Death Wave

26

Lia reached the top of the crater slope and looked around wildly. Ilya was supposed to be up here, but …

A patch of brick red ground a few feet away suddenly moved. “Get down, Lia! They’ll see you!”

She dropped to the ground. “Ilya?”

A lumpy camoflaged sheet of material rolled back, exposing Akulinin’s face, his M203, and a bandolier of 40 mm grenades. “The one and only. You okay?”

“Yeah.” Her whole body was sore from the beating al-Dahabi had given her, and she was having trouble breathing through her bloodied nose, but … yeah, she was all right. The realization was only just now sinking in, and it left her as weak and trembling as the terror had earlier.

In the bowl below, the smoke was rapidly clearing, though tendrils of white fog remained in the deepest recesses of the lower crater. “What’s happening?” she asked. “I’ve kind of been out of the loop.”

“Two Marines down that way,” Akulinin said, pointing south. “They have the drilling rig illuminated with a target designator, a laser. We jumped with a whole string of Marines. By now, there are two perched above every crater you and CJ identified, pointing their lasers at the drill sites. An air strike left the U.S. a few hours ago and ought to be on final approach. Thousand-pound laser-guided bombs. They should be arriving any minute.”

“Ilya,” Lia said with a dawning cold horror. “Charlie’s still down there!”

Charlie Dean ducked as rifle bullets plowed into loose cinders just above him. The smoke screen was dissipating rapidly, and he was now in clear view of gunmen down on the crater floor. He could see several armed men kneeling or standing near the drilling rig, aiming their weapons at him as they tried to pick him off the inside wall of the bowl.

If the air strike was on schedule, the bombs were already on the way. He needed to get out of the crater, and quickly, or a laser-guided JDAM was going to sweep him off this slope like a broom.

The trouble was, he’d moved around the inside of the crater counterclockwise, hoping to lead the bad guys below away from the gully where Lia was climbing. He didn’t have the gully’s rough ground to aid his scramble up the hill. The ground here was bare rock, too steep even for the cinders that covered everything on the lower slopes, and he had to pick his way along carefully or risk sliding all the way back down into the pit.

Another burst of full-auto rounds whined off the rock just ahead, making him flinch back.

Bracing himself against the slope, taking aim, he loosed several bursts at the gunmen below. He didn’t wait to see if he’d hit anything; he just wanted to make them keep their heads down, giving him a chance to move a bit farther up. The ground was so steep here that he couldn’t move straight up but was having to navigate along the northern slope toward the west, trying to work his way uphill a few feet for every dozen yards that he traversed the inside of the crater rim. The top was still a long way above him.

“Charlie! Ilya!” sounded on his tactical radio. “Lia’s here with me.”

“Good.” He didn’t have the breath for extended conversations at the moment.

“You’ve got about two minutes before it gets very noisy down there.”

“I know. See if you can distract those guys near the drill rig.”

“I’m on it.”

“No smoke. The bombs are probably already locked on.”

“Copy that. Forty mike-mike HE on the way.”

A few seconds later, an explosion thundered in the bottom of the crater, spewing a geyser of cinder, rock, and smoke.

He began climbing faster.

At last, the helicopter began to lift from the ground. Almost immediately, bullets started striking the aircraft, sounding like rocks thrown against a tin roof.

“Get us up!” Feng screamed. “Get us up!”

The helicopter rose faster …

Akulinin heard the roar of the helicopter’s rotors, saw the brightly painted civilian aircraft begin to rise above its makeshift landing pad.

He didn’t know who or what was aboard that Puma. It might be Tango leaders trying to make an escape, gunmen getting airborne to try to find the Marines at the crater rim, or even someone with a nuclear weapon trying to get clear of the combat zone.

Whatever the case, it wouldn’t be good for the mission, and he wasn’t going to let them get clear of the crater.

The range to the helicopter was about 250 yards, well within his weapon’s maximum range, but farther than its effective range of 150 meters for a point target. He should be able to hit an area target at that range, though, and the general area of a helicopter was all he needed.

Snapping home another 40 mm grenade, he took aim and squeezed the trigger.

Charlie Dean was almost at the top, racing along the inner slope. He went to ground again, though, when he heard the helicopter taking off. Bullets kept snapping and whining past him, but Ilya’s grenade barrage had driven the Tangos to seek shelter, and their fire was now sporadic and confused.

He considered trying to take the helicopter under fire but decided that the Marines and Ilya would have that problem covered.

Dean continued making his way upslope, loose rocks and gravel spraying from beneath his boots with each step and avalanching down into the bowl. He braced himself with his right hand against the slope as he continued to move, cutting across the face of the slope to the east as he gained height.

How much time was left? He couldn’t know for sure. He wasn’t certain if the “ten minutes” Marie had mentioned eight minutes ago was how far the incoming aircraft were from releasing their weapons or how far out the bombs themselves were. He knew he could call the Art Room, but at the moment he needed all his wind for running.

He would assume the bombs were just a couple of minutes out, and use that time to get off the inside slope of the crater.

The slope was a lot steeper here. He slung his rifle over his shoulder in order to free his hands.

Akulinin was loading another grenade when the first exploded. It hadn’t struck the helicopter but had fallen short, landing close to the tents.

The explosion came in two parts — an initial burst followed by a much larger, much more powerful detonation that sent a towering plume of smoke and orange flame boiling into the sky. At first he thought he’d hit an ammo dump, then realized that he’d managed to touch off a large supply of fuel, probably avgas for the helicopter.

The blast, visible as the rising plume of smoke, caught the bright green helicopter and tilted it wildly to the side …

The helicopter lurched savagely to the right, throwing Feng against the side. Outside, a wall of boiling, oily smoke was engulfing the aircraft, which began turning sharply, out of control. They were going to crash, Feng knew it. He had only a few seconds left. Raising the remote unit Azhar had given him, he mashed his thumb down on the firing button.

Nothing happened. The helicopter continued to spin as it fell. Panicking now, Feng hit the button again and again, then flipped the remote over and clawed off the plastic panel over the battery housing.

There were no batteries.

He just had time to realize that Azhar hadn’t trusted him after all before the helicopter struck the floor of the crater in a burgeoning mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke.

Lieutenant Colonel Farley stared at the telemetry readout from his number two JDAM.

Shit!

“Firestorm, Firestorm Five,” he said. “One of my weapons just lost target lock. Switching to GPS mode.”

“Five, One. Which target? Over.”

“One, Five. The southern San Martin crater. It’s now tracking on GPS guidance.”

“Copy, Five.”

Farley didn’t know why their orders called for them to drop bombs on one of the Canary Islands. The whole thing was classified and compartmentalized, and no one talked much about it. For all he knew, it was another training exercise, one with live weapons.

He did know that the GPS coordinates loaded into those weapons were only approximate, gathered by someone on the ground and adjusted visually for distance. Under these circumstances the weapons would have a CEP — a circular error probability — of thirty yards or more.

He just hoped the people on the ground knew what the hell they were doing. This was a great way of scoring an own goal. …

Ibrahim Hussain Azhar heard the explosion and saw the green Marrakech Air Transport helicopter suddenly begin to rotate and fall. An instant later, another explosion rocked the crater as the aircraft crashed and burned.

He’d expected as much; the American forces on the crater rim wouldn’t allow a helicopter to escape the trap, not when it might be carrying a nuclear weapon off the island. He had to assume that they knew about the suitcase bombs by now.

That either bombs or U.S. Marines were now on the way was a certainty. Gunfire continued to bark and crackle across the crater floor as high-exposive rounds dropped among his men one after another. As oily black smoke rose from the helicopter crash on the higher part of the crater floor, he knew he might now have only minutes left. There was no time to evacuate the crater, no time to attach the bomb to a cable and lower it into the laboriously excavated borehole.

He’d deliberately given Feng a remote control without batteries, knowing that he would have fired the bombs as soon as he came under enemy fire. Maybe that would have been the best possible alternative, but Azhar still hoped the plan would work as originally designed. Shah and Chatel were up at Taburiente now, and as soon as they realized that the volcanos were under attack, they would trigger the bombs from there.

This one wasn’t connected to a receiver yet, though, and couldn’t be triggered down here, where the rock walls of the crater blocked incoming radio signals. But there was another way.

Scooping up the nearly completed weapon, he rose and dashed toward the lava tube entrance.

