Deep Fire Rising

THE WHITE HOUSE

The rain that had been falling for days finally abated, leaving the streets clean and fresh. Halos of mist draped the streetlamps. At this hour there was no traffic or pedestrians. Even the city’s homeless were hibernating.

The Cadillac carrying Mercer swung into the back entrance of the Executive Mansion and braked at a guardhouse. After vetting the driver and passing a mirror under the chassis to search for bombs, the guard asked Mercer for identification and checked his name against an electronic clipboard. The car was waved through.

Ira was waiting for Mercer at the West Wing entrance wearing a suit but no tie. They shook hands silently and the admiral led him into the building. They moved along dim corridors and passed several quiet offices before coming to a closed door.

“The president doesn’t know the nature of this briefing,” Ira informed him. “Kleinschmidt called him thirty minutes ago and just said there’s a crisis.”

“Who else is in there?” Mercer asked.

“Admiral Morrison.” C. Thomas Morrison was the charismatic chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the uniformed leader of the United States military, and possibly the next occupant of the Oval Office. “Paul Barnes of the CIA and Dick Henna from the FBI.”

“I haven’t seen Dick in a long time,” Mercer remarked. They’d been friends for several years but their busy schedules had taken a toll on the relationship.

“This isn’t a social call,” Ira reminded.

Mercer nodded grimly.

Ira knocked and waited for an aide to open the heavy door. This was the Cabinet Room, a long space dominated by a massive conference table. The president sat at his traditional seat at the center of the table sporting a polo shirt and twenty hours of beard. John Kleinschmidt, the national security advisor and Ira’s direct supervisor, was just settling in at the president’s right. Paul Barnes was seated to his left. Unlike the others, he’d taken the time to don a fresh suit and tie. Even Admiral Morrison was out of uniform. Mercer and Barnes had butted heads on several occasions and their mutual dislike was evident in the single glance they afforded each other.

Ira took the chair opposite the president and indicated Mercer was to sit next to him. Dick Henna, the bulky director of the FBI, gave Mercer a friendly nod. Someone handed Mercer a mug of coffee and stepped aside when he declined the offer of cream.

“I’m sure the esteemed members of the Fourth Estate are wondering about this late-night meeting, and quite frankly so am I.” The president had the rare ability of making a mild rebuke sound friendly. He spread his large hands on the polished table. “Ira, you want to tell me what we’re doing here at this god-awful hour?”

“Mr. President, I believe you’ve met Dr. Philip Mercer, a member of my staff.”

“On several occasions,” the president said with an easy smile. “I recall telling him after Hawaii nearly seceded from the union that one day he’d be working for me. How’s that Jaguar of yours?”

“Fine, sir.” Mercer was astounded the president knew what kind of car he drove and waited only a second for an explanation.

“You probably didn’t know that I paid to replace the one that got destroyed during the Hawaii crisis. It was easier for me to cut the check than to bury the expense where some forensic accountant from the GAO could find it.”

“I’m flattered.”

“It was a small price to pay for what you did for this country.” The chief executive turned serious. “And since you’re here again, I suspect you’re about to do my administration another favor.”

“If it’s not too late.”

The president turned his startling blue eyes to Ira. “Okay, tell me what’s going on.”

Ira didn’t clear his throat or shuffle papers or any of the normal delaying tactics people used when they’re about to dole out bad news. He shot straight ahead. “Through an intelligence source Mercer has been cultivating we learned of a potential volcanic eruption on an island in the Canaries called La Palma. On my order, a team from the U.S. Geologic Survey has been sent there, and about two hours ago they confirmed that the island may be in the first stages of an eruption.”

“Pardon me for a second,” the president interjected. “But why do we care?”

Ira tapped Mercer. “You’re the geologist. Want to explain it?”

