Death Wave

“Yes, sir. Or several of them, in a chain down the central spine of the island.”

“That seems a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“Look at the pieces, sir. One of my officers bugged the meeting between Feng and two oil people, one with a French company providing specialized drilling equipment to Saudi Aramco, the other with Saudi Aramco. They talk about having the boreholes ready next week … and about concerns in Saudi Arabia about losing a major trading partner. The context of the conversation is that Operation Wrath of God will have an enormous psychological impact on the Muslim world.

“Then one of the oil people goes to La Palma and says he has to check on a project there. I spoke with a representative of Saudi Aramco here in Washington. He says there is no drilling taking place in the Canary Islands, not commercial, not exploratory. He says the geology of those islands is completely wrong for oil.”

Douglas nodded slowly. “I think I see where you’re going with this. Terrorists explode several nuclear devices at the bottom of boreholes drilled into this fault line on La Palma. They trigger the landslide everybody is dreading. The damage to the U.S. eastern seaboard could be cataclysmic.”

“It would be like the 2004 megatsunami disaster in Indonesia, but much, much worse. Millions, perhaps tens of millions, would be killed. Estimates suggest that the tidal wave would be in excess of one hundred feet high when it hit the American coast, and traveling at the speed of a jetliner. Entire cities would be wrecked, made uninhabitable. Highways and rail lines washed away. Washington, D.C., destroyed by the surge coming up the Potomac. Wall Street wiped out. Our economy would be devastated. It would take years to recover. Hell, we might get smashed down to the level of a third-world country.

“It’s a force multiplier,” Douglas mused aloud. “If the bad guys have twelve tactical nukes, they could cause tremendous damage to twelve American cities. That would be bad, yes, but a one-kiloton nuke won’t vaporize a city. At most, it’ll wreck downtown, and contaminate the outlying parts with radioactivity. But … my God. If they use them to trigger a tsunami, they could wipe out every city from Portland, Maine, to Miami. Dozens of cities ruined. Tens, no, hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage …”

“It has another advantage for them, sir. Maybe an even more important one.”

“What’s that?”

“Right now, there’s no such thing as global Islam. They’re divided between Sunni and Shi’ite, between radical and moderate and conservative. Different interpretations of the Qur’an. Different cultural beliefs. But just think what might happen if a volcanic island explodes and sends a tidal wave crashing into the American east coast. It would seem like a natural disaster.”

“The wrath of God.”

“Exactly.”

“Scientists who investigated the explosion would be able to tell it was man-made. An underground nuclear detonation. There’d be radiation.”

“Maybe — but it would be days, maybe weeks, before anybody could get there and start carrying out tests. Ten minutes after the tsunami hit, the entire Muslim world would hear that it was an act of God, and that’s what the majority would believe, and keep on believing. Moderates would be shouted down. Scientific findings would be rejected as attempts to explain away something that was obviously a miracle. The vast majority of the world’s Muslims don’t agree with the idea of global jihad, but what if they saw a miracle? Moderate Islamic governments from Morocco to Indonesia could fall to the radical militants. Egypt. Jordan. Secular Islamic countries like Turkey. There might be a call for a general rising, a holy jihad to sweep across the non-Muslim world. The radical fundamentalists would take it as a sign from God that now is the time to unite the Muslim world and destroy the infidels.”

“I find it hard to believe that they’d be able to unite that easily.”

“Maybe not — but I’ll bet you a month’s salary they think it’s a possibility worth the effort. We know that the Jaish-e-Mohammad is the principal enemy group behind this. Al-Wawi — Ibrahim Hussain Azhar — is JeM, and his brother, Maulana Azhar, has been beating the drum for a united, militant fundamentalist Islam for over a decade now.”

“You think the JeM is going to go global? They’ve been pretty much a regional terrorist group until now.”

“Yes, sir, but they also have close ties to both the Taliban and to al-Qaeda. It wouldn’t take much to shift their focus from India and Kashmir to the world stage. They might think we’ll be so busy cleaning up the wreckage of our cities that we won’t be able to interfere if they start settling some scores and ending some boundary disputes. Kashmir. Israel. And there might be some bloody risings in countries with large Muslim populations. England. Germany. France. The Philippines. Even here in the United States.”

“You’re just full of good news this afternoon, Bill.” Douglas sighed. “Obviously you want me to inform the President about this.”

“At the very least, we are going to need a detailed reconnaissance of La Palma. We need to see the extent of the drilling and the exact positions of the wellheads. We have an agent team on the ground over there, but they’ll be limited in how much area they can cover. We need full, high-res satellite imagery, the sooner the better. And we may need to deploy a CAT, or coordinate with the military.”

“An invasion? The Canary Islands are Spanish territory.”

“If we need to take the boreholes out, we’ll need to do it simultaneously, or as close to simultaneous as we can manage. So we don’t warn the others when we take down one. We also need to push harder on recovering those nukes. If we can get our hands on those, the boreholes won’t matter.”

“We’re doing everything we can do. The President is out of the country now. He’ll be back Monday.”

“Then the Vice President—”

“It’s not that easy, and you know that as well as I do,” Douglas said heatedly. “Requests of this nature go through the President’s personal staff at the Oval Office.

They decide what is important, what has to be put in front of him immediately. We can flag this Code One Ultraviolet, but I’d damned well better have good justification to do so. And you have to admit that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons to generate a megatsunami large enough to wipe out the U.S. East Coast is just a tad on the far-fetched side.”

“What about the request for military intervention on the Yakutsk?”

“We’re still waiting to hear.” Douglas made a face. “I spoke with the President’s personal secretary yesterday. He was not … encouraging.”

“Okay. Then what about the Saudi foreign trade minister? Our eavesdropping on Feng and his cronies suggested that al-Khuwaytir knows at least something about Operation Wrath of God. Enough to guess that our economy is going to be tanked.”

“You know, Bill, it’s not exactly politically expedient going up to the representatives of a friendly foreign power and accusing a member of that government of collusion in a plot to flood the East Coast. And he would deny it, of course. It would also tip off the JeM. Let them know that we know.”

“There’s also Feng,” Rubens said. “He may be behind the whole plot to begin with.”

Douglas leaned back in his chair. “What the hell does China have to do with this anyway?”

“It may just be opportunism on their part. But Feng did mention something about China holding an eighth of the entire U.S. foreign debt.”

Douglas snorted. “You think they’re going to foreclose on San Francisco?”

“No, but it would give them a hell of a lot of leverage in the world economy. I could see COSCO picking up some bargains when the stock market collapses.”

“Hell, a thing like this could cause the dollar to collapse. The economy is still damned shaky as it is.”

“Yes, sir. Even if they just bet against us on the Asian markets, the People’s Republic could end up making hundreds of billions and coming out of this as the leader in the global economy. If they have advance warning about what’s going to happen, something everyone thinks is an act of God, yeah, they could clean up.

“We will want to pick Feng up, sir — but not before we have the nukes secured. It’s vital that we find and secure the nukes first. Otherwise, the bad guys go to ground and take their suitcases with them. We might not be as lucky next time around. When those weapons surface again—”

“I know,” Douglas said woodenly.

Rubens passed a hand over his face, trying to think.