Chapter 73

Outside of Hilo, Hawai‘i

Time to eruption: 24 hours

It's like General Mark Rivers has gone back to war,Mac thought. Or is looking to start one.

He'd told Mac that earlier today he'd laid things out for the president and informed him about the soldiers who had been exposed to the black death, sparing none of the details about the way they had died.

"I told the president that we all grow up hearing about the war to end all wars," Rivers said. "Well, this is it."

Rivers had asked Mac to accompany him back to the base, and the two of them bounced around in Rivers's jeep, stopping where the dikes were being built between the base and Hilo.

The tremors, great and small, continued throughout the morning. Even when big ones hit and the men felt as if they could see the mountain shaking, the work went on, the energy all around them kinetic and powerful, as if the crews here were trying to build a whole new suburb of Hilo in a single day.

And because Mac had convinced the townspeople at the Palace Theater the night before that the more they pitched in and helped the army's effort, the safer their town would be in the end, the size of Rivers's workforce had doubled this morning, maybe even tripled.

J. P. Brett was supervising the caravan of tanker trucks bringing the seawater from the bay to Mauna Loa. "I'm curious about something," Mac asked Rivers as they were driving around. "How did he make that many trucks just appear? Magic?"

"He's Brett," Rivers said, as if that explained everything. "He might be a pirate, but for now, he's my pirate. There's not enough time to lay pipe from the water to that goddamn volcano, so we're doing it this way. He's not lying when he says he gets things done."

"And gets people killed," Mac said.

"At least we were able to pull the body out of that lake," Rivers said.

Rivers, in fatigues and a hard hat, was acting more like a foreman than the most powerful figure in the military. Sometimes he climbed right up into the cab of a bulldozer to show the driver where he wanted him to go and what he wanted him to do, making it clear that it needed to happen in five minutes or heads would roll.

When the Caterpillar bulldozers with the drop-deck trailers in front couldn't get close enough to the dikes, the volunteers who had shown up before dawn formed a human chain and passed rocks from one person to another like some old-fashioned bucket brigade.

"Would you rather be with Ms. Cruz at the bomb sites?" Rivers asked Mac when they took a water break. "If so, take the jeep."

"I want to be where I can be most useful," Mac said. "Neither one of us wants to die on this island because we didn't do everything that needed to be done to the extent it needed to be done."

Rivers tipped back his hard hat, studied Mac thoughtfully. "Do you think we are going to die here?" Rivers asked.

He didn't sound like a general, didn't sound like the big brass that he most certainly was. They were just talking man to man, as if one of them were in the line passing rocks to the other.

"We might," Mac said. "I think all the things we're doing will work to some degree. It just makes me crazy not knowing which ones will work best. I think Rebecca's explosives will work; I think dropping bombs will work; I think the titanium and the canals and the seawater all make sense. It sounds like a perfect plan."

He smiled at Rivers. "But you know that old Mike Tyson line, sir: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.'"

There was another quake, biggest of the morning so far; it knocked both of them back against Rivers's jeep.

"Bottom line?" Mac said. "We might win the battle against this thing and still lose the war if we can't protect those canisters. In which case we're doomed no matter what we've done to get ready."

He added, "The road to hell really will be paved with good intentions."

It got a grin out of Rivers. "Don't sugarcoat it, Dr. MacGregor."

"You ready to go back and take one last look at the dike closest to town, see where they are with it?" Mac asked.

Rivers nodded.

Suddenly Mac extended his hand. "I'm honored to be fighting alongside you, sir. I just want you to know that."

Rivers shook his hand.

Mac said, "I'm trying to remember who said that failure wasn't an option, but for the life of me I can't. Too much else going on inside my brain."

"It's a line from Apollo Thirteen," Rivers said. "Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director, says it."

Rivers clapped Mac on the back and then jumped behind the wheel, looking in that moment as if he were having the time of his life, as if the prospect of dying somehow made him feel more alive.

Mac got in the jeep, and Rivers drove like a madman toward Hilo; another quake nearly knocked the jeep over, but Rivers laughed and kept going. A song kept running through Mac's head. He couldn't remember who sang it, only that it was an oldie that'd had a recent resurgence on Hilo's classic-rock station.

The end of the world as we know it.

They heard Rivers's phone ring on the console between them, the ring volume obviously turned up as loud as it could go.

The general picked it up. "Rivers!" he yelled into the phone. He nodded as he listened. "On our way," he said. He hit the brakes hard, made a sudden U-turn, and sped forward; Mac was glad he'd remembered to fasten his seat belt.

"We need to get back to the base," Rivers said, driving even faster now.

"What's going on?"

"Another eruption," Rivers said.