Ring of fire axial a dis.., p.15
Ring of Fire Axial: A Disaster Thriller, page 15
“Yes.”
“This gonna be a grab-and-go?” Chen asked. “Or a grab-and-get-buried?”
Rizzo cut him a glance. “We don’t bury clients.”
“I’m asking what he plans to put in the back,” Chen said, unfazed. “Weight and shape matter.”
“Not furniture,” Graham said. “Papers. Photos. A cedar box. Dad’s journals. Things that hold a life. It’ll weigh less than the bodies you could plant in these seats.” Graham was slightly perturbed by Chen’s questions. He wasn’t going to leave proof behind just because of weight or perceived worth to the pilots.
Chen nodded slowly. “Things.”
“Not just things,” Graham shot back. Then he spilled the words before he chose them. “Proof we existed.”
Silence, but a different kind. Rizzo pulled the chin strap of his helmet up half an inch, as if to take pressure off a thought. “Copy that.”
Valleys opened before them. Rizzo guided the helicopter, expertly hugging the margin between hills. Soon, rain came in bands. In one squall, it hammered the canopy like nails on sheet metal. In the next, it whispered. The AStar answered with minor corrections, a small beast shouldering past larger ones.
“Power lines ahead,” Chen warned. “Midspan sagging under water weight. West of the ridge.”
“Got ’em,” Rizzo said. “If I can see your problem, I can miss your problem.”
A tiny laugh emerged from Chen’s throat. “Put that on a T-shirt.” Fists bumped. Again.
Graham watched the world resolve into shapes. A flooded field. A blue metal roof partially caved in. A Minnie Winnie motorhome lay on its side in a drainage ditch, rainwater circling around its tires.
However, the helicopter rode the wind like it had grown up here. The rotor wash passed over him again, and the cockpit shifted. Not in reality—in recall. A white ceiling. Engineers hunched over panels with luminous status bars that lied and lied until the truth broke in with sound. The Hamaoka plant had shuddered. Graham could feel the shudder now, in the AStar, translated to his skin, which would never be forgotten.
“You have to flood it,” Tanaka had said to him, voice high with trepidation. “If the pools boil, we—”
Graham had cut his friend and coworker off. “I know,” he’d said, and the pressure behind his eyes had been a knife. He had known. There had still been a list of things between knowing and doing. Written procedures. Chain of command. The faith that the power grid would be restored. That the diesels would cough awake. And the pumps would bite water, then sling it where water belonged. Over rods, not over men.
He had cracked open the seawall anyway. He’d stood in water that wanted to be a fist and aimed it. He could still feel the invisible pull of the approaching tsunami tearing at his knees as if he were standing just offshore. He heard the roar. He felt the earth tremble the way the concrete trembled like an animal held by the scruff.
They’d only had minutes. He’d traded reputation for minutes and felt defeated.
He had escaped with Kana, ash in her hair and the scars of what she was forced to leave behind. His daughter, Emi, wondering if they’d return. Kenji, his son, hiding a stuffed dinosaur in his shirt like it could protect his heart.
Graham groaned aloud, trying to force the thoughts of failure out of his mind. Why couldn’t he be satisfied with getting his family out of Japan alive?
Then the chopper’s altitude dropped like the sky had pulled the rug out from under it.
Twenty-Five
April 23
Late Morning
AStar Helicopter
Above Oregon
THE ASTAR’S CONSOLE LIT UP with warning lights and alarms. “VRS!” shouted Rizzo as he expertly fought to maintain control by managing their descent rate and forward speed.
Graham was yanked out of musings of self-loathing to lean forward in his seat. The pilots fought the sudden strong wind shear as the chopper experienced a vortex ring state, a dangerous aerodynamic condition in which the rotor blades lose lift and the helicopter settles into its own turbulent air.
“There you go!” said Chen excitedly. “This storm is full of freakin’ microbursts.”
“No shit,” mumbled Rizzo. He took a deep breath and settled a little deeper into his seat.
“Fuel?” Rizzo asked.
“Red Bluff’s tower’s dark.” Chen’s voice cut the tension. “City says emergency ops only. Pump power’s out. Medford is logical. Or Klamath Falls regional, east of Medford.”
