Deep Fire Rising

LA PALMA THE CANARY ISLANDS

While several of the other islands of the Canary chain had paid the price for succumbing to tourist dollars, La Palma had remained virtually untouched. Partially it was because the people didn’t particularly relish the idea of their home being overrun, but mostly it was the relatively young age of the island in terms of geology. The Atlantic swells that battered La Palma hadn’t yet carved the towering cliffs into the pristine beaches so coveted by European vacationers.

Lashed by constant winds and chilled by ocean currents, La Palma had remained rugged and sparsely populated with a little more than eighty thousand inhabitants. The Cumbre ridge and the twelve-mile-wide Caldera de Taburiente cut the island into distinct segments. The northern part was covered in forests of Canary pines and tree heather, while in the south only hearty grasses and cultivated grapes grew from the volcanic soil.

At its highest point, the seventy-eight-hundred-foot Roque de los Muchachos, stands a cluster of observatories, silvered domes housing some of the most powerful telescopes in Europe. Far from smog and light pollution, La Palma made an ideal place to observe the heavens.

That was until the earth began to stir. And even the massive concrete foundations under the observatories couldn’t dampen the earthquakes that made the entire island shiver.

In the two weeks since his arrival, Mercer had logged some eighty hours crisscrossing the island in various helicopters. The chopper he was currently riding, a navy Seahawk off the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, thundered over the harbor of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz de La Palma, or S/C, as the locals called it. Half a dozen cargo ships waited at anchor for their chance to unload equipment for the effort to prevent the slide, and then carry islanders to Tenerife, where charted jetliners were ready to take them to Madrid and settlement camps being built in the center of Spain.

Farther out to sea, American and Spanish warships maintained a tight quarantine to prevent the flotilla of hired yachts from approaching. Despite the dangers, the eruptions had become the latest “must see” event for the wealthy elite. For now, the military was allowing them to approach to within twenty-five miles of the island. In a few days, the cordon would be pushed out to fifty and the airport at Tenerife would be closed to private aircraft, ending the stream of journalist-laden planes that buzzed the island.

From his vantage, Mercer could see the security personnel manning checkpoints on the roads leading out of the city. Each guard had a high-speed Palm Pilot that continuously updated destinations for the trucks, heavy equipment and fuel tankers that poured off the cargo ships. This was to ensure that no work crews were idled because they ran out of diesel or parts or any of the hundreds of items necessary for the project. Already the army of drill trucks working along the western slope of the Cumbre ridge had gone through six miles’ worth of twenty-foot lengths of drill pipe and enough lubricating mud to fill a small lake.

“There it is,” the navy pilot said over the intercom, pointing to a lone ship several miles south of town.

The ship was the one-hundred-foot Petromax Angel, a sturdy service boat belonging to Petromax Oil. With her blunt bows and extreme width in the beam, she wasn’t an attractive vessel, but she’d been designed to maintain the oil rigs and production platforms in the near-Arctic conditions of the North Sea. She personified function over form and came equipped with twelve-thousand-shaft horsepower, dynamic positioning systems, a submersible, saturation diving chambers, and two ROVs. The Angel also came with the compliments of the company’s president, Aggie Johnston, a woman out of Mercer’s past who had donated the boat despite, or maybe because of, his involvement. He didn’t know which.

It took Mercer several moments to spot the ship. Her hull was painted vivid red, her deck was clear green and her superstructure was covered in safety yellow. Even these garish colors were obscured by the ash and smoke that filled the air and wreaked havoc with all the machines in operation around the island. Each morning everyone on La Palma woke to the daily ritual of shaking out their clothes no matter how tightly sealed their bedrooms.

The sky was a constant overcast of putrid greens and grays. The satellite pictures Mercer had seen showed the sickly plume spreading eastward from the prehistoric ax-shaped island. No matter how often he brushed his teeth or how much water he drank, Mercer’s mouth always felt gritty. The only place safe from the ash was upwind in a helicopter, and even there the air was heavy with the stench of sulfur.

The pilot brought the Seahawk over the Petromax Angel’s fantail, flaring the helo over a clear spot on the deck. The navy chopper was too large to land on the workboat’s pad so he hovered just above the deck. Mercer opened the copilot’s door, tossed his duffel to the metal deck and leapt the four feet. He paused as a crewman slid open the rear door and helped Tisa make the jump. Mercer caught her and the two remained crouched until the Seahawk peeled away.

Charlie Williams and Jim McKenzie were the first to greet him. They’d boarded the Angel at Cherbourg, France, along with their gear, which had been flown in from Guam on an air force C-5 Galaxy. It was the first he’d seen of the two since the dive on the USS Smithback.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for calling us in,” Jim greeted, shaking hands.

“It all depends if we succeed.”

“He’s only speaking for himself,” C.W. said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. Talk about your opportunity of a lifetime.”

“I bet even your wife approves of this one.”

“Only after she conned Jim into letting her come.”

That surprised Mercer, but he let it pass. Her presence here didn’t matter. He introduced Tisa to the two marine scientists and asked, “You guys have everything you need?”

“What we didn’t bring,” McKenzie said, trying to light his cigar against the wind, “the folks here on the Angel have. But with an entire cargo jet to fill, we stripped about everything but the plumbing out of the Surveyor.”

“And the second diver? Alan Jervis?”

C.W.’s typical jovial expression faded. “He won’t be diving again. Kind of delayed shock or something. The night after you left he woke up screaming. The docs had to dope him up just so he could sleep. He’s still in a hospital in Guam.”

Mercer was shaken. Jervis had seemed fine the few extra days Mercer had spent on the Sea Surveyor. “I had no idea.”

“Neither did we,” Jim agreed, puffing on his Cuban. “But it does happen.”

