Death Wave (51 page)

“Firestorm, Firestorm Leader.” That was the voice of Colonel Edward Mackelroy, in Firestorm One. “Firestorm is clear to engage.”

Farley tapped the release icon for his port-side weapon—“force package” in the newspeak glossary of military terminology. The aircraft bounced higher as a thousand pounds of bomb dropped from its belly.

“Five, weapon one away.” He tapped the second icon. “Two away.”

Death hurtled toward La Palma through the brilliant blue of the Atlantic sky.

DRILL SITE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1539 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The assembly was almost complete.

The suitcase nukes purchased from elements of the Russian
mafiya
a few weeks earlier rested inside their cases in several pieces: the actual warhead, containing two masses of plutonium at either end of a forty-centimeter-long steel tube; and the firing mechanism, consisting of a shaped charge of plastic explosives inside a cylinder designed to fit snugly over one end of the tube; three detonators, which needed to be uncased and inserted inside the plastique; a battery; a timer; a length of electrical wire; and a small radio-receiver trigger device.

It took a matter of minutes to prepare one of the weapons for detonation. They were broken down so that they would fit inside the suitcase; assembled, one of the weapons was half a meter long and thirty centimeters wide at the widest.

In standard drilling practices, most rigs created a borehole just under twenty centimeters wide—about eight inches. The specialized drilling equipment they’d purchased from the Frenchman, Chatel, allowed JeM to drill boreholes thirty-five centimeters wide, including the thickness of the high-strength tubing necessary for keeping the boreholes open.

Each nuclear device had an eye ring soldered to one end of the plutonium housing; the boreholes were wide enough to allow each device to be lowered at the end of a long cable deep into the shaft. The electrical wire paid out behind as it was sent down the hole, attached to the reels of electrical cable flown in from Morocco. When the device was in place at the bottom of the borehole, the radio receiver was attached to the surface end of the cable and placed high up on the crater rim. A single radio signal transmitted from a safe distance would detonate the plastic explosives, which would drive the plutonium masses together, creating critical mass and detonating the bomb. The timers were included in case circumstances forced a change in plan, but the idea was to have one radio signal detonate all ten bombs at the same instant, something impossible with separate electrical timers.

Al-Wawi himself came up with the idea years ago, after seeing a documentary program on the BBC. Seeing the plan through, however, had been a monumental effort. Factions within both the JeM and al-Qaeda wanted to use the Russian suitcase bombs against American and European cities, or even simply to hold them in reserve as bargaining chips or for future blackmail efforts. The politics involved had been the most difficult part of the entire operation, harder even than drilling down through hundreds of meters of solid basalt. Al-Wawi had gotten his way at last only by giving up two of the recently purchased weapons for a Palestinian attack by Hamas against the Jewish government in Jerusalem.

The operation had been expensive. Not only had millions been paid for the weapons themselves, but the cost of the drilling operation itself, the bribes paid to Aramco and Petro-Technologique and the authorities in Santa Cruz, the cost of the helicopter charters out of Marrakech, all of those had amounted to several hundred million dollars. Only massive financial assistance from the Chinese had made the effort possible.

As for the technical difficulties, they had been almost insurmountable. Drilling over a hundred meters down through the solid basalt within the throat of each of the selected volcanos had been expensive, time-consumming, and fraught with breakdowns and delay. Along the way, the Aramco engineers reported that as the boreholes went deeper, they were approaching a magma chamber beneath the island. On the one hand, that was excellent news; the nuclear detonation might well trigger a massive volcanic eruption, and that, it was hoped, would hide indications that the explosion had been triggered by nuclear weapons, suggesting that it
had
been an act of Allah. On the other, however, the rock grew increasingly hot and plastic the deeper the drills went, until the drill bits themselves began to melt. The discovery had limited the depth to which the boreholes could be drilled.

Now, at last, everything was in place. The last borehole was complete, the last weapon about to be lowered into the depths of La Palma’s volcanic ridge. After this, it
would
be Allah’s wrath, in a way. Azhar was convinced that there would be a tidal wave, a megatsunami, despite the skepticism of some geologists. How big it would be, how much devastation it would cause, that would all be up to God.

“Al-Wawi!” a fedayeen standing nearby called. “Where are Abdullah and Nadhir?”

Azhar’s head snapped up. A hundred meters away, the boulder where he’d posted the two guards outside of the lava tube rested bare and empty. The guards were gone.

They would not have simply wandered off. The fedayeen—the fighers—attached to JeM’s La Palma operation had been extensively trained in Pakistan’s Northeastern Territory, and most had fought the Americans in either Afghanistan or Iran. They were well disciplined and knew the penalty for deserting their post. If they were gone, it could only mean …

“Suhair! Amir! Get your men! Get them to the cave!”

His eyes flicked across the crater rim looming in every direction about the drill site. If the Americans had already infiltrated troops, they would be up there among those heights somewhere. He reached for his radio. “Shihadeh!” he called. “Do you hear me?”

There was no reply. Turning, he looked up at the west rim of the crater. Shihadeh al-Ali should be up there.

“What’s the matter?” Feng asked.

“We may be under attack.”

Feng smirked. “By who?”

“The enemy, obviously. The Americans. Three of my sentries are missing.”

Feng’s face went blank, and he drew his pistol from his holster. “What … are your intentions?”

Azhar knew exactly what Feng was asking. The final bomb was not yet assembled completely, but the other nine were, and they were planted, awaiting only the radio signal from a remote location. If those nine weapons were detonated now, everyone along the Cumbre Vieja would die—including Feng.

