Rain of Fire Read online

  Sure enough, he jabbed a finger at Monty. “Earth tides set up the scenario for a quake waiting to happen.”

  “Ooh,” from the audience.

  “You mean today?” Monty gripped the couch’s arm. “Like this morning?”

  Brock nodded.

  “Gutsy,” Stanton observed, lighting another cigarette in defiance of university smoking regulations.

  Her heart rate accelerating, Kyle mentally agreed it took brass balls to go on national television and declare an earthquake was about to take place.

  “There you have it.” Monty sounded subdued, as though his bluff as well as his guest’s was about to be called. “Straight from Brock Hobart, a Stanford Ph.D. and former scientist at the United States Geological Survey.”

  In his typical fashion, Brock hadn’t predicted where the quake would take place.

  “When we come back,” Monty enticed, “we’ll talk to Laurie, who was kidnapped by aliens.” Music swelled and the studio audience applauded.

  “Little green men,” Stanton mused, “and earthquakes on demand.”

  But, Kyle realized, though most geologists made fun of Brock with his website and quake predictions, didn’t it strike a chord in her? Deep down, didn’t she want to believe she could someday save some other little girl a lifetime of nightmares?

  Stanton clicked off the TV. In the silence, she heard a buzzing from the lab.

  Her fingers curled and she pushed away thoughts of the Wasatch Fault skirting the base of the hill the Institute sat upon. The zone of unstable earth was believed capable of producing a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, as strong as the one she’d survived at Hebgen Lake. Hoping their luck had not run out, she slid a hand onto the kitchen counter, the way a mother might check her child’s forehead for fever.

  Buoyed by the solid feel of the Formica, she turned to Stanton. “The alarm.” His hearing wasn’t what it once was.

  In the same moment, the pager on her belt began to vibrate, an electronic leash that connected her to the Institute 24/7. Whenever it went off, no matter where she was, a stab of anxiety pierced her.

  She raced to the lab, where pens traced dark arcs on the strip charts. Taking a seat before one of the computer monitors, Kyle typed in quick commands, connecting to the National Earthquake Information Center in Boulder.

  Stanton came up behind her carrying his coffee and a fresh cigarette.

  Somewhere in the world, the quake continued. Kyle felt an ache in her chest for the little girl who must be crying for her parents. In Madison Canyon, her own voice had been small against the sifting and cracking of avalanches, while the earth heaved and shimmied like Jell-O.

  Two minutes ticked toward three since the quake had begun. Sweat broke out down Kyle’s sides, while at the same time she felt chilled. Though there was a chance the upheaval was in some remote area, people could also be hurt, dying, crushed beneath the rubble of homes where they had felt safe.

  Finally, the amplitude of the oscillation began to dampen. Kyle and Stanton waited while the Earthquake Center calculated the location of the epicenter using triangulation of multiple stations. The first bulletin came up.

  A major earthquake occurred near Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Sakhalin Island, Russia, 800 miles (1330 km) north of Tokyo, Japan, at 7:10 AM Mountain Daylight Time today, September 10th (September 11th at 12:10 AM local time.)

  Sakhalin lay just off the east coast of Siberia, part of the ‘ring of fire’ encircling the Pacific. Just to the south lay Japan, with its populous coasts and its own unstable ground.

  A preliminary magnitude of 7.3 was computed. This area has a history of large earthquakes. On August 4, 2000, a 7.0 struck 120 miles (200 km) north. In addition, on May 27, 1995, a magnitude 7.5 shook the Neftegorsk area 240 miles (400 km) north, killing 2,000 people and causing severe damage.

  Kyle didn’t want to feel relief that disaster struck faceless foreign victims, for she had lived the havoc wreaked by earthquakes and volcanoes … both as a child and as a scientist. Nevertheless, she was fiercely glad this morning’s quake wasn’t happening in Yellowstone where she would be forced to deal with it. Her love-hate relationship with the park region balanced uneasily at best.

