Rain of Fire (52 page)

“You remember when Kyle and I called you from my office, and I said nobody needed to know you’d cut off the park’s access to the website …”

“Right,” Hollis said warily.

“Well, we said that if nothing happened to Nick, nobody need know about your slimy little trick.”

Kyle turned and faced Hollis. “We’d be happy to keep our end of the bargain, but there’s just one little problem.” She gestured toward Nick, who appeared so infirm it was hard to see how he managed to stay in the chair.

Wyatt advanced again. “Yes, a problem.”

“What’s that?” Hollis blustered, fetching up against the wall.

“It looks to me as if something happened to Nick,” Kyle said.

Wyatt put a hand on Hollis’s shoulder. The smaller man looked scared.

“Now, here’s what you’re going to,” Wyatt instructed. “You’re going to turn in a letter of resignation addressed to Stanton, with copies to Colin Gruy and Radford Bullis. In this letter, you will indicate that you intend to pursue other interests and that you appoint Kyle Stone as your interim successor.”

Hollis started shaking his head.

“You can probably get on again at UCLA,” Nick suggested quietly, “as long as I don’t call my friend the Chairman and tell him you were responsible for nearly getting me killed. If Kyle had seen the tornillo before the eruption and warned me, those minutes could have made the difference between this,” he gestured toward his head, “and me walking away without a scratch.”

Kyle met Hollis’s eyes and shrugged. “Your choice.” She went back to dinking around from seismic station to station.

Hollis opened his mouth and closed it. He looked at Nick, who held out his hands and lifted his shoulders in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture.

“All right.” Hollis sent Kyle a glare of hatred, and without another word, left his office.

Wyatt was already heading for the door as Nick and Kyle scrambled to their feet. Hollis’s footsteps were rapid on the tile floor, so they had to rush to the hall to watch him reach the exit.

“Yee haw,” said Nick.

In the lab across the hall, the portable seismograph made a dutiful record of Hollis slamming the door.

B
y midsummer, Nez Perce Peak had erupted twice more, building a lava dome inside the crater and spreading ash on the cities and towns to the northeast.

The Friday afternoon before the Fourth of July weekend found Kyle in the Institute lab studying the pattern of bumps and thumps that marked the new era in Yellowstone seismology. She brought up a map from the website that compiled the historic earthquakes in the area. The largest number and the most intense magnitudes had been in the western part of the park and outside it near the Hebgen Lake Fault System, as well as within the outline of the 630,000-year-old caldera. Next, she plotted the quakes since last September 10
^th
when the swarm that led to eruption began. Contrary to the past, there had been a marked diminishment of activity in all the western areas.

She turned from the computer monitor to Stanton, who sat beside her in his wheel chair.

“One should never assume they’ve got things figured out,” she tempered, “but I think the opening of the Nez Perce vent released some of the pressure we saw building for years beneath the caldera.”

“I wouldn’t argue with that,” Stanton replied with the slow and deliberate speech he’d developed through long months of therapy. Fortunately, he was right handed so his still-drooping left side did not prevent him from light duty as a Professor Emeritus, filling in some for the void left when Hollis returned to UCLA.

“Knock, knock,” said Leila from the door. She looked as lovely as ever in silk and pearls, her silver hair in soft waves. In contrast, Stanton was tieless and wore khaki trousers; having declared that life was too short to go around overdressed when he had trouble keeping his fork steady at the dinner table.

“What are your plans for the weekend?” Leila asked Kyle.

“Thought I’d drive up to Yellowstone this evening.”

Leila checked her watch and advised, “You should get on the road so you’ll get there before dark.”

Kyle looked at the wall clock and found there was probably just enough time to make it to Mammoth before summer night fell. “I’ll go soon.”

But once Stanton and Leila had gone, she turned back to the computer and brought up her email.

Nick’s latest message was from the Andes, where he and a group of South American geophysicists were conducting gravity studies on a newly smoking crater that had been dormant for over sixty years.

As soon as this project is wrapped up, I want to come back to Nez Perce. Some folks may think the small eruptions released the energy, but you and I both know Yellowstone is the world’s largest supervolcano
.

