Minutes To Burn Part 1

MINUTES.

TO.

BURN.

GREGG ANDREW HURWITZ.

For Jess TaylorandAdriana AlberghettiBrian LipsonDawn...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

My Crew:.

Matthew Guma-the champion of M2B, and my editor extraordinaire Diane Reverand-my publisher, a woman of great vision David Vigliano, Dean Williamson, and Endeavor-the most supportive, dedicated agents around Marc H. Glick and Stephen F. Breimer-for holding it all together.

My Consultants:.

Ross Hangebrauck-former member of SEAL Team EIGHT, and one cool Johnny.

Cynthia Mazer-entomologist, Conservatory Director of Cleveland Botanical Garden Joshua J. Roering-Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Oregon.

And also:.

Tim Tofaute-former member of SEAL Teams FIVE and EIGHT, and of the Naval Strike Warfare Center.

Jack Nelson-beachcomber, international yachtsman, owner of the Hotel Galpagos Dr. Amanda Schivell of the Biology Department at the University of Washington.

Robert Kiersted-professional traveler Sean D'Souza-Ecuadorian Peace Corps guru Byron Riera Benalczar and Pablo Leon-for showing me real Quito Ron Cohen-Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Berkeley Fredie Gordillo, Alex Montoya-for introducing me to some off-the beaten-path Spanish Barry Brummer, M.D., Vani Kane, Chuck O'Connor, Andy Sprowl, Geoff Smick, Anne Trainer, Bret Peter Nelson, David Schivell, Kristin Baird, M.D., and the fabulous Laura Tucker All mistakes result directly from my inability to listen to them better.

And of course:.

My parents, my sister The booksellers who have shown me such wonderful support Kristin Herold for putting up with me throughout.

Galpagos Islands.

Slope: 20 to east of peak.

8 to west of peakLat.: -0.397643Long.: -91.961411.

24.135km west of Fernandina.

Sangre de Dios.

15 NOV 07.

faint cry carried into the house, distracting Ramn Lopez Estrada from the plate of fried pork. He froze, fork raised halfway to his mouth. The noise had probably come from the livestock pens at the edge of his property, across the rows of crops. It was slightly different than the usual, restless mooing of the cows-it was more like a fright-ened whinny. Dismissing it to the wind, he took a bite and loaded up another generous forkful. He ate hungrily; he'd worked on his farm from sunup until dusk, clearing another section of forest to free the vol-canic soil for crops.

Soil was a rarity in Galpagos, islands formed of basaltic lava. It took hundreds of years for the barren rock to soften, turning to brick-red clay as its iron oxidized, then to topsoil as roots and rain intervened. Over millennia, dense Scalesia pedunculata forests emerged and flourished, the trees stretching as high as twenty meters in the air. Only the most ele-vated regions of the highest islands had undergone the process in its entirety, catching clouds that pa.s.sed aloof and withholding over the scorched lowlands.

Floreana, her belly rounded beneath her ap.r.o.n, stopped behind Ramn and rubbed his aching shoulders. She paused to pluck a twig from his hair and tickled his cheek with it until he lovingly shooed her away.

They'd had one child already, a boy whom Ramn had sent to Puerto Ayora to find work and play. Ramn had chosen his boy's happiness over his own need for a second pair of hands around the farm, permitting him to discover life in the small port town on Santa Cruz. However, that meant more time for Ramn in the fields, clearing the forest, building pens for his livestock, planting his crops with a meticulousness based on the seasons and his own islander's sense.

Because of the earthquakes, the supply ship had stopped pa.s.sing by last month. Without any gasoline or oil, the town had slowed down, like a wind-up toy losing steam. The chainsaws no longer roared in the mornings, the gas stoves were used only as countertops, the houses fell dark after dusk-even Ramn's prize tiller sat in the field collecting rust while he worked the ground with a spading fork.

