Chapter 22

The men at the table stared back at him.

"Excuse me?" one of them finally said.

"You heard me," Mac said.

Briggs cleared his throat. "Listen," he said, "there's plenty of blame to go around. Blame the army. Blame the Cold War. Blame your congressperson for not appropriating the money. Blame Hawai‘i for protecting its tourist trade. Blame the tree-huggers for blocking the construction of dump sites forty years ago when we could still have moved this stuff out. Blame all the people who looked at one piece of the puzzle and not the whole problem. We've inherited this mess from the 1950s, with plenty of help from the '70s and '80s. The whole thing has been a slow-moving train wreck."

They all looked through the window and watched as six U.S. Army CH-47 Chinooks—tandem-rotor, heavy-lift helicopters—slowly descended, mini-excavators hanging beneath and backhoes in the cargo bays.

Briggs said, "We're going to build a dike."

He sounded like Noah announcing he was going to build an ark.

"How big?"

"Twenty feet high, maybe a quarter of a mile long."

Mac shook his head. "Not big enough," he said. "It needs to be fifty feet high and half a mile long. At least."

"Fifty feet?" Briggs said. "That's the height of a four-story building. You're joking, right?"

"With all due respect, Colonel, do I look like I'm joking?" Mac pointed to the dark slope of Mauna Loa. "It doesn't look steep out there, but it is," he said. "The lava flow is very liquid, especially when it's hot. It flows like a swollen river. You'll have lava coming down at you in flows that are going to be ten, fifteen feet high. Like a tsunami. They'll flow right over a twenty-foot wall."

"So would a fifty-foot wall work?"

"Probably not," MacGregor said. "But you should build it anyway."

Briggs said, "And I suppose bombing—"

Mac cut him off. "Won't work."

There was a moment of silence, the air even heavier than before.

Briggs said, "You may know there was a DARPA study about venting the volcano—"

"One that concluded that it won't work."

Quietly Briggs said, "There must be something we can try."

MacGregor watched the helicopters maneuvering, bringing in the big equipment. He frowned, bit his lower lip.

"Give me an hour," MacGregor said.

"To do what?"

"To come up with a plan so we don't have to kiss our asses goodbye," he said.