He gunned the turbines to full speed. He might just make it. It was starting to come back to him now. He was moving farther into Israel and away from the earthquake tremors back on the Golan. Something unearthly was about to blow. The newest Blackhawks could do two hundred and forty miles per hour. He glanced back at the Golan. The whole plateau on the Syrian side seemed to be rising up like a grotesque mountain being birthed with black smoke pouring out of the cone that was forming at its zenith. Then he looked back again and saw another one several miles beyond that farther into Syria also belching black smoke. And another smoking cone rising up in the hills beyond that. Like some prehistoric picture of the formation of the earth, the planet seemed to be in the throes of upheaval.
Joshua tried to keep the helicopter on course as he gave one final glance back toward the Golan. He saw red fiery bursts of flame and smoke rising up from the Syrian hills. He was no geologist, but the vision of every famous volcanic disaster he had ever read about, multiplied by ten, was now directly behind him. He checked his airspeed. One hundred eighty miles per hour and climbing. He knew he had to get clear of whatever was coming next.
Faster. Faster.
Two hundred and ten. Two hundred and thirty. He was about to hit maximum speed.
And then it happened. The horizon behind him exploded in a red cloud of fire and flying rock. He could feel a rush of wind punching the helicopter from behind violently forward and out of control. The Blackhawk’s nose dipped forward, and everything shuddered and shook as an explosion of smoke and debris caught up to Joshua’s helicopter and daylight was turned into night.
SIXTY-FIVE
General Oragoff had no way of knowing that the commanders of Israel’s defenses had already resigned themselves to defeat. General Shapiro and those in IDF headquarters had desperately tried to defy the odds. The Israeli forces had thrown themselves at the advancing enemy with reckless, heroic abandon, but it was now clear that there was simply no chance of victory, not in the face of the coalition’s monolithic invasion force that threatened to carpet Israel like a toxic cloud.
Oragoff had waited long enough. Time was up. He turned to his aide and was about to announce the resumption of the invasion. The general had scoffed at the Russian geologists who had been talking on the phone with him. They had ranted about the possibility of some strange, tectonic shift that they were beginning to detect deep within the earth’s core, beyond anything they had ever observed, and that it was likely to hit the Middle East along fault lines and ancient, long-dead volcanic beds. They were predicting the most intense activity in a strange pattern, virtually creating a circumference around Israel’s borders. For Oragoff it was ridiculous. Scientists should stick to test tubes and microscopes. Leave the battlefield to me.
He opened his mouth to speak — but General Oragoff would never give the order.
His armored vehicle was suddenly lifted into the air. The major next to him and the driver both screamed.
In the backseat, Turkish general Izmet cried out, “What is going on —?”
General Oragoff only had time on his open communication line to yell, “We’re under attack — “ before he realized that the attack was from the earth below.
Their vehicle was on the precipice of a mountain of steaming, smoking rock that was rising up from the ground and into the air. It was undulating like a crazy teeter-totter as it was thrust up higher and higher on the tip of a volcanic mountain that was being birthed in a violent, thundering act of labor. Then the rising stopped. It was quiet for a few seconds.
The general frantically tried to open the door to climb out.
Then the volcanic cone blew wide open. The armored vehicle containing General Oragoff and General Izmet and their staff was blown two miles up into the sky in the middle of an expulsion of fire, smoke, spewing lava, and boiling rock.
More than a hundred MiG jets had been circling the Syrian-Israel border to provide air cover for the advancing troops. There was no radar warning, no escape. The blast from the volcano that was a hundred times more powerful than the nuclear detonation over Hiroshima vaporized them instantly.
The miles of tanks, troop carriers, ammo transports, and missile launchers had been waiting for a go signal that never came. Half a million troops had only time to utter a momentary cry of horror as the sky that seemed to have caught on fire was now falling on them and burying them under hundreds of feet of white-hot ash, lava, and giant pieces of rock. Vehicles tried to bolt off in all directions, but as the tremors shook the earth, the ground opened up under them, and they fell headlong into the deep, shifting crevasses and were crushed like ants in the gears of a grist mill.
The long extinct volcanic regions in Syria, Jordan, and Egypt had suddenly erupted. All of them — simultaneously — in a coordinated series of explosions that defied all scientific explanation.
At the very tip of the advancing front, the colonel in command of the Russian-Islamic invasion was watching. He could only see, behind him now, a series of massive columns of smoke reaching up into the atmosphere, and it covered the horizon like a grey, billowing curtain of death.
The colonel tried to phone central command. Nothing. He tried to call General Oragoff’s staff, but the lines of communication were down. A billion tons of burning debris and gases blown into the atmosphere had disrupted electrical transmissions. The only message from the general to the rear, an interrupted one, was that they were under attack.
“This is a trap!” he cried. “The Jews have blocked our view with these clouds of dust. They are attacking us from the rear — ”
But the major next to him tried to protest. “Those are our troops behind us, yes?”
“No, they must have repositioned. That must have been why General Oragoff was giving the order to halt. Send the word. Fire our missiles through those clouds so we can kill the Jews before they have us pinned.”
