by Linda Jacobs
“You bet.” Feeling some butterflies at being alone with him after last night’s debacle, she blurted, “Have you seen Wyatt?”
Nick sobered. “He’s right behind me, seeing to Thunder.” He went to the fire and put his back to her, holding his hands toward the flames.
A moment later Wyatt paused in the doorway and took in the cooking pot. His eyes sought hers. “Thanks. I wasn’t looking forward to cooking.”
“You’re welcome,” she murmured. “I’m glad you’re back safe.”
“In addition to bringing the data drives from the west, I found traces of H2S all along the Saddle Valley.” Wyatt took a few long strides and intimidated Nick into making room for him to get warm.
Ignoring Wyatt, Nick looked at Kyle. “Did you see the snow has melted all along the fault?”
She nodded. “Based on your experience with live volcanoes, what do you think’s going on here?”
He frowned. “Volcanoes can throw off a lot more gas and heat than this and not hurt anybody …” he trailed off.
“But?” Wyatt asked.
“In 1993,” Nick said, “at Galeras in southern Colombia, volcanologists took a fieldtrip to the crater. They believed it was safe because the fumaroles were quiet and the earth tremors calm.” In a grim voice, he finished, “It erupted without warning. Killed nine and injured six.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SEPTEMBER 27
The next afternoon Kyle kept checking the seismic traces. Nick’s warning about Galeras only served to renew her suspicion that the quiet after the New Moon’s storm might be the calm before the next one.
She rose and went out onto the porch to stretch her legs. This sitting around waiting for something to happen was driving her crazy to be out in the field.
At just past two, she saw Nick walking up from the valley.
“You’re back early,” she called when he was within earshot.
“Thought I’d beat the cowboy’s time.” His light-hearted banter was back, a sign she interpreted to mean he wasn’t going to speak of the other night, at least not in a serious manner. “Where is he, by the way?” Something in Nick’s expression said he was turning the tables on her for asking where Wyatt was the afternoon before.
“Should be just down the way, putting a new cable on seismic station four.”
He nodded toward her boots at the doorway. “Get your shoes on.”
“What for?”
“Thought we’d check for gas readings in that lava cave I told you about. If you bring your climbing rope you can help us get in and out.”
The last thing she wanted was to go into a cave. “Don’t I need to stay here and watch the signals?” she said, though only moments before she’d been eager for an excursion.
“It’s not far up to the cave mouth, and I got to thinking. Gas readings from a lava tube could be another valuable early-warning tool.” She heard that he didn’t mind risking their lives for information.
Well, weren’t they all gambling by simply being here? If something happened as swiftly as it had at Galeras, there would be no time to even call for a helicopter.
Nick took her silence for assent. “Did I see your climbing rope in the stable?”
“It’s there on a nail,” she replied evenly.
He headed out for the small log building, but once alone, she hesitated. The mere idea of total darkness made her breath come shallow. What if they got underground and got lost?
When Nick came back, she was still sitting before the computer.
“Daylight’s wasting,” he said.
“I don’t…”
Nick grinned. “You don’t like the dark … I know.” With a flourish, he dipped into two of his pockets and brought out flashlights. “Extra backup.” He nodded toward the bunkroom. “Bring some of yours.”
Moving quickly before she could change her mind, she geared up, putting extra lights in her pack as he suggested. Then she grabbed her jacket and put on her boots. If she got to the cave and couldn’t manage it, she’d tell him she should stay outside to be sure the rope didn’t come untied or something.
“It’s not far,” Nick said. “We’ll hike the spine and then drop down on the east side.”
The trail was rugged and so steep that they had to climb more than halfway to the summit before the mountaintop came into view. When Nick came to a sudden stop, Kyle trod on his heel.
“Sorry.”
Nick didn’t answer as he stared up the slope.
She looked. Above the tree line, up on the rusty looking cinder cone, steam poured from hundreds of places. The brisk breeze drew eddies and currents in the smoke-like vapors.
