09.Deep Black: Death Wave Read online

  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. …

  CALDERA TABURIENTE

  NORTH END OF LA PALMA

  MONDAY, 1542 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  26

  NORTHEAST RIM

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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!”

  INNER SLOPE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  HELICOPTER

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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 …

  NORTHEAST RIM

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  INNER SLOPE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  NORTHEAST RIM

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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 …

  HELICOPTER

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1545 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  FIRESTORM FIVE

  12 NMI NORTHEAST OF LA PALMA

  MONDAY, 1547 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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. …

  DRILL SITE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1548 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  CALDERA TABURIENTE

  NORTH END OF LA PALMA

  MONDAY, 1548 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  FIRESTORM FORCE PACKAGES

  MONDAY, 1548 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  NORTHEAST RIM

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1548 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.