House Divided

by Jack Mars

  Susan shook her head. These guys were not going to budge with Stone. They seemed to have lost all respect for him. An idea for injecting a modicum of respect back into this interaction—and also to get off this phone call—occurred to her.

  “Director Stone,” she said, using his new title, “we need to chew on these ideas over here for a little while. You’re asking us to move Heaven and Earth. We’re going to check with some of our intelligence people and see how your theory dovetails with what they know and what they might be hearing. Give us a little while and then we’ll issue you further instructions.”

  She paused. There was no sound coming from the octopus.

  “Sound okay?” she said.

  “Okay, Susan,” he said.

  “Good. We’ll be in touch.”

  The line went dead. Susan looked at Kurt.

  “Thirty-minute break?” Kurt said. “Time for everyone to get some more coffee and a bite to eat, or freshen up if they want. It’ll take a little while to pull together some details on all this.”

  “Are you planning to take this seriously?” Loomis said.

  Loomis was becoming a pain in the butt. Susan would sack him right now, during this coming break, except… He might be the leaker. If that was true, he had a ton more information he could leak whenever he wanted, especially after being removed from his position. Moreover, he might have theories that he wanted to share with the media. The theories could be worse than the facts.

  Kurt nodded. “I am taking it seriously, until I can debunk it. Naturally, I’d like to eliminate the idea from contention. But one thought nags at me.”

  “Which is?” Loomis said.

  Kurt shrugged his big shoulders. “What if it’s true?”

  * * *

  It was more than two hours before the meeting reconvened.

  Susan was mildly annoyed when she slid back into her leather chair at the Situation Room conference table. Hurry up and wait was not a game she enjoyed playing. She had spent the delay sitting in the Oval Office, too tired to concentrate on any work, too wired to take a nap. Instead, she had slowly worked her way through three more cups of delicious White House coffee, plus a bagel and salmon with cream cheese, and half a jelly donut.

  This was no way for the President to stay fit and healthy, and long delays were no way to run a railroad.

  Kurt stood directly at the far end of the table, poised in front of his screen. It was a small crowd, and there was no need for hand clapping—everybody here was ready to go.

  “Hi, Kurt,” Susan said. “I must say that two-hour waits are a little out of character for you.”

  Kurt nodded, not the slightest bit disarmed. “I agree and I apologize. Thank you for your patience. I hope you’ll agree that the delay wasn’t in vain. When Amy, myself, and our team were preparing for this meeting, we felt that the presence of someone from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would make a big difference to everyone’s understanding of the challenges we face. It took a little to pull that together this early in the morning, but we did it. And I’d like to welcome Dr. Jason Bartner of DARPA to our discussion.”

  A tall, thin man with wispy blond hair and glasses sat at the end of the table to Kurt’s right. He wore a drab gray pinstripe suit. He had some papers laid out on the table in front of him, along with a bottle of spring water and an upright nameplate: Dr. Bartner—DARPA.

  “Welcome, Dr. Bartner,” Susan said, immediately pricked up and interested. “What do you have for us?”

  Kurt wouldn’t bring someone like this in unless he hadn’t been able to debunk Stone’s report, and there was something more to know.

  Bartner glanced at Kurt, and Kurt waved a hand as if offering him the stage.

  “Thank you, Madam President. As you know, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a federal agency under the Department of Defense. We are responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the United States military. We like to say that our mission—”

  “Dr. Bartner?” Susan said.

  Bartner looked up from the page he was reading. “Yes?”

  Susan smiled. “Here in the Situation Room, we like to say that there’s no time to waste. Let’s get right to the point, shall we?”

  The newcomer nodded. “Of course. Sorry about that. National Security Advisor Kimball invited our agency to address this meeting, and the director asked me to speak on our behalf. I believe the question on the table today is the feasibility of so-called tectonic weapons that use either electromagnetic energy or sound waves, or some combination of the two. I can say that we have experimented with these theories, most recently at our High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program—HAARP for short—in Alaska. I can also say that such weapons are indeed possible, though of course we don’t like to acknowledge this publicly.”

