Congo

  Although it rose to an altitude of only 13,500 feet, Mauna Lea was the largest mountain in the world. Measured from its origin at the depths of the ocean floor, Mauna Loa had more than twice the cubic volume of Mount Everest; it was a unique and extraordinary geological formation. And Mauna Loa had long since become the most carefully studied volcano in history, having a permanent scientific observation station on its crater since 1928. It was also the most interfered-with volcano in history, since the lava that flowed down its slopes at three-year intervals had been diverted by everything from aerial bombers to local crews with shovels and sandbags.

  VULCAN intended to alter the course of a Mauna Loa eruption by “venting” the giant volcano, releasing the enormous quantities of molten magma by a series of timed, non-nuclear explosions detonated along fault lines in the shield. In October, 1978, VULCAN was carried out in secret, using navy helicopter teams experienced in detonating high-explosive resonant conic charges. The VULCAN project lasted two days; on the third day, the civilian Mauna Lea Volcanic Laboratory publicly announced that “the October eruption of Mauna Lea has been milder than anticipated, and no further eruptive episodes are expected.”

  PROJECT VULCAN was secret but Munro had heard all about it one drunken night around the campfire near Bangazi. And he remembered it now as Ross was planning a resonant explosive sequence in the region of a volcano in its eruptive phase. The basic tenet of VULCAN was that enormous, pent-up geological forces—whether the forces of an earthquake, or a volcano, or a Pacific typhoon—could be devastatingly unleashed by a relatively small energy trigger.

  Ross prepared to fire her conical explosives.

  “I think,” Munro said, “that you should try again to contact Houston.”

  “That’s not possible,” Ross said, supremely confident. “I’m required to decide on my own—and I’ve decided to assess the extent of diamond deposits in the hillsides now.”

  As the argument continued, Amy moved away. She picked up the detonating device lying alongside Ross’s pack. It was a tiny handheld device with six glowing LEDs, more than enough to fascinate Amy. She raised her fingers to push the buttons.

  Karen Ross looked over. “Oh God.”

  Munro turned. “Amy,” he said softly. “Amy, no. No. Amy no good.”

  Amy good gorilla Amy good.

  Amy held the detonating device in her hand. She was captivated by the winking LEDS. She glanced over at the humans.

  “No, Amy,” Munro said. He turned to Elliot. “Can’t you stop leer?”

  “Oh, what the hell,” Ross said. “Go ahead, Amy.”

  A series of rumbling explosions blasted gleaming diamond dust from the mine shafts, and then there was silence. “Well,” Ross said finally, “I hope you’re satisfied. It’s perfectly clear that such a minimal explosive charge could not affect the volcano. In the future you can leave the scientific aspects to me, and—”

  And then Mukenko rumbled, and the earth shook so hard that they were all knocked to the ground.

  4: ERTS Houston

  AT 1 A.M. HOUSTON TIME, R. B. TRAVIS FROWNED at the computer monitor in his office. He had just received the latest photosphere imagery from Kitt Peak Observatory, via GSFC telemetry. GSFC had kept him waiting all day fur the data, which was only one of several reasons why Travis was in a bad humor.

  The photospheric imagery was negative—the sphere of the sun appeared black on the screen, with a glowing white chain of sunspots. There were at least fifteen major sunspots across the sphere, one of which originated the massive solar flare that was making his life hell.

  For two days now, Travis had been sleeping at ERTS. The entire operation had gone to hell. ERTS had a team in northern Pakistan, not far from the troubled Afghan border, another in central Malaysia, in an area of Communist insurrection; and the Congo team, which was facing rebelling natives and some unknown group of gorilla-like creatures.

  Communications with all teams around the world had been cut off by the solar flare for more than twenty-four hours. Travis had been running computer simulations on all of them with six-hour updates. The results did not please him. The Pakistan team was probably all right, but would run six days over schedule and cost them an additional two hundred thousand dollars; the Malaysia team was in serious jeopardy; and the Congo team was classified CANNY—ERTS computer slang fur “can not estimate.” Travis had had two CANNY teams in the past—in the Amazon in 1976, and in Sri Lanka in 1978— and he had lost people from both groups.

