The Flaming Mountain

by John Blaine

  “I guess we can relax now,” Rick said with relief. “The job is out of our hands.”

  “Not quite,” Hartson Brant corrected. “They all agreed that the Spindrift Foundation should be placed in over-all charge. So we’ve got our work cut out for us!”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The Seabees

  The sea off the west coast of San Luz was alive with ships. Rick counted up to twenty-five and then gave up. Some of the ships were moving, and he was sure he had counted the same one three times. He identified cruisers, destroyers, one aircraft carrier with a squadron of helicopters aboard, and landing ships of several kinds.

  One huge landing ship was nosed right up to the shore, and from it rolled tons of heavy equipment. From an attack transport, the equipment’s operators, a U. S. Naval Construction Battalion-Seabees- were disembarking by the hundreds.

  Scotty asked, “How many different kinds of flags can you see? I’ve counted six so far.U. S., British, Dutch, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Panamanian.”

  “It’s an international job, all right,” Rick agreed. “And when the UN observers arrive tonight you can run up a few more flags, too.”

  “Reminds me of the amphibious exercises we used to have in the Marines,” Scotty commented to Rick.

  Nearby, Hartson Brant and the other scientists were deep in conversation with a group of civilians and Navy officers. The officers were the engineers, from the Naval Construction Battalion. Last night had been spent in working with them on the details of the problem. It would be their job to drive the big hole down into the earth below El Viejo, working against time to intercept the rising magma.

  Scientists had arrived, too, and they were taking over much of the detail of keeping track of the magma.

  Each scientist had his own special field of interest, but all were anxious to have the data from tracings.

  There were geophysicists, including volcanologists and seismologists; mineralogists and more geologists.

  “Nothing much left for us to do,” Rick said, a little sadly.

  “Except watch,” Scotty corrected. “That’s enough! Great crumbling craters, what do you want?A Page 72

  mystery every day?”

  Rick had to grin. “I guess this is enough. But one thing I want to do is go over to the volcanic pipe and see how Guevara and Connel are making out.”

  “You will have an escort,” a voice said from behind them. They turned to greet Ricardo Montoya. “Now that we can turn our attention to that pair, I think we should have a talk with them. To make the talk easier, we will put bars between us.”

  “You’re going to arrest them?” Rick asked.

  “Of course! What did you think?”

  “Right now?”

  “If you want to come along, join me. Now is as good a time as any.If we can find them, of course.”

  The boys joined Montoya in the front seat of a military vehicle. The back was loaded with his men.

  Montoya at once steered for the trail to the volcanic pipe. It was only a thousand yards to the north from the point selected for the big hole. Even around the site of the hole there were diamond seekers, and it was hard to find a piece of ground that had not been tried with a shovel.

  As they got closer to the diamond field the numbers of treasure hunters increased until, as Scotty remarked, they were thicker than fleas at a mutt show. Montoya had to lean on the horn continually, and even then the San Luzians paid little attention.

  Finally the group got out and walked. It was easier to move on foot through the frantically digging mob.

  Strangely, there was little noise. Each individual seemed intent on his own little hole. But the digging was futile. There was no yellow ground under the flying shovels.

  Then the group did reach yellow ground, and met rifles in the hands of Guevara’s peons. Evidently Guevara had put a ring of men around the volcanic pipe and planned to hold it by force of arms.

  Rick looked at Montoya. What would he do now?

  The young officer looked haughtily at the nearest peons and demanded in Spanish, “Do you know me?”

  One of them nodded respectfully. “ Si , Senor Capitan Montoya.”

  “Good. You will stand aside. I am inspecting Senor Guevara’s mine.” He stalked through as though there was not the slightest question that the peons would allow it. The boys and the police officers followed on his heels.

  A shelter had been erected on one side of the volcanic pipe. Only blue ground showed, and there was a power scoop digging out more. Watching the shovel were Guevara and Brad Connel.

  Montoya walked up to the pair before they were even aware of his presence.

  “Good afternoon, senores,” he greeted them courteously.

  Guevara snapped, “What are you doing here, Montoya?”

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  “Arresting you, senor,” Montoya replied calmly.

  Connel looked worried, but Guevara gestured toward the ring of men with rifles. “Don’t be a fool. We outnumber you five to one. You haven’t a chance.”

  Captain Montoya smiled affably. “But, senor, it is you who haven’t a chance. Consider, senor. The honor of the Montoyas requires that I take you to my uncle, eh? Well, I allow the chance that perhaps I will not survive to take you to my uncle, but I can assure you that you will become a lifeless body on the instant a rifleis raised. Surely you do not doubt me, senor?”

  Guevara looked at the officer, looked at the capable hand on the cocked gun in the holster. Then he looked into the fierce Montoya eyes, and his swarthy face turned pale.

  “Not even a Montoya would throw his life away for so small a thing,” he said harshly.

  The captain smiled gently. “Call my bluff, senor.”

  Rick had no doubt whatever that Montoya was not bluffing. Apparently Guevara was convinced, too.

  But he tried once more. “How do you expect to get us out of here?”

