The Tsunami Factor

   Danny Lorenzo took the first quadrant and approached the location where his electronics told him the first bomb was placed.  He waited forty-five minutes until each team member, in turn, reported their arrival at the designated locations.

   Ready with all the equipment in hand, he then gave the order into his ear-mounted microphone, beginning the operation.  One by one they began to climb the inside of the crater wall, searching for and locating the first in the series of concussion bombs, removing them from their porcelain cradles and beginning the neutralizing procedures.

    Over the next forty-five minutes, Danny located and collected three bombs.  As was protocol, he returned them to the crater floor where he had set up a field laboratory and, under battery-fed LED lighting, analyzed their contents in preparation for dismantling.

   Five minutes into the operation, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. 

   The bombs had plenty of sophisticated electronics within the porcelain cover, including a reservoir of a water-like substance, but none of the typical explosive plastique materials he had expected.

   In all his years as a munitions expert with the U.S. Army Rangers Special Forces, he had never seen anything like this. Analyzing the situation quickly, Danny suddenly realized what had to be done and be done immediately. 

    The clear, water-like substance he identified as  Triacetonetriperoxide or TATP, as it was commonly known in the scientific and munitions community. Danny recognized this chemical as a compound made from acetone, hydrogen peroxide and various mineral acids.   This highly-sensitive and volatile chemical was only used as the detonator, however.  Separated by a thin membrane from a chamber beneath was a compartment containing the extremely responsive and highly-explosive compound, Pentaerthritol Tetranitrate (PETN).  He had seen this before and PETN, he knew, was one of the most explosive components of concussion bombs used by the U.S. military.  One or two of these bombs alone were enough to cause severe damage to the crater wall, but the satellite photos showed there were twenty-five of them along the 27 kilometers of the Cumbre Vieja. He couldn’t imagine how Carla Bartoli might have transported such explosives to the island and implanted twenty-five of them without detonating at least one. As a professional, he couldn’t help but respect her expertise.

   He quickly called the other members of his team to share his analyses and to order them to temporarily abort the mission. Next, he put in a call to Captain Blackman-Woods back in London.  Aside from filing the complete report, he had to also advise Blackman-Woods that it was quite likely that one or more of the bombs would probably detonate during the dangerous dismantling process, and that he and the entire team would likely be sacrificed in the process. 

   The head of MI-6 tried to talk Danny into calling off the mission altogether but there was no other alternative or option.  The bombs had to be removed and dismantled in order to save millions of lives on the North American coastline from Canada to the United States, to Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean.