Death Wave

22

Stand up!” The cargo master barked the order over the intercom from his station at the front of the cargo bay. “Gear check!” Charlie Dean turned and faced Ilya Akulunin, tugging at various snaps, latches, and D-rings to make sure all was secure, having him turn so he could check his back, and then standing with arms slightly out from his body while Akulinin did the same check-over for him.

“Ready for this, Sharkie?” he yelled.

“Just like in training,” Akulinin yelled back.

No, Dean thought.

It never goes the way it does in training …

The rear ramp of the Hercules ground slowly open, and Dean saw dazzling sun-glare off impossibly white clouds below. In some ways, it was good making a HALO jump in daylight; night operations were always a lot riskier. On the other hand, they would be coming down near the bad guys’ positions in broad daylight.

The rushed timetable, he knew, had been cobbled together because no one knew when the Tangos might have their bombs planted and armed, or when they were planning on detonating them. The smart money said that the ten nuclear devices arrived at Mogador Airport Friday or Saturday, and that the terrorists started flying them out to La Palma as soon as possible to avoid complications either from the Moroccan authorities or from American or Spanish agents.

If the bombs were already on La Palma, they might already be planted. Marine Task Force Green Amber might be about to fly into a nuclear holocaust.

Colonel Kemper, in charge of the FORECON elements deployed for Green Amber, had argued hard for a night drop, but he’d been overruled. It was more important that the two-man Marine elements be down and in place absolutely quickly as possible than that they come in under the cover of darkness.

Besides, the chances that they would be seen were not as large as might be imagined, Dean knew. This was a HALO jump — the acronym standing for “high altitude, low opening.” The C-130 was currently cruising southeast at twenty-six thousand feet; the jumpers would exit the aircraft and free-fall all the way down to six thousand feet before opening their chutes. Their target drop zones along the eastern flanks of the Cumbre Vieja were all at around three thousand feet above sea level. Once they popped their chutes, they actually would be flying in along the mountainside at an altitude well below the very top of the ridge, which averaged around fifty-nine hundred feet and in places rose as high as sixty-two hundred. The op planners thought that the Tango sentries patrolling the rims of the volcanic craters wouldn’t see individual parachutists in free fall — dust motes against the sky. Even after their Ram Air chutes opened, the Marines might be too far away for the guards to spot them; the actual drop zones were almost a mile from the top of the ridge.

The weather reports were promising. A large mass of cumulus clouds had been moving in with the northeastern trades all morning, their base at around six thousand feet. The jumpers would actually have the clouds as cover for the gliding part of their descent.

While nothing was ever certain in a military operation, especially one with as many variables as this one, the chances were acceptable that the Marines would be able to get to their positions without being seen.

The insertion was the easy part. Ten separate terrorist sites, ten nuclear weapons. The approach, recon, and takedown would have to work perfectly ten times in a row, or people, quite likely a lot of people, were going to die.

Dean felt the deck of the aircraft tilt beneath his feet. The Hercules was turning now, coming around to a northerly heading. The Marine Recon jumpers would exit the aircraft two at a time, spaced out along a line five and a half miles long, matching the south-to-north line of volcanos up the center of La Palma. Dean and Akulinin would go with the first two Marines, vectoring toward San Martin, the southern most volcanic crater.

“First jumpers! Stand ready!”

The rear ramp was fully down now, with sunlight blasting across the slanted exit track. Dean and Akulinin stood just behind the first jumpers, Sergeant Dulaney and Gunnery Sergeant Rodriguez, waiting … waiting …

A red light above the gaping opening flashed to green, and the jumpmaster yelled, “First jumpers … go!”

Dulaney and Rodriguez launched themselves forward, running down the ramp and flinging themselves into the sunlight. Dean and Akulinin were right behind them, hitting the ramp, then diving headfirst into sun-brilliant emptiness.

They fell, wind hammering at their torsos, the blast fluttering loose folds of Gore-Tex tight around their outstretched arms and legs. The sheer adrenaline rush of free fall hit Dean as it always did, a sharp, pounding exhilaration that caught at his breath and chest.

