The Yellowstone Event: Book 1: Fire in the Sky

by Darrell Maloney

  Tony said nothing, for fear the old man would think he was crazy.

  But he didn’t have to say anything. The old man could see it in his eyes.

  Finally, he decided on some words he thought might be noncommittal.

  “Everything will turn to ashes or dust eventually.”

  “I know that, son. But that doesn’t mean I have to rush it.

  “The way I figure it, this is a nice desk with a lot of life left in it. There’s no reason to hurry its demise. So I’ll use it and then leave it to someone I can trust, with the understanding they won’t destroy it as long as they’re alive. Hopefully it’ll live for hundreds of years before some old wretch thinks it’s time to destroy it. And I’ll be long gone by then.”

  It wasn’t as though they were wasting their time debating theological theories. For as they spoke Bud was putting the finishing touches on several pages of bond paperwork. He finally finished and hit the print key on his computer, causing the ancient IBM ink-jet printer next to his desk to come to life.

  “You don’t throw anything away, do you?”

  “Oh, now you’re starting to sound like my ex-wife.”

  Chapter 45

  Bud had him read everything before he signed it.

  “I want to make damn sure you agree to my terms before you commit to them. Especially the part where it says I get to come and collect your sorry butt if you fail to show up for your hearings.”

  “What if I don’t agree to your terms?”

  “Simple. I call the cops, tell them I’m revoking your bond, and they can take you back to jail, where you can call another bondsman.”

  “Would you really do that?”

  “Wouldn’t have any choice. The law says I have to do it if you refuse to sign your paperwork.”

  He said it with a smile, but Tony got the sense Bud wouldn’t enjoy doing it.

  “It’s a good thing I like you, Bud,” Tony said as he signed his name to the last page. “And it’s a good thing I don’t want to go back to jail.”

  “Good thing for you or for me?”

  “Actually for both of us.”

  Bud burned Tony a copy, and as it was printing he took the nameplate off his desk which read:

  BUD AVERY

  Bondsman

  He opened up a desk drawer and placed the nameplate inside it, replacing it with another one:

  BUD AVERY

  Private Investigator

  He smiled and said, “Okay. Let’s move on to the next subject. You said something on the phone about your wife missing. You said you had reason to believe that the federal government took her.

  “I’ll tell you up front, I almost dismissed that part of the conversation. I thought you were a crackpot and I’m not partial to conspiracy theories.”

  “And what caused you to change your mind?”

  “Several things, really. First of all, you remind me of my grandson. We had a very special relationship. We were best buddies. He died in a boating accident several years ago. I miss him a lot.

  “Also, I get the sense you’re not as nutty as I first believed. And to be honest, this whole ‘government took my wife’ thing intrigues me. I’d like to hear more about it.”

  “And you can help me find her? You’re really a private investigator?”

  “Yep. Licensed and everything.”

  “How much is this gonna cost me?”

  “Nothing. At least for the initial consultation. After that I’ll decide if it’s worth pursuing. If I think it is, I’ll quote you an hourly rate. If I think it’s pure hogwash, I’ll pass. Fair enough?”

  “I suppose.”

  “So, tell me all about it. How did she disappear, and why do you think the government is involved?”

  Tony hesitated.

  “I… I’m afraid I can’t tell you everything. Just the basics.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Hannah and I were working on something secret. She told me I couldn’t tell anybody. That if I did, bad things might happen.”

  “And you don’t think your wife disappearing is already a bad thing? What could possibly happen that would be worse?”

  He had a point.

  “Okay….”

  “Start from the beginning.”

  “Hannah is a scientist. She’s way smarter than I’ll ever be. She’s a geologist, and a damn good one. So good that when she graduated from college several companies went after her.

  “The company she worked for got a government contract, from the United States Geological Survey. They had to go into Yellowstone National Park with a whole bunch of equipment and take a lot of readings.”

  “What kind of readings?”

  “All kinds of mumbo jumbo that I didn’t really understand. Things like soil temperatures at certain depths. Sulfur levels at certain depths. Water pressure at certain depths. They did a lot of drilling and took a lot of core samples. And they had all kinds of equipment that kept spitting out graphs and numbers and all kinds of stuff.

  “It was stuff that made absolutely no sense at all to me. Just numbers and squiggly lines on graph paper and stuff like that.

  “But to Hannah, it was like a whole other language. She understood what it meant, and it seemed to scare her to death.”

  “Okay. Don’t keep me in suspense. What exactly did it mean?”

  “It meant there’s a volcano simmering just below the surface of the park. A great big volcano.”

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yes. Seriously. And not only that, but that scientists have known about it for a very long time. Dating back to the 1920s, even. That’s why there’s all those geysers there. The geysers are nature’s way of letting off steam for the volcano. Kind of a pressure relief valve. That’s how they discovered the volcano. Scientists back in the 1920s went to figure out what the geysers were all about and discovered the volcano beneath it.”

