Death Wave

14

Dean was thinking about Lia.

Their service with the Agency didn’t exactly encourage personal relationships, with good reason. Field operators, especially, had to make decisions, hard ones sometimes, that always, always kept the mission first. Ilya had made a major error in judgment by letting himself get involved with the Alekseyevna woman. Dean didn’t begrudge his partner a bit of fun or comfort, but it would have been all too easy for Ilya to have made decisions out of concern for Masha’s safety, compromising the needs of the op.

Charlie Dean and Lia rarely deployed together anymore. No one had said anything about it back at the Puzzle Palace, but they knew how he felt about Lia. Rubens knew, certainly.

Damn, he missed her.

He sat on a hard, narrow seat in the back of a U.S. Navy MH-60S helicopter, flying southwest across a night-shrouded ocean. Unofficially known as the Knighthawk because it was replacing the venerable CH-46D Sea Knight, the aircraft flew off both aircraft carriers and smaller naval vessels in a multi-mission role that included “VERTREP” resupply at sea, search-and rescue, and even combat with its add-on “batwing,” or armed helicopter kit. An hour ago, he and Akulinin had boarded the helo at Masroor Air Base, a Pakistani military airfield on the western side of Karachi. The Knighthawk had flown in from USS Constellation, somewhere in the Gulf of Oman to the south, refueled, and readied for a flight to USS Lake Erie.

Ilya was seated across from him, all but anonymous in his baggy Navy flight suit and helmet. Dean wondered where Lia was right now; the last he’d heard, she was in Berlin tracking down the Chinese connection in this puzzle.

He hoped she was okay.

“So what’s the story?” Akulinin asked, shouting to make himself heard above the pounding roar of the Knighthawk’s rotors. “They bringing in a Black CAT?”

“Don’t know yet,” Dean yelled back. “CAT Bravo is being deployed, but that’s going to take time. We may have to use assets in place.”

Black CAT was the NSA’s highly secret Deep Black Combat Assault Team, a specialized unit drawn from active duty U.S. Navy SEAL and Army Delta personnel. CAT Alpha was based in San Diego; CAT Bravo was at the Marine base at Pax River, Maryland.

Getting a twenty-four-man unit with its equipment from Virginia to the Indian Ocean, however, would take at least twenty-four hours, and possibly more … and that was after they got clearance to go in the first place. Rubens had told Dean earlier that they were still waiting to hear from the White House on a go/no-go decision about the Yakutsk. He was trying to pre-position the team, but even that required high-level authorization, and from the sound of it, everyone in Washington right now was playing a round of cover-your-ass.

There was a SEAL detachment with the Constellation Battle Group, and a forty-man troop — two platoons — was being flown in from Kuwait. If they got the go-ahead, Rubens might well decide to use the CBG — the “assets in place” Dean had mentioned — rather than wait for CAT Bravo to deploy halfway around the world. One way or the other, though, Rubens wanted Dean and Akulinin present when the Yakutsk op went down.

The helicopter lurched, dropping a dozen feet, then gave a heavy jolt. The air was rough this morning, the sky overcast and promising rain. When Dean turned to peer through one of the rectangular windows set in the Knighthawk’s port-side sliding door, he saw gray ocean below, and nothing else.

Another half hour or so, he thought, until they reached the Lake Erie.

Then the real fun would begin.

Lia DeFrancesca looked up as the tall, slender man entered the hotel lobby. She checked the photograph currently being displayed on her BlackBerry but already knew that it was Vincent Carlylse — pale and wispy hair, glasses, jutting nose.

And he wasn’t alone.

“Target acquired,” she murmured, putting away the BlackBerry. The Art Room had sent her the image — from the dust jacket of a recent book — earlier that morning. The woman with him, though, was going to be a complication. “He’s with someone, a younger woman.”

“A prostitute?” Rockman’s voice shot back.

“Now how the hell am I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know. Prostitutes carry big, shiny purses, right? How’s she dressed?”

“She looks like another tourist. Slacks, blouse, sunglasses …”

“They used a prostitute to get to Pender in his hotel room,” Rockman told her. “They might be using the same plot here.”

