Scimitar SL-2 (4 page)

THE CANARY ISLANDS, SEVEN VOLCANIC RISES OFF THE COAST OF NORTH AFRICA

The whole idea of this tiny cluster of Spanish Islands, set in the sparkling Atlantic off the coast of Africa, had been hers. She had lived in Europe when she was much younger and her sister-in-law, Gayle, who lived in southern Spain, had suggested the Canaries because of the January weather, which was warm, much warmer than mainland Spain, a thousand miles to the northeast. But the most significant reason for Tenerife was that Kathy had wanted to arrange a Catholic Blessing for their marriage, which had thus far been only legally formalized by a U.S. Justice of the Peace in Washington.

Gayle had located the perfect little church on the neighboring island of Gran Canaria, the Iglesia de San Antonio Abad down near the waterfront at Las Palmas, the island’s main city. She had arranged for the English-speaking priest to meet Arnold and Kathy on Friday morning and conduct a short private service.

Only after their arrival did Kathy plan to tell her husband that San Antonio, unprepossessing, painted white, and Romanesque in design, was the very church where Christopher Columbus had prayed for divine help before sailing for the Americas.

The Great Modern American Patriot and the Great European Adventurer. Two Naval Commanding Officers somehow united at the same altar, separated by the centuries, but not in spirit. Yes, Kathy thought, Arnold would like that. He’d like that very much, the secret romantic that he ultimately was.

So it was settled. A honeymoon in the Canaries. And even the globally sophisticated Arnold had been taken aback by the sheer opulence of the place, the terra-cotta exteriors, five swimming pools, the perfect alfresco dining area on the terraces looking down to the soft sandy beaches.

“And here he is, up the stupid tower, for the fourth day in a row,” thought Kathy. “With the telescope, presumably looking for the enemy.”

Just at that moment, the former National Security Adviser to the President of the United States made a timely poolside appearance. “Oh hello, my darling,” said Kathy. “I was just thinking this is like being on a honeymoon with Lord Nelson, you up there with that ridiculous telescope.”

“It’s better, I assure you,” grunted Arnold. “Admiral Nelson lost an arm in the battle of Santa Cruz about 40 miles north of here. Right now you’d be sitting in intensive care, waiting to see if he lived or died.”

Kathy could not help laughing at his mercurial mind, and encyclopedic knowledge.

“Anyway,” added Arnold, “Lord Nelson was not big on honeymoons. Never married Lady Hamilton, did he? Probably trying to avoid a hard time when he was caught using his telescope.”

Kathy shook her head. She knew that Arnold Morgan was impossible to joust with because he always won, impossible to reason with because he always had more knowledge, impossible to be angry with because he could find a joke, a shaft of irony, or even slapstick from any set of circumstances. She had been in love with him from the day he had first thundered into her life, instructing her to call the head of the Russian Navy and tell him he was a lying bastard.

Of course he was impossible. Everyone knew that. But he was also more exciting, fun, and challenging than any man she had ever met. He was over twenty years older then she, an inch shorter, and the most confident person in the White House. He cared nothing for rank, only for truth. The former President had plainly been afraid of him, afraid of his absolute devotion to the flag, the country, and its safety.

To the former Kathy O’Brien, when Arnold Morgan pulled himself up to his full five feet, eight and a half inches, he seemed not one inch short of ten feet. In her mind, and in the mind of many others, she had married the world’s shortest giant.

It seemed incredible that he was gone from the West Wing. Kathy, a veteran of the White House secretarial staff, simply
could not imagine what it would be like without the caged lion in the office of the President’s National Security Adviser, taking the flack, taking the strain, and laying down the law about “what’s right for this goddamned country.”

