Death Wave

20

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and Rubens fished it from his jacket. The only person who would call him on that phone was his secretary.

“What is it, Ann?”

“You have a one-thirty appointment with ANSA, sir,” she told him. “White House basement.”

Rubens groaned inwardly. He made a serious error letting Lia descend into that crater, and he didn’t want to leave the Art Room. Feng might kill her at any moment.

“I hate to ask it of you, Ann, but is there any chance in hell General James can see me later in the day?”

“I doubt it, sir. He was tight for time as it was, and told me it had ‘fucking well better be about Armageddon or worse,’ his words, sir. I gather he’s going to be flying to London this afternoon.”

“Right.” Rubens thought hard for a moment. There was nothing he could do for Lia if Feng decided to pull a trigger. He also needed to keep his eyes on the bigger situation. He needed the President to sign off on sending Marines into La Palma, and he wasn’t going to get it without ANSA.

He’d already flagged his request to James as Yankee White urgent. You did not use such a high-level code without very good and immediate reason. Worse, if he delayed, he would end up talking to Wehrum, James’ chief aide, and Wehrum was a political enemy who would block Rubens just for the hell of it.

“Mr. Rubens?” Ann Sawyer asked. “Can I confirm?”

“Yes, Ann. Confirm me for one thirty, WHB.” He snapped the phone shut and checked a wall clock. He would have to leave within the next few minutes to be sure he was there on time. “Marie!”

Marie Telach looked up from her console, startled. “Yes, sir?”

“Status on Black CAT Bravo, please.”

“They’re at Sigonella, sir.”

Sigonella was a joint Italian-NATO air base in Sicily, the location of a U.S. naval air station, NASSIG, which served as the hub of U.S. military operations in the Mediterranean. Yesterday, Rubens had ordered a Close Assault Team to fly from Pax River to Sigonella, where it would be closer — about three thousand miles — to the scene of the pirate hijacking in the Gulf of Aden. If something had happened to shut down the SEAL assault on the Yakutsk, he’d wanted a second force ready to go in.

Sigonella was also about two thousand miles from La Palma.

The situation on board the Yakutsk was well in hand. They wouldn’t need CAT Bravo there. “Okay. Tell the CO of CAT Bravo I want his team to deploy to Rota immediately. Have them stay at Readiness Green-One. Second, see what we can do about getting Dean and Akulinin to Rota as well.”

“Right away, sir.”

“Third, I want your best people monitoring Ms. DeFrancesca at all times. I want to know exactly where she is, who she’s with, and what’s happening. Support her every way you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Next, check whatever records we can snag on flights out of Karachi, Tuesday through Thursday. I want to know how they might have gotten ten suitcase nukes to La Palma, and when.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Raise Ms. Howorth.”

“She doesn’t have a comm implant, sir.”

“No, but she has a cell phone, and La Palma has a cell network for European tourists. I want her and Carlylse out of there. They can’t help Lia, and if the Jackal picks them up they become tactical liabilities.”

“Right.”

He thought for a moment more. “Okay. There’s a major observatory on La Palma, isn’t there? Some sort of big scientific facility?”

“Yes, sir. La Roque, up on the north end of the island.”

“Have Ms. Howorth see about getting in touch with the public affairs people there, at least for a start. If the JeM is pretending to be a scientific research expedition of some kind, the Jackal might have talked with someone official there — getting permission to put up those roadblocks, to shut down park trails, that sort of thing. She might also talk with the island’s guardia. I want to know how extensive this thing is — how many people the Jackal has on the island, where they’re located, whether they’ve infiltrated local organizations like the guardia or the observatory. Find out who on the island is responsible for watching those volcanoes, and where they’re based. La Roque? Or someplace else?”

“Yes, sir.”

Was there anything else he could do? There was not, he decided. Everything rested now with ANSA and, ultimately, with the President.

If he could get permission to deploy the CAT to La Palma, he would, but Rota would do for now. Rota was another U.S. naval air station, located across the bay from Cádiz, sixty miles north of the Straits of Gibraltar and just 850 miles from La Palma. That was a two-and-a-half hour flight for a C-130 Hercules.