“Wait one. I’m going to make contact.”

As Carlylse and the woman crossed the lobby, the desk clerk called out. “Ah! Señor Carlylse! Hay un mensaje …”

Lia emerged from behind one of the tropical plants. The clerk saw her and bowed. “This lady,” he said in English, “wished to speak with you.”

“Mr. Carlylse?” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Diane Lau. It is important that I talk to you.”

“I see,” the writer said, looking her up and down. “Are you a reporter?”

“Not … exactly.” She smiled at the woman. “Is this your wife?”

“Why … uh, yes. Yes, she is.” She looked Spanish, with black hair and olive skin. She might have been a tourist from the mainland, or she could have been a native islander.

“This concerns your books,” Lia told him, “and your collaborator, Jack Pender.”

“Jack? I haven’t seen him in over two months. How is the old son of a bitch?”

“Mr. Carlylse, I need to speak with you alone. Please. It’s important.”

He pulled a keycard from his shirt pocket and handed it to the woman. “Why don’t you go on up to our room, my dear? Room 312. I’ll be along in a moment.”

Without saying a word, the woman took the key, gave Lia a dark look, then walked away, her heeled sandals clicking across the marble floor. She was young, no older than her midtwenties, while Carlylse was easily fifty. She might be his wife … but Lia was willing to bet she wasn’t. She glanced around the lobby. There were other people there — a man reading a Spanish newspaper, a young couple watching a television monitor. It was just a little too public here.

“Let’s step outside,” she said.

They stepped onto the outside pool area a moment later. There were several hotel guests here as well, sunbathing on the lounge chairs around the pool, but the wind and the crashing surf would make certain that their conversation remained private. Lia pulled out her wallet and flashed an ID at the man.

“Just what is it you want to tell me, Miss, um, Ms. Lau?” he asked as they walked past the pool toward the safety railing above the cliff. “You know, the State Department ID card you just waved at me had your photograph on it, but the name wasn’t Diane Lau.”

“No, it wasn’t. Congratulations for actually reading an ID when it’s showed to you.” Most people just glanced at a proffered ID without really looking at it. “You asked how Jack Pender is. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He was almost certainly murdered in New Jersey early Wednesday afternoon,” she told him.

“Murdered? Who—”

“We’re working on that, but we have evidence that they may want to kill you as well.”

Carlylse looked thunderstruck. “Who wants us dead? Did we piss someone off? They could always sue us for libel instead …”

“Have you ever written about al-Qaeda, Mr. Carlylse? Or any Islamist terror group?”

“Terrorists?” He shook his head. “This is about terrorists? Jack and I … we write about weird shit, Ms. Lau. UFOs. Atlantis. Not … not about terrorists!”

“Let’s sit down, Mr. Carlylse,” she said, gesturing toward a vacant poolside table beneath a brightly colored umbrella. “I need to ask you some questions.”

“Come in.”

“Mr. Rubens?” Ann Sawyer said, opening the office door. “Miranda Franks.”

“Send her in.”

An older woman walked through the door, carrying a file folder in one hand.

“Miranda. What did you find?” Rubens asked her. Franks was from the NSA’s Research Department.

“We might have found what you were looking for, sir,” she said, handing him the folder. “The book isn’t out yet, but it will be in another week or two. We have a call in to the publisher, to try to get some copies. This gives the overview.”

Rubens took the papers and began reading through them. Then he stopped, went back to the beginning, and began reading more carefully.

“Jesus,” he said quietly. “La Palma?”

“Yes, sir. There’s been a little released on the subject already. There was a Discovery Channel show on it last year. The whole idea is highly speculative. Most reputable scientists say it would never happen.”

“How sure are they?”

Franks shrugged. “There are impassioned voices on both sides, sir. Like global warming.”

“You’ve certainly earned your pay this week, Miranda. Thank you.”

He reached for his phone.

“So why are you on La Palma?” Lia asked Carlylse.

“A research trip,” he told her. “Jack and I—” He broke off. “Damn, I can’t believe he’s dead!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carlylse — and I’m sorry to have sprung it on you like that. But we think the same people might be planning to kill you as well, and it would help us, help us a lot, if you could tell us why.”

