by Jack Mars
“Tell the world you have confidence in the President. Tell the world you have confidence in this country, and in our shared future. Thank you.”
At the front of the room, Kurt waved his hand, and his aide, Amy, muted the volume. On the monitors, Stephen Lief began to take questions from the assembled reporters, speaking, making mild hand gestures, and shrugging his shoulders, all in absolute silence.
“I think he did a nice job,” Susan said.
“It was a good speech,” General Loomis said. “Very stirring. In the meantime, it doesn’t change the fact that Russian missile defense is on a war footing, and we are not. We need to come up with a response, and quickly.”
Susan looked at Kurt. Kurt was now kneeling next to Amy’s chair as she whispered something in his ear.
“Kurt?”
He stood and turned to Susan. “Uh, we’ve just received an intelligence report from fighter planes patrolling the Canary Islands. In the past several minutes, a firefight involving shoulder-fired missiles and at least one helicopter has erupted on the island of El Hierro, just across a wide bay from the Cumbre Vieja volcano.”
“How unusual is that?”
Kurt shook his head. “It doesn’t happen.”
A one-word thought appeared in Susan’s mind: Stone.
“How soon before we can put troops there?” Susan said.
Kurt looked at Haley Lawrence, then at General Loomis.
“Not soon enough.”
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT
7:25 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (2:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Valverde Coast
El Hierro, Canary Islands
Atlantic Ocean
“Holy rocky coastline,” Ed Newsam said.
They were dragging the pilot, Penza, out of the water. He was almost dead weight, gasping for air, struggling, coughing, crying. Luke had an image of throwing him down on the beach, but there was no beach. There were just large, round, black volcanic rocks, an endless field of them, covered with moss, slippery as hell.
They stumbled, fell, got up, kept going. The water was three or four feet deep here, the waves surging in behind them.
Above their heads, a flare went up, lighting up the sky, casting strange shadows among the bizarre moonscape around them.
“Another flare,” Luke said. “Down! Everybody down!”
They hit the deck, and he tasted the salt of the ocean water. The last several minutes had passed in a blur. He had pulled the pilot out of the helicopter almost without thinking about it, losing everything else in the chaos. His gun and his ammo were gone. The rest of their gear was gone. The chopper was gone. Paul Dunn was gone.
At least he had found Ed.
Bullets hit the rock field, ricocheting everywhere. The flare passed slowly overhead, burned out, and dropped to the water, sparking and flickering, then disappearing. The coast descended into merciful darkness again.
Ed was lying prone in shallow water, his head behind a tall rock.
“I don’t think they saw us,” he said. “They’re just probing.”
The pilot started shrieking. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Ed suddenly slithered across the rocks like a big snake and cracked Penza across the face. It was an open-palm slap. Penza quieted instantly.
“Listen, man. You need to shut that up. We ain’t here to die, and you ain’t gonna get us killed. If you open your mouth again, I’m going to hit you, but this time for real. You got it?”
Penza nodded. “Yeah,” he said, barely louder than a whisper. “I got it.”
“Good.”
Luke wedged himself between and below a couple of large rocks, in preparation for when the next flare went up. “Ed,” he said. “Did you see what happened to Dunn?”
Ed shook his head. “Nah. I saw him get off the chopper, but that’s the last I know.”
“I’m up here,” a disembodied voice said. “I’ve been waiting for you guys.”
A large white hand appeared from between some rocks twenty yards further up the beach. It was so white compared to the darkness of the night, it almost seemed to glow. It waved for an instant, and disappeared again before anyone up above could target it.
“You hurt?” Luke said.
“Negative.”
Luke grunted. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’m a Navy SEAL, man. The water is my home.”
Luke looked at Penza. He was crammed up behind a rock, with his eyes squeezed tight. It wasn’t out of the question that he was about to start screaming again.
“Thanks for helping out with the pilot,” Luke said.
