Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  We emerged to find ourselves alone in the sunstruck draw. We geared up and pushed off, filled with the imperative to get Lindsay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  We halted at the mouth of Gold Dust and Lindsay lifted her chin. “Where?”

  Perhaps it was the surprise at this hidden gouge in the mountain, but there was surprise in her voice.

  I said, “Then you’ve never been here?”

  “Should I have?”

  I kicked off. “This way.” For the first time in the field with Lindsay, I took the lead. It was midday and Walter’s and my earlier tracks had softened in the sun. Walter had bowed out of a second trip to Gold Dust in one day. Truth was, he was giving it to Lindsay and me, the volcanologist and her pupil.

  The rockfall was again seamless in the flat light. I led Lindsay to the door.

  She whistled. “You have young eyes.”

  I told her about the dipper.

  She bent to examine the Dutch door. She looked cold, the flush of exertion draining from her Dresden skin.

  Urgency welled in me. I took off my skis and went first through the cavity and she passed me her knapsack and I shoved it around the corner. She followed me on her belly and when she reached the grotto she grunted in amazement. I did not give her time to read deeper into the geological record. I snatched up her pack and moved out through the granite leaves into the little pocket. The dipper had not returned.

  She followed, and blanched.

  I had not prepared her. I had told her only, there’s activity. I had wanted her to come to it raw.

  “Oh honey,” she said, and her face just opened like a flower. I handed her the knapsack and got out of the way.

  She went alone to the fissure’s rim.

  With Lindsay in the field, I’ve always hung back upon first examination of an object. I would wait for her to take it in, and when she’d processed it, to draw me close and explain. Even when I knew as well as she what the object signified, I would wait for her to speak. On a primitive level, no fumarole or stratum of ash was real to me until Lindsay said it was. If we had gazed into the face of Mount Pelee herself in eruption, I would have waited for confirmation from Lindsay. If Lindsay had said honey it’s a mirage, I would doubtless have stood there admiring the volcanic hallucination until the hot cloud incinerated us both.

  I joined her, finally. Heat from the fissure had returned the flush to her face, and steam had wetted her skin like dew on the flower.

  She said again, “Oh honey.” Now her face tightened.

  The way I read her face, the flower opening and then closing, was that she was seeing here something every volcanologist both dreams of and dreads. She was seeing her volcano unloose its bonds.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  In town we parted without ceremony, Lindsay to alert the Geological Survey and me to report to Krom.

  We took facing chairs in his office. I sat sweating, still wearing my thermo-lined snow pants, and told him about the fissure up on Red Mountain. He showed amazement, like he was stumbling upon it along with me, following in wonder through the grotto and then halting to gape at the rockfall’s secret. He sat silently, seeing it.

  I gripped the arms of my chair. It was death to just sit here.

  He spoke, finally. “Then she really did find something.”

  I nodded.

  “What did Lindsay say when you showed her?”

  “It’s a big deal. Not in those words, but…”

  “No way out?”

  I glanced at Krom’s wall of photos, at the frozen family who didn’t escape. “Lindsay didn’t say that.”

  “Tell me everything she did say.”

  “She didn’t say a lot. She took measurements. She took photos.”

  “And what is she doing now?”

  “Alerting USGS.”

  “Good.”

  I said, “What about you?”

  “I’m going to contact my people.”

  “So you can spin it?”

  His hand slammed down on the desk and I jumped.

  He too looked poised to bolt. Both hands on the desk, forearms braced. White scar stood up from brown skin, Dante rising. He said, “So I can do my job.”

  “Glad to hear that.” I stood. “That’s why I came to tell you.”

  “Let’s be clear,” he said, “there’s no more spin involved. I’m going to notify FEMA that the situation has altered, then I’m going to go have a look for myself and consult with USGS. Then I’m going to study the maps and reprogram the simulations and see where we go from here. Then I’m going to telephone everyone on the Council, then email my report to the home office, and copy it to Len Carow. And in the course of doing my job I’m going to reclaim my reputation.” He looked at me squarely. “I win, we all win.”

