09.Deep Black: Death Wave

by Stephen Coonts

  He positioned the red sighting dot on the back of the head of one of the guards, adjusted the brightness level down a click, but didn’t fire. Orders…

  Dean tried hard not to think about what might be happening to Lia right now inside that cave.

  PRESIDENTIAL BRIEFING ROOM

  THE WHITE HOUSE, EAST WING

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  MONDAY, 1012 HOURS EDT

  Rubens reached the crescendo of his lecture. “We estimate, sir, that the tidal wave could be as high as three hundred feet and be traveling at something like five hundred miles per hour when it reaches the East Coast. The wave will easily travel inland as far as twenty-five to fifty miles. In places with narrow tidal estuaries or rivers to channel and focus the wave—places like the James River, the Hudson River, the Potomac—the wave could possibly become much higher and more powerful. Mr. President, we are looking at the complete destruction of New York City, Washington, D.C., and a dozen other major cities from Portland, Maine, to Houston, Texas. Millions of people could be killed. The damage will amount to the tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars. Sir, we may not even survive as a nation!”

  He let those words hang above the table for a moment, then added, “Mr. President, we need to capture or disable those nukes before the terrorists detonate them, and we need to do it now.”

  After a moment, the President sighed. “Are you quite finished?” he asked.

  Rubens thought over what he’d just said, then nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.” The die, as Caesar had said, was cast. In his case, though, challenging the laws of Rome by crossing the Rubicon had merely placed his career, his life, and his army at risk. Rubens had just done all of that, and by challenging the President directly, by speaking out of turn this way, he might have put the survival of the country at risk as well. Rubens knew he needed to convince the man, not make him so angry that he ignored the true threat.

  “I am concerned,” the President said slowly, “that what you have just told us represents another intelligence gaffe. I’m sure you remember what our so-called intelligence agencies did to my predecessor in office.”

  He was referring, of course, to the celebrated failure of U.S. intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction that had led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The comparison, though, was not really apt. The problem had been far more involved than the CIA telling the President that Iraq had WMDs, and the President sending in the troops. Intelligence work was always a shadowy and imprecise business, more art than science despite high-tech satellites and futuristic eavesdropping techniques. You found a piece of the picture here, another there, pulled in others from someplace else, and you hoped to fit it together into a coherent whole.

  Coherence, though, was almost impossible when politics were involved—when agency directors were protecting their own turfs, when department heads were protecting their jobs, when not fitting neatly into the correct political orientation for a given worldview was tantamount to career suicide. Any given intelligence result had more than one possible interpretation, and political animals within the system tended to adopt the interpretation that made their superiors higher up the chain happy.

  Of course, that same weakness in the system still existed now. The current political wisdom within Washington tended to downgrade the War on Terror to a skirmish, to downplay the threat of radical Islam in the holy name of political correctness.

  Still, sometimes it was necessary to drop political correctness in the name of national survival.

  The problem here, though, was not national survival so much as it was victory in this particular piece of the skirmish, and the survival of Rubens’ people. Katie Walden had been pretty emphatic in her declaration that dropping half of La Palma into the Atlantic would not result in a three-hundred-foot megatsunami.

  But, damn it, Rubens wasn’t going to risk the possibility that the scientists might have gotten it wrong.

  He also wasn’t going to let Lia and Charlie and the rest twist in the wind, nor was he going to watch some tens of thousands of La Palma islanders get blown away in the name of political expediency. If he had to lie—or, at the least, to overstate the threat of a tidal wave scouring the East Coast down to bare rock—in order to save those people, then he’d do it, and damn the consequences to himself.

  “My predecessor invaded Iraq because you people gave him bad information!” the President continued. “Now you’re telling me to invade an island belonging to Spain. If I do this and you’re wrong again, this will not be good for America’s image overseas. They already see us as the world’s bully, the tough guy going around knocking down the little kids.”

  “For God’s sake, Mr. President,” General James said. “This isn’t some schoolyard scrap!”

  “Perhaps,” the secretary of state said, “we could turn this whole thing over to the Spanish authorities. Let them deal with it. Our hands stay clean.”

  “How about that, General?” the President said. “It doesn’t have to be us putting our reputations on the line.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. President,” Rubens said, “there isn’t time for that. Sometimes you have to put everything on the line.”

  “What do the Spanish have in the area?” the President said.

  The DNI was prepared with the figures. “Mr. President, local Spanish forces include one light infantry regiment—the 9th, the ‘Soria’—deployed to La Palma along with a headquarters battalion. Two more light infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, and a helicopter battalion are all positioned on Tenerife, about eighty miles away by air.”

  “And frankly, sir,” General James said, “they won’t be able to do shit. Light infantry without combat experience? Artillery? That’s exactly the wrong tool for the wrong job.”

  “And what is the right tool, General?”

  “I’d say a U.S. Marine recon force deployed by helicopter, followed up by a Marine landing battalion. FORECON just happens to be in the area. And the Iwo Jima can be there in twenty-four hours.”

