Scimitar SL-2 (2004) Read online

  Of course he was impossible. Everyone knew that. But he was also more exciting, fun, and challenging than any man she had ever met. He was over twenty years older then she, an inch shorter, and the most confident person in the White House. He cared nothing for rank, only for truth. The former President had plainly been afraid of him, afraid of his absolute devotion to the flag, the country, and its safety.

  To the former Kathy O’Brien, when Arnold Morgan pulled himself up to his full five feet, eight and a half inches, he seemed not one inch short of ten feet. In her mind, and in the mind of many others, she had married the world’s shortest giant.

  It seemed incredible that he was gone from the West Wing. Kathy, a veteran of the White House secretarial staff, simply could not imagine what it would be like without the caged lion in the office of the President’s National Security Adviser, taking the flack, taking the strain, and laying down the law about “what’s right for this goddamned country.”

  Whoever the new President decided to appoint in the Admiral’s place, he’d need some kind of a hybrid composed of John Wayne, Henry Kissinger, and Douglas MacArthur. And he wasn’t going to find one of those. The only one in captivity was, at this moment, sprawled out next to Kathy, holding her hand, and telling her he loved her, that she was the most wonderful person he ever had or ever would meet—

  And now, he announced, he was going to take a swim. Four days in Tenerife had already seen him acquire a deepening tan, which contrasted strikingly with his steel-gray close-cut hair. Even as he approached senior citizenship Arnold still had tree-trunk legs, heavily muscled arms, and a waistline only marginally affected by a lifelong devotion to roast-beef sandwiches with mayonnaise and mustard.

  He was pretty smooth in the water too. Kathy watched him moving along the pool with a cool, professional-looking crawl, breathing every two strokes, just turning his head slightly into the trough of the slipstream for a steady pull of air. He looked as if he could, if necessary, swim like that for a year.

  Kathy decided to join him and dived into the pool as he went past, surfacing alongside him and slipping into a somewhat labored form of sidestroke. As always, it was difficult to keep up with the Admiral.

  When finally they came in to rest on the hotel lounges, Arnold made a further announcement. “I’m taking you to see something tomorrow,” he said. “The place where scientists predict there will be the greatest natural disaster the earth has ever seen.”

  “I thought you said that was due to happen in the White House next month?”

  “Well, the second greatest then,” he replied, chuckling at his sassy new wife.

  “What is it?” she asked absently, turning back to her book.

  “It’s a volcano,” he said, darkly.

  “Not another,” she murmured. “I just married one of those.”

  “I suppose it would be slightly too much to ask you to pay attention?”

  “No, I’m ready. I’m all ears. Go to it, Admiral.”

  “Well, just about 60 miles from here, to the northwest, is the active volcanic island of La Palma. It’s only about a third of the size of Tenerife, pear-shaped, tapering off narrowly to the south—”

  “You sound like a guidebook.”

  “Well, not quite, but it’s an interesting book that I found by the telescope.”

  “What book?”

  “Honey, please. Kathryn Morgan, please pay attention. I have just been reading, rather carefully, a very fascinating account of the neighboring island of La Palma and its likely affect on the future of the world. You may have thought I was just goofing off looking through the telescope. But I actually wasn’t—”

  “You abandoned the telescope! Then it’s surprising Tenerife hasn’t come under attack in the last couple of hours. That’s all I can say.” Mrs. Kathy Morgan was now laughing at her own humor. So, for that matter, was her husband. “If you’re not darn careful you’ll come under attack,” he said. “You want me to tell you about the end of the world or not?”

  “Ooh, yes please, my darling. That would be lovely.”

  “Right. Now listen up.” He sounded precisely like the old nuclear submarine commanding officer he once had been. A martinet of the deep. Stern, focused, ready to handle any back talk from anyone. Except Kathy, who always disarmed him.

  “The southerly part of La Palma has a kind of backbone,” he said. “A high ridge, running due south clean down the middle. This volcanic fault line, about three miles long, takes its name from its main volcano, Cumbre Vieja, which rises four miles up from the seabed, with only the top mile and a half visible. It’s had seven eruptions in the last five hundred years. The fault fissure, which runs right along the crest, developed after the eruption of 1949. Basically the goddamned west side of the range is falling into the goddamned sea, from a great height.”

  Kathy giggled at his endlessly colorful way of describing any event, military, financial, historical, or in this case geophysical.

  “Pay attention,” said the Admiral. “Now, way to the south is the Volcan San Antonio, a giant black crater. They just completed a new visitors center with amazing close-up views. Then you can drive south to see Volcan Teneguia, that’s the last one, which erupted here back in 1971. You can climb right up there and take a look into the crater if you like.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “But the main one is Cumbre Vieja itself, about eight miles to the north. That’s the big one, and it’s been rumbling in recent years. According to the book, if that blew, it would be the single biggest world disaster for a million years…”

  “Arnold, you are prone, at times, to exaggeration. And because of this, I ask you one simple question. How could a rockfall in this remote and lonely Atlantic island possibly constitute a disaster on the scale you are saying?”