As Castelano talked with the policeman, CJ took a couple of steps forward, staring at the group of men on the tourist viewing platform. They seemed intent on something on the ridge to the south.

A moment ago, there’d been a wisp of white cloud above one of the craters visible in the blue haze in the distance. Now a black pillar of smoke hung like a storm cloud above one of the peaks. The men were arguing, one gesturing with what looked like a television remote.

Reaching behind her back, CJ pulled out the P226, raised it braced in both hands, and began squeezing the trigger. The guard in front of the police tape twisted and fell.

Advancing step by step, she continued firing. Behind her, the policeman reached for his holstered sidearm, pushing past Castelano, yelling at her in Spanish to stop. Castelano reached out and grabbed the officer, using his foot to lash out and trip the man into a headlong sprawl.

CJ kept firing.

Ten bombs whistled softly through the afternoon sky, spreading out slightly as each vectored in on its assigned, illuminated target. They guided on beams of reflected laser energy, each beam set at a different frequency to avoid targeting confusion, their tail control surfaces adjusting moment to moment to keep the falling weapon centered on its target.

The first strikes were at the cluster of three northernmost peaks, at Volcán de San Juan and Birigoyo almost simultaneously, with a bomb striking the third crater seconds later. Gouts of smoke and cinders were hurled into the sky, as drilling derricks toppled and collapsed, as fuel stores erupted, as JeM personnel tried to take cover … and died.

The next two in line were Hoyo Negro and Duraznero. The explosions seemed to walk south along the crest of the Cumbre Viaja, explosion following explosion in thundering promenade as drilling rigs were torn apart, boreholes sealed, and radio receivers and electrical cables flung about and shredded by the blasts.

One bomb, the second released by Firestorm Five, lost its lock on its illuminated target when clouds of smoke blocked the laser light from the Marine position nearby. Operating now on GPS data as backup, it howled in low above the northeastern rim of the crater, missed the drilling rig by scant yards, and slammed into the upper portion of the crater floor.

The blast was akin to the crack of Armageddon.

Akulinin saw the detonations of the other bombs off to the north. “Get down!” he screamed. Lunging forward, he knocked Lia to the ground, throwing himself over her.

An instant later, they heard the bomb shriek over the crater and strike among the tents close by the burning wreckage of the helicopter.

The explosion felt like a volcano going off, a heavy, massive whoom that literally shook the earth and slammed Akulinin’s chest and belly with what felt like a hard kick. They were plunged into shadow as a vast column of black smoke and debris lofted itself above the crater rim; then, slowly and with a measure of grace, it began to collapse back into the pit.

It began to rain rock fragments and cinders, and all the two could do was cover their heads and necks with their arms and ride it out.

The ridge top was suddenly, inexplicably, and oddly silent. Akulinin could see Lia shouting something … but he couldn’t hear her words.

Dean had just made it to the top of the crater rim when the blast caught him from behind, lifting him up, flinging him forward, slamming him down. Lying flat, he covered his head with his arms as rock pelted him. As the cascade subsided, he rolled over and looked back at the crater.

The drilling derrick still stood. He couldn’t see any signs of life, but the crater floor was filled with smoke and swirling dust from the explosion. The tent farm, the wrecked helicopter, the landing pad — all had vanished, replaced by a steaming crater fifteen yards across.

CJ’s SIG SAUER clicked empty, the slide snapping back on an open chamber. She’d reached the yellow tape, now, stepping past the body of the Tango in the guardia uniform.

On the observation platform, Shah lay on his back, dead, the remote control device just beyond his outstretched hand. The other two were wounded, one clutching his belly in grimacing anguish, the other, Chatel, clutching his leg. With one hand, the Frenchman reached for the remote. CJ stepped up to him, the P226 still gripped two-handed, and aimed it at his face, point blank. “Don’t,” she said.

Chatel rolled back, his hands held up, palms out. His expression was one of glassy-eyed shock, and he didn’t seem to notice that CJ’s pistol was empty.

Castelano reached her a moment later, followed closely by an angry and confused Spanish police officer.

“These are the ones,” Castelano told the officer in Spanish. “You’ll need to take them into custody, keep them under heavy guard.”

To the south, pillars of black smoke were rising above the line of volcanic craters.

