Death Wave (48 page)

“I am concerned,” the President said slowly, “that what you have just told us represents another intelligence gaffe. I’m sure you remember what our so-called
intelligence
agencies did to my predecessor in office.”

He was referring, of course, to the celebrated failure of U.S. intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction that had led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The comparison, though, was not really apt. The problem had been far more involved than the CIA telling the President that Iraq had WMDs, and the President sending in the troops. Intelligence work was always a shadowy and imprecise business, more art than science despite high-tech satellites and futuristic eavesdropping techniques. You found a piece of the picture here, another there, pulled in others from someplace else, and you hoped to fit it together into a coherent whole.

Coherence, though, was almost impossible when politics were involved—when agency directors were protecting their own turfs, when department heads were protecting their jobs, when
not
fitting neatly into the correct political orientation for a given worldview was tantamount to career suicide.
Any
given intelligence result had more than one possible interpretation, and political animals within the system tended to adopt the interpretation that made their superiors higher up the chain happy.

Of course, that same weakness in the system still existed now. The current political wisdom within Washington tended to downgrade the War on Terror to a skirmish, to downplay the threat of radical Islam in the holy name of political correctness.

Still, sometimes it was necessary to drop political correctness in the name of national survival.

The problem here, though, was not national survival so much as it was victory in this particular piece of the skirmish, and the survival of Rubens’ people. Katie Walden had been pretty emphatic in her declaration that dropping half of La Palma into the Atlantic would
not
result in a three-hundred-foot megatsunami.

But, damn it, Rubens wasn’t going to risk the possibility that the scientists might have gotten it wrong.

He also wasn’t going to let Lia and Charlie and the rest twist in the wind, nor was he going to watch some tens of thousands of La Palma islanders get blown away in the name of political expediency. If he had to lie—or, at the least, to
overstate
the threat of a tidal wave scouring the East Coast down to bare rock—in order to save those people, then he’d do it, and damn the consequences to himself.

“My predecessor invaded Iraq because you people gave him bad information!” the President continued. “Now you’re telling me to invade an island belonging to Spain. If I do this and you’re wrong again, this will
not
be good for America’s image overseas. They already see us as the world’s bully, the tough guy going around knocking down the little kids.”

“For God’s sake, Mr. President,” General James said. “This isn’t some schoolyard scrap!”

“Perhaps,” the secretary of state said, “we could turn this whole thing over to the Spanish authorities. Let
them
deal with it. Our hands stay clean.”

“How about that, General?” the President said. “It doesn’t have to be us putting our reputations on the line.”

“With all due respect, Mr. President,” Rubens said, “there isn’t time for that. Sometimes you have to put
everything
on the line.”

“What do the Spanish have in the area?” the President said.

The DNI was prepared with the figures. “Mr. President, local Spanish forces include one light infantry regiment—the 9th, the ‘Soria’—deployed to La Palma along with a headquarters battalion. Two more light infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, and a helicopter battalion are all positioned on Tenerife, about eighty miles away by air.”

“And frankly, sir,” General James said, “they won’t be able to do shit. Light infantry without combat experience? Artillery? That’s exactly the wrong tool for the wrong job.”

“And what is the right tool, General?”

“I’d say a U.S. Marine recon force deployed by helicopter, followed up by a Marine landing battalion. FORECON just happens to be in the area. And the
Iwo Jima
can be there in twenty-four hours.”

“They ‘just happen to be in the area,’ huh?”

James met his stare with a level gaze of hs own. “Yes, sir. The
Iwo
was on her way to the eastern Med, and is currently four hundred and fifty nautical miles northwest of La Palma. We managed to preposition FORECON on the
Iwo Jima
just in case they were needed.”

The Air Force general at the table cleared his throat. “Sir, acting on a recommendation from Mr. Rubens, we have deployed six aircraft of the 43rd Fighter Squadron out of Tyndall. F-22 Raptors with laser-guided JDAMs. Call sign Firestorm. Officially, and until you say otherwise, it’s a routine training flight across the Atlantic to Rota and back.” He looked at his watch. “They should be engaged in their second air-to-air refueling as we speak.”

“You’re suggesting an air strike?” the President said.

“The JDAMs will seal off the boreholes Mr. Rubens mentioned. If the nukes are already in position at the bottoms of those holes, the explosions will bury them, leaving no way to set them off. If the nukes are still on the surface but in the craters, the explosions will fragment them without causing them to detonate. There may be some radiological contamination in the area, but no nuclear explosions.”

The President sighed. “So help me, people. If this is another case of bad intelligence—”

“This isn’t a case of bad or misapplied intelligence, Mr. President,” Debra Collins said. “We
know
this threat exists, and we’re in a position to do something about it.”

Rubens blinked. Collins was coming in on
his
side?

“Admiral Blaine? What is your assessment?”

“I don’t see that we have any other choice, Mr. President. This looks damned solid.”

“I ran this nonsense about tsunamis past my science advisor before coming here,” the President said. He was looking directly at Rubens. “
He
says the danger from a large tidal wave is overstated. Pseudo-science.”