  The Admiral prepared his saber. Then, metaphorically, slashed the air with it. “Tsunami, Kathryn,” he said. “Mega-tsunami.”

  “No kidding?” she said. “Rye or pumpernickel.”

  “Jesus Christ!” said the President’s former National Security Adviser. “Right now, Kathy, I’m at some kind of an intersection, trying to decide whether to leave you here looking sensational in that bikini but overwhelmed by ignorance, or whether to lead you to the sunny uplands of knowledge. Depends a lot on your attitude.”

  Kathy leaned over and took his hand. “Take me to the uplands,” she said. “You know I’m only teasing you. You want some of that orange juice, it’s fabulous.”

  She stood up easily, walked three paces, and poured him a large glass. The Spanish oranges were every bit as good as the crop from Florida, and the Admiral drained the glass before beginning what he called an attempt to educate the unreachable.

  “Fresh,” he said, approvingly. “A lot like yourself.”

  The third, and most beautiful, Mrs. Arnold Morgan leaned over again and kissed him.

  Christ, he thought. How the hell did I ever get this lucky?

  “Tsunami,” he said again. “Do you know what a tsunami is?”

  “Not offhand. What is it?”

  “It’s the biggest tidal wave in the world. A wall of water that comes rolling in from the ocean, and doesn’t break in the shallows like a normal wave—just keeps coming, holding its shape, straight across any damn thing that gets in its way. They can be 50 feet high.”

  “You mean if one of ’em hit Rehobeth Beach or somewhere near our flat Maryland shore, it would just roll straight over the streets and houses?”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said, pausing. “But there is something worse. It’s called a mega-tsunami. And that’s what can end life as we know it. Because according to that book up by the telescope, those waves can be 150 feet high. A mega-tsunami could wipe out the entire East Coast of the U.S.A.”

  Kathy was thoughtful. “How ’bout that?” she said quietly, feeling somewhat guilty about the lightly frivolous way she had treated Arnold’s brand-new knowledge. “I still don’t see how a volcano could cause such an uproar�
��aren’t they just big, slow old things with a lot of very slow molten rock running down the slopes?”

  “Aha. That’s where La Palma comes in…Cumbre Vieja last erupted about forty years ago, and the scientists later discerned a massive slippage on the western, seaward flank. Maybe twelve feet downwards.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “It is, if the rock face is eight miles long, and the whole lot is slipping, at a great height above sea level, sending a billion tons of rock at terrific speed, straight down to the ocean floor. That will be the biggest tsunami the world has ever seen—”

  “Are they sure about that?”

  “Dead sure. There’s a couple of universities in America and I think Germany with entire departments experimenting with the possible outcomes of a mega-tsunami developing in the Canary Islands.”

  “Did one of them publish the stuff in the book you read?”

  “No. That was done by a couple of English Professors at London University. Both of ’em very big deals, by the sound of it. One of ’em’s called Day, the other one Sarandon, I think. They sounded like guys who knew what they were saying.”

  0900, The Following Day.

  At the insistence of his two armed agents, the Admiral and his wife chartered a private plane to take them over to La Palma—an elderly ATR-72 turboprop that was only slightly more silent and restful than a train crash. They took off from little Reina Sofia airport, only five miles from their hotel, and shuddered, shook, and rumbled their way up the west coast of Tenerife, past the main resort areas, and along the spectacular coastline. Before the northwest headland of Point Teno they veered out to sea, crossing Atlantic waters almost two miles deep. They touched down at the little airport four miles south of Santa Cruz de La Palma at 9:25 in the morning.

  A car and chauffeur awaited them. Actually two cars and one chauffeur. The agents who had accompanied them would follow in the second automobile. A condition of Admiral Morgan’s original appointment to the White House had been that he would be provided with round-the-clock protection for a minimum of five years, effective immediately upon his retirement. In the U.S. he had a detail of four agents, working shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Two of them had been designated to accompany the former NSA on his honeymoon.

  The Admiral was now a wealthy man. His full Vice Admiral’s pension had been accruing since he left the Navy, almost ten years previously. He had no children to educate, no alimony to pay, no mortgage. He had sold his house in Maryland and moved into Kathy’s much grander home in Chevy Chase. This too carried no mortgage. Kathy had a liberal trust fund provided by a rich but unfaithful first husband, and she too had been able to bank most of her salary over the last six years while Admiral Morgan took care of regular expenses. Together, Arnold and Kathy had a net worth of several million dollars. Sufficient for the Admiral to have tossed straight into the bin two $5 million offers from New York publishing houses for his memoirs. Neither received even the courtesy of a reply.

  Stepping down onto the runway, dressed in a dark blue polo shirt, smartly pressed stone-collared shorts, no socks, tan Gucci loafers, and a white Panama hat, the Admiral was unable to avoid looking precisely what he was—ex-Government, ex-Navy, a powerful man, not to be trifled with. No bullshit.

