Landing Party: A Dinosaur Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

easy to see that the entire bottom portion of the volcano was flooded with water.
    “Seawater coming up from below or perhaps trapped inside during formation. Will be interesting to find out,” Skylar said.
    “What’s not so interesting about it,” Richard pointed out, “is that it means there’s nowhere flat for us to put down in there.”
    At this, the pilot nodded. “After we fly across, we’ll circle the perimeter and see if we can find a level enough spot there.”
    No one disagreed, and they flew over the yawning opening in silence. When they were about halfway across, Lara pointed excitedly.
    “Look! I see something, something orange.” She raised binoculars to her eyes and focused. “Looks like it could be a life jacket.”
    Ethan clicked off a few photos. “Definitely a good place to start looking, then.”
    When they reached the other side, the pilot made a right turn and began following the curve of the island’s roughly circular form.
    “Not a whole lot of optimal landing spots here, either. Maybe we should have come by boat after all.” Anita glared at Richard, who shrugged as he looked down at the rugged new landscape.
    “We’ll see. We have yet to go all the way around.”
    But as the circumnavigation of the island continued, it became clear that the topography varied little. Steep, rocky sides thrust up from the open ocean with very few exceptions, and none of those were sufficient to land a helicopter. By the time they had gone all the way around, a sullen silence had fallen over the cabin as they all pondered the unspoken question: where to land?
    At length, that silence was broken by Richard, the explorer who had figured out many a route into inhospitable places over the decades. “Look, the Tongans must have found a way either inside it or up onto it, right? And they came by boat…”
    Anita, the sailor, was quick to reply. “Unless their boat sank on the way there—who knows, maybe they never even got here. There hasn’t been any proof one way or the other.”
    The pilot interrupted them by leaning back and saying, “It’s up to you, but we do have options. Let me lay them out. One: we can fly around a little more to try and find a nice flat landing zone, but when I reach my low fuel point, we’ll have to head back to Samoa.” He continued on over the groans in response. “Two: we can abort now and head back after seeing the place up close.”
    “Anything else?” Richard asked.
    “Yeah, or three: We can try having Steve, here, lower you down wherever you want to go by winched cable.” He patted his co-pilot on the shoulder, and Steve nodded.
    “Then we’d pick you up the same way in reverse—lower it down, you grab hold of the basket, and I reel you back in.”
    “Just remember to ground ourselves first before we touch the cable, right, or zap!” Richard mimicked convulsions induced by electrocution.
    The co-pilot grinned. “I see you’ve done this before.”
    Richard nodded. “More than once, I’m afraid. Somehow, it’s always worked out for me so far.”
    “Let’s hope that luck holds out, because I think at this point that’s our best option.”
    “So where to lower us down?”
    “All business as usual, eh, Dr. Chandahar?” Richard smiled in her direction. “I like it. I say we split up, if it’s okay with our good pilot.”
    The pilot’s brow furrowed. “Split up how? I don’t have all day.” He tapped his fuel gauge.
    Richard was quick to reply, as he could see others about to protest as well. “Two groups of four. One dropped somewhere up on the outside slope, wherever you think you can pull it off. And the other to be dropped along with the inflatable boat down into the lake, near where we spotted that life jacket or whatever it is. That’ll give us a chance to cover the most ground possible. This is considered a search-and-rescue mission, let’s not forget. We should cover as much area as we possibly can.”
    The pilot pointed up and to the