“I understand.”

“So why were you here? Research, you said?”

“Yeah. We were planning a new book on the lost continent of Atlantis.”

Lia kept her face impassive. She’d already endured as much of the fabled lost continent as she cared to some months earlier, when she’d been a passenger on board the Atlantis Queen, a luxury cruise ship with an Atlantean theme that had been hijacked by terrorists.

Carlylse continued talking, enthusiasm brightening his face. “You see, we, Jack and I, we’re convinced that the Canary Islands were once the southern rim of a larger, single island, perhaps the size of Spain. The northern edge would have been opposite the Pillars of Hercules, just as Plato’s account claimed.”

“Mr. Carlylse—”

“Vince, my dear, please.”

“Vince, that’s all quite fascinating, I’m sure, but I can’t see terrorists being interested in you and Mr. Pender because of your theories about Atlantis.”

“No. No, I don’t suppose so.” He thought for a moment. “Of course, it could be the other book that brought me to La Palma.”

“And what book is that?”

“Death Wave: The 2012 Prophecies Fulfilled,” he told her. “I have an advance copy in my room, if you’d like to see.”

“More of the 2012 stuff?” she asked. “The end of the world?”

“Some people think so. In the ancient Mayan calendar, their Fourth Sun ends on the Winter Solstice of 2012.”

“What does La Palma have to do with the end of the world?”

“Well, there’s a rift, a geological fault line, running right down the center of the island. Some geologists think that if that fault slips, like in a really big earthquake or volcanic eruption, half of the island of La Palma could fall into the ocean.”

“A landslide?”

“A big landslide. Billions and billions of tons of rock. It could generate a gigantic tidal wave, a megatsunami that could sweep across the Atlantic and destroy everything from Maine to Brazil.”

“That sounds a bit more promising,” Lia told him. “Go on. I’m listening.”

“You’re shitting me,” Lieutenant General Alexander Douglas said. “Half the island is going to fall into the sea? I thought that was supposed to be California.”

“The theory,” Rubens said, “is … let’s say speculative at best. Most serious geologists discount the possibility completely. They point out that during the last major earthquake on the island, in 1947, the fault didn’t slip at all. And there was a volcanic eruption more recently, in 1971. Again, nothing moved. There’s some question as to just how deep the surface fault extends, and whether or not it’s still active.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Douglas said.

“I made some phone calls just now before calling you. The chair of the Geology Department at Georgetown was able to point me in the right direction. He doesn’t think there’s anything to it.”

“But you do?”

Rubens frowned. “Do I think the island is going to fall into the ocean by itself? No, sir, but lots of people do. There was a program on cable a year or two ago about La Palma collapsing and triggering a megatsunami. And Pender and Carlylse wrote a book about it, tying it in with the 2012-end-of-the-world crap. So my question is … what if La Palma is the actual destination of those suitcase nukes?”

Douglas’s eyes widened. “An underground detonation?”

“Yes, sir. Or several of them, in a chain down the central spine of the island.”

“That seems a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“Look at the pieces, sir. One of my officers bugged the meeting between Feng and two oil people, one with a French company providing specialized drilling equipment to Saudi Aramco, the other with Saudi Aramco. They talk about having the boreholes ready next week … and about concerns in Saudi Arabia about losing a major trading partner. The context of the conversation is that Operation Wrath of God will have an enormous psychological impact on the Muslim world.

“Then one of the oil people goes to La Palma and says he has to check on a project there. I spoke with a representative of Saudi Aramco here in Washington. He says there is no drilling taking place in the Canary Islands, not commercial, not exploratory. He says the geology of those islands is completely wrong for oil.”

Douglas nodded slowly. “I think I see where you’re going with this. Terrorists explode several nuclear devices at the bottom of boreholes drilled into this fault line on La Palma. They trigger the landslide everybody is dreading. The damage to the U.S. eastern seaboard could be cataclysmic.”