“I’m not here to babysit,” Dunn said. “I’m here to get that weapon.”
They sat for a long moment. How to go after the weapon seemed like an open question. On the craggy bluffs above them, another flare launched.
“Flare!” Luke said.
It began its slow ascent, lighting up the night.
An instant later, a line of bombs dropped from somewhere in the heavens. They came screaming down, a violent rain, invisible, pounding the top of the bluff where the flare had just gone up.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A hundred yards of fire and fury, a field of death, briefly turning night into day. The explosions echoed out over the water, and back. In the aftermath, there came the crackling of flames as the grasses on top of the bluff burned, along with the bodies of whoever had just been positioned there.
Swann.
Luke reached into the pocket of his cargo pants. The phone was still there. He checked it. Waterproof, shockproof, only the best. Here was where it earned its keep. He scrolled it, found Swann, pressed the button. The number dialed. Ha! It worked.
There was a delay of several seconds as the signal bounced around the world.
“Hello?”
“Swann, was that you just now?”
“Did you see that?” Swann said. “Cowabunga, man! I just about ate those dudes for lunch. That’s Chinese ingenuity for you.”
Swann paused. “Uh, what’s the situation down there?” he said, lowering his voice, taking his enthusiasm down a notch.
“We’re alive,” Luke said. “But we lost our weapons in the crash. We can’t take that hill unless it’s cleaned up.”
“It’s yours,” Swann said. “Those guys were lined up like ducks. Most of them just got toasted. There are a couple of squirmers left on the ground, but I don’t think they’ll hurt you.”
Luke looked at Ed. “We’re back in business,” he said, loud enough so Dunn could hear him, too. “Let’s roll.”
* * *
A gunshot sounded along the lonely coastline.
CRACK!
Ten minutes had passed, and they were standing on top of the bluff. There were guns here, yes—a couple of AK-47s, and a few handguns that the Al-Qaeda guys had left in their jeeps. Swann, bright boy, had killed the fighters and left the vehicles intact. Small fires were still burning in the sea grass, and Dunn was putting the last survivors out of their misery with single shots to the head.
CRACK!
The pilot flinched every time Dunn pulled the trigger.
“Mike,” Luke said. “I need you here with me, okay?”
The pilot nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I can do it. I’m here.”
“Can you drive a car right now?”
The man nodded crazily. “Oh yeah. I can fly a helicopter, I can drive a car. You kidding? I can drive a car.”
“Good,” Luke said. “We’re going to get one started for you. You can’t come with us. I need you to drive that way.” He pointed off to the southwest, down the curving, narrow two-lane roadway. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. Don’t drive into the water. If you see a road going inland, take it. Drive inland and to higher ground, as high as you can get. Just keep going. Okay?”
“Inland,” Penza said. “Higher ground.”
“Exactly,” Luke said. “Inland and higher ground. All the time. Don’t stop.”
H
e looked at Ed and Dunn. Ed was checking the magazine on an AK-47.
“You guys ready?” Luke said.
They nodded.
“Born ready,” Ed said.
Three minutes later, they were barreling down the road in an open-air jeep, headlights off. Ed was at the wheel, Luke in the passenger seat, Dunn in the back. Luke had the phone pressed to his ear.
“Where are they?” Luke said.
“The strobe is about three miles ahead of you,” Swann said. “They’ve stopped. I don’t know what they’re doing. It looks like they’ve got a gate lift on the truck. Yeah, it is. The road hugs the coast there, close to the water. The truck is backed up to a flat ledge just below the road. They’re lowering the thing to the ground. That point has an unobstructed view straight across the water toward the volcano.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “They’ve had that spot picked out for a while. What are the other vehicles doing?”
“Uh, it’s a headland and the road curves away from the water there. The vehicles are parked across the road on either side of where they’re setting up the weapon. They’re basically establishing roadblocks, checkpoints. They’ve got four cars left, and they’re parking them in twos, V shapes, nose to nose, facing any oncoming traffic. It would be hard to ram that. They’re hunkering down behind those blockades. Guessing they’ve got automatic weapons back there.”
