Rain of Fire (12 page)

On the short drive to the Institute, she drove with her convertible top down, enjoying the air. The rest of the snow from Sunday’s storm had melted with yesterday’s rain and the smog that usually lay in the valley had blown out. Above the university, sunrise silhouetted the peaks and painted their tops with hues of coral as she parked near the Wasatch Fault.

Once in the building, Kyle stopped by the seismograph lab. Since the light was on, she went in and checked the Yellowstone stations. The blotchy seismic pattern typifying an earthquake swarm seemed more intense than the day before.

With a frown, she went down the hall to the equipment storeroom. The shelves and floor were bare.

Hollis Delbert sat behind his office desk, dressed in a suit again.

“Where are the seismographs?” Kyle demanded.

Hollis took a deliberate moment before looking away from his computer. In two days of being in charge, he’d rearranged his office furniture so supplicants stood on the far side of his desk. A single guest chair sat against the wall. “Kyle,” he said vaguely.

“Pleased to meet you. What happened to the equipment in the storeroom?”

Hollis remained seated but pulled himself up behind the desk as though conducting a formal interview. “I have earmarked it for use on the Wasatch Project.”

“You can’t have put everything in the field.”

“Let’s just say I’ve put things where they can’t be misappropriated.”

Kyle’s face got hot. “We need that equipment in Yellowstone. The caldera has come up six inches in the past week. Even you know that means magma is on the rise.”

“That damned caldera pants like a dog,” Hollis scoffed.

“You know we’ve never seen anything like this. And there’s no evidence the Wasatch is anything but quiet.”

“My students’ work has shown that the Snowbird Branch of the fault, not ten miles from here, has been locked up for the past decade. I’m hoping to God we detect some movement that might relieve the tension before we have a massive earthquake.”

“So we’re damned if the faults move and damned if they don’t.” She reached for the guest chair and swung her leg across the top. Straddling it backward, she leaned her chin on her hands. “I know there’s work to do along the Wasatch, but the threat at Yellowstone is real, too. Think of the park full of tourists, of Mammoth, West Yellowstone, Cody.”

He shoved his glasses up where they’d slid down his nose, but did not reply.

“Come on, Hollis. I’m not taking anything off you with the caldera coming up this fast. Think what we’ve learned about the eruption of Toba in Sumatra 75,000 years ago. Based on DNA studies of human remains found both before and after, the earth’s population was nearly wiped out by ash clouds causing climate change.”

Hollis sneered. “If something like that happens in Yellowstone, we’re both dead.”

“Dammit! Of course, we’d be dead this close to ground zero.” Suffocated by ash, or killed in the collapse of roofs overwhelmed by the weight. “Is death toll just words to you, like passed on, succumbed, and the other tidy euphemisms?”

She rose and kicked aside the chair; it went sprawling on its side with a clatter. “Dead! We’d be dead like my folks …”

Something in Hollis’s eyes stopped her. A look that said her outburst would be reported to Colin and anybody else who would listen.

Kyle took a shuddering breath and tried to get calm. “If Stanton were running things, he’d divide our resources between the projects, get on the phone, and find more. What say we split what we’ve got here right now?”

Hollis stared at her across the desk.

“All right.” She went to the door. “You play your game of hide and seek. I’ll get what I need elsewhere.”

First, Kyle dialed Cass Grain, a fellow seismologist at USGS in Menlo Park. Kyle had met red-haired, ruddy-faced Cass on a plane to Bogotá in November 1985, when the Nevado del Ruiz volcano had erupted in Colombia. The cataclysm had killed 23,000 people in lahars, landslides composed of rock and soil mixed with melted snow and ice. Expecting to fulfill their roles as scientists, the young women found themselves overwhelmed by human need. Going without sleep for days, they toiled alongside desperate villagers, searching for survivors beneath the moonscape of debris flows. Their small field shovels, usually used for gathering samples, dug to uncover men, women, and children. Each time Kyle’s blade struck something yielding, she felt a surge of hope that faded as ash-painted flesh came up lifeless.