Sangre de Dios had been a spa.r.s.ely populated island to begin with, and the new conditions had driven the other farming families away. Though few had admitted it, many had also fled because of the strange things that had been happening around the island. Dogs and goats miss-ing, changes in the behavior of the wildlife. The girls who used to live one farm over told stories about the tree monster with glistening fangs. And then Marco's little girl had gone missing. After a week of frantic searching, they'd given her up for dead, and Marco had taken his family and moved to the continent.

Ramn and Floreana were now living on a deserted island.In their haste to leave, one of the families had stolen their boat. But it didn't mat-ter-Floreana was too pregnant to travel anywhere until she delivered, and an oil tanker still pa.s.sed by the island every other month.

Ramn finished his meal and pulled his wife into his lap. He groaned, pretending to be crushed by her weight. She laughed and pointed to her stomach. "This is your fault, you know," she said. Her voice was high and lively; she spoke a rapid, chattering Spanish with the accent of the Oriente, though she's been born in Galpagos. She'd been named for the island of her birth.

Ramn raised a hand to her cheek and leaned forward to kiss her, but Floreana playfully pushed him away, wiping a smudge of aji from his lip with her thumb and clearing his plate. She pointed to the stack of logs in the corner of the humble box of a house. Built of porous concrete blocks cemented with a thick, messy mortar, the walls were cracked and skewed by the numerous earthquakes that wracked the small island. A cooking fire danced in the hearth, which was little more than two absent blocks backed with plywood and opened to the Pacific air above.

Ramn groaned, lowering his head to the table with a thump. His fork and knife jangled. With a sigh, he rose and crossed to the fireplace. Pick-ing up the ax, he twirled it as he stood a log on end on the dirt floor. Sud-denly, a loud bleating split the air. Floreana dropped the plate, which shattered across the counter, and the ax slipped through Ramn's hand, giving his index finger a deep nick. The bleating rounded out into a moan, and Ramn realized it was an animal bellowing in pain. The cry, an intensified version of the one he'd heard minutes before, was rife with panic. Instinctively, Floreana circled the table toward her husband, her eyes on the small hole of the window.

The sound was coming from the livestock pens, across the rows of crops. Ramn squeezed his wife rea.s.suringly, but his hand was trem-bling. He stepped for the door, ax swinging by his side, blood curling around his finger and dripping to the floor.

The nights were growing warmer and the air outside was thick and moist. The gara was settling into the peaks of the forest, crowning it with ribbons of mist. The cry came again, this time with more urgency, and Ramn imagined he felt it rattling through his bones. He pa.s.sed through the low castor oil plants, the wide-leafed flowering guavas, the tall stands of pltanos. Beside him hung the bunches of fruit, hard-sheathed and ridged. He thought of the panicked looks in the eyes of his neighbors who had fled, the foolish stories that had been told around the village. The tall tales seemed more real in the darkness.

The cry elevated into an almost human scream, undulating unnatu-rally, like the wail of a child seized and shaken. Its pitch, except when wrenched high with pain, was low and broad, issuing from some large creature. There was more bleating, more sounds of struggle. Though the air was cool, Ramn felt his shirt clinging to his body, moist and limp. He tightened his grip on the ax, thinking of his over-under shot-gun in the small house and cursing the ammunition shortage, and reached a hand out cautiously to part the fronds.

Something lay up ahead, wheezing in the tall gra.s.s of the western-most livestock pen. A large creature, lost in the shadows, the darkness, and Ramn's own intoxicating fear, was retreating slowly to the brink of the forest. At least three meters tall, it seemed to walk upright like a man, the gra.s.s shushing around its swollen body. Unhurried, it reached the edge of the Scalesia forest and faded from sight.

A renewed cry brought Ramn's attention back to the injured beast. It was one of Ramn's favorites, a thick brown-and-white spotted cow. He stepped forward, trying to focus on her, but his mind was slow and unre-sponsive, having followed the thick majestic creature through the mist and into the forest.

