Deep Fire Rising

by Du Brul, Jack

  “Won’t happen that way. If she tried to fight me, C.W. would be busy planning her funeral. You know, it’s funny how people can adapt to anything. Here we all are, standing at the edge of disaster and we all continue to act on our basest emotions.”

  “That’s part of being human. We can adapt to any misery, our capacity for it sometimes seems bottomless. I read someplace about romances between inmates in the Nazi concentration camps. If people can retain their humanity there, it can endure anywhere.”

  “You think we will recover if we can’t prevent the avalanche?”

  “As a species, absolutely. As a civilization, who knows?” Mercer’s phone jiggled.

  “I’m back,” Ira said, his tone ominous.

  Mercer caught it instantly. “What happened?”

  “That was Kleinschmidt. He just came back from a meeting with the president’s national security council. As you can imagine, the president is under tremendous pressure to order an evacuation of the East Coast. Some say the order should have been given weeks ago. The idea of impeachment’s been floated. Meanwhile every senator and representative from Maine to Florida is clamoring for federal aid.”

  “I told you I don’t care about the squabbles in Washington.”

  “This one affects you. Originally you were given four weeks to stabilize the western side of that volcano and detonate the nuke, leaving one week for an evacuation if it doesn’t work. The president has decided to bump that up by a week in order to give people fourteen days to hightail it out of the danger zones.”

  Mercer couldn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry to hit you with this. It came right from the Oval Office. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”

  “They call this a compromise, right? Jesus. Ira, if what we’re doing here fails, even those towering intellects on Capitol Hill have to understand an evacuation won’t mean shit. Taking away that week kills my chances while gaining almost nothing on the other end.”

  “I argued that point, John Kleinschmidt argued that point and so did the vice president. On the other side were about fifty politicians representing forty million frightened Americans. We didn’t stand a chance. If it’s any consolation, the situation is much worse in Spain and Portugal. Both countries’ prime ministers have stepped down. And some of the Caribbean islands are in full-out revolt. Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are about the only places where people have a chance to survive and even there it’s chaos.”

  “Are we doing anything to help?” Mercer asked, disregarding his own edict about not paying attention to world reaction.

  “People who have their own boats have been arriving in Florida and a few in Texas. The Immigration Department’s not even bothering to count them. As for the rest, Christ, even if we wanted to we couldn’t save a fraction of the millions of people living down there. If we had every cruise ship and freighter in the world ready to take them off, we could maybe evacuate one of the smaller islands.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” Mercer said, feeling the anguish in Ira’s voice. “I knew the answer already.” He put his arm around Tisa’s slim body, needing her warmth to soak into him. She snuggled close.

  “Mercer?” Les Donnelley called from the control van. “We found the vent! You were right.”

  “Ira, we found the vent,” Mercer said into the phone. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Mercer folded the cell back into his pocket and strode to the van. “Great news.” He gave Les a congratulatory high-five.

  “It was right below where we first looked, like ten feet to the left.”

  Back in the control room, Mercer looked over Jim’s shoulder. The lava tube was almost perfectly round and about eight feet in diameter. The high-intensity lamps attached to Conseil could penetrate only twenty feet into the aperture before their glow was absorbed.

  “Looks pretty clear,” Mercer said. “Our first lucky break of the day.”

  “We found it in a day,” Jim replied. “I call that lucky too.”

  Mercer put his hand on McKenzie’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you the rest after we explore the tube. Any change to the temperature?”

  “Nope. Nice and cool. The vent’s still dormant.”

  “All right, send in the ROV.”

  Jim pulled a microphone to his mouth to talk to the men on deck manning the spool. “We’re about to enter the vent. Spool out three hundred extra feet of cable so it doesn’t snag.” He looked over his shoulder at Mercer. “The cable’s armored, but . . .”