After excavating the dead, they reversed the process, assisting the locals in digging graves in the hard soil of a country churchyard. Open trenches were placed beyond the rusting wrought-iron fence, for the plot was now far too small.

As Kyle waited for Cass to answer the phone, she studied a photo on her credenza, of the two of them in front of the sloping fuselage of a DC-3. Cass had managed a brave smile in defiance of the horrors they’d witnessed. Kyle had been too shaken to muster a pleasant expression.

Cass answered in a hearty voice that became subdued as soon as she learned who it was. “I heard about Stanton. How soon do you think he’ll be back?”

Kyle had been lying to herself about that, but because it was Cass, she was able to say, “He won’t be back anytime soon … maybe ever.”

The line went silent for a beat.

“You knew he’d retire,” Cass said. “You just didn’t expect to take his place under circumstances like these.”

“Hollis Delbert is in charge.” Kyle spoke over the hard feeling in the back of her throat.

“How in hell did that happen?”

“It’s a long story. Colin Gruy had a hand in it.”

“Doesn’t Stanton have a say?”

“Since they moved him to the CCU, he’s not talking.”

It turned quiet again.

With an effort, Kyle got to business. “What I’m calling about is I need some portable seismographs for Yellowstone. There’s a swarm of activity and Hollis is holding the Institute’s supply hostage for the Wasatch.”

“I saw the Yellowstone action on the Web,” Cass said. Even when she and Kyle weren’t in touch they kept up with each other through the little tracks and traces of their projects.

“What you didn’t see,” Kyle told her, “is the vertical motion on the caldera. It’s coming up like an active volcano rather than a dormant thermal area.”

“Where’s the fire?”

“I’m afraid it may be Nez Perce Peak.”

“I’ve been worried about that mountain ever since we learned it was such a young volcano,” Cass said. “Honest to God, I wish I could help, but we’ve got everything in the field.” Kyle heard a sound like a fist striking a metal desk. “If there was anything in storage, I’d overnight it.”

Did Cass’s sense of urgency make her feel better or worse? At Nevado del Ruiz, they’d learned together the meaning of “death toll” in a way neither Hollis nor Colin seemed to grasp. On the other hand, as Kyle preferred to believe, the men did know such things at a gut level and refused to let it out.

At least Wyatt seemed to understand.

“I guess I’ll try Volcano Hazards.” Kyle skipped to her next line of backup, the USGS Cascades Volcanic Observatory where Colin worked. “I can check what Colin did about sending me some help.”

Cass hesitated. “Do you know about the new group in Volcano Hazards?”

“No.”

Volcanologists had the same toys as seismologists; maybe they could help. Kyle snugged the phone against her neck and reached for a piece of paper. “Wait till I get a pen, and give me a name.”

“You won’t need a pen,” Cass said slowly. “The new group leader is Nicholas Darden.”

Her luck had run out. Nick was only a call away, and she had the best excuse on the planet to make it.

Slumping forward, Kyle put her head onto her crossed arms. Over the years, she had kept up with Nick’s career so she’d know how not to run into him. After he became a volcano junkie and was out of the country for most of the year, she continued to attend professional meetings with antennae out, ready to turn on her heel if she so much as saw him.

She never had … but in her imagination, in dreams when he came to her, he was always the same shining youth who had wakened at dawn and scaled the highest peak before noon.

Lying with her head on her desk, Kyle felt like a fool for being hung up over a thirty-year-old affair. If she saw Nick again, she would simply meet a fellow traveler, someone else whose bright hair had faded and whose lips had thinned.

Surely, she could find equipment elsewhere.

The IRIS/PASSCAL Instrumentation Center in New Mexico provided field equipment for people with grant money, but you couldn’t just call and order seismographs like carryout pizza. The National Earthquake Center in Boulder was an option, but they indicated Hollis had already requested assistance and it was being taken care of. The same thing happened at other research centers, where they politely assumed she was helping Hollis with his calls.

