Minutes to Burn (2001) Read online

  "We've had our share of oddities on this end as well," Rex said. He filled him in on Juan's death, losing the boat, and the larva that Cameron and Derek had discovered.

  There was a long, breathless pause. "I'd do anything to see that larva," Donald finally said. "I'll ready the lab in case you bring it back."

  "What were you saying about the dino pellet?" Rex asked.

  "I was correct. About its containing a virus. Dr. Everett was unable to identify it--they have it in a nucleic acid probe test now, but I doubt strongly it'll correlate to any gene bank specimens. They just E-mailed me the micrograph--the virus looks like curved ladders, like segments

  of DNA."

  "What are its effects?"

  "They've yet to figure out its pathogenicity, but Everett's extremely concerned. Have you been taking water samples?"

  Rex glanced over at Diego, who momentarily stopped keying the handset and reached into his bag. He pulled out the two jars they'd filled with water samples--one from the waters off Punta Berlanga and one from the lagoon. "Yes," Rex said.

  "Well, take more. A smattering through the island--hit any standing water reservoirs--and around the coasts so we can pick up samples from each of the major currents. I want to source this thing, see how it entered the water supply. As far as we know, it's only near Sangre de Dios--there's nothing in the recent records from nearby waters to indi-cate the virus's presence elsewhere."

  Rex's hair fell in straight, lanky wisps over his forehead. "Of course," he murmured. "The drilling boat." He turned to the others, excited. "Remember that kid on Santa Cruz asked us if we were heading here again on the drilling boat?"

  Diego shot to his feet. "The deep-sea core drilling boat!"

  "The who?" Tucker asked.

  "They took several cores off the coast here," Diego said, pointing south to the sea. "Just beyond Punta Berlanga."

  "What's going on?" Donald's voice squawked. "What's all the commotion?"

  "There was an ODP boat through here," Rex said. "Pulling up cores. It could've unleashed this virus from where it was buried in the ocean basin. Virogenesis is usually localized like that. The core holes left behind in the ocean floor could be like . . . like that cave in Kenya, the one they think is the hiding place for the Marburg filovirus."

  "Kitum Cave," Diego said. "On the slope of Mount Elgon." He stood and unscrewed the whip antenna, pulling the cylindrical segments apart and S-folding them.

  Rex turned back to Szabla, looking somewhat ridiculous speaking into her shoulder. "The cores will be refrigerated and archived on one of the boats--get them thawed out, see if any thermophilic microbes have survived the refrigeration, and get them over to Dr. Everett to see if they're infected with the same thing. If they are, odds are they're what

  infected the dinoflagellates to begin with."

  Donald agreed and clicked out.

  The soldiers stared at Rex and Diego blankly. Szabla ran her fingers up along the front of her neck, testing the tender skin above her larynx. Derek averted his eyes from her, and she turned back to Rex.

  "You want to tell us just what the fuck you're talking about?" she asked.

  Captain Buck Tadman shifted his damp cigar to the left side of his mouth, leaning over the prow of the 143-meter advanced drilling ship and watching the waves crash against the hull. The cook stood next to him, wearing a stained white apron.

  "You want my marital advice?" Buck said. He smacked the back of one hand into the other. "Buy a belt with a thicker buckle." The cook threw his cigarette into the foaming waters and headed back to the kitchen.

  A thin man in spectacles walked past Buck and waved, and Buck sneered at him, spitting the plug of his cigar on the damp deck. The man scurried away toward the laboratory. Buck was tired of scientists. And his ship, the SEDCO/BP 469 was overrun with them--paleontologists, sedimentologists, petrologists, magnetics specialists, geophysicists, geo-chemists, geodipshitologists. All the degrees tacked on behind their names made the ship roster look like alphabet soup. He supposed it made sense--the boat was a floating research station, after all.

  They'd left port in San Francisco over two months ago, setting out on Ocean Drilling Program Leg Seventeen, a six-month cruise that would take them down the west coast of South America, around the Cape, and back up to Florida. They'd stop at key sites along the way, pulling up plugs of earth from the ocean basins and seeing what information they encoded about the origin and evolution of oceanic crust, marine sedi-mentary sequences, and the tectonic evolution of continental margins.

