At least they had until that fateful hour in 1997, when the south part of the island was literally bombarded with massive molten rocks and lava, as the mountain exploded like an atom bomb. Nothing was ever the same, and the islanders have lived ever since in the fear that it would happen again, against the hope that the high-surging magma would finally subside.
Volcanologists had not been so optimistic. People were periodically advised to leave. But too many had nowhere to go. And they merely fled to the north, away from the lethal south side of the volcano. And the Soufriere Hills continued to growl and blast steam, dark smoke, fire, and occasionally lava on an uncomfortably regular basis.
Below its shimmering peak, set to the west, the town of Plymouth, former home to the island’s seat of government, lay virtually buried under the ash. One tall British red phone booth is long gone. The high clock on the war memorial juts out almost at ground level above the gray urban landscape of dust and rocks.
As Professor Paul Landon had said to General Rashood in a house in West London, six months previously…“Montserrat! You could probably blow that damn thing sky-high with a hand grenade. It could erupt any day.”
Ravi Rashood’s master plan to frighten the Pentagon to death, to scare them into obeying the Hamas demands, was within one hour of execution. The launch time of midnight in the eastern Caribbean was one hour in front of Washington. General Rashood had allowed thirty-five minutes running time for the missile, and maybe twenty-five minutes for the news of the eruption to make it to the networks.
Admiral Badr was confident. His orders were to launch four missiles, the Scimitar SL-1s (nonnuclear warheads), straight at the high crater in the Soufriere Hills. In 1996, the entire island, roughly the form of a pyramid if seen from the sea, had looked like an exploding Roman candle in the night.
Like Mount St. Helens, the Soufriere Hills volcano was not a proud, towering queen, standing like a sentinel over the lush green island.
Instead, like her ugly sister in faraway Washington, she was an unstable, dangerous bitch, rotten to the core, unable to control herself, a lethal pile of shifting black rubble, swollen by mammoth carbuncles that every now and then lanced themselves and released the satanic magma.
Admiral Badr kept the Barracuda going forwards to the edge of his launch zone. He checked his watch.
In the past hour, they had made dozens of checks on the prefiring routines and settings. Lieutenant Commander Shakira had personally supervised the numbers that had been punched into the tiny onboard computers in each of the Scimitars’ nose cones. They had pored over the little screen that displayed the chart references. All four were the same—16.45N 62.10W, the very heart of the volcano high in the Soufriere Hills on the island of Montserrat.
With the competence of the North Korean technicians, and the electronic engineers of Huludao, the quartet of Scimitars could not miss. They would plunge into the crater within 10 feet of each other, each one drilling deeper into the upper layer of rock, all four of them driving substantial fault lines into the flimsy pumice stone crust that held back the deadly fire.
Shakira had selected a southerly route for the missile attack on the grounds of her uncertainty about U.S. tracking stations either in or near the old Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Puerto Rico.
The Scimitars would swerve 20 degrees off their due-western course and swing through the Guadeloupe Passage, passing five miles to the north of Port Louis on the French island’s western headland. They would make their big right-hand turn out over the open water northwest of Guadeloupe, and then come swooping in to Montserrat out of the southwest.
They would flash over the half-buried ghost town of Plymouth, and then follow the infamous route of the 1997 magma, two miles at 600 mph over the rising ground, straight up to Chance’s Peak, before diving into the crater.
And this time, there would be no Tony Tilton below, no observer to hear the eerie swish of the rockets’ slipstream through the air. These days, this southern part of Montserrat was deserted. Shakira’s plan was for no one to hear, or see, anything. Until the vicious old mountain exploded again.
Ben Badr checked with the sonar room. Then he ordered the submarine to periscope depth for a lightning fast surface picture check. The seas were deserted and nothing was showing on the radar—critical factors when launching a missile with a fiery red tail as it cleared the ocean, visible for miles.
He ordered the Barracuda deep again. Then he made a final check with his missile director. And at one minute to midnight (local), he issued the order to activate the immaculate preprogramming plan. The sequencer was watching his screen. The Barracuda was facing west, running slowly, 300 feet below the surface.
“STAND BY TUBES ONE TO FOUR…”
“Tubes ready, sir.”
“TUBE ONE…LAUNCH!”
The first of the Scimitars blew out into the pitch-black water, angled upwards, and came blasting out of the ocean, and into the warm night air. It left a fiery, crackling wake as it roared into the sky, until it reached its preset cruising height of 500 feet and settled onto a firm course for the Guadeloupe Passage. At this point, the state-of-the-art gas turbines cut in and eliminated the giveaway trails in the sky.
Scimitar SL-1 was on its way, and there was nothing in this lonely part of the western Atlantic that could possibly stop it. And even as it streaked high above the waves, Admiral Badr was ordering the second one into the air, then the third, and then, a mere three minutes after the opening launch, the final missile. The volatile, unstable volcano in the Soufriere Hills was about to awaken the Caribbean once more.
