Deep Fire Rising

By attaching lifting bags to the warhead, Mercer was confident that the ROV could position it in the vent.

“Can I call you back in a minute?” Ira asked suddenly. “My boss is on the other line. I think it’s important.”

“Sure.” The call had already been cut.

Mercer stayed at the rail, leaning far over to watch the occasional boil of water when the thrusters kicked on to keep the Petromax Angel in position. The control van door opened. Tisa stood poised until she spotted him. As project director Mercer rarely slept in the same place on two consecutive nights so they’d had very little time together since their arrival in the Canaries.

Yet even these absences, and the shadow of the impending cataclysm, couldn’t spoil their budding relationship. She made every second magical, like the candlelight bath in his hotel room, or the midnight stroll she’d taken him on through gnarled olive trees. In the very heart of the grove, she’d erected a tent for them.

She smiled as she sidled up to him, slipping her arms over his shoulders and drawing his mouth to hers. “I think I should be jealous,” she said.

“Jealous, why?”

“That woman, Spirit. I think she’s in love with you.”

Mercer was even more confused. “What?”

“You have to admit she is beautiful.” He could tell she was teasing him.

“I suppose so,” he said, as if giving the question serious consideration, “if you’re one of those guys who goes for women with long legs, a big chest and dark smoldering eyes,” inviting a quick slap to the hip.

She massaged the spot in widening circles until she had a firm grip on his backside. “I’m not kidding about her. She’s attracted to alpha males. I bet back home she and C.W. are the center of their social group. Out here her husband looks to you for leadership. She doesn’t like it, while at the same time she’s also attracted to you. That’s why she’s always nasty.”

“You got all this from the tone of her voice?”

“Oh, she’s not that subtle. When you’re not looking she can’t take her eyes off you. And since I don’t think she owns a bra, her arousal can be obvious.”

Mercer burst out laughing and it took several moments for him to catch his breath.

“What’s so funny?”

“My life is starting to sound like a cheesy potboiler. Pretty soon you and Spirit will get into a catfight and then Charlie and I will have to defend the honor of our women or something.”

“Won’t happen that way. If she tried to fight me, C.W. would be busy planning her funeral. You know, it’s funny how people can adapt to anything. Here we all are, standing at the edge of disaster and we all continue to act on our basest emotions.”

“That’s part of being human. We can adapt to any misery, our capacity for it sometimes seems bottomless. I read someplace about romances between inmates in the Nazi concentration camps. If people can retain their humanity there, it can endure anywhere.”

“You think we will recover if we can’t prevent the avalanche?”

“As a species, absolutely. As a civilization, who knows?” Mercer’s phone jiggled.

“I’m back,” Ira said, his tone ominous.

Mercer caught it instantly. “What happened?”

“That was Kleinschmidt. He just came back from a meeting with the president’s national security council. As you can imagine, the president is under tremendous pressure to order an evacuation of the East Coast. Some say the order should have been given weeks ago. The idea of impeachment’s been floated. Meanwhile every senator and representative from Maine to Florida is clamoring for federal aid.”

“I told you I don’t care about the squabbles in Washington.”

“This one affects you. Originally you were given four weeks to stabilize the western side of that volcano and detonate the nuke, leaving one week for an evacuation if it doesn’t work. The president has decided to bump that up by a week in order to give people fourteen days to hightail it out of the danger zones.”

Mercer couldn’t respond.

“I’m sorry to hit you with this. It came right from the Oval Office. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”

“They call this a compromise, right? Jesus. Ira, if what we’re doing here fails, even those towering intellects on Capitol Hill have to understand an evacuation won’t mean shit. Taking away that week kills my chances while gaining almost nothing on the other end.”

“I argued that point, John Kleinschmidt argued that point and so did the vice president. On the other side were about fifty politicians representing forty million frightened Americans. We didn’t stand a chance. If it’s any consolation, the situation is much worse in Spain and Portugal. Both countries’ prime ministers have stepped down. And some of the Caribbean islands are in full-out revolt. Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are about the only places where people have a chance to survive and even there it’s chaos.”

“Are we doing anything to help?” Mercer asked, disregarding his own edict about not paying attention to world reaction.

“People who have their own boats have been arriving in Florida and a few in Texas. The Immigration Department’s not even bothering to count them. As for the rest, Christ, even if we wanted to we couldn’t save a fraction of the millions of people living down there. If we had every cruise ship and freighter in the world ready to take them off, we could maybe evacuate one of the smaller islands.”

“I shouldn’t have asked,” Mercer said, feeling the anguish in Ira’s voice. “I knew the answer already.” He put his arm around Tisa’s slim body, needing her warmth to soak into him. She snuggled close.

“Mercer?” Les Donnelley called from the control van. “We found the vent! You were right.”

“Ira, we found the vent,” Mercer said into the phone. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Mercer folded the cell back into his pocket and strode to the van. “Great news.” He gave Les a congratulatory high-five.

“It was right below where we first looked, like ten feet to the left.”

Back in the control room, Mercer looked over Jim’s shoulder. The lava tube was almost perfectly round and about eight feet in diameter. The high-intensity lamps attached to Conseil could penetrate only twenty feet into the aperture before their glow was absorbed.

“Looks pretty clear,” Mercer said. “Our first lucky break of the day.”

“We found it in a day,” Jim replied. “I call that lucky too.”

Mercer put his hand on McKenzie’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you the rest after we explore the tube. Any change to the temperature?”

“Nope. Nice and cool. The vent’s still dormant.”

“All right, send in the ROV.”

Jim pulled a microphone to his mouth to talk to the men on deck manning the spool. “We’re about to enter the vent. Spool out three hundred extra feet of cable so it doesn’t snag.” He looked over his shoulder at Mercer. “The cable’s armored, but…”

With gentle touches on the joysticks, he eased Conseil into the tube, keeping the robot exactly centered. The rock had been polished glassy smooth by the tremendous heat and pressure of the lava it once discharged, and it ran as straight as a sewer pipe, but he was careful not to scrape the tunnel lining and damage the ROV.

After the first three hundred feet, the team was starting to feel they had found what they needed. More cable was stripped from the reel and Jim sent Connie deeper under the volcano.

At five hundred feet the tunnel had shrunk so there was only a few inches’ clearance on each side of the ROV. The temperature was also on the rise, up to eighty-four degrees. This in itself wasn’t an issue, but it meant that magma was heating the water. Somewhere deep in the volcano, lava was boiling near the tube.

“I still think we’re okay,” Jim said. “We can strip Conseil when we make the run with the bomb. There are a few struts and sensors we don’t need that’ll reduce her width. I’m just worried about the heat.”

Without warning the lights on the ROV went dark.

“What the…?” Jim checked his console. “We’ve got a problem.”