09.Deep Black: Death Wave

by Stephen Coonts

  “Yup. When I’m on duty, anyway.”

  “So when are you off duty? I’d kind of like to get to know you better. Maybe over dinner?”

  “Mr. Carlylse, are you making a pass at me?”

  “Of course!”

  “My only interest in you is getting you back to the States in one piece. Some of those friends you mention want to talk to you about your book—the one about megatsunamis.”

  “I won’t be able to tell them much that isn’t already in the book.”

  “They’d be interested in your sources, your research. Where you got your information about La Palma and giant tidal waves, that sort of thing.”

  He chuckled. “Most of that came from a BBC television program a few years ago. Horizon, I think the show was called. And there was a disaster program on American cable later about megatsunamis that went into La Palma a bit.”

  “They’d still like to interview you.”

  “Maybe you could interview me? Then I wouldn’t have to go back to America.”

  “There are people here who want to kill you, Mr. Carlylse. Doesn’t that worry you at all?”

  “Not really. So far, the most dangerous person I’ve seen is you.”

  She ignored the jibe, raising the binoculars once again. “You’ve been up there, then?”

  “Sure was. Wednesday morning. I rented a car in Puerto Naos, drove up to the village of Fatima, then rented a bike and tried to get up there.” He pointed to the left of Pico Berigoyo, indicating another peak. “That’s Montaña Rejada.”

  She looked him up and down. “You’re in better shape than you look.”

  “Thank you so much. Anyway, I got to a point just below the top of the ridge when the guards stopped me. They had the path blocked off with yellow tape, and there was that geological institute sign.”

  “Guards? How many?”

  “Two.”

  “What kind of guards? Spanish Army?”

  “I don’t think so. Might have been a private security group. They were wearing mostly civilian clothing, but the vests and hats looked military. Canteens. Boots. Maybe military surplus. Otherwise, they were wearing sports shirts and blue jeans, that sort of thing. But they had guns.”

  “What kind of guns?”

  “AK-47s.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’ve written about military stuff. A little, anyway. Yeah, I’m sure. They were either AK-47s or AK-74s. I’m not sure of the difference. But Russian assault rifles, anyway. They told me I was trespassing and that I should go back down the mountain unless I wanted to be arrested.”

  “So you did?”

  “Not immediately. I rode a little ways back down the hill into a stand of pines, parked my bike, and then looked around a bit on foot. I was curious about those guys.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw a helicopter land.”

  “What? Where?”

  He pointed again. “It’s kind of tough to see from here, but Rejada Mountain has three volcanic craters, side by side, in a kind of V formation. I was on a bike path just below the rim of the middle crater, maybe a hundred feet from the crest. I saw a helicopter fly up over the top of the ridge from the east side of the island, then disappear down inside that crater.”

  “What kind of helicopter?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t see any markings. It was pretty big, though, like a transport. I figured they must be using choppers to get all their gear up there.”

  “Did you see any of the drilling rigs or equipment?”

  He shook his head. “No. I heard some of the guards up on the slope above me, so I hurried on back to where I’d stashed my bike.”

  “I think I’d like a closer look.”

  “I could take you up there.”

  She gave him an appraising look. “Maybe. It would not be a date. You understand that?”

  “Absolutely!” He raised his hand. “Scout’s honor!”

  “We’ll need to check the airline schedules first—and I want to see what this geological research institute is, where it’s headquartered. But … maybe. If you’re still here tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s a date!” He grinned, then saw her expression. “Um, it’s a deal, I mean,” he amended.

  “That’s better. Let’s get back to the hotel.”

  “Lia?” a familiar voice said over her implant. “This is Bill Rubens.”

  She stopped. “Yes? What do you have?”

  Carlylse looked at her curiously but didn’t say anything.

  “CJ just called us. There’s … a complication.”

  “What complication?”

  “Flight Twelve, the commuter flight to Madrid. It went down about half an hour ago off the coast of Morocco.”

  “My God!”

  “What is it, Lia?” Carlylse asked.

  She waved him to silence. “A bomb?”

