When The Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead

WHEN THE SEA SHALL GIVE UP HER DEAD
The year is 2012 and Tod Johnson, a senior CIA officer, receives a call from a man with whom he has not spoken in some twenty years. This man is Ari Arad, a semi-retired officer of the Aman, the security arm of the Israeli Army. In an atypically urgent voice, Ari urges Tod to come to meet with him in Israel the next day. There, Tod is told a shocking secret which could have disastrous consequences for both Israel and America. Exactly what consequences, when they will occur, and where, are completely unknown.
After several days of fruitless speculation, Tod is attempting to return to Boston when his El Al plane is turned around in mid-flight and heads back to Tel Aviv. As Tod suspects, the person behind this in-flight maneuver is Ari himself, who, in a city in the Negev Desert, has discovered a cryptic note:
17, 9, 12
Lituya Bay
100,000,000 dead
This note was found beside the body of a man who had access to one of Israels greatest secrets; a secret that Tod and Ari must now assume has been give to someone bent on mass murder. The two quickly come to the conclusion that the numbers on the first line of the note represent a dateSeptember 17, 2012, but the critical questions of who, where and how these terrorists intend to kill 100 million people remain unanswered.
Through a tortuous process of elimination Ari concludes that a 100 year-old man living in Beirut, the last living senior member of the Nazi holocaust machine, may be the individual behind the plot. However, an elaborate attempt to infiltrate this mans organization fails, and the pair are left to continue their speculations. They ultimately conclude that the only way the number of deaths indicated in the note could be achieved is through the cataclysmic employment of a vast amount of water, billions of tons of water. The second half of the book is devoted to the events of the 8 days remaining until the disaster is scheduled to occur.