The volcanic cloud spread, blotting out the sun. Ash fell heavily out of the darkness. Salt Lake City, Denver and Phoenix ground to a standstill. Outside the towns, roadside markers were buried. In every direction the landscape became a featureless grey blanket, so that rescue teams trying to bring in earth-movers became disorientated and ran off the roads. Cars skidded and sank as their spinning tyres struggled for traction in the deep, powdery surface. The stranded vehicles blocked the highways, creating queues of stationary traffic that stretched for miles. Drivers turned off their engines. Some sat in their cars, hoping for rescue. Others abandoned their vehicles and tried to continue on foot. They stumbled on with little sense of direction, handkerchiefs tied over mouth and nose in a vain attempt to filter out the choking air.
The ash continued to fall. Slowly cars and corpses disappeared from view. Everything was deadened with a cloak of unnatural silence, punctuated only by the rumbling of thunder as lightning flickered in the black cloud overhead.
Then the rain started. It fell in torrents, turning the ash into a thick sludge. In the towns that were worst affected it crawled down the streets, an unstoppable black tide that blocked sewers and drains, carried off cars and mobile homes, collapsed houses, and swallowed up people and livestock. The sulphurous air became tinged with the rancid, rotting odour of death.
CHAPTER 59
An emergency meeting had been called at the Institute.
“Okay,” Terry said, when the hubbub in the lecture theatre had died down. “Now first let me say that I don’t know any more than you do at this stage. We heard the reports last night and we’ll have to wait for better media coverage before we have a more detailed picture of what’s happening. One thing I want to make clear: so far as our own situation is concerned we won’t be too badly affected. Ash has already come in but we’re away from the main fallout zone and it won’t get much worse than this. There will be changes in the climate; in fact, in a few weeks’ time I suppose the weather here in Florida will be more like that in England, so bad luck.”
There was a little uneasy laughter.
“Well,” he continued. “I’m sure we can manage as far as that’s concerned. What I’d like to do this morning is try to interpret this event in relation to our research effort.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “In our recent meetings you’ve followed the reports of the atmosphere and climate teams. What they were telling us was that ammonia was rising more rapidly than ever and at this stage we still haven’t got a solution. I must say I’d started to wonder if the atmosphere would be too toxic to breathe before we had, and maybe some of you felt the same way.
“Now we have this enormous eruption in Montana and it’s changed the picture dramatically. The acid gases from the volcano will fix a lot of the free atmospheric ammonia as salts, and the rain has already washed a lot of it down. At higher altitudes the ejecta and the ammonium salts will produce global cooling; that, and the reduction in sunlight, may slow the organisms down, but we can’t rely on it. The net effect is that it’s bought us some time. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it won’t last forever. Eventually generation of ammonia will overtake the declining emissions from the volcano. We have no idea how quickly that will happen. What I’m saying is: we can’t afford to relax. We’ve got to go for that biological solution just as fast as we can.
“In view of the new situation we asked Gordon Lang to join us. I think most of you have met him by now. Gordon is a volcanologist with the US Geological Survey. He’s here with his colleagues to help us follow the progress of the eruption and they’ll be modelling the effects on the climate.” He smiled in their direction. “The supercomputer on this campus is one of the biggest in the country, so it should be adequate even for you guys. Eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano aren’t unprecedented but no one in history has ever had a chance to measure their effects directly. This will be an unparalleled opportunity to do just that. Gordon?”
Gordon Lang was giving him a strange look.
“Terry,” he drawled, “I have to say this is a strange sort of good fortune. I was in touch with some colleagues at Yellowstone Park not so long ago. At that time they said there was no indication of an impending event. It’s pretty certain that not one of them survived this eruption.”
Terry’s heart started to beat faster. He responded quickly. “Yes, it’s taken a lot of people by surprise but there’s no point in debating why. Many people have lost their lives and many more will be affected. There is no doubt this is a disaster on a scale never seen before, but it’s a disaster that could save the rest of the population left on this planet. Okay, I’m going to turn this over to Maggie now, and the biologists can update us on the progress they’ve been making. As some of you know, there’s been a major breakthrough and we should be able to speed things up.”
After the meeting the staff filed out of the lecture theatre into the foyer and many of them paused to look out through the glass front of the building. Conditions had deteriorated rapidly. The clear blue hemisphere of the Florida sky had darkened to a yellowish grey haze through which the sun cruised as a sickly brown disc. A fine dust had settled over everything, coating the vegetation, the roads, the cars, and the buildings. Outside, the line of palm trees stood like petrified sentinels in the still, ash-laden air. Viewing that grey landscape, ghostly in the weak daylight, made them feel isolated and closed in. They shivered and turned away, heading for the labs.
Now that the entire administration had moved to Florida, Terry had only to walk across the campus to meet with the President the next morning. He showed his pass to the two Marines at the entrance to the building and rode the lift to the President’s floor. He found the man seated with his elbows on his desk, his cheeks cupped in his hands. He released one hand to wave Terry to a chair, then laid it palm down on a sheaf of papers on his desk.
