Ark Storm (48 page)

The roads were full of traffic. Many had not believed in the severity of the coming storm. Now they sat in their cars, blinded by rain, trapped. Those stuck near rivers would be washed away when the banks broke. And they called it an Act of God.

146

STANFORD, ARK STORM OPS ROOM, 6:00 P.M.

The Ops Room was a mass of bodies, some bent over monitors, others on the phone, others dashing between terminals. Dan, Gwen, and Holdstone erupted into their midst, causing temporary paralysis.

Hendrix glared at them with disbelief. “Join the party, why don’tcha?”

Dan subsumed the urge to slam a fist into the man’s face. Riley ran up.

“Boudy! You’re blue.”

“Should have seen her ninety minutes ago,” murmured Dan. “I need a sofa, pillows, blankets, and intravenous hot, sweet tea. And some heavy-duty anti-inflams.”

Art, hovering in the background, spoke up; “Hey, Boudy. I’m on it. You with the muscles, follow me.”

Gwen slipped into an empty seat and smiled as Dan hurried off. He and Art returned a few minutes later carting a sofa covered with pillows and duvets. They placed it in an alcove at the back of the room.

Dan escorted Gwen to it, draped her with duvets while Art returned with the first of what would be an endless stream of sugary, milky teas.

Gwen lay back, still wearing her ski suit, and sipped the tea. Riley doled out two prescription-only anti-inflammatories she kept in her cupboard, the legacy of a broken toe. Then she raced back to check her screens and the feed from the webcams dotted around California. She had gone beyond manic and scurried back and forth, her heels replaced by running shoes.

Holdstone sat cross-legged on the floor beside Gwen’s sofa, refusing all Gwen’s offers to take a seat beside her.

“I’m fine here,” she said. She pulled out her cell, tried and failed to make a call. The networks were overwhelmed.

*   *   *

Above ground, FEMA and CalEMA orchestrated the evacuation. Those on the coast had fled, or been helped to flee in scores of army transport trucks. Those living in the line of mudslides were the next priority. Transporters took them north or south depending on which edge of the storm was closest. Over two hundred and fifty thousand people were mobilized already. More would follow in the days to come.

The atmospheric river just kept on coming; one thousand kilometers long, banked up with more than enough water to feed forty Mississippis, it wasn’t going to run out of ammunition anytime soon. Ominously for the state of California, once it approached the Sierra Nevada, it began to slow and stall.

The Sacramento, Colorado, and San Joaquin rivers were rising relentlessly. Many stretches of the Southern California coastline were already suffering erosion as ten-foot waves gouged away at cliff and dune.

*   *   *

Frank Del Russo watched the live feeds, biding his time. His attention flickered between the disaster unfolding on the screens to the players who, in their own way, had stood like a doomed Canute trying to hold back the waves, or in this case, the flood. He felt a tad queasy at the thought of the flood. The building he now found himself in was supposedly hurricane, flood, and earthquake proof, but they’d said the
Titanic
was unsinkable. On the screens before him, man’s hubris was playing out loud and clear as nature toyed with man and his creations with an unparalleled brutality.

Del Russo noticed the two women, one half dead, clearly in severe pain, the other pulsing with vitality. When he saw the man who had to be Dan Jacobsen blow out a breath, saw his shoulders drop about five inches, he approached.

“Jacobsen?” he asked, extending his hand. “Frank Del Russo. CTC. Have a bit of catching up to do.”

Dan shook the man’s hand, gave him a smile, half grim, half amused.

As the two men, nearly matched in height, bowed their heads and spoke softly, Hendrix bustled about, trying and failing to eavesdrop. He wore his complaints on his face. “Getting a tad crowded in here!” he would shout every ten minutes as he passed Gwen’s sofa or the bulk of Dan and Del Russo, deep in conversation. They ignored him utterly, only adding to his bubbling fury. Beneath her manic movement, Riley was strangely calm: the general in the heat of battle, utterly focused.

*   *   *

Dan finished briefing Del Russo.

“Need a landline,” said Del Russo to Art. “If I may.”

“Office back there. Private too,” said Art, leading Del Russo.

Dan waited until the CTC man had made his call, then he walked into the office and nodded at the phone.