“Thanks, Nick,”
she thought.
“Here I was feeling pretty good about things, and you have to bring me back to earth.”

In the meantime, you keep watch over Nez Perce and the Wasatch, and I’ll see you in the fall. P.S. I miss your smile
.

Kyle’s lips curved into a full-blown grin. If she and Nick had been friends first, instead of lovers, they might not have lost all those years.

She pushed back her chair, locked up the lab and went out to her Mercedes. Her overnight bag was already stowed in the trunk.

Anticipating a lot of traffic if she drove through the park from the south, she took the longer but faster route around the west side. It was high summer, the potato and wheat crops of eastern Idaho emerald green where elaborate aluminum irrigation machines rolled through the fields. The air was so clear that she could look to the east and see the tips of the Grand Tetons. About fifty miles south of West Yellowstone, she entered the Targhee National Forest.

The ‘Land of Many Uses’ had been intermittently logged with vacant fields of stump stubble alternating with deep forest. The afternoon sun set off a strobe effect of light and shadow on the highway.

Kyle knew that beneath the mantle of vegetation lay the Island Park Caldera, the relatively small fifteen-mile-wide crater from the eruption of 1.3 million years ago. It also happened to mark the edge of the gargantuan two-million-year-old eruption, which had left a hole fifty by forty miles and rained ash over the western half of North America.

Once in the park, she drove through the open meadows along the Madison River. Here she crossed into the youngest 630,000-year caldera. Spying grazing elk and buffalo alongside wading fly-fishermen, she lowered her window and drew a breath of clean mountain air.

North of Madison Junction, she passed back out of the caldera and headed for Norris Geyser Basin, occasionally closed due to soil temperatures in the boiling range along the nature trails.

Dusk was falling when she caught sight of the small Headquarters community. Inhaling the familiar scent of sage, pine and earth, she felt she was coming home.

When she turned in at his duplex, Wyatt was waiting in the shadow of the porch.

As she got out of the car, the moon began to rise over the eastern horizon.

Wyatt came to her through the blue twilight, wearing faded jeans and a pullover, carrying a bottle of Lite and a Guinness. “Little late tonight?”

She took the proffered beer, knocked it against his and drank. “Made it by dark.”

“Only just.”

She looked again at the lemon orb of moon.

“Full tomorrow.” Wyatt took her drink, placed it with his on the trunk of her car, and put his arms around her from behind.

She leaned back, enjoying the feel of his muscle and warmth. “I’m learning to see the full moon as something other than a symbol of a single disastrous event in my life.”

Wyatt’s embrace tightened.

“I’m even trying to enjoy this time of evening. It’s as though everything is more sharply defined before darkness falls.”

He bent and his lips and moustache brushed her neck. “I wish you could spend more time here.”

She smiled. “I may be able to soon. I just hired Cass Grain out of Menlo Park, and she loves the kind of administrative nit-picking I plan to hand off to her.”

“Cass is a true supporter of romance,” Wyatt said dryly. “Hungry?” he went on. “I’ve got rib-eyes from the Firehole Inn.”

Picking up their beers, they got her bag out of the trunk and went inside.

Over dinner, she told him her theory about Nez Perce easing the pressure on the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone.

Wyatt forked up some baked potato. “Don’t let Superintendent Kuni hear you say that.”

“How so?” Kyle sipped some of the red wine Wyatt had poured for them.

“Now that the park has reopened, Joseph plans to use the proceeds from the Wonderland Campaign to augment the scientific program. He doesn’t ever want to be caught asleep at the wheel like Janet Bolido.”

Thinking how much better suited the former Chief Ranger was to manage the park, Kyle said, “I wonder how Janet’s doing since she fled back across the Potomac.”

“Do you really want to know?” Wyatt asked.

She took another bite of the succulent steak Wyatt had cooked medium rare the way she liked it. “That’s great about Kuni’s commitment to research, since my theory about things being quieter since Nez Perce blew could be totally wrong. In fact, I got an email from Nick today, warning us not to get complacent.”

Wyatt grinned. “You know it’s against Nick’s nature to want anything calm.”