Whoever the new President decided to appoint in the Admiral’s place, he’d need some kind of a hybrid composed of John Wayne, Henry Kissinger, and Douglas MacArthur. And he wasn’t going to find one of those. The only one in captivity was, at this moment, sprawled out next to Kathy, holding her hand, and telling her he loved her, that she was the most wonderful person he ever had or ever would meet—

And now, he announced, he was going to take a swim. Four days in Tenerife had already seen him acquire a deepening tan, which contrasted strikingly with his steel-gray close-cut hair. Even as he approached senior citizenship Arnold still had tree-trunk legs, heavily muscled arms, and a waistline only marginally affected by a lifelong devotion to roast-beef sandwiches with mayonnaise and mustard.

He was pretty smooth in the water too. Kathy watched him moving along the pool with a cool, professional-looking crawl, breathing every two strokes, just turning his head slightly into the trough of the slipstream for a steady pull of air. He looked as if he could, if necessary, swim like that for a year.

Kathy decided to join him and dived into the pool as he went past, surfacing alongside him and slipping into a somewhat labored form of sidestroke. As always, it was difficult to keep up with the Admiral.

When finally they came in to rest on the hotel lounges, Arnold made a further announcement. “I’m taking you to see something tomorrow,” he said. “The place where scientists predict there will be the greatest natural disaster the earth has ever seen.”

“I thought you said that was due to happen in the White House next month?”

“Well, the second greatest then,” he replied, chuckling at his sassy new wife.

“What is it?” she asked absently, turning back to her book.

“It’s a volcano,” he said, darkly.

“Not another,” she murmured. “I just married one of those.”

“I suppose it would be slightly too much to ask you to pay attention?”

“No, I’m ready. I’m all ears. Go to it, Admiral.”

“Well, just about 60 miles from here, to the northwest, is the active volcanic island of La Palma. It’s only about a third of the size of Tenerife, pear-shaped, tapering off narrowly to the south—”

“You sound like a guidebook.”

“Well, not quite, but it’s an interesting book that I found by the telescope.”

“What book?”

“Honey, please. Kathryn Morgan, please pay attention. I have just been reading, rather carefully, a very fascinating account of the neighboring island of La Palma and its likely affect on the future of the world. You may have thought I was just goofing off looking through the telescope. But I actually wasn’t—”

“You abandoned the telescope! Then it’s surprising Tenerife hasn’t come under attack in the last couple of hours. That’s all I can say.” Mrs. Kathy Morgan was now laughing at her own humor. So, for that matter, was her husband. “If you’re not darn careful you’ll come under attack,” he said. “You want me to tell you about the end of the world or not?”

“Ooh, yes please, my darling. That would be lovely.”

“Right. Now listen up.” He sounded precisely like the old nuclear submarine commanding officer he once had been. A martinet of the deep. Stern, focused, ready to handle any back talk from anyone. Except Kathy, who always disarmed him.

“The southerly part of La Palma has a kind of backbone,” he said. “A high ridge, running due south clean down the middle. This volcanic fault line, about three miles long, takes its name from its main volcano, Cumbre Vieja, which rises four miles up from the seabed, with only the top mile and a half visible. It’s had seven eruptions in the last five hundred years. The fault fissure,
which runs right along the crest, developed after the eruption of 1949. Basically the goddamned west side of the range is falling into the goddamned sea, from a great height.”

Kathy giggled at his endlessly colorful way of describing any event, military, financial, historical, or in this case geophysical.

“Pay attention,” said the Admiral. “Now, way to the south is the Volcan San Antonio, a giant black crater. They just completed a new visitors center with amazing close-up views. Then you can drive south to see Volcan Teneguia, that’s the last one, which erupted here back in 1971. You can climb right up there and take a look into the crater if you like.”

“No, thanks.”

“But the main one is Cumbre Vieja itself, about eight miles to the north. That’s the big one, and it’s been rumbling in recent years. According to the book, if that blew, it would be the single biggest world disaster for a million years…”

“Arnold, you are prone, at times, to exaggeration. And because of this, I ask you one simple question. How could a rockfall in this remote and lonely Atlantic island possibly constitute a disaster on the scale you are saying?”

