by J. G. Sandom
“I’m not blind.”
“We’re almost out,” said Seiden.
They barreled through the tunnel, mindless of the bumps and curves, and suddenly the tube expanded, widened up into a cave, and they were in the open . . . and taking heavy fire. Decker jammed his foot on the breaks. The golf cart skidded and began to roll. He reached for Swenson’s hand and pulled her to him, just as the cart went over. They skidded across the ground into a stand of green banana palms.
“Hold your fire,” someone said.
Decker was lying on top of Swenson, covering her body. She was barely dressed, still wrapped in strands of gun-gray metal ribbon. Seiden had disappeared into the brush.
“Don’t move,” somebody else said. “Freeze!”
Decker looked up. A U.S. Special Forces soldier approached them through the trees. Behind him, another dozen men materialized out of the grass and jungle. They were wearing camouflage fatigues and their faces were blotched with green paint. Then he heard the helicopter. It hovered overhead – a Seahawk, and she was gradually descending, straight down on top of them! Decker covered his head.
The helicopter fell. The wind almost carried them away. Then it was down.
A soldier grabbed Decker by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Another approached Swenson. He picked her up as if she were a bag of laundry and threw her deftly through the open hatch. A second later, Decker was hoisted up into the helicopter. Then, as the landscape dropped away, Ben Seiden suddenly appeared. He was running in their shadow. He leapt into the open hatch and rolled across the deck.
The helicopter climbed. Somebody put a blanket on top of Swenson’s naked form. Decker looked up to thank him when he noticed, with a start, that he was dressed in a dark gray business suit. It was Warhaftig.
The CIA operative smiled and said, “You sure go for those dramatic exits, don’t you, John? I see you’ve met Ben Seiden.”
“I’m glad to see you, Otto.” Decker turned toward Seiden. “You too, Chief Seiden. You saved our lives.”
“Perhaps not. How long do we have?”
Decker glanced at his watch. He shrugged and looked down through the open hatch. He could see the island of La Palma gradually receding, a green mound in a deep blue sea. He could see the various volcanoes, including the Cumbre Vieja to the south. Wet verdant mountains glistened in the sun.
“We don’t.”
Just then there was a thunderous roar. It was so loud, so omnipresent, that it seemed to lift the helicopter up, to flip her over for an instant. Decker rolled directly into Swenson, who rolled against Warhaftig, who rolled against Seiden and the bulkhead with a bang. Only the weight of a hundred billion tons of rock prevented them from being incinerated instantly by the nuclear explosion.
Then, the helicopter righted. She settled down. Warhaftig and Seiden pulled themselves to their feet. Decker was lying on top of Swenson. She opened her eyes and realized, looking down, that she was almost naked, exposed, her breasts pressed up against his chest. “Excuse me,” she said, just as the Electro-Magnetic Pulse shot through them.
The helicopter veered to port, flipped over on her back, and began to plummet toward the earth. She fell and fell. The pilot wrestled with the stick but it was useless. The EMP had disabled every instrument on the ship. They were being sucked down by the funnel of the Cumbre Vieja, and there was nothing they could do.
Chapter 41
Thursday, February 3 – 2:59 PM
La Palma, The Canary Islands
Giles Pickings was proofreading the first draft of his Passion of Pius II when he felt the earth move underneath his feet.
He had just finished the manuscript the night before. It had taken him almost five years, but he was finally done. And, more importantly, he felt good about it. It was a worthy contribution to the literature. One day, perhaps, his name would be remembered. Not as a giant in the field, of course; he could not hope for that. But as a worthy squire or a page, attendant to the Hamlets of the age. A Prufrock.
He sighed. He put the manuscript aside and glanced outside the window by his writing desk. A rain had swept across the mountains in the morning and the palm trees glistened like blown glass.
That’s odd, he thought. A moment earlier he’d been harassed by songbirds as he had tried to concentrate on his review. Now, they were silent as the grave.
He looked up. A cloud of daffodil-colored canaries commingled with another, and another, and yet another still when Pickings was blown backwards over his chair. A deafening explosion rocked the earth.
He landed on his back somehow, but turned the other way, with his feet propped up against the far wall. For a moment he couldn’t see. Everything went blurry. Then he noticed his bookcase tipping over, right on top of him! He rolled out of the way. It shattered across the floor, sending books in all directions. The window tinkled as it cracked. No, it wasn’t the window.
Pickings turned and stared wild-eyed beyond his desk. It was the wall. It was still cracking. It was being ripped apart, as if by giant hands.
* * *
Far, far below, in the vast subterranean reservoirs of the Cumbre Vieja, lava cascaded into steam, into water that had been accumulating for millennia in soft permeable streams. Slowly, the reservoirs began to heat, like radiator foils wrapped in impermeable stone, to roil and bubble, charged by the furious energy of the exploded bomb, nursed by the lava streams that followed. Each reservoir was several thousand meters deep, and each was stacked against another of its size for countless kilometers, like Titan tombstones. The waters boiled between these dense impenetrable towers, desperate to be free.