“You’re okay, aren’t you?” Mercer asked C.W.

The lanky Californian grinned. “Taking risks is why they pay us. Seriously, I’m fine. Spirit and I talked a lot about it. I think what happened down there scared her more than it scared me. That’s why she insisted on coming. We have a backup diver. Scott Glass. He’s damned good.”

“And your team is settled here on the Angel? No problems with the regular crew?”

Charlie dismissed the notion. “Are you kidding? Underwater technology is one of the few areas where academia leads industry in having the latest and greatest. Their guys would love to get their hands on my suits. As we sailed down from France we already decided to use Conseil, the ROV we brought, rather than the two owned by Petromax. We finished the software download this morning.”

Jim cut in, “Besides, we all know what’s at stake here. No one is going to fight a turf battle with so much on the line.”

Mercer nodded. “All right. Les Donnelley spent last week talking with every local diver still left on the island and has taken temperature readings all the way around La Palma. He’s pinpointed three volcanic vents along the eastern coast below the Cumbre ridge that may suit our needs. Two of them show a steady rise in temperature so we think they are active. The third has remained dormant. It’s down a hundred eighty feet so few have dived into the tunnel. We don’t know what to expect.”

“How hot is the water around the other vents right now?”

“At their mouths, about eighty-four degrees. That’s twenty above the ambient water for their depths.”

“My ADS can take temperatures up to two hundred,” C.W. stated.

“We may need that capability if this last vent pans out. For now we’ll check the dormant tunnel with the ROV before committing anyone to the water.” Mercer handed Jim McKenzie a notebook opened about halfway. “Here are the coordinates. Get these to the captain and let’s get to it.”

C.W. and Jim left Mercer and Tisa alone at the rail of the stubby workboat. A half mile from shore the island didn’t look dangerous. They could almost pretend the pall was just smoke from a forest fire and not the sulfurous discharge from deep within the earth.

“I find it interesting,” Tisa noted, looking up at him. Even in the ruddy glow of the near-eclipsed sun, her dark hair shimmered. “People take orders from you as though they’ve worked for you for years.”

Mercer demurred. “The three of us shared a pretty wild experience.”

“Not just Jim and C.W. Others too, even your boss, Admiral Lasko.”

Mercer looked out across the waters to the island. “I never really thought about it. I see something that needs to be done and if I can’t do it I find people who can. I think the trick is finding the right people. Any idiot can manage a group who knows what they’re doing.” He smiled. “All I have to do is make sure I surround myself with experts and I get to look good.”

She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Fool.”

Six hours later, the Petromax Angel was in position near where Les Donnelley, the chief volcanologist on La Palma, had thought there was a suitable vent. The boat’s bow and stern thrusters were slaved to the dynamic positioning computer that was receiving updates every half second from global positioning satellites. She was as stable as if she’d been anchored to the seafloor.

Jim McKenzie sat in the glow of several video monitors, his hands on the joysticks that controlled Conseil, their ROV, which they’d named after the assistant to Professor Aronnax in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Behind him in the control were Mercer, Tisa, Charlie and Spirit Williams, and a mix of people from Petromax and the crew Jim had brought from the Sea Surveyor. The control van bolted to the Angel’s deck hummed with computers and the hiss of air purifiers. The doors had to remain closed because of the dust and the air-conditioning labored to dispel all the body heat.

Outside of the steel box, workers were monitoring Conseil’s umbilical as it unreeled from the huge stern-mounted spool. The bug-eyed ROV sank deeper into the waters.

Jim had a well-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth and a fresh pitcher of ice water at hand. His fingers were light on the controls, and the cameras on the unmanned submersible had become his eyes.

The ROV was the size of, and roughly the same shape as, a queen-sized bed but was made of high-strength steel, carbon fiber and composite ceramics. It carried four sets of extreme-low-light stereoscopic cameras, as well as a manipulator arm, pressure and temperature gauges, and a chemistry suite that allowed it to analyze water on a continuous basis.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Jim said without looking at his audience. “We’re dropping through one fifty. Connie’s board shows green.”

On the monitor they could see virtually nothing other than the glare from lights mounted directly above the cameras. The ROV was still falling, and Jim kept it well away from the island’s underwater basalt foundation.

“What’s the temp?” asked a Petromax technician.

“A bracing sixty-two degrees,” Jim answered. “No sign of volcanic heating.”

Mercer was relieved. The San Juan volcano loomed directly above their location. While lava had begun to jet from vents on the southern part of the island, San Juan, in the island’s middle, merely rumbled and occasionally belched ash.

Designed to probe the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, Conseil had no problems as Jim brought the ROV to a hover at one hundred eighty feet, a depth that even a scuba diver could work.

“The vent should be a hundred yards ahead of us and a bit to the left,” Jim intoned as he spooled up the nimble craft’s propulsors.

He eased the ROV forward, keeping one eye on the video feed and another on the sonar screen that was mapping the irregularities of the undersea cliff. An accidental brush with the rock, even this shallow, could damage the remotely operated vehicle.

“All right, I see the cliff.”

On the screen a murky shadow resolved itself into a jagged promontory of solidified lava. As he nosed the craft forward for a better look, the team could see the lava had formed in long ropes that had once shot from the vent like toothpaste. This pillow lava, as it was called, was what they all expected. To Mercer it looked like the ruins of a Greek temple, with the longer, straighter pieces of lava resembling fallen columns.

“Judging by the size of that lava,” he said, “I’d say our vent is big enough.” The shafts of rock were easily fifteen feet in diameter.

“We’re below the vent.” Jim brought Conseil up ten feet, then another thirty.