However, the CAT Bravo team numbered just forty men, too few for a simultaneous assault on all ten drilling sites on La Palma.

For this job, Rubens needed U.S. Marines.

Lia’s knee shot up, catching the guard in the crotch. He doubled over, white teeth bared by his grimace, but the other guard, standing behind her, placed his hands on Lia’s shoulders and slammed her down onto the folding metal chair.

“Let me go, you bastards!” she screamed, still playing the role of outraged tourist. “You have no right—”

“Excuse me, but we have all the right we need,” Feng told her. He patted the pistol, now resting in the leather holster on his hip. “So sit still and behave yourself while we decide what to do with you.”

Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. The guard kept his hands heavy on her shoulders, pinning her to the chair.

They’d taken her to one of the tents near the parked helicopter. It appeared to be used for storage, with a number of large crates stacked up in the back and along both sides of the interior. Feng was examining the items they’d just taken from her — a compass, her BlackBerry, the binoculars in their case, her wallet — all laid out on a folding card table. He pulled her ID card from the wallet and looked at it.

“Cathy Chung, U.S. State Department, GS-14,” he said, reading it. He flipped it over to check the back. “At this point, I think we can assume this is a false ID.”

“You’d better pray it’s false,” she snarled. “When State gets through with you—”

Feng smiled. “They’ll what? Slap me with sanctions?” He dropped card and wallet on the folding card table in front of him, picked up her BlackBerry, and thumbed through several apps. Finding nothing of interest, he opened the binoculars case.

“Very fancy,” he said. He held the device to his eyes and pressed several of the buttons on the small control panel on top. “CIA issue?”

“You can get them in any good electronics store back in the States.”

“Electronic binoculars? I think not. As a senior executive for COSCO, I have a good understanding of what’s available to consumers. Is this how you turn them on?” He stepped to the entrance of the tent and aimed them up at the crater rim. “Yes. Zoom control … and is it also a video recorder?”

He continued playing with the button controls. Lia watched him in silence. He was looking at the crater’s north rim, not the west, where she’d left CJ and Carlylse, and she hadn’t been so amateurish as to have left data in the device’s memory. He turned and came back into the tent. “Quite ingenious. Does it let you transmit your recordings to a remote site? Possibly by satellite?”

“To my laptop with a cable connection, yes,” she lied.

“I assume that’s in your room. We’ll send someone down there later to retrieve it.” He set the binoculars on the table. “So … what is it you expected to learn, coming up here like this?”

“I already told you. I was looking for Herve.”

“Your taste in men is deplorable. I was most upset when you simply left me in Spain. I thought we’d come to an understanding.”

“I got cold feet.”

“That … or your handlers decided to send you after Mr. Chatel. What did you see in him?”

She thought she saw an opportunity. “Look … my name is Cathy Chung, and I am with the U.S. State Department. COSCO is on our watch list, you know … because of the Empress Phoenix affair. My bosses were curious about you, and they did plant me on you in order to find out if COSCO was up to no good.”

“Indeed? And what did you learn?”

“Nothing. After I met you in Spain, they decided you weren’t important. They told me to come home.”

“You live in the Canary Islands?”

“No. I decided to take a bit of vacation as long as I was over here, and Herve offered to let me tag along with him to the Canaries.” She managed a shrug, despite the weight of the guard’s hands still pressing down on her shoulders. “I thought he would be fun, but he disappeared on me as soon as we got to the hotel.”

“Mm.” He turned and raised his voice. “Mr. Chatel! Would you come in here a moment?”

Chatel entered the tent a moment later. He must have been standing just outside the tent’s entrance. “Yes, sir?”

“Ms. Chung here told me she came to these islands with you. Is that true?”

“She was on my flight out of Alicante.” A Gallic shrug. “I assumed you’d sent her here on some errand that was none of my business. She didn’t come with me, however. We didn’t even speak—”

“He’s lying,” Lia said, snarling the words through clenched teeth. If she could get the two of them squabbling with one another, there might be an opening for her, at least a chance to cause confusion enough to help her escape.

“She suggests that the two of you have a relationship. Is that true?”