  Looking at a wall map showing the Pacific and the earthquake epicenters and volcanic terrains surrounding it, she knew it was too soon to feel relief. Sometimes, whether because of celestial alignments or seismic waves propagating through the planet, quakes tended to happen in widely varying locales in a sort of chain reaction.

  Behind her, Stanton remained silent. Kyle assumed he was watching the monitor, but with a sudden jerky move, he seized her arm. Thinking he was about to say something about Brock Hobart’s uncanny skill or blind dumb luck, she turned to him.

  Instead of speaking, he gave a small gasp. His hand clutched her like a claw even as his body began to sag.

  Leaping to cushion his fall, she found him a dead weight. His cup hit the floor with a clatter and rolled under a table. A trail of smoke curled from his cigarette, dropped from nerveless fingers.

  “Kyle, thank God you’re here.” Stanton’s wife Leila entered the ER, her heels tapping on the tile. The sixty-five-year-old moved with the grace of a much younger woman.

  “I was with him when he had the stroke,” Kyle said.

  Going into Leila’s embrace, she was struck anew by how fine-boned her friend was, draped in the delicate softness of a gray silk dress. For the first time since Stanton’s collapse, tears pricked Kyle’s eyelids. She’d been too busy calling 911, screaming in vain down the hallway for anyone else there that early in the morning, and waiting by his side for the paramedics.

  Leila must have felt the change in her, for her arms wrapped tighter. “God, Kyle, not Stanton.”

  Her anguish was all it took to set Kyle’s dammed-up tears flowing. Though the age difference between the Jamesons and her was not so great that they could have been her parents, she had always treasured both Leila and Stanton as dearly as though they were bound to her by blood. Especially after losing her maternal grandmother, who had raised her after Hebgen Lake. Being in a hospital reminded her of Franny’s last days and that ultimately, nobody got out alive.

  “How is he?” Leila pulled back and wiped her wet face without shame.

  “They’re doing a CT scan.” Kyle dashed at the salt tears on her own cheek. “After that, he’ll be moved to a room.”

  The two women took seats in a small waiting area. A tattered copy of yesterday’s newspaper littered the floor, but Kyle’s focus was too shattered for her to read. She tried not to watch the wall clock as its hand leaped forward to mark each interminable minute. Though dry-mouthed, she did not dare leave for coffee.

  After an hour’s wait, she thought she was prepared. However, when she pushed open the door of Stanton’s hospital room, she found out otherwise. He lay slumped on his side with his eyes closed, his skin as ghostlike as the transparent tubes connecting his IV bag.

  Leila’s gaze rested upon her husband. They had been friends first, or so the story went, but her look bespoke a deep and abiding love, one Kyle had always envied. After a disastrous relationship of her own when she was twenty, Kyle had believed up into her forties that she’d someday meet the right man.

  “The doctor said he was awake,” Leila murmured.

  “Should we let him sleep … or maybe call somebody?”

  Blue-veined eyelids flickered then opened. “Stop that infernal whispering.” Stanton’s voice, though weak, projected attitude.

  Leila tugged Kyle along with her to his bedside. “Look who’s here?”

  “I see who’s whispering.” He fixed them with a look composed half of iron will and half of melted wax where the left side of his face sagged.

  When he reached out with his good right hand, Kyle met him. She kept her eyes on his, wondering if he could see out of them both. Part of her wanted to cry or run, but all they had been for each other kept her in place. Yet, as Stanton looked toward his wife, Kyle realized she should
leave them. If, God forbid, he did not make it through this, he and Leila deserved their time together.

  With an ostentatious look at her watch, she spun, “I was planning to cancel my afternoon seminar, but with you doing so much better, I think I’ll go ahead and teach.”

  Stanton mumbled something she had to bend closer to hear.

  “You and Hollis …” A bit of spittle escaped his mouth. “Now, no referee …”

  How quickly he defined the animosity beneath the surface of every encounter she had with fellow scientist Hollis … or Dr. Delbert, as he insisted, though almost everyone he worked with had a Ph.D. The slight blond scientist peered at the world through wire-framed spectacles and pitched himself at the Institute as everybody’s friend … except Kyle’s. Although he was in his late thirties, he spoke in a breathless rush that people other than she interpreted as boyish enthusiasm.