  Things were going badly. Yet this latest GSFC was much better than the previous report. They had—it seemed— managed a brief transmission contact with the Congo several hours earlier, although there was no verification response from Ross. He wondered whether the team had received the warning or not. He stared at the black sphere with frustration.

  Richards, one of the main data programmers, stuck his head in the door. “I have something relevant to the CFS.”

  “Fire away,” Travis said. Any news relevant to the Congo Field Survey was of interest.

  “The South African seismological Station at the University of Jo’burg reports tremors initiating at twelve oh four P.M. local time. Estimated epicenter coordinates are consistent with Mount Mukenko in the Virunga chain. The tremors are multiple, running Richter five to eight.”

  “Any confirmation?” Travis asked.

  “Nairobi is the nearest station, and they’re computing a Richter six to nine, or a Morelli Nine, with heavy downfall of ejecta from the cone. They are also predicting that the LAC, the local atmospheric conditions, are conducive to severe electrical discharges.”

  Travis glanced at his watch. “Twelve oh four local time is nearly an hour ago,” he said. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  Richards said, “It didn’t come in from the African stations until now. I guess they figure it’s no big deal, another volcano.”

  Travis sighed. That was the trouble—volcanic activity

  was now recognized as a common phenomenon on the earth’s surface. Since 1965, the first year that global records were kept, there had been twenty-two major eruptions each year, roughly one eruption every two weeks.

  Outlying stations were in no hurry to report such “ordinary” occurrences—to delay was proof of fashionable boredom.

  “But they have problems,” Richards said. “With the satellites disrupted by the sunspots, everybody has to transmit surface cable. And I guess as far as they’re concerned, the northeast Congo is uninhabited.”

  Travis said, “How bad is a Morelli Nine?”

  Richards paused. “It’s pretty bad, Mr. Travis.”

  5. “Everything Was Moving”

  IN THE CONGO, EARTH MOVEMENT WAS RICHTER scale 8, a Moreili scale IX. At this severity, the earth shakes so badly a man has difficulty standing. There are lateral shifts in the earth and rifts open up; trees and even steel-frame buildings topple.

  For Elliot, Ross, and Munro, the five minutes following the onset of the eruption were a bizarre nightmare. Elliot recalled that “everything was moving. We were all literally knocked off our feet; we had to crawl on our hands and knees, like babies. Even after we got away from mine-shaft tunnels, the city swayed like a wobbling toy. It was quite a while—maybe half a minute—before the buildings began to collapse. Then everything came down at once: walls caving in, ceilings collapsing, big blocks of stone crashing down into the jungle. The trees were swaying too, and pretty soon they began falling over.”

  The noise of this collapse was incredible, and added to that was the sound from Mukenko. The volcano wasn’t rumbling anymore; they heard staccato explosions of lava blasting from the cone. These explosions produced shock waves; even when the earth was solid under their feet, they were knocked over without warning by blasts of hot air. “It was,” Elliot recalled, “just like being in the middle of a war.”

  Amy was panic-stricken. Grunting in terror, she leapt into Elliot’s arms—and promptly urinated on his clothes—as they began to run back toward th
e camp.

  A sharp tremor brought Ross to the ground. She picked herself up, and stumbled onward, acutely aware of the humidity and the dense ash and dust ejected by the volcano. Within minutes, the sky above them was dark as night, and the first flashes of lightning cracked through the boiling clouds. It had rained the night before; the jungle surrounding them was wet, the air supersaturated with moisture. In short, they had all the requisites for a lightning storm. Ross felt herself torn between the perverse desire to watch this unique theoretical phenomenon and the desire to run for her life.

  In a searing burst of blue-white light, the lightning storm struck. Bolts of electricity crackled all around them like rain; Ross later estimated there were two hundred bolts within the first minute—nearly three every second. The familiar shattering crack of lightning was not punctuation but a continuous sound, a mar like a waterfall. The booming thunder caused sharp ear pains, and the accompanying shock waves literally knocked them backward.