  “They ‘just happen to be in the area,’ huh?”

  James met his stare with a level gaze of hs own. “Yes, sir. The Iwo was on her way to the eastern Med, and is currently four hundred and fifty nautical miles northwest of La Palma. We managed to preposition FORECON on the Iwo Jima just in case they were needed.”

  The Air Force general at the table cleared his throat. “Sir, acting on a recommendation from Mr. Rubens, we have deployed six aircraft of the 43rd Fighter Squadron out of Tyndall. F-22 Raptors with laser-guided JDAMs. Call sign Firestorm. Officially, and until you say otherwise, it’s a routine training flight across the Atlantic to Rota and back.” He looked at his watch. “They should be engaged in their second air-to-air refueling as we speak.”

  “You’re suggesting an air strike?” the President said.

  “The JDAMs will seal off the boreholes Mr. Rubens mentioned. If the nukes are already in position at the bottoms of those holes, the explosions will bury them, leaving no way to set them off. If the nukes are still on the surface but in the craters, the explosions will fragment them without causing them to detonate. There may be some radiological contamination in the area, but no nuclear explosions.”

  The President sighed. “So help me, people. If this is another case of bad intelligence—”

  “This isn’t a case of bad or misapplied intelligence, Mr. President,” Debra Collins said. “We know this threat exists, and we’re in a position to do something about it.”

  Rubens blinked. Collins was coming in on his side?

  “Admiral Blaine? What is your assessment?”

  “I don’t see that we have any other choice, Mr. President. This looks damned solid.”

  “I ran this nonsense about tsunamis past my science advisor before coming here,” the President said. He was looking directly at Rubens. “He says the danger from a large tidal wave is overstated. Pseudo-science.”

  Rubens continued worrying the bone. “And the people I talked to s
aid we can’t know for sure what would happen if those nukes go off. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe the tidal wave will be thirty feet high instead of three hundred. But even that would drown a lot of people, Mr. President. It would drown New York and Washington, and it would kick our economy in the nuts so hard that we might never recover. The intel we have so far suggests that the Chinese are behind this for exactly that reason. They plan to step in and take over all over the globe when our economy goes under.”

  “Even if nothing else happens, Mr. President,” Collins said, “no tidal wave, no Chinese takeover, we’re going to look very bad if ten nuclear weapons are detonated on La Palma and a few thousand people are incinerated. We cannot afford to stand by and do nothing!”

  “Fuck,” the President said.

  24

  GREEN AMBER ONE

  NORTHEAST CRATER RIM

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1515 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Fuck this,” Charlie Dean whispered. “I’m going down there.”

  “Shit, man!” Akulinin said. “You trying to start a war?”

  “No, but when we get the word to go, I want to be in position and ready. Now.”

  “I heard that, Charlie,” Marie Telach said. “I recommend that you stay put! We should be hearing from the boss soon.”

  “Recommendation noted,” Dean said. He was already crawling forward, the tech-Ghillie stretched over his back, shifting with each movement of hand or foot.

  The descent was a lot tougher than the slow crawl around the crater’s rim. He was moving head-down, and at times the ground was steep enough that he began sliding on loose gravel or cinders. Each time he did, he spread his arms and legs, bracing against whatever support he could find in the ground with his hands, and hung on until the slide stopped. Then he would freeze in place, holding himself absolutely motionless in case someone at the bottom of the pit noticed the slither of rock and cinder down the slope.

  Then he would begin moving again. He didn’t have to worry about being quiet, at least. The drill was pounding away with a steady thump-thump-thump, and the air was filled with the rumble and chug of motors and pumps.

  Ilya had his back. Watching from the top of the gully through his sniperscope, he would be alert for signs that Dean’s crawl down the slope had been noticed, and take out any threat before the bad guy opened fire.

  But the idea was to get all the way down without being seen.

  Because once people started shooting, there was a real danger that the Tangos would set off their one-kiloton toys.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  MONDAY, 1035 HOURS EDT

  Rubens emerged from the conference room, bemused and gratified. The President had given the necessary approval. Operation Mountain Storm was now officially a go.

  “So why’d you do it?” he asked Collins, who was walking out beside him.

  “Do what?”

  “Go to bat for me in there. Point out that this time the intel was good. He didn’t even ask for my resignation.”

  “He will if this goes bad.”

  “If this goes bad, he won’t have to ask.”

  “We are on the same team, Bill.”

  “With all of the interagency politics, sometimes it’s hard to remember that.”

  “You don’t have to play stupid, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You deliberately planted information about the Yakutsk through CIA assets in Ethopia and Somalia. You made sure those Somali pirates knew that the Yakutsk was a rich target for them. The Constellation battle group was shadowing that ship. As soon as the Yakutsk got off a distress call, your team went in.”

  “It wasn’t my team.” Well, except for Charlie and Ilya, he thought, but she doesn’t need to know everything.

