by Chris Angus
***
Jon crouched beside a boulder jutting out of the side of the vent they’d been trudging down. His wits were almost totally frayed. The paranoia was firmly rooted. His heart lived in his mouth, anticipating the next horror they were sure to come upon.
He stared at Kraus. The man was an idiot. The German had moved forward toward the edge of what appeared to be a great sinkhole. A vast wind had come up, blowing so hard it made it difficult to walk against as they had moved down the tunnel.
A wind here, so deep beneath the surface, was completely inexplicable and, having no explanation, they avoided talking about it.
But then they had reached the opening. The tentacles that provided them with light had continued to grow in size. Now the arm-sized coils, like thick electrical conduits, covered the vent walls. They snaked over the edge of the precipice in front of them and disappeared into the void from which the wind was coming.
The gale-force blast whipped out of the opening, and Kraus’s hair blew straight back as though slicked down like some fifties crooner as he struggled to the edge.
He wanted to see what was down there. Curiosity had overcome his fear, at least for the moment. He looked back briefly to see Jon cowering behind the boulder. Good. The man was useless . . . hopelessly mired in some paranoid trauma. He felt it too, but relied on his faith to keep going.
Kraus grasped a sort of stone barrier at the edge of the opening and pulled himself forward. The wind was incredibly strong. Slowly, he pulled his head even with the ledge and looked down.
What he saw simply didn’t register at first. Certainly not in any rational sense. Perhaps he was becoming as paranoid as Jon. He had to be hallucinating. Holding tight to the stones with his left hand, he raised his right to try to shield his eyes from the incredible blast of wind.
“What is it?” Jon cried from behind his boulder. “What do you see? Is it a way out?”
Kraus ignored him. He couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to. For he had no idea what he was looking at.
The swollen tentacles poured over the sides in a mass and disappeared into the void. The pulsating light that had been guiding the two men in their nightmarish journey through the venthole disappeared as soon as the branches plunged into the opening, as though every bit of energy in the tentacles was suddenly drained away.
But something else was also dissipating. Kraus felt his fears and barely controlled paranoia fall away. The knot in his shoulders relaxed. His mind slipped into a state of peace and tranquility. He felt completely content and happy to be where he was. Warmth seeped into the very heart of his being.
He stared down into the darkness. The wind whistled out of the depths, and he wondered if there might be some sort of vent to the outside that allowed the wind to roar through the tunnel. If so, then it could be a way out. But how could they fight the nearly hurricane-force wind? And how could they begin to climb down the sides of the opening?
It would be a journey into blackness. Even so, he felt not a tremor of concern. It was wonderful just to be here. To feel so . . . perfect. He looked back at Jon. Poor bastard. If he only knew.
He squinted against the wind. There was something down there. Something that made no sense. All was blackness . . . except . . . he could see pinpoints of light. Thousands of them.
Almost . . . like stars.
***
Ryan put his pistol in his jacket pocket. No need for it now. Whatever lay ahead, they would have to face together. Akbari. The senator. The Secret Service agent.
Ex-agent. Lately, he’d almost forgotten that.
“Where do we begin?” asked Graham. He wore slacks, dress shoes, and a lightweight nylon jacket. Ryan knew the man was in good physical condition. Evidently, part of his lifelong quest to extend life had been to take care of the body he had. To give science as long as possible to come up with the answer he so desperately wanted while he was still in relatively good health.
Akbari grunted in response. He seemed soft, a little pudgy. But at least he was younger than the senator, maybe fifty years old. He was already peering into the various vehicles now abandoned in the parking lot.
“No way to tell if one of these belongs to Rashid,” he said. “But I’d bet on it. He’s down here somewhere. He was in a hurry to put his foolish plans to work.”
Ryan stared across the fire-blasted landscape. Which way to go? Sam was somewhere down below, along with Dagursson’s men, maybe Jon, and a lunatic with a nuclear weapon.
He turned on his heel. “Come on,” he said and disappeared into the first venthole he saw.
It was warm underground. It had been nothing like this before. The temperature of the entire mountain seemed to be rising. And there was a near-constant background din. Things were moving and shaking beneath Laki, as if the whole place were coming apart at the seams. If he’d been willing to wait, Rashid might not have needed his backup plan.
They kept close together. Periodically, Graham called out Samantha’s name. His voice sounded pathetically small in the tiny circles of light their flashlights threw.
Still, Ryan knew if the senator hadn’t been calling, he’d have done it himself. He remembered Sam telling him how this place was an enormous maze—ten thousand years of ventholes was how she had put it. How in God’s name were they going to find anyone?
Chapter Nineteen
Margret found Sahar coming out of her chemistry class. She wasn’t the last one out of the room this time, and she was actually talking to another girl. She smiled when she saw Margret and said something to the girl, who went ahead on her own.
“A new friend?” Margret asked.
“Maybe,” said Sahar. “I didn’t see you at lunch today.”
“I need to talk to you, Sahar. Can we go somewhere?”
“Okay. I just have study hall next. Want to go to the library?”