“That’s our fuel stop,” Rizzo said. “If it’s dead, we’ll backtrack to Medford. Gotta keep fuel range from falling under a hundred.”
After a moment, Chen offered his fist to bump his partner’s. There was no need for pats on the backs or words of encouragement. They both understood how close they had been to being pancaked to the ground.
They made their way to Klamath Falls as the storm began to set in. Rizzo set down in a crosswind that wanted to take their knees out from under them. The chopper bounced once, skids kissing runway, light and then heavy. The ramp was a sheet of water. A man in a raincoat as yellow as defiance met them at the truck by the pumps, shoulder hunched, hands out as if to ask, what do you want?
Rizzo answered with a genuine smile, the universal sign for “we’re very happy to be here.” Chen hopped down into ankle-deep water to help him thread the rubber snake into the AStar’s flank.
“Cash?” the raincoat shouted.
“Yeah,” Graham said. He passed a wad of cash to the attendant.
The chopper was quickly refueled, and the Klamath Falls ramp attendant gave Graham his change. “You boys are dumb,” Mr. Yellow Raincoat said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Godspeed, dumb boys.”
They were airborne again in nine minutes, heavy with fuel and the smell of it. The storm had inched east and thickened. They tucked low to the deck to avoid the wind like a kid ducking under a table during an argument between his parents.
“News says Mount St. Helens turned the gorge into a sandbox,” Rizzo said.
“Sand with teeth,” Chen corrected, reading off a USGS update on his iPad. “Lahar channels down the Washougal and Lewis chewed up everything in their path. Fires broke out where the ash rained hot. Roofs collapsed under the water and ash mix. Whole neighborhoods. Gone.”
Graham pictured his mother’s kitchen, the one he’d stenciled bees onto at eleven with a patience he’d never shown his school homework. He pictured Duke’s dark boots by the door, ankle-deep in ash.
A gust shouldered the nose, and the helicopter rolled slightly. Rizzo caught it with a small correction that looked like nothing and felt like grace. The rain changed pitch, more thumping needles than the sheets they’d experienced earlier. On the horizon, the clouds opened their floodgates. Small, dark waves of heavier rain moved left to right. Lightning framed the atmospheric river in the margins.
Graham respected the pilots despite their brusque attitudes. He imagined that it was a coping mechanism to deal with the horrors they encountered on the streets of East Oakland or Tenderloin in San Francisco.
Hours passed until Chen announced their arrival with a warning.
“Ride ahead,” Chen warned. “Columbia River Gorge southside. Look at the wind bending the firs.”
Minutes later, the river found them, a brown muscle flexing across the land. The banks had been chewed raw. Pockets of foam and debris spun in eddies big enough to swallow a school bus. A boathouse, unmoored, rotated slowly like a farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz.
“Welcome back to the gorge, Mercer,” Rizzo said softly.
They ran the south edge, keeping the river under them both as a guide and a threat. The hills on the Washington side were black, scorched ribs. The ash softened them to something that wanted to be dust. Where the ash had met rain and then fire, the world had the skinned look of charred meat.
“Jesus,” Chen said with an exhale.
Graham swallowed around a knot of something that wasn’t ash and wasn’t rain. “If the house is there,” he said, to see if the words would turn into a miracle twice, “we take what we can carry and go. If the roof’s bad, you guys can stay out.”
“Hard line,” Rizzo said. “I like hard lines.”
In the headset, a new voice bled through. It was the U.S. Coast Guard, the coastie’s voice clipped and efficient. “All stations, barometric anomaly noted on buoy PAPA—” the voice faded before returning “—repeat, anomaly—monitoring for equipment fault—” The atmospheric river ate the rest.
“What’s PAPA?” Chen asked.
“Offshore buoy,” Rizzo said. “Might be the Pacific playing tricks. Might be more.”
Graham felt the insinuation of Rizzo’s words. More. His dad would understand. There was a prehistoric creature lying in wait under the ocean. Not a mythical beast, but one the likes of which man had never experienced. It had been the bane of his dad’s existence.
The rotors beat steadily, providing reassurance over his head, and the machine manipulated the air. Yet something under the planet surface was moving furniture.