Luke stared out the windshield at the onrushing darkness, stark hillsides to the right, wide open nothing to the left. Nothing in front yet.
“Oh yeah,” Swann said. “They’re moving a shoulder-fired rocket in on your side. They know you’re coming, and they are ready.”
“How far now?” Luke said.
“Two miles,” Swann said. “Coming fast. It’s going to get very hot in a minute.”
“We’re going to be outgunned down here,” Luke said. “We’ve got a couple of AKs, and a couple of pea-shooters. Not much. I need you to put your air-to-ground missiles on those guys. Can you do that?”
“When?” Swann said.
Luke shrugged. “Now’s good. How does now sound? We’re gonna be there in another minute.”
“Yeah, but I gotta put the phone down. This is new-to-me technology. That’s why it took me so long to drop those bombs.”
“Good,” Luke said. “Fire when ready. Call me if there’s any problem.”
He hung up and looked at Ed. “We need to slow down, man. They’ve got the road blocked off ahead, and they’re going to hit us with everything.”
“Where’s the weapon?” Dunn said.
“Past the blockade, on the left, on some kind of ledge or platform just off to the side of the road.”
“How you want to play this?” Ed said.
Luke noticed that he had hardly slowed down at all.
“Swann’s supposed to hit those blockades. He takes them out, you and Dunn clean up the leftovers, and I go straight for the weapon. We need to hit hard and get there fast—sixty seconds or less. The weapon has a handle that sets the amount of oscillation. There’s some kind of power drive that sets it.”
“I looked at the specs on the plane,” Ed said. “I know.”
“If they destroy that power drive, we’re going to have a hard time turning the thing off. We need to make sure they’re all dead before they can do that.”
The road dipped ahead, dropping fast with a black cliff face to the right. At the bottom, the road curved around to the right.
The phone rang. Luke picked it up.
“What?”
Swann’s voice, shaking: “Slow down! You’re right on top of them.”
“Where’s that missile strike, Swann?”
“It’s coming. There’s a trick to this, an extra step somewhere. I haven’t used this system before.”
“Oh, man,” Luke said. “Figure it out, Swann. Do your job!”
He hung up.
“We need to ditch this car. This is coming up any second.”
Luke picked up his gun. Generic nine-millimeter handgun, probably Chinese-made. He popped the magazine, checked it, slid it back in.
Ed squashed the brake, slowing drastically. The car rounded the bend and crested a rise. Suddenly, there were bright headlights ahead, blinding.
“That’s it,” he said. “Out.”
Ed grabbed the AK-47 propped up next to him, shoved his door open, rolled out, and disappeared. Luke shouldered his own door open. Behind him, he saw the shadow of Dunn go over the top. Then Luke leapt out, hit the pavement, and rolled. He dropped, hit hard, and bounced. He pulled into a tight ball, protecting his head. His momentum carried him up the road.
He slid to a halt, then crawled for the side of the road.
The car drove on without them. An instant later, a rocket launched from behind the glaring headlights of the blockade. There was a bright muzzle flash, the whistle of the rocket itself, then:
BOOOM.
The jeep they were just riding in blew apart, a fireball rising to the sky from the inferno. The flaming car rolled on a bit further, turning to the left and grinding to a halt by the side of the road.
Luke lay in the depression of a drainage culvert, breathing hard.
So much for plans.
Machine gun fire opened up from the blockade, strafing the area. There was no way to move. Luke looked back for Ed and Dunn. In the dark, he could hardly see anything—just the blinding lights of the blockade, and the flames of the burning jeep.
“Swann!” he croaked. “Come on already.”
As if Luke had conjured it, a missile streaked to Earth from somewhere in the sky. The signature was loud and bright. It came down the like the hand of God, out of nowhere, without warning except zooming light and a screaming whistle.
