Ring of Fire Cascadia: A Disaster Thriller, page 4
“Bets, listen. I’m gonna do all the things retirees do. You know, like fixing things. You won’t have to nag me about the loose cabinet door over there. I can feed Winston all the time. Plus, you’ve been wanting to spruce up the guest house. I can do that now.”
“You have to do that anyway,” she countered. “Remember? All of the kids will be here for, drum roll, please, your family-hosted retirement party.”
Duke sulked and tried to slide down the seat of the dining chair under the table to join Winston, who’d already gone into hiding. Duke made eye contact with the pup, his eyes pleading for help. Us boys need to stick together.
Duke continued to scramble. “I know. I’m not trying to weasel out of retiring. I can’t anyway. It’s just, um, I have concerns about my legacy and Sloan’s future.”
“The kids and grandkids are coming. They’re your family’s legacy.”
“Family’s why I’m in this,” Duke said low, the words as heavy as ash, Sloan’s current dive into Axial’s heart heavy on his mind. However, as always, the criticism he’d received after publishing his theories on the GSM weighed on him. And his Mount Pinatubo failures early in his career always screamed never again. A solemn vow carved into his bones.
Duke’s cell phone rang, piercing the heavy, tense air of the kitchen. He answered, wincing, as the phone displayed the identity of the caller. “Vaughn, it’s Saturday. What can I help you with?”
Dr. Helen Vaughn’s voice was ice, sharp as a glacier’s edge. With Duke’s upcoming retirement, she’d practically taken control of the CVO, which meant Sloan’s career would be in danger.
“Sloan is chasing your core-surge nonsense, Duke. On a Saturday, no less. A fairy tale spun from thin air. Axial’s basaltic. A small fry by comparison to the volcanic systems in your own backyard. You know this, and you also know we don’t have the resources to expend with the latest budget cuts.”
Duke’s knuckles whitened. Retirement suddenly sounded really good except he couldn’t leave his daughter to the wolves. If he’d told Betsy the truth behind his software download, that he hoped to spy on Vaughn and the CVO to keep Sloan aware of any backstabbing, she would’ve understood but would’ve become concerned about Sloan as well. So he’d taken his laptop to work last week, where he’d downloaded the software with the help of a member of the IT team who was leaving for a promotion in California.
Duke’s stew was getting cold, and his wife remained hot under the collar. Duke responded to Vaughn, relaying the data he’d just digested in his office.
“Sloan’s got two hundred ppb xenon, ten microtesla down. Cosmic rays are up twenty percent, according to the SPWC,” he explained, referencing the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. He spoke with their scientists so often they’d offered to give him a cubicle.
He continued, “Helen, the core’s stirring. The data doesn’t lie. It’s right there in black and white.” His voice growled, the data a shield against Vaughn’s ambition to eclipse his career’s fame.
“We’ve been through this before. St. Helens in ’05,” Vaughn sneered, her words venomous, dripping with calculated disdain. “Her joyride is over for today, Duke. I’m ordering her topside.” She disconnected the call.
He bristled at the reference to another moment in Duke’s career he wasn’t proud of. Vaughn hung up, the line dead as ash. Duke slammed the phone down. Winston grumbled, his drool-flecked jowls quivering. Betsy’s eyes softened as she placed her warm hand on his shoulder.
“What is it, honey?” Betsy asked, her demeanor changed in order to stand in solidarity with her husband against his office nemesis.
“Dammit, Bets. Vaughn is a real problem,” Duke growled, the room’s cedar walls seeming to close in. “Sloan and I agree the GSM’s tearing the crust apart with cosmic rays, creating auroras that may be pretty to the eye but potentially devastating for the planet. It’s not just me saying this. Even the SPWC’s waking up to the correlation.”
Duke took a deep breath and exhaled, recalling momentous events during his career, including the early assignment at Mount Pinatubo in 1991. He’d silenced Pinatubo’s truth that year, costing hundreds of lives. Never again.
“You’re fighting for Sloan,” she said. Then she understood. “Will the software help you, um, spy on that—?” Betsy stopped short of calling Vaughn what she’d been thinking.