  “Why don’t you like to acknowledge it?” Susan said.

  “Uh, Madam President, you may be aware of some of the conspiracy theories on the Internet regarding HAARP, and DARPA for that matter. There are widespread rumors that we are developing weather-based weapons, and that we were involved in recent disasters, including the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, as well as the sudden left turn taken by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which caused it to make direct impacts on New Jersey and New York City.”

  Susan must be overtired. This man’s testimony, if that’s what it was supposed to be, was becoming weirder and weirder.

  “That’s very interesting, Dr. Bartner. Was your agency involved in those incidents?”

  Bartner shook his head and opened his bottle of water. He took a long gulp of it. “Mrs. President,” he said.

  Mrs. President? Bartner was flustered already.

  He went on. “I’m not empowered to discuss at this time any specific projects our agency may have worked on, or any specific research we may have conducted. You would have to speak to the director for that information. I’m merely here to give general guidance on the question of tectonic weapons. In that role, I can say yes, such weapons are theoretically possible. Yes, we have researched them. And yes, the Soviets may have developed a version or versions of these weapons thirty years ago. Intercepted communications at the time certainly indicated that they believed they had done so.”

  “Were you able to verify the accuracy of those communications?” Haley Lawrence said. “It could have been a misinformation operation by the Russians.”

  Bartner nodded. “It certainly could have been. True or not, it sparked the development of our own tectonic weapons research program.”

  Susan looked at Kurt. “Kurt? Where does this put us?”

  Kurt nodded and looked at his aide, Amy.

  “Amy, can you give us Cumbre Vieja, please?”

  On the big screen at the front, on small table-mounted and embedded screens, and on screens around the room, an aerial image of a green and reddish-brown volcanic island appeared. The volcano was the primary feature of the island, its giant caldera like the exit wound of a gunshot, taking up perhaps ten percent of the island’s landmass.

  “This is the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands archipelago,” Kurt said. “The Canary Islands are a self-governing Spanish possession located about sixty miles off the coast of southern Morocco. The volcano you see is Cumbre Vieja, the Old Summit in English, and it is an active volcano. It has erupted seven times since the late 1400s, with the most recent eruption occurring in 1971. The entire region where the Canaries are located is in fact profoundly active, in terms of both earthquake and volcanic activity.”

  Behind Kurt, the island image disappeared. What replaced it was a slow-motion animated filmstrip, showing a drawing of a volcanic island. One wall of the volcano collapsed, then rushed downhill in a massive landslide, the rubble from it sliding into the ocean. The filmstrip continued, going beneath the surface of the ocean, and indicating that the volcano was actually a large underwater mountain.

  Under the water, the landslide did not stop; instead, it pi
cked up steam. The landslide penetrated deep beneath the sea, causing a massive wave to form. The wave then raced away from the volcano, drawing surrounding volumes of water to it, becoming larger and larger as it went.

  “This,” Kurt said, and half-smiled, perhaps amused by the use of a cartoon during a serious national security meeting, “is a filmstrip created in 1998 to explain in simple terms the forces at work when a mountain landslide causes what is known as a mega-tsunami. The geological record suggests that such a circumstance has occurred numerous times in natural history, though never since the rise of modern civilizations. Every time a mega-tsunami has occurred, the results are believed to have been catastrophic, to put it mildly. If it happened now, we would literally have to redraw our maps.”

  He paused for emphasis, looking around the room at the people in attendance.

  “This filmstrip was in fact developed with Cumbre Vieja in mind. Many geologists believe that Cumbre Vieja could be The Big One. The caldera is crumbling, and the western wall is unstable. The mountain rises seven thousand feet out of the ocean, but goes much deeper below the surface. If the wall were to collapse…”

  He shrugged. “We don’t know for sure.”

