Now, with all that in its rearview, the packet said Cape Verde was actually thriving. It was an up-and-coming, laid-back, beachy island vacation destination with microclimate vineyards and eco tours.
Too bad I didn’t feel that laid-back as the plane began its descent. The video showing all those bombs in the cave wouldn’t stop replaying in my head.
Maybe the pirates had come back, I thought.
We received permission to land at Amilcar Cabral International Airport on an island called Sal ten minutes later. It certainly looked like a vacation destination, I thought as we came in low over whitewashed stucco houses and colorful fishing boats in an ultramarine bay. As we touched down, I spotted a small passenger plane on a distant runway — bright green, yellow, and red, like a parrot.
Too bad the cheery welcome-to-the-Bahamas feeling lasted about a New York minute. When we were walking down the plane’s ramp into the bright glare, several vehicles shot out from around the terminal building.
There were three pickup trucks with a dozen or more armed uniformed men standing in the beds. The long stretch Mercedes limo that followed the trucks had Cape Verde flags flying from each corner.
“Is it the ambassador?” one of the SEALs said to Nate Gardner.
Nate suddenly frowned as the cars came right at us.
“Olender, get Colorado on the horn,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of this. These guys look pissed. Something must have gotten screwed up. Find out what.”
“I am Vice President Basilio Rivera!” yelled a short and sleekly handsome brown man with a little mustache as he leaped from the Benz. “What the hell is going on here? Why are those men armed? You are US military, yes? Who gave you permission to land? I demand to know what you are doing here!”
“Mr. Vice President,” Nate said, smiling warmly at the little tin-pot dictator and his soldiers. “My name is Lieutenant Commander Nate Gardner of the US Navy. There must have been a mix-up, sir. Everything is okay. We have permission to be here from your government. It was very last-minute, though, so perhaps not everyone was informed. I’m calling my people right now to get confirmation. I encourage you to do the same, sir.”
The tense, silent soldiers hopped down, palming their automatic rifles. They flanked the limo as Nate and Vice President Rivera walked back toward its open door. Emily and I stood next to each other in the sweltering wind, sweating as the small man spoke in Portuguese into his phone.
“This is all we need,” I said, checking my phone to see exactly zero messages from my kids. “I wasn’t expecting mai tais with little umbrellas in them, but this is ridiculous.”
The VP hung up, and he and Nate spoke tensely for a minute. Then suddenly they were laughing.
“What are you waiting for?” Nate yelled to his guys as he jogged back. “Don’t just stand there. Let’s get these planes unpacked.”
Chapter 86
Outside the tilted-open door of the Black Hawk, the sun glittered off the flat sapphire surface of the Atlantic, blurring by less than fifty feet below.
It had been a little more than an hour since we had landed, and we were twenty miles south of Sal, heading in two Black Hawks for Árvore Preta. The choppers were packed. The SEALs sat clipped by safety harnesses to the aircraft’s deck, their feet dangling out the open door, while everyone else had to sit on one another’s laps. It was dead silent but for the whirring whine of the rotor. I saw a SEAL check his watch, so I decided to check my own. We had seven hours to the deadline, I saw.
Seven hours to find the needle, I thought as I slowly let out a breath, and we haven’t even arrived at the haystack yet.
Vice President Rivera actually turned out to be extremely agreeable and helpful once he was brought up to speed on the threat. He had his men race off in one of the trucks and bring us back a man named Armenio Rezende.
Rezende, one of only two government-licensed nature guides on Árvore Preta, readily agreed to show us around the island. The happy-seeming middle-aged black man with dyed blond dreads told us he hadn’t seen any suspicious activity on Árvore Preta but confirmed that there were several vent caves very high up on the ocean side of the unstable northern rim of the volcano’s caldera.
I looked over at Rezende, sweating across from me in the Black Hawk’s jam-packed cabin, then out at the water as a hopeless, horrible thought occurred to me.
What if we’re wrong? What if this is just another head fake and the threat is coming from somewhere else altogether?
Bursts of white water exploded off jagged black rocks as we finally drew alongside Árvore Preta’s desolate shore. It got a little cooler as we began to fly higher up the slope of the volcano toward the summit. Our two Black Hawks seemed tiny against the immensity of the volcanic black-rock mountain, like flies attempting the ascent of a cathedral roof.
Rezende directed the pilot over one of the jagged peaks near the summit, and we landed in a clearing of dull, light-brown dust at the bottom of a shaded gorge.
I closed my eyes against the pebbles and grit that stung my face as we piled out, and when I opened them, I just stood there gaping.
There had been some pines at the southern end of the island near the water, but up here there was nothing. In every direction was a dusky lunar landscape of black rock and black ash on which nothing moved.
“These are the four caves that I know about,” Rezende said as he knelt and began drawing a crude outline of their locations in the dirt with his finger.
We decided to split up into four teams. Emily and I and Mr. Duke went with Nate’s team west, up a slope of loose, black, sandlike volcanic dust. When we arrived at the top of a ridge, we climbed up an outcropping and looked down into the caldera of the volcano itself.
Mr. Duke had just pointed out what looked like a cave opening in the dried lava bed a couple of hundred feet below when Nate’s radio started popping, chattering frantically.
“Commander Nate! Nate!” came over the radio.
“What is it?”
“The island guide, Rezende. He just went nuts or something! He tried to shove Olender off a cliff, and now he’s running up the hill! He’s almost near the top. What do I do?”
“Drop his ass!” said Nate without hesitation. “In the legs if you can, but drop him. He could be going for the explosives!”
We heard the crackle of gunfire as we quickly headed for the eastern slope. When we got to its top, we saw a cluster of SEALs about a football field away, standing near the edge of a cliff, looking down. When I got to the edge of the cliff, I was hit with vertigo. It was insanely high up, a sheer hundred stories or so straight down to the sea.
“Mike! Look! This is it! This looks like the still from the video!” Emily said.
“What the f happened?” Nate said to his guys.
“I did like you said, Commander,” one of them said. “I put two in him, one in the back of each knee, but then he crawled to the edge and just rolled off.”
“He committed suicide, sir,” said another SEAL. “I swear on a stack of Bibles. It was completely deliberate.”
“But why?” said Mr. Duke.
“He must have been in on it is why,” I said, looking around. “He was one of only two licensed guides, right? He had the run of the island basically to himself. He must have been paid to help the bombers. Damn it, I didn’t even think of it.”
Then I saw it. Off to the left, down the ledge of the cliff, about a hundred feet away was a fissure in the rock wall. A familiar one.
I stared at the almost circular opening in the wrinkled black rock, then way down the cliff, where petrels were flying this way and that like confetti. Emily was right. This was the place from the video. We’d actually found it.