Death Wave (41 page)

“FORECON may be the best we can do.” He read for another moment. “You realize this requires presidential approval?”

“That’s why I’m here, sir.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Unknown, sir. However, one piece of intercepted intelligence suggested that the bad guys were going to have everything ready sometime this coming week … and we believe earlier in the week rather than later. If I had to guess, tomorrow or Tuesday.”

“Shit. You’re just full of good news, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they pay me for.”

“And you really think these terrorists are able to generate a tidal wave of this magnitude?”

Rubens shifted uncomfortably. James had immediately highlighted the weakest part of the threat assessment. “There are … pros and cons,” he admitted. “We have a lot of good people looking at the situation. A geology professor over at Georgetown tells me that the idea of La Palma blowing up and causing a hundred-meter tsunami is a crock. It would take just the right explosion, triggering a really big volcanic eruption, and with a
lot
of rock hitting the ocean all at once, to make a respectable wave. She says that computer modeling carried out in Holland recently suggests that it just wouldn’t happen that way.”

“But?”

Rubens sighed and nodded. “But. Can we take the chance? Do we gamble the entire U.S. East Coast on those Dutch computer simulations? What if they’re wrong?”

“The terrorists obviously think they have something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use ten suitcase nukes just to make a big splash. They’d go after cities.”

“Exactly. We think there may have been a power struggle inside JeM over those nukes. The two weapons we’ve just recovered in the Gulf of Aden were probably the compromise—‘okay, we’ll give you two weapons to use against Israel, if you let us have the other ten for La Palma.’ ”

“I’m still not sure I follow that logic,” James said. “Sure, if the tidal wave thing works, they have us on our knees. But it seems like a hell of a long shot. They’d be better off smuggling those weapons into ten U.S. cities.”

“I think, sir, that they’re looking for something more. Not a political or economic victory. A
religious
victory.”

“What do you mean?”

Rubens pointed at the folder. “You saw the part about the writer?”

“The guy in New Jersey? Yes.” He leafed back through the report. “Here he is. Jack Pender.”

“Pender was assassinated by JeM or al-Qaeda killers at a hotel in Fort Lee last Wednesday. It took us a long time, though, to figure out
why
.”

“It says here that Pender and another guy—Carlylse—wrote a book about the La Palma megatsunami. Your source in Spain found out that the bad guys had targeted both of them. Maybe they wanted to shut them up.”

“Except that the book is already on the shelves and hitting the bestseller lists,” Rubens said. “Not only that, the La Palma theory has been circulating for years, ever since the BBC’s
Horizon
aired the first program about it back in 2000. And the closer we get to the year 2012, and all of the nonsense about the end of the world, the more we’ve been hearing about it. Cable TV programs, Web sites—it’s all over the place, so much so that Pender and Carlylse jumped on the bandwagon as well. So why slam the barn door shut after the horse gallops out?
Especially
if killing the writers calls even more attention to the book?”

“Point …”

“We’ve had our analysts going over the book, looking for anything that the enemy might not want us to know. And we think we now know what they’re worried about.”

“What?”

“
Death Wave: The 2012 Prophecies Fulfilled
is about how all sorts of doomsday predictions might come true if La Palma blows up, okay?”

“Yes.”

“The collapse of the U.S. economy, widespread destruction of lots of our cities. Pender and Carlylse tie all of that into the Book of Revelation in the Bible.”

“Like you said. Doomsday.”

Rubens shook his head. “Except that the Book of Revelation doesn’t have anything to do, really, with the 2012 garbage,
except
for doomsday.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The year 2012 is when the ancient Mayan calendar runs out. Some airy-fairy New Age types think that means a new age of peace and enlightenment will be upon us, kind of like the Age of Aquarius back in the sixties. Some, including sensationalist writers like Pender and Carlylse, think it means the end of the world. It’s the sensationalists who link the end of the Mayan calendar with something completely different—Armageddon and the end of the world as described in the Bible, in Revelation.”

“It seems like a reasonable supposition. The end of the world is the end of the world, whether you’re Christian or Mayan.”

“Or Muslim,” Rubens pointed out. “The Qur’an has verses about Judgment Day, and some of them are closely patterned on the Book of Revelation—trumpets sounding, mountains being carried away, that sort of thing. Some of the Hadiths, the sayings of Mohammad, are even more to the point. There’s one that says that just before the Day of Judgment, there will be three tremendous landslides, unlike any seen before—one in the west, one in the east, one in Arabia.

“Pender and Carlylse go into some of that in the book, including the idea that in the aftermath of the disaster, a lot of people on the Religious Right in America might think that the Book of Revelation is literally coming true. ‘And I saw something like a burning mountain fall into the sea …’ ”

“The Qur’an?”

“No, sir. Book of Revelation, Chapter eight, Verse eight. They suggest that the tsunami might lead to an all-out war between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam, ending in the Battle of Armageddon. What they
don’t
say is that Muslims might get the same idea.”

“How would killing Pender and Carlylse help the terrorists?”

“We know they were planning another book about a megatsunami and the end of the world. We also know that Pender was about to appear on a TV talk show being filmed in New York City the afternoon he was killed, and that he was going to be talking about end times stuff, how their book might fit in with prophesies about the end of the world.

