Death Wave

25

I’m waiting, Cathy. If you prefer, the guard will put a bullet through your right knee. It will then hurt a great deal more when we put you on the table and forcibly undress you.”

Lia evaluated her chances. If she dove for al-Dahabi and tried to grapple with him, she might catch the two gunmen by surprise. If she could get close enough to the interrogator, they might not be able to shoot for fear of hitting him.

But then what? She was bigger than al-Dahabi, and younger … but she’d spent the past twenty-some hours tied to a chair, and both the adrenaline surge of the past few minutes and the beating had left her shaking and weak. Even if she did take him down, she would be no match, then, for the two armed Tangos on the other side of the chamber.

Besides, she now noticed that al-Dahabi also had a gun, a holstered pistol on his right hip. Jumping him would be suicide.

She decided to keep stalling. If she could keep him talking …

The danger lay in the possibility that he would become impatient and move on to the next level of force in this psychological game.

“No!” she cried. “Why should I make it easy for you, you bastard? You’re just going to torture me anyway!”

“I will need to ascertain that you are telling me the truth. The process can be relatively brief, a matter of an hour or so as I ask you questions, then apply, shall we say, a certain measured amount of pain as I test your truthfulness. But if you force me to rip the truth from you, the process will be long and agonizing no matter what you tell me.”

“You’re still going to kill me!”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. But … cooperate, and I might see if I can intercede with Major Feng. He’s not a monster, after all. I think he likes you. He might let you live.”

The lie was so transparent she very nearly laughed in his face.

She battled to keep her face frozen, empty of expression. She’d just seen … was that Charlie slipping in through the tunnel entrance?

The two guards were watching her with wide, hungry eyes, their backs to the entrance.

“Okay!” she cried. “Please, please just don’t hurt me!” She started fumbling at her belt.

Dean eased into the widening of the lava tube, all of his senses at a heightened pitch. He saw Lia in the pool of light ahead, facing him, and felt a surge of relief. Her face was bruised and bloody, but she appeared to be standing on her own, at least. To the left was the Palestinian, an old man standing with arms folded beside a steel table. Directly in front of Dean were two guards, their backs to the entrance, watching Lia undress.

If he shot them, a convulsive muscle contraction might close a trigger finger and kill Lia.

“Hey!” Dean shouted, his voice echoing down the tunnel.

“Allahu akbar!”

The two guards and the old man turned to face him.

Lia heard Charlie’s shrill yell, an echoing battle cry, and saw the startled guards spin to face him. Immediately, she launched herself at al-Dahabi, who’d also turned to face Dean and was groping at his hip for his holstered sidearm. Dean’s rifle fired, a sharp chuff of sound, and the back of a guard’s head exploded in a scarlet spray.

She struck al-Dahabi from the side just as he started to pull his sidearm clear, slamming him back into the portable table, upending it with a clattering crash, then continuing on until Lia, al-Dahabi, and the table all smashed into the light stand.

The light toppled, flared, and went dark with a loud pop.

There was neither room nor time for subtlety. Lia raised her arm, then slammed her elbow down against the side of al-Dahabi’s head. The man beneath her screamed, dragging his pistol up, twisting beneath her. She elbowed his temple again, then again, but he turned his head and her last blow caught him squarely in the nose with a gush of blood.

She kept hitting him, kicking and kneeing him, slamming his head and face with her elbows and knees as the pistol hit the stone floor and clattered away into the near-darkness.

She felt a hand close on her shoulder and spun, still fighting.

“Easy, Lia! It’s me!”

Her breath coming in savage, rapid gasps, she stared up into Dean’s face for a moment, still ready to kill—

“Charlie?”

“It’s okay, Lia. It’s me.”

She let him pull her back from al-Dahabi. Dean knelt and probed the interrogator’s throat with two fingers. “He’s dead. Nice hand-to-hand technique.”

She shuddered. “Thank God you got here!”

“What’s with the striptease?”

She glared at him. “Don’t you dare even joke about that!”

“Sorry.” Dean looked away, checking the darkened chamber. Enough light was filtering in from the entrance to to show shapes and dark shadows. Both guards, Lia saw, were dead, sprawled in growing pools of blood. She hadn’t even heard Dean kill the second one. “Just those three?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay to walk?”

“I think so.”

“Get dressed. We need to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”

Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Farley saw two red indicators on his weapons panel wink on. “Firestorm, Firestorm Five,” he called. “Signal acquired.” He tapped an icon on the screen, watched another indicator light up. “I have target lock.” A moment later, a second indicator winked on, his second target, illuminated at a slightly different wavelength. “Firestorm, Firestorm Five, I have two target locks.”

