Death Wave (32 page)

Beneath the pile of scrap lumber, he found the radio, carefully swaddled in plastic. The battery was growing weak; he would need to get a new one on his next trip to Addis Ababa, but it should last for the next week or two. He switched the device on, placed the earphones on his head, and picked up the microphone.

“Black Bull, this is Sand Shark,” he said, as he’d been trained. He kept his voice low, because he didn’t want his parents to know. “Black Bull, come in, please …”

16

LA PALMA AIRPORT
SOUTH OF SANTA CRUZ DE LA PALMA
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
SATURDAY, 1115 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The man walked up to the airport ticket counter, wheeling a single suitcase. Handing his ticket to the woman behind the computer monitor, he gave her a friendly smile.

“Is it on time?” he asked in Spanish. “The flight out to Madrid?”

She looked up at the big scheduling board overhead. “
Sí, señor
. Leaving Gate One at eleven fifty.” She made an entry at her keyboard, then asked, “One bag?”

“Just one.” He folded up the handle and placed it on the scale platform.

“And did you pack this bag yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Did any person unknown to you give you anything to pack?”

“No.”

“Has your bag been in your possession at all times since arriving at the airport?”

“Yes.”

The woman ran through the usual list of security questions, and the man answered each one. At the end, the woman attached a luggage tag, then hauled the suitcase off the scale and slung it onto the conveyor behind her.

The man watched the bag disappear through a plastic curtain. Security here in La Palma, he knew, was light, the questioning and the checks perfunctory at best. The only flights were island hoppers and a few larger commuter flights to and from the mainland, not the sort of traffic that would interest a politically motivated group like, just for instance, the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The man had been careful not to fit the typical terrorist profile. He was clean-shaven, wore glasses, and was well dressed, and his papers gave him a Spanish identity. He spoke fluent Spanish, and he’d been rehearsed on current events in Spain—politics and sports especially, just in case someone engaged him in casual conversation.

He looked around the terminal. “Not many people flying today.”

“Oh, this is the slow season, Señor Mendoza,” she told him with a smile. “Not many tourists yet.”

“Tell me … has a colleague of mine checked in yet? A Mr. Carlylse?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m really not supposed to discuss the affairs of other passengers.”

He gave her his brightest smile. “Of course. But surely you can tell me if he’s on the passenger list. I know he checked out of his hotel room last night. I was supposed to meet him here before the flight.”

“I’m so sorry, sir. Company regulations—”

“Yes, yes. Security. Well … can you tell me, is this the only flight out of La Palma today?”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“Then he must be on it! Thank you. I’ll find him on the plane.”

“Gate One, sir. Right down there.”

“I see it. Thank you.”

He walked off toward the gate but turned aside to enter the airport’s small boutique area first.

He had no intention of going through the security checkpoint, or of boarding that plane.

RUBENS’ OFFICE
NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
SATURDAY, 1015 HOURS EDT

“It’s utter and complete nonsense,” Dr. Walden said. “It’s not even good fiction.”

Dr. Kathryn Walden was a professor of geology at Georgetown University. Brilliant as well as drop-dead gorgeous, she was one of a number of science and academic professionals in a Washington-area network created to provide specialist information to the NSA when necessary. At the moment, she was on the other end of a secure-line video hookup on Rubens’ computer.

“
What
is utter and complete nonsense?” Rubens asked. “The tidal wave hitting the East Coast? Or the possibility that half of La Palma is going to shift and fall into the sea in the first place?”

“Both!” Walden hesitated, then went on. “Okay …
if
that much rock hit the ocean, and
if
it hit with a high enough speed, and
if
it hit all at once, yes, it could create a megatsunami.
Maybe
. Conditions would have to be just right. But geologists aren’t sure that the fracture line at the top of the Cumbre Vieja goes very deep. Most think it’s strictly superficial. The important thing is, despite a lot of panicky hype to the contrary, there is absolutely no evidence that any of those rocks have slipped at all since we started watching them.”

“But if a landslide did happen, it
could
cause a tidal wave?”

“That’s a ridiculously big if—but yeah. It might.”

“Three hundred feet high? Traveling ten miles inland?”

“No. Absolutely not.” She waved a copy of the book in front of her computer video pickup. “Even if the splash started off as high as these guys claim—and that’s saying a
lot
, believe me—it would be down to twenty meters or less by the time it crossed the Atlantic. It
would
get funneled by estuaries and river mouths, so there would be a flood surge up rivers like the Hudson, the Potomac, and the York. Those surges might,
might
reach twenty to fifty meters. But what these guys claim would happen, with killer waves scouring everything as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains … that’s nonsense.”

“Twenty to fifty meters is still bad,” Rubens said. “A wave over a hundred fifty feet high and lasting maybe ten or fifteen minutes? That would still kill millions of people if we couldn’t evacuate.”

“Bill … since when did you start going in for off-the-wall pseudo-science? These guys write about UFO abductions, for chrissakes. They’re
kooks
!”

“Oh, I skimmed the book, Katie. I agree with you.”

“This whole La Palma thing started a few years ago when the BBC aired a so-called documentary about it, claiming an earthquake or a volcanic eruption was going to throw some hundreds of cubic kilometers of rock into the ocean and trigger a megatsunami. They claimed a hundred million people on the East Coast would be killed.”

“Yes.”

“After that broadcast, thousands of Americans e-mailed the BBC, worried that they were all going to die and wondering if they needed to move. Thousands of tourists canceled their holiday flights to La Palma. Lots of rich Europeans with vacation homes on La Palma sold their property and left the island. JMC stopped their direct charter flights to the island from Britain, as did the Swiss. German airlines reduced their charter flights by half. If you ask me, La Palma could sue the BBC for damages. The BBC has since issued a partial retraction—what amounts to an apology—saying the threat was overhyped.”