  “No details yet. Officially, the flight is missing. Miss Howorth is in the La Palma Airport tower, however, and tells us the plane went out of radio contact with Agadir Traffic Control at fourteen hundred hours, your time. Until we hear more, we must assume that hostiles have attempted to take out Mr. Carlylse.”

  “Understood, sir.” She grabbed Carlylse’s elbow, pulling him forward.

  “What?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Shut up,” she told him, “and move!”

  17

  CUMBRE VIEJA

  LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS

  SUNDAY, 1115 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  The bike ride up from Fatima to the crest of the towering ridge had been both exhausting and exhilarating. The view, certainly, was spectacular, with pine-clad mountains thrusting into the sky ahead, with a panorama of impossibly blue ocean and sweeping green and black coastline at their backs. They’d been pumping away with their bikes in the lowest possible gear for the last mile or so, their legs circling steadily as they barely made headway up the slope.

  “We never got much of this sort of thing in Yorkshire,” CJ gasped. “I think I’ve been behind a desk for way too long.”

  “Then it’s time you got out and got some exercise,” Lia told her. Her own legs were burning, however, with the unaccustomed exertion. She’d passed her physical quals at the CIA’s Farm near Williamsburg, an endurance-fitness test that included running for four miles—but that had been two months ago, and she hadn’t been doing anything nearly this strenuous since.

  “I thought you James Bond types were supposed to be in peak physical shape,” Carlylse said. He was panting hard himself, though, and sweating heavily.

  “That’ll be enough out of you, mister,” Lia told him. “You’re here strictly on sufferance—and until we figure out what to do with you.”

  “I can think of several possibilities,” he said.

  Lia ignored him. He’d been flirting heavily with her, or trying to, since yesterday. She wondered if he was capable of taking anything seriously at all.

  CJ was in the lead. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Up ahead.”

  “That’s the roadblock,” Carlylse confirmed.

  “Same guards?”

  “I don’t think so. Hard to tell.”

  “Chances are they’re a different two. I imagine all tourists look alike to them anyway.”

  The three cyclists brought their rented bikes to a halt as one of the sentries stepped out in front of them, hand waving them off. Carlylse had been right; they were carrying AK-74s, the updated 5.45 mm version of the older 7.62 mm AK-47. They wore a dirty mix of civilian clothing and army surplus cast-offs, and the beards gave them a less than military appearance. She couldn’t see any sign of an identifying badge or patch, and they certainly didn’t look like members of a private or corporate security firm.

  “Alto,” the nearest of them said. “El camino está cerrado.”

  “We’re meeting friends,” CJ said, also in Spanish. She pointed toward the left, toward the rugged skyline of the caldera on the north end of the island. �
��Over there. Can’t you just let us ride up that way, instead of having to go all the way around?”

  “No. The road is closed.”

  As CJ argued with the guards, Lia looked around, making mental notes. The sign was there, nailed to the trunk of a tree, proclaiming in English and in Spanish that the area was off-limits to tourists, courtesy of the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.

  CJ was getting nowhere with the guards. “Come on, CJ,” Lia told her. “At least going back it’s all downhill.”

  They turned their bikes and began walking them down the road. Lia heard one of the men make a guttural comment in what sounded like Arabic. The other snickered, then said, “Bintilkha-ta!”

  Down the road and around a curve, they hid their bicycles behind a tumble of massive blocks of volcanic rock. Carlylse pointed up the steep slope. “That’s where I went, up there. That’s where I saw the helicopter.”

  “Let’s do it,” Lia said.

  The climb took them about five hundred feet up a steep slope of loose gravel. At first, they had trees and shrubs to grab hold of and help their ascent, but then they emerged into the open. “Keep low,” Lia warned the others, “and when you reach the top, stay flat on the ground. Don’t show your silhouette against the sky.”

  They crawled the last thirty feet, reaching the rim of the crater at last. The crest was topped by scattered boulders and rocks, and they were able to find a spot from which they could peer down into the crater without being seen.

