Deep Fire Rising m-6

by Jack Du Brul

  He heard it the same way again and again. Leper Alma. Leper Alma.

  Forcing himself to watch her vanish time and again was worse than the emptiness he’d woken to for the past three days. His heart beat furiously, and yet his hands maintained their unhurried rhythm as he scoured rust from the length of railroad track.

  It had been too dark to see her mouth. Even from a few yards away her face had been a pale oval struggling just above the surface. Leper Alma. She’d bobbed in the water as she’d said those words, he recalled now. A wave had passed close by, raising her head slightly, but also covering the lower part of her face as she spoke.

  It hadn’t been leper. The second syllable had been her clearing seawater from her mouth. Lep Alma. He was close and his hands began to work faster, the dull metal between his fingers growing bright under the chemical and physical assault.

  The solution came and he dropped the polish-soaked rag on his desk and rolled back in his chair. She’d either said Le Palma or La Palma. He turned to the computer, unconcerned that his fingers left smudges on the keyboard as he typed the names into the search engine.

  The computer turned up tens of thousands of matches, but just fifteen minutes after starting in on the first entry he was on the phone to a geologist in Cambridge, England, named Robert Wright. Mercer didn’t know Wright, but the Ph.D. was mentioned prominently on several Web pages about La Palma. After an hour-long conversation, he made a frantic call to Admiral Lasko.

  “Ira, it’s Mercer. We’ve been searching in the wrong place. I misheard what Tisa said. It wasn’t Leper Alma. She said La Palma.”

  “We know,” Lasko said.

  “Huh? How?”

  “I put the NSA’s cryptoanalysis computers on it. Their report was sitting on my desk yesterday morning. They tore apart the words phonetically and came up with a couple thousand matches. The most obvious was La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, volcanic but dormant.”

  “Not according to the scientist who’s spent his entire career studying the place. I just got off the phone with him.”

  “You’re talking about Dr. Wright? I’ve already had people go over his research and frankly we’re not that impressed. On more than one occasion he’s been accused of falsifying data to fit his model.”

  “Are you willing to take the chance he’s wrong?”

  “We’re taking a wait-and-see attitude right now.”

  “Ira, listen to me. This whole thing has been Tisa’s way of warning me about a La Palma eruption. I’m certain of it. Obviously she did it far enough in advance so we could do something about it. But I don’t think we have time for your wait-and-see attitude. If you’ve read some of what Dr. Wright predicted, you understand the consequences.”

  “Give me a little credit, will you? A team’s already been sent to the island to monitor the situation. They arrive today. Another group with equipment more sophisticated than anything Wright has seen should get there tomorrow. We’re on it, Mercer, but right now there’s no need to panic.”

  “Have you told the president?”

  “I passed it up to Security Advisor Kleinschmidt. I don’t know if he took it any further.”

  “We have to find her, Ira.”

  “Who? Tisa?”

  “That mountain’s going to blow no matter what your teams tell you. She’s the only person who knows when. We need her, damn it.” Mercer slowed, taking a breath to calm himself. “I agree that monitoring the island is the best course right now, but we have to talk with Tisa before it’s too late.”

  “Even if we wanted her, we don’t have a clue where she is.”

  “I’m working on that,” Mercer countered quickly. “If I pinpoint where I think she is, will you authorize a rescue?”

  “I… I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Then that’s all I’ll ask.” Mercer cut the connection and felt better than he had in days. He was able to put the appalling consequences of a La Palma eruption out of his mind only because he was thinking about Tisa. She had the answers he needed, and Ira was beginning to box himself into a corner to allow Mercer to find her.

  With most of his luggage spread from Canada to Vegas to the bottom of the Aegean Sea, Mercer went to the second-floor guest room where he kept an old set. From the bar, Harry saw him lugging the bags upstairs. “What are you doing?”

  “Packing.”

  “For where?”

  “Africa, at the least. China if I get lucky.”

  “You gotta talk to your travel agent. Your itineraries are all screwed up.”

  Once he had both bags packed, he returned to the bar with the box full of sixteen-by-sixteen-inch satellite pictures from the imaging company in California. He’d requested they be stacked chronologically so that the first ten pictures showed the same spot on the earth over the past five years. The next set was an adjacent segment of ground over the same period of time. Dividing the file box in half, Mercer handed Harry one of the two magnifying glasses he’d brought up from his office. He turned up the bar lights and explained how the pictures were organized.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Look for clouds that don’t move.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tisa told me the valley of Rinpoche-La is fed by a geothermal hot spring. There should be waste heat from the spring that will show up as steam. If each picture of the same spot shows a cloud, we’ve got a possible hit.”

  “Not a bad idea. How many pictures?”

  “Two thousand. And if we don’t find her in this batch, I’ll order more.”

  Harry bent to the first picture, muttering. “And they say chivalry is dead. You do remember that Romeo only killed himself over Juliet. He didn’t force his best friend to go blind.”

  Mercer couldn’t suppress a smile. “Less discussion, more dissection.”