  “You’ll be back and keep us from each other’s throats,” she assured.

  Stanton gave a strained bark. “Not by Monday.”

  “Oh, God.” In this morning’s wake, she’d forgotten there were only six days to their funding meeting.

  He gripped her hand. “Hollis came to me recently … asked me to make him … head of Institute … when I retire.”

  Her heart began a rapid pattering like she’d just searched her purse and found her wallet missing. If Hollis were in charge, she had an idea what would happen to her Yellowstone funding.

  “Watch your back,” Stanton warned. “Tell Hollis I said … you’re to chair the meeting.”

  On the drive to the Institute, Kyle still couldn’t believe Stanton had been struck down. From his unfailing energy, she had assumed he would work well into his seventies.

  That didn’t mean everyone else at the Institute was brain dead. Back in the nineties, when Stanton asked her to leave government bureaucracy and teach, she’d been re-reminded that academic funding was more about ass-kissing than science. It was especially difficult dealing with Hollis, who had joined the Institute two years ago from UCLA and seemed to think his prior credentials made him an instant shark in the Utah fishbowl.

  This morning’s crisis having shattered her habitual control, she strode into the geology building and found Hollis in the seismograph lab before a computer terminal. The small-framed scientist turned toward the sound of her footsteps and hit a key that brought up his screen saver. A laughing Golden Retriever who looked a lot like Max filled the screen.

  Kyle tried telling herself that if Hollis liked Goldens, he couldn’t be all bad.

  “I’ve just come from Stanton,” she said coldly. “He’s in bad shape, but was able to talk about Monday’s meeting.”

  Though Hollis pushed back his chair and stood, she was able to look down on his head with its bad comb-over. Sparse blond stubble on his jaw suggested he might be growing a beard, but his thin moustache bespoke a difficult time ahead.

  Taking off his wire frame glasses, Hollis rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What did Stanton tell you?”

  “He told me about your going behind my back asking him to make you Director. And he said for me to take charge at the meeting Monday.”

  Hollis’s complexion took on a splotchy flush. “I’ll never be part of your inside track with Stanton …” His breath started to come fast. “All you have to watch is Yellowstone while I take care of the Wasatch where millions of people live. On Monday, I’m making a pitch for more support.”

  Kyle slammed her hand on the top of the nearest monitor. “You know millions of dollars were spent in Salt Lake setting up a real-time seismic network for the 2002 Winter Olympics.” If the Wasatch Fault let go, reports from a network of sensors would arrive within seconds to guide rescue workers toward the worst damage.

  “You’ve got all the resources you need, Hollis.” She ignored his penchant for being addressed as ‘Doctor.’ Figuring a good offense would be her strongest defense, “I’m going to propose a number of new recording sites in Yellowstone.”

  “The Park Service needs to put their own people and money on it.”

  “That’s for the Consortium to decide,” she bit out. “As long as I can make my case on Monday, I think they’ll agree inadequate resources are allocated to Yellowstone. You know perfectly well another eruption the size of the ones the park has seen in the past few million years would cause the equivalent of nuclear winter.”

  How many times had she lectured along these same lines without her pulse rate going ballistic? How often had she fielded questions from students and the press without feeling the sense of foreboding she did today? She glanced again at the map showing the ‘Ring of Fire’ and hoped the Sakhalin shake hadn’t spawned others.

  Turning back to Hollis, she went on, “Millions would die when crops failed around the world.” She’d parroted those words before too, but today she imagined a hungry little girl watching snow fall from a leaden summer sky.

  “What’s got into you?” Hollis replaced his glasses and glared at her. “Stop being dramatic.”

  He squared narrow shoulders and marched away down the aisle between computer terminals. The oscilloscope hooked to a portable seismograph on the table showed a small excursion, a dutiful record of him slamming the door.

