Page 39 of Eruption

“Right away.”

He sat back and almost immediately leaned forward again and jabbed at the intercom button. “Never mind. Cancel the calls.”

There was something else to consider. If he started asking questions, he’d probably get answers today. But what about tomorrow? And the day after? These men had already demonstrated their indifference to Civil Defense by keeping him out of the loop on whatever they were doing. Henry couldn’t very well call them every day, hat in hand, pleading for intel. What he needed was an ongoing flow of information. From the inside.

He needed a contact inside HVO.

The trouble was, everybody up there was loyal to MacGregor. All of them, whether they were newly arrivedhaoleorkama‘aina.Like that Kimura girl from Oah‘u who acted like a snob because of her fancy mainland education. There wasn’t a chance in hell that she’d inform Tako of anything. And the other techs were just foot soldiers.

He needed to put a source in place. A reliable source.

There were only two people in the world who could help him.

One more time, he pushed the intercom button. “Do we know where the Cutlers are?” he asked his assistant.

“No, but I can probably find them by following their bread crumbs on social media.”

“So find them,” Takayama said.

CHAPTER 25

NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawai‘i

Ahalf hour before the morning meeting, everyone from HVO had been packed into the belly of one Chinook copter. Now they were all clustered around Kenny Wong’s laptop. Alongside it was the laptop belonging to one of the six young guys from the military base. The six guys immediately began swinging away at Kenny and Rick’s calculations.

They were doing it politely, but that didn’t matter. They were relentlessly carving up his work into what he imagined were bite-size morsels. It made Kenny want to hide under his desk. Rick Ozaki was sitting next to him breathing heavily and painfully, like a wounded bear. Kenny didn’t dare look around for Mac.

It turned out these guys were part of a geophysical modeling team from AOC, Army Ordnance Corps.

And, Kenny had to admit, they were damned good.

They had been to UH and reviewed Kenny’s stored data. They had run their own calculations on the data. And they seemed to have dozens of additional programs that they were running and rerunning on the spot.

Finally, the head of the team, a George Clooney look-alike named Morton, said, “I think we need to go outside now. All of us.”

Kenny, Rick, Mac, Jenny, Briggs, and the army guys all walked outside, shoes crunching on black lava. It was sunny up there at eleven thousand feet, with a light, fluffy cloud layer about five thousand feet below them.

“I’m sorry, boys,” Morton said, “but the stress-load calculations are very clear. Even if you have magma within a kilometer of the surface—and most of it is much deeper than that—there is no way to open a one-kilometer vent in a mountain with conventional explosives. This mountain is too big; the forces are too big. It would be like trying to move a jumbo jet with a swizzle stick.”

Kenny said, “Even with resonant explosives?” Resonant explosives were a recent innovation. The idea was to use small, precisely timed charges to set up resonant movement in large objects, the way giving small pushes to a swing gradually made it go higher and higher.

“Even resonant explosives won’t do it,” Morton said. “Computer-controlled timing can produce very powerful effects. But we’re still orders of magnitude too small. Even if we wanted to go nuclear—and I’m going to assume we don’t—it probably wouldn’t be enough.”

No one spoke right away. The only sound was the wind.

During the discussion, something had nagged at Mac. He gazed at the summit now, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun, looking past the engineers and Colonel Briggs andJenny and the guys from the data room to where steam vents hissed into the air.

He had been thinking about steam all day.

Whenever the volcano began degassing, there was always the question of whether it was gas released by magma or groundwater being heated to steam. Steam eruptions had occurred on multiple occasions in the past, and Mac knew the dangers they presented, and not just to the environment.

“Hold on a minute,” he said.

They all turned to him.

“We’re thinking about this wrong,” Mac said.

Morton, who was standing next to Briggs, said, “How so?”