Death Wave

of the crater.

“Green Amber One, let’s move,” Gunny Rodriguez’s voice said over the tactical radios each man had strapped to his combat harness. “The opposition’ll be busy watching the landing.”

As one, four patches of brick red earth shifted, bunched up, and opened, revealing the four recon team members as they continued the climb up the steepening slope.

SAN MARTIN CRATER

MONDAY, 1424 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Ibrahim Hussain Azhar stood on the floor of the crater near the tents, watching the Marrakech Air Transport helicopter fly low above the caldera’s eastern rim, then gentle in for a landing a dozen meters away. Feng, standing beside him, muttered something in Chinese.

“What was that?” Azhar asked.

“I said it’s about time,” Feng replied in his thickly accented Arabic. The man didn’t speak Urdu, so Azhar’s conversations with him were in English, which Feng spoke very well, or in Arabic, which he did not.

“For the weapon?” Azhar asked, shifting to English. “Or for the passenger?”

“Both, actually,” Feng replied in the same language. “This is the last device from Tan-Tan. It’s taken long enough … but we should be ready to go by tonight.”

“We can have the weapon in place late this afternoon,” Azhar said, “but the plan calls for detonating the weapons tomorrow, at thirteen hundred hours.”

“Why such a precise time?”

“Because that will be eight hundred hours, eight o’clock on the U.S. East Coast. The cities will be filling with commuters driving in from the suburbs. In cities farther west like Houston and New Orleans, it will be an hour earlier, seven o’clock, but the highways will still be crowded. News that a volcano has exploded, that a megastsunami is rushing across the ocean toward the United States, will reach them when the bridges, the tunnels, the highways leading into their cities, and the narrow canyon-streets inside their cities all will be jammed with traffic … what they call ‘rush hour.’

“The wave won’t reach them until sometime in the afternoon, but for some six or seven hours, the panic will build … and build. Millions of people will be struggling to get out of the city death-traps, and when the wave does hit, with the highways and tunnels impassably blocked by fleeing people …”

“Ah!”

“We believe that this timing will increase the number of deaths tremendously, first in the panic, then as cars are swept from the highways, bridges toppled, and tunnels drowned later in the afternoon. We conservatively estimate between one and two million deaths as a direct result of the strike. A similar number, we believe, will die of starvation, disease, and food and water riots within the next several weeks.”

“An ugly picture.”

Azhar shrugged. “You want to see America’s commercial and industrial infrastructure destroyed. We want to kill as many of them as possible, to drive home the message that this is God’s judgment on a sinful people. The devices will serve both of our purposes.”

“You put a great deal of trust in this megatsunami concept,” Feng said. “The reality may be considerably less than you anticipate.”

“Perhaps. We are aware of the Dutch studies that suggest nothing much will happen. We believe them to be mistaken.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“First, science in the West has been so completely politicized, their researchers routinely come up with the the answers that fit their preconceived theories. They do not know. Look at their idiocies, the way they cripple themselves economically, with their politically correct beliefs about global warming.

“Second … have you ever been to the Hawaian Islands?”

Feng nodded. “Many times.”

“One of the islands — Molokai — is long and slender, running east and west.”

“Yes. A beautiful place.”

“One and a half million years ago, Molokai was round in shape — an enormous shield volcano emerging above the surface of the ocean, much like the Big Island to the southeast. But half of the island or more broke away in a volcanic or seismic event. The debris spilled northward for hundreds of kilometers under water, leaving behind the sheer cliffs of Molokai’s northern coast. Similar landslips have occurred off Oahu and the other islands as well. The geological evidence is that these underwater landslides raised catastrophic tsunamis that scoured much of the Pacific Rim.” He smiled. “Of course, there was no economic infrastructure to wreck then, and no rush-hour commuters.”

“So what is your point?”

“Simply that the computer simulations in Holland and elsewhere were calculating the waves raised by the splash of several hundred billion tons of rock as it struck the ocean. Those researchers pointed out that all of that rock would have to hit the water at one time to raise even a small tidal wave … say, thirty meters. But it’s not the splash that causes the tsunami. It is the movement of vast quantities of rock underwater, the submarine landslide, that displaces the water and raises the tsunami.”

“Ah. I read once that the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was caused by a relatively small movement of the Earth’s crustal plates.”

“Exactly. In that case, a twelve-hundred-kilometer stretch of the fault line moved about fifteen meters. Here on La Palma, the fault line is only an estimated fifteen kilometers long — but all of that rock will be moving for hundreds of kilometers, displacing titanic volumes of water as it moves.” He pointed west. “Out there, the sea floor drops sharply away from this island. Four hundred kilometers from here, the bottom is forty-eight hundred meters down, and it continues to drop. We expect that the landslide will generate a megatsunami similar to the ones caused by the collapse of Molokai in the Pacific.” Azhar spread his hands. “It is possible that the megatsunami will be something less than the one- to three-hundred-meter wave we expect. There are many variables, including how efficiently the nuclear explosions split the rock from the fault line, and how quickly it actually travels along the sea floor. But even a thirty-meter wave would drown tens of thousands of people, from New England to the Texas coast.”

“Not to mention England, France, Brazil, and other countries around the Atlantic coastlines. But … your point is taken. My objective is simply that America’s economy be crippled.”

“Tens of trillions of dollars of property damage. Millions of homes and automobiles destroyed. Their financial centers in New York wrecked. Their capital flooded and their government forced to relocate. Many of their military bases submerged. I think such a blow would cripple their ecomony to the point that they might well never recover.”

“And the People’s Republic becomes the dominant superpower in the world, both economically and militarily,” Feng said. “And you have your global jihad.”

“Allahu akbar,” Azhar said, shifting to Arabic. “God is great. And with the Americans … preoccupied with their personal problems, they will no longer be a player on the world stage, not for many decades, if ever.”

“Ah!” Feng said. “There is al-Dahabi.”

The helicopter’s rotors had stopped turning, and a man in a business jacket and checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh stepped off the boarding ladder carrying what looked like a doctor’s bag. He was old, his face deeply wrinkled, and he was smiling.

“I still fail to see the purpose of bringing him here,” Azhar said, speaking English again.

“The woman has information. She is CIA, I am certain of it. We must know how much the Americans know of our activities here.”

“In another twenty-four hours, none of it will matter. America will have fallen, the woman will have been incinerated … and you and I will be busily engaged in the next phase of Wrath of God. What can you possibly learn in that twenty-four hours that will help us?”

“Whether or not the Americans know what we are doing here, for one,” Feng replied. “Whether or not they are mounting some sort of attack. But … I admit that there are personal issues.”

“What issues?”