“Two minutes,” Chen said, eyes on the tablet map. “Cape Horn Road should be under us. If there’s a clearing, it’ll be to the north of the river.”
The helicopter tipped a fraction, slow and deliberate, and the world on the other side of the bubble rolled past in a wet parade. A skeletal fir tree holding up its bare arms. A roof with a hole punched in it as if it had been pelted by a meteorite. A fence lay down in the direction the water had chosen when it flooded.
“There,” Rizzo said, and his voice went small and private, as if they’d just discovered a deer in the woods and didn’t want to scare it.
Graham inched up in his seat and pressed his nose against the glass. And there it was, rising out of the wreckage of a part of Washougal that had given up.
The Mercer home.
The back porch sagged at the southwest corner. The roof had collapsed slightly. The lawn was gone, replaced by a grayish-black tongue that had licked down from the bluff and dried mid-gesture. The dock was a scrap pile of boards peeling off into the river. Overall, however, the old family home had held.
Graham’s breath left his body and didn’t come back right away. The helicopter hovered, as steady as the weather allowed, and the house stared up with all its broken windows and said welcome home.
Rizzo’s hand tightened on the collective. “We’ve got one clear pad in the backyard by the barn, or what’s left of it.”
“Wind’s squirrely,” Chen said. “She’ll try to roll us left on final.”
“Yeah. Let her try,” said Rizzo, his chiseled jaw sticking out a little further.
Graham put his hand flat against the window as if he could touch his home, as if glass and rain and air and distance were just ideas.
“Proof,” he muttered, and the word fogged the Plexi.
Rizzo’s voice came in calm and clinical, a countdown to a thing you couldn’t keep from happening: “Setting up for landing. Gusting cross. Tail low. Watch the ash dust devils on the downwash.”
The AStar slid into a committed turn, and the old house appeared to them through rain and static and the low growl of a river that had lost its temper.
Permanently.
Twenty-Six
April 23
Late Morning
The Saddle
Island of Hawai’i
TAYLOR KEPT THE CHOPPER in the cooler air along the waterfront, nose just down enough to keep speed without inviting the updraft fists that waited inland. Beau wondered at Papakōlea, one of the world’s few green sand beaches, created with unique coloration caused by the olivine crystals from Mauna Loa’s surrounding cinder cone.
The intercom crackled with a soft static that never went away, drawing Beau out of his thoughts.
“Three-axis is happy,” Taylor said, eyes scanning, hands quiet on the cyclic and collective. “Four-axis is standing by. When we pin a hover, let the computer do the math, and we’ll watch for lies.”
“Copy.” Beau wedged Billy’s topo map under his knee board and smoothed it with his palm. Based on his visuals during flight, he’d cross-hatched to avoid zones where even his superhero sister couldn’t survive. The long scar where the methane had exploded in a rush of fire continued to smolder, now smothered with lava.
They curved in a wide arc to clear the dirtiest plume coming off Mauna Loa. From this angle, the volcano looked like it had been unzipped. A line of fountains threw molten arcs outward in dramatic fashion. Rivers of fire braided and rebraided, surging until a black scab skinned over, then broke periodically with a hiss. Heat shimmer made the horizon waver as if the island were viewed through water.
To the south, Kilauea stuttered with orange. The lake inside the crater sloshed, flashing white where it lapped and cooled, gas boiling off in jets that flickered blue green at their edges to put on its version of a laser light show. On the far shoulder, Mauna Kea’s fresh vents pulsed with spatter fountains similar to her sisters’, which glittered mid-flight before going black. Throughout the eruptive zone, lava pebbles fell to create an insidious hailstorm.
The focus of Beau’s attention was between giants where the Saddle gasped. You could see the air there, not because air ever wanted to be seen but because something had forced it to glow. Convection columns twisted up and vanished into the dirty anvils, and here and there low orange flares licked outward where the ground exhaled fuel and flame found it. The land wore an ugly, uneven burn that read less like geology and more like a wound.
The intercom popped. A spit of static snapped Beau’s ear, drawing him out of his focused search.
“Heat’s talking,” Taylor said, as if the mountain had a mouth and a vocabulary. “We ride seams, not center. But I gotta say, we don’t have a lot of options.”