  Bud rubbed his chin and pondered Tony’s words.

  “I still don’t get why the government would kidnap your wife. If they wanted to keep the whole volcano thing quiet, they wouldn’t have sent her company out there to begin with. And if the volcano was discovered in the last century I’m quite sure it’s common knowledge by now.”

  “The volcano is, yes. I never heard about it, but it’s all over the internet if you care to read up on it. Just Google ‘Yellowstone Calderon’ and it’ll tell you all about it.”

  “So what makes you think the government had anything to do with her disappearance?”

  “It wasn’t the volcano she discovered. It was information about the volcano.”

  “Exactly what kind of information?”

  “She discovered that the volcano is about to blow.”

  Chapter 47

  He had Bud’s full attention.

  So much so that when the phone rang Bud made no effort to answer it, or even acknowledge it was ringing.

  “Go on.”

  “She said the last time the volcano erupted was about 300,000 years ago. She said scientists have known since its discovery that it was still active, and that it would erupt again at some point.

  “That’s why the government tasked the U.S. Geological Survey to check it every ten years, so they could keep an eye on it.

  “They’ve been doing it since the 1950s. And Hannah said the data never indicated a major problem before. Until now. Now the data indicates that pressure within the volcano is increasing at an alarming rate.

  “And she said when it gets to a certain point, the volcano will blow.”

  “And when it blows, what will happen? Exactly how big is the volcano, Tony?”

  “Big enough to take twenty to thirty percent of the United States with it.”

  Bud’s jaw dropped. He was stunned.

  And although his mouth stopped working, his mind was running in high gear, trying to wrap itself around Tony’s words.

  He got up and walked across the room, to a full sized refrigerator.

  He open
ed the fridge and removed two bottles of water, then walked back to his desk and handed one to Tony.

  He chose his words carefully.

  “And you’re absolutely sure about the data pointing to that conclusion?”

  “I wasn’t sure about anything. It was all gibberish to me, just a bunch of numbers. But Hannah was absolutely sure. She studied all that stuff in college. And she was totally freaked out.

  “She did show me the numbers. Although I didn’t really understand what they meant, it was easy to see they had gone up significantly. She also showed me the graphs, and I could see the squiggly lines that were pretty much level until the 1970s, when they started to rise. And then in the last two readings they’d shot up dramatically. One of them went almost straight up.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Tony. I have two concerns. First of all, everyone can misinterpret things. Also, equipment can malfunction. I’m hoping, and I hope you’re hoping as well, that she’s just mistaken.

  “But what concerns me even more than that is the whole concept of the federal government kidnapping her. It seems to me that if this is true they owe her a great debt of gratitude so they can address the problem and fix it while there’s still time.”

  “That’s just it, Bud. I asked Hannah how they would go about deactivating the volcano, or whatever it’s called.

  “She said there’s no way to stop it from erupting if that’s what it wants to do. No way to reduce the pressure. That any attempts to vent the pressure would cause it to blow.

  “She said it’s like blowing up a balloon. If you keep blowing air into it, you know it’s going to explode at some point. But if you poke it with a pin to keep it from exploding, it explodes anyway.”

  “But why on earth would the government kidnap her?”

  “She wasn’t sure. She thought it was to shut her up.”

  “Shut her up why?”

  “So they wouldn’t have to do anything. They being the government. She said the entire country would panic and freak out. They’d probably riot and insist the government do something… anything, to fix the problem.

  “She said there’s nothing they can do. And that they probably figure it’s easier to just let it happen and to deal with it afterwards.”

  Bud let out a low whistle.

  “That’s easy for them to say. They all live in Washington or close to it. They wouldn’t be affected.”

  “Exactly.”

  For half a minute neither man said anything. Then Tony caught his breath and continued.

  “But there’s more.”

  Chapter 48

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “Her friend Gwendoline works for the same company, out of an office in Phoenix. She was the first one to interpret the data and to decide it pointed to the volcano erupting very soon.

  “She’s the one who asked Hannah to double check her findings. She said she was hoping there was an error in the data somewhere, and she was hoping she was wrong.

  “Right after they talked Gwendoline went missing. So we went on line and did some research. We found that many of the people who did previous surveys over the last thirty years or so have also gone missing. Or have died under mysterious circumstances.”

  “But why would somebody who did a survey thirty years ago be a threat to the government when it was only recently determined the volcano’s about to blow?”

  “Hannah said even thirty years ago some of the indicators started creeping up. Enough to alert some scientists who were paying attention it could be pointing to a problem.

  “She thought those were the scientists who’d gone missing or who died. The ones who were worried by what they saw and who might have raised the alarm.”