Margret stopped when they entered the library and stared. It was totally different from when she was a student. Then, books lined the walls and there were large, wooden desks to work on. Now, the books were mostly gone. In their place was row upon row of computers lined up in little cubicles in place of the large wooden desks.
“Wow!” she said. “Doesn’t anyone use books anymore?”
Sahar smiled. “Sure. They’re mostly back in the stacks though. No card catalogs either. You find what you want on the computer and then ask one of the librarians to get it for you.”
Margret just shook her head. They went over to the single remaining desk that didn’t have a computer on it. There were only two other students in the room, at the far end.
“I need to tell you some things, Sahar. And I need to apologize to you.”
Sahar looked puzzled. “What for?”
“I’m not a teacher’s aide, Sahar. I’m a police officer.”
The girl’s eyes went wide.
“I apologize for lying to you. It had to be done. And for what it’s worth, after you hear me out, I’d still like to be your friend.”
Sahar seemed to close down, like she knew in some strange way what was coming.
“Things are going to be a lot better for you, Sahar. You probably noticed that Sven and Nils have not been in school the last couple of days. Well, you can get used to that. They are never coming back.”
“Never coming back? Why?”
“Because of what they did to you. Yes. I know about it. I’ve seen the picture, and you can be sure that no one else will ever see it. For all practical purposes, Sven and Nils have been expelled. But no one will know why. And none of the other students will know what they did to you. In fact, it’s part of their punishment. They understand if they ever mention what they did to anyone, they’ll go to jail.”
Tears started to flow down Sahar’s face. Margret reached over and took her hand. “What happened to you should never happen to anyone. But you’re safe now and you can at least begin to try to stop thinking about it. I want you to talk to one of the counselors. She’s a very nice lady who u
nderstands what happened and is very sympathetic because she once went through something very similar.”
“My . . . my father doesn’t believe we should talk to others about our problems. That it is private.”
“Well, sometimes it’s necessary. And this is one of those times. Your parents don’t have to know about it. Your sessions with the counselor will be informal and she’ll tell no one about them.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
Margret smiled. “You can’t get rid of me that easily. I’ll stop by the school regularly to have lunch with you and see how you’re doing. Maybe we can get together outside sometimes too. One thing I didn’t lie to you about, Sahar, is that I really do want to be your friend.”
Sahar seemed to be trying to absorb everything. “Is it true?” she almost whispered. “Sven and Nils . . . are gone?”
“From your life—forever. I give you my word on it.”
The smile that emerged and grew from Sahar was almost beatific. She could be a girl again.
Chapter Twenty
Prescott Carlisle stood off to one side of the parking lot at Laki and surveyed the activity going on around him. The two large buses were pulled up at right angles to one another. A generator hummed loudly and men were snaking cables between the two vehicles.
Thus far, things had gone more smoothly than he could have hoped. The C-17s had arrived on time as the General had promised, along with a contingent of specialists and scientists stationed at the U.S. base in Frankfurt.
The inside of each bus looked like a NASA launch center with banks of computers, technicians, volcanologists, seismologists, physicists, and military grunts who sprang into action whenever any of the scientists needed something. The computer network equipment was state-of-the-art, capable of simulating abstract models of a whole range of systems. They would rely upon such simulations for much of their analysis.
All in all, it was a very efficient-looking operation and Carlisle grunted in approval. Most of the military people and a smattering of the technical assistants had been provided by Iceland’s prime minister. This was a joint venture, so to speak, between Iceland and the United States, with a handful of German specialists thrown in.
Dagursson came over and stood beside Carlisle. He was just a little in awe at the incredible might of U.S. technical prowess that had suddenly been brought to bear in his homeland.
“Have your people detected any radio transmissions?” he asked.
Carlisle snorted. “Not bloody likely. One drawback to all this equipment is the amount of interference it causes. Right now, I’m counting ourselves lucky to have gotten the vehicles here in one piece. There are hot spots all over this place. One tire in the wrong place and POOF!
“We’re getting some pretty strange readings. Cosmic particles are going through the roof. Our people have detected some sort of vast chamber or void located far beneath the surface. We haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
Dagursson stared at the bleak landscape. Steam vented from a dozen holes. A semi-permanent lava flow oozed from the western slope and meandered away into the distance.
He was beside himself with indecision. A dozen of his men were out there somewhere, along with Sam, maybe others. There was no way to tell where they were. To send more men below in this violent landscape without any idea where they were going or what they might encounter would be folly and risk many more lives.
“Have there been more earthquakes?” he asked.
“Nearly continuous. Mostly aftershocks, but there have been two quakes that came close to 7.0 on the Richter scale. The entire region is experiencing massive destabilization. Frankly, I’m not at all sure we’re safe here. God knows what it must be like underground.”
A young, nerd-looking scientist emerged from one of the buses and came over to the two men. He carried a computer readout.
“I think you should look at this,” he said.
Carlisle took the readout and stared at it. Dagursson saw his face darken. “You double-check this?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. It’s under the entire region, not just Laki. Biggest chamber any of the volcanologists have ever seen—or even speculated could be possible.”
“What is it?” asked Dagursson.