The four jumpers drifted slowly apart, turning to orient themselves. La Palma was off to the right and below, spread out against the blue ocean like an immense mottled arrowhead pointed south. Clouds massed against the north and northeastern coastline, blindingly bright in the midday sunlight. Dean could easily make out the island’s principal feartures — the vast circular formation of mountains called Taburiente in the north, the straight thrust of the Cumbre Vieja toward the island’s southern point. He could see the line of craters down the central ridge, but it took him a moment or two to positively identify his target — San Martin — for there were several other craters around it. Scattered cumulus clouds drifted slowly above their own shadows down the eastern side of the ridge. He made out the clear separation in color and texture between the forested lower slopes of the ridge and the barren, volcanic cinder and rock higher up. He spotted the area designated as his drop zone — among the trees, but in an area more open, less heavily forested than others. The idea was to land somewhere sheltered by the woods but not so heavily overgrown that he ended up stuck in a tree.

He was very glad that they weren’t doing this at night.

Dean checked the altimeter, which was mounted on his reserve chute in front of him. He was now falling past twenty thousand feet. He’d reached terminal velocity — about 124 miles per hour, or just under eleven thousand feet per minute. That gave him a bit over a minute of free fall; his AAD, or automatic activation device, would open his chute at eight thousand feet above sea level, with his drop zone target at five thousand. One of the dangers of HALO jumps lay in the possibility that a malfunction in the parachutist’s breathing gear might cause him to pass out. The AAD made sure his chute would open whether he was conscious or not.

The other jumpers in his team had spread out, with plenty of room between them. They were falling past ten thousand feet now; the ones- and tens-place numerals on his altimeter’s digital readout flickered past almost too fast to read. More alarming was the loom of the mountains below and ahead. With arms and legs extended and his back sharply arched, he’d picked up some forward momentum and literally flown toward the island. The city of Santa Cruz was spread along the coast to his left, just north of the single sharp, straight slash of the island’s airport runway.

At six thousand feet, his drogue deployed, pulling his Ram Air chute from the pack gently enough to avoid damaging it during the deployment. A moment later, the Ram Air caught hold, the sudden deceleration a sharp jerk against Dean’s harness that made it feel as though he’d suddenly grown very heavy, then started rising.

He took a quick look up to make sure the canopy had deployed properly — no rips or tears, no “Mae West” twists in the fabric. Everything was working as it should. The canopy itself was neither night-ops black nor traditional white, and it certainly had none of the bright colors popular in sports-jumping. It was a blend of neutral grays in random computer-generated patterns that blended well with sky or with distant vegetation. He was still a good six miles from the crest of Cumbre Vieja, coming in toward the beach at Punta El Lajio. “Chute open and functioning,” he reported.

“Copy, Charlie,” Marie Telach replied.

It was good to know someone was listening over his shoulder.

He could see the El Lajio lighthouse below, a stark, modernistic white tower with a rounded cap that probably had been intended as futuristic architecture but looked like a tall, skinny grain silo … or an enormous sex toy. That lighthouse had been his first waypoint marker for his drop zone approach.

“Going feet dry,” he said. “Fifty-five hundred feet and directly above the giant dildo. I have the DZ in sight.”

A fifteen-mile-per-hour trade wind out of the northeast had him on course. Ideally, a ground team should have been present to set out signal panels to mark the drop zone, but there hadn’t been time to organize that. Rubens had told him that two more NSA officers were on their way to La Palma — one to join CJ, the other to take charge of the writer, Carlylse — but they didn’t have any of the equipment necessary for marking one DZ, much less ten. Instead, each parachute team had memorized the rugged silhouette of the Cumbre Vieja, the position of each volcanic caldera, and the general appearance of the designated drop zones on the ridge’s eastern slope.

As he got closer, he realized that this last wasn’t quite as easy as he’d thought at first. There were a lot of clouds floating above the east side of the island, many of them flowing up against the ridge crest itself. North, the entire northern curve of La Palma appeared to be engulfed in a sea of dazzling white, a solid cloud deck pressing against and spilling into the hollow of the big Taburiente caldera.