  Funded and managed by the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling and the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ocean Drilling Program ran four advanced drilling ships around the globe, each converted from a petroleum drilling rig and engineered to collect core samples of rock and sediment. Buck's boat, the SEDCO/BP 469, was the finest of these.

  Buck gazed proudly up at the derrick rising over sixty meters above the waterline. Two men attached the four-coned tungsten-carbide roller bit to the drill pipe, along with its stabilizing weights. Once the bit got rolling, it would slice through the ocean floor like a razor coring an apple. The taller man signaled another member of the drill floor crew, and the assembly was lowered to the moon pool, a hole seven meters wide in the bottom of the ship. The assembly entered the water through a funneled guide horn.

  The machinery wound up, a clicking and humming of mechanical and hydraulic devices that extended the drill string down to the ocean floor. The spot they hovered over was 5,500 meters deep; it would take the drill bit roughly twelve hours to hit bottom.

  Once it did, they'd rotate the drill string, pump surface seawater and drillers' mud down the drill pipe to remove the cuttings and keep the bit cool. The plugs of earth, safely ensconced in an inner core barrel, would be pulled right up out of the ocean floor and through the drill string to the ship, where scientists would run it to the lab and pore over it for days. They'd check the six-inch-wide, ten-foot-long plugs for fossils, gas pock-ets, bubbles, patterns in the mafic and olivine minerals, and tiny, heat-resistant organisms called hyperthermophilic microbes. Sometimes, they'd even run a Gamma Ray Attenuation and Porosity Evaluator to measure density.

  Buck barked out a few commands just to feel important, enjoying how the workers grew uneasy under his eyes. He chomped the end off another cigar and twirled it beneath his thick gray mustache before lighting it. A deck hand jogged up. "Someone from the New Center on the radio," he said. "A Dr. Donald Denton."

  "And?" Buck asked.

  "He wants to talk to you. Says it's urgent."

  Buck walked in slowly to the radio in the control deck, enjoying his cigar. When he spoke into the receiver, his voice was gruff. "Yeah? Help ya?"

  "Mr. Tadman, Donald Denton here, New Center of Ecotectonics in Sacramento. I understand you did some core drilling off the coast of Sangre de Dios?"

  "Always good to be understood," Buck said.

  "I need to get my hands on samples from those cores. We have reason to believe that the drilling unleashed a new virus from the oceanic crust. In fact, the virus might be present in the thermophilic microbes living in the archived cores. It's quite urgent; I've spent the better part of the past few hours figuring out how to get ahold of you."

  "Then you've been wasting your morning," Buck said. "We skipped the goddamned Galapagos this time down. Too much shakin' and bakin'. Drilled Sangre last leg. The cores are archived up in your neck of the woods."

  "Where?" Donald's voice conveyed his exasperation.

  "Scripps Institute. Right in La Jolla, California." Buck pronounced the "J" hard in "La Jolla" and gave the end of "California" a western spin--Californ-i-ae.

  "Excellent. Thanks very much."

  "No shit off my back. Oh, and Doc?" Buck shot a puffy jet of cigar smoke across the radio. "It's Captain Tadman."

  Chapter 35

  Tell Iggy that peanut butter will get it out, but he shouldn't go to bed "chewing it to begin with." Samantha
shifted on the small bed, cradling the phone to her ear with a shoulder. "No, you can't go to the NVME concert, Kiera. Because you're...how old are you again? Well, there. See--that's much too young to be going to a concert."

  She gazed at the ceiling, having memorized each line, crack, and bump over the past two and a half days. She should have made sketches of the ceiling the last time she was in the slammer; she could have wiled away her hours now analyzing the changes in the plaster.

  Donald had called to let her know he was sending her thermopro-teaceae pulled from a deep sea core, of all things. Evidently, they'd sur-vived being archived and refrigerated at Scripps, which she supposed made sense--they could endure temperature extremes, sometimes thriving in environments of up to 113 degrees Celsius. Donald sus-pected that the thermoproteaceae were infected with the same virus as the dinos. Once the sample arrived, she'd hand it off to Tom so that he could get it under the lens for comparison.

  She was wearing scrubs now, finally having changed out of her chil-dren's clothes.