  Everything happened so fast that they had little chance to absorb sensations. Their ordinary expectations were turned upside down. One of the porters, Amburi, had come back toward the city to find them. They saw him standing in a clearing, waving them ahead, when a lightning bolt crashed up through a nearby tree into the sky. Ross had known that the lightning flash came after the invisible downward flow of electrons and actually ran upward from the ground to the clouds above. But to see it! The explosive flash lifted Amburi off his feet and tossed him through the air toward them; he scrambled to his feet, shouting hysterically in Swahili.

  All around them trees were cracking, splitting and hissing clouds of moisture as the lightning bolts shot upward through them. Ross later said, “The lightning was everywhere, the blinding flashes were continuous, with this terrible sizzling sound. That man [Amburi] was screaming and the next instant the lightning grounded through him. I was close enough to touch him but there was very little heat, just white light. He went rigid and there was this terrible smell as his whole body burst into flame, and he fell to the ground. Munro rolled on him to put out the fire but he was dead, and we ran on. There was no time to react; we kept falling down from the [Earthquake] tremors. Soon we were all half-blinded from the lightning. I remember hearing somebody screaming but I didn’t know who it was. I was sure we would all die.”

  Near camp, a gigantic tree crashed down before them, presenting an obstacle as broad and high as a three-story building. As they clambered through it, lightning sizzled through the damp branches, stripping off bark, glowing and scorching. Amy howled when a white bolt streaked across her hand as she gripped a wet branch. Immediately she dived to the ground, burying her head in the low foliage, refusing to move. Elliot had to drag her the remaining distance to the camp.

  Munro was the first to reach camp. He found Kahega trying to pack the tents for their departure, but it was impossible with the tremors and the lightning crashing down through the dark ashen sky. One Mylar tent burst into flames. They smelled the harsh burning plastic. The dish antenna, resting on the ground, was struck and split apart, sending metal fragments flying.

  “Leave!” Munro shouted. “Leave!”

  “Ndio mzee!” Kahega shouted, grabbing his pack hastily. He glanced back toward the others, and in that moment Elliot stumbled out of the black gloom with Amy clinging to his chest. He had injured his ankle and was limping slightly.

  Amy quickly dropped to the ground.

  “Leave!” Munro shouted.

  As Elliot moved on, Ross emerged from the darkness of the ashen atmosphere, coughing, bent double. The left side of her body was scorched and blackened, and the skin of her left hand was burned. She had been struck by Lightning, although she had no later memory of it. She pointed to her nose and throat, coughing. “Burns. . . hurts. . .”

  “It’s the gas,” Munro shouted. He put his arm around her and half-lifted her from her feet, carrying her away. “We have to get uphill!”

  An hour later, on higher ground, they had a final view of the city engulfed with smoke and ash. Farther up on the slopes of the volcano, they saw a line of trees burst into flames as an unseen dark wave of lava came sliding down the mountainside. They heard agonized bellows of pain from the gray gorillas on the hillside as hot lava rained down on them. As they watched, the foliage collapsed closer and closer to the city, until finally the city itself crumbled under a darkly descending cloud, and disappeared.

  The Lost City of Zinj was buried forever.

  Only then did Ross realize that her diamonds were buried forever as well.

  6. Nightmare

  THEY HAD NO FOOD, NO WATER, AND VERY LITTLE ammunition. They dragged themselves through the jungle, clothes burned and torn, faces haggard, exhausted. They did not speak to one another, but silently pressed on. Elliot said later they were “living through a nightmare.”

  The world through which they passed was grim and colorless. Sparkling white waterfalls and streams now ran black with soot, splashing into scummy pools of gray foam. The sky was dark gray, with occasional red flashes from the volcano. The very air became filmy gray; they coughed and stumbled through a world of black soot and ash.

  They were all covered with ash—their packs gritty on their backs, their faces grimy when they wiped them, their hair many shades darker. Their noses and eyes burned. There was nothing to do about it; they could only keep going.