“It would be like the 2004 megatsunami disaster in Indonesia, but much, much worse. Millions, perhaps tens of millions, would be killed. Estimates suggest that the tidal wave would be in excess of one hundred feet high when it hit the American coast, and traveling at the speed of a jetliner. Entire cities would be wrecked, made uninhabitable. Highways and rail lines washed away. Washington, D.C., destroyed by the surge coming up the Potomac. Wall Street wiped out. Our economy would be devastated. It would take years to recover. Hell, we might get smashed down to the level of a third-world country.

“It’s a force multiplier,” Douglas mused aloud. “If the bad guys have twelve tactical nukes, they could cause tremendous damage to twelve American cities. That would be bad, yes, but a one-kiloton nuke won’t vaporize a city. At most, it’ll wreck downtown, and contaminate the outlying parts with radioactivity. But … my God. If they use them to trigger a tsunami, they could wipe out every city from Portland, Maine, to Miami. Dozens of cities ruined. Tens, no, hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage …”

“It has another advantage for them, sir. Maybe an even more important one.”

“What’s that?”

“Right now, there’s no such thing as global Islam. They’re divided between Sunni and Shi’ite, between radical and moderate and conservative. Different interpretations of the Qur’an. Different cultural beliefs. But just think what might happen if a volcanic island explodes and sends a tidal wave crashing into the American east coast. It would seem like a natural disaster.”

“The wrath of God.”

“Exactly.”

“Scientists who investigated the explosion would be able to tell it was man-made. An underground nuclear detonation. There’d be radiation.”

“Maybe — but it would be days, maybe weeks, before anybody could get there and start carrying out tests. Ten minutes after the tsunami hit, the entire Muslim world would hear that it was an act of God, and that’s what the majority would believe, and keep on believing. Moderates would be shouted down. Scientific findings would be rejected as attempts to explain away something that was obviously a miracle. The vast majority of the world’s Muslims don’t agree with the idea of global jihad, but what if they saw a miracle? Moderate Islamic governments from Morocco to Indonesia could fall to the radical militants. Egypt. Jordan. Secular Islamic countries like Turkey. There might be a call for a general rising, a holy jihad to sweep across the non-Muslim world. The radical fundamentalists would take it as a sign from God that now is the time to unite the Muslim world and destroy the infidels.”

“I find it hard to believe that they’d be able to unite that easily.”

“Maybe not — but I’ll bet you a month’s salary they think it’s a possibility worth the effort. We know that the Jaish-e-Mohammad is the principal enemy group behind this. Al-Wawi — Ibrahim Hussain Azhar — is JeM, and his brother, Maulana Azhar, has been beating the drum for a united, militant fundamentalist Islam for over a decade now.”

“You think the JeM is going to go global? They’ve been pretty much a regional terrorist group until now.”

“Yes, sir, but they also have close ties to both the Taliban and to al-Qaeda. It wouldn’t take much to shift their focus from India and Kashmir to the world stage. They might think we’ll be so busy cleaning up the wreckage of our cities that we won’t be able to interfere if they start settling some scores and ending some boundary disputes. Kashmir. Israel. And there might be some bloody risings in countries with large Muslim populations. England. Germany. France. The Philippines. Even here in the United States.”

“You’re just full of good news this afternoon, Bill.” Douglas sighed. “Obviously you want me to inform the President about this.”

“At the very least, we are going to need a detailed reconnaissance of La Palma. We need to see the extent of the drilling and the exact positions of the wellheads. We have an agent team on the ground over there, but they’ll be limited in how much area they can cover. We need full, high-res satellite imagery, the sooner the better. And we may need to deploy a CAT, or coordinate with the military.”

“An invasion? The Canary Islands are Spanish territory.”

“If we need to take the boreholes out, we’ll need to do it simultaneously, or as close to simultaneous as we can manage. So we don’t warn the others when we take down one. We also need to push harder on recovering those nukes. If we can get our hands on those, the boreholes won’t matter.”

“We’re doing everything we can do. The President is out of the country now. He’ll be back Monday.”

“Then the Vice President—”

“It’s not that easy, and you know that as well as I do,” Douglas said heatedly. “Requests of this nature go through the President’s personal staff at the Oval Office.

