Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz

               14-year-old Alex Rider was recruited by Britain's intelligence (spy) agency, MI6, upon the death of his uncle, who was his legal guardian as his parents had died in Alex's infancy and was a spy working for Britain. At the start of Snakehead, he had worked for MI6 on four separate missions as well as for the Americans' CIA twice - in fact, he is just landing in Australia at the end of the latter when Australian secret service wants him to work for them by sending him into an illegal immigration pipeline operated by the extremely dangerous Snakehead triad groups of the far east. At first, Alex is entirely against it; every mission he had been on had put him in more and more danger then the last, and some of the enemies he was making along the way were already starting to come back around, and he had uncovered information about his parents' murder (his father was also a spy) that only left him in a deep confusion. But once he finds out that a godfather that he never knew and had known his parents would be working with him, Alex takes the mission solely to get answers about his past. He and his godfather known as Ash are disguised and Iraqi refugees and sent through the process of immigrating to Australia. From the beginning, there were problems; Alex had seen someone tailing them but wasn't sure if it was an issue, the men who had been supposed to give them the false papers necessary to get out of the country were suspicious and tried to get Alex killed, and a major center of business for the Snakehead was destroyed as a result. Yet somehow Ash manages to get the two of them to the boat that would take them to friendly territory. This was because he was actually a double-agent working with the Snakehead, and Ash ended up giving Alex away to an old enemy to save his own life. Alex discovers that this enemy was trying to detonate a bomb under the sea in a fault line that would create a tsunami big enough to wipe out the entire west coast of Australia, and he was doing this to kill an important group of people while making it look like an accident. Alex manages to escape and tell the secret service, only to find himself sent back in with a task force to find and defuse the bomb, as well as bring back Ash if he found him. Alex ends up detonating the bomb before it is deep enough to do any damage, the shock wave kills his enemy, and Ash is shot and killed on the process.
                 Anthony Horowitz's usual fast-paced style is seen here as it is showcased in every book in the Alex Rider series. One of the things that makes this unique series so special is that all of the crazy diabolical things the bad guys do are actually terrifyingly possible. In this case, if a bomb was sent into a fault line, it could create enough energy to push apart the tectonic plates apart, causing an earthquake. the shock wave would also create a small wave on the surface of the ocean. Given the right time of year, however, the moon and the sun would be in just the right places so that the gravitational pull that creates tidal waves would be at its strongest. See where this is heading? The three-foot-tall wave created by the explosion would be carried toward the coast, and would be six stories high by the time it reached land. A thorough explanation can be found at this link: http://www.abc.net.au/science/surfingscientist/ask/tidalwaves.htm