His ears were ringing loudly, but Dean could still hear. “Art Room!” he called. His own voice sounded distant, almost muffled, and it cracked as he spoke. His mouth was parched and felt like it was coated with dust.

“We copy, Charlie,” Jeff Rockman said.

“The strike went down. I don’t know about the other targets, but this one missed. The derrick is still standing. I can’t see it, but I think the borehole must still be open.”

“That’s okay, Charlie.” Rockman’s voice, too, sounded distant. Dean had to work to pick the words out from behind the auditory ringing. “Marines from the Iwo Jima are on their way in. You may be able to see them now.”

Dean was standing on the northwestern slope of the crater, a good 280 yards from the top of the gully where Ilya and Lia were sheltering. He couldn’t see them, and hoped they’d found cover on the outside slope of the cone. They were close over there to the spot where the bomb had struck.

Turning, he looked northwest and saw the helicopters coming in.

The helo in the lead was an MH-60S Knighthawk, painted pale gray and sporting Navy markings.

“The Recon Marines will be in soon to secure the area,” Rockman was telling him. “That lead helicopter is there to pick up you and the Green Amber Marines.”

“Roger that.”

He could see Ilya and Lia now across the crater, standing side by side, waving. He saw Rodriguez and Dulaney as well, farther south, their forms barely glimpsed, shimmering, through the haze of smoke filling the caldera. The helicopter flew past Ilya and Lia, vectoring in on the Marines.

Dean was feeling a bit exposed on the crest of the ridge, so he moved over the top and started down the western flank. A bike path was there, winding its way from crater to crater along the top of the ridge.

The rifle shot ricocheted off a boulder two feet to his left, and Dean hit the ground. Lia’s report had mentioned Tangos manning roadblocks along those bike paths; some of the bad guys must still be out there.

Crawling around behind the boulder, he tried to see where the enemy fire was coming from.

Another shot struck the rock close by his face, close enough that fragments stung his cheek.

The massive explosion had thrown Azhar to the floor of the lava tube and showered him with rock breaking loose from the ceiling, but he was still alive. He’d dropped his flashlight, saw it yet gleaming in the dusty air nearby.

The bomb was intact, thanks be to Allah.

This, he thought, was deep enough. The Cumbre Vieja, he knew, was riddled with lava tubes like this, some of them winding through the depths of these mountains for miles. He didn’t know how deep this one ran, wasn’t even sure how far down he’d come. At one point during the planning for Wrath of God, they’d considered using this lava tube, and others, rather than drilling boreholes. The far more costly expedient of drilling wells into the throats of these volcanos had been adopted in the end for the simple reason that doing so guaranteed placement of the bombs as deep beneath the mountains as possible, to lift the maximum mass of rock from the flanks of the Cumbre Vieja and hurl it into the sea.

This would do, though. The explosion moments earlier might have been the other nukes all going off together … but he didn’t think so. He hoped he was wrong, hoped the bombs had detonated, but if they had, they should have taken this section of rock along with them on the long slide to the sea. More likely, the blast had been an American bomb, and that meant that the plan had almost certainly failed.

There was still a chance, however. One bomb was not ten, and a lava tube some hundreds of meters in length was not a borehole sunk four hundred meters directly down into solid rock, but it was something. He would detonate the weapon, and the resultant landslide might be enough.

At the very least, he would blow the top off of this mountain and wreak a measure of revenge against the enemy forces that had brought his plan for Islamic unity to ruin.

He still needed to connect the battery. Holding the flashlight between his teeth, he began working on the final steps to arm the device.

Lia watched as the Navy helicopter came closer. It had picked up the two Marines on the west flank of the crater, and now the aircraft was coming after her and Akulinin. Four more Marines from the FORECON Green Amber team were arriving as well from nearby craters. As the helicopter touched down, rotors still turning, they formed up in an orderly line and began filing aboard, clambering into the side cargo hatch.

The Marines were brisk and businesslike; Lia had expected that they would have been jubilant at their success, bringing in nine out of ten blockbuster bombs to annihilate the terrorist threat on La Palma. A nuclear holocaust had been averted, as had a potential doomsday threat to the U.S. East Coast. She’d have thought they’d all be whooping it up.

Maybe they were as numb as she was.

Maybe the celebrations would come later.

Ilya helped her up into the helicopter. “Is that all of you?” a crewman yelled at her over the clatter of the rotors as the last Marine came on board.