Del Russo vacated the seat and the phone.

“Mind if I listen in?” he asked.

Dan shrugged. He rang Meade.

“Admiral, what’s up?”

“Down,” came the answer. “Every last one of the “’squitos.”

“Great. The yacht?”

“Still going.”

“What the—?”

“My thoughts. Politics. Wait out.”

“He’ll be close to the border by now. Must be. My guess is he’ll have a jet ready and waiting to fly out from there.”

“We’re checking on the jets.”

“Mexicans won’t cooperate in time. There’s no choice but to shoot that yacht out of the sea.”

Del Russo smiled. Jacobsen was everything he’d heard about, and more.

Dan asked Meade to keep him posted, then hung up.

Gwen had materialized silently in the doorway. She held onto the doorjamb.

“Will they do that, really? Shoot a yacht from the sea in US waters?” she asked.

Del Russo eyed her in alarm.

Dan turned to him. “She was the one who got the first intel on this. She knows everything,” he said. “Risked her life many times over.”

Del Russo gave a brief nod, but looked deeply uncomfortable. As a serving member of the intel community, he was restricted in a way that Jacobsen wasn’t, but he could hardly silence the man.

Dan turned to Gwen. “I think they will. I hope they will.”

“If I could get to the Zeus model, I could reverse the program, get the ionizers on the drones to reduce the rainfall,” said Gwen.

“The drones are no more,” said Dan. “And there’s no time to get anything off the yacht.”

He looked beyond the room, his eyes seeing the F-22s, hoping that even now they were closing in on Al Baharna and his super-yacht, the ship-killing Harpoons primed and ready.

147

THIRTY-TWO KM
s
FROM THE MEXICAN BORDER, 7:00 P.M.

Five miles off the coast, approaching San Diego, the super-yacht
Zephyr
was outrunning the storm. In his cabin, Sheikh Ali watched the devastation play out on his TV screen. He watched cars being washed down streets. He watched houses collapse and sail away in the deluge. He saw desperate people, standing through the sunroofs of cars, holding their children aloft as the flood waters swirled around them. He felt the surge of righteousness. The rain would wash away his old sins, purge him, as it purged the land of the infidel and his possessions. In twenty minutes he would be across the border, in Mexican seas.

148

7:02 P.M.

Squadron B, low on fuel, had been replaced by Squadron C. The new contingent of F-22 pilots watched the clear and distinct thermal image of the yacht
Zephyr
powering toward the Mexican border.

The squadron leader communicated with his commander.

“Target is approximately twenty minutes from entering Mexican waters, sir. Requesting guidance.”

“Wait out.” The commander rang SECAF, who in turn rang CTC’s Andrew Canning, who, guts doing a tango, rang the president, who took the call on speakerphone.

“Sir, we have approximately fifteen minutes left. Target is very much afloat. In my opinion, we need to take action,” declared Canning as tactfully as he could manage.

The president turned to his secretary of defense. The man nodded. He turned to the head of the CIA. The man smiled.

“I’ll ring SECAF to give the command to fire,” intoned the president. He hung up, made the call.

“Here’s your order,” he told SECAF. “Permission to fire is granted. Destroy and sink the yacht
Zephyr
before she gets near Mexican waters.”

The squadron leader got the message twenty seconds later. He passed it on to his second-in-command.

The two pilots primed their Harpoons, two each, and let them fly.

Ali Al Baharna, gazing out of the bulletproof window of his stateroom, saw the darkness pierced by streaks of gray. Coming right at him.

He just had time to intone “Allahu Akbar,” then the world turned white.

The yacht took four direct hits. The Harpoons with their combined payload of 860 pounds of high explosive DESTEX blew it apart. Flames billowed into the night.

The F-22s overflew, checking their handiwork. What little was left of
Zephyr
sank in less than a minute. Ali Al Baharna and the whole ship’s crew were buried at sea.

149

NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER, TYSON’S CORNER

Canning’s phone rang. He picked up the handset, listened intently, said three words: “Good. Thank you.”

