Death Wave

PROLOGUE

The man stood on the rugged volcanic spine of the island, staring west into the sunset. At his feet, the ground dropped away sharply, leveling off eighteen hundred meters below in the green rectangles of banana plantations and tiny, tourist-oriented villages before reaching the ocean five kilometers away, where the piercingly blue waters of the Atlantic crashed endlessly against rock and black sand.

At his back, a drilling derrick towered against a cloud-crowded sky, the harsh, steady grinding of the drill head shattering the idyllic peace of the place. A large white sign in Spanish proclaimed the area off-limits to tourists, a special reserve for the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.

He called himself the Jackal.

That nom de guerre wasn’t original, of course. Another man, a Venezuelan revolutionary, had carried that name many years earlier, before he’d been betrayed and sent to prison. Ibrahim Hussain Azhar had declared himself to be the new Jackal—“al-Wawi” in Arabic. He’d first taken that battle name when he’d led the band of Mujahideen that hijacked an Indian Airlines jetliner to Kandahar in 1999. Among the prisoners freed by India in exchange for the hostages had been his brother, the cleric Maulana Masood Azhar.

This new Jackal drew himself up a bit taller as he recalled the thunderous cheers of ten thousand exultant Muslims in Karachi when the freed Maulana Azhar had addressed them.

I have come here because this is my duty to tell you that Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed America and India, he’d proclaimed.

The Azhar brothers had gone on to create the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad, in 2000. This group, based in the rugged mountain fastness of northeastern Pakistan, was dedicated to freeing the embattled state of Kashmir from India — but Ibrahim never forgot that the true, holy cause of militant Islam extended far beyond merely local politics, beyond the geopolitical concerns of borders and governments. India was the enemy of Pakistan, yes — but behind India were the far greater enemies of all of Islam: Israel and the despised United States of America.

When those enemies were swept away by the hand of Allah, the supreme, the powerful, the lesser foes of India and Russia would scatter and run like dogs.

Almighty God would reign supreme over a world at last cleansed of capitalism, of Western decadence, of Hindu polytheism, of Christian blasphemy.

A world under Sharia law, ruled by Allah alone, with Mohammad as His Prophet.