09.Deep Black: Death Wave Read online

  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.

  INNER SLOPE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1548 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  CALDERA TABURIENTE

  NORTH END OF LA PALMA

  MONDAY, 1548 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  WESTERN SLOPE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1550 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1550 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  NORTHEAST RIM

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1555 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  In the darkness far below, Ibrahim A
zhar 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 …

  WESTERN SLOPE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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 …

  NAVY HELICOPTER

  NORTH OF THE SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  WESTERN SLOPE,

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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.

  NAVY HELICOPTER

  NORTH OF THE SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1559 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  “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.

  WESTERN SLOPE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1600 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  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 BEACH

  ACADIA NATIONAL PARK

  MAINE

  6:08 P.M.

  Sand beaches are uncommon along the rock
y 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.