* * *
Pickings got up slowly. He had twisted his right knee. It felt like someone were pushing needles into him. He hobbled over to the wall. The crack had stopped expanding. The earthquake, or whatever it had been, seemed to have finally settled down. He could see his prize flower garden in the back, the birds of paradise and codeso, the colorful hibiscus. He made his way carefully toward the rear door, keeping an eye out for falling plaster. It was already strewn across the floor. The crack stretched to the ceiling.
The kitchen was a disaster. Every plate he owned, it seemed, each bowl and every glass was on the floor, smashed in a million pieces, including his most precious china. The refrigerator had fallen on its side, and milk and juice were puddling up beside it.
He crossed the floor with care, picking his feet up to avoid the shards. When he finally reached the other side, Pickings hesitated for a moment in the open doorway and gasped. He had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t some sort of optical illusion, trompe l’oeil. His garden had been cut in half!
A huge hole, the size of a city bus, or larger, had opened up between his fuchsia rum runners and lavender eyes of the storm. He shuffled as fast as he could down the path. He stopped at the precipice, by the lip of the ditch, and looked down – then instantly pulled back.
He couldn’t look over the edge. It was too hot! It felt like it would melt his face. The ground quivered and a vast tower of steam and stone and dust shot out of the crevasse.
Pickings was thrown backwards to the ground. The volcano was erupting! And, just as this completely terrifying thought had settled in his mind, he was assaulted with the bleak, bone-chilling certitude that he was going to die.
The ground continued to tremble violently, shaking his stunted stand of gnarled Canary Pine. His house began to groan, to wobble and finally bend and fall. Pickings ran over to his jeep. Miraculously it had been parked in front, not in the carport, beside the shattered house. He had been too lazy to walk down to his mailbox earlier that morning. He leapt into the vehicle. He turned the ignition key and the engine came to life. He put the jeep in gear and screamed out of the driveway. He turned the corner, banked. He accelerated down the straightaway. Then he breathed a deep sigh of relief, until he suddenly recalled his manuscript, the way that it had looked there on his writing desk as he had run out of the house, all stacked and neatly typed, unabashedly
dense, the labor of five years, when the mountain road gave way. The tarmac started to melt. There was no way to negotiate the road. Then, there was no road.
Pickings leapt out of the jeep. He felt as if he were descending into a Pieter Bruegel mindscape, a hectare of the Triumph of Hell. He walked a dozen paces when the earth opened up before him, spewing steam and fire. He turned the other way. Another fissure blocked his path. It didn’t matter, he thought. It was too hot to move anyway. The last thing that he thought of was his missing wife, his Layla, and his two children back in England. They were probably sitting down to tea right now. He wanted desperately to move. He wanted to reach out to them. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do anything . . . but boil.
Chapter 42
Thursday, February 3 – 3:02 PM
La Palma, The Canary Islands
The Seahawk tumbled from the sky. The downdraft following the detonation of the bomb continued to suck the helicopter downwards toward the waiting funnel of the Cumbre Vieja. Then, without warning, the vacuum created by the shock wave filled. The instrumentation settled. The helicopter flipped, righted herself and started rising once again.
Inside the ship, Warhaftig pulled himself off Decker and struggled to his feet. “Are you alright?” he said. Seiden steadied him from behind.
Decker was still lying next to Swenson. He grabbed a nearby blanket and covered her again. Swenson sat up. She looked about. The Rangers were strapped in all around her. They were okay. She looked down, under the blanket, and began to strip away the magnesium tape still wrapped about her body. Everyone pretended not to watch.
“Excuse me,” Warhaftig shouted over the din. “I have to break the news to the Director.” He zigzagged forward toward the cockpit.
“And I must contact my superiors,” said Seiden, following in his wake.
Decker stared out through the open helicopter hatch. The island was disappearing from view. They were headed north-northwest, toward the Azores. He looked over at Swenson. “Can I help?” he said. She was picking off the remaining metal ribbon like strands of a cocoon.
“What?” She cupped a hand behind her ear.
“Can I help?” Decker shouted, pointing.
“No thanks, I got it,” she replied. Then she changed her mind. “Well, maybe you can help me with the pieces on my back.”
Decker shimmied over to her. He reached his hands behind the blanket and began to pull the metal ribbon off her naked shoulders. It unraveled like dried snakeskin. “You look like a mummy in some new age horror flick,” he said.
“Does that mean I’m already dead?” She turned and looked at him and smiled. He was looking at her cleavage. “Why, John Decker, Junior! You are such a boy. I had no idea. You like my outfit, huh?” She lowered the towel a little more. “Look what was sitting on your coach two nights ago,” she said, “before you sent her to bed.”
“I think you like to torture me, don’t you?”
“Yes.” She pulled the towel up, turned away. All the soldiers were staring at her.
“Emily?”
“Yes, John?”
“Before, when we were on our way to La Palma, you seemed to believe that there might be some way of stopping this. I mean, I know you said there wasn’t. But you kind of hesitated. Just for a moment. I thought . . . ” He tried to look away, tried to ignore the logical extension of his argument. Forty million souls, he thought, compared to one or two. “When you mentioned Newton, I thought . . . Maybe I’m wrong.”
