Death Wave

24

Fuck this,” Charlie Dean whispered. “I’m going down there.”

“Shit, man!” Akulinin said. “You trying to start a war?”

“No, but when we get the word to go, I want to be in position and ready. Now.”

“I heard that, Charlie,” Marie Telach said. “I recommend that you stay put! We should be hearing from the boss soon.”

“Recommendation noted,” Dean said. He was already crawling forward, the tech-Ghillie stretched over his back, shifting with each movement of hand or foot.

The descent was a lot tougher than the slow crawl around the crater’s rim. He was moving head-down, and at times the ground was steep enough that he began sliding on loose gravel or cinders. Each time he did, he spread his arms and legs, bracing against whatever support he could find in the ground with his hands, and hung on until the slide stopped. Then he would freeze in place, holding himself absolutely motionless in case someone at the bottom of the pit noticed the slither of rock and cinder down the slope.

Then he would begin moving again. He didn’t have to worry about being quiet, at least. The drill was pounding away with a steady thump-thump-thump, and the air was filled with the rumble and chug of motors and pumps.

Ilya had his back. Watching from the top of the gully through his sniperscope, he would be alert for signs that Dean’s crawl down the slope had been noticed, and take out any threat before the bad guy opened fire.

But the idea was to get all the way down without being seen.

Because once people started shooting, there was a real danger that the Tangos would set off their one-kiloton toys.

Rubens emerged from the conference room, bemused and gratified. The President had given the necessary approval. Operation Mountain Storm was now officially a go.

“So why’d you do it?” he asked Collins, who was walking out beside him.

“Do what?”

“Go to bat for me in there. Point out that this time the intel was good. He didn’t even ask for my resignation.”

“He will if this goes bad.”

“If this goes bad, he won’t have to ask.”

“We are on the same team, Bill.”

“With all of the interagency politics, sometimes it’s hard to remember that.”

“You don’t have to play stupid, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“You deliberately planted information about the Yakutsk through CIA assets in Ethopia and Somalia. You made sure those Somali pirates knew that the Yakutsk was a rich target for them. The Constellation battle group was shadowing that ship. As soon as the Yakutsk got off a distress call, your team went in.”

“It wasn’t my team.”

Well, except for Charlie and Ilya, he thought, but she doesn’t need to know everything.

“It was a Navy SEAL VBSS unit you ‘happened to have close by.’ ”

“Our ships and personnel are required by the law of the sea to respond to any distress call at sea.”

“Uh-huh. And you were setting up the same thing in La Palma.”

“Not the same thing at all. I just made sure that we had plenty of solid assets where they could be used when they were needed.”

“You already have an assault force on the island, don’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“A reconnaissance force, then. Marines? Black CAT? I notice that you didn’t tell him that.”

“I didn’t want to complicate things.”

“I admire your balls, Bill.”

“You haven’t seen them in years.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

They reached the secure elevator that took them down to the underground visitors’ garage beneath the White House East Wing. Rubens pulled his cell phone from his pocket and examined the screen. He still wasn’t getting a signal — part of the White House’s security system.

Rubens and Collins parted company in the garage. “Bill?” She called after they’d gone a few steps. Her voice echoed off the bare concrete.

“Yeah?”

“Keep me in the loop.”

“Don’t worry, Debra,” he told her. “I’ll tell you if this works. You’ll know if it doesn’t.”

Still no signal on his phone. He got into his car, checked out past gate security, and pulled out onto East Executive Avenue Northwest. He was reaching for the phone again when it rang. He didn’t bother checking the caller ID.

“Rubens.”

“Bill? Katie.”

“Katie! Yes. What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to let you know … after our conversation Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“Some of us here have been doing some digging. There is a danger.”

“Really? What did you get?”

“Those Dutch studies were looking at water displacement from a large amount of mass striking the ocean. You remember? I was telling you it all had to hit at the same time.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I got to thinking about other examples of landslips we know. There was one off of Sicily, Mount Etna, that caused a devastating tsunami all across the eastern Mediteranean eight thousand years ago. Some scientists think that might have been the source of the biblical flood myth. And there have been a number of landslips in the Hawaian Islands. Molokai and Oahu, especially. There’s evidence that those sent huge tidal waves all across the Pacific Rim something like a million and a half years ago.

“But those tidal waves weren’t caused by the impact of all of that rock in the ocean, but by something more subtle. Those island-sized masses of rock moved, and they moved fast, sliding for hundreds of kilometers across the sea floor before coming to rest. It was the movement that displaced the water, generating the waves, not the splash.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That there very well might be a danger to the U.S. East Coast if part of La Palma does break off and fall into the sea.”