Rubens continued worrying the bone. “And the people I talked to said we can’t know for sure what would happen if those nukes go off. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe the tidal wave will be thirty feet high instead of three hundred. But even that would drown a lot of people, Mr. President. It would drown New York and Washington, and it would kick our economy in the nuts so hard that we might never recover. The intel we have so far suggests that the Chinese are behind this for exactly that reason. They plan to step in and take over all over the globe when our economy goes under.”

“Even if nothing else happens, Mr. President,” Collins said, “no tidal wave, no Chinese takeover, we’re going to look
very
bad if ten nuclear weapons are detonated on La Palma and a few thousand people are incinerated. We cannot afford to stand by and do nothing!”

“Fuck,” the President said.

24

GREEN AMBER ONE
NORTHEAST CRATER RIM
SAN MARTIN VOLCANO
MONDAY, 1515 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Fuck this,” Charlie Dean whispered. “I’m going down there.”

“Shit, man!” Akulinin said. “You trying to start a war?”

“No, but when we get the word to go, I want to be in position and
ready
. Now.”

“I heard that, Charlie,” Marie Telach said. “I recommend that you stay put! We should be hearing from the boss soon.”

“Recommendation noted,” Dean said. He was already crawling forward, the tech-Ghillie stretched over his back, shifting with each movement of hand or foot.

The descent was a lot tougher than the slow crawl around the crater’s rim. He was moving head-down, and at times the ground was steep enough that he began sliding on loose gravel or cinders. Each time he did, he spread his arms and legs, bracing against whatever support he could find in the ground with his hands, and hung on until the slide stopped. Then he would freeze in place, holding himself absolutely motionless in case someone at the bottom of the pit noticed the slither of rock and cinder down the slope.

Then he would begin moving again. He didn’t have to worry about being quiet, at least. The drill was pounding away with a steady
thump-thump-thump
, and the air was filled with the rumble and chug of motors and pumps.

Ilya had his back. Watching from the top of the gully through his sniperscope, he would be alert for signs that Dean’s crawl down the slope had been noticed, and take out any threat before the bad guy opened fire.

But the idea was to get all the way down without being seen.

Because once people started shooting, there was a real danger that the Tangos would set off their one-kiloton toys.

THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MONDAY, 1035 HOURS EDT

Rubens emerged from the conference room, bemused and gratified. The President had given the necessary approval. Operation Mountain Storm was now officially a go.

“So why’d you do it?” he asked Collins, who was walking out beside him.

“Do what?”

“Go to bat for me in there. Point out that this time the intel was good. He didn’t even ask for my resignation.”

“He will if this goes bad.”

“If this goes bad, he won’t have to ask.”

“We
are
on the same team, Bill.”

“With all of the interagency politics, sometimes it’s hard to remember that.”

“You don’t have to play stupid, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“You deliberately planted information about the
Yakutsk
through CIA assets in Ethopia and Somalia. You made sure those Somali pirates knew that the
Yakutsk
was a rich target for them. The
Constellation
battle group was shadowing that ship. As soon as the
Yakutsk
got off a distress call, your team went in.”

“It wasn’t my team.”
Well, except for Charlie and Ilya
, he thought,
but she doesn’t need to know everything
.

“It was a Navy SEAL VBSS unit you ‘happened to have close by.’ ”

“Our ships and personnel are required by the law of the sea to respond to any distress call at sea.”

“Uh-huh. And you were setting up the same thing in La Palma.”

“Not the same thing at all. I just made sure that we had plenty of solid assets where they could be used when they were needed.”

“You already have an assault force on the island, don’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“A reconnaissance force, then. Marines? Black CAT? I notice that you didn’t tell
him
that.”

“I didn’t want to complicate things.”

“I admire your balls, Bill.”

“You haven’t seen them in years.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

They reached the secure elevator that took them down to the underground visitors’ garage beneath the White House East Wing. Rubens pulled his cell phone from his pocket and examined the screen. He still wasn’t getting a signal—part of the White House’s security system.

Rubens and Collins parted company in the garage. “Bill?” She called after they’d gone a few steps. Her voice echoed off the bare concrete.

“Yeah?”

“Keep me in the loop.”

“Don’t worry, Debra,” he told her. “I’ll tell you if this works. You’ll know if it doesn’t.”

Still no signal on his phone. He got into his car, checked out past gate security, and pulled out onto East Executive Avenue Northwest. He was reaching for the phone again when it rang. He didn’t bother checking the caller ID.

“Rubens.”

“Bill? Katie.”

“Katie! Yes. What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to let you know … after our conversation Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“Some of us here have been doing some digging. There
is
a danger.”

“Really? What did you get?”

“Those Dutch studies were looking at water displacement from a large amount of mass striking the ocean. You remember? I was telling you it all had to hit at the same time.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I got to thinking about other examples of landslips we know. There was one off of Sicily, Mount Etna, that caused a devastating tsunami all across the eastern Mediteranean eight thousand years ago. Some scientists think that might have been the source of the biblical flood myth. And there have been a number of landslips in the Hawaian Islands. Molokai and Oahu, especially. There’s evidence that those sent huge tidal waves all across the Pacific Rim something like a million and a half years ago.