Page 61 of Eruption
“If wearegoing to successfully divert the lava,” she said quickly, as if she’d been waiting for a chance to jump in, “we actually want it to move rapidly enough through our new channels that it won’t cool into rock and clog those same channels.”
Jenny pointed her remote at the screen, and now even more detailed fodar imagery appeared. The photogrammetry technology turned aerial photos into a high-resolution map showing specific elevations, angles of slopes, and locations of the various caves on Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and even Hualalai, northwest of Mauna Loa, the third youngest of the volcanoes on the Big Island.
“At the end of the day,” Jenny said, “what we’re trying to do with these explosives is not only use gravity but basically make our own.”
Rebecca shrugged. “So there you have it,” she said. “We’re going to try to do with this mountain of yours what we do when we blow the hell out of a building.”
“And what do you do?” Jenny asked.
“Tell it where we want it to go,” Rebecca said.
“It sounds pretty simple when you put it that way,” Pia Wilson said.
“You’re confident this plan you and Mac have come up with will work?” Kenny Wong asked Rebecca.
“Actually, I’m scared silly,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of dangerous things in a lot of places, but I’ve never done anything this dangerous in my life.”
She looked briefly at Mac and then at the rest of the people seated around the table. She took a deep breath and forced a smile.
“But then, no one has,” she said.
CHAPTER 38
Hilo International Airport, Hilo, Hawai‘i
The two jets arrived roughly thirty minutes apart, both on runway 8-26, the longer of the airport’s two runways.
The first to land, at 2:00 p.m., was a Peregrine, a modified Gulfstream G550 business jet, one of the many jets that belonged to billionaire tech legend J. P. Brett, friend and occasional business partner to Oliver and Leah Cutler.
On this Saturday, the Cutlers and their film crew were on board. They’d been picked up in Iceland after Oliver Cutler called Brett and explained why they needed to get to Mauna Loa as fast as humanly possible.
“Is it dangerous?” Brett had asked.
“I wouldn’t be calling if it weren’t,” Oliver Cutler told him. “And we wouldn’t be going if it weren’t.”
“You want company?”
“Always, my friend.”
“Then I’ll get there as soon as I can,” Brett said, “as soon as I wrap up some business with my friend Zuckerberg.”
“Do it quickly,” Oliver Cutler said.
“I always do with that particular gentleman.”
When the Cutlers deplaned, Henry Takayama was there with the Rivian R1T truck Oliver Cutler had requested that would take them all to the new Four Seasons property and the villa that Leah Cutler had requested, although Takayama knew thatrequestwasn’t the right word.
The crew packed their equipment into an SUV Takayama had rented for them. There was another new resort in Hilo, the Lani, but the crew were staying at the Hilton.
There were no reporters waiting to speak to the Cutlers at the airport, although they had initially “requested” the press. Takayama had managed to talk them out of that, at least for now.
He needed the Cutlers—they were his way of finding out what was going on inside the army and at HVO. The Cutlers wanted to be even more famous than they were, the heroes of this particular drama.
Henry Takayama wanted to be more powerful than he had ever been and to once again feel like the biggest guy in town.
When they had all settled into the crew cab of the electric pickup truck that handled like a sports car, Leah once again raised the possibility of a press conferencebeforethey met with the big brass.
Or the biggest brass, in this case.