by Jack Mars
The man shrugged. “More tusks. Also teeth from the hippos.”
Rajan nodded. “Okay. Close it up.”
He stepped back down the ramp as the men went to work with the wooden front of the crate and a power screwdriver.
Out on the tarmac, Rajan took out his satellite phone and made a call. The phone beeped several times, indicating a phone ringing very far away.
“How is it?” a man’s voice said as soon as he picked up.
“Everything is good,” Rajan said. Briefly, he marveled that the device had been stolen by pirates on the high seas, brought deep inland, and yet he had been able to reacquire it very quickly and at almost no cost. Allah was truly on their side.
“The setback was little more than a delay, as it turned out.”
“And not much of one at that,” the voice said. “When do you expect to arrive?”
Rajan glanced at his watch. Nearly 7 a.m. now. With a stopover for refueling, perhaps six hours to Casablanca. A one-hour time difference meant the elapsed time would be five hours. The usual payoffs to low-level airport inspection officials to look the other way as the smuggled ivory came through, then another hour and a half in the air to the final destination.
“I hope to arrive in Morocco in the early afternoon, perhaps by noon if all goes well. Delays in the airport, the next leg… I may reach you before four p.m.”
“Perfect,” the man said. “I will treat you to an early dinner. The seafood here is unmatched. And the Spanish wine is as you must remember it.”
A devout Muslim, Rajan Muhammad did not drink, of course. But Gregorio Fuentes was Catholic. A little wine would not hurt him.
Rajan smiled. “God is great,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
9:05 a.m. West Africa Time (3:05 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Nigerien Air Base 201
Agadez, Niger
“The National Academy of Geosciences,” Trudy began.
She was hot and tired. There was no air conditioning anywhere on the base, as far as she could tell. The rooms in this building were stuffy and became explosively hot as the day wore on. Her body just wouldn’t adjust to the heat. She and Swann slept on hard, narrow bunk beds in an empty barracks that reeked of some sort of lemony antiseptic.
Between the discomfort of the bed, the heat, the smell, and the fact that Stone and Ed were fighting in an African wilderness four hundred miles away… well, she had hardly slept at all. The fact that Swann had snored and snorted like a Mack truck half the night didn’t help any, either.
They were back in their drab and stifling command center. Since she couldn’t sleep, Trudy didn’t bother looking out the window anymore—there was nothing to see out there. Inside the office, the ceiling fan spun slowly, somehow making the room hotter, not cooler. Trudy had come in here early and gone right to work trying to divine what the missing weapon was.
Swann was wearing madras shorts, a DOORS T-shirt, and flip-flops, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail. Apparently, he didn’t give a hoot about dress codes or protocols. He looked well rested. He didn’t even look terribly hot. In fact, he looked like a man on a beach vacation, even though the nearest ocean was more than a thousand miles away.
Swann stood near his row of laptops and sipped a cup of coffee from the mess hall. “I’m listening,” he said.
Trudy referred to the tablet in her hand.
“During the time of the Soviet Union, the National Academy of Geosciences was a scientific body that nominally conducted independent research in Earth science, but was also closely associated with the Soviet intelligence agencies, and the military. American intelligence believed that in addition to the somewhat pedestrian research they conducted and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, they were involved in attempts to weaponize rare Earth metals, develop radioactive chemicals into portable and easily deliverable assassination devices, as well as manipulate the weather.”
She raised an index finger. “As part of their efforts to manipulate the weather, they created something called Project Mercury, which looked into using electromagnetism and sound waves to cause all kinds of mayhem, including earthquakes along vulnerable fault lines, volcanic eruptions, and the collapse of undersea shelves.”
“Plate tectonics,” Swann said, “is definitely a geoscience.”
“Apparently, they were very interested in a research effort conducted during World War Two in New Zealand called Project Seal, which attempted to replicate the conditions that would cause a tsunami. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Russian spies were arrested on three separate occasions infiltrating military bases in New Zealand, trying to copy or steal classified materials from the 1940s.”
Swann took another sip of his coffee. He seemed thoughtful. He gazed up at the nearly useless ceiling fan. “I’m with you. Walk me all the way home.”
“Okay,” Trudy said. She had developed the beginnings of a theory, one that she hadn’t fully articulated yet, not even to herself. It was rapidly coalescing in her mind.
“The weapon is pretty big—about the size of a bomb, let’s say. We can assume that because the bad guys were moving it up the coast inside a freighter, and the steel crate Stone found this morning is ten feet tall.”
“Sure,” Swann said. “The thing is large.”
“That rules out assassination devices that use radioactive plutonium or uranium or anything along those lines. Those things are small—syringes or ampoules filled with powder. The assassin needs to carry it in his pocket. It probably also rules out rare Earth metals, since by definition, they’re very rare and hard to acquire. If you were able to pile them ten feet high, you’d be a lot better off selling them than turning them into a weapon.”
“I buy the assassin part,” Swann said. “The rare Earth metals are a tougher sell. The freighter left out of the Congo, a major source of rare Earth metals, and the whole point of those metals is electrical conductivity. You said an earthquake-causing weapon might employ electromagnetism.”
