Minutes to Burn

When the guy rose to his feet, his eyes were lit with rage. "You motherfucker!" he screamed. "I'll rip your fuckin' 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 piss, 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

Rex 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?"

His lank, jet-black hair hung medium-length, darting down to the back of his shirt collar, and swept hastily to one side in the front. His eyes were almost hypnotically intense, a dark brown that looked black in dim lighting. As usual, he was unshaven, an even sprawl of stubble covering his cheeks and his too-strong chin.

Donald Denton chuckled on the other end of the phone. "They only travel in groups. I guess it's a half platoon, the smallest unit they use for international outings. I still can't believe we're getting you down there at all."

Rex was the preeminent complex plate margin ecotectonicist specializing in South American sites. The New Center for Ecotectonic Studies, of which Rex and Donald were Co-Chiefs of Research, focused on the interaction of tectonic movements and ecology, examining how earthquakes impacted flora and fauna. It had been established to contend with environmental fallout from the Initial Event, a massive earthquake that had occurred on March 3, 2002. Registering 9.2 on the moment magnitude scale, the quake had ruptured the tectonic plates near the Ecuadorian coast along a 307-kilometer length. The resultant high rates of plate motion, unprecedented since the Precambrian era more than six hundred million years ago, accounted for massive and recurrent after-shocks.

For the last five years, the region had been plagued with earthquakes in excess of the usual frequency and intensity, perturbing other stress fields and causing rumblings for thousands of miles in every direction. In Ecuador, an earthquake registering approximately six on the moment WW magnitude scale occurred on average once a week, with M=3 or M=4 events registering almost daily. This scale, which measures both the energy release and amplitude of earthquakes, replaced the Richter in the early 1990s.

The fourteen large islands, six small islands, and forty-some islets that compose the Galapagos Archipelago-Rex's principal area of expertise-could not have been more precariously located given the increase in seismic activity. Nine hundred and sixty kilometers off the coast of Ecuador, the Galapagos sit dangerously close to the triple junction of three tectonic plates. Perched high on the north edge of the Nazca plate a mere one hundred kilometers beneath its junction with the Cocos plate, the islands had been regularly rattled by the earthquakes that accompanied the upwelling magma from the rift. The sea floor continued to spread along this seam, the Galapagos Fracture Zone, driving the Nazca plate southward. To further complicate the tectonic regime, a north-south running chain of undersea mountains, the East Pacific Rise, spread the ocean floor in similar fashion one thousand kilometers west of the Galapagos, pushing the Nazca and Pacific plates apart and shoving the Nazca plate east beneath the South American continent. There had been six centimeters of eastward displacement in November alone.

Rex and Donald's colleague, Dr. Frank Friedman, had gone to Sangre de Dios, the westernmost island of the Galapagos, at the end of October, prompted by troubling reports of increased microseismicity from the island.

He had not been heard from since.

Due to the elevated earthquakes in the area and the resultant social unrest, travel to Ecuador and the Galapagos had since become restricted by the U.S. military, the airports closed off to civilians. The scientists, like everyone else, were fleeing the Galapagos, leaving behind antiquated equipment that yielded low resolution data. What little information the New Center now received came in from what remained of the Charles Darwin Station in Puerto Ayora.