The Yellowstone Brief

by Larry LaVoie

  Heather had never seen Joshua this passionate. He certainly seemed as if he believed in what they were doing. “I’ve never pretended to be a scientist, but wouldn’t a dramatic reversal of global warming harm mankind?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but any time man has experimented with the environment, it has ended in disaster. The Yellowstone Brief is loaded with speculation. First they are predicting Yellowstone will erupt. No one knows that for certain. That in itself is the first flaw in the report. By making the report classified, Top Secret, they are preventing the scientific community from commenting on its validity. It’s pure speculation. The science for predicting volcanic eruptions is not at all developed. Secondly, the thought they can tunnel into the magma pool and prevent an eruption is preposterous. The volcano they tunneled into in Mexico diverted the lava into a valley 40 miles long and that area won’t be habitable for decades, if ever. Man should not mess with Mother Nature. If a volcano erupts, it’s for the good of the planet.”

  Heather took a sip of her wine. She was seeing a dangerous side of Joshua. He was sounding like the radical environmentalist he had been pretending to be for so many years. Was it for real? Had he become a convert to his own cause as well as Al-Qaida? Up until now, she had only seen a person who was organizing protests because there was money in it. If Joshua was as committed to stopping the Yellowstone tunneling as he now professed, he had become as dangerous as Andy Rhane. It sounded like he was teaming up with Andy on this cause. She was aware Operation Greenback had turned from a white collar crime investigation into a full-blown terrorist investigation, but she was confused about what part she was supposed to be playing. Sure, she had to determine where the poison gas was, and how it got into the country, but she had no way of getting the information out, even if she found out. “What are you going to do?”

  “You haven’t eaten anything. Better finish your dinner. Tomorrow is going to be a big day.”

  Heather smelled a bite of potatoes and gravy and opted for the string beans instead. “My dad told me about an event he attended in the Seventies, called Woodstock. I’ll bet it was a lot like this with the music, of course.”

  Joshua chuckled. “You think this is a gathering of hippies, don’t you? Saving our environment is just a joke to you! Someday, when the history books look back on this event, they will see we saved the earth from total destruction. Our government has gone too far this time. Peaceful protests won’t stop this from happening. When the government gets it this wrong, no simple change in administration will keep it from destroying itself. Green Keepers is going to save the planet and will go down on the right side of history. I need your commitment. Will you help us?”

  Heather looked Joshua in the eyes. “What can I do to help?”

  “Good.” Joshua looked into her eyes. “You’re right, I didn’t bring you out here to keep the books. You’ve got a good analytical mind. You’re good at tracking things as well as book work. I have a very important job for you that your bookkeeping skills will be well suited for. There is only one requirement.”

  “What’s that?” Heather asked.

  “I need your word that you will be completely loyal. Will you give me your word?”

  “Yes. I’m behind you 100%. Why would you think otherwise?”

  “Then you won’t mind if we install this little device in you.” He held up a tiny bullet-shaped piece of metal slightly larger than the tip of a ball point pen.

  “What’s that?” Heather asked, but she already knew it was a miniature GPS tracking device. The FBI had used them in covert operations when they didn’t trust the people they were working with. There was no way she could refuse the device and survive to tell about it.

  “It’s a tracking device. It allows us to keep tabs on everyone crucial to the operation. If we need to rescue anyone, we need to be able to find them quickly. Look, I have one right here.” He pointed behind his left shoulder.

  “You’re going to put that under my skin?”

  “It happens so fast, you won’t realize what’s happening. Think of it as a vaccination.” He removed a walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke into it. “Andy, send in the doctor with Heather’s chip.”

  The doctor was a tall, balding man with oversized eyeglasses partially hiding bushy black eyebrows. His facial features were hidden by a thick, black beard. Heather watched as he removed a gun from his leather doctor’s bag. The doctor’s eyes were dark brown and his skin olive. Middle Eastern descent, she thought. She recognized his accent as Iranian. Where did he come from? she wondered. She hadn’t seen him before; in fact, many of the people in the food line and milling around the site appeared to be more than student dropouts. Many had Middle Eastern features. A surprising number of the young men wore beards, and many women were wearing scarves, although, they were not covering their faces.

  “You’ll feel a little pinch,” the doctor said, “ but it will be over in a second. Please bare your shoulder for me.”

  Heather pulled her jacket and shirt down, exposing her left shoulder. The doctor put on latex gloves, tore open an iodine swab, and wiped a spot on Heather’s shoulder. He loaded a capsule into the pistol and cocked it. She felt the chill of the iodine and then the metal muzzle on her shoulder. She gritted her teeth as he pulled the trigger. “Ouch!” Heather protested. She put her hand to the spot where the projectile had entered and felt a small lump under the skin. Her fingers came back bloody.

  The doctor handed her a cotton pad. “You can wipe up the little bit of blood with this. Think of it as an initiation. Now you are one of us.” The doctor was grinning. “Her number is 986,” he said to Joshua. “She is the last one.”

  “Good,” Joshua said, as he watched the doctor exit the motorhome. He then turned back to Heather. “Now, I am able to speak freely on why you are to accompany me on this mission.”