The view was spectacular, the interplay of clouds and sea and mountain utterly mesmerizing. He was flying southeast, now, above a tiny village — it should be Tigalate — and that road glimpsed through the trees would be LP-132. That was waypoint two, at an altitude of two thousand feet. Beyond, the ground began rising very sharply. Directly west now was Mount Deseada, its crest at over sixty-one hundred feet, looming above him. The top was lost in a chain of clouds running down from the north, but he could tell he was already below the peak.

His altimeter read five thousand feet.

Much more quickly than he’d expected, the ground began rising up to meet him. Trees skimmed past beneath his jump boots in a blur. Tugging on his risers, he brought the leading edges of his Ram Air double canopy up, stalling to kill some of his forward velocity. He passed over another village, a cluster of white and brick-pink roofs seemingly imbedded in the steep hillside. That was waypoint three, the town of Monte de Luna, at a mean altitude of twenty-four hundred feet above sea level. He yanked at his right-hand risers, pulling into a sharp right turn, swinging from a southwesterly heading to directly west.

He saw patches of heavy forest interspersed with more open ground. He aimed for one of the thinner regions, which appeared to be riding on a bare-topped shoulder extending east from the mountain.

Treetops skimmed beneath his boots, the ground rising swiftly. He unhooked his drop bag from his hip and let its nylon tether pay out through gloved fingers until it was dangling twenty feet below. His gliding descent carried him over open ground … the drop bag struck, and he tugged again on his risers, killing more speed and settling toward the slope.

He touched down at a quick walk, the parachute dumping air and spilling into an unruly mass in front of him. He kept walking, bundling the fabric in with his arms. Fifty feet ahead and to his right, another parachutist touched down. He couldn’t tell whether it was Ilya or one of the Marines.

From the drop bag he extracted electronic binoculars, pouches holding ammunition for his rifle, Kevlar vest, combat harness, water and rations, backpack, and a last-minute piece of special gear shipped out the day before from Fort Meade. The jump harness, reserve chute, breathing equipment, helmet, and attachments went into the bag.

The other parachutist was Gunny Rodriguez, but both Dulaney and Akulinin joined them a few minutes later as they trudged up the slope from below. To the east, the falling ground offered a spectacular view of blue ocean, scattered clouds, and the village of Monte de Luna less than a thousand yards away and about nine hundred feet below. West, they looked up … and up at the slope in front of them, culminating in the peak of the San Martin caldera some fifteen hundred feet higher.

A GPS tracker confirmed they were now just twelve hundred yards from the rim of San Martin. It was going to be one hell of a long twelve hundred yards.

They started walking.

“Miss Howorth?” the man asked in brisk, no-nonense tones. “Mr. Carlylse?” James Castelano stepped out from behind a pillar. Nearby, on the other side of the entrance to the airport terminal, Harry Daimler pretended to read a newspaper.

“Good to see you again, James,” CJ said — and it was good. CJ’s knees were shaking as she shook his hand. There’d been no way to know if other assassins were waiting for them along the descent off Taburiente, or here at the airport. Being no longer alone gave her a tremendous surge of relief. Right now, Castelano looked about ten feet tall, and she was tempted to ask where his white charger was.

“Is this our package?” He gave Carlylse a cold look up and down.

“The very same.”

“Are you going to board the aircraft with us now, sir,” Castelano asked in a flat voice, “or do we knock you unconscious and carry you on board?”

Carlylse raised both hands. “I’m going with you! Jesus Christ …”

“He’s not available at the moment, Mr. Carlylse. You’ll have to settle for my partner over there instead.”

“You’re not going back?” CJ asked.

“No, ma’am. I’ve been ordered to stay with you.”

“Is it … is it safe?” Carlylse asked. He looked terrified, and CJ could understand why. He was a firm believer in the frailly of life … now.

“We flew in on a private plane, Mr. Carlylse, a Learjet 45. It was thoroughly checked before we left Rota, and there are two U.S. Marshals standing beside it on the tarmac now. Yes, it’s safe.”

“In that case, sir, there is nothing

I want more than to get off this godforsaken island!”