  The landscape stretched out below and around them was utterly alien and otherworldly, sere and convoluted, a maze of boulders and broken ground. The crater looked like a tiny piece of the surface of the moon, a perfectly formed bowl of dark gray cinders. A few isolated pines grew inside the crater, but for the most part the caldera below was barren. At the bottom, however, a helicopter rested on a cleared patch of ground off to one side. Nearby were several tents, and at the center of the depression a black derrick jutted forty feet high. Even at a distance of over six hundred feet, the noise was jarring—the roar of a gasoline-powered generator, the pounding of a heavy mud pump, the grinding rasp of the turning drill string.

  Lia extracted her binoculars from their case and switched the device on. “Okay, Art Room,” she said quietly, raising the eyepieces to her face. “Are you getting a picture?”

  “It’s coming through perfectly, Lia,” Marie Telach replied. “What are we looking at?”

  “This is the largest of the three craters that make up the top of Rejada Mountain, the one in the center. I’d estimate the floor at about a hundred and twenty feet below the crater rim.” Raising the binoculars, she focused on the opposite rim and checked the numbers appearing at the lower right of the image. “The crater is just over twelve hundred feet across, rim to rim. Siege? What’s our altitude?”

  CJ was examining a small handheld unit. “Fifty-seven hundred feet.”

  “Weather is clear, with a low layer of clouds off to the north, at the north end of the island …”

  Lia continued reading off measurements and observations to the Art Room while panning the electronic binoculars back and forth, transmitting the images through the antenna in her belt. After showing the overall panorama, she zoomed in on the activity on the crater floor.

  The helicopter was a Eurocopter EC145, a light utility aircraft used for transporting personnel or small cargos. Lia could see neither markings on its dark-olive fuselage nor weapons.

  The drilling tower was positioned at the exact center of the crater. Lia could see half a dozen men working at the tower’s base, barechested and covered in grime. She wondered if Chatel was among them, then decided the Frenchman was a bit too aristocratic to get his hands that dirty.

  Another paramilitary guard with an AK stood a few dozen feet away, watching the work.

  “Get us a closer look at the drill pipe, will you?” Telach asked.

  “Here you go.” Lia pressed a button on the side of the binoculars, zooming in even more. She held it on the central mechanism inside the derrick. The tubing appeared to be hexagonal rather than a cylinder, which surprised her.

  “Okay,” Telach told her. “That’s fine. We need to see the approaches now, if you could manage it.”

  “I don’t see any easy way down there,” Lia said over the radio link as she pulled back on the zoom and panned across the crater. “The inner slopes of the bowl are bare gravel, rock, and cinders. I can see one more … no, two more armed guards on the crater rim opposite from our position. There are poles set up around the drill site perimeter, with what look like floodlights. I suspect the crater walls are pretty brightly lit at night.”

  She continued describing what she could see for another few minutes. Then CJ tapped her arm and pointed. Another guard was walking along the crater rim, three hundred feet away, but moving slowly in their direction. He was taking his time, his weapon slung, and he appeared bored. They hadn’t been seen yet.

  “Okay,” she told the Art Room. “There’s a sentry coming. We’re going to move back downslope.”

  Staying flat against the slope, they alternately slid and crawled down the side of the volcanic cone until they were again within the shelter of the pines. From there, they made their way farther down the hill until they returned to the place where they’d left their bikes.

  “What now?” Carlylse asked. “Back to Fatima?”

  “No,” Lia said. “I think we can follow some of these lower trails along the west flank of the ridge south. I want to see where else they have roadblocks—and to see if they have any more drill sites.”

  “More pedaling?”

  “More pedaling.”

  “You know,” Carlylse said, “you spies are supposed to run around in souped-up Aston Martins and high-tech aircraft, not goddamned bicycles, for Christ’s sake.”

  “We’ll take that under advisement, Mr. Carlylse. But the agency has had to cut back a lot lately. Budget constraints, you know.”

  They mounted up and started back down the road.

  CIC, USS LAKE ERIE

  NORTH OF SOCOTRA

  GULF OF ADEN

  SUNDAY, 1605 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  “Good picture,” Dean said.

  “Ought to be,” Captain Morrisey replied. “The hardware cost enough.”