  “And if a collapse did trigger a tsunami,” General Loomis said, “where would it go?”

  Behind Kurt, the filmstrip, which had been looped, repeating from the start of the landslide until the formation of the massive wave, then going back to the beginning again, suddenly skipped and picked up where the wave left off. On the screen, the image zoomed outward, showing a map of the world. The massive wave, growing larger all the time, moved to the northwest across the Atlantic Ocean.

  A caption appeared. It read SPEED: 400 mph+ with an arrow indicating the wave. Another caption appeared. It read WAVE HEIGHT: 900 ft. The image zoomed back in to the crest of the wave, and the point of view of someone riding on top of it. The Statue of Liberty appeared, was dwarfed and overwhelmed by the wave. An instant later, the buildings of Lower Manhattan appeared, including the World Trade Center, which still existed at the time the filmstrip was made. The wave hit right at the top of the Twin Towers, then kept going. The image zoomed out again, and showed a map of the East Coast, with the ocean now reaching almost as far as Pennsylvania.

  “Ouch,” Susan said.

  Kurt nodded. “Yes.”

  “Nice filmstrip, though.”

  Kurt agreed. “Clever,” he said.

  “Kurt,” General Loomis said, “I’m sure this twenty-year-old cartoon you’re showing us has been vetted eight ways to Sunday, and its accuracy is impeccable. That said, if Al-Qaeda were planning to launch an attack from the Canary Islands, they would need a presence there, would they not? I did a little research myself during the break. While there is intelligence that a major attack is planned or is coming, there is no indication of any Islamic militant activity in that sector at all.

  “That area is patrolled by the coast guards of both Spain and Morocco, as well as the Moroccan Air Force. If Al-Qaeda planned to put a large weapon there, they would need a support team in place, people who knew how to use the weapon, and other people to protect and run interference for them. They would need to bring the weapon ashore, transfer it to ground transportation, and bring it to a location suitable for operating it. They would need site control of that location.

  “We are always listening to their networks, what we call Islamic radio, and there is no chatter suggesting any of this. There do not appear to be any Islamic militants in place, or preparing to be put in place, on those islands.”

  The man from DARPA raised his hand as if he were in school.

  “Madam President?”

  “Yes, Dr. Bartner. Can you shed light on this?”

  He nodded. “We have studied the possibility that to create an earthquake, a tectonic weapon could be deployed hundreds of miles from the site of the earthquake itself.”

  “And?” Susan said.

  Bartner shrugged. “Inconclusive. Obviously, you’d want the weapon as close to the target as feasible, but depending on how advanced the weapon is, it’s at least theoretically possible to do it from far away.”

  Susan nodded. “Thank you.”

  The comment had shed no light whatsoever.

  Susan looked at Kurt.

  “Maybe we should talk to our friend in the Kremlin,” she said. “Ask him if they ever had one of these things, and if it happened to go missing.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  1:55 p.m. West Africa Time (7:55 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)

  Nigerien Air Base 201

  Agadez, Niger

  Trudy hung up the telephone.

  “What did they say?” Luke said.

  He was lying on the floor of Trudy and Swann’s dismal command center, his head on his pack. He, Ed, and Dunn had all gotten showers, changes of clothes, and breakfast at the mess hall. Now they were all sprawled out in the command center, waiting to see what was next.

  Luke felt awful, exhausted, but he was reluctant to cut anyone loose to catch some shut-eye, especially himself.

  “I told them I had you on the line, awaiting instructions for deployment. They said the Situation Room meeting went on a long break. There may have been a classified side meeting that happened in the Oval Office. Either way, the President is not available. The National Security Advisor and his staff are not available. No one is available. We can leave a message and they will call us back.”

  “It’s been over two hours,” Luke said. Didn’t Susan say they would contact him again in a little while? What did in a little while mean?

  Trudy nodded. “I’m aware of that.” Her hair was damp from the heat. She ran a hand across her wet forehead. It was hot in here.