Duke nodded. His face not only revealed the stress he was under for Sloan’s sake but also what the data was portending for the fate of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Three
April 5
1300 Hours
Aboard the Neptune II Submersible
Axial Seamount
300 Miles off the Coast of Oregon
“NEPTUNE’S ARRAY IS howling,” crackled NOAA tech Jamie Ruiz, her voice sharp through static. Ruiz was on loan to the CVO from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, at Duke’s request. The young woman was considered NOAA’s rising star in the field of space weather. Duke had designs on stealing her permanently, so he’d paired her up with Sloan as his daughter’s number one.
Ruiz continued, “Xenon’s at two hundred ppb. Argon’s past a thousand now. Sloan, I swear hell’s waking up.”
The Neptune II submersible groaned, its titanium hull creaking like splintering bone shuddering under the Pacific’s crushing pressure, fourteen hundred meters below the surface, where darkness swallowed light like a ravenous beast. Sloan Mercer, who’d recently turned forty, gripped the controls, her breath rasping in the claustrophobic cockpit. The air was stale with a metallic bite, sharp as a blade against her throat.
A seasoned volcanologist with a Stanford PhD, like her father, Sloan’s persistence and determination carved her reputation as one of the USGS’s sharpest minds. However, on that afternoon, her fingers trembled, brushing the pouch around her neck made of deer hide and leather drawstring. Inside was a tourmaline crystal gifted by her dad when she entered Stanford.
The talisman, a gemstone known for its wide range of colors and unique properties, was tucked in her jumpsuit, its rough weave a lifeline. Born out of ancient volcanic eruptions, it was known to have electric properties because, when subjected to heat or pressure, it developed a charge, resulting in the polarization of the crystal. Known as pyroelectricity, the watermelon-colored gemstone, found by Duke while conducting research at a volcano in San Diego County, California, had once helped save Sloan’s life.
Newly divorced, her heart raw from a year of solitude and personal reflection, she strived to prove her father’s grand solar minimum theory, redeeming his legacy scarred by the Pinatubo disaster.
Neptune’s screens flared crimson, data shrieking like a wounded leviathan, as she undertook the solo expedition to probe Axial Seamount’s unrest. Spurred by Duke’s warnings and auroras, which had painted Seattle’s skies in ghostly hues of purple and emerald, she took the risk of incurring Vaughn’s wrath to make the unusual Saturday dive.
Sloan’s eyes locked on the gas chromatograph, spikes slashing in a frenzied pulse. Xenon tripled, argon quadrupled, a chemical scream from the deep. The magnetometer lurched ten microtesla downward, its needle spinning like a dervish in a windstorm.
The GSM’s seventy percent magnetic field collapse, as tracked by INTERMAGNET, the global consortium of cooperating magnetic observatories, unleashed a twenty percent Earth-directed cosmic-ray surge.
Prompting the dive with a sense of urgency was a phone call she’d received the night before from a colleague at the Cosmic Ray Station in Oulu, Finland. Their monitors had been wailing. “Off the charts,” her friend had said. There was no other conclusion in Sloan’s mind.
A cosmic fire was stoking the Earth’s core.
Her father’s research paper, which she helped prepare, was seared into her mind. Cosmic rays could boil magma, unleash chaos. The Axial Seamount, a volcanic colossus on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, churned. Its one-hundred-cubic-kilometer-wide caldera was a genuine VEI 6 threat. If their theory was correct, despite being an underwater eruption, Axial could easily surpass the eruption of Hunga Tonga in 2022. An eruption that continued to be discussed as having a profound impact on global temperatures.
“Marine life’s fleeing,” Sloan relayed to Jamie.
“I see it,” she added, her sonar pinging a frenetic dance. “Squid swarms, fish bolting. They sense a bomb’s ticking. No doubt they’re hauling ass away from Axial.”
Sloan lowered her eyes to view the displays before her. She glanced above the control panel where the viewport framed a murky abyss. Neptune’s floodlights carved trembling beams through swirling sediment, bubbles erupting like champagne from the bottom of the ocean.
Without warning, a squid jetted past, its ink a ghostly veil, its eyes wide with primal panic. Sloan sensed the seafloor pulsing, a low groan vibrating the hull as if the core’s heartbeat thundered through the steel.
