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Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawai‘i

Mac made the Times reporters wait a little longer so he could sit in his office and have a few minutes to himself.

He was rarely alone these days, and he needed solitude to do his best thinking.

Linda, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, had told him once in the middle of an argument that she thought solitude was her husband’s natural state.

Mac had the new seismic profiles—detailing both the volume and movement of the magma—spread across his desk. There were maps of the two rift zones at Mauna Loa’s summit caldera, extending to the southwest and to the northeast; most of the volcano’s eruptive fissures and vents were there. Hypothetically—and historically—the summit caldera provided a topographic barrier protecting the southeast flank of the mountain from normal lava flow.

Which was all well and good, except the coming flow would be anything but normal.

Normal, Mac knew, was whatever would happen when their world exploded sometime in the next forty-eight hours. He sat there and looked at hourly projections about the lava flow they could reasonably expect this time. Mac knew from his research that there had been upward of five hundred lava flows at Mauna Loa, starting as far back as thirty thousand years ago, all originating from the summit area, rift zones, radial vents. All their current estimates and projections were based on what had happened in the past.

But nothing like this had happened in the past, here or anywhere.

He was certain that an insane amount of lava was coming this time, so much lava that it might ultimately be impossible to divert all of it no matter how many channels they dug and how many bombs they set off and how many vents they used between now and the day after tomorrow.

Rebecca was on her way back to HVO from Hilo International. The military transport planes carrying her explosives from Cruz Demolition had finally arrived; Rebecca and her brother David had supervised the loading of the boxes onto the army trucks that would transport them to the Military Reserve. If everything went as scheduled, they’d be putting them in place by the end of the afternoon.

What he saw from the latest charts and graphs was that vents that had been so useful in the past were being plugged on an almost hourly basis by the volcano’s initial underground rumblings. Not all. But too many, in his view.

He pushed back from his desk, put his feet up on it, tipped his chair back, and closed his eyes. Then Jenny and Rick came blowing into the office, both of them clearly on fire.

“Did they text you too?” Jenny snapped.

“Did who text me?” Mac asked.

“Those weasels Kenny and Pia, that’s who,” Rick said.

“I have no idea what you guys are talking about.”

“They just went to work for J. P. Brett,” Jenny said. “For Brett and the Cutlers.”

She was breathing in big gulps, her chest heaving, her face red. Mac imagined steam coming off her. Jenny prided herself on her loyalty, and she hated disloyalty almost as much as she hated politicians.

“I just checked their stations,” Jenny said. “They took their work with them, and their hard drives.”

“How much of their work?” Mac asked.

“I misspoke,” Jenny Kimura said. “I didn’t mean their work. I meant our work. And they took all of it, Mac.”