The cow bleated again, but its cries had none of the fearful edge of before. Its side was raked open in two diagonal strips, the torn flesh revealing a crushed tangle of ribs and tissue. Her breath rattled through the holes, fluttering the fur surrounding the gashes. Her hind leg was snapped back under her body, and her head rested at a painful angle to her neck, as if she'd been raised and dropped, or thrown a short distance in frustration.

As if something had bitten off more than it could chew.

Ramn lowered the ax to his side, breathing hard. There were no bears here, no large cats or crocodiles. As far as he knew, the largest nat-ural predator in the entire archipelago was the Galpagos hawk.

The cow moaned and Ramn crouched over her, caressing her flank. Her mouth was sprayed with froth. He noticed that the back of her neck had been attacked, sc.r.a.ped or gnawed through to the thick plate of the scapula. The flesh was ribboned across the wound, glistening with blood and a foreign, clear, viscid liquid that looked like saliva. Ramn reached out and touched the wound, drawing his hand back sharply as pain shot through the cut on his index finger. He wiped the excess blood on his jeans and instinctively put his finger in his mouth to clear the wound. He spit into the gra.s.s, a red-lined glob thick with mucus, and rose.

The cow rustled in the gra.s.s, her head trembling above the ground. Ramn picked up the ax, again cursing the fact that there were no sh.e.l.ls for his shotgun. With a nervous glance at the band of forest into which the large creature had vanished, he raised the ax back over one shoulder and swung downward at the cow's neck.

CHAPTER 1.

--------------------- 17 DEC 07.

ameron leaned forward, resting her elbows on the steering wheel of her Cherokee. The horn blasted, startling her back in her seat, and several of the children on the playground turned and glanced in her direction. She waved, but none waved back.

The timing was less than perfect.

Though not beautiful, Cameron had neat, pretty features. Her blond hair was badly cut-thirteen dollars at SuperCuts-yet it somehow added to her casual good looks. It was short, up off her shoulders in the back and blunt along the sides. She was solid through the hips and broad across the shoulders. She was not a pet.i.te woman.

In the twenty minutes she had been watching, children had overrun the small playground. She found something vulgar in their exuber-ance-the exaggerated swinging of their arms, the open screaming mouths, the tint of their rosy cheeks. A stocky girl tripped a smaller boy, and he went down with a yelp. He stood, bawling, the knees of his jeans marked with dirt.

Cameron noticed that she was nervously jiggling her hand, so she set it on her knee. She examined her fingers, thick and strong like a man's, free of jewelry, the nails cut short. She kept her wedding ring as a pen-dant on her necklace. The ring, a handsomely sized sapphire surrounded with diamond chips, served both as an engagement and wedding ring. It had cost Justin approximately twenty percent of his life savings. At first, Cameron had valiantly tried to wear the ring on her finger, but it was a constant hazard, catching in trigger guards and rip cords. She had finally given up, as Justin later had on his wedding ring, which he kept around his watchband. Moving the ring to her necklace, Cameron had resigned herself to yet another abnormality in her abnormal life.

The chanting of girls jumping rope called Cameron's attention back to the playground. The thin girl in the middle was beautiful, with curly hair bouncing across her perfectly smooth cheeks. She held her flowered dress down when she jumped, Marilyn Monroe style. When she was fin-ished, a boy ran by and goosed her. She ignored him brilliantly, and he lingered in the shadows by the handball wall, sheepish and sullen.

For the first seventeen years of Cameron's life, every part of her had felt large and unwieldy-her solid b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her size-ten feet, her stomach ridged with muscle from as early as she could remember. She'd always felt thick and horsey next to other girls. Her strong hands and broad shoulders seemed all the more undainty beside their thin elegant fingers, their frail necks and girl-skinny arms. In high school, other girls always seemed busy with makeup and dating and first kisses. Cameron, on the other hand, never even bothered to get up when the phone rang. Until she met Justin, she'd been convinced she was meant to spend her life alone.