Nick slung off his pack, pulled out his map and marked the broad field of vents onto it. “They may be just water vapor, but without any silica tubes to collect a gas sample, we don’t know.”
Kyle’s heart started to beat faster. According to studies in Central America and the Kamchatka Peninsula, there was a definite order to the gases released by rising magma. First water, then carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and finally hydrogen chloride was the last to be emitted before an eruption.
“There may be HCl in the gas.” He confirmed what she’d been thinking.
Though Kyle half-expected him to want to walk up to and sniff around the steamers, he turned to her. “I had a clear view of the summit from down the valley a few hours ago.”
“No steam then?”
“Not a trace.” He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Let’s go back and check the seismic.”
At the cabin, Nick sat on the porch steps and drew a pack of Marlboros from his coat pocket. When she sat down beside him to remove her boots, she caught the slightly sweet aroma of cured tobacco.
“I thought you only smoked when you drank.”
He shook his head as he cupped his hands and used a lighter. “I also smoke when the shit hits … although this situation may soon call for a drink as well.”
Something in his tone suggested he was thinking of them trying to find the bottom of a brandy bottle. Her cheeks flushed.
Though they needed to go inside and check the seismic, they sat a few moments in silence. Their shoulders did not touch, but Kyle imagined she could feel warmth from his.
And a moment later, “Hey, here’s Wyatt,” Nick said unnecessarily.
Wyatt reined in Thunder at the corral, dismounted, and unloaded three data drives from the seismic stations. He stopped and looked into the pen where Strawberry was trotting in fits and starts, her mane tossing. Even Gray looked wall-eyed.
With a scratch of his head, Wyatt brought the drives up and set them on the porch.
“Horses are spooked,” he said with a glare at Nick’s cigarette. “Maybe a bear.”
He went back toward the barn.
Rather than follow Wyatt into bear territory, Nick rose and lifted two of the drives to take inside. Kyle followed with the third.
She started up the laptop and hooked one of the drives to it for downloading. It was from the closest portable station to the peak, with data that should cover the time when the steamers had erupted.
Nick pulled out his cigarettes and lit another with the leisurely style he lent to the smallest action. The smoke made her nostrils flare.
“For God’s sake,” she snapped. “Take that outside.”
Nick stubbed it out on the wooden tabletop, leaving a circlet of char. “There.” The cabin door opened again and he said, “See a bear, cowboy?”
As Wyatt fanned his hand at the leftover smoke, the cabin floor leaped. The computer bounced up and smashed back onto the tabletop. Pots and pans clattered to the floor.
“Guess there wasn’t a bear,” Nick said cheerfully. “Just the animal earthquake alarm.”
Kyle grabbed the table’s scarred pine boards, her heart rate in overdrive.
She’d asked for this, through every geology class, fieldtrip, or conference with Stanton in which she had insisted earthquake seismology was
right for her. The thumps and bumps went on for less than ten seconds and then subsided. Wyatt went back out, probably to calm the horses again.
“Nick,” she said. “Give me a cigarette.”
He tapped one out with maddening slowness, making a production of placing it between her lips and lighting it. The first drag stung.
Fifteen minutes later, staring at the seismic records, Kyle inhaled the smoke from her third cigarette. It was just as she’d imagined, back in the groove as though she’d never left.
“Take it easy,” Nick cautioned. “You’re not used to it.”
He was right. The nicotine had gone to her head as surely as the brandy had the other night. A little lightheaded, she looked at her laptop screen though a soft focus.
Wyatt came in and sloughed off his coat. He removed his boots with a glance at Nick, who was still wearing his muddy ones.
“Horses okay?” Nick asked to Kyle’s surprise.
“They settled after the shake.”
She hoped their calm meant there would be no more action this evening.
Wyatt sniffed and made a distasteful face. “Come on, Darden, take the cigarette outside.”