Twenty-five minutes after the opening launch sequence, the lead rocket came swishing past the inshore waters of northern Guadeloupe. Four minutes later, it was hammering towards the Plymouth waterfront, deserted now for ten years, beneath the haunted rock face of Chance’s Peak.
It ripped over the almost-buried war memorial with its high clock tower, now only five feet above ground level. It shot straight above George Street, with its second-story-only shopping facade, past Government House, over the cricket pitch, and on towards the mountain.
At the back of the town it made a course adjustment, veering right to the northeast, following the inland road down from the east coast airport. One mile from the central crater it swung right again for its final approach, and came hurtling in out of clear skies, straight at Gage’s Mountain.
At 0036, on the morning of Tuesday, September 29, General Rashood’s Scimitar SL-1, courtesy of the illegal North Korean arms factory, smashed eight-feet deep into the steaming active crater in Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills, detonating with barbaric force.
The packed rubble of the volcano gave the blast a dead, muffled, subterranean thumping effect, just as the first missile had done at Mount St. Helens. But less than one minute later, the second Scimitar crashed bang into the middle of the crater and exploded savagely, splitting the already wide bomb-cavern almost in two.
That was plenty for the fragile, cantankerous killer mountain, which seemed to take a deep quivering breath before belching fire and ashes a thousand feet into the air. And then, with an earth-shaking rumble, it erupted with mind-blowing force, sending a thousand white-hot rocks and boulders hundreds of feet into the sky, lighting up the entire eastern stretch of the Leeward Isles.
Admiral Badr did not need missile three, which came arrowing in through the fire and fury of the exploding volcano, and reached its target before detonating in the immeasurable heat of the magma. Missile four melted and blew to pieces in midair, in the raging fires of gas-filled magma that lit up the atmosphere half a mile above the mountain.
A gigantic pyroclastic flow now developed on the southwest side of Gage’s, and the dense burning ash began to envelope the entire area, cascading down the upper slopes, heading for farmland that had never recovered from the initial eruption in 1996, and on to the already half-buried town of Plymouth.
If anything, this was a bigger blast than the one seen on Montserrat th
irteen years earlier, when the ash plume had blown itself 40,000 feet into the air and endangered all commercial aircraft. It was not quite so high this time, but by common consensus, the heat and the fire were greater, and the surging lava flow down the mountain was deeper and just as hot.
It took ten minutes for the massive second phase of the explosion. The biggest of the carbuncles to the northeast of Chance’s Peak suddenly began to collapse. Later, geological studies surmised that the carbuncle must have shaken and cracked with the upwards surge of the magma, which was unable to exit from the main crater.
It finally gave way, and a new gout of molten rock burst 200 feet into the air in a hurricane of blazing ash, gas, and black rubble. Instantly, the magma began to flow, and it gushed out from the heart of the mountain, rising up from the fires of Hell.
And it rumbled down the northeastern slopes of the Soufriere Hills, down the ghats, down the Tar River Valley towards the airport. Anything it touched burned instantly. It melted the blacktop on the roads, set fire to every tree and hedge in its path, incinerated cottages and barns, mostly abandoned.
Moving at 40 mph, it rolled towards the sea, surging right to the little town of Spanish Point and then crushing and burning every last vestige of the old airport. The coastal area went completely black, as the burning ash cloud blotted out the moon and stars. The ocean boiled along the shores as the white-hot lava rolled into the light Caribbean surf.
Then, nine minutes after the last square foot of blacktop on the airport runway had melted, Chance’s Peak erupted again, this time on the south side. It was a second devastating explosion from the same mountain, and it once more blew rocks and boulders thousands of feet into the air before they crashed down around the remains of the deserted fishing village of St. Patrick’s, setting fire to everything within 50 feet of their landing.
Like the other two eruptions, this one broadly followed the lava paths of the 1996–97 blast, the magma pouring south and then splitting near the little village of Great Alps Falls. The main torrent burned its way straight over the road and directly into St. Patrick’s, the secondary flow veering left over the same road, a mile to the east and into the sea. There was nothing left to weep for in St. Patrick’s. The thriving little seaport had been taken off the face of the earth.
By 0100, there was no one asleep on the entire island. Indeed, almost everyone was awake on the north coast of Guadeloupe, the southwest coast of Antigua around the town of Falmouth, and Charlestown on the neighboring island of Nevis.
The lady who ran the Montserrat radio station was up and broadcasting within seven minutes of the first massive explosion on Gage’s Mountain. The transmitter was in a building adjacent to her home on the island’s safe area, north of the line that demarked the southern exclusion zone since 1997.
From the studio in the Central Hills, the news was hitting the airwaves by 0048. The giant volcano in the Soufriere Hills had erupted, without warning. In the modern observatory built by the international scientific studies group on a hillside near the western town of Salem, they recorded no pre-eruption activity whatsoever, on either the tiltmeters or the seismographs that constantly monitored the state of the petulant mountain of fire.
In fact the seismographs had given very early and very definite warning of the oncoming catastrophes in 1996–97, their needles almost shaking themselves off the rotating drums, as the onrushing magma rumbled and roared below the earth’s crust.