Beau nodded. “Eyes on the high ground. Pretty sure that’s where she’d go.”
“Copy.”
Taylor toggled the gain and pointed at the instrument panel. “FLIR’s blind drunk.”
FLIR, an acronym for forward-looking infrared, was especially useful during the day in bright daylight conditions. However, it lit the world in false color now. Effective for finding heat signatures in a jungle environment, the volcanic activity simply generated a smear of whites and yellows wherever lava ran or rock still burned. The screen painted everything hungry in heat. A human should be a different kind of hot, a shape against the radiance. But the palette washed out where it mattered most.
“Trust it, then verify,” Beau said. His finger found a penciled circle near a square symbol on the map, located on a low rise. He raised the map onto the instrument panel to get his bearings, “There.”
Taylor nodded. “Heading in. Gonna be a rough ride.”
A sideways lightning crawler, bright and ornery, skated across the belly of a plume inside the vog overhead. The helicopter jolted. Sideways first, then downward. The tone in the headset bleeped a warning that wasn’t a warning—just a system clearing its throat. Ash hissed against glass in a steady, light sandblast. The smell in the cockpit shifted toward hot rubber and copper.
“Dammit!” Taylor voiced his frustration as he struggled not to overcorrect.
“How’s the brain?” Beau asked, internally questioning why Taylor continued to maintain manual control when the artificial intelligence might be a better approach.
“ALIAS is awake,” Taylor said. “MATRIX will hold a hover on a dime as long as the dime doesn’t melt. If the sky is erratic like now, we fly, not the AI.”
“Okay,” said Beau, unconvinced. After the brief time in his dad’s Tesla Cybertruck, experiencing its autonomous driving capability, he suspected the DARPA technology on this chopper was a better qualified pilot than he was.
Taylor reached the coast and then turned. Below, the pristine volcanic beaches turned to fields of sugarcane that looked like hair burned in patches. Beau scanned the area, making mental notes so they didn’t hit the same area twice. Taylor angled them up a deep canyon that led directly between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. The instrument stack wobbled a degree and settled. Ahead, a low shock pulse thumped the airframe. Not an explosion but more of a pressure exhale from the planet.
“This is erratic. Unpredictable,” Taylor commented as he let out a deep sigh. “This shit could take us down in a heartbeat.”
“Copy.” Beau leaned forward, the harness tugging his chest back. Beau’s teeth touched and stayed touching. He swallowed against the metallic taste creeping along his tongue.
Where are you, Sloan?
Twenty-Seven
April 23
Late Morning
The Saddle
Island of Hawai’i
AS SLOAN AND KANE rushed across the backyard, they were thrown to the ground. Not with the force of the planet’s heat. Not yet.
But with a vertical punch that even rollicked the cottage on its stilts. A fissure ripped open the yard in a jagged zipper, swallowing landscape materials and an outdoor dining area.
Kane’s eyes rolled as a wave of pain took him. “Go,” he managed through clenched teeth. “Don’t wait for—”
A deeper roar drowned him. The far slope beyond the trees unfurled in hues of orange, hungrily licking over lava rock from ancient eruptions. The heat pushed through the open seam, enveloping the yard like the breath of an open wood stove.
“Follow me!” Sloan shouted. She could no longer allow Kane to nurse his wounds, mental or physical. He had to fight through the pain, or they’d both die.
She felt the mountain’s voice under her feet. The steady thumping had turned to a staccato drumbeat. Behind them the cottage let out a sound no house should make, a long tearing screech of nails being separated from wood.
Sloan resisted the urge to look back. She couldn’t. There was no time.
Together, they cleared a stand of ōhi’a lehua trees, their red, yellow, and orange blossoms immediately wilting under the extraordinary heat. Once through, the gulch appeared just as Leilani had promised. Footing was treacherous, as the ground was rocky and choked with haole koa, the invasive native Hawaiian plant. Inexplicably, cool air pooled there, precious as water. Sloan breathed once, twice, before she pushed her luck. Behind her, Kane gagged as a chalky wave of volcanic fog, or vog, rolled down after them, sour and ghost hot.