  “Simplicity itself.You will walk to my truck, arm in arm with Senor Connel. That is all. Of course if you should be so unfortunate as to have a peon lift his rifle, you would never reach the truck alive. But perhaps you are lucky. Shall we try, senor?”

  Guevara hesitated,then shrugged.“Very well.”

  Connel spoke for the first time. He demanded hoarsely, “Are you going to let him get away with this when our men have all the rifles?”

  Guevara smiled wryly. “You do not know the Montoyas, Brad. Call his bluff yourself-only not if you wish to live.”

  The ex-lieutenant governor walked slowly toward the ring of men. After a moment Connel joined him.

  Montoya stepped behind them as though taking a stroll through the Calor public gardens. The ring opened and let them through. Rick breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t been quite as confident as Ricardo Montoya appeared to be.

  Guevara paused. “May I make an announcement?” he asked.

  “Certainly, senor.”

  Guevara called, “Amigos!” Montoya translated the Spanish for the boys. “You know what you have been guarding. Now I must leave. What is left is yours. Work as fast as you can and find many diamonds. May good fortune beyours! ”

  The ring broke as the peons rushed to grab shovels. Guevara led the way to the truck.

  It was all so easy, Rick thought later, if you were an aristocratic Montoya with a code of honor that permitted no yielding, even unto death. No one else he had ever met could have carried it off quite so superbly.

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  So fast had the Seabees swung into operation that work on the big hole already was in progress when Montoya dropped the boysoff. Pneumatic drills hammered into the congealed lava, cutting holes in which charges would be placed. As the boys watched, explosive was thrust into the holes, a warning was yelled through a portable loud-speaker, and the charge fired. Tons ofrock were loosened.

  Even before the dust had begun to settle, huge machines were lifting the rock out, or dragging big chunks, and dumping them down the mountainside. Bulldozers kept the rock moving, keeping
the entrance clear. Within minutes the hole was empty of rock and the pneumatic drills were hammering again. The cycle was repeated.

  The Seabees joked as they worked, and warned each other against shoving ahole right through into hot lava, but the pace never slowed for an instant.

  Hour after hour the big hole deepened until the Seabees ran into noxious gases. Then they donned gas masks and continued. Deeper and deeper the hole was driven, until the temperature at thehole’s end was over a hundred degrees. The Seabees merely shortened working time and operated in relays so efficiently that no time was lost.

  Rick and Scotty got back to the hole as often as they could, but there was much doing elsewhere. The Hot Springs Hotel swarmed with scientists and observers, and there were heated conferences and late evaluation sessions. The Spindrift scientists were always in demand, and their faces grew gaunt as the days passed.

  The hole gave its own location because of the shock waves it sent through the earth to the recorders, and even Rick’s untrained eye could see the traces slowly closing with the magma front.

  Earthquakes increased in frequency until Rick and Scotty felt as though the ground never ceased shuddering.

  The air became noisy with planes as the Military Air Transport Command began ferrying in troops.

  Flight after flight of huge transports roared in for a landing at the Calor airport, discharged the soldiers, and took off again at once.

  And still the diamond hunt continued.

  Then, atone o’clock in the afternoon, Hartson Brant called a halt.

  “The magma’s moving up through the dike,” he reported. “It’s now or never. Captain Montoya, we will ask the troops to clear the area. Commander Jameson, withdraw all men and equipment except those necessary for the final packing. Dr. Cantrell, please be ready to place the charge at dawn tomorrow.”

  The final phase of the operation swung into action. The troops gathered at Redondo and marched shoulder to shoulder southward along the mountain slopes. They herded the diamond seekers before them, sometimes with enough roughness to overcome protests, but mostly with little difficulty. They herded the population entirely around El Viejo, and established a perimeter from Calor northward, with the population confined to a narrow segment of the island along the seaward side.

  Loud-speaker trucks roamed along the perimeter, reassuring the people. Military disaster units cooked huge quantities of food and prepared thousands of gallons of coffee and reconstituted milk. American soldiers played with cute little San Luzian kids and -after the diamond seekers became convinced they Page 75

  had never had a chance to find diamonds-the whole affair became one big picnic.

  But it was a picnic with overtones of fear.

  Rick and Scotty watched the placement of the nuclear explosive-a simplesteel can, from the outside -in the big hole. They watched the remaining handful of Seabees load tons of rock in after it. Only the wires connecting the device to a radio firing unit on the beach gave evidence that an explosion equal to ten thousand tons of TNT was about to take place.

  Rick asked, “Won’t all those rocks keep the volcano from erupting?”

  Hartson Brant smiled. “Rick, compared with the force of the volcano, that atomic device is like a firecracker compared with a hurricane. But even to the nuclear explosion those rocks won’t mean much.

  They’re just to confine it a little.”

  The night passed. San Souci was empty of people. The Seabees were back aboard ship. The scientific instruments were in place. Only a small group of scientists remained, their helicopter standing by. They checked out the radio firing unit, threw switches according to their check list,then announced:

  “We’re ready!”

  CHAPTER XIX

  The Old One Yields

  Rick banked the Sky Wagon over the fleet. Scotty, in the front passenger seat, had the camera ready.