“Five, Firestorm Leader. Copy. Arm the force packages.”

“Roger that. Arming the packages.”

Using the touch-screen controls, he told the computer on board his F-22 Raptor to arm the two JDAMs nestled into his internal bays and to open the bay doors. The Raptor was an extraordinarily stealthy aircraft — at certain angles it had the radar cross-section of a steel marble — and carried its munitions internally to maintain that stealth.

On the advanced touch-screen readout, the schematic drawings of both JDAMs switched from gray to green.

“Firestorm, this is Firestorm Five,” he called. “Weapons hot, I repeat, weapons hot. Bays open. Ready to engage.”

It had been a long flight. The six F-22 Raptors of the 43rd Fighter Squadron had lifted off from Tyndall Air Force base on the Florida panhandle nearly four hours earlier. At a supercruise speed of Mach 1.8, the coast of Africa was less than three hours’ flight time from home, but they’d needed two rendezvous along the way with KC-135 Stratotankers for midair refueling.

Each aircraft carried two one-thousand-pound LJDAM-modified Mk 83/BLU-110 gravity bombs in internal bays; LJDAM stood for Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition, the kit that turned an ordinary dumb bomb into a precision smart weapon. Guided in by a laser designator on the ground, a Raptor traveling at Mach 1.5 could precisely plant one of those babies on a moving target from twenty-five nautical miles away and fifty thousand feet up. The weapons could also be precision-guided by onboard GPS units, but the mission planners didn’t have precise GPS targeting data on all of the targets, and so the decision had been made to use laser guidance instead.

Old tech — but it would work just fine, so long as there were no clouds or smoke in the target area.

Six aircraft, twelve LJDAMs; the extra was along as backup in case of weapon malfunction or a problem with one of the aircraft. Firestorm Five’s targets were the southernmost two in a line of ten. The Raptors were strung out now in a long line at forty thousand feet, angling toward the island of La Palma from the northeast at Mach 1.2.

“Firestorm, Firestorm Leader.” That was the voice of Colonel Edward Mackelroy, in Firestorm One. “Firestorm is clear to engage.”

Farley tapped the release icon for his port-side weapon—“force package” in the newspeak glossary of military terminology. The aircraft bounced higher as a thousand pounds of bomb dropped from its belly.

“Five, weapon one away.” He tapped the second icon. “Two away.”

Death hurtled toward La Palma through the brilliant blue of the Atlantic sky.

The assembly was almost complete.

The suitcase nukes purchased from elements of the Russian mafiya a few weeks earlier rested inside their cases in several pieces: the actual warhead, containing two masses of plutonium at either end of a forty-centimeter-long steel tube; and the firing mechanism, consisting of a shaped charge of plastic explosives inside a cylinder designed to fit snugly over one end of the tube; three detonators, which needed to be uncased and inserted inside the plastique; a battery; a timer; a length of electrical wire; and a small radio-receiver trigger device.

It took a matter of minutes to prepare one of the weapons for detonation. They were broken down so that they would fit inside the suitcase; assembled, one of the weapons was half a meter long and thirty centimeters wide at the widest.

In standard drilling practices, most rigs created a borehole just under twenty centimeters wide — about eight inches. The specialized drilling equipment they’d purchased from the Frenchman, Chatel, allowed JeM to drill boreholes thirty-five centimeters wide, including the thickness of the high-strength tubing necessary for keeping the boreholes open.

Each nuclear device had an eye ring soldered to one end of the plutonium housing; the boreholes were wide enough to allow each device to be lowered at the end of a long cable deep into the shaft. The electrical wire paid out behind as it was sent down the hole, attached to the reels of electrical cable flown in from Morocco. When the device was in place at the bottom of the borehole, the radio receiver was attached to the surface end of the cable and placed high up on the crater rim. A single radio signal transmitted from a safe distance would detonate the plastic explosives, which would drive the plutonium masses together, creating critical mass and detonating the bomb. The timers were included in case circumstances forced a change in plan, but the idea was to have one radio signal detonate all ten bombs at the same instant, something impossible with separate electrical timers.

Al-Wawi himself came up with the idea years ago, after seeing a documentary program on the BBC. Seeing the plan through, however, had been a monumental effort. Factions within both the JeM and al-Qaeda wanted to use the Russian suitcase bombs against American and European cities, or even simply to hold them in reserve as bargaining chips or for future blackmail efforts. The politics involved had been the most difficult part of the entire operation, harder even than drilling down through hundreds of meters of solid basalt. Al-Wawi had gotten his way at last only by giving up two of the recently purchased weapons for a Palestinian attack by Hamas against the Jewish government in Jerusalem.

