Chapter 53

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawai‘i

Mac thought about the canisters constantly.

Mostly he wondered how the army could do everything it was doing and build everything it was building at Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea and yet not have been able to figure out a way to get the canisters the hell out of here.

He thought about the canisters when he and the team were trying to devise one final set of schemes to keep the contents from escaping into the atmosphere if the lava reached them, but they were as helpless to stop that as the rest of planet would eventually be.

A planet whose inhabitants had no idea what might be about to happen on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

No matter how old you were, you grew up fearing that a nuclear war would blow up the world. This, Mac thought now, is that.

He vaguely remembered learning in Catholic school about the ten plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament, how some of them had destroyed certain groups while sparing others.

But this plague would spare nothing and no one in the end; it would destroy all the life on the planet. At first, it had been impossible for Mac to wrap his mind around that fact, make sense of it in a rational way.

No longer.

The end.Mac thought that the real Ice Tube was the one inside him; knowing the magnitude of the situation as the clock continued to relentlessly wind down was like a cold grip on his heart.

His sons—they were his heart.

He stared now at one of the pictures of them on his desk, a black-and-white photograph in a small silver frame of his boys and him on a fishing trip in Montana. When he looked up, he was startled to see Jenny standing in the doorway.

"Hey," she said. "You okay?"

"Not even close."

She came around the desk and looked at the photo in his hand.

"I know how much you miss them, Mac," Jenny said.

He put the framed picture down gently, as if it might break if he weren't careful. "What if I never see them again?" he asked.

"You will."

What came next seemed to explode out of him; there was nothing he could do to stop it.

"You don't know that! No one does!"

He knew how angry he sounded and knew it had nothing to do with her, his best friend and his wingman and whatever else she was and might not ever be if they couldn't keep the lava away from the cave.

But she was Jenny. If he knew these things, so did she.

"Sorry," he said.

"You know you don't have to apologize to me."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I do."

She sat down on the edge of the desk.

"I can't do this," he said, his voice not much above a whisper.

She smiled at him. "Then we really are screwed," she said.

He could not make himself smile back.

"I come in here sometimes and close the door and sit down behind this desk and try to think of what I might have missed," he said. "And then, just like that, I feel as if I want to drive a fist through one of these walls." He looked down and saw his fists clenched in front of him.

"I didn't sign up for this!"He didn't care if the people out in the bullpen heard him.

"None of us did," Jenny said softly. "And yet here we are. And all I'm going to ask is that you don't let anybody else see you like this. Because this isn't you, and we both know it."

"I'm allowed to feel like this, Jenny," Mac said. "And I'm allowed to tell you that right now I feel like there's not a snowball's chance in hell that we can pull this off."

She went behind him and reached down to the bottom drawer where she knew he kept the bottle of Macallan and two glasses. She poured them each a shot.

They drank, and Jenny made a big show of wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Now please shut the fuck up and get to work, because that's what I'm going to do," Jenny said. When she got to the door, she added, "You're always telling me that if these jobs were easy, everybody would do them."

And she walked out.

Mac could hear the strain in Briggs's voice when the colonel called and said Mac needed to see something right away. It was as if Briggs's voice were stretched as far as it could go, and the next thing he said might snap it like a rubber band. He told Mac where he was—in a remote cabin at the end of Pe‘epe‘e Falls Road, near a succession of bubbling pools known in Hilo as the Boiling Pots area.

"Make sure to stop at the base on your way and pick up your hazmat suit," Briggs said.