He hung up, turned to Peters, Furlong, and Southward. In the Eastern Time Zone, it was late, past 10:00
P.M.
, but none of them were tired. They were fired up on adrenaline, bolstered by caffeine. Paper cups littered the table, along with the remains of a sandwich dinner and an empty tube of Tums. Canning’s dyspepsia had gone nuclear, but at that moment he didn’t care. Southward sat upright, spine scarcely touching her chair back. Furlong slouched, thin legs stretched out under the table. Peters lounged against the bombproof glass window, gazing into the darkness, conjuring images of his own. He wheeled round as Canning began to speak.

“Ali Al Baharna is no more. The yacht
Zephyr
will be reported as
lost at sea.
A casualty of the storm.”

“Live by the storm, die by the storm,” mused Peters. He took a seat at the table, eyed his boss keenly. Was this a victory, or a failure? Canning’s eyes were cold, revealing nothing.

Canning nodded. “I wonder if Al Baharna really did create the ARk Storm, or whether it would be happening anyway?” he asked.

“Who can know,” replied Southward. “What matters was his intention. He
wanted
to create it. And hell, maybe he really did. We won’t know the death tolls for days, for weeks if it keeps raining. What we do know is that he has more than enough blood on his hands to justify killing him and the rest of the Jihadis he had on board.”

Peters glanced across at Southward. He’d wondered if she would shed a tear, go all queasy, but her hand as she lifted her coffee cup to her lips was rock steady and in her eyes was the glow of triumph.

He reached out his hand, shook hers.

“Your trail,” he said. “Good job!”

She smiled.

“In at the beginning, in at the end,” intoned Canning, giving Southward the ghost of a smile.

Oddly, it was only Chris Furlong who wondered who else had been on board, who might not have been a Jihadi, but he said nothing, just sat in the still office, hands folded in his lap.

*   *   *

Canning picked up the phone again, rang the number at ARk Storm Ops. Del Russo took the call, listened hard, smiled. He hung up, walked over to Dan, Gwen, and Holdstone.

“Went down,” was all he said.

150

MANHATTAN, THE NEXT DAY, 9:00 A.M.

While the storm raged on through the night in California, in Manhattan it dawned calm and clear. Ronnie Glass took a spinning class at Equinox, snagged a coffee and bagel, then made his way to his office. He got there a comfortable half hour before the bell rang on the NYSE and trading got underway.

He clicked on his Bloomberg Terminals, scrolled straight to the three California casualty insurers. He smiled. At the opening bell they were already down an average four percent. His Aunt Mandy had rung him last night, 2:00
A.M.
his time, raving about the storm.

“Hey, Ronnie!” she’d screamed. “ARk Storm! They called it, officially, at 1:30 yesterday afternoon. It’s the real deal. I got me the hell outta there. I’m in Reno on the slots.”

Ronnie smiled at the memory. His aunt was a prime-time pain in the ass, but she was useful; as to the true extent of her value, time would tell. If Mandy were right, the storm would go on and on, causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage. They’d make out like bandits. He felt the stirring; making money always made him horny. He might just treat himself, some more art, some fresh sex, not in that order.

He scrolled on ArtScene, checking the exhibitions, running quick calculations, scenario-planning on different budgets. Next, he scrolled to the news. Storm warnings flashing red. Hundreds already dead in California. Potentially thousands of deaths feared. The trend was right. All he needed to do now was sit back and watch the devastation.

151

9:45 A.M.

Ange Wilkie checked her reflection in the mirrored elevator. Agent chic, she liked to think of it. The sleek trouser suit, part wool, part lycra, body-conscious and fluid enough to let her wrestle, to let her run if she needed to; the MBT shoes. She wouldn’t need to run, though, she reckoned.

She turned to Rac Rodgers. “You ready?”

“Oh
yeah
!”

“Let’s goooo!”

*   *   *

She loved the looks of naked curiosity, the rows of swiveling heads, the halted conversations as they strode across the floor accompanied by two of the bank’s security men: the human equivalent of a siren and a flashing blue light. The security guys thrummed with excitement despite their poker faces. Ange could feel it. Schadenfreude met the thirst for justice. Who didn’t love to see the bad guy go down, especially when that bad guy earned near on a hundred times what you did? Plus, it enlivened their day, broke the monotony. They were keener than keen to help.