Her mission, forged in Duke’s insistence that his theories were coming to fruition, was to catalog this anomaly that surrounded her. Now she was experiencing a surreal growl from the Earth’s molten heart. It enveloped her. Demanding she recognize its power.
Then her deerskin pouch seemed to be warming. Her past flashed in front of her. Kilauea’s 2015 trauma clawed at her psyche. She’d been trapped in a lava tube, heat searing, walls crushing, reconciling death would be her fate.
“Sloan, you copy?” Vaughn’s voice was unemotional, unable to appreciate the moment. “You need to return topside. This ride is over.”
Sloan sighed. She hadn’t expected Vaughn to intercede. She tried to buy more time with Neptune, gathering data around Axial. “Axial’s gas is screaming. Magnetometer’s down ten microtesla. The core’s alive.”
“Topside, now,” came the response.
“Swelling like a bruise,” Sloan continued, begging for more time. Her sonar pinged a three-centimeter bulge. The seafloor was rippling like a trapped animal panicking in a net. “This could be the start of Axial’s awakening.”
“Don’t make this worse for yourself, Sloan. Let’s go.”
She nudged the sub closer to the caldera, its floodlights slicing through the murk. She caught a glimpse of a red fissure pulsing like a gaping wound, the magma’s flow representing a molten foreshadow of trouble. The hull rattled, a deep bellow echoing, steel groaning under the ocean’s fist. An alert screamed:
Core Pulse, 10 megahertz.
“It’s waking,” she muttered to herself, firmly convinced now.
A tremor slammed into them, lights strobing crimson, alarms wailing like banshees. The viewport blazed orange, magma seeping, a fiery vow of chaos. Sloan’s heart thundered as the sub’s alarms roared like a beast unchained.
“It’s alive.”
Four
April 5
1400 Hours
Evergreen Highway
Near Vancouver, Washington
DUKE AND BETSY MADE PEACE over the issue of the installed spy software, as his wife called it. She, too, had concerns for Sloan’s future career as she fell under the power of Duke’s replacement at the helm of the Cascades Volcanic Observatory—Dr. Vaughn.
Sloan was somewhat stubborn and loyal to a fault. The three of them had discussed the office dynamics within the CVO following Duke’s departure. Sloan planned on doing a lot of fieldwork to avoid interaction with the overbearing Vaughn.
Duke loaded Winston into his vintage International Harvester for the thirty-minute drive into the CVO in Vancouver. The powder-blue Scout model was his pride and joy. Duke, who preferred to remove the soft top to let fresh air in when he drove the fifty-two-year-old truck, kept the vehicle in a small barn on the family’s property most of the time. The Pacific Northwest was known for its wet weather. This cool, crisp spring day was devoid of clouds. A perfect opportunity for the two besties to enjoy the ride along the Columbia River.
The 1978 Scout rumbled to life, its V8 engine a guttural hymn. Its body, worn like Duke’s, had faded paint chipped with battle scars from many years of off-road fun. Duke, his face weathered like a basalt cliff after years in the field before taking on a more administrative role, gripped the cracked leather steering wheel.
For his part, Winston was a good rider. His harness kept him securely in the passenger seat. As he grew older, he was less inclined to look over the door to see if he could jump out. Now, opting to sprawl out on the seat, he alternated between listening to Duke speak aloud and catching a few winks.
He pulled out of their gravel driveway toward Cape Horn Road, tires crunching over rock. His modest one-story home, built nearly a hundred years ago, sat perched on a wooded bluff overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. Their view was incredible. Even at midday, during springtime, mist curled low over the water like warm breath on a windowpane. Across the Columbia to the south, the dark shoulders of the river canyon dropped steeply away, a thousand feet of basalt walls and Douglas firs leading down to the mirror-still river. Above their property, it was not unusual to sight a lonesome eagle wheeling in a slow spiral, scouting for breakfast in one of the many creeks that provided mountain water to the river.