“We can get your stuff out of your room,” CJ told him. “Your computer and clothes and all that. I’m sure they can set you up at Fort Meade with a razor and a toothbrush.”

“Thank you. I don’t want to lose the laptop. It’s got half of my next book on it.”

They went through the terminal, and Castelano flashed a card at a security gate that let them all go through. The Learjet was waiting on the far side of the terminal, two tough-looking men in civilian clothes standing beneath it.

“Is that your plane?” CJ asked. “You really did arrive on a white charger!”

“I beg your pardon?” Castelano asked, looking puzzled.

“Never mind.” CJ had already decided that Castelano and Daimler, with body-builder muscles beneath their touristy bright-print shirts, were lacking in the conversation department and had social skills approximating those of bricks.

“This way, Mr. Carlylse,” Daimler said.

Carlylse turned suddenly. “Thank you, CJ. You … you saved my life back there a couple of times over.”

“Don’t mention it,” she told him. “That’s what we get paid for.”

“Well, I appreciate it. And … I wasn’t really that upset by your driving …”

She gave him a hug and a quick peck on the cheek. He nodded, then turned and followed Daimler across the tarmac toward the waiting aircraft.

When she’d called Rubens earlier, during the drive down the east side of the mountain, he said, that Charlie Dean, Ilya Akulinin, and a number of Force Recon Marines were on their way, by parachute. As she and Castelano stood in the blazing tropical sunshine outside the terminal, watching Carlylse walk up the boarding stairs, she looked away, toward the west and the southwest, wondering if she would catch a glimpse of them.

That was impossible, of course. She had no idea when they would be arriving. Rubens had not confided anything else about the op, and rightly so. He’d probably been bending security regulations just telling her that they were coming. They might still be on the way from the air base in Spain, or they might already be on the ground.

She did see something unexpected, though … an aircraft much closer at hand. It was a big, blue Aérospatiale Puma with a bright red Moroccan flag showing on the tail boom, and the white-letter logo of Marrakech Air Transport, a civilian air charter service. She’d seen two like it yesterday, when the three of them had picked their way across cinder slopes and through puine forests to peer into the ten calderas along the Cumbre Vieja. This one, with a thunderous roar, was lifting off of the southern end of the La Palma runway. As she watched, it hovered a moment, then dipped its nose and turned away, angling toward the mountainous interior of the island.

From this angle, it looked like it was heading straight for the San Martin volcano, just seven miles to the southwest.

She pulled out her cell phone for another call to the Art Room.

“Charlie? Ilya?” Jeff Rockman’s voice said over Dean’s implant. “You may be about to get company.”

Charlie Dean was panting with the effort of the climb. They’d emerged from the pine forest on the slope below the San Martin crater and were in the open now, trudging slowly up the loose cinder scree of the volcanic cone. He stopped, looking up. The crest was still two or three hundred yards ahead, and another three hundred feet above them.

“Whatcha got?” he asked.

“CJ’s at the airport,” Rockman told him. “She just called in a report. A Moroccan civil helicopter is on its way, headed in your direction.”

Dean whirled in place, fumbling for his binoculars — and suddenly he realized that he didn’t need them. He could see the aircraft now, between him and the airport, several miles away.

“Take cover!” he called, his voice barely above a sharp whisper. “Incoming aircraft!”

The others saw the helicopter now as well. It would be over them in less than a minute — and they were well above the tree line, nakedly exposed on the volcano’s eastern slope.

Inside his backpack, on the very top, was the special gear from Fort Meade, a tightly rolled bundle of tough, waterproof fabric. He ripped open the closures, unrolling it on the ground. A seven-by-seven blanket with elastic loops at each corner, its color was a faded and mottled red brick and dark gray, a close match for the colors of the surrounding volcanic landscape. Slipping a corner strap over one boot, then the other, he pulled the blanket up over his body, and in seconds effectively disappeared.