  Dean and Akulinin stood inside the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of the Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser Lake Erie, a darkened shipboard compartment every bit as high-tech as the Art Room back at Fort Meade. Large-screen monitors were everywhere, watched intently by Navy enlisted personnel, both men and women, seated at workstation consoles. Captain Morrisey had brought them down a few minutes ago, their security classifications taking them past several checkpoints manned by no-nonsense Marine guards.

  The largest monitor display showed a high-def television image, an aerial view of a rust-streaked cargo ship. Her name, Yakutsk, could be read on her prow.

  “I thought you’d want to see,” Morrisey said. He pointed. “It’s begun.”

  Two small wooden boats were approaching the Yakutsk from astern, their outboard motors churning up frothing wakes. A crewman on the Yakutsk’s fantail appeared to be shouting, though there was no sound with the picture. He was holding an automatic rifle.

  “Can we get a closer view?” Dean asked.

  “Nothing easier.” Morrisey spoke with a technician at a nearby console, and the image zoomed in, focusing on the man on the Yakutsk’s fantail.

  “What’s the range?” Akulinin wanted to know.

  “Three miles,” Morrisey said.

  “Do they know we’re watching?”

  “I doubt it very much,” Morrisey replied. “The Fire Scout is small, and it’s stealthy. We could be a lot closer and they’d never see us.”

  The remarkably high-quality pictures were being relayed from a MQ-8B Fire Scout, a Navy UAV. Dean had watched them launch the craft from the Erie’s helicopter deck earlier. The unmanned aircraft looked like an odd mix of helicopter an
d submarine, with a teardrop-shaped body and the rotors attached to what looked like a submarine’s conning tower. The craft was twenty-three feet long with a rotor diameter of just over twenty-seven feet, painted gray and weighing a ton and a half. It carried a sophisticated array of sensors and cameras that let it see in the dark or in bad weather, and was said to be able to zero in on the glowing tip of a man’s cigarette from five miles away.

  The Fire Scout was the smartest robot in the Navy’s inventory, with the ability to take off, patrol, and land on the pitching deck of a ship at sea without help from a human teleoperator. Stealth characteristics gave it a tiny radar profile, and its engine and rotor noise had been suppressed to a fluttering whisper. Wth an endurance of over eight hours, it could silently stalk its assigned target without the enemy even knowing it was there.

  The man on the Yakutsk suddenly raised his AK to his shoulder and fired a burst down at the water, the picture sharp enough to show spent casings flash in the sunlight as they spun across the deck. A technician in the Erie’s CIC panned the image on the big screen to focus on one of the pursuing boats. A man in a ragged T-shirt and jeans had just stood up in the pitching craft, an RPG balanced on his shoulder. In the next instant, there was a puff of smoke from the back of the tube, flaring out over the water, and the warhead streaked toward the ship’s fantail.

  The technician pulled the view back then, just in time to show the silent flash of the grenade exploding on the Yakutsk’s deck. The gunman there pitched backward and sprawled on the deck, dead or badly wounded. The pursuing boats, meanwhile, had drawn up to either side of the cargo vessel’s stern, and the men on board were unshipping ladders with hooks on the ends. Dean watched, fascinated, as the men hooked the ladders against the ship’s side and began swarming up onto the deck.

  “Do you ever get the feeling,” Akulinin said, “that it’s 1801 all over again?”

  “Barbary Pirates,” Dean said, nodding. “Only this time they’re Somali.”

  “We beat them back then,” Morrisey said. “We could do it again if the damned politicians would let us.”

  In 1801 through 1805, and then again in 1815, the young United States Navy had fought two wars against the Muslim city-states on the North African coast. Two hundred years later, Somalian fishermen had discovered it was more profitable to hunt for ships both close inshore and in international waters, board them, and hold ships, cargos, and crews for ransom. Most of the vessels targeted had been cargo ships like the Yakutsk, though the pirates had also begun capturing yachts and pleasure craft as well. As in the early 1800s, countries were finding out that paying the ransoms encouraged more and more attacks—but the lack of anything like a real government in Somalia meant that there were no courts where captured pirates could be tried, no venue for enforcing international law.