“Well, we do not have one shred of proof that he’s ever done anything. So why should you expect me to turn the world upside down, moving half the U.S. Armed Forces around the world?”
“The answer to that is very simple, Mr. President,” replied General Scannell. “Because he might actually be telling the truth. Maybe he did blow Mount St. Helens, maybe he is going to pull off some outrage tonight. And maybe he could cause one of the world’s great landslides, and put New York and Washington under 50 feet of water.”
“Well, I don’t think so. I think we’re dealing with a crank.”
“Sir. In the military we are taught to think precisely the opposite. What if he did? What if New York was underwater?”
“What if, General. What if, what if?” The cry of the civil servant, the cry of the frightened executive. “What if…I would remind you that I did not get to sit in this chair by running scared. I got here, to use your parlance, by facing down the enemy…Do you really think that one man could possibly wreak the havoc and destruction you are forecasting?”
“Yes, Mr. President. I do. For a start, we have incontrovertible evidence that cruise missiles may have been fired at Mount St. Helens. And if they were, they came from a submarine.”
“From the documents I have read, you were relying almost entirely on a bank manager who appeared to have drunk a half-gallon of Dewars Scotch?”
“The bank manager was actually the President of one of the largest financial institutions in the West,” interjected Admiral Dickson. “He will probably run for State Governor at the next election, and the half-gallon of Dewars was unopened. The proof that he heard what he heard is evidenced by the fact that he escaped from the foothills of the mountain, when no one else did.”
“All he heard was a couple of gusts of wind, and that’s not enough hot air to have me redeploy half the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.”
“Sir, we have come to see you to offer advice involving the safety of this country. If our enemy is indeed planning to do something tonight, something quite possibly beyond the scale of 9/11 and Kerman’s last attack on our soil, we should be on full alert. I do not need to confirm that the Pentagon is already in a state of readiness. I suggest the White House do the same.
“I also ask your permission to begin deploying the fleet into the eastern Atlantic on a search for the submarine, which might be carrying nuclear missiles, and to begin a substantial troop and aircraft evacuation of our bases in the Middle East. Essentially I’m trying to buy us some time to locate the Hamas assault ship.”
“I’m certain we’d be chasing our tails, General. Permission denied on both counts. Let’s just wait till midnight and see what happens.”
“I should warn you, sir, that if anything drastic happens at midnight, either to ourselves or to someone else, you will have to consider your position very carefully. Remember, unlike politicians, we in the Military are not trained to lie.”
“General, I resent that remark…”
“Do you? Then I suggest you spend the next fourteen hours wondering what you’ll say…if you are proven wrong. Good day to you, sir.”
With that, the two Generals, and the two silent Admirals, stood up and took their leave. Alone in the White House, the President shook his head, muttering to himself…Goddamned paranoid military. Nothing’s going to happen…these guys are crazy… and he hit the button for Bill Hatchard to come in for a sensible chat about the real issues of the day.
Admiral Ben Badr’s Barracuda moved slowly through the outer approaches to the Caribbean. He was due east of the Leeward Isles, and somewhere up ahead, two days’ running time at this low speed, were the playgrounds of the rich and famous — St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda.
Admiral Badr’s target was located 25 miles farther into the Caribbean than Antigua. It was much less of a playground than its bigger palm-strewn brothers, since half of it had been obliterated in the ferocious eruption of 1996–97.
Montserrat — battered, dust-choked, grieving, almost wiped out, workaday Montserrat — tonight slumbered peacefully beneath a Caribbean moon. For those who remained in residence on the island, there was always the hope that the great steaming, smoke-belching heart of the Soufriere Hills would soon calm down and relapse into its dormant state, beneath which generations of islanders had grown up, safe and sheltered.
At least they had until that fateful hour in 1997, when the south part of the island was literally bombarded with massive molten rocks and lava, as the mountain exploded like an atom bomb. Nothing was ever the same, and the islanders have lived ever since in the fear that it would happen again, against the hope that the high-surging magma would finally subside.
Volcanologists had not been so optimistic. People were periodically advised to leave. But too many had nowhere to go. And they merely fled to the north, away from the lethal south side of the volcano. And the Soufriere Hills continued to growl and blast steam, dark smoke, fire, and occasionally lava on an uncomfortably regular basis.
Below its shimmering peak, set to the west, the town of Plymouth, former home to the island’s seat of government, lay virtually buried under the ash. One tall British red phone booth is long gone. The high clock on the war memorial juts out almost at ground level above the gray urban landscape of dust and rocks.
As Professor Paul Landon had said to General Rashood in a house in West London, six months previously…“Montserrat! You could probably blow that damn thing sky-high with a hand grenade. It could erupt any day.”
Ravi Rashood’s master plan to frighten the Pentagon to death, to scare them into obeying the Hamas demands, was within one hour of execution. The launch time of midnight in the eastern Caribbean was one hour in front of Washington. General Rashood had allowed thirty-five minutes running time for the missile, and maybe twenty-five minutes for the news of the eruption to make it to the networks.
Admiral Badr was confident. His orders were to launch four missiles, the Scimitar SL-1s (nonnuclear warheads), straight at the high crater in the Soufriere Hills. In 1996, the entire island, roughly the form of a pyramid if seen from the sea, had looked like an exploding Roman candle in the night.
Like Mount St. Helens, the Soufriere Hills volcano was not a proud, towering queen, standing like a sentinel over the lush green island.
Instead, like her ugly sister in faraway Washington, she was an unstable, dangerous bitch, rotten to the core, unable to control herself, a lethal pile of shifting black rubble, swollen by mammoth carbuncles that every now and then lanced themselves and released the satanic magma.
Admiral Badr kept the Barracuda going forwards to the edge of his launch zone. He checked his watch.
In the past hour, they had made dozens of checks on the prefiring routines and settings. Lieutenant Commander Shakira had personally supervised the numbers that had been punched into the tiny onboard computers in each of the Scimitars’ nose cones. They had pored over the little screen that displayed the chart references. All four were the same—16.45N 62.10W, the very heart of the volcano high in the Soufriere Hills on the island of Montserrat.
With the competence of the North Korean technicians, and the electronic engineers of Huludao, the quartet of Scimitars could not miss. They would plunge into the crater within 10 feet of each other, each one drilling deeper into the upper layer of rock, all four of them driving substantial fault lines into the flimsy pumice stone crust that held back the deadly fire.