She shook off her thoughts and checked her watch. She'd have to be home soon for dinner. In the four years of their marriage, Cameron and Justin had seen less and less of each other. The timing of their tours was almost always unfortunate; one of them would leave a few days after the other returned home. And those days together were hardly blissful-last time she'd arrived home with her back thrown out and twenty-one st.i.tches laced up her forearm, and she'd spent the hard-won three days with her husband eating microwave popcorn and watching a James Bond marathon on TV.

She and Justin had fallen in love the quiet, old-fashioned way, with unspoken a.s.surances and soft yieldings of vulnerabilities. Cameron had sworn always to recognize their relationship as a necessity and an enchantment; together, they had sworn to always put each other first. Because of that, they'd recently resolved to restructure their lives so that they could spend more time together. They'd dropped from active duty, choosing to remain on call as reserves. The transition from full-time sol-dier to weekend warrior was not an easy one, and they were still trying to adjust to their new lives. The time requirements were not taxing-one weekend a month to maintain proficiency, two weeks a year active duty.

Cameron found she missed the order of the military, the rules and codes she'd kept around herself like armor. With civilian life came much more freedom, and she found herself unraveling without the imposed pressure holding her together. Justin was having an easier time with the transition, but then he'd never been the soldier she was.

They'd started looking for other work this week, and both had been startled by how useless their skills were in the real world. They'd return from days full of interviews, spent and discouraged, and sit side by side on the couch sipping beer in the dark. She'd stopped opening the bank statements.

The timing was less than perfect.

Last week, a day care building had collapsed in Oakland after only a 4.2. Cracks in the foundation from previous tremors that no one could even see. Would've gone down in a strong wind, the structural engineer had said. Seventeen kids had died, and four more were in intensive care. The photograph in the Bee focused on a bright yellow jump rope on the front lawn, framed by the majestic ruin of the building in the back-ground.

And they were only catching the secondary quakes here, the spent dis-tant rumbles of the East Pacific Rise, which grew shallower and quieter as it twisted its way north into San Andreas, sending ripples up to Sacra-mento. In South America, riots followed the seismic activity up the coast from Ecuador into Colombia, but UN troops had quelled the outbreaks.

A siren blared, so piercing Cameron could feel its vibration in her teeth. Kids scrambled off the jungle gyms and swings, off the monkey bars and tetherball courts. They hit the ground, curled up in b.a.l.l.s, hands laced over the backs of their necks. They stayed like that for a few moments, frozen little animals. The siren stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the children resumed their activities.

Cameron glanced down at the small wand of the pregnancy test on the pa.s.senger seat, the "+" sign glaring at her in red. The timing was less than perfect.

CHAPTER 2.

--------------------- 21 DEC 07.

he barking bulldog woke him up, just as it had every morning that week. William Savage groaned and shifted in bed, releasing his death-grip on the empty bottle of Jack Daniel's. It clattered on the concrete floor, momentarily drowning out the dog. Mumbling angrily, Savage pulled the pillow over his head, fighting the onslaught of light from the window.

Savage was fully clothed from the night before, though one of his boots was missing. His reddish-brown hair was amply streaked with gray, held off his face with a blue bandanna he kept tied around his forehead. His long hair, in concert with his thick beard and ripped navy cammies, made him look as if he'd just stumbled in from a tour of duty. Strapped to his calf was his favored knife-a Lile "Death Wind."

The apartment was little more than a room, a small box on the third floor of a run-down building. The ceiling was buckled with water dam-age and cracked on the north side from a recent earthquake. When the wind was strong, drafts through the closed window stirred the paper shooting-range targets on the floor. A wooden gun cabinet, the only piece of furniture in the apartment aside from the small bed, leaned against the far wall. A Congressional Medal of Honor served as a coaster for a half-drunk cup of coffee on the kitchen counter.

The bulldog's barks continued, adding to the pounding in Savage's head.

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!" he yelled, his voice still glazed with sleep.

A truck rumbled by down on the street. The dog let loose with a fresh flurry of barks. With a grunt, Savage swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. The room swam around him, but he fought it back into focus. It felt as though the bulldog were inside his head, each bark echo-ing against the walls of his skull.