  At 4 PM Kyle finished teaching her Earthquake Risk seminar and headed for her office. Passing Hollis’s door, she heard him on the phone, “… talking about ridiculous things like nuclear winter …”

  Her face went hot. Torn between eavesdropping further and walking away, she decided on neither. Instead, she stepped to his door and leaned against it, her arms folded across her chest. She cocked one of her brows in an expression of disdain.

  Hollis flushed. “I’ll have to phone you back.” He fumbled the receiver and almost dropped it.

  “To whom were you talking about me?”

  He shook his head.

  “More behind the back stuff?” She pointed her slender index finger at Hollis. “Whoever it was, you know what I said was not the least ridiculous. Even the park rangers tell the tourists about the possibilities.”

  She went on down the hall, trying to believe her sense of impending disaster stemmed from Stanton’s collapse.

  “Any calls?” she asked Xi Hong, as she passed his open door next to hers. She and the Chinese postdoctoral researcher shared a phone line in a triumph of bureaucratic false economy.

  Xi shook his head. All the while, he maintained a squint at vertical rows of characters on his computer monitor. In one of his trademark moments, Hollis had suggested Xi was a spy for Mainland China.

  As she started to go into her office, Xi roused. “There is a note here from the department secretary.” He passed it to her with a grave look. “Leila says the CT scan shows area of damage in Stanton’s brain from stroke.”

  Kyle took the message and scanned it, but there was no more than he had said.

  She went into her small cluttered space and sank into the swivel chair. Raising her long legs, she propped feet clad in slim black flats on the desk, crossed her ankles, and leaned back. In the familiar, rewarding hubbub of teaching, she had managed to set aside thoughts of Stanton’s misfortune, but now, with her eyes stinging, she crumpled the note and threw it at the wall.

  Why him? And why now for his good fortune to run out?

  On her office credenza rested what Kyle liked to think of as her lucky piece, a colorful chunk of the bright green copper mineral malachite. When she was growing up under the watchful eye of her grandmother near the great open pits of Globe, Arizona, Franny’s second husband, Zeke, worked in the mines. He had learned early on that bringing a sample of deep-blue azurite or soft, turquoise-hued chrysocolla from the tailings piles outside the mine brought delight to Kyle’s young eyes. By the time she was in junior high, her rock collection outstripped his capacity to identify samples. The malachite was the first specimen Zeke had given her; the mass of emerald hue striped with deeper green was worn smooth from touching.

  As she worried the stone with
her thumb, her thoughts returned to Stanton and the people who needed to know what had happened to him. Though the thought of telling others made her feel hollow, and served to make his collapse all too real, she lifted the phone.

  For the next hour, she tried to swallow her sorrow and placed calls all over the world: California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Bolivia, Japan, and the Philippines. She spoke in a controlled voice to Consortium members at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington State, researchers at a number of universities, and some of Stanton’s contacts in foreign governments.

  In the home stretch, she realized she had saved the hardest task for last, that of informing former Utah student Wyatt Ellison, now a Yellowstone Ranger. Perhaps because he was older than most graduates, fortysomething Wyatt was a friend to both her and Stanton.

  Imagining the crestfallen look on Wyatt’s lean and craggy face, she tried his office in the Resource Center near Park Headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs. As it was after five, she also tried his park housing. Getting no answer and nothing on his cell phone, she decided not to break the news by email.

  As she replaced the phone, Kyle picked up her lucky malachite again. Turning it in her hands, she figured Stanton needed it more than she did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SEPTEMBER 11

  Ranger Wyatt Ellison crawled through golden reeds along Yellowstone’s Lamar River. Though the ground was cold in the northern range, he didn’t mind. Time spent in the field was always good, especially on a fall day when the summer tourists had retreated from the park like a receding tide. It didn’t even matter that a heavy-looking gray cloud sailed toward the valley, trailing a gauzy scarf of precipitation.

  From his position in the river bottom, Wyatt could see mountains rising on both sides. To the southwest was the long shoulder of Specimen Ridge, crowned by Amethyst Mountain. On the slopes was a fossil forest of upright stone trees.