“How certain are you of the data?”

“Not very.” He could hear the frustration in her voice. “The things are totally unpredictable. The size and strength of the wave would depend on the actual mass of the rock and on how fast it was moving. You might get a wave a hundred meters tall hitting the United States. Or it might be ten meters. Or less.”

“Okay, Katie. I appreciate knowing.”

“I’m sorry to give you bad news.”

“Look at the bright side. I didn’t just lie through my teeth to the President of the United States.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He laughed. “Never mind. Thanks, Katie. I need to get off and make another call.” He hesitated. “Are you thinking of leaving the area?”

“No, Bill. Too much to do here. And too many good friends.”

“I understand. I’ll keep you informed, okay?”

“Okay, Bill.”

“Later.” He switched off, then hit the speed dial button for the secure line to the Art Room.

He needed to let them know of the President’s decision.

Lia’s ears were ringing, blood drooled from her mouth and nose, and her left eye was swollen almost shut. After he’d spent all of that time showing her the nightmarish implements of torture in his bag, the beating the smiling man had given her with his bare fists had been brutal, direct, and startlingly unexpected. She’d thought she’d been beginning to understand Feng’s interrogator, but his savage response to her defiance had left her shaken and uncertain, as well as hurting.

Then, after the beating, he’d begun puttering about the chamber, smiling, chatting pleasantly, attaching straps to the four corners of the table, and finally showing her once again each implement in his bag, carefully explaining what each was for.

The stress, the sheer terror, was building in Lia to a near-unbearable point, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath coming in sharp, short gasps, her teeth chattering in her bruised jaw.

“Now this … this is one of my favorites,” the man said, holding up a lancet with a long, slightly curving blade that gleamed like oil in the light. He brought it to within a couple of inches of her eyes, turning it slowly in front of her. “A flensing blade … you understand? For skinning the subject. For example, I can use it to slice through your skin just … here …” Reaching down, he dragged his fingertip lightly across her upper thigh, from groin to hip. She flinched at the touch, and his smile broadened.

“I cut all the way around your leg, you see,” he continued, “and then use just the tip of blade to tease the skin from the underlaying fascia. I work my way down your leg, peeling back the skin as I go, around and around, until I roll it in one piece from your leg, just like removing a stocking.

“The entire process lasts, oh, perhaps an hour, an hour and a half. The time depends on how often you pass out from the pain, and on how long it takes to revive you each time. And then, of course, we go to the other leg … and your arms … eventually we get to your face. It’s necessary to proceed slowly to avoid having you lose too much blood …”

Her own pulse thundered in Lia’s ears as the nightmare monologue dragged on, louder, it seemed, even than the sounds of drilling from outside. She told herself that this was part of the actual torture, a psychological softening up that would leave her more vulnerable to drugs or to the actual touch of a scalpel when it finally came.

Her training had emphasized going along with an interrogator, giving him what he wanted, if necessary. The important thing was to keep her wits about her, to resist going into shock, to keep alert for the possibility, any possibility, of escape …

“Please …” she said. Her lips were dry and cracked, despite the sweat drenching her face. “Please don’t …”

“You have something you wish to tell me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Your name, for a start.” With precise, businesslike movements he replaced the lancet in the canvas carrier. “We’ve not been properly introduced, you see. I am Dr. Taysir al-Dahabi. Oh, yes! I am a medical doctor. The University of Cairo. It helps to be able to monitor my subject’s condition as I work. And you are?”

“C–Cathy Chung,” she said. Her voice cracked with the effort.

“Ah, yes. The name on your ID card we found in among your things. And you work for?”

“The U.S. State Department.”

“I see, I see.” He extracted a notebook and pen from the bag and wrote something with quick, flowing scribbles. “That matches the fact of the ID itself, of course. But why should I believe you? If, as my employers believe, you are CIA, that would all be part of an internally consistent story, a legend, as I believe spies call it.”

“I … I told you I’d talk!”

“Yes, but you are nowhere close to being broken yet. Broken to the point where you are begging me to be allowed to tell me everything you know. So we will need to test those statements.”

An inarticulate whimper escaped Lia’s lips; she did it for effect, but she didn’t have to reach down far to find it.

“I’ll tell you what, Cathy. I’ll call you Cathy for now, anyway, until we learn more about you … about the real you. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. How well you do this will tell me how willing you are to cooperate with me right now. Okay?”