  As Ross trudged through the dark air, she was aware of an ironic ending to her personal quest. Ross had long since acquired the expertise to tap into any ERTS data bank she wanted, including the one that held her own evaluation. She knew her assigned qualities by heart:

  YOUTHFUL-ARROGANT (probably) / TENUOUS HUMAN RAPPORT (she particularly resented that one) / DOMINEERING (maybe) INTELLECTUALLY ARROGANT (only natural) / INSENSITIVE (whatever that meant) / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT ANY COST(was that so bad?)

  And she knew her Late-stage conclusions. All that flop-over matrix garbage about parental figures and so on. And the last line of her report: SUBJECT MUST BE MONITORED IN LATE STAGE GOAL ORIENTED PROCEDURES.

  But none of that was relevant. She had gone after the diamonds only to be beaten by the worst volcanic eruption in Africa in a decade. Who could blame her for what had happened? It wasn’t her fault. She would prove that on her next expedition....

  Munro felt the frustration of a gambler who has placed every bet correctly but still loses. He had been correct to avoid the Euro-Japanese consortium; he had been correct to go with ERTS; and yet he was coming out empty-handed. Well, he reminded himself, feeling the diamonds in his pockets, not quite empty handed.

  Elliot was returning without photographs, videotapes, sound recordings, or the skeleton of a gray gorilla. Even his measurements had been lost. Without such proofs, he dared not claim a new species—in fact, he would be unwise even to discuss the possibility. A great opportunity had slipped away from him, and now, walking through the dark landscape, he had only a sense of the natural world gone mad:

  birds fell screeching from the sky, flopping at their feet, asphyxiated by the gases in the air above; bats skittered through the midday air; distant animals shrieked and howled. A leopard, fur burning on its hindquarters, ran past them at noon. Somewhere in the distance, elephants trumpeted with alarm.

  They were trudging lost souls in a grim sooty world that seemed like a description of hell; perpetual fire and darkness, where tormented souls screamed in agony. And behind them Mukenko spat cinders and glowing rain. At one point, they were engulfed in a shower of red-hot embers that sizzled as they struck the damp canopy overhead, then turned the wet ground underfoot smoky, burning holes in their clothing, scorching their skin, setting hair smoldering as they danced in pain and finally sought shelter beneath tall trees, huddled together, awaiting the end of the fiery rain from the skies.

  Munro planned from the first moments of the eruption to head directly for the wrecked C-130 transport, which would afford them shelter and supplies. He estimated they would reach the aircraft in two
hours. In fact, six hours passed before the gigantic ash-covered hulk of the plane emerged from the murky afternoon darkness.

  One reason it had taken them so long to move away from Mukenko was that they were obliged to avoid General Muguru and his troops. Whenever they came across jeep tracks, Munro led them farther west, into the depths of the jungle.

  “He’s not a fallow you want to meet,” Munro said. “And neither are his boys. And they’d think nothing of cutting your liver out and eating it raw.”

  Dark ash on wings and fuselage made the giant transport look as if it had crashed in black snow. Off one bent wing, a kind of waterfall of ash hissed over the metal down to the ground. Far in the distance, they heard the soft beating of Kigani drums, and thumping mortar from Muguru’s troops.

  Otherwise it was ominously quiet.

  Munro waited in the forest beyond the wreckage, watching the airplane. Ross took the opportunity to try to transmit on the computer, continuously brushing ash from the video screen, but she could not reach Houston.

  Finally Munro signaled, and they all began to move forward. Amy, panicked, tugged at Munro’s sleeve. No go, she signed. People there.

  Munro frowned at her, glanced at Elliot. Elliot pointed to the airplane. Moments later, there was a crash, and two white-painted Kigani warriors emerged from the aircraft, onto the high wing. They were carrying cases of whiskey and arguing about how to get them down to the jungle floor below. After a moment, five more Kigani appeared beneath the wing, and the cases were passed to them. The two men above jumped down, and the group moved off.

  Munro looked at Amy and smiled.

  Amy good gorilla, she signed.