Seismic Surge

Option Omega wanted to show the world’s governments how weak they truly were. La Palma was a tourist mecca, a wide-open maw for tourist revenues that kept Spain solvent.

Option Omega intended to show Spain and the other European members of the G8 simply how weak they were when it came to pushing the people under the wheels of their insane economic policies.

Brognola knew that this group was borrowing the vague, half-assed rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street and the even older Tea Party movement—two groups of American

citizens who had legitimate gripes about American financial and fiscal woes—and was regurgitating it with elements of both groups’ ideals. It was a hodgepodge jumble that had garnered them a modicum of “I admire your sentiments, but not your actions” lip service on left- and right-wing squawk boxes.

He proceeded to where Barbara Price, the Farm’s mission controller, was working at her station, collating information as quickly as it came in.

“Anything new?” Brognola asked.

“Gunfight in Norfolk,” Price told him matter-of-factly, not hiding the annoyance in her voice. “Small consolation is that it was far from bystanders, though the whole waterfront heard machine guns and grenades for miles.”

“How’s the Virginia news handling it all?” Brognola asked.

“They’re reporting that it might be gang violence. They brought up the fire that gutted the boatyard a month ago,” Price said. “And then they skimmed away when there was a fresh tweet from that actress trapped on La Palma.”

Brognola grimaced. “She’s still posting to the internet?”

“Nobody can get out of the hotels, but they have some pretty good internet connections,” Price told him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were letting hostages have access to social media in order to keep the world watching.”

“Social media, but they’re pretty good at only putting their video out,” Brognola mused.

“Even smartphone video has a pretty large footprint to be intercepted,” Price suggested. “Aaron told me that it would be easy for someone to monitor and purge video footage or digital photos from the stream.”

“Meanwhile, social media posts adding only 140 characters at a time can get through because there’s no way that a strike team could use a status update to plan an assault,” Brognola grumbled.

Price nodded. “Aaron also said that our satellite coverage of the Spanish Canaries is being assailed. We keep getting spikes of interference, which means they are intent on keeping the outside world blind but not deaf.”

Brognola sneered. “It’s like poking a wounded hostage so that their screams weigh on rescuers, but they keep the drapes drawn so we can’t take a shot in.”

“But we did take a shot,” Price said. “We sent in Phoenix.”

Brognola nodded. “You don’t sound happy.”

“We got an upload of a few dozen photos over satellite laser link. They’re of preserved corpses in the waters off of Tazacorte,” Price said. “That was a few minutes ago, but they’re of young people. We’re trying facial IDs, as well as tapping some SIM cards that survived being at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Tourists?” Brognola asked.

“McCarter and James both suggested that in texts to us,” Price answered. “Mode of dress was summer casual, very casual. Everyone was topless.”

Brognola grumbled at this suggestion. “Meaning that if they were on a boat, they left the majority of their clothing and personal identification in their state rooms.”

Price nodded. “James sent that as a follow-up after they came up. There were some yachts still docked at the marina in Tarajal.”

“What have we got on those faces and cards?” Brognola asked.

“Still checking on it,” Price told him. “But we’ve got the fastest fingers on the East Coast working on this.”

Brognola looked immediately over to Akira Tokaido, who was running through multiple images on his computer screen. They were flashing through too fast for Brognola to follow, but Tokaido had been born with a nervous system that seemed to have a quad-core processor. Brognola was still in abacus world when it came to technology, and he barely knew what quad-core meant, but it was fast, and Tokaido was that quick. He could look at those faces and run through code at lightning speed.

There was a quick whoop as Tokaido made a connection. “Barb! I have IDs.”

“That was fast,” Price said. Brognola accompanied her over to his station.

“We’ve been looking for signs of trouble since the first explosions,” Tokaido said. “That meant going back months.”

“So missing persons reports?” Brognola asked.

Tokaido nodded. “A bunch of twenty-somethings gone missing, but they said that they were staying on some extra time.”

“Email contact?”

“And new photos and videos up on social media,” Tokaido added. “So that’s allaying most of the suspicion.”

“Who isn’t buying this?” Brognola asked.

“Young lady, Cathryn Lopez. She was due to ship out after her vacation,” Tokaido said.

“Where?” Brognola asked.

“Marines. When a female Marine doesn’t report in for duty, it raises some flags. Especially if she’s still posting online,” Tokaido said. “As her last port of call...”

“The USMC is doing part of our intel for us,” Brognola mumbled. “There was a face in that batch?”

Tokaido shook his head. “But Lopez was on the same boat with Bryce Jennings. And his SIM card was recovered by McCarter.”

“Bryce Jennings?” Price asked. She shook her head. “Was he a porn star or something?”

“No, it was his real name,” Tokaido said.

“They slipped ashore disguised as tourists,” Brognola murmured. “Does our satellite coverage have identification on any of the boats?”

“We’re getting interference,” Tokaido returned. “And any IFF we have on the ships show nothing on the yacht that these kids were supposedly on.”

“So they’re anticipating us,” Price mused. “They’re anticipating something.”

“Are we getting anything at other marinas on that side? Or just Tarajal?” Brognola asked.

“No fine details in Tarajal, so that means that particular marina has some craft inside that’s jamming us,” Tokaido mused.

“And keeping watch on that coast,” Price added.

“You can fit a bit of surveillance equipment on a yacht,” Brognola said. “Radar, telescopes, satellite communications...”

“And Option Omega scouts,” Price noted.

“Option Omega has very little history except as an Idaho-based splinter of a white-supremacist militia,” Huntington Wethers, another member of Kurtzman’s cyberteam, interjected. “As to being a splinter, we’re talking a top membership of a dozen.”