Though Mercer hadn’t heard of La Palma until a few hours earlier, he spoke with the confidence of an expert. “For those that don’t know them, the Canaries are a group of islands in the Atlantic about a hundred miles off Morocco’s west coast. They’re Spanish owned and are considered a vacation getaway for snowbound Europeans. La Palma is the westernmost of the islands and, in terms of geology, the youngest and the most volcanically active. The latest eruption was in 1971, but the one that concerns us occurred in 1949.

“That year, the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which dominates the southern third of the island, erupted over the course of several days. This in itself isn’t unusual. She generally pops every two hundred years or so. What made the ’forty-nine eruption unusual is the four-meter-wide crack that appeared along the center of the island. The western flank of the island, a chunk of rock about a hundred twenty cubic kilometers in size, slipped a few feet toward the sea and stopped.”

“Why did it stop?” the president asked.

“Because Mother Nature wanted us to dodge a bullet, sir. There are two geologic features that make La Palma particularly dangerous. The first is that the composition of the island’s soils allows for it to build up in very steep slopes. In fact La Palma is one of the steepest islands in the world. By rights, the slab of rock should have kept sliding down into the water. We got incredibly lucky. But maybe not for long.

“About ten years ago, a British scientist named Robert Wright floated the idea that a significant eruption could further loosen that slab of rock, allowing it to crack through completely and crash into the ocean. Such an event would produce a catastrophic wave, a phenomenon called a mega-tsunami. The supposition garnered a few doomsday headlines when he published his research, but no government took the idea seriously and certainly no large-scale analyses have taken place.”

“What is a mega-tsunami?” asked the Joint Chiefs chairman.

“Though commonly called tidal waves, a tsunami has nothing to do with tides. Generally they’re caused by undersea earthquakes and their size is limited by the amount of crustal displacement, which is fortunate because rock can only take so much strain before it snaps. That’s why we’ll never experience an earthquake much above eight-point-six. Most geologic faults slip long before they contain enough energy to cause a quake of even magnitude seven. Therefore an undersea earthquake will cause a tsunami of corresponding size. If a fault drops twenty feet, the wave will top out around twenty feet.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” This came from the caustic director of the CIA, Paul Barnes.

Mercer rounded on him, not bothering to keep the anger from his voice. “Tell that to the three thousand residents of Papua, New Guinea, who were killed by such a wave in 1998.” He turned his attention back to Morrison but kept an eye on the president. “In contrast, a mega-tsunami is caused by a rockslide, and the only limit to the size of the wave is the amount of debris that hits the water. Petroleum geologists working in Alaska in the 1950s found evidence of such a wave in Letuya Bay. Ringing the bay was a line where the old-growth forests inexplicably ended. It was as if some force had ripped out every tree up to about five hundred fifty feet above sea level.”

“Five hundred fifty feet?”

“That’s the height of the wave created when a huge chunk of granite sheered away from a cliff and hit the bay.”

“That’s impossible,” Barnes opined.

Mercer shifted his gaze to the president. “Three years later a group of fishermen were caught in a tsunami more than a hundred feet tall in the same area. Only a handful survived.”

The president looked grave. “And you’re saying that another eruption in the Canaries will cause such a mega-tsunami?”

Mercer shook his head. “The chunk of granite that created the wave in Alaska weighed a couple thousand tons. If La Palma lets go we’re talking half a trillion tons of rock. That’s an energy pulse equal to the total U.S. power consumption over six months.” That fact had come from a research team in Switzerland with verification from several computer modelers.

The men around the table paused, reflected on the enormity of what Mercer described.

Dick Henna cut the silence by clearing his throat and asking, “You said that two things make La Palma particularly dangerous. One was how steep the island is. What’s the other?”

Mercer wasn’t surprised it was Henna who’d picked up on that. Unlike the president, Paul Barnes or Ira’s boss, John Kleinschmidt, Dick had worked his way through the ranks to his current job. He was an investigator at heart, not a politician.

“Dikes,” Mercer said.

“Excuse me?” the president and Henna said simultaneously, shooting each other quizzical glances.