  With gentle touches on the joysticks, he eased Conseil into the tube, keeping the robot exactly centered. The rock had been polished glassy smooth by the tremendous heat and pressure of the lava it once discharged, and it ran as straight as a sewer pipe, but he was careful not to scrape the tunnel lining and damage the ROV.

  After the first three hundred feet, the team was starting to feel they had found what they needed. More cable was stripped from the reel and Jim sent Connie deeper under the volcano.

  At five hundred feet the tunnel had shrunk so there was only a few inches’ clearance on each side of the ROV. The temperature was also on the rise, up to eighty-four degrees. This in itself wasn’t an issue, but it meant that magma was heating the water. Somewhere deep in the volcano, lava was boiling near the tube.

  “I still think we’re okay,” Jim said. “We can strip Conseil when we make the run with the bomb. There are a few struts and sensors we don’t need that’ll reduce her width. I’m just worried about the heat.”

  Without warning the lights on the ROV went dark.

  “What the . . . ?” Jim checked his console. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “The lights?” Tisa asked.

  “Across the board. Connie just went dead. I’ve got zero telemetry.” He continued to scan his computer readouts, searching for the problem. “Goddamn it!” he roared. He grabbed for the microphone. “Bridge, this is McKenzie. What the hell are you doing up there? We’re drifting.” He pointed to the screen where it showed their coordinates. They were more than five hundred feet from where they were supposed to be.

  “Hold on, Mr. McKenzie,” the officer on watch called back. “I’m checking right now. Yes, I see we have drifted. I don’t know what happened. It must be a computer glitch.”

  “Glitch my butt. Were you even watching the screens?”

  “Of course. Everything was fine but now we’re off course. I can’t explain it.”

  “I can. You weren’t doing your job.” Jim switched channels on the PA system, uninterested with the man’s excuses. “Deck, this is the van. The ROV is down, reel her back in. Nice and slow. No more than twenty feet a minute. She’s in the tube and I don’t want her banged up.”

  It took an agonizing hour to retrieve the cable. While the others went to dinner, Mercer and Jim stood shoulder to shoulder at the rail to watch the operation. And when the last of the cable appeared their worst fears were realized.

  They’d recovered a thousand feet of armored data line but no ROV. When the Petromax Angel drifted from her assigned position Conseil’s tether had snapped.

  “We have to send in C.W. to attach a towline,” Jim said in a defeated monotone. “Connie’s blocking the pipe and we need to get her out of there.”

  “We can still use it to insert the bomb, right?”

  McKenzie shook his head and spat into the sea. “When that cable snapped, it opened a conduit to the sea. Right now water’s wicking through the tether and slowly filling the interior of the Conseil’s interior. It’s cooked.”

  “Okay, we’ll use one of Petromax’s ROVs.”

  “They’re camera platforms only, half of Connie’s size. What does the bomb weigh?”

  “Two hundred sixty pounds.”

  “With that kind of payload, they’d sink like a stone.”

  “What about attaching air bags?”

  “I won’t take the chance of a bag hooking on something and deflating. We have to insert the bomb with the NewtSuits. Besides, tho
se ROVs can’t function at temperatures above a hundred and twenty.”

  “The water’s eighty-four.”

  “Right now. Tomorrow it’ll be a hundred. The day after, who knows?”

  “So we do it with the Advanced Diving Suit,” Mercer stated. “It’s not our first option, but we knew there was a chance.”

  “I know. I just don’t like it. If something goes wrong, Conseil can be replaced. Divers can’t.”

  Later that night, Mercer lay in his bunk beside Tisa. He was going over in his head how the ship could have drifted from its position and caused them to lose the ROV. He and Jim had confronted the watch officer and the helmsman on duty. They insisted neither had left their posts in the minutes leading to disaster. Two off-duty crewmen had vouched for them as well. They’d been on the bridge wing photographing the lava glow to the south. That left a computer glitch, an unlikely explanation since the GPS worked fine now and the chances of it failing when the ROV was most vulnerable stretched credibility.