During his years as a U.S. Marine sniper, Charlie Dean had frequently used camouflage Ghillie suits, making them himself in the field from locally available materials. The tech-Ghillie was a high-tech wrinkle on an old idea. The surface color adapted to the local light levels, fading in strong light, darkening in shade. A ceramic weave inside the layers of fabric blocked infrared radiation — heat — rendering the tech-Ghillie effectively invisible under IR. That last made the things ungodly hot, since the wearer’s body heat couldn’t escape to the open air, but then the same was true of traditional Ghillie suits, which commonly inflicted temperatures of 120 degrees on the people wearing them.

The things were custom ordered for specific environments; the color scheme of these blankets had been based on satellite photos of the top of the Cumbre Vieja taken just a few days ago.

Dean could hear the stuttering whop-whop-whop of the helicopter now as it grew closer. Helicopters, he knew from his briefing, were being used to transport men and material up to the volcanic craters, but there was always that small chance that something had gone wrong, that the op had been compromised and the aircraft overhead was actively searching for them.

The thunder of rotors grew louder, then still louder. Dean hugged the ground, motionless. As the noise passed overhead, he raised his head slightly, risking a look. The helicopter, a civilian Puma, was flying over the rim of the crater ahead. As he watched, it circled to the left, hovered, then drifted slowly down, vanishing behind the lip of the crater.

“Green Amber One, let’s move,” Gunny Rodriguez’s voice said over the tactical radios each man had strapped to his combat harness. “The opposition’ll be busy watching the landing.”

As one, four patches of brick red earth shifted, bunched up, and opened, revealing the four recon team members as they continued the climb up the steepening slope.

Ibrahim Hussain Azhar stood on the floor of the crater near the tents, watching the Marrakech Air Transport helicopter fly low above the caldera’s eastern rim, then gentle in for a landing a dozen meters away. Feng, standing beside him, muttered something in Chinese.

“What was that?” Azhar asked.

“I said it’s about time,” Feng replied in his thickly accented Arabic. The man didn’t speak Urdu, so Azhar’s conversations with him were in English, which Feng spoke very well, or in Arabic, which he did not.

“For the weapon?” Azhar asked, shifting to English. “Or for the passenger?”

“Both, actually,” Feng replied in the same language. “This is the last device from Tan-Tan. It’s taken long enough … but we should be ready to go by tonight.”

“We can have the weapon in place late this afternoon,” Azhar said, “but the plan calls for detonating the weapons tomorrow, at thirteen hundred hours.”

“Why such a precise time?”

“Because that will be eight hundred hours, eight o’clock on the U.S. East Coast. The cities will be filling with commuters driving in from the suburbs. In cities farther west like Houston and New Orleans, it will be an hour earlier, seven o’clock, but the highways will still be crowded. News that a volcano has exploded, that a megastsunami is rushing across the ocean toward the United States, will reach them when the bridges, the tunnels, the highways leading into their cities, and the narrow canyon-streets inside their cities all will be jammed with traffic … what they call ‘rush hour.’

“The wave won’t reach them until sometime in the afternoon, but for some six or seven hours, the panic will build … and build. Millions of people will be struggling to get out of the city death-traps, and when the wave does hit, with the highways and tunnels impassably blocked by fleeing people …”

“Ah!”

“We believe that this timing will increase the number of deaths tremendously, first in the panic, then as cars are swept from the highways, bridges toppled, and tunnels drowned later in the afternoon. We conservatively estimate between one and two million deaths as a direct result of the strike. A similar number, we believe, will die of starvation, disease, and food and water riots within the next several weeks.”

“An ugly picture.”

Azhar shrugged. “You want to see America’s commercial and industrial infrastructure destroyed. We want to kill as many of them as possible, to drive home the message that this is God’s judgment on a sinful people. The devices will serve both of our purposes.”

“You put a great deal of trust in this megatsunami concept,” Feng said. “The reality may be considerably less than you anticipate.”

“Perhaps. We are aware of the Dutch studies that suggest nothing much will happen. We believe them to be mistaken.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“First, science in the West has been so completely politicized, their researchers routinely come up with the the answers that fit their preconceived theories. They do not know. Look at their idiocies, the way they cripple themselves economically, with their politically correct beliefs about global warming.

“Second … have you ever been to the Hawaian Islands?”

Feng nodded. “Many times.”

