Page 88 of Eruption
Ito shrugged. “Just another tip. Some kind of chemical spill, is what we heard.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Mac said.
“One more from me,” Imani Burgess said. “Think of it as a Hail Mary. Do you know anything about a bunch of hazmat-suited army guys dragging a soldier out of a Hilo bar?”
“Can’t help you there either.” Mac walked over and opened the door for them. They left, and he was alone again in his office until Jenny came back. He told her he’d spent most of the past half hour bobbing and weaving.
“You think they know more than they were saying?” Jenny asked.
“They almost always do.”
“You think they know about the canisters?”
“Not yet.”
“You think they’re going to give up?”
“They hardly ever do,” Mac said.
They sat and talked about Kenny and Pia selling them out, and Mac let Jenny vent about them in increasingly colorful language. She told Mac he couldn’t let this go. Mac said she had to know him better than that by now.
“Kenny and Pia did what they did,” he said. “I’m not after them.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’re after Brett.”
He nodded. “He’s so worried about targets, he doesn’t realize there’s a brand-new one as of today.”
“Where?”
“On his back.”
Mac’s phone buzzed. He picked it up and nodded when he heard the voice at the other end of the line. “I’m on my way,” he said.
“Where are you going?” Jenny asked.
“You know what they say,” he said. “If the mountain won’t come to MacGregor…”
“Is that what they say?” she said, grinning at him.
Mac told her where he wanted her and Rick to meet later and headed for his car. He found himself wondering what new surprises the goddess of fire and lava, the one the locals called Madame Pele, “She Who Shapes the Sacred Land,” had in store for him today.
Little did he know.
The ground underneath him had not shaken today, although the magma continued its steady rise on a timetable only it knew and maybe even it couldn’t control. Over the past twenty-four hours the magma, thicker and more viscous than ever, had been thwarted, briefly, by the various blocked chambers it encountered above the subduction zone.
This was happening as the lava above it was receding below the water table, and the volatile mix of water and magma was turning to steam and beginning to eat away at the crater area.
They were less than two days from when they were convinced the eruption would come, and Mac was becoming more concerned by the hour that it might come sooner, before they could finish enough of their guardrails. More vents near the summit were being blocked. Mac wasn’t sure how many.
Only the volcano goddess knew that.
Only she knew in this moment how quickly the increasingly combustible combination of steam and blocked gases and solid lava, known as cinder, was rising up within the Earth, ready to show them all that she still ruled the Big Island the way she always had.
And the unseen clock on the ticking bomb continued to count down.
Mac kept trying to focus on the work, distract himself from the reality of the situation with the volcano and the canisters, email his sons at least once a day, keep assuring the members of his team that they could only do what they could do in whatever time they had before the eruption that could destroy the island if the lava found the death inside the Ice Tube and inside the canisters and released it into the atmosphere…
Mac always stopped himself there. Dwelling on the consequences of their schemes not working, the devastation that would follow, got him nowhere, except to darker places.