Death Wave (54 page)

The bomb was intact, thanks be to Allah.

This, he thought, was deep enough. The Cumbre Vieja, he knew, was riddled with lava tubes like this, some of them winding through the depths of these mountains for miles. He didn’t know how deep this one ran, wasn’t even sure how far down he’d come. At one point during the planning for Wrath of God, they’d considered using this lava tube, and others, rather than drilling boreholes. The far more costly expedient of drilling wells into the throats of these volcanos had been adopted in the end for the simple reason that doing so guaranteed placement of the bombs as deep beneath the mountains as possible, to lift the maximum mass of rock from the flanks of the Cumbre Vieja and hurl it into the sea.

This would do, though. The explosion moments earlier
might
have been the other nukes all going off together … but he didn’t think so. He hoped he was wrong, hoped the bombs had detonated, but if they had, they should have taken this section of rock along with them on the long slide to the sea. More likely, the blast had been an American bomb, and that meant that the plan had almost certainly failed.

There was still a chance, however. One bomb was not ten, and a lava tube some hundreds of meters in length was not a borehole sunk four hundred meters directly down into solid rock, but it was
something
. He would detonate the weapon, and the resultant landslide might be enough.

At the very least, he would blow the top off of this mountain and wreak a measure of revenge against the enemy forces that had brought his plan for Islamic unity to ruin.

He still needed to connect the battery. Holding the flashlight between his teeth, he began working on the final steps to arm the device.

NORTHEAST RIM
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1555 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia watched as the Navy helicopter came closer. It had picked up the two Marines on the west flank of the crater, and now the aircraft was coming after her and Akulinin. Four more Marines from the FORECON Green Amber team were arriving as well from nearby craters. As the helicopter touched down, rotors still turning, they formed up in an orderly line and began filing aboard, clambering into the side cargo hatch.

The Marines were brisk and businesslike; Lia had expected that they would have been jubilant at their success, bringing in nine out of ten blockbuster bombs to annihilate the terrorist threat on La Palma. A nuclear holocaust had been averted, as had a potential doomsday threat to the U.S. East Coast. She’d have thought they’d all be whooping it up.

Maybe they were as numb as she was.

Maybe the celebrations would come later.

Ilya helped her up into the helicopter. “Is that all of you?” a crewman yelled at her over the clatter of the rotors as the last Marine came on board.

Her hearing had been gone for a moment or two there, but the ringing in her ears had been steadily growing louder over the past couple of minutes. She realized she could hear again, though the ringing made it touch and go.

She shook her head and pointed west. “One more!” she yelled. “Other side of the mountain somewhere!”

The roar of the rotors increased, and the helicopter lifted off again.

LAVA TUBE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

In the darkness far below, Ibrahim Azhar looked up toward the ceiling of the tunnel.

He believed in Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. He believed that God had spoken through His Prophet, bless his name, and that God would judge the universe. That belief, of course, was as much a part of the image of radical fundamentalist Islam as was hating the Jews and demanding an end to the Jewish state. Yet … sometimes the faith wavered, something he rarely admitted even to himself. What just and merciful God would allow the injustice and poverty of so many people, while their rulers enjoyed such opulence?

Though God alone was what united a billion Muslims, He seemed curiously unwilling to assist His people in regaining their rightful place in this world.

So, if God refused to show Himself, what remained was only …
politics
, his passionate yearning to see his people united under a single leader from Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines, from central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. To see the western oppressors humiliated and overthrown.
Especially
to see America brought low.

Operation Wrath of God yet might work.

It was possible. God might act after all. Azhar could yet be that God’s avenging right arm. Perhaps God had brought him here to this darkness for exactly that purpose.

“Allahu akbar!”
he cried. “God is great!”

He brought the bare end of one wire down on a battery contact.

And darkness turned to Light …

WESTERN SLOPE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean saw a Tango leap up from cover and dash forward up the hill, racing toward his position. He raised his rifle, but the man dropped again behind cover before Dean could squeeze off a round. There were several bad guys down there among the pine trees and boulders, and they had him pinned here, unable to move. That helicopter wasn’t going to be able to come in to dust him off if hostiles were firing at it from a hot LZ.

Then the earth moved.

It started as a vast and powerful, deep rumble, an eruption from far, far below the surface that became louder and more powerful moment by thunderous moment. The boulder was actually trembling, and loose stones and cinders on the ground were dancing about wildly as the earthquake grew in strength.

The side of the mountain was
lifting
, rising toward the sky …

NAVY HELICOPTER
NORTH OF THE SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The helicopter lurched suddenly as though swatted by a giant hand, tipping wildly to starboard. Lia clung to a handhold as several of the Marines around her cursed, some of them pitched to the deck.

“What the hell is going on?” one demanded.

Sparks burst from a bundle of electrical wiring attached to the overhead, spilling foul-smelling smoke into the compartment. The Navy crewman yanked a fire extinguisher from a wall bracket and doused the fire with CO
₂
.

Below, half of the mountain appeared to be rising, pushing upward atop a pillar of black debris, rising and falling outward, toward the west.

“Hang on, everyone!” the pilot yelled above ongoing thunder and shouting Marines.

The helicopter began climbing.

WESTERN SLOPE,
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1558 HOURS LOCAL TIME

He tried to stand up but couldn’t. The boulder that had been his cover shifted suddenly, then began rolling and bouncing down the hill. The Tangos, fortunately, were too busy hanging on to take advantage of Dean’s sudden exposure.