  “I sure hope so.” I headed for the door.

  His voice followed me. “We’re finished, you and I.”

  I turned. “Finished?”

  “The bargain. You delivered. In fact, you might very well have saved us, finding that fissure. Congratulations.” He looked down at the scar on his forearm, then back at me. “No sacrifice required.”

  I didn’t feel much like a savior. “I just found what Georgia found. She’s the one who deserves the credit.”

  He briefly bowed his head.

  “One thing,” I said, “that surprises me. You didn’t ask about Georgia—what happened to her there.”

  “Do you know?”

  “No. Just that she died there. Pending analysis of the evidence and exemplars, of course. I’ll copy you our report. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I think she was murdered. I don’t know if we’ll get an ID on the killer.” I shrugged. “I can’t foretell the future.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It was impossible, now, to think of Gold Dust as hidden.

  There were people everywhere—laden with instrumentation, in big parkas and gaiters and wool caps and you could tell the men from the women, more often than not, by the beards. They were in the mine tunnel with headlamps, they were taking the temperature of the dipper’s stream, they were scouring the mountain for cracks in the snow and newly dead trees. There was a field camp in the shell of the cabin and it looked like the miners had returned to work the lode. There was a bearded man tending a radio and he was in contact with the USGS field station set up in Mammoth’s fire department, and that in turn was in communication with Survey headquarters.

  It looked like USGS had been here a week but it’s been just thirty-six hours since Lindsay made her call and the Survey put its Western Region Event Response Team on a plane.

  A path had been blasted through the rockwall. Nobody need negotiate the cavity behind the Dutch door.

  The snow looked like it had been paved.

  Amidst this buzz, Walter sat on a crate waiting for the okay to go back behind the rockfall and dig. He chafed his hands. He’s not used to being a sideshow to other people’s business. He wanted more samples from the hot spring because the soil we’d hurriedly scooped and stashed in our pockets had orange-peel particles from our gloves and had to be considered contaminated.

  I paced, from the Dutch door to the mouth of the tunnel. From the tunnel to the cyanide pond.

  “What are you doing?” Walter asked, as I passed his crate.

  “Trying to figure out in what order Georgia picked up the stuff in her boots.”

  He strained for a glimpse of Lindsay. We’d seen her an hour ago, disappearing through the blasted corridor. She’d nodded in passing. Was already looking beyond us, seeing the fissure. She’s consumed by it, she’s stripped to raw energy, she’s an exposed high-voltage wire and Walter’s been trying to keep an eye on her.

  “And what are your conclusions?” Walter asked, on my next pass.

  I halted. “I figure Georgia picked up the leaf near the stream, and then tramped through the tailings area and acquired the cyanide. Looking
around for the hot spring. Picking up bits of the native soil. Then she found the door in the rockwall, crawled through, found the spring, acquired the sulfur and calcite. Found the fissure. Freaked out.” No wild-ass guess needed for that. “And maybe that’s when she wrote what she wrote in her Weight Watchers notebook.”

  Walter nodded.

  “And then she crawled back through the cavity. In a panic. Intending, I’d hope, to get Lindsay. And maybe that’s when she encountered her killer. Or, alternatively, he caught her back at the fissure.”

  Walter nodded.

  “I’m thinking that they ended up in the tunnel—because of all the powder she’d acquired. So that’s where I’d say she took her final steps. And then there was a struggle, and she took no more steps.” And who was struggling? Georgia and Mike? Georgia and Krom? Georgia and someone else? Death by fury? Death by passion? Or was it death by cold calculation? “Anyway,” I said, “that’s one theory.”

  Walter gave a brief nod. He was looking at the fissure. “She’s been back there for hours.”

  Lindsay, not Georgia. An hour at most.

  He rose. “I believe they’ve forgotten us. I’m going to go collect that sample.”

  I snatched up my pack and followed him through the corridor.

