Deep Fire Rising

feet, change the pitch of your rotors. Make it sound like you’re working.”

He pulled back on a control lever. The diesel bellowed as the crane hoisted the back corner of the container off the deck. Mercer rotated the A-frame, lifting the box even farther. He locked the controls and jumped from the crane, the M-16 pulled tight to his shoulder.

The van’s door swung open, rocking in time with the roll of the ship.

The first person to stumble out was Jim McKenzie. He dove for the deck as if certain the container would be snatched off the ship at any moment. Mercer kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back and sending his revolver sailing. As much as Mercer wanted to put a bullet between his eyes, he didn’t. He pressed himself to the side of the container and waved his hand over his head for the pilot to lower the safety basket right to the deck.

Luc Nguyen exploded from the van, firing his machine pistol in a wild spray. He vanished around a winch housing before Mercer could fire. The two traded bursts, neither able to get an angle. Ricochets filled the air. One struck McKenzie in the leg as he lay sprawled. Jim screamed as blood erupted from his severed femoral artery. He’d bleed out in minutes without treatment.

Twenty miles to the west, two hundred feet under the sea, the vent was nearly choked with lava that spurted from rents in the tunnel’s walls. Enough water remained in the shaft to prevent the molten rock from flowing so the whole chamber was simply being sealed off.

None of the tremendous heat or increased pressure affected the suitcase-sized box so meticulously placed inside the mountain. The timer clicked to zero.

The trigger for the bomb was a complex ball of shaped high-explosives charges. They went off with nanosecond precision. At the center of the blast wave was a sphere of refined plutonium. There wasn’t enough of the deadly material to form a critical mass and create the self-sustaining chain reaction of a nuclear blast — until the trigger charges compressed the sphere. In a burst as bright as the surface of the sun, the plutonium went critical and mass became energy according to Einstein’s famous theory.

The explosion bloomed at nearly the speed of light for the first few fractions of a second, vaporizing everything in its path — rock, soil, and most importantly the western supports of the natural dikes inside La Palma.

At the surface the light pulse was a flash capable of blinding even miles away, and when it faded, a giant mushroom cloud had appeared, a glowing seething column of plasma and debris equal to the volcanic eruption the day before. At its base tens of thousands of tons of rock had been pulverized, releasing a million years’ worth of trapped rain. A mile-long, mile-deep chunk of La Palma slid into the sea, washed away in a deluge of trapped water.

On the southern part of the island, the Teneguia volcano suddenly ceased spewing lava as internal pressure deep under the island shifted. Magma and boiling water poured from the tear in the island in a seemingly never- ending gush.

Ahead of this surge, a wall of seawater grew, born of the nuclear blast and nourished by the release of the dikes. While nowhere near the size of the mega-tsunami that threatened the United States had the eastern part of the island collapsed, the wave reached eighty feet in a minute and sped outward at a hundred miles per hour.

Mercer and Luc both paused as the horizon bloomed a fiery purple. And then movement on the deck broke both from their awe. They wheeled at the same time. Mercer held his fire. Luc did not. Tisa had finally freed herself from the container.

She’d come out on deck, unknowingly standing between her brother and Mercer. Luc’s burst caught her in the stomach, blowing her body back against the container. Her blood trickled down the side of the steel box.

Luc dropped his weapon, wailing as he raced for his sister. Mercer tightened his grip on his M-16 and put Luc’s head right in the crosshairs. He pulled the trigger on an empty magazine. Luc reached his sister’s side, cradling her limp body in his arms.

Mercer’s rage boiled. As he rushed to them, the safety basket skittered by as the chopper pilot fought a crosswind. Mercer grabbed the edge of the mesh litter and dragged it with him. He slammed the heavy stretcher into Luc’s shoulder, spinning him away from Tisa. She fell back to the deck.

Luc held up his hands. “No. We must save her. Help me to get her out of here.”

Mercer hooked the corner of the basket under the edge of the shipping container and threw three coils of the wire line around Luc’s chest. Luc didn’t understand; perhaps he even thought Mercer was going to save him too. Mercer didn’t take his eyes off the madman as he spiraled his hand over his head, a universal sign to take up slack on a cable.

The pilot heaved back on his controls, tightening the wire around Luc’s chest until he could not scream. Mercer’s face was an inhuman mask as he repeated the gesture.

The chopper heaved again. The coils sliced into Luc Nguyen’s chest, and as they cut through to his spine and snapped his backbone the recoil sent his legs skittering across the deck like a crab. He flopped sideways, trying to reach out for the severed limbs as they came to rest a few feet away.

His eyes swiveled to Mercer. “At least you won’t have her.” And he was dead.

Those words drained everything from Mercer. He could barely see through the tears as he freed the safety basket from under the container. “Hold on,” he cried. “Hold on.”

Tisa was alive, but barely. She’d taken three rounds, two in the abdomen and one in the chest that leaked frothy blood. A lung shot. “Mercer?” Her voice came as a soft whisper.

“I’m here, darling. Hold on.”

She was so deeply in shock she hardly reacted as he rolled her into the litter. Mercer placed himself over her, keeping his weight off her body, and felt the stretcher lift from the Petromax Angel.

The wave bore down on the ship in an unchecked rampage, a wall of water stretching across the breadth of the sea. True to his word Seamus Rourke had gotten the ship turned so she faced the wave that towered over the ship. She started to scale the front of the tsunami as the Seahawk began to winch Mercer and Tisa from the deck. The litter remained rooted as angry black water foamed around the ship’s bows and covered the deck.

Mercer and Tisa were soaked and the litter began to skid toward the stern. An instant before it slammed into the NewtSuit garage, it flew up and off the deck, lifting clear of the watery frenzy.

The Angel rose ever higher, her inclinometer pegged at ninety degrees as the wave’s momentum kept her pinned to the wall of water. And then her bow reached the crest, cleaving a fat wedge from the wave’s apex, and she vanished into the trough, dropping as fast as a runaway roller coaster. She should have been driven straight under the surface when she reached the bottom. Or at least snapped in two. But the Angel buried her prow deep, then fought her way back. Her deck had been scoured clean. The garage, the control van, and the cranes had all been torn away. Not a single piece of glass, from her windscreen to her smallest porthole, was left intact. But she fought it off, pouring water off her deck as though she were a surfacing submarine. The next wave was half the size of the first and she met it almost contemptuously. The ship was safe.

Tisa kept her eyes open as they were winched into the helicopter, a smile on her lips as she stared up at Mercer. “Hold on,” he kept repeating, although his words were lost in the noise of the rotors and the wind that buffeted the stretcher.

When they reached the chopper, strong hands hauled the basket into the cargo hold and the side door was slammed closed. The PJ helped Mercer out and then cut away Tisa’s shirt and assessed her wounds.

“How is she?” Mercer shouted.

The PJ continued to work as if he hadn’t heard.

“I said how is she?”

A minute passed before the man slumped away from her. His arms were bloody to the elbows. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Mercer shoved him aside and knelt next to Tisa. He took her hand. It was cold, much colder than anything he’d ever felt.

“Mercer?” He put his ear close to her mouth. “Mercer, what time is it?”

That’s when he finally understood. Her request was a plea, an attempt to find her place in a future she’d always known. She’d lived at a lonely crossroads between the past and inevitability. She’d been denied the promise of the unknown, the sense of wonder each new day could bring because she knew somewhere how it would end.