09.Deep Black: Death Wave Page 32

  “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.

  GREEN AMBER ONE

  EAST SLOPE OF SAN MARTIN

  MONDAY, 1422 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  “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.

  SAN MARTIN CRATER

  MONDAY, 1424 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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 starvatio
n, 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.”

  23

  GREEN AMBER ONE

  EAST SLOPE OF SAN MARTIN

  MONDAY, 1429 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Charlie Dean held himself motionless, staring intently upward at the sharp edge where rock met sky. He’d just seen movement—the head of a Tango sentry making his rounds about the caldera’s rim. The sentry vanished again and, after an agonizing wait, Rodriguez gave a hand signal and the four began crawling forward once more. The slope consisted mostly of loose cinders here, with a few chunks of larger rock, the hill rising now at a forty-five-degree angle. If any of them lost their footing, they would slide helplessly back down the slope, raising a billowing cloud of dust as they fell.

  They picked their way forward cautiously, making certain of each step before they moved. They were only a few dozen yards beneath the crater rim now, and it was vital that they not be seen or heard by the sentries.

  As the ground began leveling off, the four again unrolled their tech-Ghillies and secured them to ankles and wrists. Staying flat on the ground to avoid showing their silhouettes against the sky, they inched their way onto the edge of the caldera and had their first look down into the interior.

  The view was much the same as the images transmitted by Lia yesterday, but from the opposite side of the crater. The helicopter sat on a level spot near an array of tents. Within a deeper portion of the crater to the right, a drilling derrick rose from a tangle of support structures and struts, the rumble of pumps and generators filling the bowl with noise. Ten or twelve men were visible—workers around the derrick, and guards carrying AKs. Two sentries were on the crater rim, the nearest a hundred yards away.

  Several unarmed men were walking away from the helicopter, following a curving path that led to the deeper part of the crater to the right.

  Dean pulled out his binoculars and focused on the group. There were three men, and two he recognized from file photos transmitted to his computer during his briefing for this op. The Asian man was Feng Jiu Zhu, formerly a major in China’s Ministry of
State Security, now a vice president of COSCO, itself virtually a branch of the Chinese military. The other was Ibrahim Hussain Azhar, the Jackal, terrorist and cofounder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

  He didn’t recognize the third man, the one carrying a satchel, but he was wearing the black-and-white checkered headscarf that served as a unifying symbol of solidarity for the Palestinians.

  “Art Room,” Dean whispered. As he spoke, he reached down and removed the case containing his rifle’s SOPMOD kit from his leg sheath, opened it, and began removing the four-power optical telescopic sight. “I’ve got both Feng and Azhar in view. I have a clear shot. Request permission to fire.”

  It was a long shot, he knew. The team’s orders were specific—to wait and watch until word came down the chain of command initiating the assault—but Feng and Azhar both were high-priority targets. Capping them now, before the assault teams all had even gotten into position, would decapitate the Tango force, perhaps panic them, and certainly leave them without anyone telling them what to do.

  “Negative on that, Charlie,” Rockman’s voice came back. “The boss is seeing POTUS now. Let’s not drop him in hot water.”

  “Copy.” He continued attaching the sight to his weapon’s rail, however, using the marks incised in the metal to put it solidly in its presighted configuration. He’d practiced this a lot at the range back at Fort Meade; the sight might be a hair off, but at this range, less than two hundred yards, it wouldn’t miss the aim point by more than an inch or two, making it plenty accurate enough for him to take a shot without needing to sight in the weapon anew.

  With the sight screwed down tight, he brought the M4A1’s butt to his shoulder and peered through the sight. He could see the backs of all three men as they made their way down a steep trail into the deeper part of the crater.

  “Art Room. Targets are descending into the northern part of the crater, down where the derrick is.”

  “Copy that,” Rockman replied. “Do you see where the wall between the two drops off sharply? Kind of separates the two craters.”