  “The car’s over here, sir,” said Harry, Arnold’s longtime secret service agent. “The front one of those three black Mercedes parked outside the building.”

  They walked across the already-warm runway under a cloudless blue sky. Harry held open the rear door. The Admiral jumped in first and slid across the backseat. Harry continued to hold the door for Kathy, nodded his head curtly, and said, “Mrs. Morgan.”

  Ten years earlier, Agent Harry had once asked the svelte, newly divorced Kathy O’Brien if she’d care to go out to dinner with him. She had politely declined, and now the memory of that innocent but toe-curling piece of misjudgment actually gave Harry acute chills on the rare occasions he allowed himself to recall the incident.

  With Mrs. Morgan safely on board, the chauffeur moved slowly out of the airport, while Harry, now at the wheel of the second Mercedes, fell in behind him, line astern, as the Admiral insisted on putting it. They drove south towards the very tip of La Palma, all along the coastal highway for around 10 miles, before arriving at the little town of Los Canarios de Fuencaliente, which used to be a small spa town, dotted by hot springs. The most recent eruption in 1971 had buried them, turning them into great lakes deep in the underground caverns of cooled-off lava.

  Now the whitewashed outpost of Fuencaliente served as a kind of volcano mission-control area, with signposts everywhere pointing the way up to the great line of craters and mountains that patiently guarded the future of the planet earth.

  The big white board, which proclaimed Volcan San Antonio above a black painted arrow, instantly caught the Admiral’s eye. “Straight up there, Pedro,” he told the chauffeur, checking his stern arcs through the rear window to ensure Harry was still in strict convoy.

  Kathy, who was fiddling with the digital camera Arnold had just bought her—complete with all bells and whistles, even a telephoto lens—said distractedly, “How d’you know he’s called Pedro?”

  “Well, I’m not dead certain. But many people in Spain are called Pedro or Miguel, like Peter or Michael in the States.”

  “God help me,” said Kathy. “Darling, you can’t go around making up names for people. It’s rude. Like me suddenly calling you Fred.”

  “Oh, I agree you couldn’t do it with Americans. But the odds are stacked in your favor in Spain. Or anywhere in Arabia. Mohammed, Mustapha, or Abdul. Can’t miss.”

  “Still, it’s rude. Just like you shouldn’t go around calling every dark-skinned man a towelhead.” Admiral Morgan muttered something and, despite herself, Kathy laughed. And she tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said. “Could you tell me your name?”

  “Oh, sure, señora. It’s Pedro.”

  “How did you know?” she demanded, smelling a rat, and turning back to Arnold.

  “Harry told me,” replied the Admiral.

  Kathy rolled her eyes heavenwards.

  Which was more or less where they were headed. The Mercedes was now revving its way up a very steep escarpment, through the pines, towards the yawning chasm at the peak of the great black cone on the top of the mountain.

  Recent rumblings inside this forty-year dormant volcano had caused officials to cordon off the rim of the crater to all visitors. But Harry was already out, talking to the guard and explaining the precise identity of the man in the Panama hat.

  The guard waved Admiral Morgan and his wife through and they wandered companionably up to the very edge of the crater, staring down into the abyss. Up ahead of them, they could see another group of four people, all men, taking photographs of the area, and obviously heading north, along the tourist paths, up the great ridge of the mountains. Two large golf carts were parked nearby.

  “Can we get a couple of those?” asked the Admiral.

  “Lemme check with the guard,” said Harry, who returned three minutes later with the good news that one big cart, a four-seater, was on its way up from the Visitors’ Center.

  “Beautiful,” said Arnold. “That way we can ride right up to Cumbre Vieja and then I’d like to take the car down to the coast road to see the cliffs above the ocean.”

  The excursion in the cart revealed spectacular scenery. All along the lava fields, the Ruta de Los Volcanes, across the rugged range of mountains sometimes redolent with thick light green Canary pines, sometimes just a stone wilderness, the golf cart bumped and lurched across terrain that had been molten rock less than forty years ago. In many places on top of the ridge it was possible to see the Atlantic both to the east and to the west. But they were not sure the battery on the electric-powered golf cart would make it all the way down to the west coast, and they elected to turn back, pick up the car, and drive on down in comfort. Ninety minutes later they found themselves parked at th
e top of a gigantic cliff of black basalt rock, towering over a strange black sandy beach hundreds of feet below, beaten by the seemingly endless breakers of the Atlantic.

  They were parked in a rough, flat clearing and there was only one other car, another black Mercedes, just beyond them. Photographing the cliff were the same four people they had seen on the rim of Volcan San Antonio. They were all swarthy in appearance, with short, curly black hair, but somehow not Spanish. And despite their phalanx of cameras draped around their necks, they were not Japanese either. Arabian, from the looks of them.

  “What the hell?” muttered Arnold. “What are they doing up here photographing the landscape and getting in our way?”