Deep Fire Rising - v4 (48 page)

“Who are you again?” Mercer spat.

“Professor Adam Littell of MIT.”

“And your specialty, Professor?”

“Fluid dynamics with an emphasis on wave propagation,” he replied archly.

“We all know about the waves if we can’t stop the slide so we don’t need your services. Kindly turn off your camera.”

“Excuse me?”

“Admiral Lasko, can you cut him off?” No sooner had Mercer made the request than the portion of his computer monitor showing the professor went dark.

“He does raise a good point,” Lasko said.

“That’s for the politicians, Admiral. Let them worry about it. I suspect when the UN’s secretary-general realizes a fifty-foot wall of water is going to wash away his shiny skyscraper he’ll see that the right thing gets done.”

“Provided it’s the right thing,” Briana said.

“That’s why we’re talking.” Mercer drained his coffee and poured more from a sterling carafe. “Okay, other ideas to minimize a slip. Has anyone thought about trying to blast the western side of the Cumbre ridge into strips? Or what about pinning the top layer of material to the underlying rock to hold it in place?”

His questions were met with blank stares.

“Someone start an equipment list.” Ira nodded to an assistant off camera. “We need as many rotary drill trucks as we can get to the island, machines capable of boring at least a thousand feet.”

“Once you drill the holes, what do you use to pin the rock together?” Les Donnelley asked.

“The drill pipe itself. We’ll leave everything down hole and move to the next site with new bits and new drill string. That means we need drill mud, pipe, as many diamond bits as we can lay our hands on and enough support personnel to keep crews working around the clock.”

“And your idea about cutting the slope into strips?” Ira prompted.

“Expert explosives people, liquid explosives, blast mats, detonators. The works. I’ll call Bill Janson at Blastech in Houston. I’ve worked with him a few times at the open pit mines out west. He’s the best surface blaster in the business. Admiral Lasko, you’ll have to organize transport. What’s the airport at La Palma?”

“Not big enough” Donnelley said. “The Canaries’ international airport is on the nearby island of Tenerife.”

Once Mercer got started the orders came crisp and concise. “We’ll fly equipment to Tenerife, then either take it to La Palma by boat or get the airport there extended. Probably be a good idea to plan on both. Gas masks, a field hospital, thermal suits capable of taking at least five hundred degrees, fifty thousand gallons of diesel fuel to start. Fresh water because the natural springs on La Palma are either going to dry up, boil over, or turn to sulfuric acid. We need boats, security personnel—”

“What about food?” a consultant from the U.S. Geologic Survey asked.

“There should be enough left behind by the residents for us to scavenge,” Mercer said without pause. “We’ll need it in a week or so. Right now I’m giving the top priorities. Admiral Lasko, where is the
Sea Surveyor
?”

“She was just relieved by the navy’s submersible tender
Endeavor
and her two minisubs. I think she’s in Guam.”

“Contact the ship. I want Charlie Williams and another diver on a plane with their NewtSuits.” Mercer thought for a moment and added, “We might need a larger submersible too. Get one from one of the oil companies operating in the North Sea or maybe the French. They have a couple that might be closer to the Canaries.”

“What else?”

“Portable industrial refrigeration systems, burn specialists, firefighting helicopters, cylinders of liquid oxygen, scuba gear, bulldozers — Caterpillar D-7s or larger — a case of Grey Goose vodka and a couple of bottles of Jamaica Gold lime juice, and of course the nukes.”

“What type and how many?”

His ascension to the head of the project came so smoothly and so naturally that it suddenly hit Mercer that he was being given control over nuclear bombs and had every intention of setting off one or more. The thought held his attention for only a moment. “I don’t know yet, but put the wheels in motion to get them.”

He went on uninterrupted for five minutes, naming anything he thought they had the remotest chance of needing. When he was done, the others added items they thought would be useful until it became clear they were talking about a mobilization on the scale of going to war. And that’s exactly how Mercer saw it. This was a war against Mother Nature herself. Win or lose, he was putting everything he had into the fight.

