Seismic Surge. Don Pendleton
volcanic landslide could result in a mega-tsunami. La Palma, seen from orbit, looked something like a yolk-up egg, except that the dome was actually the depressed caldera of an ancient but recently geologically active volcano. Most of the tourism was concentrated along the lower level, southern coasts of the island.
James’s frown was ever present as he checked the forearm-strapped com link that kept him in touch with Stony Man Farm. Still nothing about the identities of the bodies seen below the waves.
McCarter noticed the grim look on James’s face. “You put a few clues together to get something disturbing.”
“Those were tourists dropped off shore,” James returned. “We haven’t gotten anything solid back from the Farm, but who else would they be?”
“And that marina is a good place for a yacht full of terrorists disguised as vacation-goers to pull in,” Encizo added.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” McCarter said. He had been right there, looking the corpses in their lifeless faces, getting digital photographs to upload to the Farm. “So they could have parked, leaving behind spotters.”
“And they could have women terrorists on hand,” James threw in. “So we can’t be sure of who we’re looking at, if we run across some tourists.”
“Which is why we’re avoiding any contact until we’re sure who we’re dealing with,” McCarter said.
James nodded.
“You’re not going to get cold feet about shooting a woman, are you?” McCarter asked.
“If they have a gun and they’re trying to kill me, not a chance,” James answered. “We’ve encountered enough murderous ladies, and I’ve never flinched from that.”
“This is also Spain, where gun laws aren’t like America. It’s not bloody likely that we’ll run into a lady with a concealed carry pistol,” McCarter added.
“And that was what I’d worry most about,” Encizo said, nodding to James in agreement with his unspoken doubts.
“Just keep your eyes peeled,” McCarter warned.
The three men swam back to the submerged vehicle, turned it to the south and continued on toward the rocky shore.
* * *
HAROLD BROGNOLA LURCHED from the couch in his office, grimacing as he felt the pinch in his neck caused by sleeping with his head on the armrest. While he was aware of the Farm’s accommodations for guests—soft, comfortable beds—Brognola was more of a mind to avoid sleeping there. The couch was its own quiet alarm, its lumps and painful armrest rousing him from slumber after only an hour. If he were on a schedule that would allow a full night’s sleep, he’d drag himself to a guest room and snore happily.
Awake, he made his way to the Stony Man Farm War Room, looking at the gigantic map on the wall. The display was made of several interlocked plasma screen televisions, enabling different panels to be pulled up for individual windows containing pertinent information. Right now, the screens showed a blockade around the island of La Palma in the Atlantic Ocean. Forty-eight hours earlier, the western port of the island, Santa Cruz, became ground zero for a wild, unprecedented explosion of violence, literally.
A cruise ship, what appeared to be a cruise ship more precisely, suddenly fired anti-shipping missiles from its deck and shattered the hulls of two ocean liners so that they were left malingering in the path of any other large craft attempting to get away. With the sudden blasts, smaller craft were suddenly set to flight, two speed boats with vacationers accelerating out of the harbor as quickly as humanly possible.
As they fled, smaller missiles were launched. They easily caught up with the civilian crafts and blasted them out of the water.
All of this was caught on video camera and transmitted to the rest of the world with its grim, ominous warning.
“Send forces ashore, and we shall kill thousands.”
The group called itself Option Omega, and they were railing against the G8 and its interference with the natural economy of the world. Governments mismanaging taxes and regulations, they had said, were leading the world to the brink of financial collapse.
Option Omega wanted to show the world’s governments how weak they truly were. La Palma was a tourist mecca, a wide-open maw for tourist revenues that kept Spain solvent.
Option Omega intended to show Spain and the other European members of the G8 simply how weak they were when it came to pushing the people under the wheels of their insane economic policies.
Brognola knew that this group was borrowing the vague, half-assed rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street and the even older Tea Party movement—two groups of American
citizens who had legitimate gripes about American financial and fiscal woes—and was regurgitating it with elements of both groups’ ideals. It was a hodgepodge jumble that had garnered them a modicum of “I admire your sentiments, but not your actions” lip service on left- and right-wing squawk boxes.
He proceeded to where Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, was working at her station, collating information as quickly as it came in.
“Anything new?” Brognola asked.
“Gunfight in Norfolk,” Price told him matter-of-factly, not hiding the annoyance in her voice. “Small consolation is that it was far from bystanders, though the whole waterfront heard machine guns and grenades for miles.”
“How’s the Virginia news handling it all?” Brognola asked.
“They’re reporting that it might be gang violence. They brought up the fire that gutted the boatyard a month ago,” Price said. “And then they skimmed away when there was a fresh tweet from that actress trapped on La Palma.”
Brognola grimaced. “She’s still posting to the internet?”
“Nobody can get out of the hotels, but they have some pretty good internet connections,” Price told him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were letting hostages have access to social media in order to keep the world watching.”
“Social media, but they’re pretty good at only putting their video out,” Brognola mused.
“Even smartphone video has a pretty large footprint to be intercepted,” Price suggested. “Aaron told me that it would be easy for someone to monitor and purge video footage or digital photos from the stream.”
“Meanwhile, social media posts adding only 140 characters at a time can get through because there’s no way that a strike team could use a status update to plan an assault,” Brognola grumbled.
Price nodded. “Aaron also said that our satellite coverage of the Spanish Canaries is being assailed. We keep getting spikes of interference, which means they are intent on keeping the outside world blind but not deaf.”
Brognola sneered. “It’s like poking a wounded hostage so that their screams weigh on rescuers, but they keep the drapes drawn so we can’t take a shot in.”
“But we did take a shot,” Price said. “We sent in Phoenix.”
Brognola nodded. “You don’t sound happy.”
“We got an upload of a few dozen photos over satellite laser link. They’re of preserved corpses in the waters off of Tazacorte,” Price said. “That was a few minutes ago, but they’re of young people. We’re trying facial IDs, as well as tapping some SIM cards that survived being at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Tourists?” Brognola asked.
“McCarter and James both suggested that in texts to us,” Price answered. “Mode of dress was summer casual, very casual. Everyone was topless.”
Brognola grumbled at this suggestion. “Meaning that if they were on a boat, they left the majority of their clothing and personal identification in their state rooms.”
Price