  This time, the hidden pocket was different. First time, when Walter and I came, and even the second time with Lindsay, this had seemed like a lost land whistled into existence by the dipper. Now, it was mapped and staked, concrete as a crime scene. Orange tape roped off the hot spring and fissure. People hovered over the great wound and the banks were draped in silver tarps upon which instruments had been laid out, like the fissure was due to undergo surgery.

  Lindsay was at the fissure, head to head with Response Team leader Phil Dobie, who was unmistakable due to his beard—notable even among USGS beards for the quartz-white vein that diked through the black.

  We took our samples at the hot spring then went to join Lindsay.

  “Phil,” Lindsay was saying, “we’re there.” She looked worse than she had earlier, eyes bloodshot, skin drawn, like she’d waved off sleep because there was no time to sleep.

  I butted in. “We’re where?”

  She collared me, fingers like hot pokers. We were goddamn snuggled right up to the rim. “Cassie saw him.”

  Saw who? All I saw now was the fissure.

  “You remember my little fumarole?” She didn’t wait for my memory to kick in, she turned back to Phil. “He popped out six months ago and if you’d care to draw a line from here down to the caldera’s south moat, my little fellow is sitting on that line.”

  Phil, who is about as low-key as white noise in the network, said, “It’s not out of the question. Moat activity’s at a depth of about ten kilometers so, sure, new surface phenomena could be offset by that much.”

  I stiffened. From Phil, this was worry. The fissure’s certainly been worrying enough to spark an event response from the Survey but all on its own, it’s not enough to do the trick. It’s the location that’s raising blood pressure, the idea of a dike reaching out from the caldera’s magma chamber and thumbing up through the crust here, an area thought so placid that the Red Mountain geodimeter station is sampled only once a year. But it was sure being sampled now and I had to wonder if it had measured new deformation of the earth. I asked, “What’s the strain rate now?”

  “Up ten parts per million,” Lindsay snapped.

  Phil said, “We need the quakes…”

  “We’ve got them.”

  “You’ve got low-frequency?” I swallowed. Magma’s on the move.

  “We do,” Phil said, “but we need them at a little shallower depth.”

  “We’ll get them,” she said. “I know this volcano.”

  I looked at her in alarm. She was flying by the seat of her pants.

  “Maybe,” Phil said thoughtfully, “you’re a little too close, Lindsay.”

  “Horseshit.”

  Walter cleared his throat. “We all get ahead of ourselves at times. I certainly have, in my work.”

  Not that I’d ever seen.

  Lindsay shot a red-eyed look at Walter, decades of rivalry and devotion in that look: geology is volcanology, honey.

  I felt a charge run from Lindsay to me, her fingers grounded in my neck, and the circuit ran from the fissure to Lindsay, and by chance of touch through me, and back to earth again. It did not loop through Phil or Survey headquarters. It was Lindsay and the volcano, a closed loop. We all leaned toward the fissure, like yearning toward water when standing on a bridge, Phil stroking the quartz in his beard, Lindsay drumming her fingers on my neck, Walter fairly itching to consult, and me, damned if I was going to come unglued.

  “My volcano,” Lindsay said, “has extended his reach.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The mood was ugly at the intersection of Minaret Road and the Bypass.

  The rolled-gravel escape route branched off Minaret and disappeared into a forest of Jeffrey pine. Somewhere in there, the trucks and dozers and cats sat idle. Work had stopped because the road crew was here along with the rest of the town.

  It was a whipped crowd, sunk deep into parkas. Council members huddled in their own group, not looking any happier than the rest of us. They’ve got their own emergency meeting, so I’ve heard, in three hours.

  I couldn’t wait three hours. I had eyes now for only four people:

  Phil Dobie, more haggard than he’d looked five hours ago up at the fissure.

  Lindsay beside him, hot-eyed, still riding the fever.

  Len Carow, babying a cigarette until it flamed.

  Krom, on his cell phone, watching Carow.