  "Are you remembering to take your meds?" she continued into the phone. "Uh-huh. And aren't you getting report cards or something soon? After the break?" Her face softened with empathy. "I know, I know, honey. English does suck."

  Someone banged on the window. Samantha sat up, nervously straightening her hair once she realized it was Dr. Foster. It was a losing battle--her hair stood up in tangles where she'd been resting her head on the pillow. He made her simultaneously buoyant and insecure, a mix-ture of emotions to which she was unaccustomed. She was unsure if she needed buoyancy and insecurity in her life. She pulled on a surgical cap to hide her crazy hair and scurried to the window, speaking rapidly into the phone.

  "There are plenty of fourteen-year-olds in day care. Oh. Well, just pretend you're the teacher's assistant or something. Maricarmen will get you over to the college to pick up your microbiology assignment. Good. If there are any problems, make sure she calls me. All right, sweetie. Tell your European brothers I love them." She snapped the phone shut and faced Dr. Foster with a smile.

  "Kids?" he asked.

  She nodded.

  "I have two myself." Samantha nervously adjusted the surgical cap, and Dr. Foster looked at her with amusement. "Getting ready to scrub in?"

  She worked her lower lip between her teeth for a minute, gathering her thoughts. "Look, Martin, I wanted to say...well, I don't really date. It's not that I don't want to. It's more that I don't know how. And, well, I could save you the time of finding out how badly I'm gonna botch--"

  He held up his hand and she stopped, mouth open. "There's a space suit through the crash door," he said. "Suit up--I need to show you something."

  She was into the space suit in ten minutes, and then she was free from the slammer, shuffling down the long, white hallway by Dr. Foster's side. She knocked over a tray of folders with a puffy hip, and Dr. Foster stopped to pick them up for her. For the rest of the way, he guided her, a hand resting softly on the small of her back.

  She turned to him, awkward and mushy in the space suit. "Romantic, isn't this?" she said sarcastically.

  "Yes," he replied. "It is."

  They reached another slammer unit, and he pointed through the large plate glass barrier. A woman whom Samantha recognized as the flight attendant lay on a bed near the window, weak, pale, and dotted with fading bruises, but very much alive. Samantha could tell, even from her pres-ent state, that she was an attractive woman. Gorgeous blue eyes paired with flowing blond hair gave her a sexy, if somewhat unsophisticated, look.

  The woman tried to pull herself up to a sitting position, but couldn't. She turned slightly, her swollen face looking through the glass at Saman-tha. She reached out a hand, touching the window, and Samantha raised a glove and rested it on the glass near hers, feeling her eyes tear up.

  "She's not out of the woods yet, but I think she's going to pull through, she and the pilot," Dr. Foster said softly. "The titers have decreased substantially. She wanted to see you."

  The insides of the flight attendant's lips were stained with dried blood.

  "Tough little blond, huh?" Samantha murmured. She blinked back the growing moistness in her eyes, staring at the woman's thin arm extending to the glass. "Maybe I should've been a stewardess. More job security." She leaned forward until her mask bumped against the win-dow. "Are there any openings on your airline?" she asked.

  The woman shook her head, confused. "What?" she mouthed.

  Samantha smiled. "Nothing." She turned to go, but Dr. Foster gently grasped her elbow, turning her back to the window.

  The woman was breathing hard, her chest rising and falling beneath a thin hospital gown. A tear spilled from her eye and ran sideways down her cheek to the pillow. She opened her mouth, her lips forming sound-less words.

  Thank you.

  Chapter 36

  His boots hooked up on one of the logs and his hands resting in the grass, Savage began a series of decline push-ups. Tucker watched him, his thumb working away on his thimble like a small piston. Justin paced loose, meandering circles around the fire.

  Diego and Rex had set out several hours ago to circle the coast and collect water samples. Despite Justin's advice, Tank had escorted them to try to walk the remaining stiffness from his back. The scientists had planned to concentrate on the southern coast, where the cold Peruvian Oceanic Current would have carried the infected dinoflagellates to the island from the deep-sea core holes.

  At the base of the log, the larva curled around Derek's ankles. "What if it gets hungry?" Derek asked.

  "If it starts crying," Savage grunted between push-ups, "you can always breast-feed."

