Death Wave

16

The man walked up to the airport ticket counter, wheeling a single suitcase. Handing his ticket to the woman behind the computer monitor, he gave her a friendly smile.

“Is it on time?” he asked in Spanish. “The flight out to Madrid?”

She looked up at the big scheduling board overhead. “

Sí, señor. Leaving Gate One at eleven fifty.” She made an entry at her keyboard, then asked, “One bag?”

“Just one.” He folded up the handle and placed it on the scale platform.

“And did you pack this bag yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Did any person unknown to you give you anything to pack?”

“No.”

“Has your bag been in your possession at all times since arriving at the airport?”

“Yes.”

The woman ran through the usual list of security questions, and the man answered each one. At the end, the woman attached a luggage tag, then hauled the suitcase off the scale and slung it onto the conveyor behind her.

The man watched the bag disappear through a plastic curtain. Security here in La Palma, he knew, was light, the questioning and the checks perfunctory at best. The only flights were island hoppers and a few larger commuter flights to and from the mainland, not the sort of traffic that would interest a politically motivated group like, just for instance, the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The man had been careful not to fit the typical terrorist profile. He was clean-shaven, wore glasses, and was well dressed, and his papers gave him a Spanish identity. He spoke fluent Spanish, and he’d been rehearsed on current events in Spain — politics and sports especially, just in case someone engaged him in casual conversation.

He looked around the terminal. “Not many people flying today.”

“Oh, this is the slow season, Señor Mendoza,” she told him with a smile. “Not many tourists yet.”

“Tell me … has a colleague of mine checked in yet? A Mr. Carlylse?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m really not supposed to discuss the affairs of other passengers.”

He gave her his brightest smile. “Of course. But surely you can tell me if he’s on the passenger list. I know he checked out of his hotel room last night. I was supposed to meet him here before the flight.”

“I’m so sorry, sir. Company regulations—”

“Yes, yes. Security. Well … can you tell me, is this the only flight out of La Palma today?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“Then he must be on it! Thank you. I’ll find him on the plane.”

“Gate One, sir. Right down there.”

“I see it. Thank you.”

He walked off toward the gate but turned aside to enter the airport’s small boutique area first.

He had no intention of going through the security checkpoint, or of boarding that plane.

“It’s utter and complete nonsense,” Dr. Walden said. “It’s not even good fiction.”

Dr. Kathryn Walden was a professor of geology at Georgetown University. Brilliant as well as drop-dead gorgeous, she was one of a number of science and academic professionals in a Washington-area network created to provide specialist information to the NSA when necessary. At the moment, she was on the other end of a secure-line video hookup on Rubens’ computer.

“What is utter and complete nonsense?” Rubens asked. “The tidal wave hitting the East Coast? Or the possibility that half of La Palma is going to shift and fall into the sea in the first place?”

“Both!” Walden hesitated, then went on. “Okay … if that much rock hit the ocean, and if it hit with a high enough speed, and if it hit all at once, yes, it could create a megatsunami. Maybe. Conditions would have to be just right. But geologists aren’t sure that the fracture line at the top of the Cumbre Vieja goes very deep. Most think it’s strictly superficial. The important thing is, despite a lot of panicky hype to the contrary, there is absolutely no evidence that any of those rocks have slipped at all since we started watching them.”

“But if a landslide did happen, it could cause a tidal wave?”

“That’s a ridiculously big if — but yeah. It might.”

“Three hundred feet high? Traveling ten miles inland?”

“No. Absolutely not.” She waved a copy of the book in front of her computer video pickup. “Even if the splash started off as high as these guys claim — and that’s saying a lot, believe me — it would be down to twenty meters or less by the time it crossed the Atlantic. It would get funneled by estuaries and river mouths, so there would be a flood surge up rivers like the Hudson, the Potomac, and the York. Those surges might, might reach twenty to fifty meters. But what these guys claim would happen, with killer waves scouring everything as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains … that’s nonsense.”

“Twenty to fifty meters is still bad,” Rubens said. “A wave over a hundred fifty feet high and lasting maybe ten or fifteen minutes? That would still kill millions of people if we couldn’t evacuate.”

“Bill … since when did you start going in for off-the-wall pseudo-science? These guys write about UFO abductions, for chrissakes. They’re kooks!”

“Oh, I skimmed the book, Katie. I agree with you.”