“Casualty reports from Idaho,” he said. “The surge that went out over Snake River Plain.” He shook his head. “My God, Terry. All the towns along that river were buried. It’s Pompeii twenty times over. Big towns like Rexburg, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Twin Falls, Nampa, Boise, and Caldwell, all gone. First estimates are at least half a million dead, and that’s conservative. We’re awaiting figures from Montana and Wyoming. They were hit by other surges, probably a million dead there, maybe more. And we’re left with a real humanitarian crisis in that whole area. We’re trying to evacuate survivors but we’re short of helicopters – we’re drafting them in from all over the country.”
Terry looked at him, taking in the darkening of the slack flesh under the eyes, the reddened eyelids, the hunched shoulders. He pictured a mind burdened with the buried towns, the bodies in their hundreds of thousands, the stranded survivors, and he felt a wave of sympathy, mingled with guilt.
“The sheer scale of it, Terry!” he continued. “We’re running the rescue missions from the West Coast but a helicopter has limited range. We have to refuel in flight so some of them can reach further. It’s a slow business – too many people left behind. The best we can do is drop supplies by Hercules and hope those poor folk can keep going.” He sighed. “I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.”
There was nothing Terry could say.
The President dragged his gaze away from the reports, straightened up and pushed himself back from the desk. He refocused on Terry. “We’ve put a news embargo on this for the moment. Once we’ve got something positive to say about the rescue effort we’ll let the media run it – we have to. I hope to God you’ve got something there to cheer me up.”
“I believe I have, sir,” Terry said quietly.
“Good, good. Let’s hear it.”
“It all comes down to the way the eruption was triggered. Your nuclear device sent out shock waves that weakened the crust over a very large area. When it blew, the lid came right off. The eruptive column was at least thirty miles across.”
“Sweet Jesus! You’re saying it was even bigger than we expected?”
“Not exactly. In terms of the volume of magma ejected it wasn’t far off what we’d predicted. But the decompression was so general that it couldn’t sustain the eruption. Quite early on there wasn’t enough impetus to support the weight of that huge column. That’s what led to the early collapse and the pyroclastic surges. The Rockies, Sierras and Cascades shielded the coastal population from the worst of it, otherwise your casualties would have been a lot higher.”
“That’s a crumb of comfort, I suppose. Are there going to be any more of these surges?”
“Probably not. It’ll go on smoking for years but the main eruptive force dissipated in the first explosion so the whole thing won’t last as long as we thought. That’s the first item of good news. The second is that the release of energy in that initial eruption was enormous – it made your warhead look like a firework. The force of it carried the ejecta to a height of more than twenty-five kilometres. What that means is that the ash will be widely distributed around the planet but the really heavy fall will be restricted in extent and it’ll be mainly to the east. The model suggests that by the time we get out to 1500 kilometres from the eruption the thickness won’t be more than a few millimetres.”
“1500 kilometres. That’s what? – a thousand miles?”
“A bit less. It means your helicopter bases on the west coast shouldn’t be affected and your major centres of population and industry out east won’t be blanketed. The ash will be a nuisance for sure, but they should be able to function.”
He grunted.
“So tell me, Terry, has all this been worth it? What’s happening to the ammonia?”
“There’s some good news there as well, sir. It’s what I said would happen: the sulphuric acid released into the atmosphere by the volcano has combined with the ammonia to form ammonium sulphate. We’re already recording a dramatic fall in the levels of free ammonia. And there’s another mechanism too, one I hadn’t anticipated. The ash cloud is highly charged and it’s laced continually with lightning. The lightning makes oxygen and nitrogen combine directly and together with water they’re forming nitric acid. That’s taking more free ammonia out of the air as ammonium nitrate.”
“And the rain? The rainstorms in the north-west are unprecedented. Is that part of it too?”
“Yes, I expect we’ll get that here, too, sooner or later. The crystals of ammonium sulphate and nitrate and the ash have seeded the clouds and that’s what brought down the rain.”
“It’s causing major damage out there.”
“I realize that, sir, but it’s also cleared the air of ammonia and the ammonium salts and a lot of ash.”
The President let out a long sigh and looked wearily at Terry. “So we’re winning, then?”
“No sir, I can’t say we’re winning.”
“What do you mean?”
“We still haven’t got the biological solution. Once the volcano starts to taper off it’ll cease to be a serious source of acid gases. The ammonia will start to take over again.”
“Oh sure, but it took years to build up to those levels before.”
“It won’t this time. These ammonia-generating organisms are present in far larger quantities now, and they’re very widely distributed. That threshold could be reached in months, not years.”
“Dammit, Terry, when that happens I won’t have any bullets left to fire.”
“I’m afraid that’s right, sir. You won’t even have a gun.”
CHAPTER 60
Terry made some notes and added some papers to a pile on his desk that had been growing in the days since the eruption. Ash and gases from the volcano had spread all around the world, their research flights were bringing in an undreamed of wealth of data, and the climate modellers were beginning to make sense of it. He knew that together the team would have enough results for a lifetime of publications. It would certainly make his reputation – if they survived.
“Terry?”
Maggie came into the office. His mind was full of models and hypotheses and it took him a moment to focus properly on her. He had barely seen her since the eruption. The look on her face told him something was wrong.