“La Palma is comprised of volcanic rock that is very permeable to water. The island absorbs rain like a sponge. However, there are formations, called dikes, of very dense basalt that cut along the spine of the island like a picket fence. These dikes act like dams that trap the rainwater, forming tall columns of supersaturated soil. It’s believed that the dikes are solid enough that they wouldn’t be affected by the seismic shocks associated with an eruption.”

“So where’s the danger?”

“An eruption begins with magma filling chambers deep under the island. The heat from an influx of molten rock will begin to boil the water trapped in these columns. As we all know from high school physics, water expands as it heats, but it cannot be compressed. This would put incredible pressure on the dikes. The failure of one or many of them is inevitable.”

The president leaned forward. “And this would trigger the landslide and cause the mega-tsunami?” Mercer nodded and the president asked the obvious follow-up. “What kind of damage are we talking about and what can we do to minimize it?”

“According to the computer modeling done a few years back, the wave will be one thousand feet tall and would have already traveled outward at least sixty miles in the first ten minutes after the landslide. It would cross the ocean at about five hundred miles per hour, radiating in all directions. North Africa would be hit first. The wave will have abated to three hundred fifty feet by then and fortunately that part of the continent is sparsely populated. Loss of life would be minimal. Next would be Spain, Portugal and then southern England. The wave crest at this time will top out at over a hundred feet, still carrying enough energy to ricochet and radiate through the English Channel and completely drown all of the Netherlands.”

The faces around the table paled with sickly fascination.

“Nine hours after the landslide,” Mercer continued, “the wave is still traveling at jetliner speeds. It will scour everything off the Bahamas and Bermuda and the archipelago islands stretching from Puerto Rico to Venezuela. Nothing would remain behind. No plants, no people, no evidence anything had ever called those places home.”

Jaws were beginning to slacken, but the men around the table were tasked with protecting the United States and someone, Mercer wasn’t sure who, asked, “What about us? What happens when it hits us?”

“The wave will hit Miami first. It’ll be eighty feet tall and be about forty feet thick at the base, a surge unlike anything ever seen. At five hundred miles per hour the kinetic energy is almost incalculable. Every structure, road, bridge, and building within fifteen miles of the coast will be destroyed. At twenty miles, there’s a chance a few of the more solid buildings will remain, though they will be completely gutted, first by the initial wave pulse and then again when the water drains back to the sea.

“This scenario will play out all along the East Coast from Florida to Maine. Jacksonville, Savannah, Norfolk, Washington, Philly, New York, Boston. All of them are wiped from the face of the earth. That’s roughly forty million dead. And these are just the figures for the United States. Add an equal amount of dead in the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.”

“And the number of injured?” Ira asked.

“It’ll be like the World Trade Center.”

The men understood. Like many around the nation, they’d donated blood to help the injured survivors only to discover that in such a tragedy there were none.

“If this is really going to happen, what about evacuating the eastern seaboard?”

Admiral Morrison took that question. After a lifetime in the military, he had the background in logistics. “You’re asking about relocating fully one-fifth of our population, Mr. President. It would take months just to coordinate where to put them all.”

“Do we have months?” the chief executive asked Mercer.

“The truth is, we don’t know, sir.” Mercer gathered his thoughts for a moment. He was standing on top of a precipice. The wrong word could send him over the edge. Or more accurately send Tisa over the edge.

“Over the past fifty years,” he started, “scientists have made strides in predicting cataclysmic events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. There are certain signs we can look for to tell us what’s happening deep underground long before anything is visible on the surface. The presence of microshocks, tiny swarms of earthquakes, is one. New seismographs are hundreds of times more precise than ever before. From soil taken from core samples we can detect elevations in diffused gasses like CO₂, a precursor event to an eruption.

“All of this gives us an idea that a volcano’s coming to life. This is the type of evidence the team Admiral Lasko sent to La Palma has found. But this isn’t a guarantee that a mountain’s about to erupt. Volcanoes give off signs all the time only to fall dormant once again.”

“You don’t believe the recent activity on La Palma will end soon, do you? You believe the island is going to erupt.”

“Yes, Mr. President, I do. And we all should.”

“Why?” Paul Barnes’s voice dripped acid.

“Ira mentioned I was cultivating a contact. That’s not entirely true. She approached me first.” With a quick glance around the table, Mercer realized that he had the lowest security clearance and needn’t keep anything back. He began his tale from the moment the two agents first arrived at his house and told it straight through. When he finished, it appeared that everyone had questions and was eager to parse his story.

The president staved off the onslaught with a wave. “Do you believe her?”

“I’ve never doubted the presence of her organization. I saw it in Vegas, the Pacific, and aboard the ferry. Her claim about predicting earthquakes I would have dismissed as fantasy except I saw the book and felt the Santorini quake myself. She knew when and where it was going to hit. That’s not a coincidence and judging by the size of the journal she carried, I believe her group’s had this ability for a long, long time.”

The president was about to ask another question, but Mercer forestalled him. “Please don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. What she showed me flies in the face of everything I’ve ever learned as a geologist and yet I can’t refute the evidence.”

Several seconds passed. They were waiting for the president.

Mercer glanced at Ira, who gave him a small shrug. His bald head was covered in sweat. Mercer had always assumed that Ira had become comfortable in the corridors of power. He’d retired from the navy with two stars, so dealing with the nation’s elite shouldn’t have been anything new. And yet this meeting made him sweat. He was on the line here, Mercer realized. By bringing him in, Ira was tacitly backing him. If the president dismissed the claims, Ira would be out of a job by morning.

Mercer shot him a wink filled with more bravado than he really felt.

The president laced his fingers and set them carefully on the table. “There’s been an interesting change to what is expected of this office over the past few years. The American people now count on their president to be omniscient. They expect us to know the motivation of every ally and enemy and divine the consequences of every action. Mistakes are no longer an option.

“I think this started during the Gulf War when people saw the precision of force projection. They began to believe that if we could slam a bomb through a designated window, we can damn well do anything. People now presume that this kind of precision should extend to the economy and foreign affairs. Put simply, people think that I have a crystal ball sitting on my desk in the Oval Office.

“Obviously I don’t. I have the authority to order the evacuation of fifty million people, but what if thousands are killed in a panic and nothing happens. Or I can order the evacuation and those that are saved will blame the government for not preventing the catastrophe in the first place. Another option is to do nothing, believing that this crisis has been concocted by a gullible scientist influenced by a fringe group and no one will be the wiser.”

Paul Barnes folded the leather-bound binder in front of him as if the meeting was over. “I think that’s the best course.”

The president didn’t appear like he was going to stop the CIA director.

It was now or never. “There’s one more option, sir,” Mercer said quickly.

The chief executive almost smiled. “I was hoping there was.”

“I believe Tisa Nguyen gave me enough time to do something to prevent this from becoming a disaster. We’re seeing the first signs of an eruption. That doesn’t mean the eruption is imminent. It might take six months. It might be six years.” Mercer paused. He wasn’t being dramatic; he was thinking about the aftermath if his next words were true. “Or it might be six weeks. She is the only person who knows for sure. We need to find her. With the information she can provide, we’re in a better position to understand what we’re up against.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Possibly, but I need help. I spent the day going over commercial satellite photographs looking for a telltale sign of where Rinpoche-La could be located. I have to admit the person helping me and I aren’t photo interpreters and I kind of think it was a colossal waste of time.”

“Harry helped you?” Dick Henna asked incredulously.

Even Mercer had to admit asking a pair of eighty-year-old eyes to scan thousands of pictures was a long shot. However it was the only shot he had and he was desperate. He gave a little rueful smile. “Well, he was there and didn’t hinder me. That’s about all the help he could give.”

