Scimitar SL-2

by Patrick Robinson

  Professor Landon’s hands were now bound together with plastic masking tape, and he was still in the bag, in every sense of the phrase. He was sitting between two of the world’s most lethal Muslim fundamentalists, and in answer to his frightened pleas to know what was going on—since his captors plainly had the wrong man—he was told softly and firmly, Keep quiet, Dr. Landon, we wish only to talk to you and then you will be set free.

  The first part was accurate. Almost. The second part was a lie. Lava Landon already knew far too much.

  Back at the scene of the crimes, two ambulances were transporting the bodies of the murdered officers to St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals van was loading the carcass of Roger into a box, while the police were desperately looking for witnesses.

  But no one had heard gunshots. No one had actually seen either policeman being attacked. No, it was impossible to identify the exact type of four-wheel-drive wagon that may have contained the criminals. No one had seen its license plate.

  Someone thought it had driven off with no lights. Someone thought it turned right, down Exhibition Road. Someone else thought it turned left. No one could cast a single ray of light on the physical appearance of its occupants.

  It was the most brutal slaying of police officers in London for nearly half a century, since the night when gangsters gunned down three policemen in Shepherd’s Bush, a couple of miles to the west of the Albert Hall.

  But at that time, the police had been pretty sure who had committed the crime within about five minutes of the shooting. This time they did not have the remotest idea. They had no clues, no witnesses, and absolutely no motives to work on. And of course, they had no notion whatsoever that a celebrity kidnap victim was being held in the back of the getaway vehicle.

  The interrogation of Professor Landon began at one o’clock in the morning. The black bag had been removed from his head, his wrists were unbound, and he was given coffee at a large dining room table in a white room with no windows. Flanking the door were two Middle Eastern–looking guards wearing blue jeans, black boots, and short brown leather jackets. Both were holding AK-47s.

  Before him sat a broad-shouldered English army-officer type, more formally dressed, no longer wearing sunglasses. He too was Middle Eastern in appearance, but his voice and tone could have been honed nowhere else on earth but a leading English public school.

  The discussion was about volcanoes.

  How many genuine eruptions have occurred in the world in recent years?

  Probably a hundred since 2002, maybe a few more.

  Can you name some?

  Certainly…Montserrat in the West Indies…Karangetang, Indonesia…San Cristobal, Nicaragua…Tangkubanparahu in Java…at least three on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Siberia…Fuego in Guatemala…Stromboli in Italy…Kavachi Seamount, Solomon Islands…Chiginagak Island, Alaska…

  How many in the past twelve months?

  You mean serious ones, or just rumblings?

  How many explosions?

  Well, Colima in Mexico…Etna in Sicily…Fuego, Guatemala…the one in the Solomon Islands, and all three of the big ones on Kamchatka…plus Killauea in Hawaii…Maman in Papua New Guinea…always the Soufriere Hill in Montserrat…with a bit of a shout from Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Also some dire rumblings in the Canary Islands—the most serious of all.

  Because of the tsunami?

  Absolutely.

  By 7 A.M. Professor Landon was growing anxious. One hour from now, he was due in his office in the splendid white-pillared Benfield Greig building on Gower Street near Euston Square. As the senior professor in London University’s Department of Geological Sciences, his absence from his second-floor lecture room was sure to be noticed. But the questions continued, and he had little choice but to answer them.

  What would it take to explode an active rumbling volcano? A big bomb? Maybe a couple of cruise missiles straight down the crater?

  Well, the magma is very close to the surface in the Montserrat volcano on the western side of the island. I should think you could bring that one forward with a well-aimed hand grenade. It’s never really stopped erupting in the last five years.

  How about Mount St. Helens?

  More difficult. But there have been small explosions and a lot of rumblings in the past several months. And remember. When St. Helens blew in 1980, it unleashed forces equal to four Hiroshimas every second. But it’s very dangerous now and getting worse. I’d say four big cruise-missile explosions bang in the right place on the vulnerable south side would almost certainly unleash its lava again.

  And Cumbre Vieja?

  You mean to cause the mega-tsunami I was talking about last night? No conventional explosion would prise that huge hunk of rock off the cliffside. The volcano would have to erupt. And you’d need a sizable nuclear blast to make that happen.

  You mean a full-blooded nuclear bomb?

  No, no. Not that big. But you mentioned cruise missiles. And if you were thinking short-range, not ballistic, I’d say a medium-sized nuclear warhead would probably blow a big enough hole to release the magma.

  And that starts the landslide into the bottom of the ocean?

  No. No. Not on its own. You see, that whole line of volcanoes in southern La Palma contains a vast amount of water deep in the mountains. The release of the magma bursting up to the surface creates stupendous heat inside the rock. In turn this causes several cubic miles of water to boil rapidly, and then expand, like a pressure cooker. That’s what will blow the mountain to pieces, and will most certainly collapse the entire southwest section of La Palma into the sea. A landslide, on a scale not seen on this earth for a million years.

  So, if you fired a missile at the vulnerable spot on the volcano of Cumbre Vieja, which you said tonight was the most active, you’d need it to penetrate the surface and then explode deep below the ground?