  Hartson Brant, in the rear seat, had a motion-picture camera poised. Governor Montoya, the fourth in the party, even had his personal camera along.

  Their cameras were not the only ones. Nearly every ship had its official photographers, and there were photography planes in the air.

  Directly under the Sky Wagon now was aU. S. destroyer. Aboard her was the nuclear firing party from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and the UN Observer Group. On other ships of the fleet were the representatives of the interested nations and the Sea-bees.

  Rick turned up the volume of his plane radio. By agreement, the count-down was to be broadcast to all aircraft over one of the airport frequencies.

  “Thirty seconds!” the voice said.

  “Won’t we need dark glasses?” Scotty asked.

  “No,” Hartson Brant replied. “The nuclear fireball won’t emerge. If it gets a little too bright, squint and turn your head.”

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  “How long after the nuclear shot will the volcano go?” Rick asked.

  “We don’t know.Anywhere from seconds to hours. It depends on how much of a path the nuclear shot cracks.”

  “Tenseconds !”

  Rick made sure they had a good view of El Viejo’s western slope, and held the plane on course.

  “Five, four, three, two, one . . .

  “Zero!”

  There was an instant of quiet,then dust spurted from the deep hole, followed by billowing clouds of pulverized rock. Down below, the earth heaved as though from another earthquake, and a line of waves appeared, running from shore outward!

  The dust settled slowly, hanging in the air like a great gray ball.

  The nuclear explosion, deep underground, had gone off.

  “Now what?”Rick wondered.

  Hartson Brant said quietly, “We may have to wait a while.”

  “That explosion sure didn’t look like the pictures I’ve seen of shots inNevada ,” Rick told him.

  “No, Rick. This was too far underground. They’ve had those inNevada , too, but the pictures don’t get much publicity because they’re not spectacular.”

  Far below, where the end of the big hole had been, the huge chamber blown by the atomic explosion was white-hot with trapped heat and radioactivity. Below the chamber the earth was shattered, with myriad tiny cracks reaching far down.

  Some cracks reached the white-hot magma. Instantly the magma exploited the new weakness, pressure was released until . . .

  “Look!” Even in the plane Scotty’s yell was loud.

  Rick turned in time to see the side of El Viejo blow off in an explosion that made ten kilotons of fission seem puny indeed. For an instant he saw thousands of tons of white-hot lava rise into the air,then it fell into the sea. Instantly steam clouds blanketed the area, but the steam was mixed with traces of red and gray from the rock carried upward.

  A great boulder, weighing many tons, was hurled high in the air to fall into the steam cloud. The great rift in the volcano widened, and the molten lava was visible until steam rose again.

  Under the steam cloud was an inferno, but it was only occasionally visible as the wind tore rents in the vapor. The noise must be deafening, Rick knew, but only a low rumble and an occasional hissing could be heard in the plane.

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  “Well,” Hartson Brant said wearily, “it worked.”

  Governor Luis Montoya spoke gently. “Yes, my friend. It did indeed work. And it has saved our island.

  I doubt that a single lif e was lost, thanks to you and your associates.”

  “We’d better be sure.” The scientist smiled. “Rick, suppose you fly us around the island?”

  “Yes, sir.”Rick instantly swung the Sky Wagon onto a northward course that would take them past the erupting volcano and on to the north. He kept well out to sea, because now and then he could see big rocks flying through the air as the volcano spouted.

  Only the immediate area was affected. The new outlet was about a half mile wide, stretching from sea level and possibly below, to about a quarter mile up the slope. Beyond the crater San Luz seemed normal, alt
hough Rick knew there were no human beings in the area.

  Not until he passed Redondo did signs of life appear, and then the beach became black with people.

  The wave of humanity extended inward to the slopes of El Viejo and along the beach to Calor. Past Calor, at the airport, troops not needed on the perimeter waited for their planes. Already there were planes landing.

  Rick completed the circuit of the island, then on impulse moved past the volcano and took a good look at where the diamond pipe had been. A momentary wind blew the area clear long enough for him to glimpse white-hot lava.

  “Well,” he remarked, “there go Connel’s diamonds. Either buried, or burned.”

  “Cheer up,” Scotty said with a grin. “Maybe El Viejo is making some new ones.”

  Governor Montoya added the final word. “I hope not. But if so, I can only hope they will not be discovered just before the next eruption!”

  CHAPTER XX

  A Few Souvenirs

  San Luz settled back to normal in an astonishingly short time, a tribute to the calm nerves of the population. Within recorded island history, the discovery of diamonds was the sole event that seemed to have excited most of the islanders.

  The troops left on MATS planes. The ships withdrew, except for two oceanographic ships sent hurriedly byColumbiaUniversity and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Aboard were not only ocea-nographers , but marine biologists experienced in radiation physics. They would keep track of events in the sea for many months.

  The scientific population of the Hot Springs Hotel did not decrease appreciably. The combination of advance warning of eruption, a nuclear explosion, and the eruption itself provided data never before Page 78

  obtainable. The scientists intended to make the most of it.