They lost sight of the pillow lava but didn’t spot the vent opening. He swiveled the ROV, searching along the dark cliff for the blacker spot of the volcanic vent. Nothing. He dropped Conseil back to their original starting point, moved ten feet to the left and allowed the robot to ascend. The dozen pairs of eyes watching the screen all thought they saw the vent, but it was their desire, not reality. Once the ROV had risen above the layer of pillow lava, Jim sank her again and started a new search lane another ten feet to the left.

They ran fifty vertical lanes before the area of lava ended entirely. Four painstaking hours had been wasted.

“No one said this was going to be easy,” Jim opined, undaunted by the job. He maneuvered Conseil to where they first encountered the lava and methodically started the next stripe ten feet to the right.

“I thought I put us right on the spot,” Les Donnelley said miserably.

“Don’t sweat it, man,” Charlie offered. “We learned a long time ago that you can’t find anything underwater until it wants to be found.” He turned to his wife. “Any dowsing tricks you can use to help?”

Spirit squeezed his hand. “Sorry, lover, that only works when you’re looking for water. How about you, Dr. Mercer? You always seem to have a bag of tricks up your sleeve.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

Mercer didn’t notice. “Not this time.”

“Oh, that’s right. You only perform miracles when your own ass is on the line.”

He shot her a look, but let it pass.

After another hour and ten more search lanes, the lava field petered out once again.

“Damn.” The mild expletive was the most emotion Jim McKenzie had shown since starting the search while the others were showing signs of their anger and frustration. “The vent that spewed this stuff must have been sealed sometime in the past. So now what?”

They’d covered a mere thirty-five hundred square feet, a tiny fraction of the cliff face. Without a more precise idea of the vent’s location, they could spend the next week scouring the undersea wall without finding it.

“I am so sorry, guys,” Les kept repeating. “The divers I talked to were certain there was a vent here.”

“Go back to our original starting point,” Mercer ordered, “and let Connie descend.”

“Why down and not up?” Spirit Williams challenged. “The vent could be above where we’ve searched just as easily as below.”

“It’s a guess,” Mercer admitted. “But an educated one. Charlie can back me on this. He’s a more experienced diver than I am. I think the answer is nitrogen narcosis, also called rapture of the deep. It’s a feeling that can overwhelm a diver working at depth not unlike drunkenness. You get impaired judgment, lack of motor coordination and feelings of euphoria. Now suppose the divers Les talked to had been affected by nitrogen narcosis when they discovered the vent. Chances are they would have been deeper than they thought, not shallower.”

C.W. nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

“And what if they were a mile south of here, or a mile north when they dove?” Spirit countered.

“They were on the surface when they fixed their position,” Charlie answered her challenge. “I’m sure they could read a handheld GPS.”

Spirit didn’t like that her husband defended Mercer and shook off the hand he had around her waist. She crossed her arms over her chest and stormed out of the control van.

Jim ignored her outburst. “I think Mercer’s on to something. I’ll let Connie sink down to three hundred and see what we see.”

“That’s way below how deep a diver can go on scuba gear.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Jim backed Conseil away from the cliff and let the ROV slowly drift deeper into the abyss. He kept the cameras pointed straight down so he could avoid any rock outcrops as the little robot sank.

At two hundred seventy feet they found another platform covered in ropes of pillow lava. “Bingo!”

The cell phone in the pocket of Mercer’s khakis vibrated. Rather than disturb the others, he stepped out of the control van. The air was crisp but heavily laden with fine ash particles. It had a metallic taste and Mercer couldn’t take deep breaths without the urge to cough.

The sun was setting beyond the Cumbre ridge. It silhouetted the volcanic formation, creating an undulating line of darkness and light. Because of the ash in the atmosphere, the color was more melon than yellow. To the south, where molten rock fountained from the Teneguia volcano, the sky’s glow was unworldly and hellish.

He fished the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. The caller-ID feature showed Ira Lasko’s number. They spoke at least ten times a day. “What’s the latest?” Mercer answered.

“I’ve got something for your file of the most ridiculous things you’ve ever heard. The North Korean delegation to the United Nations is willing to drop their objections to us using a nuke on La Palma if we give them permission to test one of their own. Get this — they say that a detonation on the island is a peaceful use of nuclear weapons and that their test would also have a beneficial purpose.”

“Yeah, beneficial in scaring the crap out of Japan and South Korea. What’s the UN’s reaction?”

“Publicly they don’t have much choice but to allow it. The way the resolution was drafted every nation has to agree for us to get permission. Privately, as soon as they run their test, the germane countries are going to sanction them even further into the Stone Age.”

Mercer snorted. “What else is going on?”

“The team at Lawrence Livermore have come up with the weapon you need. It’s an old W-54 SADM.”

“Saddam?”

“Small Atomic Demolition Munition. It was developed in the fifties to be fired from the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle. The engineers have modified its plutonium implosion core to push up the yield. Originally it was a one-kiloton warhead. They’ve brought it up to four and a half, which Dr. Marie says should be sufficient.”

“Provided we can find the vent,” Mercer said.

“No luck yet?”

“We’re closing in,” was all Mercer would give. “How big is the bomb?”

“Ah, hold on. About two feet square.”

“Sounds like the legendary suitcase bomb.”

“It is, or was. When they increased the yield they had to add shielding. It weighs in at two hundred sixty pounds.”

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.”

“The lights?” Tisa asked.

“Across the board. Connie just went dead. I’ve got zero telemetry.” He continued to scan his computer readouts, searching for the problem. “Goddamn it!” he roared. He grabbed for the microphone. “Bridge, this is McKenzie. What the hell are you doing up there? We’re drifting.” He pointed to the screen where it showed their coordinates. They were more than five hundred feet from where they were supposed to be.

