As I got to the doorway, the plane swung left, then down below, through the windshield, islands suddenly appeared—small oblong islands with rims of beach standing very white against the dark teal of the Atlantic.
“Fifteen minutes!” the female pilot called back.
I stared down at the bright, sandy flat strips of land. I’d already read the info packet. It said that, like a lot of the islands in the eastern Atlantic near Africa, Cape Verde had originally been settled in the 1500s by the Portuguese. Once an important hub of the African slave trade and a notorious haunt of pirates, it had gained its national independence in the early 1970s, when a Marxist revolutionary—a Fidel Castro–like figure named Amilcar Cabral—had fought for its independence.
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.