“This whole La Palma thing started a few years ago when the BBC aired a so-called documentary about it, claiming an earthquake or a volcanic eruption was going to throw some hundreds of cubic kilometers of rock into the ocean and trigger a megatsunami. They claimed a hundred million people on the East Coast would be killed.”

“Yes.”

“After that broadcast, thousands of Americans e-mailed the BBC, worried that they were all going to die and wondering if they needed to move. Thousands of tourists canceled their holiday flights to La Palma. Lots of rich Europeans with vacation homes on La Palma sold their property and left the island. JMC stopped their direct charter flights to the island from Britain, as did the Swiss. German airlines reduced their charter flights by half. If you ask me, La Palma could sue the BBC for damages. The BBC has since issued a partial retraction — what amounts to an apology — saying the threat was overhyped.”

“So … you’re saying there’s no danger at all?”

“Not the way that program presented it.”

“If none of it is true, why did the BBC air it?”

“Because disasters sell, Bill. Parts of the BBC program were recycled later by an American cable channel, with the same effect.” She waved the book in front of the pickup. “These guys are just taking the pseudo-science scare-stories from that program and recycling it. It’s damned irresponsible, coming up with scary fiction and passing it off as science to people who don’t know any better. Same with all the tripe written about 2012.” She scowled out of the monitor. “Please tell me the government is not taking this seriously!”

“There’s been a … threat. We’re still evaluating it. That’s why I called you.”

“The government’s as bad as the damned insurance companies. It’s like the powers that be are trying to keep the public in a constant state of terror.”

Rubens smiled. “Now you’re getting into conspiracy theories.”

She chuckled, a grim sound. “The real conspiracy is that the sponsor for that BBC Horizon program was a hazard research company — which in turn is owned by a major insurance company. The so-called research company provided the writers with a lot of their data — much of it manufactured. People get scared out of their wits watching this drivel — and they go out and buy more insurance.”

“I hope I never get as cynical as you, Katie.”

“It’s not cynicism, Bill. It’s the way the modern world works. Sometimes I think we should scour everything clean with a hundred-meter tidal wave and start over!”

Rubens hesitated, then continued. “You’re saying the disaster scenario can’t unfold the way it was presented on TV, but that was assuming a volcano or an earthquake was the culprit.”

“It would have to be something of that nature to shift that much rock.”

“I’m going to ask you another question, Katie. I remind you that this conversation is classified.”

“I’ve got clearance, Bill.”

“I know you do. We wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. What about a nuclear explosion?”

That startled her. “What?”

“Specifically, several nuclear explosions, probably set off at the bottoms of a number of boreholes along the length of the Cumbre Vieja.”

“That … would depend on the size, placement, and number of the explosions.”

“As many as twelve devices, each releasing approximately one kiloton of energy. Placement … we’re not sure, but likely at the bottom of some deep oil wells drilled along the Cumbre Vieja, down the center of La Palma.”

Walden was quiet for a long moment, her face on the monitor thoughtful. “I don’t think I can answer that one for you, Bill.”

“Okay …”

“If we just compare energy released with energy released … no. Absolutely not. The nukes wouldn’t even come close.”

“An earthquake is more powerful?”

“An earthquake measuring four point oh on the Richter scale releases about one kiloton of energy. We classify a Richter four to four point nine quake as ‘light.’ It rattles the dishes but doesn’t cause any significant damage. Twelve kilotons … that would still be less than a five. The earthquake off Sumatra in 2004, the one that caused the big tidal wave that killed two hundred and twenty thousand people around the Indian Ocean, that one was around nine point two, maybe nine point three on the Richter scale, and that translates as a hundred and fourteen gigatons — a hundred and fourteen billion tons of TNT.”

“My God.”

“Exactly. That’s the equivalent of over one hundred thousand onemegaton thermonuclear bombs going off together, and that’s way, way more than all of the nuclear weapons in all of the world’s arsenals put together.” She gave him a wan smile. “We humans have a long way to go before we can compete with Mother Nature in the raw energy department.”

“But you’re sounding unsure of yourself.”

“Because I am. Most of the energy in an earthquake is wasted … unfocused. And when it comes to tidal waves, there are so many variables — bottom depth, the shape of the coastline, things like that. We’re also talking about two different ways of generating a tidal wave — by direct transmission of the earthquake energy into the ocean, or by knocking a mountain into the sea and causing a big splash.

