Chapter 37

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawai‘i

Rebecca Cruz waited for Mac and his crew at the observatory. He'd called her from his car and asked her to meet him there, said they were on their way back from the army base, where they'd gone after leaving the caldera.

When he told Rebecca about the trip to the summit, she pronounced it the second-dumbest stunt ever. "What's the first?" Mac asked.

"I don't know," she said, "but there must be one."

She heard him laugh. At least somebody around here has a sense of humor, she thought. "One more thing," she said.

"What's that?"

"Next time you better take me with you," Rebecca said.

What little she knew of him so far, she liked, starting here: He was sure of himself in an almost cocky way, and he was clearly used to being the smartest guy in the room.

Same as me,Rebecca thought. May the best person win.

He told her he wanted to get his team with her team at HVO, not the Military Reserve, and he had pointedly not asked Colonel Briggs to join them.

"I'll fill him in later," Mac said. "For now I'm proceeding on the fairly safe assumption that the army is resistant to independent thinking."

"Well," she'd said, "until they need it."

"Yeah," Mac said, "to get them out of what the natives call a huikau. One they helped create, incidentally."

"Huikau?"

"‘Mess' is a rough translation."

"Is there no Hawaiian word for ‘clusterfuck'?" Rebecca Cruz asked.

Mac told her that they needed to present their plan by the end of the afternoon. And he told her why. And to whom it would be presented.

"We've got to pitch our plan to him?"

"We do," Mac said. "I'm told the president asked him to come here and make sure the fiftieth state wasn't about to disappear into the Pacific."

A half hour later, they had all assembled in HVO's second-floor conference room. Rebecca's team was there: David, Leo, Don McNulty, Ben Russell. So was Mac's: Jenny, Rick, Kenny Wong, Pia Wilson.

"First off," Mac said, "I've been asked by Colonel Briggs to remind everybody that everything you hear in this room stays in this room, without exception," Mac said. "What we don't want to do is cause a panic because of what is about to happen and what Rebecca and I are proposing to do to deal with that."

"What exactly are you proposing?" Rick asked. "We've only heard pieces of it so far."

"You know we're really good at blowing up things, right?" Rebecca said to Rick. She paused.

"Well, this time we need to talk about blowing up a volcano," she said.

Mac went and stood in front of the map as Jenny pointed her remote at the map on the screen behind him, which featured a detailed schematic of the Big Island. Most of the island was in dark green, with the exception of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, which were highlighted by much lighter shades of green. There were various landmarks dotted throughout, all the way down to Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, south and west of the town of Hilo.

They didn't waste time talking about anything other than blowing huge holes in the largest active volcano on the planet. "I'm going to show you where I think our main point of attack should be," Mac said.

"Northeast flank," Rebecca said.

Mac and Jenny nodded.

"The only thing that makes sense for us, and by ‘us' I mean HVO and Cruz Demolition, is a man-made eruption on that side of the mountain," Mac said, pointing. "Or a series of them. I've taken a hard look at our various gradient maps, and I've determined what the steepest descent path is, because it is essential that we divert the lava there."

"But if we do that," Jenny said, "won't the lava flow right into Hilo?"

"Right down Kīlauea Avenue," Mac said, "if it makes it that far."

"Which it won't," Jenny said.

"As some of you know and the rest of you can see," Mac said, "Mauna Loa, because it's such a gigantic shield volcano, has fairly gentle slopes in most places."

Rebecca looked at her brother but didn't speak.

Mac said, "We're going to need to have conduits in place, ones we're confident will hold, to draw the flow to the east. But mostly to the east. Gentler slope, longer distance from the town. Canals, really. Venice with lava."

"But whether the canals and conduits hold won't matter without precise, strategic bombing," Rebecca Cruz said. "If the explosives get too hot, they'll detonate before we want them to."

"And the lava flowing through the canals won't trigger those explosives?" Jenny asked.

A quiet alarm went off in Mac's head then—he realized he'd been ignoring Jenny. And he hadn't missed the looks she'd given Rebecca Cruz. He turned to her now. "Jenny, I know you've got some thoughts about the way this needs to work," he said.

"If we are going to successfully divert the lava," she said quickly, as if she'd been waiting for a chance to jump in, "we actually want it to move rapidly enough through our new channels that it won't cool into rock and clog those same channels."

Jenny pointed her remote at the screen, and now even more detailed fodar imagery appeared. The photogrammetry technology turned aerial photos into a high-resolution map showing specific elevations, angles of slopes, and locations of the various caves on Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and even Hualālai, northwest of Mauna Loa, the third youngest of the volcanoes on the Big Island.

"At the end of the day," Jenny said, "what we're trying to do with these explosives is not only use gravity but basically make our own."

Rebecca shrugged. "So there you have it," she said. "We're going to try to do with this mountain of yours what we do when we blow the hell out of a building."

"And what do you do?" Jenny asked.

"Tell it where we want it to go," Rebecca said.

"It sounds pretty simple when you put it that way," Pia Wilson said.

"You're confident this plan you and Mac have come up with will work?" Kenny Wong asked Rebecca.

"Actually, I'm scared silly," she said. "I've done a lot of dangerous things in a lot of places, but I've never done anything this dangerous in my life."

She looked briefly at Mac and then at the rest of the people seated around the table. She took a deep breath and forced a smile.

"But then, no one has," she said.