They decide what is important, what has to be put in front of him immediately. We can flag this Code One Ultraviolet, but I’d damned well better have good justification to do so. And you have to admit that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons to generate a megatsunami large enough to wipe out the U.S. East Coast is just a tad on the far-fetched side.”

“What about the request for military intervention on the Yakutsk?”

“We’re still waiting to hear.” Douglas made a face. “I spoke with the President’s personal secretary yesterday. He was not … encouraging.”

“Okay. Then what about the Saudi foreign trade minister? Our eavesdropping on Feng and his cronies suggested that al-Khuwaytir knows at least something about Operation Wrath of God. Enough to guess that our economy is going to be tanked.”

“You know, Bill, it’s not exactly politically expedient going up to the representatives of a friendly foreign power and accusing a member of that government of collusion in a plot to flood the East Coast. And he would deny it, of course. It would also tip off the JeM. Let them know that we know.”

“There’s also Feng,” Rubens said. “He may be behind the whole plot to begin with.”

Douglas leaned back in his chair. “What the hell does China have to do with this anyway?”

“It may just be opportunism on their part. But Feng did mention something about China holding an eighth of the entire U.S. foreign debt.”

Douglas snorted. “You think they’re going to foreclose on San Francisco?”

“No, but it would give them a hell of a lot of leverage in the world economy. I could see COSCO picking up some bargains when the stock market collapses.”

“Hell, a thing like this could cause the dollar to collapse. The economy is still damned shaky as it is.”

“Yes, sir. Even if they just bet against us on the Asian markets, the People’s Republic could end up making hundreds of billions and coming out of this as the leader in the global economy. If they have advance warning about what’s going to happen, something everyone thinks is an act of God, yeah, they could clean up.

“We will want to pick Feng up, sir — but not before we have the nukes secured. It’s vital that we find and secure the nukes first. Otherwise, the bad guys go to ground and take their suitcases with them. We might not be as lucky next time around. When those weapons surface again—”

“I know,” Douglas said woodenly.

Rubens passed a hand over his face, trying to think.

“Something you said earlier, Bill … about the militant Islamists using this to unite Islam and launch a global jihad.”

“Yes?”

“Maybe we could defuse things by stealing a march on them — publicize this thing. If the whole world knew before it happened that they were planning this …”

“General, you’re the one who told me how thin this sounds right now,” Rubens said with a wry grin. “Again, the terrorists would disappear, and take their toys with them.”

Douglas merely rubbed his face.

“We must recover those weapons,” Ruben said flatly, “even if we have to violate Russian territoriality to do it.”

Douglas cleared his throat, then said, “The President’s secretary brought up another option.”

“What’s that?”

“We could hand the responsibility off to the Russians.”

“We may have to bring them in at some point,” Rubens said, “but—”

“Exactly. ‘But.’ They’re not going to search one of their own ships without damned good reason. Especially in light of the Tajikistan incident.”

Rubens nodded. The shoot-down of a Russian helicopter over Afghanistan territory was publicly being played as an unfortunate accident, a tragic helicopter crash on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Congressman Mullins’ unthinking revelations about a U.S. intelligence operation in Tajikistan, however, had sharply chilled relations between Washington and Moscow. The Russian ambassador had already delivered a crisply worded protest to the White House about “wild west shoot-outs” in the streets of Dushanbe, this despite the fact that Tajikistan no longer was a part of Russian territory.

“Moscow denies that there are any missing tactical nukes,” Rubens said. “They have their heads planted firmly up their asses and aren’t going to extract them now.”

Douglas grunted. “The Constellation CBG is the closest naval force to the area right now, he said. They’re in the best position to board and search the Yakutsk.”

“Yes, sir.

If we can get the approval to go in.”

“Damn it, get me something harder to go on with this tidal wave thing. I can’t go to the President with a wild tale from a mass-market paperback.”

“I’ve already arranged for the Deep Black team on La Palma to do some checking, sir,” Rubens told him. “I’ve also initiated a requisition with the NRO for detailed satellite reconnaissance of La Palma.” He spread his hands. “It’s all we have going for us at the moment.”

“Then it’s going to have to do. You and your people have my authorization to do what you need to do … but get me that proof.”