The operation had been expensive. Not only had millions been paid for the weapons themselves, but the cost of the drilling operation itself, the bribes paid to Aramco and Petro-Technologique and the authorities in Santa Cruz, the cost of the helicopter charters out of Marrakech, all of those had amounted to several hundred million dollars. Only massive financial assistance from the Chinese had made the effort possible.

As for the technical difficulties, they had been almost insurmountable. Drilling over a hundred meters down through the solid basalt within the throat of each of the selected volcanos had been expensive, time-consumming, and fraught with breakdowns and delay. Along the way, the Aramco engineers reported that as the boreholes went deeper, they were approaching a magma chamber beneath the island. On the one hand, that was excellent news; the nuclear detonation might well trigger a massive volcanic eruption, and that, it was hoped, would hide indications that the explosion had been triggered by nuclear weapons, suggesting that it had been an act of Allah. On the other, however, the rock grew increasingly hot and plastic the deeper the drills went, until the drill bits themselves began to melt. The discovery had limited the depth to which the boreholes could be drilled.

Now, at last, everything was in place. The last borehole was complete, the last weapon about to be lowered into the depths of La Palma’s volcanic ridge. After this, it would be Allah’s wrath, in a way. Azhar was convinced that there would be a tidal wave, a megatsunami, despite the skepticism of some geologists. How big it would be, how much devastation it would cause, that would all be up to God.

“Al-Wawi!” a fedayeen standing nearby called. “Where are Abdullah and Nadhir?”

Azhar’s head snapped up. A hundred meters away, the boulder where he’d posted the two guards outside of the lava tube rested bare and empty. The guards were gone.

They would not have simply wandered off. The fedayeen — the fighers — attached to JeM’s La Palma operation had been extensively trained in Pakistan’s Northeastern Territory, and most had fought the Americans in either Afghanistan or Iran. They were well disciplined and knew the penalty for deserting their post. If they were gone, it could only mean …

“Suhair! Amir! Get your men! Get them to the cave!”

His eyes flicked across the crater rim looming in every direction about the drill site. If the Americans had already infiltrated troops, they would be up there among those heights somewhere. He reached for his radio. “Shihadeh!” he called. “Do you hear me?”

There was no reply. Turning, he looked up at the west rim of the crater. Shihadeh al-Ali should be up there.

“What’s the matter?” Feng asked.

“We may be under attack.”

Feng smirked. “By who?”

“The enemy, obviously. The Americans. Three of my sentries are missing.”

Feng’s face went blank, and he drew his pistol from his holster. “What … are your intentions?”

Azhar knew exactly what Feng was asking. The final bomb was not yet assembled completely, but the other nine were, and they were planted, awaiting only the radio signal from a remote location. If those nine weapons were detonated now, everyone along the Cumbre Vieja would die — including Feng.

The Aramco employees had no idea what the boreholes were for, were completely unaware that their lives now hung in the balance. Azhar’s fedayeen had sworn to die at his orders. Feng, however, wanted to live. Azhar suspected that if he said he was going to set off the bombs, Feng might well shoot him on the spot.

“We will fight, of course,” Azhar replied. “The remote detonator is not yet in place.”

He thought for a moment. He didn’t trust Feng or Feng’s associates. Operation Wrath of God would not have been possible without Chinese money and influence, but the man was in it for reasons of his own, reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with uniting the Islamic world in jihad. He’d been using the Jaish-e-Mohammad for his own agenda from the start.

Which was fine, since JeM had been using him as well — and now, Azhar could use Feng to draw out the enemy. If American forces were already up there on the crater rim, they would never let the helicopter escape.

Azhar added, “You can, if you choose, escape in the helicopter.”

Feng was looking about the crater rim wildly. “Yes. Yes. I could set off the weapons, if you wish.”

Azhar reached into the nearly empty suitcase. Inside was a remote control with a single button.

“Very well. You will need a clear line of sight to all of the craters in the Cumbre Vieja, and you will need to be at least five miles away … no, make that ten, if this device is not yet buried. Minimum safe distance for a surface one-kiloton burst.”

Nodding, Feng accepted the controller, turned, and began jogging up the trail toward the upper crater.

Azhar’s men were running in from several directions now. Kneeling by the bomb, he pointed at the cave. “There! See if the enemy is there!”

His men charged toward the entrance to the lava tube.