“Hold on, Mr. McKenzie,” the officer on watch called back. “I’m checking right now. Yes, I see we have drifted. I don’t know what happened. It must be a computer glitch.”

“Glitch my butt. Were you even watching the screens?”

“Of course. Everything was fine but now we’re off course. I can’t explain it.”

“I can. You weren’t doing your job.” Jim switched channels on the PA system, uninterested with the man’s excuses. “Deck, this is the van. The ROV is down, reel her back in. Nice and slow. No more than twenty feet a minute. She’s in the tube and I don’t want her banged up.”

It took an agonizing hour to retrieve the cable. While the others went to dinner, Mercer and Jim stood shoulder to shoulder at the rail to watch the operation. And when the last of the cable appeared their worst fears were realized.

They’d recovered a thousand feet of armored data line but no ROV. When the Petromax Angel drifted from her assigned position Conseil’s tether had snapped.

“We have to send in C.W. to attach a towline,” Jim said in a defeated monotone. “Connie’s blocking the pipe and we need to get her out of there.”

“We can still use it to insert the bomb, right?”

McKenzie shook his head and spat into the sea. “When that cable snapped, it opened a conduit to the sea. Right now water’s wicking through the tether and slowly filling the interior of the Conseil’s interior. It’s cooked.”

“Okay, we’ll use one of Petromax’s ROVs.”

“They’re camera platforms only, half of Connie’s size. What does the bomb weigh?”

“Two hundred sixty pounds.”

“With that kind of payload, they’d sink like a stone.”

“What about attaching air bags?”

“I won’t take the chance of a bag hooking on something and deflating. We have to insert the bomb with the NewtSuits. Besides, those ROVs can’t function at temperatures above a hundred and twenty.”

“The water’s eighty-four.”

“Right now. Tomorrow it’ll be a hundred. The day after, who knows?”

“So we do it with the Advanced Diving Suit,” Mercer stated. “It’s not our first option, but we knew there was a chance.”

“I know. I just don’t like it. If something goes wrong, Conseil can be replaced. Divers can’t.”

Later that night, Mercer lay in his bunk beside Tisa. He was going over in his head how the ship could have drifted from its position and caused them to lose the ROV. He and Jim had confronted the watch officer and the helmsman on duty. They insisted neither had left their posts in the minutes leading to disaster. Two off-duty crewmen had vouched for them as well. They’d been on the bridge wing photographing the lava glow to the south. That left a computer glitch, an unlikely explanation since the GPS worked fine now and the chances of it failing when the ROV was most vulnerable stretched credibility.

Staring at the ceiling, Mercer knew the only explanation was sabotage. Someone on board wanted them to fail. His suspicion turned first to Spirit Williams. Only she didn’t have a motive. As he sought one, it dawned on him that the signal Jim McKenzie had intercepted in the moments before the hydrate cooling tower had activated could have been sent from the Surveyor and not some mystery ship that no one had been able to locate. Someone on the research ship would have known exactly when to turn on the massive impellers in order to kill the divers.

That realization took Spirit off his suspect list. He could accuse her of a lot of things but she was obviously devoted to her husband. He couldn’t picture her sending the signal, knowing that C.W. was right in the path of the boiling methane hydrate.

He folded his arms under his pillow as Tisa tucked herself tighter against him, her mouth near his neck.

If not Spirit, then who? Scott Glass, the alternate diver, hadn’t been on the Surveyor. He’d joined Jim and C.W. in California. And those two hadn’t done it, he was sure. That left the five technicians who had made the trip from Guam with McKenzie.

Mercer didn’t even know their names, which he supposed made it easier for him to have them confined to their quarters until after the bomb went off. For good measure, he’d lock up Spirit too, just so he wouldn’t have to listen to her mouth. Maybe he’d ask Tisa to be her jailer.

Now that he’d satisfied himself as to the who — and the why didn’t really concern him; who knew why fanatics did anything? — he still found himself wondering about the how. How had they made the ship drift off course?

Tisa shifted. Mercer knew he’d remain awake until he solved the mystery, so he moved her a little farther and swung off the bed. She gave a soft moue of annoyance and settled back to sleep.

He dressed in the dark, not bothering with his boxers or socks, and slipped out of the cramped cabin. The corridor was deserted, but he felt the presence of the ship, the thrum of her generators and the whoosh of air through the ventilators. He passed the cabin Jim was sharing with Scott Glass. He could hear Jim’s snores through the closed door and pitied the diver. The next cabin in line was Spirit and C.W.’s. He heard voices.

He paused. It was three o’clock in the morning.

He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it sounded like an argument. Charlie must have told her that the ROV had been lost and he and Scott were going to have to place the nuclear weapon themselves. Mercer could imagine her reaction.

He moved on, found a flight of stairs and climbed to the bridge. He didn’t know the watch officer, but the red-haired Irishman knew him and greeted him by name. “Kind of late for a stroll, Dr. Mercer. I’m Seamus Rourke.” Most of the Petromax Angel’s officers and crew were from the British Isles.

“No rest for the wicked.” They shook hands.

“I thought it was the weary.”

“Both.” He helped himself to coffee from the urn on a counter at the back of the spartan bridge. “Can you show me the GPS receivers.”

“You too, huh? I’ve been sitting here thinking about that since I heard what happened and I kind of thought sabotage. But the receivers are on the antenna mast outside. You can’t get to them without accessing a service ladder that’s kept locked. Only the captain and chief engineer have keys and I already checked the padlock. No one messed with it.”

“That blows my theory.”

“There is another way,” Rourke suggested.

“I’m all ears.”

“There is such a thing as a GPS scrambler. It’s only available to the military so they can prevent enemies from accessing the positioning satellites or at least messing with their reception.”