  Chapter 24

  August 24th, Yellowstone National Park

  In the front of the room, now designated Homeland Security Headquarters, Trick and David studied a satellite image of Yellowstone Park. The 80-inch monitor showed a real-time image which they could zoom in and out. The detail of the image was incredible. To demonstrate, the corporal with the remote zoomed in on the building they were in and focused on a soldier standing by the front entrance smoking a cigarette. He continued to zoom in until they could read the name on the soldier’s uniform. Valdez. David could remember seeing the man earlier in the chow line.

  “Big brother is really watching,” Trick said, taking the controller from the corporal. “We should all feel a lot more secure, because of this technology,” he said sarcastically.

  “Before this is over, I’ll bet we’ll be glad this technology exists,” David said. “Let’s see if we can use it to find a tunneling site.”

  “Rugged country,” David said. “They want to drain a magma pool the size of Lake Erie into thousands of miles of pine trees, lakes and rivers. What can go wrong?” The corner of his mouth formed a crooked grin. Of course he was being facetious.

  “I could use a stiff drink,” Trick said. “The only up side to this assignment is we will be the first to know when we’re going to die.”

  “There is a science to this,” David said, in a more serious tone. “We need to find an area where the tunneling can enter the magma pool at an angle which will minimize the height of the ash cloud. If we can keep it from rising to the ionosphere we can mitigate the overall damage to the country.”

  “And the world,” Trick added. He switched the image over to thermal imaging. It showed the entire Yellowstone Caldera, an area approximately 50 miles long and 35 miles wide, as much hotter than the surrounding mountains. The image was glowing with varying degrees of red and purple. As he zoomed in on the caldera, the Mallard Lake Dome and the Sour Creek Dome were glowing bright red. He looked over at David shaking his head. “Look at the size of that hot spot. You sound like this is possible. I say we split this hemisphere, grab Tanya and the three of us head for New
Zealand. I hear the trout fishing is terrific. If there’s any place on earth that will escape the aftermath of an eruption, that’s our best bet.”

  David didn’t disagree. If the volcano was allowed to erupt, it was certain that the northern hemisphere would be in perpetual darkness for many years. The best case scenario, in the event of an eruption, had glaciers moving down from the north as far south as Chicago, Detroit, and New York City on the East Coast and as far down as San Francisco on the West Coast. Most of Europe, Russia and northern China would be covered in perpetual ice. A nuclear winter didn’t began to describe the devastation. For most governments, the outcome was beyond comprehension. If he hadn’t seen the tunneling in Mexico, he would have taken up Trick on his offer. Right now, New Zealand or Australia seemed like a much better bet than being in Yellowstone or anywhere in the United States.

  For the next two hours David and Trick hovered over maps, zooming in on likely tunneling sites and dismissing them. Finally, obviously frustrated, David placed his finger on a spot on the map. “Here! There are plenty of routes for the lava to flow down and away from the park. The valleys are nearly deserted below and there are fewer trees to go up in flames.”

  Trick looked at the map on the table, picked it up in his hands and walked over to the monitor with the satellite image of the area. “There’s not much room to stage the equipment. How the hell can they get that much equipment into that remote area? How far can these machines tunnel in a day? They will have to bore over twenty miles to make that site work.” He was shaking his head. “How can you dismiss the possibility that this thing might blow up, like a bottle of champagne that has been shaken up? The lava from this system is infused with gas under tremendous pressure, making it more likely to explode, than flow out of a tunnel.”

  David wiped his sweating forehead with his hand. “We’ve been pouring over these maps for hours. There isn’t any perfect place. Right now the volcano wants to blow up, not out. I agree with you, but it’s still better for it to blow sideways, than up into the prevailing winds.” He went back to the map. “What if we bore into the Mallard Lake Dome at an angle and let the lava drain into the caldera acting as its own reservoir.”

  Trick was not buying it. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “Puncturing into the magma pool will cause a catastrophic explosion. The rapid relief of pressure will release the gases and the whole plan could backfire, literally.” Trick was shaking his head. “When the explosion hits the mountains, it will be diverted up into the atmosphere defeating the purpose for the tunnel. Yellowstone Park will cease to exist. There’s got to be a better plan.”

  “Maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong.” David had new energy in his voice. “We’ve been looking at tunneling from inside Yellowstone Caldera. What if we went outside the caldera and tapped into the magma pool outside the park?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Trick said. “We’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle. Are you sure these machines can bore several miles a day?”

  “That’s what they tell me.” David took the controller from Trick and brought up an image on the monitor. It showed the thermal hot spots in different detail from the infrared pictures. “This is a map of the magma pool under Mallard Lake Dome. The computer image was generated by measuring the speed of seismic vibrations as they travel through the ground after an earthquake. The vibrations travel at different speeds through solid ground and magma. The thousands of earthquakes around the park these past weeks have allowed us to get pretty good detail of the size and depth of the magma pool.”

  Trick picked up a laser pointer and walked closer to the monitor. “This is the edge of the caldera. Everything outside of this line has potential as a tunneling site.”