But this time there was absolutely nothing, not one of the observatory’s new computer screens registered even the faintest tremor. Nor did the state-of-the-art tiltmeters that the scientists in permanent residence had set to measure, constantly, any earth movement on the mountain slopes around the developing carbuncles, or, in scientific parlance, the domes.
The Montserrat Observatory was the most sought-after study area in the world. Students, professors, and specialist volcanologists traveled from five continents to experience, firsthand, the geophysical hazards of a brooding, threatening mountain, which had already destroyed half of its island.
The detection systems were second to none. Every subterranean shudder, every gout of steam or fire, every ton of escaping lava was meticulously recorded. It was said that the volcano in the Soufriere Hills was the most carefully observed square mile in the world, more so than even Wall Street.
And yet, on this moonlit September night, that volcano had blown out with an unprecedented explosion, without so much as a shudder or a ripple to forecast the cataclysmic eruption. The eruption had come from nowhere, and it would, at least temporarily, baffle volcanologists from the finest geohazard departments of the world’s most prestigious universities.
On this September night, the troubleshooters of Montserrat—the police, fire departments, and ambulances—were not even on high alert until the first convulsion of the mountain almost shook the place to pieces. And even then, there was little they could do, although members of the Royal Montserrat Police Force made instantly for the helicopter pads where they ran into scientists already assessing the dangers of flying into an area almost engulfed by smoke and burning ash. The Police Chief himself banned all takeoffs until the air cleared.
This time, there were no instances of farming people being swallowed up in their own fields by the onrushing lava. No one was incinerated in their own homes. This was a clinical no-killing fiery spectacle in the eastern Caribbean lighting up the Leeward Isles and threatening certain members of the United States Military to go into cardiac arrest.
Shortly before midnight EST, reports of the eruption on Montserrat were filtering through to the United States networks. The radio station in Antigua was the first to go on air, describing what could be seen. They managed to hook up with Radio Montserrat, and their signals were picked up by the eastern Caribbean network, which in turn was monitored by one of the U.S. network offices in Puerto Rico.
Moments later, the news was out in Miami, Florida, and three minutes later CNN was on the case in Atlanta. Television pictures from Falmouth, Antigua, were poor and slightly late after the initial blast, but there was truly spectacular footage taken by the scientists’ cameras in the Salem observatory.
These were instantly wired electronically to Antigua and Puerto Rico, under the contractual agreement that paid for much of the research undertaken at Salem.
By 12:05 A.M. (EST), thanks to CNN, Atlanta, the sensational pictures of a giant volcano in full cry were on television screens all over the world.
Lt. Comdr. Jimmy Ramshawe was sitting comfortably in an armchair in his parents’ pricey Watergate complex when the erupting volcano jumped onto the screen. His fiancée, the surf goddess Jane Peacock, was in bed reading, paying no attention to Jimmy’s grave forecast of a big event around midnight.
The first she knew of it was when Jimmy leapt to his feet, stark naked, pointing at the screen and shouting, “HOLY SHIT!! HE’S DONE IT…THAT MONGREL BASTARD WAS NOT JOKING!”
He grabbed the telephone and dialed Admiral George Morris at home in Fort Meade, as arranged. The Director of the National Security Agency had been to a Naval dinner, and was already snoring like a elephant bull. It took him a couple of minutes to hear the phone and answer, but he was visibly shaken by Jimmy’s news.
“How long ago, Jimmy?” he asked.
“I’d guess about half an hour,” replied his assistant. “What do we do?”
“Well, we can’t do much now. But we’d better schedule a very early start tomorrow. Say, 0600, in my office.”
“Okay, sir. You want me to call the Big Man? Or will you do it?”
Just then the Admiral’s other line rang angrily—General Scannell. George Morris told Jimmy to speak to Arnold Morgan while he dealt with the CJC and then Admiral Dickson.
Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe, still stark naked, dialed Admiral Morgan’s number in Chevy Chase, but Arnold had been watching CNN news.
“Well, sir, that’s taken a whole bloody lot of the guesswork out of this conundrum, right?”
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“You can say that again, kid,” answered the Admiral. “Right now I’m planning to sit here and watch this thing develop…Maybe see if there was any warning. And I think that’s what we all should do. Then we better meet early…”
“Admiral Morris has scheduled a meeting in his office at 0600, which is where I’ll be. We can take a look at the CIA stuff, if any. Then I guess we better all meet up somewhere around 0900. My boss is on the line to General Scannell right now…Tell you what, sir, I’ll leave a message on your machine soon as I know where we’re meeting in the morning…I guess the Pentagon, but I’ll confirm.”
“Okay, Jimmy. Keep your eyes and ears open. This bastard’s serious. He just hit the fucking mountain with missiles, and that mega-tsunami’s getting closer by the minute, no doubt in my mind.”
“Nor mine, sir.”
“What’s happened? Will you please tell me what’s going on?” Jane Peacock had lost all interest in her magazine.
Scimitar SL-2 (2004) Page 26