“That’s right! I think Saddam Hussein tried to use them during Iraqi Freedom. As I recall they didn’t work.”

“Not against the equipment used by the U.S. Air Force and Navy, but it might confuse our gear long enough for us to drift off station. The Angel’s a good boat but she was state-o’-the-art when Maggie Thatcher was hanging her girdle at Number Ten.”

Rourke’s idea had merit. “What would one of these scramblers look like?”

“Probably just a little black box. Something that could be tossed overboard. I doubt we’d ever find it even if the saboteur kept it with him. And there’s also the chance that our receivers were scrambled by somebody onshore. We’re close enough.”

Mercer hadn’t thought of that. Had there really been a ship over the horizon from the Sea Surveyor? That opened the possibility that someone on the island had the jammer. Eleven thousand workers were currently on La Palma along with about a thousand diehard locals who had yet to evacuate. Not one had been screened by security. There hadn’t been time.

The tall officer looked Mercer in the eye. “I want to know why. Why would they do it? We’re trying to save the world. Why would someone want to stop us. No one gains.”

“It’s not about gain.” Mercer set his cup next to the coffeemaker and turned to the door. “I think it’s about maximizing loss.” He hadn’t forgotten that Tisa’s brother, Luc, hadn’t been at Rinpoche-La and was still at large.

Mercer found his way to the deck. The air felt heavier than before and charged with static. Lightning licked along the distant Cumbre ridge, caused by the ash and gas erupting from the southern part of the island. Mercer watched strike after strike. On the far side of the ridge he had teams drilling into the mountain trying to stabilize the slope. The drill trucks were well grounded, but it was only a matter of time before one of the men was struck.

With just one week left he considered evacuating them. The extra support pipes they were pinning into the rock wasn’t worth the risk of one or more being killed. He knew from the beginning that the whole scheme had been a long shot at best. His hopes had always lain with the nuke.

But what if each pipe prevented one ton of debris from slamming into the ocean? And what if that one ton meant saving a family trapped on the Bahamas, or in the Belgian lowlands?

On his numerous inspection tours he’d talked to enough of the roughnecks to know that they’d probably ignore his evacuation order anyway. He was pretty sure a few of the tougher ones would even continue to drill as the Cumbre Vieja split and slid down to the sea.

He turned his back on the atmospheric discharges and looked to the east. Dawn was hours away, but the glow from the erupting Teneguia volcano painted the sky in oranges and flickering reds. The light danced like the mindless rage of an artillery barrage. Cracks of thunder added to the illusion.

It would be ten o’clock on Saturday night back home, he realized. Harry would be slouched on his stool at Tiny’s. Paul would be in his cramped office getting tomorrow’s odds for his sports book. Doobie Lapoint would be behind the bar, the crisp towel over his shoulder the cleanest item in the place. Mercer desperately wanted to be a part of that normalcy, not here making decisions that affected the lives of millions of people.

He pulled the phone from his pocket and started to dial the Arlington number when he realized he didn’t have a signal. The lightning, he guessed, and turned back to appraise the island.

Mercer had a second to realize the sky had been shredded — the burst of ash had already climbed to five thousand feet — before the wall of sound rocked the Petromax Angel and threw him off his feet.

San Juan was erupting.

Lit from below by its own fiery heart, the top of the volcano had been blown skyward, a seething, billowing column of ash and rock that spread as it rose, a bruised purple mushroom cloud that cleaved the darkness.

The ship was a mile from shore, and the volcano was another eleven miles inland, and yet the shock wave slammed the Angel with hurricane force. Mercer clung to the rail as the wind ripped and tore at his precarious grip. He had to find cover. In moments the first ash and chunks of pumice would rain on the deck, yet he could not let go until the wave passed.

His head was filled with the ceaseless bellow of the explosion, a sound that seemed to shake his flesh loose from his bones. When the concussion finally dissipated, he felt like a dried husk. His fingers were bent into claws from his grip on the metal stanchion.

He staggered to his feet, his first concern for the crews working to pin the side of the mountain. He had to find a working phone or radio. He had to know how many he’d lost. At least five drill trucks were working the lower flank of San Juan. Fifty men had been within three miles of the blast, more when he considered the tanker drivers and relief workers, who rarely ventured far from their machines.

A door into the superstructure flew open. Spirit Williams was backlit against the interior lights. Her T-shirt was cropped so high that the bottom of her breasts were visible, two heavy crescents of white skin. Her panties were little more than a triangle of silk. Mercer brushed past her without a glance.

“What happened?” she cried and raced to keep pace.

“It blew. The son-of-a-bitching mountain blew.” Crewmen and scientists tumbled from their cabins in various states of undress.

Mercer climbed for the bridge. Third Officer Rourke stood at the windscreen, binoculars pressed to his eyes. “Get on the radio, Seamus. See if you can get a signal. We need to know what’s going on.” Mercer tried his cell again but there was no signal.

“Your little girlfriend said we had two more weeks,” Spirit accused.

“Go find Jim,” Mercer ordered. “And your husband. We have to push up the dive.”

“Dr. Mercer, I have someone onshore.” The watch stander handed him the radiophone handset.

“This is Philip Mercer. Who is this and where are you?”

“Bill Farley, Doctor. I’m an assistant supervisor for the drilling crews. I’m about eight miles south of the volcano.”

“What’s the situation?”

“Chaos. I don’t know what’s happening. There were three crews up near the summit and another two farther down. I haven’t heard from them and from what I can see here I don’t think they made it.”

That news wasn’t unexpected but still hit like a body blow. “What about the fault?” Mercer asked. “Has it slipped?”