The Aramco employees had no idea what the boreholes were for, were completely unaware that their lives now hung in the balance. Azhar’s fedayeen had sworn to die at his orders. Feng, however, wanted to live. Azhar suspected that if he said he was going to set off the bombs, Feng might well shoot him on the spot.

“We will fight, of course,” Azhar replied. “The remote detonator is not yet in place.”

He thought for a moment. He didn’t trust Feng or Feng’s associates. Operation Wrath of God would not have been possible without Chinese money and influence, but the man was in it for reasons of his own, reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with uniting the Islamic world in jihad. He’d been using the Jaish-e-Mohammad for his own agenda from the start.

Which was fine, since JeM had been using him as well—and now, Azhar could use Feng to draw out the enemy. If American forces were already up there on the crater rim, they would never let the helicopter escape.

Azhar added, “You can, if you choose, escape in the helicopter.”

Feng was looking about the crater rim wildly. “Yes. Yes. I could set off the weapons, if you wish.”

Azhar reached into the nearly empty suitcase. Inside was a remote control with a single button.

“Very well. You will need a clear line of sight to all of the craters in the Cumbre Vieja, and you will need to be at least five miles away … no, make that ten, if
this
device is not yet buried. Minimum safe distance for a surface one-kiloton burst.”

Nodding, Feng accepted the controller, turned, and began jogging up the trail toward the upper crater.

Azhar’s men were running in from several directions now. Kneeling by the bomb, he pointed at the cave. “There! See if the enemy is there!”

His men charged toward the entrance to the lava tube.

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1540 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean raised his hand, stopping Lia at the entrance to the cave. “Wait a sec!” Carefully, he peered around the boulders framing the left side of the opening. A dozen armed men were charging toward them, running flat out. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, he flipped the selector switch to three-round burst, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

One of the running fedayeen crumbled and fell. The others dropped to the ground, firing wildly. Full-auto rounds chirped and howled off rock above Dean’s head.

“Ilya!” he called. He hoped the surrounding rock walls weren’t blocking Akulinin’s signal. “Ilya, do you copy?”

“Right here, buddy. Keep your head down. One forty mike-mike surprise package on its way.”

A moment later, an explosion erupted fifty yards away, behind the attacking fedayeen and near the drilling rig. A few seconds after that, a second round detonated, this one squarely among the Tangos. Dean heard a shrill scream, saw a body flying with the gout of cinder, smoke, and fragmented rock.

He loosed another burst toward the attacking troops. “Ilya! We’re inside the tunnel mouth! They have us trapped! Can you lay down some smoke, let us get out of here?”

“On the way.”

Another 40 mm grenade burst on the crater floor, between the tunnel entrance and the drilling rig. White smoke erupted from the canister, boiling into the sky, creating a smoke screen between Dean and Lia and the attacking JeM soldiers.

“Let’s go!” Dean told Lia, and the two darted into the open, hunched over, running hard.

SAN MARTIN CALDERA RIM
MONDAY, 1540 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Ilya Akulinin broke open the M203 grenade launcher attached to his M4 carbine, ejected the empty cartridge, and slipped a fresh bluntnosed grenade into the receiver. The enemy was just about at the maximum effective range for the weapon—160 yards—but the shot was tricky because he was shooting
down
into the bottom of a huge bowl, and he had to correct for a tendency to aim high. His first round had been way over the target.

He didn’t want to correct too far, however, or he would risk hitting Charlie and Lia. He snapped the receiver shut on the second smoke grenade, took aim, and fired. The weapon gave a solid thunk as it fired, and the round burst close beside the first. The bottom of the crater’s bowl was beginning to fill with thick white smoke.

“Amber Four! Amber Four! Negative on the smoke! Repeat, negative on the smoke!”

Calmly, Akulinin reloaded with a third smoke grenade, took aim, and fired. As the round burst in the crater below, he said, “Amber One, this is Amber Four. Did not copy. Please repeat.”

“Amber Four, cease smoke! Cease smoke! You’re screwing the laser lock!”

Ambers One and Two, some two hundred yards south of Akulinin’s position, were using a tripod-mounted GLTD II, a small and lightweight ground laser target designator, to illuminate the base of the drilling rig for the incoming Firestorm strike. Smoke, however, blocked the laser light.

Akulinin glanced at his watch. Firestorm was still seven minutes out. The smoke ought to clear within a couple of minutes.

Plenty of time …

INNER SLOPE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1541 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean knelt at the bottom of the gully, his rifle against his shoulder. A thick clump of pine trees and a tangle of large rocks provided a good firing position.

“Climb straight to the top,” he told her. “Ilya’s up there, among those rocks.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“Right behind you.
Go!
”

White smoke drifted heavy and opaque at the bottom of the crater, like thick fog. A shadow, upright and moving, began to materialize ahead, and Dean put a three-round burst into it. At least, he thought as the shadow twisted and fell, he had the comfort of knowing that anything moving in that cloud would be a hostile. He didn’t need to worry about inflicting friendly-fire casualties.

He heard the Tangos calling to one another—whether in Arabic or a Pakistani language, he wasn’t sure. He stayed in position, listening to the sounds of Lia’s clamber up the rugged slope fade. “Ilya?” he called. “Lia’s on her way up the gully. Don’t shoot her by mistake.”

“Copy that, Charlie. I’m not shooting. I can’t see shit in the crater. And Amber Four told me to stop making smoke.”

“Just sit tight and take care of Lia.”

“She okay?”

“Seems to be. Don’t piss her off, though. I just saw her kill a guy with her bare hands.”