Minutes to Burn

With their prolegs and rippling contortions of their abdomens, they crawled off in different directions, disappearing into the lush vegetation. Fronds rustled around the last larva, then stilled.

The forest was quiet.

Chapter 19

Even compared to Guayaquil's, the airport at Baltra was in bad shape. One of the runways was decimated with cracks and fissures. Cameron stretched her legs as the C-130 came in evenly on the one remaining strip of intact pavement and eased to a halt.

The flight had been smooth. Difficult getting out of Guayaquil, but once they'd been airborne, it had been an easy hour-and-a-half glide over miles of blue ocean. The pilot would rest, fly back to Guayaquil, and return to pick them up in five days.

The tension within the squad seemed to be even worse. Szabla was furious that Derek had breached protocol by ordering Cameron to bunk in with her and Justin, and Justin had made things worse by cracking threesome jokes all night. At four-thirty in the morning, Savage had woken the entire hall screaming from the depths of some nightmare, and Derek had had to kick in the door to see what was wrong. It had taken two of them to awaken Savage. Tucker had gotten the sweats in the middle of breakfast, and after one look at him, Justin had removed the morphine Syrettes from his trauma bag, wrapped them in a sock, and hid them at the bottom of the weapons box.

At least Juan seemed to be getting along with everyone-at the Guayaquil airport, he'd greeted the squad with a half bow, telling them how pleased he was to be along on their mission. Szabla had scooted over, letting Juan sit beside her for the flight.

Derek had been quiet since takeoff, standing by one of the windows and gazing out across the water. He looked as if he hadn't slept at all.

Rex had filled the uncomfortable silences on the flight, providing a geology lesson and pointing out the window at the islands as they passed. Born of volcanic eruptions-fierce plumes of magma shot through the earth's crust-the Galapagos, he said, had spent much of its ten-million-year existence in flux, its islands undergoing a continual process of reshaping and reforming through eruptions and earthquakes. Rising from the Galapagos Platform, a basaltic submarine plateau some two hundred to five hundred fathoms beneath the sea, the islands were arranged chronologically, aging as they moved east. The shadowy ghosts of islands past lurked beneath the waters east of the current island chain, victims of erosion and the erratic movement of the earth's crust.

Espanola and Santa Fe, the oldest existing islands at 3.25 million years, were less volcanically active than their westernmost cousins, Fer-nandina, Isabela, and Sangre de Dios, which at seven hundred thousand years still experienced marked fits and growing pains. Because the islands were formed of basalt, a low viscosity magma that flowed and spread easily, the volcanic peaks rose less steeply than their continental counterparts, whose silica-laden andesite magma permitted more conical protrusions. The product of gentle, effusive eruptions, the Galapa-gos were broad and mildly sloping islands that resembled the domed backs of the tortoises for which the archipelago was named.

The islands floated amidst seven oceanic currents, which carried with them marine life from as far away as Antarctica and Panama. The conflu-ence of these currents, warm and cold, northern and southern, gave the archipelago a climate uncharacteristic of the equator. In most aspects, Rex pointed out, the Galapagos were anomalous: the lumbering reptiles; the smattering of penguins and flamingos among the more traditional pelagic birds; the albatross that clattered their way through their elabo-rate mating dance and threw themselves from cliffs to become airborne.

Cameron had listened to Rex intently, but she'd thought the others seemed bored.

The sun in Baltra was much more intense than in Guayaquil. Their faces slick with sunblock, the soldiers exited the plane. Cameron felt the heat of the concrete through her boots. A Minutes to Burn electronic bill-board flashed 2:50 on the runway. Two Kfirs were parked on the far edge of the apron, where they sat in the hot sun, still linked to tow trac-tors-Israel had been kind to the Ecuadorian army.

Two French soldiers met them on the tarmac, their uniforms adorned with UN trimmings. One of them jogged out to direct the taxiing plane. Szabla conversed with the other in French and gestured to the squad to follow them inside.