  Staring at the ceiling, Mercer knew the only explanation was sabotage. Someone on board wanted them to fail. His suspicion turned first to Spirit Williams. Only she didn’t have a motive. As he sought one, it dawned on him that the signal Jim McKenzie had intercepted in the moments before the hydrate cooling tower had activated could have been sent from the Surveyor and not some mystery ship that no one had been able to locate. Someone on the research ship would have known exactly when to turn on the massive impellers in order to kill the divers.

  That realization took Spirit off his suspect list. He could accuse her of a lot of things but she was obviously devoted to her husband. He couldn’t picture her sending the signal, knowing that C.W. was right in the path of the boiling methane hydrate.

  He folded his arms under his pillow as Tisa tucked herself tighter against him, her mouth near his neck.

  If not Spirit, then who? Scott Glass, the alternate diver, hadn’t been on the Surveyor. He’d joined Jim and C.W. in California. And those two hadn’t done it, he was sure. That left the five technicians who had made the trip from Guam with McKenzie.

  Mercer didn’t even know their names, which he supposed made it easier for him to have them confined to their quarters until after the bomb went off. For good measure, he’d lock up Spirit too, just so he wouldn’t have to listen to her mouth. Maybe he’d ask Tisa to be her jailer.

  Now that he’d satisfied himself as to the who—and the why didn’t really concern him; who knew why fanatics did anything?—he still found himself wondering about the how. How had they made the ship drift off course?

  Tisa shifted. Mercer knew he’d remain awake until he solved the mystery, so he moved her a little farther and swung off the bed. She gave a soft moue of annoyance and settled back to sleep.

  He dressed in the dark, not bothering with his boxers or socks, and slipped out of the cramped cabin. The corridor was deserted, but he felt the presence of the ship, the thrum of her generators and the whoosh of air through the ventilators. He passed the cabin Jim was sharing with Scott Glass. He could hear Jim’s snores through the closed door and pitied the diver. The next cabin in line was Spirit and C.W.’s. He heard voices.

  He paused. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it sounded like an argument. Charlie must have told her that the ROV had been lost and he and Scott were going to have to place the nuclear weapon themselves. Mercer could imagine her reaction.

  He moved on, found a flight of stairs and climbed to the bridge. He didn’t know the watch officer, but the red-haired Irishman knew him and greeted him by name. “Kind of late for a stroll, Dr. Mercer. I’m Seamus Rourke.” Most of the Petromax Angel’s officers and crew were from the British Isles.

  “No rest for the wicked.” They shook hands.

  “I thought it was the weary.”

  “Both.” He helped himself to coffee from the urn on a counter at the back of the spartan bridge. “Can you show me the GPS receivers.”

  “You too, huh? I’ve been sitting here thinking about that since I heard what happened and I kind of thought sabotage. But the receivers are on the antenna mast outside. You can’t get to them without accessing a service ladder that’s kept locked. Only the captain and chief engineer have keys and I already checked the padlock. No one messed with it.”

  “That blows my theory.”

  “There is another way,” Rourke suggested.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “There is such a thing as a GPS scrambler. It’s only available to the military so they can prevent enemies from accessing the positioning satellites or at least messing with their reception.”

  “That’s right! I think Saddam Hussein tried to use them during Iraqi Freedom. As I recall they didn’t work.”

  “Not against the equipment used by the U.S. Air Force and Navy, but it might confuse our gear long enough for us to drift off station. The Angel’s a good boat but she was state-o’-the-art when Maggie Thatcher was hanging her girdle at Number Ten.”

  Rourke’s idea had merit. “What would one of these scramblers look like?”

  “Probably just a little black box. Something that could be tossed overboard. I doubt we’d ever find it even if the saboteur kept it with him. And there’s also the chance that our receivers were scrambled by somebody onshore. We’re close enough.”

  Mercer hadn’t thought of that. Had there really been a ship over the horizon from the Sea Surveyor? That opened the possibility that someone on the island had the jammer. Eleven thousand workers were currently on La Palma along with about a thousand diehard locals who had yet to evacuate. Not one had been screened by security. There hadn’t been time.

