban kid, accustomed to the action of the city, the honk of horns and the rush of traffic. This desolate silence made him uneasy.
"Come on," Thorne said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "let's get started." They turned to the cargo containers, left by the helicopter. They were sitting a few yards away, in the tall grass.
"Can I help?" Malcolm said, a few yards away.
"If you don't mind, no," Eddie said. "We'd better unpack these ourselves."
They spent half an hour unbolting the rear panels, lowering them to the ground, and entering the containers. After that, they took only a few minutes to release the vehicles. Eddie got behind the wheel of the Explorer and flicked on the ignition. There was hardly any sound, just a soft whirr of the vacuum pump starting up. Thorne said, "How's your charge?"
"Full," Eddie said.
"Batteries okay?"
"Yeah. Seem fine."
Eddie was relieved. He had supervised the conversion of these vehicles to electric power, but it was a rush job, and they hadn't had time to test them thoroughly afterward. And though it was true that electric cars employed less complex technology than the internal-combustion engine-that chugging relic of the nineteenth century - Eddie knew that taking untested equipment into the field was always risky.
Especially when that equipment also used the latest technology. That fact troubled Eddie more than he was willing to admit. Like most born mechanics, he was deeply conservative. He liked things to work - work, no matter what - and to him that meant using established, proven technology. Unfortunately, he had been voted down this time.
Eddie had two particular areas of concern. One was the black photovoltaic panels, with their rows of octagonal silicon wafers, mounted on the roof and hood of the vehicles. These panels were efficient, and much less fragile than the old photovoltaics. Eddie had mounted them with special vibration-damping units of his own design. But the fact remained, if the panels were injured in any way, they would no longer be able to charge the vehicles, or run the electronics. All their systems would stop dead.
His other concern was the batteries themselves. Thorne had selected the new lithium-ion batteries from Nissan, which were extremely efficient on a weight basis. But they were still experimental, which to Eddie was just a polite word for "unreliable."
Eddie had argued for backups; he had argued for a little gasoline generator, just in case; he had argued for lots of things. And he had always been voted down. Under the circumstances, Eddie did the only sensible thing: he built in a few extras, and didn't tell anybody about it.