“One of the islands — Molokai — is long and slender, running east and west.”

“Yes. A beautiful place.”

“One and a half million years ago, Molokai was round in shape — an enormous shield volcano emerging above the surface of the ocean, much like the Big Island to the southeast. But half of the island or more broke away in a volcanic or seismic event. The debris spilled northward for hundreds of kilometers under water, leaving behind the sheer cliffs of Molokai’s northern coast. Similar landslips have occurred off Oahu and the other islands as well. The geological evidence is that these underwater landslides raised catastrophic tsunamis that scoured much of the Pacific Rim.” He smiled. “Of course, there was no economic infrastructure to wreck then, and no rush-hour commuters.”

“So what is your point?”

“Simply that the computer simulations in Holland and elsewhere were calculating the waves raised by the splash of several hundred billion tons of rock as it struck the ocean. Those researchers pointed out that all of that rock would have to hit the water at one time to raise even a small tidal wave … say, thirty meters. But it’s not the splash that causes the tsunami. It is the movement of vast quantities of rock underwater, the submarine landslide, that displaces the water and raises the tsunami.”

“Ah. I read once that the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was caused by a relatively small movement of the Earth’s crustal plates.”

“Exactly. In that case, a twelve-hundred-kilometer stretch of the fault line moved about fifteen meters. Here on La Palma, the fault line is only an estimated fifteen kilometers long — but all of that rock will be moving for hundreds of kilometers, displacing titanic volumes of water as it moves.” He pointed west. “Out there, the sea floor drops sharply away from this island. Four hundred kilometers from here, the bottom is forty-eight hundred meters down, and it continues to drop. We expect that the landslide will generate a megatsunami similar to the ones caused by the collapse of Molokai in the Pacific.” Azhar spread his hands. “It is possible that the megatsunami will be something less than the one- to three-hundred-meter wave we expect. There are many variables, including how efficiently the nuclear explosions split the rock from the fault line, and how quickly it actually travels along the sea floor. But even a thirty-meter wave would drown tens of thousands of people, from New England to the Texas coast.”

“Not to mention England, France, Brazil, and other countries around the Atlantic coastlines. But … your point is taken. My objective is simply that America’s economy be crippled.”

“Tens of trillions of dollars of property damage. Millions of homes and automobiles destroyed. Their financial centers in New York wrecked. Their capital flooded and their government forced to relocate. Many of their military bases submerged. I think such a blow would cripple their ecomony to the point that they might well never recover.”

“And the People’s Republic becomes the dominant superpower in the world, both economically and militarily,” Feng said. “And you have your global jihad.”

“Allahu akbar,” Azhar said, shifting to Arabic. “God is great. And with the Americans … preoccupied with their personal problems, they will no longer be a player on the world stage, not for many decades, if ever.”

“Ah!” Feng said. “There is al-Dahabi.”

The helicopter’s rotors had stopped turning, and a man in a business jacket and checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh stepped off the boarding ladder carrying what looked like a doctor’s bag. He was old, his face deeply wrinkled, and he was smiling.

“I still fail to see the purpose of bringing him here,” Azhar said, speaking English again.

“The woman has information. She is CIA, I am certain of it. We must know how much the Americans know of our activities here.”

“In another twenty-four hours, none of it will matter. America will have fallen, the woman will have been incinerated … and you and I will be busily engaged in the next phase of Wrath of God. What can you possibly learn in that twenty-four hours that will help us?”

“Whether or not the Americans know what we are doing here, for one,” Feng replied. “Whether or not they are mounting some sort of attack. But … I admit that there are personal issues.”

“What issues?”

“The woman defied me,” Feng said. “She attempted to use me, and then she defied me. I will break her — and your man, there, will help me do just that.”

“It would be cleaner to simply shoot her,” Azhar said.

“You speak of killing millions of Americans as they drive to work, and you dislike the thought of torturing one woman?”

“Killing millions,” Azhar said, “is war. The other, as you have pointed out, is personal. The two do not mix.”

“But you are wrong, my friend,” Feng said, walking forward now to meet al-Dahabi. “War is always personal in its effects — in terror, in pain, and in blood.”