“Finally!” Marten muttered as he fairly leaped upon the fourth and last detonator.
He’d been following a bread crumb trail—extremely odd bread crumbs—through the grasses and undergrowth for what seemed like half the morning. The first thing he’d found were the granola bar wrappers with no sign of the bars. Apparently they tasted pretty good to the dapis. Next came the empty water bottles.
Then … pay dirt: the two bars of C-4 within half a dozen feet of each other. Each showed signs of nibbling through the black wrappers and into the off-white plastique beneath—very little nibbling on the explosive itself. The polyisobutyline binder probably tasted awful. Same with the roll of duct tape he found nearby—nibbled, then tossed.
A short way farther on he’d found two of the detonators in a Gordian tangle, and nearby, his satellite phone, looking as if it had been dumped from the backpack as not worth a second look. Next came the ripped backpack itself, hanging from a branch. He checked inside and almost shouted with relief when he saw his two trigger phones and their batteries still attached to their plywood bases.
At that point he was pretty much back in business, but he’d wanted the last two detonators. Theoretically—and practically, as well—he needed only one per block to set off the C-4, but his mission was too important to leave anything to chance. He wanted two detonators per block. And now he had them.
Most of the damage to the backpack had been to the outside pockets, so he loaded everything back into the main compartment and lugged it all back to the VX.
After arranging the two canisters side by side, he realized the situation was far from ideal. But he’d make do.
First he used the duct tape to affix a block of C-4 to each canister, wrapping the tape all the way around. Then he poked holes in the wrappers and inserted the detonators deep into the claylike material.
Now for the phones.
Shortly after arriving in Mozambique to begin his search for Mozi’s kin, he’d picked up three satellite phones. One he used for calls, the other two he’d modified to act as detonators. All three were tied to Mcel, the government-run provider, which supposedly allowed him access to five Intelsat satellites. His phone had worked well on the earlier trip to the island, but would it work on the island? Would the wall enclosing the caldera affect the signal? It shouldn’t, but there might be something in the lava …
He held his breath as he turned on his phone, dreading the sight of a No Service message on the screen. But no, it found a signal. One of the Indian Ocean satellites was in range and in line. He had service.
Instead of the elation and anticipation he should have felt, dread filled him. He was about to commit an atrocity.
Between trips up and down the coast, he’d worked on the trigger phones, exposing their vibrators and soldering wires to opposite sides of the vibrating chamber. When the vibrator went off, it would close the circuit between them. Then he’d glued each phone, along with four interconnected AA batteries in a waterproof pack, to a small board. Three alligator clip wires—two red, one black—completed the process. Some of the clips had come loose in the mishandling of the backpack by the dapis. He reattached these and was ready to go.
He taped the phone boards next to the C-4 blocks on the canisters and turned on the trigger phones. He’d been keeping them charged in his apartment all along. Before he attached the detonator wires, he made sure each of the four AA Energizers in the battery packs was properly oriented as to positive and negative. Then he checked that each phone was working. He had the numbers on speed dial and, after attaching a circuit tester, called each. The tiny bulb lit on each call. If the detonators had been connected, they would have exploded.
Ready.
To be extra safe, he turned off his calling phone before attaching the alligator clips to the detonator wires. The worst-case nightmare scenario in a situation like this was some stranger calling his mom or his girlfriend and misdialing a digit so that the number just happened to match the trigger phone. Though in the realm of possibility, the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against that happening. And here on the island, the odds were astronomical, because a simple cell phone wouldn’t reach; the unwitting dialer would have to be using a satellite phone.
With the detonators attached to their triggers, Marten rotated the canisters so that the C-4 block on each was facing and almost touching the other. This guaranteed success. All he had to do was trigger one block. The force of its explosion would set off its brother block, vaporizing the contents of both canisters.
Ideally, Marten would have liked one canister positioned on the north end of the caldera and one on the south, but that was impossible now. He couldn’t risk getting caught in transit.
This would do the trick. When he made the first call, the combined blast would create a VX-laced shock wave, destroying nearby vegetation, but more importantly, sending a cloud of vapor throughout the caldera, filling every nook and cranny with deadly toxin, killing everything: reptiles, mammals, amphibians, birds, insects—anything that moved. And that included humans and dapis.
If his first call failed, he had the second number, the second phone, wired to the second block of C-4.
The trees and grasses and brush would remain, unharmed, thriving in their tropical paradise. The VX would eventually dissipate and other life would return. Birds and insects at first, and perhaps even a mammal or two would find their way here.
But no dapis. The dapis would be extinct.
The question was: when to make the call? And from where? He could detonate them from anywhere in the world.
If his original plan had worked out on Saturday, he would have wired up the canisters at each end of the island and detonated them from the helicopter on his way back to Mozambique. But that had gone belly up, forcing him to improvise.
Now everything was set to blow, but he had no way off the island. He was willing to die to see this end the way it must, but only if he could find no other way. And there was almost always another way. If—
He froze as he heard an unmistakable sound. A helicopter. But where was it coming from? The sound echoed off the lava walls, filling the caldera with noise that seemed to come from everywhere.
But-but-but … the only pilot who knew the island’s location was dead. So who was up there now?
He headed toward where the sound seemed loudest.