by Jack Du Brul
“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.
LA PALMA THE CANARY ISLANDS
While 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 woul
d 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.”
Jim cut in, “Besides, we all know what’s at stake here. No one is going to fight a turf battle with so much on the line.”
Mercer nodded. “All right. Les Donnelley spent last week talking with every local diver still left on the island and has taken temperature readings all the way around La Palma. He’s pinpointed three volcanic vents along the eastern coast below the Cumbre ridge that may suit our needs. Two of them show a steady rise in temperature so we think they are active. The third has remained dormant. It’s down a hundred eighty feet so few have dived into the tunnel. We don’t know what to expect.”
“How hot is the water around the other vents right now?”
“At their mouths, about eighty-four degrees. That’s twenty above the ambient water for their depths.”
“My ADS can take temperatures up to two hundred,” C.W. stated.
“We may need that capability if this last vent pans out. For now we’ll check the dormant tunnel with the ROV before committing anyone to the water.” Mercer handed Jim McKenzie a notebook opened about halfway. “Here are the coordinates. Get these to the captain and let’s get to it.”
C.W. and Jim left Mercer and Tisa alone at the rail of the stubby workboat. A half mile from shore the island didn’t look dangerous. They could almost pretend the pall was just smoke from a forest fire and not the sulfurous discharge from deep within the earth.
“I find it interesting,” Tisa noted, looking up at him. Even in the ruddy glow of the near-eclipsed sun, her dark hair shimmered. “People take orders from you as though they’ve worked for you for years.”
Mercer demurred. “The three of us shared a pretty wild experience.”
“Not just Jim and C.W. Others too, even your boss, Admiral Lasko.”
Mercer looked out across the waters to the island. “I never really thought about it. I see something that needs to be done and if I can’t do it I find people who can. I think the trick is finding the right people. Any idiot can manage a group who knows what they’re doing.” He smiled. “All I have to do is make sure I surround myself with experts and I get to look good.”
She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Fool.”
Six hours later, the Petromax Angel was in position near where Les Donnelley, the chief volcanologist on La Palma, had thought there was a suitable vent. The boat’s bow and stern thrusters were slaved to the dynamic positioning computer that was receiving updates every half second from global positioning satellites. She was as stable as if she’d been anchored to the seafloor.
Jim McKenzie sat in the glow of several video monitors, his hands on the joysticks that controlled Conseil, their ROV, which they’d named after the assistant to Professor Aronnax in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Behind him in the control were Mercer, Tisa, Charlie and Spirit Williams, and a mix of people from Petromax and the crew Jim had brought from the Sea Surveyor
. The control van bolted to the Angel’s deck hummed with computers and the hiss of air purifiers. The doors had to remain closed because of the dust and the air-conditioning labored to dispel all the body heat.
Outside of the steel box, workers were monitoring Conseil’s umbilical as it unreeled from the huge stern-mounted spool. The bug-eyed ROV sank deeper into the waters.
Jim had a well-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth and a fresh pitcher of ice water at hand. His fingers were light on the controls, and the cameras on the unmanned submersible had become his eyes.
The ROV was the size of, and roughly the same shape as, a queen-sized bed but was made of high-strength steel, carbon fiber and composite ceramics. It carried four sets of extreme-low-light stereoscopic cameras, as well as a manipulator arm, pressure and temperature gauges, and a chemistry suite that allowed it to analyze water on a continuous basis.
“Okay, boys and girls,” Jim said without looking at his audience. “We’re dropping through one fifty. Connie’s board shows green.”
On the monitor they could see virtually nothing other than the glare from lights mounted directly above the cameras. The ROV was still falling, and Jim kept it well away from the island’s underwater basalt foundation.
“What’s the temp?” asked a Petromax technician.
“A bracing sixty-two degrees,” Jim answered. “No sign of volcanic heating.”
Mercer was relieved. The San Juan volcano loomed directly above their location. While lava had begun to jet from vents on the southern part of the island, San Juan, in the island’s middle, merely rumbled and occasionally belched ash.
Designed to probe the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, Conseil had no problems as Jim brought the ROV to a hover at one hundred eighty feet, a depth that even a scuba diver could work.
“The vent should be a hundred yards ahead of us and a bit to the left,” Jim intoned as he spooled up the nimble craft’s propulsors.
He eased the ROV forward, keeping one eye on the video feed and another on the sonar screen that was mapping the irregularities of the undersea cliff. An accidental brush with the rock, even this shallow, could damage the remotely operated vehicle.