“If it had I wouldn’t be here. I’m standing on it now.”

“Bill, I want you to reach as many of your people as you can. Evacuate everyone. I don’t know why San Juan erupted early, but you need to get everyone off the island any way you can.” Mercer’s cell vibrated. The atmospheric disturbances must have abated enough for the signal to reach him from the towers on the island. “Keep this line open.” He passed the phone to the officer and flipped open the little Nokia. “Mercer.”

“It’s Ira. What the hell happened? I just got a call from the USGS. They’re recording a massive eruption on La Palma.”

“The San Juan volcano just lit off. I just talked to a guy in the field. He says the fault hasn’t slipped so we may have time.”

“It doesn’t matter. As soon as the president hears about this he’s going to order the evacuation.”

Mercer was forced to agree. “I would too.”

How had Tisa been so wrong? That question had hidden in his subconscious since the first instant of the eruption and now stood at the forefront of his mind. On Santorini she’d predicted the earthquake to the minute. How could she miss this by three weeks?

“Where’s the warhead?” he asked the admiral.

“Still at Livermore Labs.”

“How fast can you get it here?”

“Four hours.”

Even the SR-71 Blackbird couldn’t travel the thousands of miles from California to Spain that fast. Mercer suspected that the world was about to get their first look at the SR-1 Wraith, the secret hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft mistakenly called Aurora.

“Get me that bomb, Ira. There’s still a chance.”

“Mercer, if that mountain goes it won’t matter that you’re on the other side of the island. The wave’s going to nail you. Maybe you should get out of there.”

“I’ve ordered everyone off La Palma, but we’re not running. I have to make a try with the nuke.”

“If you’re wrong, that’s a death sentence for the crew with you.”

“I don’t need you telling me the obvious.” Mercer tried to calm himself. Snapping at his friend wasn’t going to help. “Ira, can you buy me twelve hours with the president? We both know if that evacuation order comes, thousands are going to die in the panic.”

“And millions would be saved if the island collapses. There’s no way he’s going to take the chance.”

“What if this wasn’t the main eruption? What if we still have time? Tisa hasn’t been wrong before. I don’t think she’s wrong now.”

“Then tell me why that volcano’s erupting as we speak.”

“I can’t,” Mercer admitted. “Not until I talk to her.”

“And if Tisa can’t explain it either?” Mercer had no reply. “I’m sorry. He’s not going to have a choice about ordering the evacuation tonight. And I think I back him on this one.”

“All right, do what you have to, but get me that bomb.”

“That I can promise.”

“I’ll be in touch.” Mercer folded the phone into his pocket. Jim and Tisa stood at the back of the bridge. Tisa’s face reflected anguish as she looked at the towering ash cloud spreading over the dark island. Yet her voice was resolute when she said, “This isn’t the eruption from the prophecy. This is just a prelude.”

“I believe you.” Mercer touched her shoulder. “Unfortunately no one else does.”

“They’re going to try to evacuate the East Coast?” Jim asked.

“The president will probably make the announcement tonight.”

“What are we going to do?”

Mercer’s reply was never in doubt. “Finish what we started.” Jim nodded. “The bomb will be here in four hours. We need to pull Conseil from the vent so we can set it as soon as it arrives. We have to implode the mountain and stabilize the ridge in the next few hours. Where are C.W. and Scott?”

“I saw Scott heading for the control van,” Tisa said. “I haven’t seen Charlie.”

Spirit raced onto the bridge at that moment. She was nearly hysterical, sobbing and trying to catch her breath at the same time. She hadn’t yet put on anything to cover her near-naked body. “C.W.’s hurt. His head is bleeding bad and he won’t wake up.”

The pieces fell into place. “Jim, get down to the van and prep for the dive,” Mercer snapped the order. “Tisa, stay with him.” He addressed Seamus Rourke. “Are there any firearms on this ship?”

“Firearms? Why?” And then Rourke had the same thought as Mercer. The saboteur. “No, nothing. I’ll call the crew together and sweep the ship.”

“Good. Lock up everyone who came aboard with the Surveyor team except Jim here and Scott Glass. Put them in the mess hall.”

“What are you doing?” Jim protested.

“C.W. was attacked.”

“What?!” Spirit and McKenzie cried.

“The signal to turn on the turbines when we were on the Sea Surveyor, the glitch in the GPS yesterday that cut the cable to the ROV and now C.W., the best diver we’ve got, is hurt. It’s not a coincidence. Someone you brought with you has been sabotaging our work.”

“It could have been…” Jim’s voice trailed off as he made the connection, and came to the same conclusion. “Son of a bitch!”

“Tisa warned me that the Order had thousands of members and potentially millions of sympathizers. There’s no way we could have known they already had an agent in place.”

“I left him alone,” Spirit wailed, making no attempt to wipe at the tears pouring down her cheeks. “They could come back to attack him again.”

“Come on,” Mercer pulled her along as he rushed from the bridge, calling over his shoulder to Jim, “Prep both suits. Maybe C.W.’s okay.”

They ran down to the second deck. Mercer threw open the door to C.W.’s cabin. The young diver lay on the floor at the foot of their bunk, wearing jeans and shoes but no shirt. Around his upper body was a pool of his own blood. His blond hair was matted to his head, and his normal tan had faded to a ghostly white.

Spirit couldn’t enter the room. She stood at the door, her fist jammed against her mouth to keep from crying out. Her whole body trembled. Mercer knelt next to C.W. and felt for a pulse. It was there, but weak. Next he felt along Charlie’s head until his fingers sank into a sticky dent above his temple. Bits of bone grated as he pulled his fingers from the wound.

“Is he—?”