“Absolutely not.” He cocked his head to one side. “She is pretty … but definitely not my type.”

“She is female, which makes her your type,” Feng said. “But I believe you. You may go.”

Chatel left the tent. Feng leaned over her, pinning her with cold eyes.

“I believe you to be CIA, Ms. Chung … or whatever your real name is.”

“I am not CIA—”

“And we will learn the truth, soon enough. What your real name is. Who you work for. What you know about our … our operation here. Everything.”

“Go to hell! I’m telling you the truth!”

“Perhaps you are. We’ll soon know for certain, however, one way or another. I have a … a specialist flying in. He’ll be here tomorrow, and then we will learn everything about you that we wish to know.”

An interrogation, then, and a professional one if they were bringing in a specialist. With torture? Drugs?

Lia felt very cold, and very much alone.

“Tie her to the chair,” Feng told the guard. Reaching out casually, he lightly stroked her cheek. She snapped her head back, pulling away from the touch. He smiled. “And keep a very close eye on her. I want two guards in here with her at all times, watching her, two more outside the tent, and two more at a distance, watching them. If there is one mouse in the woodpile, there are almost certainly more.”

“Ya m’allmi!” the guard replied.

Lia hoped that CJ and Carlylse had already gotten back to the hidden bikes and were on their way down the side of the mountain.

“We’re with you,” the voice of Marie Telach whispered in her ear. “We know exactly where you are, and we’ll find a way to get you out of there.”

Maybe so — but Marie was thirty-five hundred miles away. Lia wished Charlie was somewhere close by, but he was even farther away than the Art Room, almost five thousand miles if he was still in South Asia.

If she was going to get out of this, she would have to do it on her own.

“So what the hell is so important that you flagged it Yankee White?” General James demanded. “You drag my ass back in here on a Sunday—”

Rubens dropped a file folder on James’ desk. “We have recovered two of the Lebed’s suitcase nukes,” he said. “We know where the other ten are, who has them, and what they’re going to do with them. We need military intervention to secure them. Now.”

James stared into Rubens’ eyes for a moment, then picked up the folder and leafed through the report inside.

“You’re suggesting an MEU?” James gave it the in-service pronunciation, “em-you.” The letters stood for Marine Expeditionary Unit.

“I believe MEU-26 is in the mid-Atlantic, sir. The Iwo Jima strike group. They could be deployed to La Palma with a minimum of delay.”

“FORECON may be the best we can do.” He read for another moment. “You realize this requires presidential approval?”

“That’s why I’m here, sir.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Unknown, sir. However, one piece of intercepted intelligence suggested that the bad guys were going to have everything ready sometime this coming week … and we believe earlier in the week rather than later. If I had to guess, tomorrow or Tuesday.”

“Shit. You’re just full of good news, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they pay me for.”

“And you really think these terrorists are able to generate a tidal wave of this magnitude?”

Rubens shifted uncomfortably. James had immediately highlighted the weakest part of the threat assessment. “There are … pros and cons,” he admitted. “We have a lot of good people looking at the situation. A geology professor over at Georgetown tells me that the idea of La Palma blowing up and causing a hundred-meter tsunami is a crock. It would take just the right explosion, triggering a really big volcanic eruption, and with a lot of rock hitting the ocean all at once, to make a respectable wave. She says that computer modeling carried out in Holland recently suggests that it just wouldn’t happen that way.”

“But?”

Rubens sighed and nodded. “But. Can we take the chance? Do we gamble the entire U.S. East Coast on those Dutch computer simulations? What if they’re wrong?”

“The terrorists obviously think they have something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use ten suitcase nukes just to make a big splash. They’d go after cities.”

“Exactly. We think there may have been a power struggle inside JeM over those nukes. The two weapons we’ve just recovered in the Gulf of Aden were probably the compromise—‘okay, we’ll give you two weapons to use against Israel, if you let us have the other ten for La Palma.’ ”

“I’m still not sure I follow that logic,” James said. “Sure, if the tidal wave thing works, they have us on our knees. But it seems like a hell of a long shot. They’d be better off smuggling those weapons into ten U.S. cities.”