She shook her head. Her back was to him and he couldn’t see her face. But he could feel the way she tightened up, the way she suddenly withdrew into herself. Then she leaned back into his arms. She lay her head on his chest. “No, you’re not wrong,” she said. “Maybe there is.” She looked into his eyes. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
“And for a wave?”
“A counter-wave,” she said. Then she smiled. “Remember I told you about my descent into those canyons off the Jersey coast? With E.J., my professor?”
He nodded.
“Well, I was thinking. What if someone, somehow were to descend into those tunnels along the Continental Shelf? What if they planted a nuclear device, like El Aqrab did in La Palma, and set it off?”
“What if they did?”
“Well, don’t you see? An explosion might precipitate eruptions of the gas trapped in the sediments beneath, initiate a massive underwater landslide. If someone were to trigger a mega-tsunami on the opposite side of the Atlantic, if we could propagate a counter-wave, traveling east – at least theoretically, and if everything worked perfectly – the two would meet and . . . ”
“ . . . cancel each other out. Is that it? Is that what you mean?”
“Something like that. Of course there would still be lots of damage, residual effects. But it wouldn’t kill tens of millions. On the other hand, it might just make things worse.”
“I doubt things could get a whole lot worse than a twenty-story wave crashing through the Eastern Seaboard. Not to mention the Caribbean, Venezuela and Brazil. Let’s face it, Emily, we can’t just sit here and watch the whole world go to hell. Someone will have to try.”
Swenson nodded, turned away. Decker felt the labyrinth of his argument unwind.
Warhaftig stumbled down the aisle. He looked completely stunned, as if someone has just punched him in the face. “That was the President,” he said. “He and his advisors all agree that there’s only so much we can do in only fifteen hours. We’ll do our best, of course. FEMA will supervise emergency evacuations of all the major cities on the coast. New York, thank God, is already virtually deserted. Members of Congress and the White House staff are being flown to safety as we speak. The Pentagon . . . ” He shook his head. “By dawn tomorrow, more than thirty-five million Americans will be dead. Tens of thousands will die just trying to get away. If only we had listened to you sooner, John, we might have–”
“We have an idea,” said Decker, interrupting him. “Well, Swenson does. A way of maybe stopping this.”
Warhaftig looked shocked. “But I thought you told me–”
“A counter-wave,” she said.
“A counter what?”
Swenson told him of her plan.
After a moment, Warhaftig said, “Do you really think it could work?”
“I don’t know,” said Swenson. “But John is right. Someone has to try.”
Warhaftig walked back toward the front of the helicopter and gathered up some headsets. Seiden was standing in the cockpit chatting with his superiors. “We have a plan,” Warhaftig said. He described it briefly.
“Wait a minute.” Seiden tapped his microphone. “Just a moment, sir, there’s been a change in strategy. I’ll have to call you back.”
Warhaftig carried the headsets astern. He handed them out, put one on himself, and showed them how to plug into the console.
Decker slipped his headset on. Now that it was gone, he suddenly realized how loud and irritating the noise from the blades and open hatch had been. He could hear Warhaftig’s voice clear as a bell.
First, they contacted the Azores and arranged for the fastest plane available to meet them in São Miguel, some commandeered Citation X. The Spanish millionaire who owned her threatened to call the Prime Minister of Spain, but then he heard about the looming wave and changed his tune. He’d be more than happy to assist the Americans, he said. At no expense.
Swenson knew a fair amount about the islands of the Azores, having traveled there for a conference three years earlier. She informed them they were the EU’s most secluded outpost, spread out across 600 kilometers of ocean, located roughly 1,500 kilometers or two hours' flying time from Lisbon. Running along a southeast to northwest axis, the islands were separated into three main clusters: the Eastern Group of São Miguel and Santa Maria; the Central Group of Terceira, Graciosa, São Jorge, Pico and Faial; and the Western Group of Flores and Corvo.
Like the Canaries, they had been formed by
the eruption of volcanoes, and lay on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a fault line that zigzagged for some 16,000 kilometers from beneath the northern icecap southwards, turning east around the southern tip of Africa to meet with the Indian Ocean Ridge. Three plates collided underneath the ocean at the base of the Azores, or rather diverged, said Swenson, in a kind of T-shaped triple junction between Flores and Faial.
The more Decker listened to Emily, the more entranced he became – and the more uncertain. As a Midwesterner, he had never experienced earthquakes or seismic activity of any kind. The earth had always seemed a permanent place to him; indeed, uncompromising. But it wasn’t fixed. Nothing was fixed. The ground swirled over molten rock, the earth twirled round the sun, the sun whirled silently around the galaxy in space.
“Decker?”
Decker looked up. Warhaftig was pointing at his headset. “Get ready.”
“For what?”
“The President. I explained your plan to him. He wants to talk to you.”
Decker sat up. “The President wants to talk to me?”
“To you and Emily. And Acting Chief Seiden too. Stand by. Go ahead,” he said. “Mr. President, can you hear me, sir?”