Sea of Japan.
Seven hundred miles out at sea in the freezing waters of the Pacific, a large aircraft strayed off course just as she had in the Middle East. This time her course would not take her over any appreciable landmass.
The navigator of the large Boeing 747 tracked their marker, an undersea beacon laid down a full year before by a Japanese-flagged fishing trawler.
Tomlinson, with his assistant in the seat next to him, had been silent since the registered charter flight lifted off from a private airstrip in the Philippines. The navigator and the pilot knew who the man was and it showed in their nervousness.
The head of the Thor program stepped out of the protected area and walked to Tomlinson. He cleared his throat.
'The Wave is operational and online. We have return echoes from the amplification modules on the seabed. Radar reports no contact of any air-superiority fighters in our immediate area.'
'Then all is well for the strike?' Tomlinson asked, his blue eyes boring into those of Professor Ernest Engvall, former head of the Franz Westverall Institute of Geology and Seismic Study in Norway.
'All is as planned; nothing has changed for the past three years of calculations,' he said, but Tomlinson knew that he had stopped short of finishing his report.
'Except?' he asked, holding his penetrating gaze on the world's foremost seismologist.
The thin, bookish man held his tongue for a brief moment but knew that he had to bring up what his entire technical crew was discussing.
'Do I have to ask twice, Professor?'
'We have two wave aircraft at our disposal, both of which could be tracked and attacked at any time. If I may ask, why have you risked your life to be on this particular strike?'
Tomlinson smiled and looked away without answering. His assistant cleared his throat and concluded the conversation.
'You may resume your countdown without further delay. Release Thor's Hammer, Professor.'
Engvall's look went from Tomlinson to his impeccably dressed assistant. Then he abruptly turned and entered the protective area of the 747.
Tomlinson was staring at nothing as he thought about his father. He had been integral part of the Coalition in the latter days of the world war. He'd never risen as high in the council as his son would in future years, but he had done his part. The thought of his father being held up against a crumbling wall and shot by Russian shock troops just outside Berlin, after delivering the Coalition's ultimatum to Hitler, didn't anger him like it used to. After all, his father had allowed himself to be used by those higher in the order and thus had reaped that particular harvest. It was the Russian leadership he had always despised and their weak-minded followers. It was not personal, as most on the Coalition Council would believe, but the smart thing to do, with their government weak and their populace uneasy.
He looked up when he heard the soft humming of the Wave equipment. He wanted the strike to be flawless, and that was the real reason why he was here. The old guard of the Coalition would be shown that a limited strike did not need the Atlantean Key for control of the weapon. Now, he was here to prove it. Their race had split once before and it had almost cost them their existence in the time of Julius Caesar. He would see to it that if this demonstration did not have a positive effect on the Coalition members who refused to follow, he would scratch them from the equation in totem.
'Bring the Wave up to full power. Directional beacon is locked and confirmed.'
Engvall ran to another panel and watched as the Wave buildup became a steady stream of blue and red on the computer's monitor.
'We have solid tone,' one of the techs called out.
Once the stream turned pure red, the audio wave was pulsed to the amplifiers on the seafloor. Once the trigger had penetrated the depths of the sea, the audio signal would be activated and then the three-pronged decibel enhancers set inside the large steel enclosures would chime like a tuning fork, creating the desired tone that the Ancients had calculated thousands of years before for the science of breaking solid stone.
The amplifiers were laid along the Koryak-Kamchatka orogenic belt, which sat above one of the most active continental plates in the world. The wave from the amplifiers would sink to crust depth and hammer at its edges in an assault of sound that would crumble any natural strata in all of known geology.
The duration of the three-second pulse would be short, due to the instability of the Wave of the Ancients. That and the fact that the fault line above the plate ran all the way to Sumatra.
'Initiate trigger, now!'
Located at the bottom of the huge aircraft, a set of doors swung open and the small laser cannon deployed. It was not a cannon in the normal sense of the word; it was a laser-guided sound pulse. A three-second burst at full power shot downward into the sea, where it would actually pick up speed as it was not diminished by one single decibel due to the salinity of the water. Twenty-one miles below the surface of the sea, the wave penetrated the waters of the cold Pacific at the speed of sound. It struck the first amplifier, then relayed down the line of six. More than six hundred miles of fault line and its supporting plate were under attack. The strike would generate enough explosive energy as fifty twenty-megaton nuclear detonations going off in the earth's crust.
As it struck, the audio wave radiated in the only direction it could: straight down through sand and rock.
The Boulder Institute of Seismology in Colorado recorded the eruption underneath the crust as it traveled as far south as Australia and as far east as the United States. The epicenter of the quake originated two hundred miles north of the undersea Siberian Seamount. As the seafloor split, ten trillion gallons of seawater flooded into the void. The smaller seamounts nearest the eruption cascaded into the gap that had instantly gone from a mere fracture to the size of the island of Hawaii. The quake hit the Siberian coast and shook houses to their foundations. The first shocks hit Japan and China only twenty-three seconds later.
As he monitored the reports coming in from prepositioned seismic stations in the Pacific, Engvall knew that they had unleashed a strike accurate to the mile. As he listened to the euphoria in the voices of his technicians, the realization had struck him that he just might have destroyed a great deal of Russia's eastern coast.
As a listening post at the northern end of the Sea of Japan, the Joint Communications and Seismic Station did not garner much respect from the U.S. Navy. The antiquated equipment failed to measure seismic activity accurately. Japan and the United States had succeeded in doing that in the late 1950s. The communications network was in an even worse state.
As the bored men fought to stay awake, the needle on the antiquated Richter monitor moved once and held steady. The operator failed to see the quick jump of the needle. Instead, the ancient radio monitor told them something was amiss.
The two young Korean and Russian officers listening in on the Japanese and American chatter were using a radio and direction finder that was surplus back in 1959. The constant replacement of its tubes and the limited- frequency channels made finding anyone, anywhere, talking openly as rare as good food on the anchored station. However, the one thing it was good at was picking up low-range high-decibel-burst releases, only because the equipment lacked the necessary filters of modern sets to block it out.
Both radiomen suddenly shouted out and threw the headphones from their ears. The Russian doubled over in pain and the Korean actually felt the trickle of blood flow from his right ear.
'What are you two fools doing?' asked the Korean duty officer.
'It must have been some sort of burst transmission,' the soldier said as he grabbed his Russian counterpart for support. 'An aircraft directly overhead, that's the only thing it could have been, maybe--'
That was as far as he got as the anchored platform was rocked on its stiltlike legs.
'My God, look at this!'
The officer gained his balance and turned to the Richter scale. The long needle was swishing back and forth on the graph paper, almost creating a solid wall of red as it moved.
The technician shouted out, '6.5 ... 7.1 ... 7.9 ... 8.0,' as he counted the numbers the needle struck. As he did so, the platform--an old oil derrick of Russian design--lifted and then swayed. He continued: '8.7 ...9.6...'
'My God, the sea is erupting around us!'
'Track that aircraft!' the officer screamed as he lost his footing.