“He’s alive, but this is serious.” Mercer checked Charlie’s eyes. One pupil was dilated, the other just a black point. “His skull is fractured and he has a concussion. He needs medical attention.” There were twenty Ph.D.’s on the ship but not one medical doctor. “I don’t want to move him, but we have to cover him up. Give me a hand.”

Together Mercer and Spirit stripped the bed and tucked the blankets under and around Charlie so he wasn’t lying on the linoleum floor. Mercer turned up the cabin’s heat and found more blankets in a storage closet.

By the time they finished, the ship’s second engineer arrived with a hard plastic medical chest. “What happened?”

“It looks like someone hit him over the head,” Mercer said, kneeling back to let the engineer, who obviously knew what he was doing, make his own examination. “Good job with the blankets,” he said in a rich Scottish accent. “He’s in shock. Hold this.” He handed Mercer a plasma bag and inserted the needle into Charlie’s muscled arm. “Blood loss is just as dangerous as the head trauma.”

“Are you a doctor?” Spirit asked, heartened by the man’s efficient manner.

“No, ma’am. I cross-trained as a corpsman in the Royal Navy.” He used scissors and a razor to get rid of the hair around Charlie’s wound. Then he cleared away the blood with a lavage of warm saline. “Okay, let’s see here. It’s deep and the bone is broken, but this part of the skull’s pretty lean so that doesn’t mean anything.” He removed some of the bone chips with a pair of tweezers. He looked at Mercer then Spirit, noticing for the first time she was barely dressed. She quickly wrapped one of Charlie’s corduroy shirts around her torso. “I’ll bandage his noggin and it’s just wait and see. He’s young, and looks fitter than an ox, so I think he’ll be okay. He’ll have a hell of a headache when he wakes and will be more than a wee bit tired for a few days. Keep an eye on him and I’ll check back in an hour or two.”

Spirit threw her arms around the engineer. “Thank you.”

“I’m going to ask if a crewman can keep watch on your door, if that’s all right,” Mercer said to Spirit after the engineer had left.

“Bit fucking late, isn’t it? His head’s already bashed in.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would go this far.”

“Didn’t think it would go this far?” she shouted back. “It went this far when someone tried to kill him on the Sea Surveyor. And what would have happened if he’d been in that lava tube when the ship drifted? You really are a conceited bastard, you know that? You don’t care about anyone or anything so long as you get the glory.” She began to sob. “Just leave.”

Mercer backed out of the cabin, knowing in his heart this wasn’t about glory. Maybe Tisa had gotten her wrong.

On deck, a blizzard of ash swept the ship in unending waves. Even with all the lights ablaze, the workboat was nearly blacked out by the ashfall. A resourceful officer had ordered the vessel’s water cannons to sweep the upperworks and deck, turning the ash into mud that drained from the scuppers. The rain that had begun to fall stung when it touched Mercer’s skin, made acidic by sulfur belching from the volcano.

He found Jim, Scott Glass and Tisa in the control van. “How’s Charlie?”

“Someone hit him over the head,” Mercer said, wiping the grime from his face with the towel Tisa had handed him. “He has a concussion, but the ship’s engineer was a corpsman and seems to think he’ll be fine.”

“What about the dive?” Scott asked. He was younger than Charlie, dark-haired and sporting a goatee and a nearly shaved head. Where C.W. was laid back and casual, Glass had an intensity and an attentiveness that Mercer appreciated. “One man can’t tow the line in alone.”

“Do any of the Petromax people have experience in the ADS?”

“No. There’s only the one pilot for their minisub. He might be able to do it, but he’s only five two. The suit’s too big.”

Jim added, “Most of the work Petromax does in the North Sea is done with saturation divers.”

“Can we use them?”

“It would take days just to set the diving bell and allow the divers enough time for their pre-breath on gas.” Jim shook his head. “Conseil’s stuck more than five hundred feet inside the vent and we have to go even deeper to place the bomb. It’s the suits or nothing.”

“I don’t know if he was bragging,” Scott put in, “but C.W. says that Mercer was pretty good in the suit when you were together a few weeks ago. If you’re willing to risk it, I’ll dive with you as my backup.”

Mercer hesitated. “Look, we only made a couple of dives. I have maybe three hours in the suit. And that was in open water. Forget it. What about you, Jim?”

“It’s ironic, but I’ve never even snorkeled.” Another resounding explosion echoed across the water. “We don’t have time to get someone else. We have to do this in one dive as soon as the bomb arrives.”

Mercer knew this was too important to risk on his limited skills. He would jeopardize everything if he made even a simple mistake. He shouldn’t do it, but what were the alternatives? He looked to Tisa. She understood how the decision tore at him. She gave him an imperceptible nod, not of consent but of compassion.

Scott would lead. Mercer’s role would be support if Scott needed something. All he’d really have to do is hang back and not be in the way. He could handle that, he thought. But what if he messed up? Mercer couldn’t let himself think about it. Glass needed someone to help haul the tow cable into the vent and there was no one else and no time to find someone.

“Okay. We’ll go as soon as the bomb’s delivered. That gives Scott four hours or so to teach me everything C.W. missed.” Mercer gave Glass a lopsided smile. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

“I was about to say the same to you.”

Before heading for the suits, Jim convinced Mercer that he needed at least one of his technicians with him to monitor the dive and personally vouched for the man.

“Just him,” Mercer agreed, but not liking it. “I don’t want the others released from the mess hall until they can be vetted.”

Mercer wanted an update on the bomb’s ETA and tried Ira on the cell phone but couldn’t get a signal again. He was able to radio Bill Farley, the supervisor over on the eastern side of the volcanic ridge.

