wrong. Good day to you, sir.”
With that, the two Generals, and the two silent Admirals, stood up and took their leave. Alone in the White House, the President shook his head, muttering to himself…
Admiral Ben Badr’s
Admiral Badr’s target was located 25 miles farther into the Caribbean than Antigua. It was much less of a playground than its bigger palm-strewn brothers, since half of it had been obliterated in the ferocious eruption of 1996–97.
Montserrat — battered, dust-choked, grieving, almost wiped out, workaday Montserrat — tonight slumbered peacefully beneath a Caribbean moon. For those who remained in residence on the island, there was always the hope that the great steaming, smoke-belching heart of the Soufriere Hills would soon calm down and relapse into its dormant state, beneath which generations of islanders had grown up, safe and sheltered.
At least they had until that fateful hour in 1997, when the south part of the island was literally bombarded with massive molten rocks and lava, as the mountain exploded like an atom bomb. Nothing was ever the same, and the islanders have lived ever since in the fear that it would happen again, against the hope that the high-surging magma would finally subside.
Volcanologists had not been so optimistic. People were periodically advised to leave. But too many had nowhere to go. And they merely fled to the north, away from the lethal south side of the volcano. And the Soufriere Hills continued to growl and blast steam, dark smoke, fire, and occasionally lava on an uncomfortably regular basis.
Below its shimmering peak, set to the west, the town of Plymouth, former home to the island’s seat of government, lay virtually buried under the ash. One tall British red phone booth is long gone. The high clock on the war memorial juts out almost at ground level above the gray urban landscape of dust and rocks.
As Professor Paul Landon had said to General Rashood in a house in West London, six months previously…“
Ravi Rashood’s master plan to frighten the Pentagon to death, to scare them into obeying the Hamas demands, was within one hour of execution. The launch time of midnight in the eastern Caribbean was one hour in front of Washington. General Rashood had allowed thirty-five minutes running time for the missile, and maybe twenty-five minutes for the news of the eruption to make it to the networks.
Admiral Badr was confident. His orders were to launch four missiles, the Scimitar SL-1s (nonnuclear warheads), straight at the high crater in the Soufriere Hills. In 1996, the entire island, roughly the form of a pyramid if seen from the sea, had looked like an exploding Roman candle in the night.
Like Mount St. Helens, the Soufriere Hills volcano was not a proud, towering queen, standing like a sentinel over the lush green island.
Instead, like her ugly sister in faraway Washington, she was an unstable, dangerous bitch, rotten to the core, unable to control herself, a lethal pile of shifting black rubble, swollen by mammoth carbuncles that every now and then lanced themselves and released the satanic magma.
Admiral Badr kept the
In the past hour, they had made dozens of checks on the prefiring routines and settings. Lieutenant Commander Shakira had personally supervised the numbers that had been punched into the tiny onboard computers in each of the Scimitars’ nose cones. They had pored over the little screen that displayed the chart references. All four were the same—
With the competence of the North Korean technicians, and the electronic engineers of Huludao, the quartet of Scimitars could not miss. They would plunge into the crater within 10 feet of each other, each one drilling deeper into the upper layer of rock, all four of them driving substantial fault lines into the flimsy pumice stone crust that held back the deadly fire.
Shakira had selected a southerly route for the missile attack on the grounds of her uncertainty about U.S. tracking stations either in or near the old Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Puerto Rico.
The Scimitars would swerve 20 degrees off their due-western course and swing through the Guadeloupe Passage, passing five miles to the north of Port Louis on the French island’s western headland. They would make their big right-hand turn out over the open water northwest of Guadeloupe, and then come swooping in to Montserrat out of the southwest.
They would flash over the half-buried ghost town of Plymouth, and then follow the infamous route of the 1997 magma, two miles at 600 mph over the rising ground, straight up to Chance’s Peak, before diving into the crater.
And this time, there would be no Tony Tilton below, no observer to hear the eerie swish of the rockets’ slipstream through the air. These days, this southern part of Montserrat was deserted. Shakira’s plan was for no one to hear, or see, anything. Until the vicious old mountain exploded again.
Ben Badr checked with the sonar room. Then he ordered the submarine to periscope depth for a lightning fast surface picture check. The seas were deserted and nothing was showing on the radar — critical factors when launching a missile with a fiery red tail as it cleared the ocean, visible for miles.
He ordered the
The first of the Scimitars blew out into the pitch-black water, angled upwards, and came blasting out of the ocean, and into the warm night air. It left a fiery, crackling wake as it roared into the sky, until it reached its preset cruising height of 500 feet and settled onto a firm course for the Guadeloupe Passage. At this point, the state-of- the-art gas turbines cut in and eliminated the giveaway trails in the sky.
Scimitar SL-1 was on its way, and there was nothing in this lonely part of the western Atlantic that could possibly stop it. And even as it streaked high above the waves, Admiral Badr was ordering the second one into the air, then the third, and then, a mere three minutes after the opening launch, the final missile. The volatile, unstable volcano in the Soufriere Hills was about to awaken the Caribbean once more.
Twenty-five minutes after the opening launch sequence, the lead rocket came swishing past the inshore waters of northern Guadeloupe. Four minutes later, it was hammering towards the Plymouth waterfront, deserted now for ten years, beneath the haunted rock face of Chance’s Peak.
It ripped over the almost-buried war memorial with its high clock tower, now only five feet above ground level. It shot straight above George Street, with its second-story-only shopping facade, past Government House, over the cricket pitch, and on towards the mountain.
At the back of the town it made a course adjustment, veering right to the northeast, following the inland road down from the east coast airport. One mile from the central crater it swung right again for its final approach, and came hurtling in out of clear skies, straight at Gage’s Mountain.