Three minutes later, the missile launchers emptied their deadly warheads into the clouds of smoke. What they did not know is that the remaining troops from their own army that had survived the initial volcanic blast were running through the smoke, soot, and ash toward the front in an effort to escape, and right into the barrage of Russian missiles that were now dropping on them with a horrendous series of flashing explosions.
The colonel gave the order to retreat in a lateral direction across Israel. They were to head for the sea. But neither the colonel nor the remainder of his army would ever begin the retreat. Earthquakes shook the ground in aftershocks. The earth ripped open under the troops and swallowed them whole.
The ring of earthquakes and volcanic explosions spread along Jordan’s border with Israel and ran down to the Sinai in the south and into Gaza. There the invading Libyan and Sudanese armies were trapped in the same conflagration of fire and rain of automobile-sized boulders that were dropping from the sky. Earthquakes ripped the ground open underneath their troop lines. Some men, in lighter and faster military vehicles, tried to escape back across the Sinai, but lava flows racing at fifty miles an hour were covering the desert, trapping the fleeing troops and melting the tires of the trucks and then trapping the screaming soldiers under a tidal wave of liquid fire.
The skies along all of Israel’s borders were filled with miles-high plumes of smoke and gas. It poured from the mouths of dozens of long-extinct volcanoes that had just been awakened in a frightening fury of power, as if an unseen finger had just flicked a switch. Then flashes of lightning started to appear in the columns of smoke. As the black volcanic ash fell from the sky in sheets, the rains began — tumultuous downpours at the Syrian borders, and at the Jordanian and Egyptian borders as well. And then the hail — huge hailstones the size of soccer balls came crashing down on the retreating armies. In the monsoon of rain, the retreating trucks and tanks became mired in the mud. The fiery lava raced toward them at heats so high that the falling rain evaporated just above the lava flows. The soldiers on foot tried to scramble for cover from the monster hailstones that were sma
shing down on them with the force of bowling balls.
Out in the Mediterranean, Vice Admiral Trishnipov had lost communication with central command, but he was determined not to lose the glory of his grand invasion by sea. So he gave the order. Hundreds of launch boats full of soldiers began motoring for the Israeli coast to commence the coastal invasion. The sea was crammed full of Russian ships in Trishnipov’s massive armada: cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers, patrol boats, and submarines prowling under the surface.
Trishnipov was in the admiral’s bridge when he suddenly saw it approaching.
And when he did, the panic that rose up inside of him nearly froze his heart into ice. It told him instantly, intuitively, that there would be no escape.
And there wasn’t. The colossal seismic disruptions had sent simultaneous shock waves into the Mediterranean, and had caused the high chalk cliffs at Rosh Hanikra at the Israeli-Lebanon border to collapse into the sea. Now, hurtling toward the Russian naval flotilla, was a three-hundred-foot-high wall of water, a tidal wave that was traveling at terrifying speeds and mounting in height along the shallows of the Israeli coastline where the naval armada had anchored.
Trishnipov only had seconds to search wildly around the bridge for a life jacket. Maybe … But it would be in vain. The wall of water as high as a skyscraper crashed into the huge naval vessels and tossed them around like toy boats in a bathtub. Trishnipov’s ship capsized in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation, and then, while it was upside-down, it sank with all hands. Mammoth aircraft carriers rolled onto their sides in one huge, groaning motion while the MiG jets parked on them slid down the upright decks and crashed into the sea. The conning towers of the ships were the last visible sign of the naval invasion, until at last they too disappeared under the rolling waves.
In Washington, D.C., Abigail Jordan strode up to the podium at the National Press Club. Phil Rankowitz had set up this event for her on short notice. Abigail hadn’t told Harry Smythe what she was about to do. Not that she wanted to blindside her own lawyer. But she knew Harry. His well-intentioned reaction to her plan might end up inadvertently undermining it. She couldn’t take that chance.
Abigail Jordan was about to drop a megaton political bomb.
She looked out over the room. It was standing room only, and several reporters were shouldering each other, trying to get a spot in the doorway.
Abigail began, “I will be appearing in federal court in Manhattan tomorrow, charged with a crime, as is my husband, an American hero, who has become a high-value target of a politically motivated, mean-spirited prosecution. Ironically, we have been charged for trying to save Manhattan from a nuclear attack. As it turns out, Manhattan was spared. But tragically, Union Beach, New Jersey, and several small surrounding towns were not, as well as four brave American volunteers who tried to stop that nuclear bomb and who died saving other Americans. Now the real question is this: why do ordinary Americans citizens, civilians like me, feel compelled to create their own system of national defense? Isn’t that the province of our government? It is. Isn’t the defense of our nation a first-order priority? It should be. The preamble to the Constitution says that our republic was created to ‘provide for the common defense’ …”
Abigail unfolded the piece of paper. She took one more glance at it before she continued. As she looked out at the reporters and television cameras, she saw Phil Rankowitz standing in the back. He nodded in her direction and gave her the thumbs up.