“Anything …”

“Very well. I’m going to have one of the guards untie you and remove the handcuffs. You will then remove your hiking boots and place them under the chair. The other guard will have very specific orders. If you try to escape, if you so much as look as though you’re going to try to attack me or them, the other guard will shoot you in the knees. The wounds will leave you helplessly crippled and in a very great deal of pain. Do you understand me?”

Lia nodded.

“Say ‘Yes, Doctor.’ ”

“Y-yes, Doctor.”

“Very well.” Al-Dahabi turned and spoke rapidly to the guards in Arabic, too rapidly for her to understand most of it, though she caught the words for “shoot,” “knees,” and “be watchful.”

Al-Dahabi stepped back from the chair and moved his black bag well out of reach. One guard leaned his AK against the tunnel wall and walked slowly toward her, keeping to one side so that he did not at any time block the other guard’s line of fire.

The remaining man, smiling as broadly as al-Dahabi, raised his weapon and took aim at her legs.

It had taken Charlie Dean more than twenty minutes to work his way down the gully, a crawl of perhaps fifty yards, made with exacting, slow, and painstaking caution. His eventual objective, the mouth of the cave, was still over a hundred yards away — and that was a straight-line distance, not the length of the twists and turns he would need to make to stay behind boulders and within eroded gullies in the crater floor.

There were those two sentries ahead as well, still perched on a rock. One faced the cave, his back toward Dean; the other, beside the first, was facing Dean. The two were chatting with one another, but every so often the guard on the right would look up and scan the ridgetop, the gully, and the bare slopes of the crater’s interior.

Another guard, Dean noticed, was on top of the crater rim, over on the opposite side of the bowl. He was sitting on the ground, smoking a cigarette.

So far, the tech-Ghillie had worked as advertised, its photo-reactive surface darkening to the same tone as the shadows in the gully and at the crater floor. Dean, his face only partially exposed beneath the blanket, watched the guard on the right carefully, timing his movements for those moments when the man was talking to his friend, freezing motionless when he began scanning the hillside.

The two were perhaps a hundred yards away now, just ten yards in front of the cave mouth. The racket from the drilling rig, more or less muted up at the top of the hill, was in full voice down here, and the air was filled with a haze of minute particles of dust thrown up by the pounding.

They certainly weren’t going to hear him with all that noise close by.

He began moving forward once more. The ground here was still broken and offered decent cover. Drawing on his old Marine sniper’s training, he picked each new piece of cover before moving, then made his way toward it with slow, steady progress, stopping every few yards to check around him. He could see the drilling rig now off to his right. Two of the men he’d watched earlier were with them now — he thought they were Feng and al-Wawi, though he couldn’t be sure with all of the dust in the air.

“Charlie?” Marie said over his implant. Even with her voice bone-conducted into his ear, it was hard to hear her over the pounding of the drill. “Charlie, do you copy?”

“I’m here, Marie.”

“The boss just called! Mountain Storm is on! Firestorm is en route, ETA ten minutes!”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He pressed his fingers into his ears, and said, “Art Room, say again, please!”

“I said, Mountain Storm is on. Firestorm is en route, ETA ten minutes!”

Dean almost laughed aloud. “Now that’s what I call good timing,” he said.

Lia sat barefoot in front of al-Dahabi, rubbing life back into her sore wrists.

“Very good, Cathy,” he told her. “

Very good. Now, stand up.”

Awkwardly, she did so. Terror still gibbered at the back of her mind, and she was trembling. She hated appearing weak like this, but the obscenely smiling interrogator, she realized, was having an almost overpowering, mesmerizing effect on her, on her will.

The fact that she knew it was all part of the interrogation process didn’t help one bit.

“Good,” al-Dahabi said. He was still standing well back from her, too far for her to kick, even if she’d had the strength. One of the guards, ten feet away, continued to aim his assault rifle at her legs. “Next, you will remove all of your clothing, fold it neatly, and place it on the chair.”

“What?”

Al-Dahabi sighed. “If you were a man, I would simply have my friends here rip the clothing from your body, a somewhat brutal demonstration that you are helpless. But working with a woman is different. You know you are weaker physically than a man, so the demonstration must prove that you are helpless psychologically. Vulnerable. Mine to command. You will do what I tell you, without argument, without hesitation. If you do not, I will find another and more unpleasant way to demonstrate your helplessness. Do you understand me?”

At that moment, Lia couldn’t tell which emotion was stronger as it churned in stomach and chest and throat — fear or fury. Women, in this bastard’s world, were things to be manipulated, toys, objects for psychological manipulation.

Several possible replies flashed through her thoughts, ranging from profanity to laughing in the little creep’s face. His prejudice was a weakness, she told himself. There had to be a way to use it to her advantage.

