Death Wave

hundred feet and be traveling at something like five hundred miles per hour when it reaches the East Coast. The wave will easily travel inland as far as twenty-five to fifty miles. In places with narrow tidal estuaries or rivers to channel and focus the wave — places like the James River, the Hudson River, the Potomac — the wave could possibly become much higher and more powerful. Mr. President, we are looking at the complete destruction of New York City, Washington, D.C., and a dozen other major cities from Portland, Maine, to Houston, Texas. Millions of people could be killed. The damage will amount to the tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars. Sir, we may not even survive as a nation!”

He let those words hang above the table for a moment, then added, “Mr. President, we need to capture or disable those nukes before the terrorists detonate them, and we need to do it now.”

After a moment, the President sighed. “Are you quite finished?” he asked.

Rubens thought over what he’d just said, then nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.” The die, as Caesar had said, was cast. In his case, though, challenging the laws of Rome by crossing the Rubicon had merely placed his career, his life, and his army at risk. Rubens had just done all of that, and by challenging the President directly, by speaking out of turn this way, he might have put the survival of the country at risk as well. Rubens knew he needed to convince the man, not make him so angry that he ignored the true threat.

“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.