The evacuation had been ordered, but no one was leaving their posts. In fact, Farley reported that the first- and second-shift workers were showing up by the hundreds, eager for an all-out assault to keep the Cumbre Vieja from slipping. He said the men would only leave the danger zone and head to the north of the island when the bomb was in the ground and the clock was ticking.

Mercer couldn’t have been more proud.

Crossing from the amidships control van on the Petromax Angel to where the NewtSuits were housed in a container at the Angel’s stern was like a walk across a newly turned field in the middle of a cyclone. Wind and rain lashed the ship, and the best efforts of the crew couldn’t keep up with the swampy mud that had grown a couple of feet thick in some areas. Layers of ash and sizzling bits of pumice blanketed the sea.

The bright yellow NewtSuits stood on their wire-frame lifting cradles and were cracked open ready for the men. They resembled the discarded carapace of some science fiction insect. The technician Jim had vouched for was installing extra lights to the shoulders and forearms and a secondary battery pack.

“We’ll be hauling in a tow rope to pull the ROV from the tunnel so we can’t be on tethers,” Scott explained. “Too much risk of getting everything tangled. You and I will be able to communicate but once we’re in the tunnel we may lose the acoustical phone from the surface.”

“How will they know when to pull Conseil back out?”

Scott patted his suit’s steel claw. “Once we’ve got the line attached, just smack it with this. Jim can pick up the vibrations on his monitors. One tap for go, two to stop.”

“That easy?”

“K-I-S-S. Now, tell me everything you did with C.W. when you were together and I’ll take it from there.”

Over the next three hours the men went over the suits, Mercer absorbing as much as he could of what Scott told him. He remembered a great deal of what Charlie had taught him, but Glass had a way of imparting even more. They worked for an hour inside the suits, taking power off the ship’s mains so as not to drain the batteries. Although it was a dry run and would differ dramatically from when they were underwater, Mercer was grateful for the practice.

The only change they made from their original plan was that Scott would use Charlie’s suit, while Mercer operated the spare, the one he’d toyed with aboard the Sea Surveyor. Scott felt he’d be better able to handle the idiosyncracies of Charlie’s suit.

They took a break when Ira’s four-hour promise approached. Mercer tried to raise the admiral on his cell phone but still couldn’t get through. Jim had been able to use the ship’s radiophone to contact an official on the island of Tenerife who’d been told the bomb had been delivered to Lisbon, Portugal, and was now en route to La Palma. The man didn’t know how.

“There’s no way they can get a chopper to us in this soup,” Scott said as they looked out into the storm from the cargo container.

Dawn was just a gray promise. The San Juan volcano had stopped spewing ash several hours earlier but the sky was choked with it. It would remain the color of lead even if the rain clouds passed. There was barely enough light to see the outline of the island a mile away.

“Hey, Mercer!” Jim’s shout came from the control van. “I think I have something.”

Mercer dashed through the filthy rain to the van. “What have you got?”

McKenzie handed him a headset. “Hello?” Mercer said into the mouthpiece.

“That you, Snow?”

There was too much interference to recognize the voice and it took Mercer a moment to remember the nickname. “Sykes?”

“Roger that.” The Delta commandos hadn’t stayed in La Palma for even an hour when they flew here with Mercer. Lasko and others in Washington needed a mission debrief and Mercer hadn’t been able to spare the time to give it. They’d been flown straight to Washington on the same Citation they’d borrowed to get to La Palma from Katmandu. “The Monkey Bombers have gone nuclear.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m about ten miles up-range of your position. The warhead was loaded into an MMU in Portugal and we’re about to drop it.”

“Don’t tell me you’re coming in too.”

“Sorry, not this time. I’m sitting behind the two pilots of the stealth that plopped us into Tibet. The least they could do was give me a ringside seat.”

Mercer saw the logic in delivering the W-54 bomb in one of the Manned Munition Utilities. The pods were designed to accurately and gently deliver a soldier to the battlefield. They couldn’t risk sending a chopper to the island until the volcanic fallout subsided. A regular parachute drop didn’t have the precision to land the weapon on the deck of a ship at sea, so the monkey bomb was the sensible choice.

“I’m calling to verify your GPS coordinates,” Sykes went on. “And to let you know the trigger is a three-hour delay. Once it’s set there ain’t no turning back.”

“Okay, Booker. I’m turning you over to Jim McKenzie — he’s the master of ceremonies for this particular ring of our circus. Good to hear your voice, man.”

“Same to you. Good luck down there. Sounds like you’re going to need it.”

“Hoo-yah!” Mercer returned the headset to Jim and went back to the deck, shouting for the crewman trying to hose mud over the side to clear the way.

The Petromax Angel had about forty feet of open deck between the control van and her stubby superstructure, more than enough room to land the MMU. He waited in the shelter of the bridge wing, shielding his eyes against the acid rain and swirling ash to glimpse the stealthy black pod as it fell from the cheerless sky. He mistakenly looked straight up, not realizing the MMU’s onboard computers were constantly correcting the pod’s descent for the brutal windshears.

The MMU actually swooped over the port side scant feet above the rail and dropped to the deck, falling lightly onto its back as the parachute was cut away. The billow of nylon vanished over the starboard rail, as fleeting as a ghost.

The seals around the lid hissed and the coffinlike door opened a crack. Mercer couldn’t help the eerie feeling he got as he approached the MMU. He almost didn’t want to touch it. He swung open the lid and stared in wonder at what lay nestled in the protective foam.

The bomb was white and nearly featureless, just a rectangular box that really was about the size of a large Samsonite suitcase. He placed a hand on its casing. It was cold.

Mercer shivered in the rain. Beneath the steel and lead shielding lay a ball of explosives that would implode an even smaller sphere of plutonium. It had the power to level a city.

He prayed it had the power to save a planet.