“What you’re talking about … a precise application of energy …” She shrugged. “It probably all comes down to whether or not there really is a deep fault line beneath the Cumbre Vieja.”

“And we don’t know if there is one.”

“Right. There is volcanic activity on La Palma, though the last few eruptions were kind of nonevents. And there have been earthquakes, so there could be a fault of some sort under that ridge, something more than the scratch we see on the surface. But we just don’t know enough about the subsurface architecture to make a good guess at how large or how deep it might be. That BBC Horizon program just went off and declared that the fault was there and that it was quite deep — on the order of twenty or thirty kilometers down, if I remember right — but they were making the numbers up.”

“To sell insurance.”

“Right. But if people are deliberately planting nuclear charges underground right along that earthquake zone? I have to say … I just don’t know, Bill. Nobody does.”

“Might the nukes trigger a big earthquake? I guess what I’m asking is, could twelve kilotons jump-start a hundred gigatons? Or would they have to try for making a really big splash?”

“The jump-start, I just don’t know. I’d have to say probably not. As for a big splash? A few years back, a Dutch research group tested the hypothesis that if half of the Cumbre Vieja fell into the Atlantic, it would generate a megatsunami. They used pretty advanced computer modeling. What they came up with was … yes, it could generate a big wave if everything worked right, but the wave that hit the East Coast wouldn’t be a hundred meters high, like it says in this book. Twenty to fifty meters at most. And it would have to be very precise — like a diamond cutter striking a diamond’s fracture plane exactly right.” She looked thoughtful. “One theory — and it’s only a theory — is that there’s a wall, a kind of curtain of basalt beneath the Cumbre Vieja, running north to south beneath the ridge. The idea is that if there is a fault, lava might have welled up through the crack and solidified into a very hard wall.”

“Okay.”

“I can imagine … well, if someone set off a nuclear explosion on the west side of that wall, a lot of the blast would be reflected toward the west.”

“What the military calls a force multiplier.”

“Exactly. That might push the whole west side of that ridge up, out, and into the Atlantic very quickly. But that’s a worst-case scenario, and it depends on that basalt wall being there. We don’t know for sure that it is.”

“But it’s possible?”

She nodded. “It’s possible. There are lots of basaltic extrusions along the top of that ridge — odd-looking rock formations, towers, exposed cliffs, things like that, things that suggest a much larger mass of basalt underground.”

“I see. How could we find out if that wall exists?”

“Geological surveys. Ground-penetrating radar, maybe. I happen to know there are a couple of tunnels running through the Cumbre Vieja. I don’t think the tunnel engineers encountered anything like a solid wall of basalt. Of course, the tunnels are up at the north end of the ridge. The basalt wall, if it’s there, would be farther south, probably.”

“Well, thank you, Katie. I appreciate your time.”

“Not a problem. But … Bill?”

“Yes?”

“When the deputy director of the NSA calls me up and asks about one-kiloton nukes causing landslides and tidal waves on the East Coast … I have to ask. Is it time for me to sell my house and move to Denver?”

“I can’t discuss the details, Katie. I’m sorry. As I said, there is a threat, yes. We don’t know how serious a threat it is, but we’re evaluating it now. Should you move to Denver?” He smiled. “Probably not. You might want to buy some extra flood insurance, though.”

“Georgetown is at an elevation of around forty meters above sea level, Bill.”

“Perfect. You may find yourself owning high-priced beachfront property. Thanks again, Katie. I’ll be in touch.”

When Lia saw him walking up the beach toward her, she was furious. CJ had called from the airport hours before, saying she hadn’t seen him at the airport, that a surreptitious check of the airport’s passenger lists had not turned up his name. Clearly, Vince Carlylse had not gotten on the flight for Madrid as planned, but where he’d gone on the tiny island instead had been a complete mystery.

After walking a couple of miles north along the beach, Lia had turned around and was well on her way back toward the hotel when she’d seen his lanky frame coming toward her across the black sand. He’d stood out. Only a few other people were scattered along the beach, bright splotches of swimsuit colors lying on towels or wading at the edge of the incoming surf. Tourism on the island was light; the beach at Alicante had been packed by comparison.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Lia demanded. She looked at her watch. “You were supposed to be on that commuter flight out of here and back to the mainland over two hours ago!”

“I decided,” Carlylse replied with an easy grin, “that I didn’t want to go.”

“What’s the matter with you? Is this some sort of death wish thing?”