Trudy nodded. That’s why you pitched these ideas to smart people—they saw where the holes were. “Touché,” she said. “Maybe they were in the Congo because they needed conductive metals to repair some aspect of the weapon. I hadn’t thought of that, but it doesn’t change where I’m going.”
She paused, picturing the scenario in her mind, how it would play out. “The Algerian man from Baltimore, Boudiaf, was clearly eager to get off the east coast of the United States. He was worried about something happening, had moved his belongings inland, and was evacuating his family. Meanwhile, the weapon was moving northbound, up the east coast of Africa. Let’s assume for a second that it’s possible to build a weapon which somehow manipulates the weather. Very strong Atlantic Ocean hurricanes that hit the eastern seaboard of the United States often begin west of the Cape Verde Islands, which are just off the coast of Africa. If you could start a monster hurricane…”
Swann shook his head. “It’s the wrong time of year for hurricanes. The ocean is too cold. The wind shear is too strong. Even if you got a hurricane going, it would fall apart before it went anywhere.”
“Good point,” Trudy said. Still, there was something to that… a hurricane, an earthquake, a tsunami…
“What if it was an earthquake weapon?” Swann said. “You haven’t really ruled that out. Why wouldn’t they just bring it to New York and set it on the fault line that goes under the Indian Point nuclear reactor? Indian Point is thirty miles from midtown Manhattan. A meltdown there could potentially kill millions of people. Or, just for argument’s sake, bring it to San Francisco and knock half the city into the Pacific Ocean. That would be the Big One everybody’s been waiting for. It would bring the property values out there back to reality, in any case.”
Trudy shook her head emphatically. She was getting excited. They were on the path, and getting warmer. She could feel it.
“That ship was old, and barely seaworthy. There’s no guarantee it would make it across the Atlanti
c Ocean during winter. New York is a long, slow trip on rough seas in a derelict craft, and even if you somehow make it, then you have the United States Coast Guard looking at you as you try to bring the boat into port somewhere. That whole idea is fraught with problems. Bringing it to California is even worse.”
She shook her head again, more softly this time.
“No. Whatever they’re planning, they want to do it here in Africa. What if the weapon caused an undersea earthquake, which in turn caused a tsunami? Could something like that travel all the way…”
Suddenly, a light went off behind Swann’s eyes. He nodded.
“Yeah. It could. And I know exactly where it would happen if it did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
10:03 a.m. West Africa Time (4:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
The Skies over Southeastern Niger
“Stone!” Ed Newsam said from somewhere. “Pick up the telephone.”
Luke had been asleep. He still might be.
He had been dreaming of… something. A woman in flowing white robes had beckoned to him on an empty beach. He had followed her, but then she was in the water, standing on the waves, still beckoning. He began to swim toward her, but the water was so rough. She kept moving further away. His arms were tired. The waves were hitting his face. He gulped down saltwater. He gasped for air.
“Stone!”
Luke sat up.
He was inside the narrow cabin of the SRT jet. It was daytime, but all the window shades were down. He could see tiny cracks of bright white light at the bottoms of the shades. Ed and Paul Dunn were sprawled across the seats. Dunn had eye shades over his eyes. They were all flying somewhere.
Back to Agadez, Luke realized. Back to base. He shook his head. It had been a long night.
His phone was ringing. He glanced at it. Trudy.
Note to self: answer Trudy’s phone calls.
He picked it up. “Yeah.”
“Luke?”
He nodded and ran a hand through his hair. The plane bucked a little over a rough patch of turbulence.
“Yes.”
“It’s Trudy.”
“I know that. How are you doing?”
“Good,” she said. “Listen, Swann and I have been going over some ideas here, and we think we have a theory that holds water. Are you ready to hear it?”
Luke shrugged. He didn’t really know. He had been fast asleep less than two minutes ago. He felt like if he closed his eyes he could go right back to sleep.
“Sure,” he said. “Hit me.”
“The weapon creates earthquakes. It’s a so-called tectonic weapon. When Swann was at NSA, he said the people at the HAARP weather station in Alaska were playing around with the exact same sort of thing. But they couldn’t get it to work.”
“How does he know that?” Luke said.
“NSA listens to everybody, according to Swann. They open everybody’s email, and they follow everybody’s network traffic. Plus Swann’s a former hacker, and also the curious type.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Luke said, and for an instant, he saw a fleeting image of a haggard Swann in an orange jumpsuit, a metal collar around his neck, chained to other ISIS prisoners in a large underground cell with stone walls.
Luke was waking up. Trudy and Swann had an idea. It was a start. It led to other ideas. And Trudy was the best scenario spinner in the game.
“So you think the Russians developed a weapon during the 1980s that we still couldn’t figure out how to make in the 2010s? And said weapon has been floating around out in the world for thirty years? And now Al-Qaeda has somehow gotten its hands on it?”
“Yes,” she said simply. She didn’t try to justify the idea or marshal any arguments in its favor.
