“It’s better, I assure you,” grunted Arnold. “Admiral Nelson lost an arm in the battle of Santa Cruz about 40 miles north of here. Right now you’d be sitting in intensive care, waiting to see if he lived or died.”
Kathy could not help laughing at his mercurial mind, and encyclopedic knowledge.
“Anyway,” added Arnold, “Lord Nelson was not big on honeymoons. Never married Lady Hamilton, did he? Probably trying to avoid a hard time when he was caught using his telescope.”
Kathy shook her head. She knew that Arnold Morgan was impossible to joust with because he always won, impossible to reason with because he always had more knowledge, impossible to be angry with because he could find a joke, a shaft of irony, or even slapstick from any set of circumstances. She had been in love with him from the day he had first thundered into her life, instructing her to call the head of the Russian Navy and tell him he was a lying bastard.
Of course he was impossible. Everyone knew that. But he was also more exciting, fun, and challenging than any man she had ever met. He was over twenty years older then she, an inch shorter, and the most confident person in the White House. He cared nothing for rank, only for truth. The former President had plainly been afraid of him, afraid of his absolute devotion to the flag, the country, and its safety.
To the former Kathy O’Brien, when Arnold Morgan pulled himself up to his full five feet, eight and a half inches, he seemed not one inch short of ten feet. In her mind, and in the mind of many others, she had married the world’s shortest giant.
It seemed incredible that he was gone from the West Wing. Kathy, a veteran of the White House secretarial staff, simply could not imagine what it would be like without the caged lion in the office of the President’s National Security Adviser, taking the flack, taking the strain, and laying down the law about “what’s right for this goddamned country.”
Whoever the new President decided to appoint in the Admiral’s place, he’d need some kind of a hybrid composed of John Wayne, Henry Kissinger, and Douglas MacArthur. And he wasn’t going to find one of those. The only one in captivity was, at this moment, sprawled out next to Kathy, holding her hand, and telling her he loved her, that she was the most wonderful person he ever had or ever would meet—
And now, he announced, he was going to take a swim. Four days in Tenerife had already seen him acquire a deepening tan, which contrasted strikingly with his steel-gray close-cut hair. Even as he approached senior citizenship Arnold still had tree-trunk legs, heavily muscled arms, and a waistline only marginally affected by a lifelong devotion to roast-beef sandwiches with mayonnaise and mustard.
He was pretty smooth in the water too. Kathy watched him moving along the pool with a cool, professional-looking crawl, breathing every two strokes, just turning his head slightly into the trough of the slipstream for a steady pull of air. He looked as if he could, if necessary, swim like that for a year.
Kathy decided to join him and dived into the pool as he went past, surfacing alongside him and slipping into a somewhat labored form of sidestroke. As always, it was difficult to keep up with the Admiral.
When finally they came in to rest on the hotel lounges, Arnold made a further announcement. “I’m taking you to see something tomorrow,” he said. “The place where scientists predict there will be the greatest natural disaster the earth has ever seen.”
“I thought you said that was due to happen in the White House next month?”
“Well, the second greatest then,” he replied, chuckling at his sassy new wife.
“What is it?” she asked absently, turning back to her book.
“It’s a volcano,” he said, darkly.
“Not another,” she murmured. “I just married one of those.”
“I suppose it would be slightly too much to ask you to pay attention?”
“No, I’m ready. I’m all ears. Go to it, Admiral.”
“Well, just about 60 miles from here, to the northwest, is the active volcanic island of La Palma. It’s only about a third of the size of Tenerife, pear-shaped, tapering off narrowly to the south—”
“You sound like a guidebook.”
“Well, not quite, but it’s an interesting book that I found by the telescope.”
“What book?”
“Honey, please. Kathryn Morgan, please pay attention. I have just been reading, rather carefully, a very fascinating account of the neighboring island of La Palma and its likely affect on the future of the world. You may have thought I was just goofing off looking through the telescope. But I actually wasn’t—”
“You abandoned the telescope! Then it’s surprising Tenerife hasn’t come under attack in the last couple of hours. That’s all I can say.” Mrs. Kathy Morgan was now laughing at her own humor. So, for that matter, was her husband. “If you’re not darn careful you’ll come under attack,” he said. “You want me to tell you about the end of the world or not?”
“Ooh, yes please, my darling. That would be lovely.”
“Right. Now listen up.” He sounded precisely like the old nuclear submarine commanding officer he once had been. A martinet of the deep. Stern, focused, ready to handle any back talk from anyone. Except Kathy, who always disarmed him.
“The southerly part of La Palma has a kind of backbone,” he said. “A high ridge, running due south clean down the middle. This volcanic fault line, about three miles long, takes its name from its main volcano, Cumbre Vieja, which rises four miles up from the seabed, with only the top mile and a half visible. It’s had seven eruptions in the last five hundred years. The fault fissure, which runs right along the crest, developed after the eruption of 1949. Basically the goddamned west side of the range is falling into the goddamned sea, from a great height.”
Kathy giggled at his endlessly colorful way of describing any event, military, financial, historical, or in this case geophysical.
“Pay attention,” said the Admiral. “Now, way to the south is the Volcan San Antonio, a giant black crater. They just completed a new visitors center with amazing close-up views. Then you can drive south to see Volcan Teneguia, that’s the last one, which erupted here back in 1971. You can climb right up there and take a look into the crater if you like.”
“No, thanks.”
“But the main one is Cumbre Vieja itself, about eight miles to the north. That’s the big one, and it’s been rumbling in recent years. According to the book, if that blew, it would be the single biggest world disaster for a million years…”
“Arnold, you are prone, at times, to exaggeration. And because of this, I ask you one simple question. How could a rockfall in this remote and lonely Atlantic island possibly constitute a disaster on the scale you are saying?”
The Admiral prepared his saber. Then, metaphorically, slashed the air with it. “Tsunami, Kathryn,” he said. “Mega-tsunami.”
“No kidding?” she said. “Rye or pumpernickel.”
“Jesus Christ!” said the President’s former National Security Adviser. “Right now, Kathy, I’m at some kind of an intersection, trying to decide whether to leave you here looking sensational in that bikini but overwhelmed by ignorance, or whether to lead you to the sunny uplands of knowledge. Depends a lot on your attitude.”
Kathy leaned over and took his hand. “Take me to the uplands,” she said. “You know I’m only teasing you. You want some of that orange juice, it’s fabulous.”
She stood up easily, walked three paces, and poured him a large glass. The Spanish oranges were every bit as good as the crop from Florida, and the Admiral drained the glass before beginning what he called an attempt to educate the unreachable.
“Fresh,” he said, approvingly. “A lot like yourself.”