Nick straightened from where he was laying logs for the evening fire and spread his empty hands. Caught with a Marlboro halfway from her mouth to the saucer she had used as an ashtray, Kyle said, “I’ll put it out.” She was getting nauseous, anyway.
Wyatt dropped his boots with a thud. “I’ve never seen you smoke.”
“I quit.” She ground out the butt. “Ten years ago.”
He looked from her to Nick and back. “I don’t think I understand you anymore.”
Nick’s head was down as he placed a match to kindling. Kyle’s face flamed.
She gave her attention to a first look at the new seismic patterns.
Her hand went to her throat. “Guys.”
Both men must have heard her urgency for they crossed the boards in record time. She pointed to the screen, where instead of the usual random pattern of noise, or even a normal earthquake signature that peaked and dampened over time … here was a constant oscillating sine wave. Kyle had seen it in books and in sample signals from volcanoes.
“Harmonic tremors,” Nick confirmed with that secret edge of excitement she’d come to recognize in his voice. “Magma’s definitely on the move.”
Kyle could feel the pulse in her neck. “Isn’t there some other explanation?”
Wyatt frowned. “It wouldn’t matter even if there were. We’ve got gas seeps that kill wildlife, steam vents …” He ticked them on his fingers. “A big earthquake along a rejuvenated fault.”
“What do you think is next?” Kyle asked Nick.
“What’s next?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I heard that in the Philippines from the brass at Clark Air Force Base before Pinatubo went off. At Mount St. Helens, the USGS got Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray to evacuate people up to eight miles from the crater. After nearly two months of nothing, local authorities let them go back to their cabins at Spirit Lake to retrieve belongings. Narrowly missed getting them all killed.”
Nick paced, his booted feet jarring the boards. Bits of mud flew off the lug soles. “At Long Valley Caldera in northern California, all the signs were there. Harmonic tremors clearly showed magma heading for the surface. I staked my reputation on an eruption that’s yet to happen. And when local business and real estate values plummeted, guess who got blamed?”
Wyatt lay in his bunk listening to Nick’s snoring and Kyle’s even respirations. After the New Moon quake, they had put the beds back together the same as before, with her on the top shelf above Nick and Wyatt across. She was no closer to Nick, but it seemed so.
Kyle’s candle lantern cast flickering shadows on the dark logs.
Not many people her age were afraid of the dark, but he’d decided she was. At the Institute, she always waited for somebody else to traverse the shadows to the seismograph lab’s light switch. Casual, the way she dragged her feet a little, or turned back to check on something in her office. As for her fear of earthquakes, he recalled how high strung she became whenever the seismic alarm went off. In a rush to check out the signals, she stared at the screen so tensely that sometimes he didn’t even think she saw it.
It all seemed odd in a woman he’d always thought was tough as asbestos.
As Wyatt’s gut told him to get off the mountain, he thought it must be worse on Kyle.
The rough bark ceiling hung a few feet above Kyle’s head in her wavering light. She lay and thought of the dead deer, small rodents, and birds overcome by gas. And the fault that ran through the lowest point of Saddle Valley, just a short way downslope. Deadly fumes could even now be pouring from fissures, filling the local topographic bowl, and rising in darkness toward the horse stable and cabin.
Knowing she’d never sleep, Kyle unzipped her sleeping bag and climbed down. She was careful not to step on Nick, who continued to snore. Through her socks, she felt the chill in the floorboards.
With her lantern in one hand, she padded into the front room. There, where the brighter light would not disturb Nick and Wyatt, she turned on a powerful torch and slipped on her jacket and cold boots. With a gas detector in hand, she went out into the night.
Her breath steamed and her nose stung from the chill, making her realize how much residual warmth there was from the coals on the hearth.
Upon nearing the stable and hearing the horses soft whickering, she paused to open the top half of the door and give all three a handful of feed pellets. Bold Thunder kept trying to shove Strawberry and Gray aside.