“Okay, I’m game,” Luke said. “What do they plan to do with it?”
“There’s a vulnerability,” Trudy said. “The Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands just off the coast of Morocco. The islands are owned by Spain. The volcano is massive, and the entire western wall of it is unstable. Geologists, as well as American intelligence agencies like NSA, have been watching that volcano for two decades, ever since it started rumbling again.”
“What are they watching it for?” Luke said.
“It’s possible that if the volcano has a major eruption, the entire western wall might collapse into the ocean. Some computer models suggest that this would throw up a wall of water hundreds of feet high, which would then travel northwest across the Atlantic Ocean at high speed, hitting the East Coast of the United States six hours later. In certain models, the wall of water would travel fifteen to twenty miles inland before dissipating. New York and New Jersey would take the brunt of it, and New York City, being so low-lying, would likely be completely destroyed. But the entire coast would catch hell.”
“A tsunami?” Luke said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Actually, when it’s that big, they call it a mega-tsunami.”
Luke sighed. Then he smiled. It was a crazy idea, possibly the craziest idea Trudy had ever pitched him. But crazy ideas were one of the things he liked about her. Think outside the box! Maybe it would spark some more reasonable ideas among Susan’s advisers.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s call it in to Washington. I should be back at the base, uh…”
“You’ll be here in a little under an hour,” Trudy said.
“Good. What time is it in DC right now?”
“A little after four in the morning.”
Ha! Susan was going to love him for this. Then again, it did seem like she tried to have him arrested. A little lost sleep might be suitable punishment.
“Set up the call,” he said. “I’ll talk to them as soon as I hit the ground.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
5:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Situation Room
The White House, Washington, DC
Luke Stone’s disembodied voice came from inside the octopus. For a moment, it seemed like Stone really was inside of there—that the black, many-legged speakerphone device in the center of the conference table was actually some sort of hostile spider creature, and Stone’s slightly wired spirit had somehow possessed it.
That’s how tired Susan was. She was imagining Luke Stone as a strange, electronic spider made of hard plastic.
She slurped her coffee, hoping for a jolt of alertness. She looked around the room at the group assembled. Everyone was in the same boat. Even Kurt Kimball looked a little tired. More than tired, he looked a little annoyed.
Stone got us up for this?
“I recommend that you guys look into it,” Stone said. “That’s all I’m really saying. This is my report from the field, it’s what we’ve got at this time, and we’re starting to run with it. We’ve already put some of our people at the Special Response Team on analyzing satellite and drone data from last night and this morning, but it’s a needle in a haystack. There’s a lot of helicopter activity on the border between Chad and Nigeria, it’s eleven thirty in the morning here and more than thirty-five planes have already left N’Djamena airport today, there are private and military airstrips all over the place, and we don’t know if the weapon has left yet, or if it will even travel by air. It could be sitting in a hangar somewhere, or traveling across the Sahara on the back of—”
“Agent Stone?” General Loomis said.
“Yes?”
“This is Frank Loomis of JSOC. Is Paul Dunn with you now?”
There was a long pause over the line.
“No, General. We, uh, left Dunn back in Chad, on the border with Nigeria.”
“Why did you do that?”
“We were finished with him,” the black octopus said. “He was our Nigeria expert. We’re four hundred miles from Nigeria at this point, and looking at heading to the coast as fast as we can. That said, I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Dunn acquitted himself admirably during our short stint with him. He was invaluable in discovering the loca
tion of the kidnapped girls, and acted with valor and heroism under hostile fire. I believe there’s no way those girls—”
“Paul Dunn is a fugitive from justice in Mexico and in Nigeria,” Loomis said. “He is wanted for the equivalent of first-degree murder in Nigeria, and manslaughter in Mexico. Are you aware of that?”
Luke paused before answering. “I heard rumors to that effect, sir, but nothing I could confirm.”
“And your mission was to find and secure the missing weapon, was it not?”
“Yes, General. I’m still working on that.”
“You do recognize that if you hadn’t detoured to attack a Boko Haram outpost and rescue those girls—”
“It was a target of opportunity, General. I believe we saved the lives of more than one hundred innocent girls who had been taken from their families.”
“And simultaneously put countless thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or according to you, millions, of other lives at risk.”
Kurt Kimball put up a large hand in the general’s direction as if to say STOP.
“Agent Stone, this is Kurt Kimball. I’m reluctant to accept this theory of yours, if only because accepting it would suggest the need to evacuate most of the east coast of the United States. There are more than a hundred million people in the corridor from Washington, DC, to Boston. There are eight million people within the confines of New York City alone. That number can jump to as high as fifteen million during weekdays. Six hours is not enough time to evacuate that many people. Six weeks might not—”
“All the more reason to get started now,” Stone said. “All the more reason to get in touch with the governments of Spain, Portugal, Senegal, Morocco, whoever else, and start to lock down the waters around those islands and that coastline.”
“It’s a tall order logistically,” Kurt said. “We need to narrow things down a bit. The amount of shipping in that region…”