  Bud pondered Tony’s words. They certainly sounded plausible. And Bud knew only too well that the United States government couldn’t be trusted.

  “One thing doesn’t make sense to me, Tony. If the government wanted so much to hide this information, why did they continue to contract out the surveys every ten years? Why not just take over the surveys themselves?”

  “I asked Hannah the very same question.

  “She said she thought that most of the USGS didn’t know about the Yellowstone Calderon. And that if they did, they’d pose the same threat that the contractors did. Maybe even more so, because the USGS scientists are protected from retaliation by whistleblower laws. So they might be more willing to go to the press, thinking their jobs were safe but never even thinking their lives might be in danger.

  “She thinks that only the higher ups in the USGS know about the increased activity of the Yellowstone Caldera. And that they didn’t want to have to kidnap or kill their own scientists. It was better for them to continue to contract out the surveys every ten years. That way they could still get the data. But if any of the scientists who actually did the survey looked like they might cause problems it would be much easier to make them disappear than their own employees.”

  “Tell me about the night Hannah disappeared.”

  “There’s not a lot to tell, really. I went out to get her some ice cream and she was going to take a bubble bath. When I got back to the room she was gone. So were the computers we were doing our research on.”

  “And that’s when you called the police?”

  “Yes. They ridiculed me. They told me Hannah left on her own and said they weren’t going to search for her because she’d come back when she was good and ready. I think the government got to them and told them what to do.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “When the government goes rogue they try not to involve local law enforcement any more than they have to. It creates more loose ends for them to tie up. It increases the chances of the local cops raising their own red flag. Then they’d have to deal with them as well as the contractors.

  “The local cops are lazy. And they’re not very smart. And they have a bad habit of bullying out-of-towners. I think that’s a more likely explanation for the way they handled your case.”

  “Then why were they waiting for me to leave, and why did they arrest me on bogus DUI charges?”

  “To put more money in the city coffers. It’s how they pay their own salaries.

  “Anything else you need to tell me?”

  Tony hesitated.

  Bud noticed.

  “Don’t hold anything back on me now, Tony. If we’re going to get to the bottom of this, I need to know everything you know.”

  “They think they got everything when they took the computers and some disks we had sitting on the desk.

  “But I have a backup copy of the data on a thumb drive.”

  “Atta boy. Is that the only extra copy you have?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you have it on you?”

  “No. It’s hidden in my car. If you can take me to my car, out on the road where they pulled me over, I can show it to you.”

  “Your car won’t be on the road anymore. It’ll be at the city impound lot.”

  “But why? I pulled it off onto the shoulder. It wasn’t blocking traffic or anything.”

  “It’s another way the city gets money from people passing through, son. Another way they pay their policemen’s salaries and the city’s electric bill.

  “Any time you get arrested for a traffic offense, they get you for fines and penalties and court costs. Then when you get out you have to go to the impound yard to pick up your car. You have to pay a hundred and eighty bucks for towing charges and eighty dollars a day for storage fees.”

  “That’s not fair! What if I refuse to pay?”

  “Then they declare your car city property and auction it off. Either way they get you.”

  “How do they get away with this?”

  “Small town America, Tony. People say the big cities like Chicago and New York City are corrupt. But they’ve got nothing on small towns. They really don’t.”

  “So where do we go from here?�
��

  “Depends on what you mean by that. If you’re talking about physically, we’re gonna leave here and go check the highway where you got picked up. Just on the off chance they haven’t got around to towing it in yet.

  “Or in case the dumb cops forgot to call it in the night you were arrested.

  “In all likelihood it’ll be long gone. And we’ll go to the impound yard, where you’ll be nice and respectful and as courteous as you would be in church on a Sunday morning.”

  “Why? Why can’t I call them a bunch of thieves and curse them out?”

  “Because the guy who runs the impound lot is the brother of the big cop who arrested you. And if you give him any lip he’ll call his brother and have you arrested a second time for causing a public disturbance.”

  Tony just looked at him in stunned silence.

  “So no matter how much it hurts, you have to be all ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ to him. Okay?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good boy.”

  “If you’re talking about where do we go with your wife’s case, you’ll come with me to Washington. We’ll pay the USGS a visit and try to strong-arm them. If they admit to having Hannah we’ll demand they let her loose or else.

  “They’ll get all smug and say ‘or else what?’

  “And we’ll tell them we’re ready and willing to stand on the rooftops and yell loud to expose their little cover-up.

  “That likely won’t impress them much. But if we also threaten to go on television to expose them to the world, they might play ball.”

  “What if they threaten to kidnap us too?”

  “Then we’ll show them we have all the cards. We’ll tell them there are other copies of the data we spread around as insurance.”

  “All right! That sounds like a great plan!”

  “I wouldn’t get my hopes up, though.”

  “Why not?”