Chapter 62

The woman reporter was named Imani Burgess. The male reporter was Sam Ito, and he wasted no time informing Mac that he'd been fascinated by volcanoes his whole life.

Ito said that his family had moved from Maui to the mainland when he was an infant and that his father had studied volcanology at Caltech, where he now taught.

Mac said nothing, just leaned back with his fingers clasped behind his head.

"Took some undergrad courses on it myself at the University of Wisconsin," Ito said.

Mac almost told him how happy he was for him but decided to just stare at him instead.

Imani Burgess smiled. It was, Mac had to admit, a winning smile.

"The scouting report on you noted that you're not really the chatty type," she said.

"Who told you that?"

She held the smile. "I can't reveal my sources."

"Are you of the opinion that I should open up to two reporters I just met?" Mac said. "In what world would that be a good idea?" But now he smiled.

"Are we getting off on the wrong foot here?" Sam Ito asked.

"You're the reporters," Mac said. "You figure it out."

"We haven't gotten much sleep the past twenty-four hours," Imani Burgess said. "Anyplace around here where a girl could get a cup of coffee?"

"There is," Mac said. "But without sounding rude, you won't be staying that long."

"Gee," she said, "why would anybody think that was rude?"

"We're not trying to make trouble for you, Dr. MacGregor," Ito said.

"Sure you are," Mac said.

"Excuse me?"

"My experience with reporters, Sam—may I call you Sam?—is that, whether the reporters are from the paper of record or not, they generally don't come around to help me."

Mac knew he was being a pain in the ass but couldn't stop himself.

"Why did you agree to see us, then?" Imani Burgess asked.

"Maybe I wanted to interview the two of you," Mac said, "before returning to my current problems with Mother Nature."

"Who I hear is one tough mother these days," she said.

Before Mac could respond, Sam Ito said, "We've spent a fair amount of time today talking to our sources in the military and getting a sense of what you plan to do about the lava once it comes. And we've spoken to a lot of the locals too. It's kind of fascinating, really, the way they talk about the volcano and the goddess Madame Pele, the force behind volcanic eruptions. But they say that what you're trying to do, divert the lava, is like trying to dim the light of the moon."

"But I'm sure, being as fascinated by volcanoes as you are," Mac said, "you know how effective diversion can be if it's done right."

He saw Imani Burgess nodding. "Etna in 1983 and 1992," she said. "The diversions saved Catania and a bunch of other towns on the east coast of Sicily." She opened her reporter's notebook and flipped through some pages. "Massive engineering effort," she continued, studying her notes. "Gouged-out channels, earthen walls, tons of workers on the front line. The fire department finally sprayed massive amounts of water on the lava and on the bulldozers, because they had to cool them down. Pretty heroic efforts, all in all."

"They usually are," Mac said. "That first effort, I'm sure you know, cost about two million dollars, and that was over forty years ago. But what they did there saved more than a hundred million dollars' worth of property. Maybe more. And they basically did it all with bulldozers and the judicious use of explosives."

"Is that what you're planning to do here?" she asked.

Mac looked at his watch. "You already know that, and I know you know that. But that's not really why you're here, is it?" He smiled again. This time neither one of them smiled back at him. It was official, he thought. They had gotten off on the wrong foot.

But Mac still didn't know why the two of them were sitting across from him.

"So how about this?" he said. "How about we all stop fucking around here?"

"You don't suffer fools gladly, do you, Dr. MacGregor?" Imani Burgess asked.

"Actually," Mac said, "I thought that was exactly what I was doing."

No one spoke. Mac was comfortable with the silence, but it turned out that so were they.

"We're here because we got a tip," Sam Ito said.

"A tip about what?"

"We're hearing some chatter that the eruption might not be the only threat to the island," Burgess said. "And that there might be concerns about Mauna Kea too."

"Do you know something about an eruption there that I don't?" Mac asked. "Because as far as I know, there hasn't been an eruption on Mauna Kea in four thousand years, give or take."

"The tip wasn't about an eruption," Imani Burgess said.

She casually reached out, placed a micro–tape recorder on the desk between them, and pushed what Mac assumed was the Record button because he saw the green light go on.

He picked it up, checked the buttons, and hit Stop. The green light promptly disappeared.

"If the tip wasn't about an eruption, what was it about?" he asked.

"Our source didn't know," Sam Ito said. "He'd just heard that there was some kind of emergency there. What the natives refer to as ulia pōpilikia."

"I know what it means," Mac said.

"Was there an emergency?" Ito asked.

He leaned forward. "At this point in time, I am basically working for the U.S. Army," he said. "And I'm not supposed to talk about things they don't want me to talk about, which is practically everything. Especially not with two reporters from the Times."