When she got to the end of her list, Kyle hung up and stared at a geologic map of Yellowstone on her office wall. Though the surface had been mapped and even the floor of the lake, there was no truly reliable picture of what went on beneath the earth. Everything geoscientists did—seismic, gravity-oriented, and magnetic surveys—all were forms of remote sensing. Each piece of data was only an inexact piece of a larger puzzle.

Kyle feared time was running out to solve it.

W
yatt looked at the laptop display from the portable seismograph he and Helen Chou had just placed in Mist Creek Canyon. “Looks like we’ve got tremors now.”

The snowy creek bottom was cold where the mid-morning sun did not reach. Helen brushed a lock of black hair back under her knitted cap, unzipped her pack and pulled out a thermos of coffee. Her nose cherry red, she poured for herself, and pulled out another stainless steel cup for Wyatt.

“Is Kyle coming back with more equipment?” she asked in her characteristic direct manner.

“When she left Sunday, there wasn’t time to make plans.”

“Speaking of plans,” Helen’s voice softened. “I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you.”

Wyatt was hunkered down on his heels, but some nuance in her tone made him straighten up. “What’s that?”

She studied the steam off her coffee. “I’ve given my notice.”

Wyatt felt that little shift he always felt when the world changed. Helen was one hell of a partner. Brilliant, as well as a hard worker, she was the kind who came to Yellowstone to intern, then moved on. “Where to?”

“The University of Seattle.”

“Where Bill…?”

“Yes. I hate to let you down.”

Wyatt tried to swallow his disappointment. “People move,” he said. “We’ll manage.”

“I’d stick around and help you out with”—she gestured at the seismograph—”all this, but Bill insists I get out of here right away.”

Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. If Wyatt had a family, he’d probably find an excuse to send them to the in-laws until things settled down.

While they finished their coffee, Wyatt tried to tell himself Helen’s loss would be somewhat offset by Xi Hong, but even so, her absence was one more blow at a time he and Kyle could ill afford it. Come to think of Kyle, she had suspected this might happen when he mentioned Helen’s relationship with Bill. Maybe woman’s intuition was better.

Wyatt and Helen hiked back to the Park Service Bronco they’d left at dawn in Pelican Valley. In the sunny meadow, the day was warming, droning insects the only sound in the silence.

However, when they climbed into the vehicle, the dispatcher broadcast a message to all units. “We need a wilderness first response in the Pelican Creek basin, up the flank of Mount Chittenden from Turbid Springs.”

Wyatt opened the channel. “Ellison and Chou here. We’re parked on the Pelican Creek service road next to Turbid Lake.”

“Proceed up the trail along Bear Creek toward Jones Pass,” the dispatcher instructed.

“What are we looking for?”

“We’ve got a report of a burn victim. His wife called 911 from a cell phone and said he fell into a hot pool.”

Wyatt shot a look at Helen. “There aren’t any thermal features in that area.”

The dispatcher came back. “The operator said the woman was clear on their location.”

“Have them ask again. They’re probably up the other side of the valley at the Mushpots.”

“They lost the signal.”

“We’ll search where they said,” Wyatt agreed, “but you’d better send somebody up the north side, where the hot pools are.”

Slamming the driver’s side door, he drove the Bronco as far as he could on the dirt track, jouncing over ruts. At the trailhead to Jones Pass, Helen pulled out the first aid kit while he grabbed a signal flare from the truck and stowed it in his pack.

For over a mile, they hiked beside Bear Creek, gaining four hundred feet of elevation. As they got closer to where the campers were supposed to be they shouted and blew a whistle.

Wyatt wondered about the hot spring. The park was full of thermal features, and who was to say they’d all been mapped? He particularly hoped this report was incorrect for he’d seen firsthand what scalding water could do.