  It’s been forty-eight hours since I sat in Krom’s office and told him about the fissure. He’s moved almost as fast as the Survey. He got Carow into town yesterday and now, right here, he’s got his own Event Response going.

  It can’t come too soon.

  “Man.” My brother dug his elbow into my arm. “Man, it’s cold.”

  Walter, on my other side, said, “Cassie, are you warm enough?”

  I said “yes” and my breath condensed like a fumarole. Come on, I thought, before we all freeze, it’s getting later by the minute.

  Krom pocketed his cell phone, then tilted his head back. Others, noticing, tilted their heads as well. Carow’s cigarette tipped skyward and Phil’s beard rose and even Lindsay lifted her chin. The movement rippled through the crowd. Walter and Jimbo followed suit and I couldn’t resist if I’d wanted.

  We all looked up to a view we’ve seen a million times. The plateau on which the town sits rises to the broad Lakes Basin, which is bordered by a string of peaks.

  Why look? Everybody knows what’s up there.

  There came the distant rumble of an engine and a big-bellied helicopter rose above the toothy skyline. I didn’t get it. But I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  The chopper came to hover above Red Mountain.

  It looked like some kind of rescue attempt.

  But it wasn’t. The chopper dipped its nose and came our way, skimming treetops, laying down a smoke trail. As it barreled over our heads, I saw the National Guard insignia on its belly. I covered my ears and turned along with everybody else to follow its path as it shrank into the morning sky.

  We were left with smoke in our eyes and the taste of sulfur on our tongues.

  “What the shit was that?” said Jimbo.

  “A simulation.” My voice shook.

  Lindsay obviously thought so too. Phil had to know. Carow surely got it. People lifted fingers, following the smoke trail, tracing the chopper’s route. It began at Red Mountain and paralleled the Lake Mary Road down the three miles to town. It crossed Minaret and then followed the Bypass in its push northeast toward highway 395.

  It was a simulation of an eruption from the site of the fissure. The smoke was meant to show the likely path of the avalanche of burning gas and rock known as a pyroclastic flow. A pyro is probably the deadliest t
hing Mother Nature can throw at you. The ground flow moves at around eighty miles an hour. It throws off a cloud of hot ash that goes at, say, a couple hundred miles an hour. You can’t outrun it. You can’t outdrive it. You can’t outfly it in a helicopter. Although, clearly, you can do a convincing simulation with a chopper trailing smoke. You can show the path the ground flow would take, seeking the clean funnel of the Lake Mary Road and then burning right through the Minaret intersection—where we all stood—and barreling along the Bypass.

  Of course, a real flow wouldn’t confine itself to this one path. It would send fingers into every inch of hospitable terrain of the Mammoth plateau.

  But this display confined itself to the fact that the Bypass was in the pyroclastic flowpath of an eruption from Red Mountain.

  Krom had confined himself to the matter at hand.

  I’d asked for this, hadn’t I? Do something, I’d demanded.

  And now he gave those who hadn’t understood a lesson in topography. He didn’t use a bullhorn, as he had at the race. He made us hold our breath to listen.

  “We’re now fighting a battle on two fronts. The caldera is the first front and that’s been enough to command all our resources. But mark this, chums—we’re sitting two thousand feet above the caldera.” He put out his hands and raised one above the other. “An eruption down at the caldera—the most likely sort our friends in the Geological Survey will predict—would not destroy our town. Damage us, yes, but we could weather it. With a caldera eruption, topography is in our favor.” He waggled the upper hand. “But a second front has been discovered up on Red Mountain. It is an offshoot, so I am informed, of activity centered around Hot Creek. When I insisted on fencing off Hot Creek, I didn’t know of that connection, but I wish I’d pushed harder. Now, it’s fenced.”

  That’s totally out of line, I thought. Reminding us that Lindsay was the one who resisted the fence. Making himself the hero of Hot Creek, instead of the sex czar.

  Krom smiled. “We mustn’t blame our volcanologist friends for not finding this second front sooner. Resources, as I’ve said, are spread thin. We can only be grateful that finally it was found.”