  They gave up late that afternoon. Neither was trained in the arcane art of photo interpretation and the pictures didn’t have anywhere near the resolution Mercer expected. In the images shot from a hundred miles above the earth, glaciers looked like the dense, stationary clouds they were searching for. In five hours they’d located thirty-five potential locations for Rinpoche-La and had covered barely a quarter of the pictures Mercer had bought.

  They did end up going to Tiny’s after having some Chinese food delivered for dinner. As for Harry’s threat to get Mercer blind drunk, they had only two drinks apiece. Both had headaches from squinting at pictures all day and weren’t in the mood to add to the pain.

  Mercer took Drag out for the last time just before midnight and climbed the spiral stairs to bed. By the time he finished brushing his teeth and using the urinal tucked in a corner of the master bathroom, the basset was spread across both pillows. Mercer didn’t have the heart to disturb the old dog so he resigned himself to the corner of one pillow he’d been left and settled in for another round of nightmares.

  The phone rang at two fifteen. Mercer was wide awake before the end of the first shrill chime. He knew who was calling and what he’d hear. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying for a moment to retain the simplicity he was about to lose. True, the call might bring him closer to Tisa, but it would also introduce him to a world on the brink of Armageddon. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said life as he knew it was about to end.

  On the second ring he answered by saying, “It’s already happening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Ira sounded like he hadn’t been to sleep yet. “A deep strata seismograph indicates La Palma’s becoming alive.”

  “How long until a car gets here?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe less.”

  “Where am I headed?”

  “The White House.”

  “See you there.” Mercer cut the connection.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  The rain that had been falling for days finally abated, leaving the streets clean and fresh. Halos of mist draped the streetlamps. At this hour there was no traffic or pedestrians. Even the city’s h
omeless were hibernating.

  The Cadillac carrying Mercer swung into the back entrance of the Executive Mansion and braked at a guardhouse. After vetting the driver and passing a mirror under the chassis to search for bombs, the guard asked Mercer for identification and checked his name against an electronic clipboard. The car was waved through.

  Ira was waiting for Mercer at the West Wing entrance wearing a suit but no tie. They shook hands silently and the admiral led him into the building. They moved along dim corridors and passed several quiet offices before coming to a closed door.

  “The president doesn’t know the nature of this briefing,” Ira informed him. “Kleinschmidt called him thirty minutes ago and just said there’s a crisis.”

  “Who else is in there?” Mercer asked.

  “Admiral Morrison.” C. Thomas Morrison was the charismatic chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the uniformed leader of the United States military, and possibly the next occupant of the Oval Office. “Paul Barnes of the CIA and Dick Henna from the FBI.”

  “I haven’t seen Dick in a long time,” Mercer remarked. They’d been friends for several years but their busy schedules had taken a toll on the relationship.

  “This isn’t a social call,” Ira reminded.

  Mercer nodded grimly.

  Ira knocked and waited for an aide to open the heavy door. This was the Cabinet Room, a long space dominated by a massive conference table. The president sat at his traditional seat at the center of the table sporting a polo shirt and twenty hours of beard. John Kleinschmidt, the national security advisor and Ira’s direct supervisor, was just settling in at the president’s right. Paul Barnes was seated to his left. Unlike the others, he’d taken the time to don a fresh suit and tie. Even Admiral Morrison was out of uniform. Mercer and Barnes had butted heads on several occasions and their mutual dislike was evident in the single glance they afforded each other.

  Ira took the chair opposite the president and indicated Mercer was to sit next to him. Dick Henna, the bulky director of the FBI, gave Mercer a friendly nod. Someone handed Mercer a mug of coffee and stepped aside when he declined the offer of cream.

  “I’m sure the esteemed members of the Fourth Estate are wondering about this late-night meeting, and quite frankly so am I.” The president had the rare ability of making a mild rebuke sound friendly. He spread his large hands on the polished table. “Ira, you want to tell me what we’re doing here at this god-awful hour?”

  “Mr. President, I believe you’ve met Dr. Philip Mercer, a member of my staff.”

  “On several occasions,” the president said with an easy smile. “I recall telling him after Hawaii nearly seceded from the union that one day he’d be working for me. How’s that Jaguar of yours?”

  “Fine, sir.” Mercer was astounded the president knew what kind of car he drove and waited only a second for an explanation.

  “You probably didn’t know that I paid to replace the one that got destroyed during the Hawaii crisis. It was easier for me to cut the check than to bury the expense where some forensic accountant from the GAO could find it.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “It was a small price to pay for what you did for this country.” The chief executive turned serious. “And since you’re here again, I suspect you’re about to do my administration another favor.”

  “If it’s not too late.”

  The president turned his startling blue eyes to Ira. “Okay, tell me what’s going on.”

  Ira didn’t clear his throat or shuffle papers or any of the normal delaying tactics people used when they’re about to dole out bad news. He shot straight ahead. “Through an intelligence source Mercer has been cultivating we learned of a potential volcanic eruption on an island in the Canaries called La Palma. On my order, a team from the U.S. Geologic Survey has been sent there, and about two hours ago they confirmed that the island may be in the first stages of an eruption.”

  “Pardon me for a second,” the president interjected. “But why do we care?”