“But did our government fail us?” Abigail asked. “Or was my husband, Joshua Jordan, myself, and others — were we all exactly what the criminal indictment charges us to be … reckless vigilantes running a ‘shadow government’ and guilty of sedition, interfering with the lawful authority of the United States of America?”
She laid the piece of paper on the podium.
“I am here because I have been wrongly accused, along with my husband and our close friends — maliciously charged. But ladies and gentlemen, right here … right now … I bring charges myself. I hereby charge the White House …” Then she paused. “No, let me be specific. I hereby charge Jessica Tulrude, sitting president of the United States, with having willfully obstructed an investigation into a real, present, and imminent nuclear threat against our country.”
The reporters had been instructed in the normal protocol, to wait until after Abigail finished her remarks before launching into question-and-answer, but this was no normal press conference. Hands flew up like those of brokers on a commodities trading floor. Several of them started shouting out her name.
She picked one in the front, a female reporter.
“You are a trial lawyer yourself, so why have you decided to come out publicly like this? Isn’t that abnormal, perhaps even unethical for a lawyer? And where is your attorney? Why isn’t he here?”
“By my count, you’ve asked five questions. I’ll give you one answer. No comment, Miss, ever, on my choice of strategy or my relationship with my lawyer.”
Another reporter shouted out. “Why isn’t your husband here to defend himself?”
“Because he’s over in Israel trying to defend them from annihilation, while I was back here with several patriotic Americans trying to save New York and Washington from annihilation.”
A female reporter cried out, “The way you talk sounds like you fancy yourself some kind of superwoman. Don’t you think that pretending to be a comic book superhero can put citizens at risk, like those poor people in Union Beach?”
Abigail had to take a moment before answering. The hostility of the press corps almost took her breath away. “There’s nothing super about us or what we were trying to do. Just imagine for a moment: you’re walking past a burning house when to your amazement you find that the fire department has been ordered not to show up. Tell me … wouldn’t you try to save the kids hanging out the upstairs windows?”
Another reporter barked out, “A lot of us consider our firemen to be heroes. So, by comparing yourself to them, are you saying that you think you’re a hero? Or are you implying that firemen are not doing their job — ”
“I would have thought that only an Olympic gymnast could do a midair twist like that. The way you’ve twisted my words deserves some kind of gold medal.”
That evoked a few chuckles from the crowd. But just as quickly another barb was tossed her way. “It’s been said that you and your husband have an agenda to destroy this administration at any cost. Wouldn’t you say that the accusations you made today are just more proof of that?”
“Only if my accusations are false.”
“Are they?” a voice shouted out.
The room suddenly shut down as if a vacuum had just sucked all the noise out. Someone coughed. More silence.
Then Abigail answered. “I have proof, ladies and gentlemen.” Then she glanced once more to the paper on the podium. She cleared her throat, took a sip of water, and continued. “Two days ago I was prepared to tell you that Jessica Tulrude’s wrongdoing was limited to collaborating with a Washington, D.C., lawyer by the name of Allen Fulsin. She used him to penetrate a lawful organization of patriotic Americans of which I am one, and she used him to try to maliciously build a case against our group. But then, yesterday, I came into possession of something else. Something remarkable. I am about to read you an email from Jessica Tulrude addressed to Attorney General Hamburg. At the time she wrote it, Ms. Tulrude was our vice president. You judge for yourselves whether my accusations are true.
“Although it was originally encrypted, it was decoded and readable by the highest-level White House staff, including the chief of staff to the president. Here is what it says:
“Joshua Jordan is a corrupt and untrustworthy source of information regarding an alleged nuclear plot against the United States. His own motives as a private defense contractor, among many other reasons, render his information unreliable and useless. President Corland’s informal remarks about investigating this so-called nuclear plot against America ought to be tr
eated as an aberration. And perhaps another indication of his worsening medical situation. Any investigation that gives credence to Mr. Jordan’s nuclear fears will cast doubt about your office, General Hamburg, and your fitness as attorney general.”
In a sports bar in Georgetown, Hank Strand, recently resigned White House chief of staff, sat with a plate of ribs in front of him. He’d been drinking heavily. Several different ball games were being televised on every one of the web televisions in the place, except one. The TV right in front of Strand. He had demanded that the bartender change the channel on that television set to the news. He said he was expecting some big news from a press conference at the Press Club.
On the screen, Abigail Jordan was reading Jessica Tulrude’s email, which Hank Strand had hand delivered to her twelve hours ago.
When Abigail finished reading the email, the news channel flashed a picture of President Tulrude on the screen.
Hank Strand lifted his glass to her image as if proposing a toast.
“Remember, Madam President … loyalty only goes so far …”
In the White House, President Tulrude was catching Abigail Jordan’s press conference, along with her press secretary and new chief of staff.
Her profanity-laced screams could be heard all the way out to the White House lawn, where a staffer was walking her French poodle.
In the Press Club, one last hand went up. The reporter was holding the special journalist edition of the Allfone, the one with instant international news and video feeds. “Mrs. Jordan,” the reporter called out, “You said your husband’s in Israel?”