Patrick Robinson
Scimitar SL-2
Cast of Principal Characters
Senior Command (Political)
Charles McBride (Democrat, Rhode Island; President of the United States)
Vice President Paul Bedford (Democrat, Virginia)
Cyrus Romney (National Security Adviser)
Senator Edward Kennedy (Senior Member, Senate Armed Services Committee)
Bill Hatchard (President McBride’s Chief of Staff)
Admiral Arnold Morgan (Supreme Commander Operation High Tide)
National Security Agency
Rear Adm. George R. Morris (Director)
Lt. Comdr. James Ramshawe (Assistant to the Director)
U.S. Naval and Military Senior Command
Gen. Tim Scannell (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs)
Adm. Alan Dickson (Chief of Naval Operations)
Adm. Dick Greening (Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet — CINCPACFLT)
Adm. Frank Doran (Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet)
Rear Adm. Freddie Curran (Commander, Submarines Pacific Fleet — COMSUBPAC)
Gen. Kenneth Clark (Commandant, United States Marine Corps)
Gen. Bart Boyce (Supreme Allied Commander, NATO)
Combat Commanders
Adm. George Gillmore (Search Group Commander, Task Group 201.1—USS Coronado)
Capt. Joe Wickman (CO, USS Simpson)
Capt. C. J. Smith (CO, USS Elrod)
Capt. Eric Nielsen (CO, USS Nicholas)
Capt. Clint Sammons (CO, USS Klakring)
Maj. Blake Gill (Commander, Patriot Missile Batteries)
U.S. Navy Seahawk Combat Pilots
Lt. Paul Lubrano
Lt. Ian Holman
Lt. Don Brickle
Middle Eastern High Command
Adm. Mohammed Badr (C in C, Iranian Navy)
Gen. Ravi Rashood (Hamas Supreme Commander Combat)
Lt. Com. Shakira Rashood (Special Navigation and Targeting—Barracuda II)
Adm. Ben Badr (CO, Barracuda II)
Ship’s Company Barracuda II
Capt. Ali Akbar Mohtaj (Executive Officer)
Comdr. Abbas Shafii (senior submariner, Iranian Navy, and nuclear specialist)
Comdr. Hamidi Abdolrahim (Chief Nuclear Engineer)
Lt. Ashtari Mohammed (Navigation Officer)
CPO. Ali Zahedi (Chief of Boat)
CPO. Ardeshir Tikku (nuclear computer controls specialist)
Maj. Ahmed Sabah (freedom fighter and personal bodyguard to General Rashood)
Foreign Military
Col. Dae-jung (Commandant, Nuclear Operations, Kwanmo-bong Complex, North Korea)
Capt. Habib Abdu Camara (C in C, Navy of Senegal)
Civilian Connections
Professor Paul “Lava” Landon (volcanologist, University of London, dec.)
David Gavron (Israeli Ambassador to Washington, ex — Mossad Chief)
Mr. Tony Tilton (Seattle Bank President and star witness)
Mrs. Kathy Morgan (wife of Admiral Arnold Morgan, recalled to White House)
His Excellency Mark Vollmer (United States Ambassador to Dubai)
Prologue
Professor Paul Landon, known to an entire generation of university students as “Lava,” hurried through the lower ground floor doorway of the Royal Geographical Society. Out into the darkness of wide, tree-lined Exhibition Road were the capital’s highway of enormous museums, running south from Hyde Park.
He paused on the broad graystone doorstep, a spot where many another great man had stood before him — the explorers Captain Scott of the Antarctic and Ernest Shackleton; the first conquerors of Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, who made the summit, and Lord Hunt, who led the historic 1953 expedition.
Like Professor Landon, they were celebrated Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, and like him, they had all delivered a series of stunning Spring Lectures at the lectern of the auditorium inside the great building. Like him, they had packed the place, and held their audience spellbound.
The prime difference between the great adventurers of the twentieth century and Professor Paul “Lava” Landon was that of subject. Whereas Scott, Shackleton, Hillary, and Hunt had entertained with breathtaking accounts of human survival in freezing conditions, the Professor had just explained in dazzling detail the forthcoming end of the world. No firm dates, of course. Like all masters of global geophysics, Professor Landon operated in approximate time slots of 10,000 years.
The upcoming catastrophe would likely occur in around 7,000 years, he concluded. “But then again,” he added, “it could just as easily happen next Friday, shortly after lunch.”
The typical Royal Geographical crowd, the scholarly, understated, well-heeled English elite, which occupied the auditorium, had loved the lecture. It had been meticulously planned, and flawlessly delivered, with excellent graphics and film clips.
The presentation illuminated the mighty eruptions of volcanoes around the world, the coast-shuddering effects of tidal waves, the ravages of earthquakes. But mostly it focused on the super-eruptions of the past like the one that split Indonesia’s Krakatoa apart in 1883, wiping out 36,000 residents of Java and Sumatra.
Landon told them of the staggering eruption of Wyoming’s Yellowstone Park volcano, which dumped molten magma and ash into California, Texas, and even onto the seabed of the Caribbean. It actually happened 650,000 years ago but “Lava” Landon made it seem like last summer.
He produced a graphic study of the pulverizing blast of Mount St. Helens in Washington State, in which the north flank swelled into a massive balloon of lava before literally exploding, blowing the mountainside asunder and obliterating nearly 400 square miles of forest.
That happened in 1980, and it led Professor Landon inevitably to the climax of his speech — the possibility of a tsunami, a Japanese word describing a series of mountainous waves generated either by an earthquake or, more likely, by a massive volcanic landslide into deep ocean.
Professor Landon’s closing focused on the new potential landslide on the southwest coast of La Palma, the northwesternmost of the Canary Islands. (Jutting out from deep Atlantic waters, La Palma stands 375 miles off the southern coast of Morocco.)
The fact was, he explained, that a gigantic hunk of volcanic rock, several miles long and set on a searing fault line in the earth’s crust, had slipped in the last forty or fifty years, maybe twelve feet down the steep cliff, detaching from the west flank. And somewhere behind this colossal, unstable chunk of rock lay, potentially, the simmering core of the mighty volcano of Cumbre Vieja.
“That lets rip, and the lot goes,” Professor Landon asserted, brightly. “It’d send a staggeringly large rock, several cubic miles of it, crashing off the west flank of the volcano, straight into the Atlantic at more than 200 mph, and surging along the ocean floor, at maybe 400 mph. I’m talking about one of the largest landslides in the past million years. Actually I’m talking about the total collapse of the southwest section of La Palma.”
The packed audience of ex — Military and Naval Officers, scientists, academics, and scions of ancient landed families, which had always shown an interest in such scientific matters, had listened, wide-eyed, as the Professor explained the establishment of a gigantic column of waves, ascending from the seabed to the surface, driving forward to reach speeds of 500 mph, and rising to a height of maybe 200 feet into the air as they arrived in shallow coastal waters.