Page 89 of Eruption

Last week, when he was on the phone with his sons, Charlie and Max, Max had asked if everything was going to be okay.

“A-OK,” he’d said.

When the boys were born, he’d promised himself he’d never lie to them. Now it was almost as easy as lying to himself.

When he began to make his way on foot toward all the men and women in their hard hats, the ones operating the heavy machinery and the ones directing it, holes being dug and rock and dirt being moved, he felt the first small quake underneath him, like a rug being pulled out from under him, making his knees buckle and nearly bringing him down.

But he did not go down.

One foot in front of the other.

When he looked up ahead, he could see that the work between him and the sky continued without interruption, making himwonder, with all the noise and activity and pieces of the mountain being moved around, if they had even felt the earth shift underneath them.

But it had. Again.

Dr. John MacGregor had stopped being so alarmed about quakes. He told himself this latest one was nothing out of the ordinary and slowed his pace just long enough to put on his hard hat.

Then he put his head back down and kept going.

CHAPTER 63

Mauna Loa, Hawai‘i

By now Mac knew the zone maps for the lava as well as he knew his email address, knew that all the information he was getting, almost moment to moment, was based on the best empirical data and geologic mapping his team had available to it.

His team minus Kenny and Pia, of course.

He had studied the hydrologic modeling of the previous downhill lava flows from previous eruptions. He was fully aware that a flow path as immense as this one was would ultimately be defined from the point source of the catchment, following as closely as possible the steepest line of descent.

That was the plan, anyway.

But he knew the earth-eating goddess Pele had her own plans, with her rift zones and cones and scattered ramparts and what looked like a million ground cracks and everything that was happening right now in unseen lava channels.

Mac knew that in the end, the area covered by the lava would be a function of the duration of the volume of magma, how quickly it left the volcano—a fact as unknowable as anything they were dealing with—and its various angles of descent, how many and how steep.

No matter how often he told himself that the world had survived volcanoes before, he knew that the reality was that it would not survive this one because of the death contained in the canisters stored inside the Ice Tube.

This time both man and nature would lose…

The ground shook again. It didn’t startle him as much as the loud voice behind him.

“You said you wanted to talk,” J. P. Brett said. “So let’s talk. I’ve got things to do.”

Mac turned to face him. He felt a sudden and powerful urge to knock the smirk off Brett’s face, this rich and powerful asshat who thought this was some kind of game, just like the Cutlers so clearly did, all of them more worried about the way things looked than the way things actually were, realizing what was on the line here, for all of them.

He wanted to ask them how being famous would help them when everyone and everything was gone. He wanted to scream at them that all of them might be about to die.

But before he could say a thing, there was an explosion from the summit. It sounded as if a bomb had gone off up there, as if the aerial bombing had already begun.

Another explosion followed that one.

Then a third.

Mac and Brett stared at where the noise was coming from and saw rocks rocketing up in the sky as if they had been shot from below the surface by some unseen cannon. Then a hailstorm of lava rock and ash rained down on them.

The vehicles came to a stop. The hard hats on all the crewsup the mountain began to scatter in all directions, men and women diving for cover, some of them going underneath the metal blades of the bulldozers, some of them crowding into the cabins, all looking for some shelter from the sudden storm.

Even from this distance, Mac could hear their screams.