Her hearing had been gone for a moment or two there, but the ringing in her ears had been steadily growing louder over the past couple of minutes. She realized she could hear again, though the ringing made it touch and go.

She shook her head and pointed west. “One more!” she yelled. “Other side of the mountain somewhere!”

The roar of the rotors increased, and the helicopter lifted off again.

In the darkness far below, Ibrahim Azhar looked up toward the ceiling of the tunnel.

He believed in Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. He believed that God had spoken through His Prophet, bless his name, and that God would judge the universe. That belief, of course, was as much a part of the image of radical fundamentalist Islam as was hating the Jews and demanding an end to the Jewish state. Yet … sometimes the faith wavered, something he rarely admitted even to himself. What just and merciful God would allow the injustice and poverty of so many people, while their rulers enjoyed such opulence?

Though God alone was what united a billion Muslims, He seemed curiously unwilling to assist His people in regaining their rightful place in this world.

So, if God refused to show Himself, what remained was only … politics, his passionate yearning to see his people united under a single leader from Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines, from central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. To see the western oppressors humiliated and overthrown.

Especially to see America brought low.

Operation Wrath of God yet might work.

It was possible. God might act after all. Azhar could yet be that God’s avenging right arm. Perhaps God had brought him here to this darkness for exactly that purpose.

“Allahu akbar!” he cried. “God is great!”

He brought the bare end of one wire down on a battery contact.

And darkness turned to Light …

Dean saw a Tango leap up from cover and dash forward up the hill, racing toward his position. He raised his rifle, but the man dropped again behind cover before Dean could squeeze off a round. There were several bad guys down there among the pine trees and boulders, and they had him pinned here, unable to move. That helicopter wasn’t going to be able to come in to dust him off if hostiles were firing at it from a hot LZ.

Then the earth moved.

It started as a vast and powerful, deep rumble, an eruption from far, far below the surface that became louder and more powerful moment by thunderous moment. The boulder was actually trembling, and loose stones and cinders on the ground were dancing about wildly as the earthquake grew in strength.

The side of the mountain was lifting, rising toward the sky …

The helicopter lurched suddenly as though swatted by a giant hand, tipping wildly to starboard. Lia clung to a handhold as several of the Marines around her cursed, some of them pitched to the deck.

“What the hell is going on?” one demanded.

Sparks burst from a bundle of electrical wiring attached to the overhead, spilling foul-smelling smoke into the compartment. The Navy crewman yanked a fire extinguisher from a wall bracket and doused the fire with CO₂.

Below, half of the mountain appeared to be rising, pushing upward atop a pillar of black debris, rising and falling outward, toward the west.

“Hang on, everyone!” the pilot yelled above ongoing thunder and shouting Marines.

The helicopter began climbing.

He tried to stand up but couldn’t. The boulder that had been his cover shifted suddenly, then began rolling and bouncing down the hill. The Tangos, fortunately, were too busy hanging on to take advantage of Dean’s sudden exposure.

All he could do was hang on. Above and behind, the top of the mountain appeared to be exploding into the sky, a pillar of smoke and blackness that must have been a mile high, perhaps higher, and still it continued to grow.

The side of the mountain to which Charlie Dean was clinging continued to rise … and then it was falling, dropping back again, slaming against the ground, but the ground itself was no longer solid but a fast-flowing avalanche of rock and gravel and dirt.

Dean guessed that he was riding a single block of stone, a chunk of mountainside perhaps a hundred yards long and fifty wide. The nearest edge, toward the north, was crumbling away as he watched, bringing the edge closer and yet closer. Beyond, the ground was a hellish churning of tumbling rock and debris, an avalanche hurtling down the western side of Volcán de San Martin, racing toward the sea.

A lone Tango a dozen yards away made it to his feet, swaying as he rode the mass of basalt, and then the rock lurched and pitched and he fell over the side and into the thunderous slide. As bigger and bigger chunks broke from the northern edge of the rock, Dean managed to get to his feet and scramble south, putting some distance between himself and the edge.

The rock slab was pitched forward nearly forty-five degrees. Dean could look down the slope at green pine forest and banana plantations, at sheer cliffs and, beyond, the sparkling blue of the Atlantic. There was nothing to stop the landslide now, nothing between millions of tons of falling, sliding rock and the ocean.