“We’ve detected a magma chamber far beneath the surface,” Carlisle replied. “Miles down.” He cursed softly under his breath and turned to the technician. “This can’t be right,” he said. “Run the tests again. And perform a sensitivity analysis.”
The man nodded and went back into the bus.
Dagursson stared at Carlisle and waited.
“If these figures are correct,” Carlisle said finally. “We could be a lot less safe than I thought. The magma chamber is huge. It could hold thousands of cubic miles of magma. That would make it a supervolcano.”
“A what?”
“Only three or four have ever been discovered. Massive volcanoes that caused enormous destruction at some point in past geological history. Yellowstone is such a volcano. It last erupted about six hundred thousand years ago. Its magma chamber is over five miles deep. It will eventually erupt again once the magma chamber fills up, quite possibly destroying much of North America and perhaps life as we know it on earth. You remember the term ‘nuclear winter’?”
Dagursson said, “The idea that a nuclear war would raise so much dust into the atmosphere that it would block out the sun and destroy plant life.”
Carlisle nodded. “This would be a volcanic winter. Same principle. The magma chamber of a supervolcano could erupt in a blast thousands of times larger than Mount St. Helens.”
“Isn’t there any way to determine how close such an eruption might be?”
“It’s an inexact science, but certainly clues would include large amounts of seismic activity, evidence of destabilization in the region, perhaps weather or temperature changes in the ocean.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Dagursson, “but isn’t that precisely what’s going on here?”
Carlisle rose up from his normal stooped position and looked the police commissioner in the eye. “Precisely,” he said.
***
Dagursson returned to his office in Reykjavik. There seemed little he could do on Laki. His best men were still inside the Earth somewhere. Sam, with the most hands-on experience with the volcano, was down there with them. If any of his men were still alive, it was likely because of her presence.
He’d considered long and hard going down into the ventholes on his own, but he’d almost certainly have become lost, which would do his men no good at all. At least here, in his office, he could monitor the situation, keep in touch with the prime minister, and begin to organize some sort of relief effort, if any information or contact from his men was forthcoming.
He looked up to see an unfamiliar face in his door.
“Can I help you?”
The man moved forward. “I am Ernst Hauptmann,” he said. “I was told you might be able to assist me. I’m looking for Miss Samantha Graham.”
Dagursson leaned back in his chair. “You’re the professor with the theory about the Nazi plot to cause an eruption on Laki.”
Hauptmann looked pleased that his reputation preceded him. He sat in a chair facing Dagursson. “I must speak with Sam—Miss Graham. I have new information about Laki. I read in the paper that she’d been detained.”
“Miss Graham’s whereabouts are currently unknown. She is somewhere beneath Laki, along with a contingent of my men. They were conducting a search and rescue.”
Hauptmann’s face showed sudden concern. “I’ve heard about the earthquakes. It cannot be safe to be down there now. What are you doing about it?”
“Perhaps if you told me what you wanted to ask Sam, it would help me determine what to do. I’ve been trying to decide if a rescue to find the rescuers is in order. But I don’t want to risk more lives in a fruitless effort.”
Hauptmann stared at him, his bushy eyebrows going up and down furiously. He sp
read his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“My research is largely speculative. I’ve uncovered new information from the sagas—about the early Vikings who lived on the volcano. Few take the sagas as gospel. There is much interpretation involved. That’s why I wish to speak with Sam. She knows as much about that lonely place as anyone.”
“Not so lonely these days,” said Dagursson. “Counting my men, Sam, a couple of dozen military types, and God knows how many scientists, Laki is more populated than Grandagardur Street on a Friday night.”
There was a timid rap on the open office door and both men looked up to see Sahar, accompanied by a middle-aged man with a large mustache.
Dagursson stood up, surprise showing in his face.
“Sahar. What are you doing here? Is everything all right?”
The girl stepped into the room, looking around. “I . . . I wish to speak to you about something. Margret said I could talk to you . . . about anything.” She turned slightly. “It’s about the volcano. This is my father. He would prefer to speak in English, if that is possible.”
“All right. Come in.” He shook hands with the girl’s father.
The man looked uneasy, but he acknowledged Dagursson with a slight nod. “My name is Hassan.” He glanced at Hauptmann. “This is a private matter,” he said.
Dagursson started to say something to Hauptmann, but the professor interrupted him.
“If this is in regard to Laki, it could be important for me to hear,” he said.
Dagursson watched as Sahar and her father sat and then said, “You are probably aware of the earthquakes that have happened. A number of people may be trapped on Laki. Professor Hauptmann and I have been discussing this. Any information you may have could be vital in saving lives, and I believe Professor Hauptmann needs to hear it. I can assure you, we will be discreet.”
Hassan stared at Hauptmann a moment longer, then seemed to dismiss him.
“First,” he said. “I know about your intervention with regard to my daughter. Sahar is a good daughter and after she spoke with a woman counselor at the school, she felt the need to tell me what happened.” He hesitated, looking about the room. “This is not easy for me. I believe in keeping family . . . things . . . in the family. I do not believe in counselors . . . but. . . .”