  Luke shook his head. “It’s no good. We can’t wait. Swann, how far are we from the Canary Islands right now?”

  Swann was sitting and staring into a laptop, poring over a field of data. “About four, maybe four and a half hours in the SRT plane. The airport at Tenerife is modern and can easily handle jet aircraft. There’s an hour time difference, so if the plane left this minute, it would get to Tenerife at about five or five thirty. If the flight plan was filed with them on departure, the delay for clearance to land probably wouldn’t be too bad. I’d say feet on the ground at six p.m., or a little later.”

  Luke slowly climbed to his feet. He looked at Trudy.

  “How sure are you about this?”

  She shrugged. “Seventy-five percent. The kicker for me is how badly the Algerian from Baltimore wanted to get off the East Coast. If it weren’t for that, I’d say fifty percent. But they were bringing that thing up the coast of Africa toward those islands. The National Academy of Geosciences worked on tectonic weapons. And if the volcano comes down…”

  She shrugged again. “Who knows? They could be driving it overland to Mogadishu, but why would they? That clearly wasn’t their original intention.”

  Luke nodded.

  “Where would you deploy it, if you were them?”

  “I would guess three places. One is right on the volcano itself. The other two are either on the west coast of the island of Gomera, or on the north coast of the island of Hierro. Both islands are relatively sparsely populated. If you were sending an electromagnetic burst or a sound wave at the volcano, both spots give you an unimpeded—”

  “Show me on a map,” Luke said.

  Trudy picked up her tablet and swiped through several screens. A map came up. It showed three islands on a blue background, indicating the ocean. The islands formed a rough triangle. La Gomera was a small circular island to the far right. El Hierro was shaped like a boomerang, open side up, and was to the bottom left. Above them was La Palma, shaped like a stone dagger, the site of the volcano itself.

  “We don’t know what we’re looking for,” Trudy said. “But it seems to me that a helicopter or helicopters could deploy in this open water area in the middle, and if an alert came in, could reach any of the three islands within maybe fifteen mi
nutes.”

  Luke looked at both Trudy and Swann. “Can you guys run the operation command from here?”

  Trudy’s shoulders slumped. “It’s hot, it’s dusty, and I hate it here. Meanwhile, you’re planning on flying to Tenerife, right?”

  “If that volcano collapses, I have a feeling it’s not going to be very nice there.”

  She shook her head. “The surf will be up, that’s all.”

  Luke looked at Swann. “Swann?”

  He nodded without looking away from his computer screen. “Yeah. We can run it from here.”

  “Okay,” Luke said. “Here’s what I’m going to need, for starters. Swann, I need you to commandeer a drone from somewhere, and get it airborne around those islands, especially the three islands Trudy was just talking about. But don’t hyper-focus. Keep your eyes open.”

  Swann shook his head now. “I know how to fly a drone, Director Stone.”

  “I also need a chopper ready for us at Tenerife. Something that can stay up a long time without refueling. Preferably piloted by someone with military experience.”

  “Got it,” Swann said. “Drone. Helicopter. I don’t know where I’m gonna scare up a drone, but…”

  Luke ignored him. “Trudy, I need you working the intelligence networks hard. If there’s the slightest peep that might indicate where that weapon went, I want to know about it. If there’s anything to suggest that it went the other way, I want to hear that too. We’re going there with no mandate from anyone.”

  “Technically, you’re disobeying an order from the President,” Swann said. “She told you to wait.”

  “Right,” Luke said. “But I can’t wait anymore. If this is wrong, or if this is right, I need to know that as soon as possible.”

  “Okay, Luke,” Trudy said.

  “Thank you,” Luke said. “Can you call the hangar and see if they’ve refueled the plane yet? I want to get out of here ASAP.”

  He turned to Ed and Dunn. Ed was already clambering to his feet. His clothes were clean. He looked showered and fresh. His face, however, looked haggard and worn.