Dean raised his hand, stopping Lia at the entrance to the cave. “Wait a sec!” Carefully, he peered around the boulders framing the left side of the opening. A dozen armed men were charging toward them, running flat out. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, he flipped the selector switch to three-round burst, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

One of the running fedayeen crumbled and fell. The others dropped to the ground, firing wildly. Full-auto rounds chirped and howled off rock above Dean’s head.

“Ilya!” he called. He hoped the surrounding rock walls weren’t blocking Akulinin’s signal. “Ilya, do you copy?”

“Right here, buddy. Keep your head down. One forty mike-mike surprise package on its way.”

A moment later, an explosion erupted fifty yards away, behind the attacking fedayeen and near the drilling rig. A few seconds after that, a second round detonated, this one squarely among the Tangos. Dean heard a shrill scream, saw a body flying with the gout of cinder, smoke, and fragmented rock.

He loosed another burst toward the attacking troops. “Ilya! We’re inside the tunnel mouth! They have us trapped! Can you lay down some smoke, let us get out of here?”

“On the way.”

Another 40 mm grenade burst on the crater floor, between the tunnel entrance and the drilling rig. White smoke erupted from the canister, boiling into the sky, creating a smoke screen between Dean and Lia and the attacking JeM soldiers.

“Let’s go!” Dean told Lia, and the two darted into the open, hunched over, running hard.

Ilya Akulinin broke open the M203 grenade launcher attached to his M4 carbine, ejected the empty cartridge, and slipped a fresh bluntnosed grenade into the receiver. The enemy was just about at the maximum effective range for the weapon—160 yards — but the shot was tricky because he was shooting down into the bottom of a huge bowl, and he had to correct for a tendency to aim high. His first round had been way over the target.

He didn’t want to correct too far, however, or he would risk hitting Charlie and Lia. He snapped the receiver shut on the second smoke grenade, took aim, and fired. The weapon gave a solid thunk as it fired, and the round burst close beside the first. The bottom of the crater’s bowl was beginning to fill with thick white smoke.

“Amber Four! Amber Four! Negative on the smoke! Repeat, negative on the smoke!”

Calmly, Akulinin reloaded with a third smoke grenade, took aim, and fired. As the round burst in the crater below, he said, “Amber One, this is Amber Four. Did not copy. Please repeat.”

“Amber Four, cease smoke! Cease smoke! You’re screwing the laser lock!”

Ambers One and Two, some two hundred yards south of Akulinin’s position, were using a tripod-mounted GLTD II, a small and lightweight ground laser target designator, to illuminate the base of the drilling rig for the incoming Firestorm strike. Smoke, however, blocked the laser light.

Akulinin glanced at his watch. Firestorm was still seven minutes out. The smoke ought to clear within a couple of minutes.

Plenty of time …

Dean knelt at the bottom of the gully, his rifle against his shoulder. A thick clump of pine trees and a tangle of large rocks provided a good firing position.

“Climb straight to the top,” he told her. “Ilya’s up there, among those rocks.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“Right behind you. Go!”

White smoke drifted heavy and opaque at the bottom of the crater, like thick fog. A shadow, upright and moving, began to materialize ahead, and Dean put a three-round burst into it. At least, he thought as the shadow twisted and fell, he had the comfort of knowing that anything moving in that cloud would be a hostile. He didn’t need to worry about inflicting friendly-fire casualties.

He heard the Tangos calling to one another — whether in Arabic or a Pakistani language, he wasn’t sure. He stayed in position, listening to the sounds of Lia’s clamber up the rugged slope fade. “Ilya?” he called. “Lia’s on her way up the gully. Don’t shoot her by mistake.”

“Copy that, Charlie. I’m not shooting. I can’t see shit in the crater. And Amber Four told me to stop making smoke.”

“Just sit tight and take care of Lia.”

“She okay?”

“Seems to be. Don’t piss her off, though. I just saw her kill a guy with her bare hands.”

“So much for rescuing damsels in distress.”

“Roger that.”

Another shadow appeared, and Dean shot it down.

Lia was well on her way up the 160-foot-high slope. Somewhere out there in the smoke, someone had a small nuclear weapon, but there was no way Dean could find him, or do anything about the nuke. That job was best left to Firestorm, now … six minutes out.

It was time for him to start climbing.

Feng Jiu Zhu, still a major of the Guóānbù despite his current technical status as a civilian, senior vice president of the China Ocean Shipping Company and, most recently, international terrorist, ran for his life.

It was that foreign woman, damn her. It had to be. The CIA must have planted her, must have organized an attack on the La Palma operation when she disappeared. Azhar had been right. He should have shot her yesterday — should have left the island and detonated the nine nuclear weapons already in place, rather than waiting for the final borehole to be complete. Nine weapons, surely, would have caused as powerful and as destructive a wave as ten.