Luke covered his ears.
The explosion was unreal. It was less a sound and more a shockwave. Suddenly the blockade was a firestorm. Something there was shrieking. It was impossible to tell what was happening.
Dunn ran by, cradling his AK-47. “Our turn! Let’s go.”
Then Luke was up and running. He ran to the left, toward the burning jeep. Ed was running to his right. Gunfire up ahead, Dunn engaging. The man was fast.
Luke skirted to the left of the flaming blockade, moving fast, giving it a wide berth. Black smoke poured into the sky. Shadows moved and danced in the flames. Gunshots. A big man mowing down smaller men.
Suddenly, there was another screaming whistle coming from above. The noise was impossible. It was right on top of them. Luke hit the deck.
Another horrifying explosion. The ground shook from it. Ahead and to the right, something else blew apart. The other blockade? It was impossible to tell. There was fire everywhere, behind him, in front of him—the night itself was on fire.
Luke clambered to his feet and stumbled forward. He started running again. It was hard to see through all the smoke. A man appeared out of the haze, a thin man, a gun in each hand. Pattern recognition: not one of mine.
Luke shot him in the face.
There was a truck just ahead, parked sideways. It was big, a lorry, with an open-air trailer. There was a noise here—a humming, loud and getting louder. Luke reached the truck, ducked down, and moved along its edge to the back.
Below, on a wide, flat ledge, stood a tall, black thing. Luke had no time to think about what to make of it. It was large. Maybe it looked like a giant dumbbell. Maybe it looked like a magic lamp, or some talisman left behind by a mysterious disappeared civilization. It glowed in the flames of the explosions. Beyond it was only darkness—the ocean.
The thing was vibrating, and it was making everything else vibrate, too. Luke touched the truck. It was a big truck, and it was sure as hell vibrating. It was nearly bouncing.
A man lumbered across the ledge toward Luke. He was a short man, round, slightly overweight. He carried something heavy in both hands, some kind of box. In the firelight, Luke could make see the man was soaked in blood. He’d been shot up, or hit in the bombings.
“It�
�s too late, my friend,” the man said in English.
The man indicated the device he was carrying. “This is the drive that turns it off,” he said. Then he turned his left hand over and showed Luke the grenade in his palm.
Luke aimed his gun at the man’s head. Too late. The man exploded, blowing himself, and the power drive, to pieces. Luke was knocked backward by the force of the blast. He fell to the ground, landing on his back.
He clambered to his feet. Again. He had dropped his gun. He would look for it, but there was no time. Ed appeared next to him. Behind them was a wall of flame and a smattering of gunfire.
“What was that?” he said.
“That was the machine that turns it off,” Luke said.
“Oh man.”
“Yeah.”
They walked together onto the ledge toward the tectonic weapon. It loomed above them. It was getting louder and louder, louder every second. The world was shaking. The device had a round face halfway up its narrow midsection. There were indentations around the face, each with a number—0, 10, 20, 30, and on up to 100. It was almost like a clock face. There was a flat iron bar mounted on it. The bar pointed to 100.
Of course.
Luke looked at Ed. What choice was there now? The iron bar was not long—there was only enough room for one person to hold it. If anyone could do this, it was Ed.
“See if you can turn it,” he said.
Ed nodded. He stepped up to the device and placed his hands on the bar.
“It’s really vibrating,” he said. “And it’s hot.”
He bent his knees, got low, and then began to pull back on the iron rod. It didn’t move. He stopped and stood up straight again. “Okay, just warming up.”
The humming from the device got louder, and the vibration more extreme. It was building toward something.
UMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Ed dropped into his crouch again and pulled on the bar. Now his body started to tremble. In the glow from the fires, Luke saw a vein pop out on his forehead. His hands, his arms, and his head shook uncontrollably.
“It’s hot! It’s getting hot!”