She toyed with her wineglass. “It’s funny. Carol Leeds’s latest series was about how we were ‘wrong’ to warn of a major eruption at Yellowstone.”

He rose and picked up both their plates. “I guess she didn’t think Nez Perce put on a big enough show.”

Kyle joined Wyatt at the sink and started rinsing the dishes.

He turned off the water. “Leave those.”

In his room, Wyatt snapped on a lamp. “We were wrong … this time.”

Kyle faced him across the bed, her fingers on the buttons of her blue cotton shirt. “It may not happen in our lifetime …”

He shrugged off his pullover.

“Or for thousands of years …” She stripped her shirt down her arms and dropped it, stepped out of her jeans and left them in a heap on the floor.

Wyatt slid beneath the covers and held them back in welcome.

She climbed in and his long limbs twined around her. Their mingled exhalation warmed the pillow.

“But it will happen,” Kyle said.

Closing her eyes, she took a second to perform what had become her ritual since last fall. She sent up a prayer for frightened little girls and everyone else who relied on fate to get them through the night.

“Wyatt,” she murmured against his chest.

He spread his hand warmly over her back. “Hmmm?”

She drew a deep breath. “Turn out the light.”

A
LSO AVAILABLE BY LINDA JACOBS,
SUMMER OF FIRE

PROLOGUE
Houston, Texas
July 1, 1988

B
lack smoke billowed from the roof vents. At any second, the flames would burst through, adding their heat to the already shimmering summer sky. Wood shingle, Clare Chance thought in disgust, a four-story Houston firetrap. She drew a breath of thick humidity and prepared for that walk on the edge … where fire enticed with unearthly beauty, even as it destroyed.

Fellow firefighter Frank Wallace, over forty, but fighting trim, gripped her shoulder. “Back me up on the hose.” Although he squinted against the midday glare, his mustachioed grin showed his irrepressible enthusiasm.

“Right behind you,” Clare agreed. In full turnouts and an air pack, she ignored the sultry heat and the wail of sirens as more alarms were called. Helping Frank drag the hose between gawking by-standers and shocked apartment residents, she reflected that the toughest part of the job was watching lives inexorably changed.

A commotion broke out as a young Asian woman, reed thin in torn jeans, made a break from the two civilians holding her. She dashed toward the nearest building entry crying, “My baby!”

Frank dropped the hose, surged forward and grabbed the woman. “Javier,” he grunted. “Take over.”

Javier Fuentes, lanky, mid-twenties, took the handoff and restrained the woman from rushing into the burning building. Her dark eyes went wide as she screamed and struggled. Her short legs kicked at Javier’s shins.

Adrenaline surging, Clare demanded. “What floor?”

“4-G …” the woman managed. “He’s only two.”

“Let’s go,” Clare told Frank without bothering to ask why the child had been left alone. As she bent for the hose, her sense of purpose seemed to lighten the weight of her equipment.

They headed in.

The building’s peeling doorframe had been defaced by purple graffiti and the interior stairwell smelled faintly of mold and urine. New and sparkling in the seventies when oil jobs had enticed northern immigrants to Houston, the housing had fallen into disrepair.

At the second floor landing, Clare and Frank met smoke. She tipped up her helmet, covered her face with the mask, and cranked the tank valve. Beside her, Frank wordlessly did the same.

As they moved up, Clare made sure the hose didn’t snag around corners while Javier and others fed slack. Business as usual, so far, and they would find that young mother’s child.

At the third floor and starting blindly toward four, Clare felt the smoke grow hotter. She crouched below the deadly heat and told herself that she could breathe. Positive pressure prevented fumes from leaking into her mask, and the dehydrated air cooled as it decompressed.

In, out, slow …

Isolation pressed in with the superheated atmosphere. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Frank had left her, belied by his tugging on the hose. At times like these, she had to keep her head on straight. No giving in to claustrophobia and no thought of turning back.

If you misguessed the dragon in the darkness, you would pay with your life.

Fourth floor hall, and Clare went onto hands and knees. Darkness and disorientation complete, she concentrated on keeping the hose in line and her breathing steady. The worst humiliation was if she sucked her tank dry and had to make an ignominious exit.