His pistol in one hand, the remote control in the other, he reached the upper level of the crater floor and raced toward the helicopter. Feng couldn’t fly the thing; he needed to find the pilot.

He spotted him, standing with his copilot near the fuel tank.

The Aérospatiale Puma had a range of 580 kilometers. The airport at Tan-Tan in southern Morocco was 650 kilometers from La Palma, which meant that with each helicopter flight between the islands and the mainland, they had to touch down at Lanzarote or Fuerteventura to refuel. As a safety measure, though, the operation planners had brought in a small store of aviation gasoline at each crater — about a thousand liters’ worth for each — to give helicopters flying out of the craters a safety margin.

The pilot looked at Feng with wild eyes. “What is going on?” he demanded in Arabic. “We heard gunshots! And all of that smoke …”

Feng gestured with his pistol. “We’re leaving! Now!”

The pilot seemed more than happy to leave the crater. He was a civilian employee of Marrakech Air Transport and knew nothing about the operation save that his company had been hired by foreign petroleum engineers to fly equipment and personnel in and out of the Canary Islands from Morocco. Gun battles had not been part of the contract. He and his copilot were in the aircraft’s cockpit in seconds, as Feng scrambled on board behind them. Taking his position in the right-hand seat, the pilot began going through preflight.

Feng pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the side of the man’s neck. “Go! Now!”

The pilot flicked a switch, and the main rotors began to turn. …

CJ and Castelano drove back up to the Taburiente Caldera from the Santa Cruz Airport as soon as Carlysle and Damlier were safely in the air. She’d originally planned to go back to the Hotel Sol at Puerto Naos, but the Art Room had pointed out that if the nuclear charges actually went off and the western half of the Cumbre Vieja did slide into the sea, the Hotel Sol lay directly in the landslip’s path.

“Shouldn’t we try to warn someone?” CJ had asked.

“To what purpose?” Jeff Rockman had told her over the phone. “If anything’s gong to happen, it’ll happen within the next couple of hours. The local police and military wouldn’t even be able to begin to evacuate thousands of people — and that’s assuming we could get in touch with the right people quickly enough, and that they believed us. No, we’re just going to have to pray that the nukes don’t go off.”

It seemed damned cold to CJ. There were dozens of small towns, villages, and resorts along the coast between the southern tip of the island and Puerto Naos, with as many as twenty thousand people in the potential landslide’s path.

Castelano, however, had agreed with the Art Room. “There’s nothing we can do for them,” he’d said as they drove up the mountain, “except make sure it doesn’t happen.”

During the entire drive, there was no sign whatsoever that a major military insertion was under way. Even so, she was conscious of the fact that the assassins who’d tried to kill Carlylse earlier might well have returned to the Taburiente overlook, and that they might have friends.

This time, though, there was a difference. James Castelano was a former U.S. Navy SEAL with combat training and experience, and he was carrying an aluminum case with an H&K MP5SD3 9 mm submachine gun tucked into the foam cutouts inside. He’d asked CJ if she could shoot and she’d told him yes; he’d given her a pistol, a SIG SAUER P226 with a muzzle modified to take a screw-on sound suppressor.

“There are civilians up there,” she told him as she drove the rental car into the Taburiente overlook parking lot. “We may be a bit conspicuous carrying guns around.”

“If anybody asks,” Castelano told her, “we’re policía here on official business.”

The parking lot was considerably less crowded than it had been a while ago, and she noticed that there were police cars parked in two of the spaces — summoned, no doubt, by the reports an hour and a half earlier of attempted murder and gunfire. They got out of the car and walked up the path toward the overlook, Castelano carrying his weapon inside the aluminum case, CJ with hers tucked into the waistband of her pants at the small of her back and covered by a tug on the hem of her sweater.

A police officer stopped them halfway to the overlook.

“Alto! Zona restringida.”

Castelano flashed an ID.

“Investigador especial,” he said.

But CJ had already seen something farther up the path that turned her cold. The overlook tourist platform, where the assassin had tried to push Carlylse over into the caldera earlier, had been cordoned off with yellow línea policía tape. A bearded man in a guardia uniform and holding an H&K submachine gun stood guard in front of it; three men were on the platform behind him, one with what looked like a small remote control unit, two with binoculars raised to their eyes.

They were studying the mountainous vista toward the south.

Toward the Cumbre Vieja, where a small patch of white cloud appeared to be caught on the ridge top.