The conversation came to a close as the sleek jet was on final approach to Al-Udeid air base in Qatar. Mercer closed the laptop and glanced at Tisa. She was awake.

“I’ve been listening to you.” Her eyes and voice were soft from sleep. “You really think we have a chance?”

“A slim one,” Mercer conceded. “It comes down to logistics and our ability to find an underwater vent that goes deep enough into the volcano for us to collapse the eastern face.”

“What happens if you succeed?”

“What do you mean?”

She sat up and sipped from his cup of cold coffee. The bitter taste did more to wake her than the caffeine. “Won’t there be a tidal wave if the eastern part of the mountain crashes into the sea?”

“Yes and no,” Mercer said. “There will be a wave, but nowhere near the size of the mega-tsunami if the western slope collapses. The danger there is one huge slab of rock, about five hundred cubic kilometers, hitting the water at one time. That energy is what creates the big wave. If we blow out the eastern side of the San Juan volcano, we can reduce the internal pressure trying to loosen that slab. I’m sure someone’s modeling for it as we speak, but the waves from the nuclear blast will dissipate rather than maintain a solid front. I bet the worst won’t be more than a dozen feet when it hits Africa. Given that area is sparsely populated we have more than enough time to evacuate the coastline.”

He stopped talking.

The way Tisa looked at him, hearing but not listening, entranced by his voice rather than interested in the details, made Mercer believe even more that they could pull it off. Her steady, trusting gaze filled him in a way he’d never experienced. The obstacles, or at least his fear of them, retreated as her eyes wove their spell around him. Mercer felt — no, he corrected himself, she made him feel — capable of doing anything.

He moved closer so their mouths met. Their eyes remained open, searching and finding what they both longed for. Even as the plane made contact with the runway and the engines shrieked to slow it, the spell endured.

W
hile several of the other islands of the Canary chain had paid the price for succumbing to tourist dollars, La Palma had remained virtually untouched. Partially it was because the people didn’t particularly relish the idea of their home being overrun, but mostly it was the relatively young age of the island in terms of geology. The Atlantic swells that battered La Palma hadn’t yet carved the towering cliffs into the pristine beaches so coveted by European vacationers.

Lashed by constant winds and chilled by ocean currents, La Palma had remained rugged and sparsely populated with a little more than eighty thousand inhabitants. The Cumbre ridge and the twelve-mile-wide Caldera de Taburiente cut the island into distinct segments. The northern part was covered in forests of Canary pines and tree heather, while in the south only hearty grasses and cultivated grapes grew from the volcanic soil.

At its highest point, the seventy-eight-hundred-foot Roque de los Muchachos, stands a cluster of observatories, silvered domes housing some of the most powerful telescopes in Europe. Far from smog and light pollution, La Palma made an ideal place to observe the heavens.

That was until the earth began to stir. And even the massive concrete foundations under the observatories couldn’t dampen the earthquakes that made the entire island shiver.

In the two weeks since his arrival, Mercer had logged some eighty hours crisscrossing the island in various helicopters. The chopper he was currently riding, a navy Seahawk off the amphibious assault ship
Belleau Wood
, thundered over the harbor of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz de La Palma, or S/C, as the locals called it. Half a dozen cargo ships waited at anchor for their chance to unload equipment for the effort to prevent the slide, and then carry islanders to Tenerife, where charted jetliners were ready to take them to Madrid and settlement camps being built in the center of Spain.

Farther out to sea, American and Spanish warships maintained a tight quarantine to prevent the flotilla of hired yachts from approaching. Despite the dangers, the eruptions had become the latest “must see” event for the wealthy elite. For now, the military was allowing them to approach to within twenty-five miles of the island. In a few days, the cordon would be pushed out to fifty and the airport at Tenerife would be closed to private aircraft, ending the stream of journalist-laden planes that buzzed the island.

From his vantage, Mercer could see the security personnel manning checkpoints on the roads leading out of the city. Each guard had a high-speed Palm Pilot that continuously updated destinations for the trucks, heavy equipment and fuel tankers that poured off the cargo ships. This was to ensure that no work crews were idled because they ran out of diesel or parts or any of the hundreds of items necessary for the project. Already the army of drill trucks working along the western slope of the Cumbre ridge had gone through six miles’ worth of twenty-foot lengths of drill pipe and enough lubricating mud to fill a small lake.