Savage rose and stumbled to the window. He tried to slide it open, but it wouldn't budge. Outside, the wind sucked at the pane. The street and buildings were drab gray, as if bled dry. To the sides of the road rose drifts of snow sheathed in ice, spotted with mud and brown splashes of road water. The joys of Billings, Montana, in the winter.

Standing guard on a porch three houses up the block, the bulldog stared at Savage, tongue lolling. Savage eyed the dog angrily. "That's right. Just shut up. Lemme go back to sleep."

The dog bolted forward, straining against its metal chain and howling.

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit!" Savage yelled. He banged the sash, but that only caused the dog to bark even louder. "YOU GET THAT DOG TO SHUT THE f.u.c.k UP!"

A beefy man strode through the front door of the house, stopping just behind the frenzied bulldog. "What's your problem, pal?"

Savage yanked the window, but it slid up only a few inches. He leaned over so he could shout through the small gap. "That f.u.c.kin' dog has woken me up every morning this week! You'd better-" He threw his weight against the window, but it refused to budge any further.

The beefy man threw his arms up in the air. "It's eleven-thirty!" he shouted.

Savage leaned over and dug through the pile of clothes beside his bed until he unearthed his alarm clock. It read 11:17 A.M. He threw the clock against the wall and returned to the window. The dog was practically bouncing up and down at the guy's feet.

"I don't give a s.h.i.t what time it is!" Savage yelled. "Get your dog a muzzle or I'll shoot the thing!"

The beefy man held out his arm and slowly extended his middle fin-ger, then turned and headed back inside his house. Angrily, Savage returned to bed, pulling the pillow back over his head. A wave of nausea swept his stomach, and he realized he desperately had to p.i.s.s. The bull-dog's barks were even louder now that the window was edged open. They penetrated the pillow, his head. He tried pressing his hands over his ears, tried humming loudly, tried tying an old sweatshirt around his head.

Finally, he snapped upright again, hurling the pillow at the wall. He crossed the room quickly, throwing open the doors of his gun cabinet and removing an air rifle. The ammo drawers were stuffed with different rounds. He started digging. A bunch of .22s clattered to the floor like bra.s.s rainfall. Buried beneath a stack of Sig Sauer cartridges was a box of tranquilizer darts, left over from an elaborate prank he had pulled during downtime on a tour of duty.

He slid a dart in the chamber, stormed to the window, and smashed the left lower pane with the end of the air rifle. He took careful aim. The bulldog snarled and growled, bounced and barked. Savage sank the dart into its neck and waited. The bulldog swayed on its feet, then collapsed flat on its stomach, the bloom of the dart waggling in the breeze.

A moment later, the beefy guy came out to investigate. He crouched, leaning over the fallen dog. Savage couldn't resist a smirk.

When the guy rose to his feet, his eyes were lit with rage. "You moth-erf.u.c.ker!" he screamed. "I'll rip your f.u.c.kin' eyes out, you stupid-"

With a grimace, Savage slid a second dart into the chamber. He snapped the rifle up against his shoulder, eyed the sites, and fired. Beefy guy looked down at the dart in his thigh with shock. He stepped forward once, paused, and stepped forward once more. He fell to his knees, then slumped over next to his dog.

Savage returned the gun to the cabinet, relishing the silence of his apartment. After a satisfying p.i.s.s, he stuffed a sweatshirt in the broken pane, filled a coffeepot with water and drank from it, then fell back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. The peace was divine.

He was just drifting off when he heard the sirens.

CHAPTER 3.

--------------------- 22 DEC 07.

ex Williams banged through the screen door into his front yard with his white pajama pants aflutter, a mobile satellite phone pressed to one ear, and a nine-foot rainbow boa constrictor wrapped around his left leg. "Do you really think we need that many people?" he barked into the phone. "Three, four, maybe, but I mean, seven soldiers! What am I, Salman Rushdie?"