Charlie Dean was falling with it.

“There he is!” Lia cried, pointing. “In the middle of that big rock!”

The helicopter swung around out of the north, descending. Somehow, somehow, the pilot brought the aircraft under control after the shuddering impact of the shock wave, and now he came in low above the avalanche.

“Ain’t no way I can land on that, miss!” he yelled.

“Just get us fucking closer!” Lia yelled back.

Dean was staring at the fast-approaching ocean. There was no way he could survive falling off those cliffs ahead, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the sea.

“Charlie!” Marie Telach yelled in his skull. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you!” He had to yell, too, just to hear himself above the roar.

“Turn around! Look up!”

He did so. The light gray belly of a Navy helicopter was pacing the sliding rock, twenty feet above him and a little to one side. He could see someone leaning out of the open cargo door, pointing at him.

It was Lia.

“Ilya just patched a call through to the Art Room,” Marie told him. “You weren’t answering your radio!”

His tactical radio, he realized, had been lost in either the first explosion or this second, far vaster blast. His implant was still working, though, and his link with the Art Room.

A length of rope came looping and falling toward him, uncoiling as it dropped. It wasn’t quite long enough, and the winds roiling above the slide right now made it twist and snap unpredictably …

The huge slab of rock struck something, jolted hard, and it began fragmenting, falling to pieces beneath Dean’s feet, lurching again skyward, and hurling him with it. Desperately, he reached out and snagged the trailing rope one-handed. The wind tore at him, but he managed to grab it with both hands, clinging to the end of a twenty-foot line as the helicopter began rising, rising, hauling Dean up and away from the deadly torrent of crumbling, hurtling, thundering rock.

Then he was out over the ocean as the landslide spewed out over a hundred-foot cliff. He saw the mass of rock, half a mountain’s worth of basalt, strike the sea in a titanic explosion of whitewater and spray.

He was far too weak to climb. All he could do was cling to the rope, his lifeline, as the Marines on board the helicopter used a winch to haul him up.

Among those who grabbed hold of him moments later, arms clutching him and dragging him up and over and onto the Knighthawk’s cargo deck, were Lia and Ilya.

Behind them, a volcano erupted beneath a black umbrella of smoke, sending gouts of molten rock, glowing orange-hot, roiling high into the tropical sky.

Sand beaches are uncommon along the rocky coast of Maine. On the entire island of Mount Desert, within the boundaries of Acadia National Park, there is exactly one, a 350-yard stretch of white sand facing south into the Atlantic. The chill waters of the Gulf of Maine are too cold to tempt any but the hardiest souls, even in late summer, but tourists flock to the beach to watch the waves, to hike the nearby trails, to play in the sand and photograph the picturesque headlands, the rocky islands along the coast, the lobster boats plying their trade just offshore.

The La Palma Landslip, as geologists would later refer to it, had indeed raised a tidal wave as it slid into the sea three thousand miles from New England, creating a swell within the ocean that raced out across the Atlantic at five hundred miles per hour. Unseen in the open ocean, it was a wave in the physics sense, a transmission of energy rather than a visible moving crest. Only as it passed into shallower water did the physics begin to manifest as something visible.

The wave rippled across the Atlantic in six hours; Mount Desert was the northernmost stretch of U.S. coastline not sheltered by the loom of Nova Scotia just over a hundred miles away. On Sand Beach, Brad and Tammy Matheson were sitting on the beach, watching Ryan, their nine-year-old son, building a sand castle between the high and low tide lines. He’d been at it for nearly three hours and had erected a labyrinth of towers and walls that would have done Camelot proud. The tide was coming in now, but Ryan still had perhaps an hour before his edifice faced a serious marine challenge.

The rogue wave caught them all by surprise. It surged up past the high-water mark, a white swirl of foam and froth that kept coming … and coming. It engulfed the sand castle as Ryan squealed, toppled ramparts, washed away walls, and continue climbing the gentle slope of the beach, forcing the Mathesons to scramble to snatch up towels, blankets, clothes, and beach bags.

“Not yet!” Ryan screamed at the implacable elements. “It’s not ready!”

Then the wave receded once more, streaming down the beach and back to the sea, taking the sand castle with it.