“I think, sir, that they’re looking for something more. Not a political or economic victory. A religious victory.”

“What do you mean?”

Rubens pointed at the folder. “You saw the part about the writer?”

“The guy in New Jersey? Yes.” He leafed back through the report. “Here he is. Jack Pender.”

“Pender was assassinated by JeM or al-Qaeda killers at a hotel in Fort Lee last Wednesday. It took us a long time, though, to figure out why.”

“It says here that Pender and another guy — Carlylse — wrote a book about the La Palma megatsunami. Your source in Spain found out that the bad guys had targeted both of them. Maybe they wanted to shut them up.”

“Except that the book is already on the shelves and hitting the bestseller lists,” Rubens said. “Not only that, the La Palma theory has been circulating for years, ever since the BBC’s Horizon aired the first program about it back in 2000. And the closer we get to the year 2012, and all of the nonsense about the end of the world, the more we’ve been hearing about it. Cable TV programs, Web sites — it’s all over the place, so much so that Pender and Carlylse jumped on the bandwagon as well. So why slam the barn door shut after the horse gallops out? Especially if killing the writers calls even more attention to the book?”

“Point …”

“We’ve had our analysts going over the book, looking for anything that the enemy might not want us to know. And we think we now know what they’re worried about.”

“What?”

“Death Wave: The 2012 Prophecies Fulfilled is about how all sorts of doomsday predictions might come true if La Palma blows up, okay?”

“Yes.”

“The collapse of the U.S. economy, widespread destruction of lots of our cities. Pender and Carlylse tie all of that into the Book of Revelation in the Bible.”

“Like you said. Doomsday.”

Rubens shook his head. “Except that the Book of Revelation doesn’t have anything to do, really, with the 2012 garbage, except for doomsday.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The year 2012 is when the ancient Mayan calendar runs out. Some airy-fairy New Age types think that means a new age of peace and enlightenment will be upon us, kind of like the Age of Aquarius back in the sixties. Some, including sensationalist writers like Pender and Carlylse, think it means the end of the world. It’s the sensationalists who link the end of the Mayan calendar with something completely different — Armageddon and the end of the world as described in the Bible, in Revelation.”

“It seems like a reasonable supposition. The end of the world is the end of the world, whether you’re Christian or Mayan.”

“Or Muslim,” Rubens pointed out. “The Qur’an has verses about Judgment Day, and some of them are closely patterned on the Book of Revelation — trumpets sounding, mountains being carried away, that sort of thing. Some of the Hadiths, the sayings of Mohammad, are even more to the point. There’s one that says that just before the Day of Judgment, there will be three tremendous landslides, unlike any seen before — one in the west, one in the east, one in Arabia.

“Pender and Carlylse go into some of that in the book, including the idea that in the aftermath of the disaster, a lot of people on the Religious Right in America might think that the Book of Revelation is literally coming true. ‘And I saw something like a burning mountain fall into the sea …’ ”

“The Qur’an?”

“No, sir. Book of Revelation, Chapter eight, Verse eight. They suggest that the tsunami might lead to an all-out war between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam, ending in the Battle of Armageddon. What they don’t say is that Muslims might get the same idea.”

“How would killing Pender and Carlylse help the terrorists?”

“We know they were planning another book about a megatsunami and the end of the world. We also know that Pender was about to appear on a TV talk show being filmed in New York City the afternoon he was killed, and that he was going to be talking about end times stuff, how their book might fit in with prophesies about the end of the world.

“The terrorists didn’t care if the murder of those two writers gave them more publicity or not. So far as they were concerned, the more people to read it the better, probably. But what they might want to hide was the possibility that a megatsunami on the U.S. East Coast might be seen by devout Muslims as anything but divine judgment on America. By selectively putting out verses from the Qur’an and some of the Hadiths, they might convince a lot of Muslims that it was time to rise up against Allah’s enemies all over the world. They would have to hide the fact that Islamic terrorists caused the disaster, of course. It would have to look like a literal act of God. I think that what they were trying to hide was, not the book itself, but the possibility that somebody might be crazy enough to create that kind of disaster artificially.”