“The terrorists didn’t care if the murder of those two writers gave them more publicity or not. So far as they were concerned, the more people to read it the better, probably. But what they might want to hide was the possibility that a megatsunami on the U.S. East Coast
might be seen by devout Muslims as anything but divine judgment on America
. By selectively putting out verses from the Qur’an and some of the Hadiths, they might convince a lot of Muslims that it was time to rise up against Allah’s enemies all over the world. They would have to hide the fact that Islamic terrorists caused the disaster, of course. It would have to look like a literal act of God. I think that what they were trying to hide was, not the book itself, but the possibility that somebody might be crazy enough to create that kind of disaster artificially.”

“Do you have any evidence that Pender and Carlylse were thinking along those lines? Talk about an Islamic plot to blow up La Palma?”

“No, sir. Not yet. Pender is dead, and Carlylse is still on La Palma, with one of our operators. We’re trying to get him safely back here so we can question him about that.” Rubens shrugged. “It’s the best we have to go on right now, though. Our analysts have been running themselves ragged, trying to figure out why JeM would try to trigger an eruption instead of just blasting twelve cities. The only thing that comes close to making sense is the idea that JeM hopes to cause a disaster that they can point to and say, ‘Look! Allah is wrecking America! It’s time to unite and destroy the infidels!’ ”

“I’m not convinced,” James said. “Too many what-ifs.”

“I’m not sure
I’m
convinced. But can we ignore the possibility?”

“No, we can’t.”

“Anyway, whether we think it’s plausible or not, there’s another consideration.”

“What’s that?”

“La Palma’s population is eighty-six thousand. Setting off ten small nuclear weapons could kill a
lot
of people, whether there’s a landslide or not.”

“True …”

“And the fact remains, we don’t know what ten nuclear weapons are going to do to an active volcanic region. Those Dutch modelers were confident that they’d discredited the idea, but we just don’t know for sure. I’m told that a powerful earthquake has a
lot
more energy than a nuclear weapon. But if it served as a trigger …”

“A detonator. A small charge that sets off a larger one.”

“Exactly.”

“I assume you realize that the Canary Islands belong to Spain. The President will insist that we consult with them first.”

“And I suggest that that would be a very bad idea,” Rubens replied. “The bad guys almost certainly got some sort of official authorization to do this, probably under the guise of scientific research. If they find out ahead of time that we’re planning an amphibious operation to secure those drill sites, they might set the weapons off early—or even trigger them when our Marines are getting close. We
cannot
afford to tip them off ahead of time.”

“There are, unfortunately, military realities … and there are political realities.” He thought a moment. “Do you know Admiral Ericson?”

“SOCOM? Of course.”

“Let’s see what we can do through his office in order to pre-position some of our assets.”

“Ericson’s a good man,” Rubens said. He’d only met Charles Ericson a few times, but he had the reputation of being pragmatic, direct, and no-nonsense, with little patience for bureaucracy and armchair quarterbacking. “What about Foster?”

Jerry C. Foster was the assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and intendependent capabilities, the head of a coordinating board within the National Security Council.

“He’ll have to be brought in. The Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon, too. But a lot of that can be UNODIR.”

Rubens nodded. “UNODIR” was an unofficial military acronym that had crept into common usage within the U.S. Special Forces community over the past couple of decades. It stood for “unless otherwise directed” and had come from the tangled political morass of spec-ops in Vietnam. An officer planning a risky but necessary operation—a recon, say, deep into enemy-held territory—might write an op plan, telling headquarters that it would be carried out
unless otherwise directed
… unless HQ came back and told him no. The op plan would then be submitted, but too late for headquarters to call off the op, and too late for enemy agents to tip off the bad guys. It had been, in fact, a common means of sidestepping political micromanagement from the rear.

What James was suggesting, though, went far beyond the scope of platoon-level operations in Vietnam.

“It’s our careers on the line, you know,” James added. “If you’ve guessed wrong, they’re going to hang us out to dry.”

“If I’ve guessed wrong, at least we won’t get wet,” Rubens replied. “But if I’ve guessed right and we don’t act, we’d all better be able to tread water for a
long
time.”

“Sometimes,” General James replied, “I think treading water is what I do for a living.”

Rubens knew exactly what he meant.

He’d considered bringing up Operation White Horse with James—a plan, still in development, to get a small team onto La Palma with the explicit purpose of rescuing Lia DeFrancesca. The thought of just leaving her there, to be interrogated and killed by the terrorists, was simply beyond the pale.

However, he also knew that while such a plan could be subsumed into the larger op easily enough, it would be
very
hard to get approval for a rescue op if his request for an amphibious invasion of La Palma was down-checked.

And he was not going to leave his people behind, even if it meant circumventing directives from the White House.

21

OBSERVATORIO DEL ROQUE DE LOS MUCHACHOS
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
MONDAY, 1115 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Damn it, I never should have left her behind
.

Carolyn Howorth stood on the rampart of the tourist observation deck, precariously perched on the edge of the dizzying overlook at the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente. The crater wall fell away beneath her feet, a precipitous fall of over a mile, virtually straight down.

The caldera was a vast mountain ring more than four miles across. Despite what it looked like, Taburiente was not the result of some ancient, colossal volcanic explosion. The formation had begun as a shield volcano, some millions of years in the past, but water erosion had eventually carved it into its current shape. To the southwest, the caldera had been torn open by a river valley, the Barranco de las Augustias, a gap in the mountain wall leading to the Atlantic at the village of Puerto.