Shakira had selected a southerly route for the missile attack on the grounds of her uncertainty about U.S. tracking stations either in or near the old Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Puerto Rico.
The Scimitars would swerve 20 degrees off their due-western course and swing through the Guadeloupe Passage, passing five miles to the north of Port Louis on the French island’s western headland. They would make their big right-hand turn out over the open water northwest of Guadeloupe, and then come swooping in to Montserrat out of the southwest.
They would flash over the half-buried ghost town of Plymouth, and then follow the infamous route of the 1997 magma, two miles at 600 mph over the rising ground, straight up to Chance’s Peak, before diving into the crater.
And this time, there would be no Tony Tilton below, no observer to hear the eerie swish of the rockets’ slipstream through the air. These days, this southern part of Montserrat was deserted. Shakira’s plan was for no one to hear, or see, anything. Until the vicious old mountain exploded again.
Ben Badr checked with the sonar room. Then he ordered the submarine to periscope depth for a lightning fast surface picture check. The seas were deserted and nothing was showing on the radar — critical factors when launching a missile with a fiery red tail as it cleared the ocean, visible for miles.
He ordered the Barracuda deep again. Then he made a final check with his missile director. And at one minute to midnight (local), he issued the order to activate the immaculate preprogramming plan. The sequencer was watching his screen. The Barracuda was facing west, running slowly, 300 feet below the surface.
“STAND BY TUBES ONE TO FOUR…”
“Tubes ready, sir.”
“TUBE ONE…LAUNCH!”
The first of the Scimitars blew out into the pitch-black water, angled upwards, and came blasting out of the ocean, and into the warm night air. It left a fiery, crackling wake as it roared into the sky, until it reached its preset cruising height of 500 feet and settled onto a firm course for the Guadeloupe Passage. At this point, the state-of-the-art gas turbines cut in and eliminated the giveaway trails in the sky.
Scimitar SL-1 was on its way, and there was nothing in this lonely part of the western Atlantic that could possibly stop it. And even as it streaked high above the waves, Admiral Badr was ordering the second one into the air, then the third, and then, a mere three minutes after the opening launch, the final missile. The volatile, unstable volcano in the Soufriere Hills was about to awaken the Caribbean once more.
Twenty-five minutes after the opening launch sequence, the lead rocket came swishing past the inshore waters of northern Guadeloupe. Four minutes later, it was hammering towards the Plymouth waterfront, deserted now for ten years, beneath the haunted rock face of Chance’s Peak.
It ripped over the almost-buried war memorial with its high clock tower, now only five feet above ground level. It shot straight above George Street, with its second-story-only shopping facade, past Government House, over the cricket pitch, and on towards the mountain.
At the back of the town it made a course adjustment, veering right to the northeast, following the inland road down from the east coast airport. One mile from the central crater it swung right again for its final approach, and came hurtling in out of clear skies, straight at Gage’s Mountain.
At 0036, on the morning of Tuesday, September 29, General Rashood’s Scimitar SL-1, courtesy of the illegal North Korean arms factory, smashed eight-feet deep into the steaming active crater in Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills, detonating with barbaric force.
The packed rubble of the volcano gave the blast a dead, muffled, subterranean thumping effect, just as the first missile had done at Mount St. Helens. But less than one minute later, the second Scimitar crashed bang into the middle of the crater and exploded savagely, splitting the already wide bomb-cavern almost in two.
That was plenty for the fragile, cantankerous killer mountain, which seemed to take a deep quivering breath before belching fire and ashes a thousand feet into the air. And then, with an earth-shaking rumble, it erupted with mind-blowing force, sending a thousand white-hot rocks and boulders hundreds of feet into the sky, lighting up the entire eastern stretch of the Leeward Isles.
Admiral Badr did not need missile three, which came arrowing in through the fire and fury of the exploding volcano, and reached its target before detonating in the immeasurable heat of the magma. Missile four melted and blew to pieces in midair, in the raging fires of gas-filled magma that lit up the atmosphere half a mile above the mountain.
A gigantic pyroclastic flow now developed on the southwest side of Gage’s, and the dense burning ash began to envelope the entire area, cascading down the upper slopes, heading for farmland that had never recovered from the initial eruption in 1996, and on to the already half-buried town of Plymouth.
If anything, this was a bigger blast than the one seen on Montserrat thirteen years earlier, when the ash plume had blown itself 40,000 feet into the air and endangered all commercial aircraft. It was not quite so high this time, but by common consensus, the heat and the fire were greater, and the surging lava flow down the mountain was deeper and just as hot.
It took ten minutes for the massive second phase of the explosion. The biggest of the carbuncles to the northeast of Chance’s Peak suddenly began to collapse. Later, geological studies surmised that the carbuncle must have shaken and cracked with the upwards surge of the magma, which was unable to exit from the main crater.
It finally gave way, and a new gout of molten rock burst 200 feet into the air in a hurricane of blazing ash, gas, and black rubble. Instantly, the magma began to flow, and it gushed out from the heart of the mountain, rising up from the fires of Hell.
And it rumbled down the northeastern slopes of the Soufriere Hills, down the ghats, down the Tar River Valley towards the airport. Anything it touched burned instantly. It melted the blacktop on the roads, set fire to every tree and hedge in its path, incinerated cottages and barns, mostly abandoned.
Moving at 40 mph, it rolled towards the sea, surging right to the little town of Spanish Point and then crushing and burning every last vestige of the old airport. The coastal area went completely black, as the burning ash cloud blotted out the moon and stars. The ocean boiled along the shores as the white-hot lava rolled into the light Caribbean surf.
Then, nine minutes after the last square foot of blacktop on the airport runway had melted, Chance’s Peak erupted again, this time on the south side. It was a second devastating explosion from the same mountain, and it once more blew rocks and boulders thousands of feet into the air before they crashed down around the remains of the deserted fishing village of St. Patrick’s, setting fire to everything within 50 feet of their landing.
Like the other two eruptions, this one broadly followed the lava paths of the 1996–97 blast, the magma pouring south and then splitting near the little village of Great Alps Falls. The main torrent burned its way straight over the road and directly into St. Patrick’s, the secondary flow veering left over the same road, a mile to the east and into the sea. There was nothing left to weep for in St. Patrick’s. The thriving little seaport had been taken off the face of the earth.