“Do you have any evidence that Pender and Carlylse were thinking along those lines? Talk about an Islamic plot to blow up La Palma?”

“No, sir. Not yet. Pender is dead, and Carlylse is still on La Palma, with one of our operators. We’re trying to get him safely back here so we can question him about that.” Rubens shrugged. “It’s the best we have to go on right now, though. Our analysts have been running themselves ragged, trying to figure out why JeM would try to trigger an eruption instead of just blasting twelve cities. The only thing that comes close to making sense is the idea that JeM hopes to cause a disaster that they can point to and say, ‘Look! Allah is wrecking America! It’s time to unite and destroy the infidels!’ ”

“I’m not convinced,” James said. “Too many what-ifs.”

“I’m not sure I’m convinced. But can we ignore the possibility?”

“No, we can’t.”

“Anyway, whether we think it’s plausible or not, there’s another consideration.”

“What’s that?”

“La Palma’s population is eighty-six thousand. Setting off ten small nuclear weapons could kill a lot of people, whether there’s a landslide or not.”

“True …”

“And the fact remains, we don’t know what ten nuclear weapons are going to do to an active volcanic region. Those Dutch modelers were confident that they’d discredited the idea, but we just don’t know for sure. I’m told that a powerful earthquake has a lot more energy than a nuclear weapon. But if it served as a trigger …”

“A detonator. A small charge that sets off a larger one.”

“Exactly.”

“I assume you realize that the Canary Islands belong to Spain. The President will insist that we consult with them first.”

“And I suggest that that would be a very bad idea,” Rubens replied. “The bad guys almost certainly got some sort of official authorization to do this, probably under the guise of scientific research. If they find out ahead of time that we’re planning an amphibious operation to secure those drill sites, they might set the weapons off early — or even trigger them when our Marines are getting close. We cannot afford to tip them off ahead of time.”

“There are, unfortunately, military realities … and there are political realities.” He thought a moment. “Do you know Admiral Ericson?”

“SOCOM? Of course.”

“Let’s see what we can do through his office in order to pre-position some of our assets.”

“Ericson’s a good man,” Rubens said. He’d only met Charles Ericson a few times, but he had the reputation of being pragmatic, direct, and no-nonsense, with little patience for bureaucracy and armchair quarterbacking. “What about Foster?”

Jerry C. Foster was the assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and intendependent capabilities, the head of a coordinating board within the National Security Council.

“He’ll have to be brought in. The Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon, too. But a lot of that can be UNODIR.”

Rubens nodded. “UNODIR” was an unofficial military acronym that had crept into common usage within the U.S. Special Forces community over the past couple of decades. It stood for “unless otherwise directed” and had come from the tangled political morass of spec-ops in Vietnam. An officer planning a risky but necessary operation — a recon, say, deep into enemy-held territory — might write an op plan, telling headquarters that it would be carried out unless otherwise directed … unless HQ came back and told him no. The op plan would then be submitted, but too late for headquarters to call off the op, and too late for enemy agents to tip off the bad guys. It had been, in fact, a common means of sidestepping political micromanagement from the rear.

What James was suggesting, though, went far beyond the scope of platoon-level operations in Vietnam.

“It’s our careers on the line, you know,” James added. “If you’ve guessed wrong, they’re going to hang us out to dry.”

“If I’ve guessed wrong, at least we won’t get wet,” Rubens replied. “But if I’ve guessed right and we don’t act, we’d all better be able to tread water for a long time.”

“Sometimes,” General James replied, “I think treading water is what I do for a living.”

Rubens knew exactly what he meant.

He’d considered bringing up Operation White Horse with James — a plan, still in development, to get a small team onto La Palma with the explicit purpose of rescuing Lia DeFrancesca. The thought of just leaving her there, to be interrogated and killed by the terrorists, was simply beyond the pale.

However, he also knew that while such a plan could be subsumed into the larger op easily enough, it would be very hard to get approval for a rescue op if his request for an amphibious invasion of La Palma was down-checked.

And he was not going to leave his people behind, even if it meant circumventing directives from the White House.