  The tall officer looked Mercer in the eye. “I want to know why. Why would they do it? We’re trying to save the world. Why would someone want to stop us. No one gains.”

  “It’s not about gain.” Mercer set his cup next to the coffeemaker and turned to the door. “I think it’s about maximizing loss.” He hadn’t forgotten that Tisa’s brother, Luc, hadn’t been at Rinpoche-La and was still at large.

  Mercer found his way to the deck. The air felt heavier than before and charged with static. Lightning licked along the distant Cumbre ridge, caused by the ash and gas erupting from the southern part of the island. Mercer watched strike after strike. On the far side of the ridge he had teams drilling into the mountain trying to stabilize the slope. The drill trucks were well grounded, but it was only a matter of time before one of the men was struck.

  With just one week left he considered evacuating them. The extra support pipes they were pinning into the rock wasn’t worth the risk of one or more being killed. He knew from the beginning that the whole scheme had been a long shot at best. His hopes had always lain with the nuke.

  But what if each pipe prevented one ton of debris from slamming into the ocean? And what if that one ton meant saving a family trapped on the Bahamas, or in the Belgian lowlands?

  On his numerous inspection tours he’d talked to enough of the roughnecks to know that they’d probably ignore his evacuation order anyway. He was pretty sure a few of the tougher ones would even continue to drill as the Cumbre Vieja split and slid down to the sea.

  He turned his back on the atmospheric discharges and looked to the east. Dawn was hours away, but the glow from the erupting Teneguia volcano painted the sky in oranges and flickering reds. The light danced like the mindless rage of an artillery barrage. Cracks of thunder added to the illusion.

  It would be ten o’clock on Saturday night back home, he realized. Harry would be slouched on his stool at Tiny’s. Paul would be in his cramped office getting tomorrow’s odds for his sports book. Doobie Lapoint would be behind the bar, the crisp towel over his shoulder the cleanest item in the place. Mercer desperately wanted to be a part of that normalcy, not here making decisions that affected the lives of millions of people.

  He pulled the phone from his pocket and started to dial the Arlingto
n number when he realized he didn’t have a signal. The lightning, he guessed, and turned back to appraise the island.

  Mercer had a second to realize the sky had been shredded—the burst of ash had already climbed to five thousand feet—before the wall of sound rocked the Petromax Angel and threw him off his feet.

  San Juan was erupting.

  Lit from below by its own fiery heart, the top of the volcano had been blown skyward, a seething, billowing column of ash and rock that spread as it rose, a bruised purple mushroom cloud that cleaved the darkness.

  The ship was a mile from shore, and the volcano was another eleven miles inland, and yet the shock wave slammed the Angel with hurricane force. Mercer clung to the rail as the wind ripped and tore at his precarious grip. He had to find cover. In moments the first ash and chunks of pumice would rain on the deck, yet he could not let go until the wave passed.

  His head was filled with the ceaseless bellow of the explosion, a sound that seemed to shake his flesh loose from his bones. When the concussion finally dissipated, he felt like a dried husk. His fingers were bent into claws from his grip on the metal stanchion.

  He staggered to his feet, his first concern for the crews working to pin the side of the mountain. He had to find a working phone or radio. He had to know how many he’d lost. At least five drill trucks were working the lower flank of San Juan. Fifty men had been within three miles of the blast, more when he considered the tanker drivers and relief workers, who rarely ventured far from their machines.

  A door into the superstructure flew open. Spirit Williams was backlit against the interior lights. Her T-shirt was cropped so high that the bottom of her breasts were visible, two heavy crescents of white skin. Her panties were little more than a triangle of silk. Mercer brushed past her without a glance.

  “What happened?” she cried and raced to keep pace.

  “It blew. The son-of-a-bitching mountain blew.” Crewmen and scientists tumbled from their cabins in various states of undress.