Page 114 of Eruption

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” he said quietly. “Isn’t that what they say?”

Mac could see that Rivers was scared whether he admitted it or not. He wondered if anything else had ever scared this man, and he also wondered how far he could take this with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“Sir,” Mac said, trying to regain his composure. “It was too late for moving those canisters when you arrived here. Colonel Briggs told all of us it was a four-week job at the very least, not the four days we had at the time.” He shook his head furiously, not believing what he’d heard. “I’m going to remind you how many of those canisters there are,” Mac said, plowing ahead. “And now we’ve seen with our own eyes what happens when what’s inside them gets out. We have no idea how many of them are damaged,” Mac continued, “but all of them are sure as hell filled with deadly radwaste herbicide that is essentially the most lethal weapon in the history of this planet. And now, at this stage of the game, we’re simply going to load them up and move them away in—I must have mentioned this—four fucking hours?”

“There is a platoon of my men in hazmat suits on their way up the mountain as we speak,” Rivers said, ignoring everything Mac had just said and acting as if the hazmat reinforcements were all they needed.

“Something has obviously changed your thinking,” Mac said. “We have a right to know what that is, General Rivers.”

Now it wasn’t simply fear Mac was seeing in Rivers’s eyes.

It was more than that.

What he was seeing now was panic.

“What changed?” Mac said again.

“People started dying,” Rivers said.

CHAPTER 83

Outside the Ice Tube, Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i

The eruption at Mauna Loa came as Mac and Rivers pulled up to the Ice Tube in General Rivers’s jeep.

From the side of Mauna Kea, they could see the smoke and flames, orange and red and blue, the color of fire, against the blue sky. Mac knew what was happening, even from here: the caldera was covered with lava that was beginning to travel from the rift zones.

They would find out soon—how soon depended on the speed of the lava—if the canals and trenches, all of the diversions, all of their plans, actually worked.

In the distance, they heard the sound of sirens from the All-Hazard Statewide Outdoor Warning Siren System, signaling that the Big Island was essentially under attack.

Our Pearl Harbor,Mac thought.Just no sneak attack from out of the sky this time.

The ground underneath them shook again; this quake lasted longer than the others and felt more serious.

Rivers yanked off his helmet, ran to the entrance, and began yelling at the men in the hazmat suits to get back into their trucks, waving at all of them to get back down the mountain.

“Go, go, go!”

Two of the men in hazmat suits hadn’t heard him over the sound of the sirens, and they continued to move toward the entrance.

Rivers ran after them, grabbed one man by his shoulders, and spun him around.

“Go!”Mac heard again.

In the distance Mac saw a sunrise-bright glow from the summit.

The fireball outlined against the sky grew bigger, and then another violent quake shook Mauna Kea, upending one of the trucks; the men inside managed to dive out before the truck crashed to the ground and rolled over.

Mac saw Rivers pitch forward maybe fifty yards from the entrance to the cave, the fall so sudden that he couldn’t catch himself with his hands, and he landed face down in the dirt and rocks. The earth underneath them would not stop shaking.

Rivers was still.

Mac ran to him, rolled him over, saw blood coming from a big cut on his forehead. But both of the man’s eyes were open and he was breathing.

“We need to get you out of here,” Mac said.

“Not until the others are out,” Rivers said.