As they turned west onto the winding Evergreen Highway, the Scout shuddered as Duke dropped it into third gear, hugging the northern lip of the gorge. This stretch of highway, old and somewhat stubborn like him, cut through a land shaped by fire and ice. Fifteen thousand years ago, the Missoula floods had ripped through here with the force of an ocean, tearing through layers of lava rock and soil, carving this mighty corridor between Oregon and Washington. The river’s banks were choked with many thousands of years of upheaval caused by the tectonic plates colliding within the CSZ.
He passed Cape Horn Lookout, barely slowing as the guardrails flared to reveal the panorama: miles of river, wind-scalloped and framed by steep canyon walls. Duke had climbed these ridges in his early twenties to enjoy the magnificent view. It had set him on a career path studying the Earth both for its beauty and its potential destructiveness.
Winston sat up in his seat and gave a bark, sharp and abrupt. His voice had transitioned from the high-pitched yap of a puppy to the deep, I mean business gruff of an adult male bulldog.
“Yeah, yeah, I see them,” Duke said, nodding at the wild turkeys strutting along the roadside. “They’ve been running that gang since ’09.”
He opted for the more informal reference rather than a flock or group. The gangs, as he called them, had destroyed their gardens in the past, forcing the Mercers to build a greenhouse for fresh vegetables. However, it wasn’t until the day Duke left his Scout outside the barn that he declared war on the gang. They’d roosted for a while on the vintage truck, scratching the hood and filling his front seats with droppings.
As they neared Washougal, the landscape softened. Forest gave way to pastureland and cedar-sided homes tucked behind mossy fences. The sky brightened, shedding the mist of the river, and drivers headed into Vancouver, most of them in silent Teslas and popular Subarus, sipped coffee, faces occasionally glancing at their smartphones.
His mind full of memories and concerns for his daughter, Duke hardly recalled the drive into the CVO as he wheeled the Scout onto SE Cardinal Street, tires crunching again, this time on the crumbling asphalt of a nondescript office park. To most, the building at 1300 SE Cardinal looked like any other. Low-slung, brick facade, flat-roofed, secured with security cameras and shatterproof plate-glass doors. The building sat squarely between utilitarian and invisible. The only identification came from a series of recently installed bronze plaques near the door. One listed the USGS mission statement, another a dedication to the scientists lost during the 1980 St. Helens eruption.
To Duke, this was sacred ground. The CVO was a fortress of science. The facility wasn’t flashy. It didn’t need to be. Its importance was buried beneath the surface, in racks of seismographs, magnetometers, and GPS stations as well as in real-time telemetry feeds and thermal-imaging arrays. This was where they listened to the heartbeat of the planet.
He parked the Scout beneath a sagging Douglas fir that threw patchy shadows over the hood. As the engine ticked and cooled, he reached over and gave Winston’s flank a gentle nudge. He pointed in the direction of Dr. Vaughn’s car. “The enemy’s here. Be a good boy.” Winston was no fan of Duke’s successor. He was a very good judge of character.
In response, Winston tilted his head upward and allowed a devilish grin, one that concerned Duke as to whether his good-natured buddy might choose today to take a hunk out of Dr. Vaughn’s ass.
Five
April 5
1530 Hours
Cascades Volcanic Observatory
Vancouver, Washington
WINSTON DUTIFULLY WADDLED alongside Duke as they entered the CVO. The lobby was a cavern of resilience. Its sheetrock walls were scuffed, and the finish of the linoleum floors revealed the paths of those who worked there. On Saturday, and most days, the reception desk sat empty. Few visitors stopped by.
Fluorescent tubes fluttered, casting a somewhat sinister shadow across the trio of photographs adorning the wall. The president of the United States, the head of the USGS, and Duke, the scientist-in-charge. He chuckled to himself as he made a mental note to take it with him after the retirement party that upcoming Friday. He was certain Vaughn would chuck it in the dumpster as soon as the clock struck five that afternoon.
The interior of the Cascades Volcano Observatory always smelled faintly of coffee and that electronic, ozone odor put off by the many computers in operation. Over time, dust accumulated on the devices, which, when coupled with overheating, produced the metallic smell.
On weekends, the CVO was quieter, even serene. It was more like a monastery of data than the usual weekday buzz of overlapping voices and phone calls. The same fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting their sterile glow over map-covered walls and buzzing servers encased behind glass panels like museum artifacts.