“There it is,” the navy pilot said over the intercom, pointing to a lone ship several miles south of town.

The ship was the one-hundred-foot
Petromax Angel
, a sturdy service boat belonging to Petromax Oil. With her blunt bows and extreme width in the beam, she wasn’t an attractive vessel, but she’d been designed to maintain the oil rigs and production platforms in the near-Arctic conditions of the North Sea. She personified function over form and came equipped with twelve-thousand-shaft horsepower, dynamic positioning systems, a submersible, saturation diving chambers, and two ROVs. The
Angel
also came with the compliments of the company’s president, Aggie Johnston, a woman out of Mercer’s past who had donated the boat despite, or maybe because of, his involvement. He didn’t know which.

It took Mercer several moments to spot the ship. Her hull was painted vivid red, her deck was clear green and her superstructure was covered in safety yellow. Even these garish colors were obscured by the ash and smoke that filled the air and wreaked havoc with all the machines in operation around the island. Each morning everyone on La Palma woke to the daily ritual of shaking out their clothes no matter how tightly sealed their bedrooms.

The sky was a constant overcast of putrid greens and grays. The satellite pictures Mercer had seen showed the sickly plume spreading eastward from the prehistoric ax-shaped island. No matter how often he brushed his teeth or how much water he drank, Mercer’s mouth always felt gritty. The only place safe from the ash was upwind in a helicopter, and even there the air was heavy with the stench of sulfur.

The pilot brought the Seahawk over the
Petromax Angel
’s fantail, flaring the helo over a clear spot on the deck. The navy chopper was too large to land on the workboat’s pad so he hovered just above the deck. Mercer opened the copilot’s door, tossed his duffel to the metal deck and leapt the four feet. He paused as a crewman slid open the rear door and helped Tisa make the jump. Mercer caught her and the two remained crouched until the Seahawk peeled away.

Charlie Williams and Jim McKenzie were the first to greet him. They’d boarded the
Angel
at Cherbourg, France, along with their gear, which had been flown in from Guam on an air force C-5 Galaxy. It was the first he’d seen of the two since the dive on the USS
Smithback
.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for calling us in,” Jim greeted, shaking hands.

“It all depends if we succeed.”

“He’s only speaking for himself,” C.W. said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. Talk about your opportunity of a lifetime.”

“I bet even your wife approves of this one.”

“Only after she conned Jim into letting her come.”

That surprised Mercer, but he let it pass. Her presence here didn’t matter. He introduced Tisa to the two marine scientists and asked, “You guys have everything you need?”

“What we didn’t bring,” McKenzie said, trying to light his cigar against the wind, “the folks here on the
Angel
have. But with an entire cargo jet to fill, we stripped about everything but the plumbing out of the
Surveyor
.”

“And the second diver? Alan Jervis?”

C.W.’s typical jovial expression faded. “He won’t be diving again. Kind of delayed shock or something. The night after you left he woke up screaming. The docs had to dope him up just so he could sleep. He’s still in a hospital in Guam.”

Mercer was shaken. Jervis had seemed fine the few extra days Mercer had spent on the
Sea Surveyor
. “I had no idea.”

“Neither did we,” Jim agreed, puffing on his Cuban. “But it does happen.”

“You’re okay, aren’t you?” Mercer asked C.W.

The lanky Californian grinned. “Taking risks is why they pay us. Seriously, I’m fine. Spirit and I talked a lot about it. I think what happened down there scared her more than it scared me. That’s why she insisted on coming. We have a backup diver. Scott Glass. He’s damned good.”

“And your team is settled here on the
Angel
? No problems with the regular crew?”

Charlie dismissed the notion. “Are you kidding? Underwater technology is one of the few areas where academia leads industry in having the latest and greatest. Their guys would love to get their hands on my suits. As we sailed down from France we already decided to use
Conseil
, the ROV we brought, rather than the two owned by Petromax. We finished the software download this morning.”