  “It was a Navy SEAL VBSS unit you ‘happened to have close by.’ ”

  “Our ships and personnel are required by the law of the sea to respond to any distress call at sea.”

  “Uh-huh. And you were setting up the same thing in La Palma.”

  “Not the same thing at all. I just made sure that we had plenty of solid assets where they could be used when they were needed.”

  “You already have an assault force on the island, don’t you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “A reconnaissance force, then. Marines? Black CAT? I notice that you didn’t tell him that.”

  “I didn’t want to complicate things.”

  “I admire your balls, Bill.”

  “You haven’t seen them in years.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  They reached the secure elevator that took them down to the underground visitors’ garage beneath the White House East Wing. Rubens pulled his cell phone from his pocket and examined the screen. He still wasn’t getting a signal—part of the White House’s security system.

  Rubens and Collins parted company in the garage. “Bill?” She called after they’d gone a few steps. Her voice echoed off the bare concrete.

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep me in the loop.”

  “Don’t worry, Debra,” he told her. “I’ll tell you if this works. You’ll know if it doesn’t.”

  Still no signal on his phone. He got into his car, checked out past gate security, and pulled out onto East Executive Avenue Northwest. He was reaching for the phone again when it rang. He didn’t bother checking the caller ID.

  “Rubens.”

  “Bill? Katie.”

  “Katie! Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to let you know … after our conversation Saturday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some of us here have been doing some digging. There is a danger.”

  “Really? What did you get?”

  “Those Dutch studies were looking at water displacement from a large amount of mass striking the ocean. You remember? I was telling you it all had to hit at the same time.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I got to thinking about other examples of landslips we know. There was one off of Sicily, Mount Etna, that caused a devastating tsunami all across the eastern Mediteranean eight thousand years ago. Some scientists think that might have been the source of the biblical flood myth. And there have been a number of landslips in the Hawaian Islands. Molokai and Oahu, especially. There’s evidence that those sent huge tidal waves all across the Pacific Rim something like a million and a half years ago.

  “But those tidal waves weren’t caused by the impact of all of that rock in the ocean, but by something more subtle. Those island-sized masses of rock moved, and they moved fast, sliding for hundreds of kilometers across the sea floor before coming to rest. It was the movement that displaced the water, generating the waves, not the splash.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “That there very well might be a danger to the U.S. East Coast if part of La Palma does break off and fall into the sea.”

  “How certain are you of the data?”

  “Not very.” He could hear the frustration in her voice. “The things are totally unpredictable. The size and strength of the wave would depend on the actual mass of the rock and on how fast it was moving. You might get a wave a hundred meters tall hitting the United States. Or it might be ten meters. Or less.”

  “Okay, Katie. I appreciate knowing.”

  “I’m sorry to give you bad news.”

  “Look at the bright side. I didn’t just lie through my teeth to the President of the United States.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He laughed. “Never mind. Thanks, Katie. I need to get off and make another call.” He hesitated. “Are you thinking of leaving the area?”

  “No, Bill. Too much to do here. And too many good friends.”

  “I understand. I’ll keep you informed, okay?”

  “Okay, Bill.”

  “Later.” He switched off, then hit the speed dial button for the secure line
to the Art Room.

  He needed to let them know of the President’s decision.

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO, NORTH CRATER

  MONDAY, 1535 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Lia’s ears were ringing, blood drooled from her mouth and nose, and her left eye was swollen almost shut. After he’d spent all of that time showing her the nightmarish implements of torture in his bag, the beating the smiling man had given her with his bare fists had been brutal, direct, and startlingly unexpected. She’d thought she’d been beginning to understand Feng’s interrogator, but his savage response to her defiance had left her shaken and uncertain, as well as hurting.

  Then, after the beating, he’d begun puttering about the chamber, smiling, chatting pleasantly, attaching straps to the four corners of the table, and finally showing her once again each implement in his bag, carefully explaining what each was for.

  The stress, the sheer terror, was building in Lia to a near-unbearable point, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath coming in sharp, short gasps, her teeth chattering in her bruised jaw.

  “Now this … this is one of my favorites,” the man said, holding up a lancet with a long, slightly curving blade that gleamed like oil in the light. He brought it to within a couple of inches of her eyes, turning it slowly in front of her. “A flensing blade … you understand? For skinning the subject. For example, I can use it to slice through your skin just … here …” Reaching down, he dragged his fingertip lightly across her upper thigh, from groin to hip. She flinched at the touch, and his smile broadened.

  “I cut all the way around your leg, you see,” he continued, “and then use just the tip of blade to tease the skin from the underlaying fascia. I work my way down your leg, peeling back the skin as I go, around and around, until I roll it in one piece from your leg, just like removing a stocking.

  “The entire process lasts, oh, perhaps an hour, an hour and a half. The time depends on how often you pass out from the pain, and on how long it takes to revive you each time. And then, of course, we go to the other leg … and your arms … eventually we get to your face. It’s necessary to proceed slowly to avoid having you lose too much blood …”