“What is it, Maggie? What’s the problem?”
“It’s Sergei. He insists on holding the phage data close to his chest. We need Rajiv’s input on the screening so we can get started on making our organism resistant to the phage. We have to work in parallel as much as we can, otherwise the whole thing will take too long. I’ve tried to reason nicely with him but he won’t take any notice. He pretends he can’t understand English. Would you talk to him?”
“Where is he? Fourth floor?”
“Yes. Do you want me to come with?”
“No, it’ll seem like we’re ganging up on him. It’s better if I see him alone.”
Sergei Daniil Kolesnikov was stubborn. His head was angled back, his bushy black beard jutting out.
“Is not problem,” he said. “One team find sequence. One team switch it off. My team find bacteriophage.”
“It is a problem, Sergei,” Terry insisted. “We are running out of time. Don’t you understand? I told you all at the last meeting: the ammonia levels are already starting to go up again. We need that phage, and we need it fast.”
“We work as fast as we can.”
“We’ll make quicker progress if you can combine forces with one of the other groups.”
“Not way I work. Publish findings, not one million authors.”
So that was it. Terry was tempted to raise his fists to the ceiling and scream in sheer frustration. He took a deep breath and expelled it slowly.
“Sergei, when we have the phage and our engineered organism with the plasmid we’ve still got to grow them up in large quantities. Then we’ve got to start spraying it on all the areas around the world where the organisms are active. That’s a huge task and it’s going to take time. If we don’t crack this problem soon we’re going to lose the battle. There won’t be any publications because there won’t be any journals and there won’t be anyone to read them because we’ll all be dead! Do you understand?”
“Not understand.”
Terry sighed.
“Okay, Sergei, do you understand this? Do you know what the temperature is in Moscow at the moment?”
Sergei’s dark eyes met his. Terry held the gaze unflinchingly as he continued:
“I’ll tell you. The volcanic winter is already setting in and it’s minus forty degrees Celsius there. And it’s going to get colder. Do you fancy going back?”
The dark eyes flashed with anger. He thrust his face close to Terry’s.
“You cannot do. I am foremost expert in world with bacteriophage.”
“Yes, and that’s why we asked you to join us. But there are others.”
The face came closer still.
“Who?”
“For a start there’s Jose-Luis Guerrero, at the University of San Diego.”
Guerrero had been on the reserves list. He was Kolesnikov’s biggest rival. Terry knew the mention of his name would raise the Russian’s blood pressure.
Kolesnikov’s face reddened.
“Jose-Luis? Pah!” The words came out with such violence that Terry felt the spittle landing on his cheek. “Is pygmy, Jose-Luis!”
“Maybe, but he knows how to work in a team. Look, Sergei, you’re the best in the world – you know that and so do I. Why the hell would we invite you here if you weren’t? But you have to understand the rules. Here we work as one big team. Our survival depends on it. Now, are you going to help us? Because if you’re not I’m going to order up that plane for Moscow right now.”
Kolesnikov looked as if a thundercloud had settled on his brow.
“What you want?” he said.
“It’s very simple,” Terry replied evenly. “Your team is screening for the best phage. I want you to bring Rajiv Gupta’s group in on it, so that he can look at resistance to the phage at the same time as you are looking at virulence and infectivity. If there’s a
publication you can publish together. That’s all.”
Kolesnikov simmered, then withdrew his face and made a conciliatory wagging movement of his head. “Not problem,” he said. “Is not understand, is all. Is not problem.”
CHAPTER 61
That evening Terry and Maggie joined the other staff in the leisure area, where everyone assembled to watch the main television news. Through his meetings with the President, Terry had a fair idea of the extent of the disaster caused by the Yellowstone eruption but he was obliged to keep the substance of those conversations to himself. For the others, including Maggie, the picture was far from complete. Previous reports had given them no more than views from the air: towns blanketed by ash, highways choked by lines of stationary cars, streets and homes flooded by a thick slurry of rain and ash. Tonight, for the first time, there was some news at ground level from cities destroyed by the surges.
A reporter stood at the side of the picture gesturing towards a lumpy grey landscape from which the shattered remnants of high-rise apartments jutted like broken teeth.
“What you see behind me is all that’s left of Idaho Falls,” he said. He winced and shifted his position. “Somewhere, maybe twenty feet below me, is one of the main arteries of this once thriving city. The death toll here is believed to be in excess of fifty thousand.” He coughed and wiped his eyes. “Excuse me. The air here’s full of sulphur and the ground’s still almost too hot to stand on. I’m going to have to hand you back to the studio.”
There were further reports, from Twin Falls, Nampa, Boise, Caldwell. The casualty figures were meaninglessly high: thirty-five thousand, seventy thousand, one hundred and ten thousand, thirty thousand... More telling were the individual images of destruction: cars carried by the surge and dumped through the second-floor windows of office buildings; rooms full of the bodies of men, women and children who had been above the surge but who had breathed the lethal cocktail of scorching hot gases and ash that came with it. A kaleidoscope of images brought it home in heart-rending detail: a shoe, a purse, a teddy bear.
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