Page 55 of Eruption
“No need to apologize, ma’am. We’re all a little jumpy these days. I didn’t know when I joined the army that I was signing up for this.”
They went through the door and saw the canisters lined up on both sides of them. Mac was unable to shake the feeling that he was looking at miniature nuclear bombs.
“There,” Sergeant Matthew Iona said, pointing to the right.
The walls seemed to press in closer.
CHAPTER 33
The Ice Tube, Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i
Mac and Jenny squinted into the weird blue light coming from the canisters as if trying not to see what Sergeant Matthew Iona was showing them:
Two canisters with clear, well-defined cracks like quake fissures, cracks that hadn’t been there when Mac came into the cave with Colonel Briggs.
“So there it is,” Iona said.
Mac’s breathing sounded louder than ever behind his mask; he was surprised the faceplate wasn’t fogging up. His suit seemed much heavier than it had when he’d put it on back at the base. He felt like he was suddenly carrying the weight of the world.
He saw Iona sag as if he were feeling the same weight Mac was, and Mac knew Jenny Kimura surely felt it too.
“It’s like they’re time bombs,” Jenny said, her voice soundingtinny from behind her mask. She stared wide-eyed at the canisters. “They’ve just been waiting half a century to explode.”
Iona said, “We have to hope that the lava doesn’t come anywhere near here and that we can find a safe way to remove these things and do it faster than Colonel Briggs says is humanly possible. We probably need a Hail Mary.”
“Full of grace,” Mac said quietly.
Mac and Jenny had spent all of last night listening to Rick and Kenny spell out their new projections in painfully precise detail. Mac had challenged them the way he always did, wanting to poke holes in their data, wanting them to be wrong. But gradually—and painfully—he’d come to the conclusion that they weren’t.
“These cracks are pretty much a nightmare for us,” Iona said.
“For all of us,” Mac said.
The ground underneath them began to shake in a way it wasn’t supposed to within these walls. The canisters right there in front of them shook too, and so did the walls.
As if they might come tumbling down.
CHAPTER 34
Honoli‘i Beach Park, Hilo, Hawai‘i
From where he stood on the Hilo beach, a place he’d begun to think of as his own private beach, Lono Akani watched with awe—there was no other way to describe it—as the cool members of the Canoe Club knifed across the water in their long boat.
Lono and his three friends were out here this early on a Saturday morning because Dennis Lee had checked the surf forecast the night before and promised them that this was when the waves would be fastest-breaking, with just the perfect chop in the water for the best possible rides.
But the guys rowing in the distance, they were training like they did almost every day, getting ready for the all-island regatta coming up in June, getting after it while Lono and Dennis and Moke and Duke ate the doughnuts they’d picked up in town.
Dennis had made them stop at Popover because he said there was no way he was surfing on an empty stomach.
“Your brain might be empty,” Moke told him, “but your stomach hardly ever is.”
Lono was barely listening. His eyes were focused on the rowers. It wasn’t just awe that he felt; there was something else, something more—a powerful sense of envy at the teamwork he was witnessing. Mac liked to tell them that he thought of his surfers as a team, but Lono knew better. In surfing, it was every man for himself.
Lono had called Mac this morning to ask if he wanted to come watch them. But that was just his cover story. A head fake. With everything he’d seen and heard at HVO yesterday, Lono hoped that if he pressed hard enough, Mac might tell him what was really going on.
Mac didn’t answer his phone, though, and Lono didn’t leave a message.
So they’d come to surf without him for a change. While they waited for the waves, Lono told his friends about what had happened yesterday at HVO and how Mac had blown him off when he tried to ask questions about it.