Don Pendleton - Seismic Surge

They were still going to land a mile to the south of Tarajal, which was a popular marina for tourists and locals alike. They wanted to stay out of sight of the native population and the mercenaries, if they were active in this part of the island. That meant that they would climb a rocky cliff and cut across the sparsely populated banana plantations that topped the oceanfront cliffs.

There were tourist-oriented beaches, such as the Playa del Puerto. A seaside promenade with restaurants and beach facilities was present. Farther south, there was Los Guirres o El Volcán, which was wild in nature, isolated, but a favorite spot for surfers who wanted to get off the beaten path. All along, they could make out the black volcanic sands that made the island so well known and striking.

McCarter joined in on the scan of the Spanish marina. “Looks like a lot of the locals got in their boats and took off.”

“I don’t see much in way of an armed presence either way,” Encizo said.

“That means bugger all. We’ve got a submarine loaded with guns and explosives, and we look like bumps on the waves,” McCarter countered. “And don’t forget that a cruise ship turned out to be a missile-launching Q-ship that took over Santa Cruz harbor.”

“That’s over the spine of the island,” Encizo said. “But they might have some kind of presence here, especially since we’re that much closer to Cumbre Vieja.”

None of the team had to double-check the map that they had memorized. Cumbre Vieja volcano was the subject of the Jeopardy white paper about how a catastrophic 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.”