All he could do was hang on. Above and behind, the top of the mountain appeared to be exploding into the sky, a pillar of smoke and blackness that must have been a mile high, perhaps higher, and
still
it continued to grow.

The side of the mountain to which Charlie Dean was clinging continued to rise … and then it was falling, dropping back again, slaming against the ground, but the ground itself was no longer solid but a fast-flowing avalanche of rock and gravel and dirt.

Dean guessed that he was riding a single block of stone, a chunk of mountainside perhaps a hundred yards long and fifty wide. The nearest edge, toward the north, was crumbling away as he watched, bringing the edge closer and yet closer. Beyond, the ground was a hellish churning of tumbling rock and debris, an avalanche hurtling down the western side of Volcán de San Martin, racing toward the sea.

A lone Tango a dozen yards away made it to his feet, swaying as he rode the mass of basalt, and then the rock lurched and pitched and he fell over the side and into the thunderous slide. As bigger and bigger chunks broke from the northern edge of the rock, Dean managed to get to his feet and scramble south, putting some distance between himself and the edge.

The rock slab was pitched forward nearly forty-five degrees. Dean could look down the slope at green pine forest and banana plantations, at sheer cliffs and, beyond, the sparkling blue of the Atlantic. There was nothing to stop the landslide now,
nothing
between millions of tons of falling, sliding rock and the ocean.

Charlie Dean was falling with it.

NAVY HELICOPTER
NORTH OF THE SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1559 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“There he is!” Lia cried, pointing. “In the middle of that big rock!”

The helicopter swung around out of the north, descending. Somehow,
somehow
, the pilot brought the aircraft under control after the shuddering impact of the shock wave, and now he came in low above the avalanche.

“Ain’t no way I can land on that, miss!” he yelled.

“Just get us fucking closer!” Lia yelled back.

WESTERN SLOPE
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1600 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean was staring at the fast-approaching ocean. There was no way he could survive falling off those cliffs ahead, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet into the sea.

“Charlie!” Marie Telach yelled in his skull. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you!” He had to yell, too, just to hear himself above the roar.

“Turn around! Look up!”

He did so. The light gray belly of a Navy helicopter was pacing the sliding rock, twenty feet above him and a little to one side. He could see someone leaning out of the open cargo door, pointing at him.

It was Lia.

“Ilya just patched a call through to the Art Room,” Marie told him. “You weren’t answering your radio!”

His tactical radio, he realized, had been lost in either the first explosion or this second, far vaster blast. His implant was still working, though, and his link with the Art Room.

A length of rope came looping and falling toward him, uncoiling as it dropped. It wasn’t
quite
long enough, and the winds roiling above the slide right now made it twist and snap unpredictably …

The huge slab of rock struck something, jolted hard, and it began fragmenting, falling to pieces beneath Dean’s feet, lurching again skyward, and hurling him with it. Desperately, he reached out and snagged the trailing rope one-handed. The wind tore at him, but he managed to grab it with both hands, clinging to the end of a twenty-foot line as the helicopter began rising, rising, hauling Dean up and away from the deadly torrent of crumbling, hurtling, thundering rock.

Then he was out over the ocean as the landslide spewed out over a hundred-foot cliff. He saw the mass of rock, half a mountain’s worth of basalt, strike the sea in a titanic explosion of whitewater and spray.

He was far too weak to climb. All he could do was cling to the rope, his lifeline, as the Marines on board the helicopter used a winch to haul him up.

Among those who grabbed hold of him moments later, arms clutching him and dragging him up and over and onto the Knighthawk’s cargo deck, were Lia and Ilya.

Behind them, a volcano erupted beneath a black umbrella of smoke, sending gouts of molten rock, glowing orange-hot, roiling high into the tropical sky.

SAND BEACH
ACADIA NATIONAL PARK
MAINE
6:08
P.M
.

Sand beaches are uncommon along the rocky coast of Maine. On the entire island of Mount Desert, within the boundaries of Acadia National Park, there is exactly one, a 350-yard stretch of white sand facing south into the Atlantic. The chill waters of the Gulf of Maine are too cold to tempt any but the hardiest souls, even in late summer, but tourists flock to the beach to watch the waves, to hike the nearby trails, to play in the sand and photograph the picturesque headlands, the rocky islands along the coast, the lobster boats plying their trade just offshore.

The La Palma Landslip, as geologists would later refer to it, had indeed raised a tidal wave as it slid into the sea three thousand miles from New England, creating a swell within the ocean that raced out across the Atlantic at five hundred miles per hour. Unseen in the open ocean, it was a wave in the physics sense, a transmission of energy rather than a visible moving crest. Only as it passed into shallower water did the physics begin to manifest as something visible.

The wave rippled across the Atlantic in six hours; Mount Desert was the northernmost stretch of U.S. coastline not sheltered by the loom of Nova Scotia just over a hundred miles away. On Sand Beach, Brad and Tammy Matheson were sitting on the beach, watching Ryan, their nine-year-old son, building a sand castle between the high and low tide lines. He’d been at it for nearly three hours and had erected a labyrinth of towers and walls that would have done Camelot proud. The tide was coming in now, but Ryan still had perhaps an hour before his edifice faced a serious marine challenge.