“Frankly, Lia, I’m not sure I believe all that stuff. I write fiction for a living, you know. I don’t know what your game is … but I’m having a little trouble believing in this cloak and dagger stuff, or terrorists out to get me because of the books I write.”

She sighed. “So would you believe me if I told you little gray aliens from Atlantis were out to get you instead?”

“That I might believe!”

Lia was angry, but she found the anger evaporating fairly quickly. Carlylse, when you thought about it, had no reason to trust her, or to believe anything that she’d told him, in fact.

“You are a world-class idiot,” she told him. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“No, actually. I find your candor refreshing.”

“Are you still in the same room at the Sol? The one we switched you to last night?”

The evening before, Lia had asked the Art Room to intercede for her, having them contact the front desk and see if there had been a complaint about a woman with a gun. There hadn’t been, thank God. A Spanish-speaking handler from the Art Room pretending to be Vince Carlylse had gotten a different room for him at the hotel and the solemn promise that no one be told where he now was staying. It was one way to stay ahead of any potential assassins until she could get him on a plane bound for the United States.

“Still there. It does have a better view than the other one.”

“Fuck the view! We need to get you someplace safe.”

“Okay, you’re trying to track down these assassins of yours, right? What better way to get them into the open than to use me as bait?”

Eyebrows raised, Lia didn’t answer that. Part of the discussion with the Art Room the day before had revolved around exactly that possibility — using Carlylse to flush out al-Wawi. She’d argued that it would be better to get him off the island and back to the United States, suggesting that he would be useful in figuring out just what it was about his tidal wave book that had turned him into a target.

When Lia didn’t reply, Carlylse went on, changing the subject. “At least Carmen doesn’t appear to have caused a problem with the front desk,” Carlylse told her. He sounded almost disappointed. “God knows what she thinks of me now, though.”

“You can always tell her I was your crazy ex-wife,” Lia told him.

He laughed. “I might just do that.”

After getting him a new, assassin-proof room last night, the Art Room had booked him on a local flight out of La Palma back to Madrid. From there, he was supposed to catch a flight to Dulles International. A couple of U.S. Marshals were to have met him in Spain to provide security for the rest of the trip back to the States.

Instead, he was still here.

Damn the man, and damn his arrogance!

“I should have ridden to the airport with you this morning,” she told him, “but I assumed you were an adult, that you could follow some simple directions! I didn’t think you needed a babysitter!”

“Look, Lia,” he said. She’d told him her real name the night before, a concession to his sharp curiosity. “You might as well know that I don’t respond well to the heavy hand of authority. Trying to make me do one thing is a great way to make me do something else.”

“Look, do you even understand that we’re trying to help you? That you’re in danger if you stay here?”

“What are you doing down here with those binoculars? Looking for me?”

“Doing some scouting,” she told him.

Unable to do anything about finding Carlylse, Lia had come down to the beach from the hotel earlier that afternoon with a pair of binoculars and had walked slowly north for over an hour, taking time now and again to scan the looming ridge of the Cumbre Viejo looking for signs of activity on the crest. She’d already decided that she was going to need to rent a car and drive up there herself.

“Scouting what? I know the island pretty well. Maybe you could use a friendly native guide.”

“Not if you can’t follow simple instructions.”

“I saw you looking at the mountains up there, though. With your binoculars. What are you looking for?”

“I’ve heard there are trails and bike paths up there,” Lia said. Stopping, she raised the binoculars to her eyes again, focusing on the top of the ridge. The looming slope was thickly forested with what looked like pine trees, but the highest peaks were bare, raw, and volcanic. Directly east of Puerto Naos was Pico Berigoyo, with upthrust slabs of black basaltic rock at the crest some four and a half miles inland and six thousand feet above the beach.

“There are,” Carlylse said. “There’s something like a thousand miles of trails back there. The one I really wanted to see was La Ruta de los Volcanes. It runs along the whole length of the Cumbre Vieja, past all of those volcanic craters. But it’s been closed since I got here.”

“Closed? Why?”

He shrugged. “Some sort of test drilling operation. The signs say the area is closed to tourists, by order of the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Isn’t it? La Palma is pretty much self-sufficient — it doesn’t depend on tourism to keep going — but those trail closures must be putting a hell of a bite on their tourist income.”

She turned away from him. “Jeff? Did you hear?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You might want to check out this scientific institute. Is it here on the island? Or back on the mainland?”

“We’re on it, Lia.”