Her eyes locked with his, she began peeling off her T-shirt.

The noise of the drill stopped, the silence startlingly sudden. Dean froze in place, lifting his head above the edge of the gully just enough to see what was happening. All the pumps and generators, a line of blue metal boxes to one side of the drill site, appeared to have been switched off at once.

A moment later, a single diesel engine fired up again, and a heavy winch began grinding away as the workers started removing the drill stack section by section. Metal clashed on metal with clanks and shrill chirps, and he could hear the men shouting at one another in Arabic.

Dean saw movement beyond and to the left of the drilling rig and pulled out his binoculars for a better look. Two of the paramilitary types were coming down the path from the upper crater. One carried an AK; the other lugged something very much like a large, heavy suitcase.

Shit!

“Green Amber, this is Amber Three,” Dean said, switching on his tactical radio.

“Three, One,” Rodriguez’s voice said in his earpiece. “Go.”

“You see the two gonzos with the suitcase, coming down the hill to the drill site?”

“Negative. Not from this position.”

Shit and more shit. The two bad guys had already moved around the bend in the descending path and were out of the line of sight of the two Marines on the hill above.

Maybe the damned timing wasn’t so hot after all. Ahead was the cave where they had Lia. To his right, the bad guys were bringing down one of the nukes.

Lia or the nuke?

“Amber One, did you get the word on Mountain Storm?”

“Three, that is affirmative. We are preparing to light up the target.”

Okay … so Rodriguez and Dulaney were going to be busy for the next ten minutes. The options sucked. If he took out the two with the suitcase nuke, he would start a firefight, the bad guys would sound the alarm, and any nuclear weapons already armed and in place elsewhere on the island might be set off — and a firefight would pin him down here, unable to reach Lia.

If he went after Lia, the bad guys would arm that weapon and put it down the hole, ready to fire. It was not exactly a comfortable prospect.

“Art Room,” he said.

“Go ahead, Charlie.”

“I have one of the suitcase nukes in sight. Looks like they’re getting ready to put it down the borehole. If I engage, they may disappear with it, and they sure as hell will pass the word to every other Tango on La Palma. I’m going to go in after Lia.”

“We concur, Charlie. Good luck.”

“Ilya?”

“I’m here, Charlie.”

“Target is the two Tango sentries outside of the cave entrance. I’ve got the one on the right. You take the one on my left. Do you copy?”

“I copy.”

“Do you see another sentry at about two seven zero up on the crater rim?”

“The goldbrick with the cigarette. I see him.”

“He’s your number two target.”

“Roger that.”

Slowly, Dean eased his M4 out from under the tech-Ghillie and braced it in the prone firing position, left elbow supporting the muzzle, right hand closing about the grip. He checked to make sure the selector switch was on single-shot, then peered through the sight, adjusting the picture until the red dot was over the sentry’s chest. The range was less than a hundred yards now, but he wasn’t going to try for a fancy head shot and risk a miss. He would go for center of mass.

“First target.”

“Sighted in.”

Both of the guards had turned now and were watching the activity at the drill head. With luck, everyone in the crater would be watching them hauling up the drill pipe and planting the bomb, and they wouldn’t notice the two sentries outside the cave getting capped.

“Okay, Ilya,” Dean said. He held the target picture steady, took in a breath, released it partway. “On my mark … and three … and two … and one … and shoot!”

His rifle kicked against his shoulder, the sound of the gunshot muffled by the suppressor to a harsh cough. Both of the sentries jerked together, collapsing into one another and then tumbling off of the boulder.

Dean pulled the tech-Ghillie straps off his wrists and ankles, got to his feet, and started toward the cave at a fast trot. He was in full view of the people near the derrick now, but all of them were focused on the activity around the borehole.

“Target two sees you,” Akulinin said. “Taking the shot …”

Dean glanced up at the crater rim to the west in time to see the lone sentry silhouetted against the sky, saw him raising his rifle … then toppling backward and falling out of sight.

“Good shot,” Dean told Akulinin under his breath. He ran faster, staying in deep shadow and moving from boulder to boulder to minimize his exposure, but no longer staying out of sight. Speed, now, was more important than stealth.

“I’ve got the others covered, Charlie. Get Lia out of there!”

Reaching the boulder in front of the cave entrance, Dean stopped, checked to make sure no one was looking in his direction, then dragged the two bodies and their weapons around behind another boulder resting close to the side of the cliff. That might buy a few more minutes, depending on how frequently the bad guys checked up on their sentries.

Then, still in shadow, he started for the lava tube entrance.