"How about if we're talking about the public's need to know?" Imani Burgess asked.

"When the public needs to know something, General Rivers will tell them," Mac said. "If you've got more questions going forward, you should probably ask him."

"We tried," Sam Ito said. "He won't talk to us."

"I know."

"General Rivers tell you that himself?" Ito asked.

"It's more something I intuited," Mac said. He shrugged and stretched his arms out wide, a gesture of helplessness. "Sorry I don't have more for you."

"Actually, you didn't give us anything," she said.

"I know," Mac said sadly. "I know."

He stood. They stood.

"One more question," Sam Ito said. "Do you happen to know anything about some incident at the botanical gardens a few years ago?"

"What kind of incident?"

Ito shrugged. "Just another tip. Some kind of chemical spill, is what we heard."

"Well, good luck with that," Mac said.

"One more from me," Imani Burgess said. "Think of it as a Hail Mary. Do you know anything about a bunch of hazmat-suited army guys dragging a soldier out of a Hilo bar?"

"Can't help you there either." Mac walked over and opened the door for them. They left, and he was alone again in his office until Jenny came back. He told her he'd spent most of the past half hour bobbing and weaving.

"You think they know more than they were saying?" Jenny asked.

"They almost always do."

"You think they know about the canisters?"

"Not yet."

"You think they're going to give up?"

"They hardly ever do," Mac said.

They sat and talked about Kenny and Pia selling them out, and Mac let Jenny vent about them in increasingly colorful language. She told Mac he couldn't let this go. Mac said she had to know him better than that by now.

"Kenny and Pia did what they did," he said. "I'm not after them."

"Don't tell me," she said. "You're after Brett."

He nodded. "He's so worried about targets, he doesn't realize there's a brand-new one as of today."

"Where?"

"On his back."

Mac's phone buzzed. He picked it up and nodded when he heard the voice at the other end of the line. "I'm on my way," he said.

"Where are you going?" Jenny asked.

"You know what they say," he said. "If the mountain won't come to MacGregor…"

"Is that what they say?" she said, grinning at him.

Mac told her where he wanted her and Rick to meet later and headed for his car. He found himself wondering what new surprises the goddess of fire and lava, the one the locals called Madame Pele, "She Who Shapes the Sacred Land," had in store for him today.

Little did he know.

The ground underneath him had not shaken today, although the magma continued its steady rise on a timetable only it knew and maybe even it couldn't control. Over the past twenty-four hours the magma, thicker and more viscous than ever, had been thwarted, briefly, by the various blocked chambers it encountered above the subduction zone.

This was happening as the lava above it was receding below the water table, and the volatile mix of water and magma was turning to steam and beginning to eat away at the crater area.

They were less than two days from when they were convinced the eruption would come, and Mac was becoming more concerned by the hour that it might come sooner, before they could finish enough of their guardrails. More vents near the summit were being blocked. Mac wasn't sure how many.

Only the volcano goddess knew that.

Only she knew in this moment how quickly the increasingly combustible combination of steam and blocked gases and solid lava, known as cinder, was rising up within the Earth, ready to show them all that she still ruled the Big Island the way she always had.

And the unseen clock on the ticking bomb continued to count down.

Mac kept trying to focus on the work, distract himself from the reality of the situation with the volcano and the canisters, email his sons at least once a day, keep assuring the members of his team that they could only do what they could do in whatever time they had before the eruption that could destroy the island if the lava found the death inside the Ice Tube and inside the canisters and released it into the atmosphere…

Mac always stopped himself there. Dwelling on the consequences of their schemes not working, the devastation that would follow, got him nowhere, except to darker places.

Last week, when he was on the phone with his sons, Charlie and Max, Max had asked if everything was going to be okay.

"A-OK," he'd said.

When the boys were born, he'd promised himself he'd never lie to them. Now it was almost as easy as lying to himself.

When he began to make his way on foot toward all the men and women in their hard hats, the ones operating the heavy machinery and the ones directing it, holes being dug and rock and dirt being moved, he felt the first small quake underneath him, like a rug being pulled out from under him, making his knees buckle and nearly bringing him down.

But he did not go down.

One foot in front of the other.

When he looked up ahead, he could see that the work between him and the sky continued without interruption, making him wonder, with all the noise and activity and pieces of the mountain being moved around, if they had even felt the earth shift underneath them.

But it had. Again.

Dr. John MacGregor had stopped being so alarmed about quakes. He told himself this latest one was nothing out of the ordinary and slowed his pace just long enough to put on his hard hat.

Then he put his head back down and kept going.