The Admiral prepared his saber. Then, metaphorically, slashed the air with it. “Tsunami, Kathryn,” he said. “Mega-tsunami.”

“No kidding?” she said. “Rye or pumpernickel.”

“Jesus Christ!” said the President’s former National Security Adviser. “Right now, Kathy, I’m at some kind of an intersection, trying to decide whether to leave you here looking sensational in that bikini but overwhelmed by ignorance, or whether to lead you to the sunny uplands of knowledge. Depends a lot on your attitude.”

Kathy leaned over and took his hand. “Take me to the uplands,” she said. “You know I’m only teasing you. You want some of that orange juice, it’s fabulous.”

She stood up easily, walked three paces, and poured him a large glass. The Spanish oranges were every bit as good as the crop from Florida, and the Admiral drained the glass before beginning what he called an attempt to educate the unreachable.

“Fresh,” he said, approvingly. “A lot like yourself.”

The third, and most beautiful, Mrs. Arnold Morgan leaned over again and kissed him.

Christ,
he thought.
How the hell did I ever get this lucky?

“Tsunami,” he said again. “Do you know what a tsunami is?”

“Not offhand. What is it?”

“It’s the biggest tidal wave in the world. A wall of water that comes rolling in from the ocean, and doesn’t break in the shallows like a normal wave—just keeps coming, holding its shape, straight across any damn thing that gets in its way. They can be 50 feet high.”

“You mean if one of ’em hit Rehobeth Beach or somewhere near our flat Maryland shore, it would just roll straight over the streets and houses?”

“That’s what I mean,” he said, pausing. “But there is something worse. It’s called a mega-tsunami. And that’s what can end life as we know it. Because according to that book up by the telescope, those waves can be 150 feet high. A mega-tsunami could wipe out the entire East Coast of the U.S.A.”

Kathy was thoughtful. “How ’bout that?” she said quietly, feeling somewhat guilty about the lightly frivolous way she had treated Arnold’s brand-new knowledge. “I still don’t see how a volcano could cause such an uproar—aren’t they just big, slow old things with a lot of very slow molten rock running down the slopes?”

“Aha. That’s where La Palma comes in…Cumbre Vieja last erupted about forty years ago, and the scientists later discerned a massive slippage on the western, seaward flank. Maybe twelve feet downwards.”

“That’s not much.”

“It is, if the rock face is eight miles long, and the whole lot is slipping, at a great height above sea level, sending a billion tons of rock at terrific speed, straight down to the ocean floor. That will be the biggest tsunami the world has ever seen—”

“Are they sure about that?”

“Dead sure. There’s a couple of universities in America and I
think Germany with entire departments experimenting with the possible outcomes of a mega-tsunami developing in the Canary Islands.”

“Did one of them publish the stuff in the book you read?”

“No. That was done by a couple of English Professors at London University. Both of ’em very big deals, by the sound of it. One of ’em’s called Day, the other one Sarandon, I think. They sounded like guys who knew what they were saying.”

0900, The Following Day.

At the insistence of his two armed agents, the Admiral and his wife chartered a private plane to take them over to La Palma—an elderly ATR-72 turboprop that was only slightly more silent and restful than a train crash. They took off from little Reina Sofia airport, only five miles from their hotel, and shuddered, shook, and rumbled their way up the west coast of Tenerife, past the main resort areas, and along the spectacular coastline. Before the northwest headland of Point Teno they veered out to sea, crossing Atlantic waters almost two miles deep. They touched down at the little airport four miles south of Santa Cruz de La Palma at 9:25 in the morning.

A car and chauffeur awaited them. Actually two cars and one chauffeur. The agents who had accompanied them would follow in the second automobile. A condition of Admiral Morgan’s original appointment to the White House had been that he would be provided with round-the-clock protection for a minimum of five years, effective immediately upon his retirement. In the U.S. he had a detail of four agents, working shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Two of them had been designated to accompany the former NSA on his honeymoon.