Pickings got up slowly. He had twisted his right knee. It felt like someone were pushing needles into him. He hobbled over to the wall. The crack had stopped expanding. The earthquake, or whatever it had been, seemed to have finally settled down. He could see his prize flower garden in the back, the birds of paradise and codeso, the colorful hibiscus. He made his way carefully toward the rear door, keeping an eye out for falling plaster. It was already strewn across the floor. The crack stretched to the ceiling.
The kitchen was a disaster. Every plate he owned, it seemed, each bowl and every glass was on the floor, smashed in a million pieces, including his most precious china. The refrigerator had fallen on its side, and milk and juice were puddling up beside it.
He crossed the floor with care, picking his feet up to avoid the shards. When he finally reached the other side, Pickings hesitated for a moment in the open doorway and gasped. He had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t some sort of optical illusion, trompe l’oeil. His garden had been cut in half!
A huge hole, the size of a city bus, or larger, had opened up between his fuchsia rum runners and lavender eyes of the storm. He shuffled as fast as he could down the path. He stopped at the precipice, by the lip of the ditch, and looked down — then instantly pulled back.
He couldn’t look over the edge. It was too hot! It felt like it would melt his face. The ground quivered and a vast tower of steam and stone and dust shot out of the crevasse.
Pickings was thrown backwards to the ground. The volcano was erupting! And, just as this completely terrifying thought had settled in his mind, he was assaulted with the bleak, bone-chilling certitude that he was going to die.
The ground continued to tremble violently, shaking his stunted stand of gnarled Canary Pine. His house began to groan, to wobble and finally bend and fall. Pickings ran over to his jeep. Miraculously it had been parked in front, not in the carport, beside the shattered house. He had been too lazy to walk down to his mailbox earlier that morning. He leapt into the vehicle. He turned the ignition key and the engine came to life. He put the jeep in gear and screamed out of the driveway. He turned the corner, banked. He accelerated down the straightaway. Then he breathed a deep sigh of relief, until he suddenly recalled his manuscript, the way that it had looked there on his writing desk as he had run out of the house, all stacked and neatly typed, unabashedly dense, the labor of five years, when the mountain road gave way. The tarmac started to melt. There was no way to negotiate the road. Then, there was no road.
Pickings leapt out of the jeep. He felt as if he were descending into a Pieter Bruegel mindscape, a hectare of the Triumph of Hell. He walked a dozen paces when the earth opened up before him, spewing steam and fire. He turned the other way. Another fissure blocked his path. It didn’t matter, he thought. It was too hot to move anyway. The last thing that he thought of was his missing wife, his Layla, and his two children back in England. They were probably sitting down to tea right now. He wanted desperately to move. He wanted to reach out to them. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do anything… but boil.
Chapter 42
The Seahawk tumbled from the sky. The downdraft following the detonation of the bomb continued to suck the helicopter downwards toward the waiting funnel of the Cumbre Vieja. Then, without warning, the vacuum created by the shock wave filled. The instrumentation settled. The helicopter flipped, righted herself and started rising once again.
Inside the ship, Warhaftig pulled himself off Decker and struggled to his feet. “Are you alright?” he said. Seiden steadied him from behind.
Decker was still lying next to Swenson. He grabbed a nearby blanket and covered her again. Swenson sat up. She looked about. The Rangers were strapped in all around her. They were okay. She looked down, under the blanket, and began to strip away the magnesium tape still wrapped about her body. Everyone pretended not to watch.
“Excuse me,” Warhaftig shouted over the din. “I have to break the news to the Director.” He zigzagged forward toward the cockpit.
“And I must contact my superiors,” said Seiden, following in his wake.
Decker stared out through the open helicopter hatch. The island was disappearing from view. They were headed north-northwest, toward the Azores. He looked over at Swenson. “Can I help?” he said. She was picking off the remaining metal ribbon like strands of a cocoon.
“What?” She cupped a hand behind her ear.
“Can I help?” Decker shouted, pointing.
“No thanks, I got it,” she replied. Then she changed her mind. “Well, maybe you can help me with the pieces on my back.”
Decker shimmied over to her. He reached his hands behind the blanket and began to pull the metal ribbon off her naked shoulders. It unraveled like dried snakeskin. “You look like a mummy in some new age horror flick,” he said.
“Does that mean I’m already dead?” She turned and looked at him and smiled. He was looking at her cleavage. “Why, John Decker, Junior! You are such a boy. I had no idea. You like my outfit, huh?” She lowered the towel a little more. “Look what was sitting on your coach two nights ago,” she said, “before you sent her to bed.”
“I think you like to torture me, don’t you?”
“Yes.” She pulled the towel up, turned away. All the soldiers were staring at her.
“Emily?”
“Yes, John?”
“Before, when we were on our way to La Palma, you seemed to believe that there might be some way of stopping this. I mean, I know you said there wasn’t. But you kind of hesitated. Just for a moment. I thought… ” He tried to look away, tried to ignore the logical extension of his argument. Forty million souls, he thought, compared to one or two. “When you mentioned Newton, I thought… Maybe I’m wrong.”
She shook her head. Her back was to him and he couldn’t see her face. But he could feel the way she tightened up, the way she suddenly withdrew into herself. Then she leaned back into his arms. She lay her head on his chest. “No, you’re not wrong,” she said. “Maybe there is.” She looked into his eyes. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
“And for a wave?”
“A counter-wave,” she said. Then she smiled. “Remember I told you about my descent into those canyons off the Jersey coast? With E.J., my professor?”
He nodded.
“Well, I was thinking. What if someone, somehow were to descend into those tunnels along the Continental Shelf? What if they planted a nuclear device, like El Aqrab did in La Palma, and set it off?”
“What if they did?”
“Well, don’t you see? An explosion might precipitate eruptions of the gas trapped in the sediments beneath, initiate a massive underwater landslide. If someone were to trigger a mega-tsunami on the opposite side of the Atlantic, if we could propagate a counter-wave, traveling east — at least theoretically, and if everything worked perfectly — the two would meet and… ”
“… cancel each other out. Is that it? Is that what you mean?”
“Something like that. Of course there would still be lots of damage, residual effects. But it wouldn’t kill tens of millions. On the other hand, it might just make things worse.”