  Accordioning its segments, the larva squirmed up onto the log. It raised its thorax, its true legs spread in the air, and angled its head toward Derek. He looked back. They gazed at each other for a few moments, exchanging information in some wordless tongue. The larva made the cooing noise, just once, then lowered its thorax. Its prolegs pulsed and tensed, moving its body forward into Derek's lap. He raised his hands, allowing the larva to ease across his thighs.

  Szabla stood up brusquely. "I don't like this. I don't like it at all."

  Derek rested a hand on the back of the larva's head. "It's fine, Szabla. Sit down. Sit down."

  Szabla sat.

  Cameron watched the larva in Derek's lap, noting just how much they were juxtaposed like mother and child. She looked away, scratching her nose. "Requesting permission to check on the Estradas," she said.

  "Who the fuck are the Estradas?" Szabla asked.

  "Ramon and Floreana."

  "Who the fuck are Ramon and Floreana?"

  Cameron turned to Szabla, unamused. "I'm not requesting permis-sion from you." She turned back to Derek, but he was lost again, gazing down at the larva. "Well? Derek?"

  Derek looked up. "Huh?"

  "Can I go?"

  "Where?"

  "To check on the Estradas?"

  "Why do they need checking?"

  "I don't know, I just thought I'd..." Her voice trailed off, leaving an awkward silence. Justin tried to catch her eye, but she refused to look over at him.

  "The woman is pregnant," Justin said, turning to Derek. "It might be wise for someone to look in on her." He bit an edge of nail off his thumb, spitting it aside.

  Derek shrugged. "Fine," he said. He nodded without looking at Cameron. "Go."

  Again, Cameron found she had some trouble with Ramon and Flore-ana's Spanish. She asked Ramon to repeat his question and listened extra carefully.

  "Why did I come?" Cameron repeated to make sure she'd gotten the question correct. Her Spanish wasn't great, but since she didn't have Diego to translate like last time, she had to forge ahead with it. She shrugged. "I suppose to check up on you." She turned to Floreana. "To make sure you were okay." She pointed to Floreana's stomach, and Flo-reana smiled. "Are you all right?"

  Ramon smiled and walked over to his wife, leaning over to embrace her from behind. She set down the
small blue quilt she was stitching and smiled. "I'm happy," she said.

  "Are you still worried about getting off the island?"

  Ramon reached around his wife, laying his hands on her stomach. "Once she gives birth to our son, then we will worry about getting off the island." His eyes saddened. "Our island."

  "What are you going to do for work? When you leave here?"

  "I don't know. I'll find something." Ramon took a deep breath and sat down at the table, sliding his hands along the rough, wooden surface. "There are things that matter and things that don't." His eyes traced over his wife lovingly--her crow's feet, the dark wave of her hair, her full stomach. "It's simple."

  Cameron started to sit down, then decided not to. "Well, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you're taken care of," she said.

  Floreana's smile was beautiful. She noticed Cameron's eyes drop to the baby quilt. "Do you have children?"

  "No," Cameron said. She smiled curtly, backing up to the door. "No," she said again.

  "Perhaps you could stay for some--"

  "That's all right," Cameron said. "I really should get back." She nodded once and left before Floreana could protest.

  Chapter 37

  Derek walked down the two-hundred-yard stretch of dirt road toward the watchtower, the sturdy balsas rising overhead, the forest looming behind him like a broad, slumbering beast. He climbed the makeshift ladder and reached the top of the wobbly structure, a decrepit open shack with an overhang about fifty feet up.

  He faced south toward the darkening blue of the ocean, leaning heavily against one of the shack walls, which groaned under his weight. A big wave rolled in, disappearing from view beneath the cliffs of Punta Berlanga, and then he saw the five distinct sprays of the blowholes shooting up in the air. They misted, dissolved. He wondered if the slight moisture he felt against his cheeks was the water from the blowholes reaching him up here, kilometers away.

  His eyelids felt heavy, almost leaden. He fought them open, and his vision blurred. He let it, taking in the island like an Impressionist land-scape. Since the mission's start, he'd hardly slept at all. He nodded off and almost toppled from the tower, awakening at the last moment and grabbing the wall. Adrenaline pounded through him.