  It would need to hit hard and pierce the rock strata that guards the lava, before it blew. The released magma surging up from the core of the earth would then erupt into the atmosphere, drawing zillions of tons of incinerating magma right behind it. The underground lakes would boil, and then flash off into steam. That’s when the whole mountain range would explode.

  The former Maj. Ray Kerman liked Professor Landon. This was a man who expertly understood explosions, both natural and man-made, and who was consumed by his subject. And he did not dwell upon ramifications. He spoke frankly, as a scientist. Very much to the point. Untroubled by the obvious innuendoes of the equally obvious terrorist who held him prisoner. The science was what mattered to Professor Landon.

  Yes, General Rashood liked him. This whole thing was rather a pity.

  “Thank you, Professor,” said the Hamas General. “Thank you very much. We’ll have some breakfast now, and talk more.”

  1

  Thursday, January 8, 2009

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  THE BRAND-NEW DEMOCRATIC Administration, fresh from a narrow election victory, was moving into the West Wing. With the exception of the President, who knew he was going anyway at the end of his second term, every hour of every day was a trauma for the outgoing Republicans. For the big hitters of the military and government, handing over the reins to what most of them believed to be a bunch of naive, inexperienced, half-assed limousine liberals led by an idealistic young President from Rhode Island, who would have been pushed to hold down a proper executive job—well, anywhere—was appalling.

  And today was probably the worst day of all. Adm. Arnold Morgan, the retiring President’s National Security Adviser, was about to leave the White House for the last time. His big nineteenth-century Naval desk had already been cleared and removed, and now there were only a few good-byes left. The door to his office was wide open, and the Admiral, accompanied by his alarmingly beautiful secretary Kathy O’Brien, was ready to go. In attendance was the Secretary of State Harcourt Travis; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Tim Sc
annell; the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Alan Dickson; the Director of the National Security Agency, Adm. George Morris; and Morris’s personal assistant, Lt. Comdr. James Ramshawe, American by birth, with Australian parents.

  As the great man took his leave, they all stood in a small “family” huddle, veterans in the last half-dozen years of some of the most brutal secret operations ever conducted by the United States Military. Their devotion to Arnold had grown from the series of great triumphs on the international stage due, almost entirely, to the strengths of the Admiral’s intellect.

  Like Caesar, Admiral Morgan was not lovable—except to Kathy—but his grasp of international politics, string-pulling, poker-playing, threats and counterthreats, Machiavellian propaganda, and the conduct of restricted, classified military operations was second to none. At all of the above he was a virtuoso, driven by an unbending sense of patriotism. During his reign in the West Wing he intimidated, cajoled, outwitted, and bullied some of the most powerful men on earth. His creed was to fight and fight, and never to lower his blade short of victory. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Gen. George Patton were his heroes. And now the Admiral was departing, leaving his Washington confidants devastated, convinced that another heaven and another earth must surely pass before such a man could be again.

  Many of the high-ranking civilians would themselves go within a few short weeks of the incoming Democrats, but none so utterly ignominiously as Admiral Morgan himself. Called on the telephone by a Miss Betty-Ann Jones, a Southern liberal who had never been to Washington, he was told, “President McBride thinks it would be better if y’all resigned raht now, since he dun’t think you and he’s gonna get along real well.”

  Arnold Morgan had needed no second bidding. Five minutes later, he had dictated his short letter of resignation to Kathy, and ten minutes later, they were working on their wedding date, the colossal job of National Security Adviser no longer standing between them.

  At Arnold’s farewell dinner, at a favorite Georgetown restaurant, Secretary Travis, always the voice of irony and sly humor, had arrived at the table humming theatrically and loudly the tune of “Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” Shortly he would return to Harvard to take up a professorship.

  The military members of Arnold’s inner circle would remain at their posts, more or less, under a new Commander in Chief.

  And now Admiral Morgan stood at the great oak door to his office. He hesitated briefly, and nodded curtly to the empty room. Then he strode outside to the corridor, where his former colleagues waited. He smiled with some difficulty. “I’d be grateful,” he said, “if each one of you would come and take me by the hand.”

  And so they said their farewells, each consumed by the private sense of trust they all shared with the National Security Chief. The last handshake was with the youngest of them, Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe, with whom Admiral Morgan had a near father-son relationship.

  “I’ll miss you, Jimmy,” he said.

  “And I’ll miss you, sir,” replied the young officer. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever know how much.”

  “Thanks, kid,” said the Admiral informally. And then he turned on his heel, immaculately tailored in a dark gray suit, gleaming black leather lace-up shoes, blue shirt, and Naval Academy tie.

  He walked resolutely, shoulders back, upright, full of dignity, with Kathy, his bride-to-be, at his side. He walked among the portraits of Presidents past, nodding sharply to General Eisenhower, as he always did. He walked like a man not departing but like a young officer recently summoned to the colors. In his mind a lifetime of thoughts, a lifetime of service to his country. The different people he had been…the Commanding Officer of a surface ship and then of a nuclear submarine out of Norfolk, Virginia…the Intelligence Tsar, head of the National Security Agency in Maryland…and finally the right hand of a faltering Republican President who ended up knowing neither loyalty nor patriotism. That never mattered. Arnold had enough for both of them.