The president turned to his national security advisor. “John, what’s that group over in Maryland that does our photo work?”

“We’ve got the National Reconnaissance Office, but I think you’re talking about the National Imaging and Mapping Agency in Bethesda.”

“NIMA, that’s the one. Dr. Mercer, where exactly were you looking?”

“The northern slopes of the Himalayas.”

Paul Barnes rounded on Mercer, his eyes bulging. “China?”

Mercer maintained his composure. “I believe so, yes.”

The president turned to the CIA chief. “Can you get her out?”

“Mr. President, please,” Barnes entreated. “Even if we can find her town, which isn’t likely, it would take weeks to mount a rescue op. We have precious few assets in China. Most of them are in the cities and wouldn’t last five minutes in a rural area without authorization.”

“What about sending in some of our own people?”

“If this was the Cold War and the target was in Eastern Europe or Russia I’d say there’s a shot. In China, forget it. A Special Operations force would have to come in overland from Nepal or Pakistan, crossing one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world. They wouldn’t make it five miles before being picked up.”

“What if the team is made up of Chinese-Americans?”

“I don’t have that kind of manpower. All our Chinese-American agents are analysts or translators. None of them is trained for fieldwork.”

“A budget of three billion a year and you don’t have one Asian James Bond?” Dick said archly.

“Gentlemen,” the president cut in smoothly, “we’re going to concentrate on locating Rinpoche-La first and hammer out how to get her afterward.” Henna and Barnes mumbled an assent in unison. “Mercer, I would like you to draft a memo for the people at NIMA to tell them exactly what they’re looking for. Finding needles in haystacks is their specialty, but I’m sure they’d appreciate anything you can give them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And then I’d like you to pack for La Palma.”

“No, sir.”

The chief executive wasn’t used to being defied. He looked more startled than upset. “Excuse me?”

“I said no, Mr. President. I trust the people Ira sent to the island are more than qualified to study the volcano. They’re specialists in that field. I am not. I’d be in the way. I think you’d be better served if I accompanied whoever is sent in to rescue Tisa.”

“Out of the question!” Barnes thundered. “I will not allow a civilian to join one of my teams. If you think you’d be in the way around volcano specialists on La Palma, just what do you think you can add to a contingent of CIA operatives?”

Mercer could have gloated. Lord knew, Barnes deserved it, but the director was just trying to protect his fiefdom. The CIA should have known about this case long before Mercer handed it to them on a platter. Barnes was humiliated, and needed to do some damage control to reestablish his authority. It wasn’t in his personality to work with Mercer so he was lashing out instead. “Mr. Barnes, you’re forgetting a very basic fact. None of your people have the slightest idea what Tisa looks like. In this situation, a composite sketch based on my impressions won’t do a rescue team much good.”

Making ready to reply, Barnes let his mouth close. There was nothing he would say. Although Barnes couldn’t see Dick Henna directly, the FBI director put his hand over his mouth so no one could see his smile.

“You have a point there, Doctor,” the president said. “I assume you know what you might be getting into?”

“Yes, I do. I wouldn’t consider it if I didn’t know it was so important.”

“Then if we do go in to get her, consider yourself on board.” The president stood and swept the assembled group with a stern look. “For now I don’t want this getting too far beyond this room. Make the inquiries you need but keep it quiet. If this eruption is as serious as we believe we have a small window of opportunity before the media get wind of it. We all know what’ll happen then. Dr. Mercer, on top of everything else, you are my special science advisor. I want options.”

“Options, sir?”

“To save our country. We may only have a couple of weeks or months. I think we all agree that evacuation is pretty much out of the question. Even if we could pull it off, the United States would cease to exist as the country it is now. The same goes for the sections of Europe that get hit too. There must be a way to prevent the eruption or stabilize the side of the volcano. Those are the options I want.”

“I understand,” Mercer replied, thinking that the president didn’t have a clue what he was asking.