“Go on, you big galoot. Let the others have some, too.”
Moving on, she checked and rechecked the detector, trying to protect it from the strong east wind, all the way to the low point where the fault line was. There, for the first time, there was a concentration of a few parts per million, barely enough to measure. Yet, as fast as things were changing on the mountain, she knew it could be only a short time before toxic levels were released.
She started back up the hill on swift feet. The moon was noticeably larger this evening, reminding her of Brock Hobart’s tidal theories. With a 6.1 logged on the new moon, she began to wonder what the next full moon might portend.
Back in the cabin, she considered waking Wyatt and Nick, but with the wind dispersing the gas, it was safe enough to let them sleep while she thought things through.
As expedition leader, it was her call on whether to pull out. If they left, they wouldn’t have access to information from the portable seismic network, but over half of the stations now relayed signals to the Institute computers.
She turned off the torch and curled up on the worn sofa in the candle lantern’s glow. A pack of Nick’s cigarettes lay on a wooden spool that served as end table, along with his lighter. The woman who’d been smoke-free for ten years waged a brief war with old habit and lost once again.
Fire at her fingertips in the shadowy room reminded her of finding Stanton alone in the seismic lab before his stroke. She wondered what he would think if faced with the information they had gathered. The harmonic waves, gas seeps, and heat flow with steam vents popping up like pressure cookers were all signs that historically pointed to eruptions.
Except when they had not.
Back in 1975, an evacuation order was issued the day before a magnitude 7.3 quake struck Haicheng in China. The precursors included changes in land elevation and ground water levels, foreshocks, and reports of strange animal behavior. It was believed that many thousands of people were saved by the evacuation. On the other hand, only a year later, China suffered a magnitude 7.6 in Tangshan. Without any warning, 250,000 people died.
In California, the Parkfield area had suffered large earthquakes in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966. USGS and other scientists regularly monitored the faults and had made a prediction of a magnitude 6.0 between 1988 and 1992.
It didn’t happen.
At Mount St. Helens, the pu
blic had been officially warned that the mountain might erupt within a few months.
It hadn’t taken that long.
Her head spinning with the conflicting stories, she took another drag on the Marlboro. It didn’t please her.
Wyatt appeared in the bunkroom doorway. His feet looked pale against black fleece long johns like hers. His chest was bare. “Can’t sleep?” he asked softly.
“No.” Knowing his aversion to smoke, she stubbed out her cigarette.
He went back into the dark bunkroom. Upon his return, he wore a pullover and carried his sleeping bag that he used to cover them both. In the light of the single candle, his face looked tanned and gaunt while a trace of midnight shadow stubbled his jaw.
“I can’t stop running scenarios.” He ruffled his sleep-tossed hair. “Guess there’s something to be said for surfing with no fear.” He nodded toward the bunkroom. As if on cue, Nick snuffled in his sleep.
“I’ve been thinking about what we should do,” she said.
They sat for a moment in silence.
“Me, too,” Wyatt admitted. “If Nick’s right about magma pushing up the fault or under the peak, this is no ordinary situation where strain will be released. Each larger quake might buy a little time before the next, but who knows?”
“I went out a while ago and detected gas below the cabin. It’s blowing away right now, but…” She envisioned red-hot melted rock pushing its relentless way toward the surface. Upon reaching a narrow conduit like the Saddle Valley fault, it would build heat and pressure until a fissure broke through to release lava …
Or the mountain could explode, blasting down the forest and crushing the cabin walls.
As if the earth could read her thoughts, a jolt shook the cabin.
At the shock, Kyle’s own walls, the ones she had built inside her, broke down. Fragments of memory formed into sharp shards. Incoherent shades of black and gray were accompanied by a shower of sound and earth.
Her fists clenched on the sleeping bag and she closed her eyes. Pain stabbed at her, the awful sense of loss, flashing her back again to memories so ancient they should have been long buried.