  “Look at this,” David said, growing even more excited. “Zoom in on the Madison Plateau. It’s no more than 10 or 15 miles from Mallard Lake dome and it’s on the western boundary of the Continental Divide.” David circled the area with a laser pointer.

  Trick walked up to the screen. “Can you overlay a topographical map of this area?”

  David brought up a real-time satellite image of the park and zoomed in on the area. As they brought the image in, it was clear, even though it was a plateau, the land was still very rugged. Snow lay heavy on the ground with only a few spots showing bare ground. Those spots were littered with downed trees and debris from winter storms. He moved outside the circle Trick had drawn with his pointer and rested his pointer on a spot half a mile north. “What do you think?”

  Trick thought out loud. “It’s about 10 miles west-southwest of Old Faithful. Pretty rough terrain. No access roads anywhere to be seen. The only access that I see is the Bechler River Trail and it’s a mile or two away. We’d have to tunnel through the Continental Divide, is that even possible?”

  “They tunneled through the Alps and under the English Channel,” David reminded him.

  “You realize, if you do this, it will drain massive amounts of lava into Eastern Idaho? Who’s to say that the smoke from the massive forest fire it creates will not be just as devastating as an eruption?”

  David was growing frustrated with Trick playing the devil’s advocate. “It’s obvious we can’t answer all the questions about the environmental impact. We need to pick the right spot to tunnel. Will this work?”

  Trick put his hand to his forehead and massaged it in deep thought. “We know almost nothing about the rock strata we’ll be tunneling through. From what I could learn we’ll be digging through granite and basalt. The best we can do is get the tunneling experts in here and lay it out for them.”

  David nodded in agreement. “They have a team of geologists and engineers to answer our questions. The Magma pool is 3 miles down and about 8 miles from this spot. From what I saw in Mexico, the machines melt a layer of rock as they move along. The melted rock is squeezed into the cracks and crevasses, making a smooth lining for the tunnel and leaving almost no residue behind. It’s up to the Corps of Engineers to get the equipment up here. I understand they have been staging equipment for the better part of a month. They just need to know where to set it up.”

  “Let’s get them in here,” Trick said. “The sooner we turn this over to them the better I’m going to feel.”

  An hour later, as teams of geologists and tunneling experts were entering the room, Trick began to have second thoughts. He rolled his eyes and leaned back in a swivel chair. “Are you sure you want to present this? There are over thirty people who have to approve the site. Why the hell weren’t they in here with us anyway?”

  “They weren’t in here,” David said, “because I told Colonel Mathews that we work best alone, and would come up with a site for him to consider within eight hours. He seems to think I’m some kind of genius.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If this goes wrong, we won’t have to worry about it.” He let out a sigh and hung his head. “Nobody will.”

  “Best we keep a positive attitude,” Trick said. “If they think we’re not sure of ourselves, they’ll start second guessing our recommendation.”

  “Spoken like a true diplomat,” David said. “When are you running for congress?”

  “I’ve got no idea how the Army Corps of Engineers do things,” Trick said, ignoring David’s comment. “They build bridges in war zones. As impossible as this seems to me, maybe this will be a piece of cake for them.”

  Engineers and Army personnel started gathering around.

  “Please take a seat,” David said, stepping up to the podium. He leaned into the microphone, “We’ve been asked to get this finished today and the shadows are growing long outside.” The satellite image of Yellowstone was displayed on the giant screen behind him. He left the stage and walked over to Trick. “Join me on stage, I’m not doing this alone.”

  The building shook and the windows rattled, as if to tell them the meeting needed to start.

  David tapped the mic and quieted the room. “I’ve met most of you, but forgive me if I do
n’t remember all your names.” He introduced Trick and showed the team the sight they had chosen for tunneling. He explained their logic and opened the floor for questions.

  Colonel Mathews introduced his staff and asked his Chief Engineer, Donald Evers, to brief the room on how they were going to proceed.

  Evers walked up to the podium. He used a laser pointer and a Power Point presentation as he spoke. “Aircraft will sweep the area between Mallard Lake Dome and the tunneling site with ground penetrating radar to get a general idea of the type of ground we are dealing with. The road building crew will start immediately to survey a route for building a road to the tunneling site. The road will provide access for ground contact GPR which will give a three-dimensional map of the rock formations up to several hundred meters deep, along with locations of any faults, and water content along the proposed tunneling route.

  “Because of the altitude and the rough terrain, heavy-lift blimps called Dolphins will be used to transport heavy equipment to the site.” He showed a picture of a giant rectangular blimp nearly the size of a football field. It had a huge piece of equipment dangling from its belly.

  David nudged Trick. “That’s one of the tunneling machines.”

  Evers continued, “The road will be used for transporting personnel and small GPR equipment. Some helicopters will be on site for emergency use. A base camp will be placed near the tunnel site. Most personnel will be housed there.”

  “How long to build a road?” David asked.

  “It’s pretty rough terrain, but I would not expect it to take more than a week. From the way the ground is shaking, let me ask you a question, Dr. Wayne. Do we have that much time?”