  Ira tapped Mercer. “You’re the geologist. Want to explain it?”

  Though Mercer hadn’t heard of La Palma until a few hours earlier, he spoke with the confidence of an expert. “For those that don’t know them, the Canaries are a group of islands in the Atlantic about a hundred miles off Morocco’s west coast. They’re Spanish owned and are considered a vacation getaway for snowbound Europeans. La Palma is the westernmost of the islands and, in terms of geology, the youngest and the most volcanically active. The latest eruption was in 1971, but the one that concerns us occurred in 1949.

  “That year, the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which dominates the southern third of the island, erupted over the course of several days. This in itself isn’t unusual. She generally pops every two hundred years or so. What made the ’forty-nine eruption unusual is the four-meter-wide crack that appeared along the center of the island. The western flank of the island, a chunk of rock about a hundred twenty cubic kilometers in size, slipped a few feet toward the sea and stopped.”

  “Why did it stop?” the president asked.

  “Because Mother Nature wanted us to dodge a bullet, sir. There are two geologic features that make La Palma particularly dangerous. The first is that the composition of the island’s soils allows for it to build up in very steep slopes. In fact La Palma is one of the steepest islands in the world. By rights, the slab of rock should have kept sliding down into the water. We got incredibly lucky. But maybe not for long.

  “About ten years ago, a British scientist named Robert Wright floated the idea that a significant eruption could further loosen that slab of rock, allowing it to crack through completely and crash into the ocean. Such an event would produce a catastrophic wave, a phenomenon called a mega-tsunami. The supposition garnered a few doomsday headlines when he published his research, but no government took the idea seriously and certainly no large-scale analyses have taken place.”

  “What is a mega-tsunami?” asked the Joint Chiefs chairman.

  “Though commonly called tidal waves, a tsunami has nothing to do with tides. Generally they’re caused by undersea earthquakes and their size is limited by the amount of crustal displacement, which is fortunate because rock can only take so much strain before it snaps. That’s why we’ll never experience an earthquake much above eight-point-six. Most geologic faults slip long before they contain enough energy to cause a quake of even magnitude seven. Therefore an undersea earthquake will cause a tsunami of corresponding size. If a fault drops twenty feet, the wave will top out around twenty feet.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.” This came from the caustic director of the CIA, Paul Barnes.

  Mercer rounded on him, not bothering to keep the anger from his voice. “Tell that to the three thousand residents of Papua, New Guinea, who were killed by such a wave in 1998.” He turned his attention back to Morrison but kept an eye on the president. “In contrast, a mega-tsunami is caused by a rockslide, and the only limit to the size of the wave is the amount of debris that hits the water. Petroleum geologists working in Alaska in the 1950s found evidence of such a wave in Letuya Bay. Ringing the bay was a line where the old-growth forests inexplicably ended. It was as if some force had ripped out every tree up to about five hundred fifty feet above sea level.”

  “Five hundred fifty feet?”

  “That’s the height of the wave created when a huge chunk of granite sheered away from a cliff and hit the bay.”

  “That’s impossible,” Barnes opined.

  Mercer shifted his gaze to the president. “Three years later a group of fishermen were caught in a tsunami more than a hundred feet tall in the same area. Only a handful survived.”

  The president looked grave. “And you’re saying that another eruption in the Canaries will cause such a mega-tsunami?”

  Mercer shook his head. “The chunk of granite that created the wave in Alaska weighed a couple thousand tons. If La Palma lets go we’re talking half a trillion tons of rock. That’
s an energy pulse equal to the total U.S. power consumption over six months.” That fact had come from a research team in Switzerland with verification from several computer modelers.

  The men around the table paused, reflected on the enormity of what Mercer described.

  Dick Henna cut the silence by clearing his throat and asking, “You said that two things make La Palma particularly dangerous. One was how steep the island is. What’s the other?”

  Mercer wasn’t surprised it was Henna who’d picked up on that. Unlike the president, Paul Barnes or Ira’s boss, John Kleinschmidt, Dick had worked his way through the ranks to his current job. He was an investigator at heart, not a politician.

  “Dikes,” Mercer said.

  “Excuse me?” the president and Henna said simultaneously, shooting each other quizzical glances.

  “La Palma is comprised of volcanic rock that is very permeable to water. The island absorbs rain like a sponge. However, there are formations, called dikes, of very dense basalt that cut along the spine of the island like a picket fence. These dikes act like dams that trap the rainwater, forming tall columns of supersaturated soil. It’s believed that the dikes are solid enough that they wouldn’t be affected by the seismic shocks associated with an eruption.”

  “So where’s the danger?”

  “An eruption begins with magma filling chambers deep under the island. The heat from an influx of molten rock will begin to boil the water trapped in these columns. As we all know from high school physics, water expands as it heats, but it cannot be compressed. This would put incredible pressure on the dikes. The failure of one or many of them is inevitable.”

  The president leaned forward. “And this would trigger the landslide and cause the mega-tsunami?” Mercer nodded and the president asked the obvious follow-up. “What kind of damage are we talking about and what can we do to minimize it?”