Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“As I have possibly convinced you with the subway bombing and the razing of 26 Federal Plaza, I am actually pretty good at blowing shit up, no? I like to think that no one has ever been as good at it as I am, but that is for history to decide, I guess.”

As the cameraman turned all the way back around, in the distance, up the shaft, we could see a bright opening in the tunnel, thin clouds in a pale-blue sky.

The camera guy started walking up toward the opening, and then as he reached it, everybody in the room gasped.

Through the cave mouth or mine shaft or whatever it was, the camera showed a bunch of dark, jagged volcanic peaks and a sheer drop-off down an immense cliff into a crashing ocean. The cave mouth was insanely high up — a hundred stories, maybe two hundred. Far below, down the dizzyingly immense slope of the mountain, there were dozens of little moving dots — seabirds flying above the spraying surf.

“Here’s what you need to know now,” said the voice. “If my calculations are right, and I believe they are, when I carefully detonate my network of explosives, I will peel off this entire peak and send a landmass roughly the size of Manhattan Island into the Atlantic Ocean at more than a hundred miles an hour.

“According to my computer models, this slide will create a tsunami a little more than twice as powerful as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and send it directly into the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Six hours from the time I detonate, Manhattan Island will be inundated with an unstoppable seventy-five-foot wave.”

“No,” said Arturo, beside me, in a whisper to the screen. “Just no.”

“New York City will be destroyed. As will Miami and Baltimore and Boston.”

There was a pause in the narration.

“I have one simple demand. Within twenty-four hours, I want three billion US dollars deposited into a list of numbered accounts that I have already sent to the mayor’s office by e-mail. That this amount is roughly the equivalent of the mayor’s personal fortune is not accidental. She can divert her money easily in the time allotted. The question is, will she? Your city’s fate lies solely in her hands.

“There will be no negotiation. The money will either appear in the accounts in the time allotted, and tomorrow will be just another day. Or it will not appear, and I will wipe New York City, along with the rest of the eastern United States, off the map.”

There was a second pause.

“Please know that, of course, any attempt to find and approach the place where the bombs are now located will result in immediate detonation. I will not contact you again. That is all.”

Half an hour later, we were in the insanely crowded OEM’s seventh-floor war room. The packed, open room had monitors everywhere. Monitors on desks, monitors built into a long cherrywood conference table in the center of the room, and a movie screen — like monitor that took up an entire wall.

The wall screen was actually composed of a grid of smaller screens that showed different parts of the city — Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, the street out in front of the UN. As I watched, the screen changed into a still of the cave or mine housing the explosives.

At the head of the U-shaped conference table packed with scientists and government officials, the acting mayor looked pale. It was impossible to know what she was feeling, but it couldn’t have been good. It was incredible that all this — the bombings and assassination — was about cleaning her out financially.

Or at least that was what was being said now. I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case.

“Please, someone, anyone, tell me what the hell is going on here,” the mayor said.

The scientists at the table stared at each other until a tan, lean, white-haired man who reminded me a lot of the famous college basketball coach Bobby Knight stood up, along with a pretty woman with chin-length chestnut hair.

“Everyone, my name is Larry Duke, and this is Dr. Suzan Bower, and we’re the coheads of the American Geophysical Union,” he said.

“Tell me this is a joke, Mr. Duke,” said the mayor. “It’s a bluff, right? Dr. Evil, James Bond bullshit? It’s too implausible. There are no islands near New York City in the Atlantic. How is this even a threat?”

“Actually, ma’am,” Larry said, “off the west coast of Africa, there are dozens and dozens of volcanic islands.”

“Africa! That’s what? Three or four thousand miles away!” she screamed.

Dr. Bower smiled calmly as she raised her palm.

“Allow me to explain,” she said politely. “The potential destructive force of a truly massive landslide into a seabed is almost impossible to comprehend. In Lituya Bay in Alaska in the fifties, after an earthquake, a one-mile-by-half-mile chunk of rock slid off a coastal mountain into the water, causing a wave the size of a one-hundred-and-seventy-story building.

“Think about that. If a similar incident happened in the Atlantic basin, even from as far away as Africa, a tidal wave the size of the Indian Ocean tsunami would hit the Eastern Seaboard six hours later, just as the man on the tape said.”

“And nothing could stop it?” said the OEM head.

Larry shook his head sadly.

“Nothing,” he said. “For years, Suzan and I have been advising the government of exactly the problem here — that some of the West African islands are potential tsunami dangers from eruption-caused landslides.”

“But you said the landslide in Alaska was caused by an earthquake, an incredible geologic event,” said the mayor. “You can’t cause an earthquake or erupt a volcano with explosives, can you?”

“No, you can’t. But you can cause a landslide with explosives, especially if an area is already unstable, like many of the areas on some of these islands,” said Dr. Bower.

“Bullshit,” somebody said.

“I wish it was,” Larry said. “In 1903, there was a disaster called the Frank Slide in Canada. A segment of mountain about the same size as the one in the Lituya Bay incident fell and flattened a mining town. How did it happen? By miners blasting in one of the mines.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Bower. “Today, demolition experts are so good with explosives, they can blow things up so buildings fall wherever they want. For example, demo guys took down a half-mile-long section of nine bridges in Ohio with only one hundred and thirty-eight pounds of plastic explosives. You get a geologist together with a demo expert and place the pow in the right place, and you just might be able to do it. You simply need to give it a push, and millions and millions of pounds of rock and gravity do the rest.”

“Shit,” I said to Emily. “Just like Twenty-Six Fed. A little bit of explosives placed perfectly took that building down pretty as you please. They know how to do it.”

“So you think it’s possible for these terrorists to actually use explosives to cause a landslide to create a tsunami?” said the mayor.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Larry said with a sad smile. “But the answer is yes.”

Two hours later, we were sprawled out in a corner of the OEM building’s third-floor cafeteria. We sat at a new folding table — which still had a sticker with the Walmart bar code on it — washing down vending-machine candy with coffee. I had my feet on a chair by the window and was sharing glum looks with Doyle and Arturo and Emily.

“Gosh, it’s tiring to beat your head against the wall,” said Arturo.

He was right. We’d just gotten off the phone with Robertson and Brooklyn. They’d called to let us know that Dmitri Yevdokimov and Anatoly Gavrilov had lawyered up.