“Are your, um, friends always listening in?” Carlylse asked her.

“Yup. When I’m on duty, anyway.”

“So when are you off duty? I’d kind of like to get to know you better. Maybe over dinner?”

“Mr. Carlylse, are you making a pass at me?”

“Of course!”

“My only interest in you is getting you back to the States in one piece. Some of those friends you mention want to talk to you about your book — the one about megatsunamis.”

“I won’t be able to tell them much that isn’t already in the book.”

“They’d be interested in your sources, your research. Where you got your information about La Palma and giant tidal waves, that sort of thing.”

He chuckled. “Most of that came from a BBC television program a few years ago. Horizon, I think the show was called. And there was a disaster program on American cable later about megatsunamis that went into La Palma a bit.”

“They’d still like to interview you.”

“Maybe you could interview me? Then I wouldn’t have to go back to America.”

“There are people here who want to kill you, Mr. Carlylse. Doesn’t that worry you at all?”

“Not really. So far, the most dangerous person I’ve seen is you.”

She ignored the jibe, raising the binoculars once again. “You’ve been up there, then?”

“Sure was. Wednesday morning. I rented a car in Puerto Naos, drove up to the village of Fatima, then rented a bike and tried to get up there.” He pointed to the left of Pico Berigoyo, indicating another peak. “That’s Montaña Rejada.”

She looked him up and down. “You’re in better shape than you look.”

“Thank you so much. Anyway, I got to a point just below the top of the ridge when the guards stopped me. They had the path blocked off with yellow tape, and there was that geological institute sign.”

“Guards? How many?”

“Two.”

“What kind of guards? Spanish Army?”

“I don’t think so. Might have been a private security group. They were wearing mostly civilian clothing, but the vests and hats looked military. Canteens. Boots. Maybe military surplus. Otherwise, they were wearing sports shirts and blue jeans, that sort of thing. But they had guns.”

“What kind of guns?”

“AK-47s.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’ve written about military stuff. A little, anyway. Yeah, I’m sure. They were either AK-47s or AK-74s. I’m not sure of the difference. But Russian assault rifles, anyway. They told me I was trespassing and that I should go back down the mountain unless I wanted to be arrested.”

“So you did?”

“Not immediately. I rode a little ways back down the hill into a stand of pines, parked my bike, and then looked around a bit on foot. I was curious about those guys.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw a helicopter land.”

“What? Where?”

He pointed again. “It’s kind of tough to see from here, but Rejada Mountain has three volcanic craters, side by side, in a kind of V formation. I was on a bike path just below the rim of the middle crater, maybe a hundred feet from the crest. I saw a helicopter fly up over the top of the ridge from the east side of the island, then disappear down inside that crater.”

“What kind of helicopter?”

A shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t see any markings. It was pretty big, though, like a transport. I figured they must be using choppers to get all their gear up there.”

“Did you see any of the drilling rigs or equipment?”

He shook his head. “No. I heard some of the guards up on the slope above me, so I hurried on back to where I’d stashed my bike.”

“I think I’d like a closer look.”

“I could take you up there.”

She gave him an appraising look. “Maybe. It would not be a date. You understand that?”

“Absolutely!” He raised his hand. “Scout’s honor!”

“We’ll need to check the airline schedules first — and I want to see what this geological research institute is, where it’s headquartered. But … maybe. If you’re still here tomorrow morning.”

“It’s a date!” He grinned, then saw her expression. “Um, it’s a deal, I mean,” he amended.

“That’s better. Let’s get back to the hotel.”

“Lia?” a familiar voice said over her implant. “This is Bill Rubens.”

She stopped. “Yes? What do you have?”

Carlylse looked at her curiously but didn’t say anything.

“CJ just called us. There’s … a complication.”

“What complication?”

“Flight Twelve, the commuter flight to Madrid. It went down about half an hour ago off the coast of Morocco.”

“My God!”

“What is it, Lia?” Carlylse asked.

She waved him to silence. “A bomb?”

“No details yet. Officially, the flight is missing. Miss Howorth is in the La Palma Airport tower, however, and tells us the plane went out of radio contact with Agadir Traffic Control at fourteen hundred hours, your time. Until we hear more, we must assume that hostiles have attempted to take out Mr. Carlylse.”

“Understood, sir.” She grabbed Carlylse’s elbow, pulling him forward.

“What?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Shut up,” she told him, “and move!”