Chapter 42

Mac saw he'd offended Cutler and quickly said, "Come on, lighten up, Ollie. I was just making a joke—a clunker, apparently—about great minds thinking alike."

"I frankly like the suggestion that my work isn't my own about as much as I like being called Ollie," Cutler said.

"I wouldn't either if I were you," Mac said, grinning at him.

Mac and Rebecca stood up and breezed through their own presentation, hitting the same PowerPoint slides they had in front of their teams. Mac noted that he and Rebecca were basically in agreement about the need to blow substantial holes over an area spanning a full square mile on the east side of the mountain, not the south side, which would push the lava toward Kīlauea and Route 11. And he stressed how much manpower would be required, especially since they would need to switch crews almost hourly because of the sweltering heat of the black rock, the volcano, and the sun.

"I can't state strongly enough that the whole ball game here is controlling the lava as much as humanly possible," Mac said. "Everything else is just noise."

"And if we can't effectively stop the lava?" Rivers asked.

"General, I'm a scientist," he said. "I deal in facts, even when we've got as many variables as we have here. In the end, what we're ultimately trying to do is redirect a tidal wave of lava and make a long-shot bet pay off."

"And what bet is that?" Rivers asked.

"That we can impose our will on the fury of the natural world," Mac said.

"We have to. Or else," Rivers said.

"Or else," Mac said.

No one spoke for a moment. Mac looked at Rivers and said, "So which of the three plans are you going to use, sir, if I might ask?"

"All of them," Mark Rivers said.

Then he added, "Now let me say one more thing before I tell you all about my plan."