  Walking along the familiar corridors, the Admiral heard once more the swish of the waves on a ship’s hull heading out of a threatened harbor and into the great rolling swells of the ocean, the metallic scream of the anchor chain, the terse instructions of the COB, and in the deepest recesses of his mind, the shouts and commands of far-lost U.S. Navy SEALs whom he had never seen, never met, obeying his orders. Always obeying. As he himself obeyed his. Mostly.

  He heard again the bells of the watch, tolling off the hours. And the smooth slide of his submarine’s periscope. Once outside, he knew he would inevitably glance upward in the chill December breeze, and he would see it, snapping so damn proudly, right above him. The flag, always the flag.

  He wore no overcoat, though Kathy was cozily engulfed in a light-brown full-length shearling number. And just before they turned left towards the main doors and out onto the West Wing veranda, she stretched out her right hand to take his, confirming once more that he would not be alone, as he left his quarterdeck for the last time and steered their ship into the long years of retirement. Admiral Morgan was sixty-four.

  No one who was there would ever forget the departure of Arnold Morgan. Each and every man in the lower corridor felt a sense of control slipping away, as if a giant warship had somehow lost its helm. There had already been reports of civilians replacing the Marine guards at the White House. Patient young men in their early thirties were shaking their heads and sadly talking about the primitive ways of the U.S. Military under a Republican Administration. The new young ideologues came from a different world, the world of the future, where education of the Third World was paramount. Where no one was evil, just ignorant. Where death and destruction were to be replaced by more and more financial aid, where tyrants must be taught the ways of the West, not murdered. And where the poor and the helpless had to be given succor, and trained Americans had to work on their lack of self-esteem. And where absolutely no one could ever be harmed in the interests of revenge, conquest, or the destruction of a rogue regime.

  Massive Naval and Military cuts were on the horizon. President Charles McBride was a globalist, certain in his own mind that reason, reason, and mercy would always prevail, however misguided a foe may appear. But like President Clinton, and Carter before him, McBride was a vacillator, a career politician accustomed to compromises, always looking for the middle ground. He was a man of nothing but political conviction, the way forwards for the lifelong lightweight. And he was chronically inexperienced in the harsher reaches of international diplomacy. President-elect McBride could not have recognized a scheming, self-interested statesman at six paces.

  The one thing that Charles McBride did know, however, was the futility of spending zillions of dollars on defense, if you weren’t planning to fight. No one had yet told him the age-old mantra of the wise—You want peace, you better prepare for war. And if you don’t, you’ll end up paying for it in blood, sorrow, and tears. Or, as Chairman Mao would say—Real power comes from the barrel of a gun.

  Most of the men still standing in the corridor had a distant idea of the truth of that creed. And most of them believed it was probably true. And that everything would be fine, so long as the U.S.A. held the biggest gun of all. But if ever there was a U.S. President who could have used Arnold Morgan in the next office, it was surely the forty-seven-year-old Charles McBride.

  And as Arnold’s footsteps faded from the building, General Scannell muttered, “Jesus. I don’t know what’s gonna happen now.”

  And Harcourt Travis added, “Neither, General, do I.”

  A few hours later, Admiral Morris and Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe sat disconsolately in the rear seat of the Navy Staff car driving back to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  “Hard to believe he’s gone, Jimmy,” grunted the Agency’s Director.

  “I just can’t seem to accept it.”

  “Nor I.”

  “It’s not gonna be the same anymore, is it?”

  “Nothing is. It’s gonn
a be worse. Because right here we got an incoming President who does not understand what kind of threats this country might face. He thinks we’re all crazy.”

  “I know he does—can you imagine, sir? Getting some secretary to call up and tell Admiral Morgan he’s fired. Bloody oath.”

  “God knows who he’ll replace him with.”

  “Oh, he’ll probably come up with some nice little social worker, team leader in the Peace Corps or something…Jesus, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Jimmy Ramshawe shook his head.

  “The trouble with Intelligence,” said Admiral Morris, “is that you need someone in Government who starts off believing you are not some kind of a dumb ass and who will listen, knowing that you speak from the kind of experience he simply doesn’t have. Otherwise there’s no point having a vast Intelligence network that costs billions to run. Not if its top operatives are wasting half their time trying to prove the unprovable to guys who are supposed to be on our side.”

  “I know, sir. That was the best thing about Admiral Morgan. He never dismissed what we said, always took it into consideration at least. He was some kind of a bloke, right? The best I ever met.”

  “And the best you ever will meet, young James.”

  The two men rode in companionable but somber silence to the northwestern suburbs of Washington and then out into the country to Fort Meade. Once there, the Director headed to his office, while Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe retreated to the chaos of his own paper-strewn lair for one of his favorite parts of the week.

  Thursday afternoons. For thirty-year-old Ramshawe it represented a couple of hours of pleasurable study. It was the day his personal newspapers arrived: the Daily Mail and the London Telegraph; The Age from Melbourne; the Sydney Morning Herald; and the Toronto Globe.