“So … you’re saying there’s no danger at all?”

“Not the way that program presented it.”

“If none of it is true, why did the BBC air it?”

“Because disasters
sell
, Bill. Parts of the BBC program were recycled later by an American cable channel, with the same effect.” She waved the book in front of the pickup. “These guys are just taking the pseudo-science scare-stories from that program and recycling it. It’s damned irresponsible, coming up with scary fiction and passing it off as science to people who don’t know any better. Same with all the tripe written about 2012.” She scowled out of the monitor. “Please tell me the government is not taking this seriously!”

“There’s been a … threat. We’re still evaluating it. That’s why I called you.”

“The government’s as bad as the damned insurance companies. It’s like the powers that be are
trying
to keep the public in a constant state of terror.”

Rubens smiled. “Now you’re getting into conspiracy theories.”

She chuckled, a grim sound. “The real conspiracy is that the sponsor for that BBC
Horizon
program was a hazard research company—which in turn is owned by a major insurance company. The so-called research company provided the writers with a lot of their data—much of it manufactured. People get scared out of their wits watching this drivel—and they go out and buy more insurance.”

“I hope I never get as cynical as you, Katie.”

“It’s not cynicism, Bill. It’s the way the modern world works. Sometimes I think we should scour everything clean with a hundred-meter tidal wave and start over!”

Rubens hesitated, then continued. “You’re saying the disaster scenario can’t unfold the way it was presented on TV, but that was assuming a volcano or an earthquake was the culprit.”

“It would
have
to be something of that nature to shift that much rock.”

“I’m going to ask you another question, Katie. I remind you that this conversation is classified.”

“I’ve got clearance, Bill.”

“I know you do. We wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. What about a nuclear explosion?”

That startled her. “What?”

“Specifically,
several
nuclear explosions, probably set off at the bottoms of a number of boreholes along the length of the Cumbre Vieja.”

“That … would depend on the size, placement, and number of the explosions.”

“As many as twelve devices, each releasing approximately one kiloton of energy. Placement … we’re not sure, but likely at the bottom of some deep oil wells drilled along the Cumbre Vieja, down the center of La Palma.”

Walden was quiet for a long moment, her face on the monitor thoughtful. “I don’t think I can answer that one for you, Bill.”

“Okay …”

“If we just compare energy released with energy released … no. Absolutely not. The nukes wouldn’t even come close.”

“An earthquake is more powerful?”

“An earthquake measuring four point oh on the Richter scale releases about one kiloton of energy. We classify a Richter four to four point nine quake as ‘light.’ It rattles the dishes but doesn’t cause any significant damage. Twelve kilotons … that would still be less than a five. The earthquake off Sumatra in 2004, the one that caused the big tidal wave that killed two hundred and twenty thousand people around the Indian Ocean, that one was around nine point two, maybe nine point three on the Richter scale, and that translates as a hundred and fourteen
gigatons
—a hundred and fourteen billion tons of TNT.”

“My God.”

“Exactly. That’s the equivalent of over one hundred thousand onemegaton thermonuclear bombs going off together, and that’s way,
way
more than all of the nuclear weapons in all of the world’s arsenals put together.” She gave him a wan smile. “We humans have a long way to go before we can compete with Mother Nature in the raw energy department.”

“But you’re sounding unsure of yourself.”

“Because I am. Most of the energy in an earthquake is wasted … unfocused. And when it comes to tidal waves, there are so many variables—bottom depth, the shape of the coastline, things like that. We’re also talking about two different ways of generating a tidal wave—by direct transmission of the earthquake energy into the ocean, or by knocking a mountain into the sea and causing a big splash.

“What you’re talking about … a
precise
application of energy …” She shrugged. “It probably all comes down to whether or not there really is a deep fault line beneath the Cumbre Vieja.”

“And we don’t know if there is one.”

“Right. There
is
volcanic activity on La Palma, though the last few eruptions were kind of nonevents. And there
have
been earthquakes, so there could be a fault of some sort under that ridge, something more than the scratch we see on the surface. But we just don’t know enough about the subsurface architecture to make a good guess at how large or how deep it might be. That BBC
Horizon
program just went off and declared that the fault was there and that it was quite deep—on the order of twenty or thirty kilometers down, if I remember right—but they were making the numbers up.”

“To sell insurance.”

“Right. But if people are deliberately planting nuclear charges underground right along that earthquake zone? I have to say … I just don’t know, Bill.
Nobody
does.”

“Might the nukes trigger a big earthquake? I guess what I’m asking is, could twelve kilotons jump-start a hundred gigatons? Or would they have to try for making a really big splash?”

“The jump-start, I just don’t know. I’d have to say probably not. As for a big splash? A few years back, a Dutch research group tested the hypothesis that if half of the Cumbre Vieja fell into the Atlantic, it would generate a megatsunami. They used pretty advanced computer modeling. What they came up with was … yes, it could generate a big wave if everything worked right, but the wave that hit the East Coast wouldn’t be a hundred meters high, like it says in this book. Twenty to fifty meters at most. And it would have to be
very
precise—like a diamond cutter striking a diamond’s fracture plane exactly right.” She looked thoughtful. “One theory—and it’s
only
a theory—is that there’s a wall, a kind of curtain of basalt beneath the Cumbre Vieja, running north to south beneath the ridge. The idea is that if there is a fault, lava might have welled up through the crack and solidified into a very hard wall.”