Ira was waiting for Mercer at the West Wing entrance wearing a suit but no tie. They shook hands silently and the admiral led him into the building. They moved along dim corridors and passed several quiet offices before coming to a closed door.
“The president doesn’t know the nature of this briefing,” Ira informed him. “Kleinschmidt called him thirty minutes ago and just said there’s a crisis.”
“Who else is in there?” Mercer asked.
“Admiral Morrison.” C. Thomas Morrison was the charismatic chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the uniformed leader of the United States military, and possibly the next occupant of the Oval Office. “Paul Barnes of the CIA and Dick Henna from the FBI.”
“I haven’t seen Dick in a long time,” Mercer remarked. They’d been friends for several years but their busy schedules had taken a toll on the relationship.
“This isn’t a social call,” Ira reminded.
Mercer nodded grimly.
Ira knocked and waited for an aide to open the heavy door. This was the Cabinet Room, a long space dominated by a massive conference table. The president sat at his traditional seat at the center of the table sporting a polo shirt and twenty hours of beard. John Kleinschmidt, the national security advisor and Ira’s direct supervisor, was just settling in at the president’s right. Paul Barnes was seated to his left. Unlike the others, he’d taken the time to don a fresh suit and tie. Even Admiral Morrison was out of uniform. Mercer and Barnes had butted heads on several occasions and their mutual dislike was evident in the single glance they afforded each other.
Ira took the chair opposite the president and indicated Mercer was to sit next to him. Dick Henna, the bulky director of the FBI, gave Mercer a friendly nod. Someone handed Mercer a mug of coffee and stepped aside when he declined the offer of cream.
“I’m sure the esteemed members of the Fourth Estate are wondering about this late-night meeting, and quite frankly so am I.” The president had the rare ability of making a mild rebuke sound friendly. He spread his large hands on the polished table. “Ira, you want to tell me what we’re doing here at this god-awful hour?”
“Mr. President, I believe you’ve met Dr. Philip Mercer, a member of my staff.”
“On several occasions,” the president said with an easy smile. “I recall telling him after Hawaii nearly seceded from the union that one day he’d be working for me. How’s that Jaguar of yours?”
“Fine, sir.” Mercer was astounded the president knew what kind of car he drove and waited only a second for an explanation.
“You probably didn’t know that I paid to replace the one that got destroyed during the Hawaii crisis. It was easier for me to cut the check than to bury the expense where some forensic accountant from the GAO could find it.”
“I’m flattered.”
“It was a small price to pay for what you did for this country.” The chief executive turned serious. “And since you’re here again, I suspect you’re about to do my administration another favor.”
“If it’s not too late.”
The president turned his startling blue eyes to Ira. “Okay, tell me what’s going on.”
Ira didn’t clear his throat or shuffle papers or any of the normal delaying tactics people used when they’re about to dole out bad news. He shot straight ahead. “Through an intelligence source Mercer has been cultivating we learned of a potential volcanic eruption on an island in the Canaries called La Palma. On my order, a team from the U.S. Geologic Survey has been sent there, and about two hours ago they confirmed that the island may be in the first stages of an eruption.”
“Pardon me for a second,” the president interjected. “But why do we care?”
Ira tapped Mercer. “You’re the geologist. Want to explain it?”
Though Mercer hadn’t heard of La Palma until a few hours earlier, he spoke with the confidence of an expert. “For those that don’t know them, the Canaries are a group of islands in the Atlantic about a hundred miles off Morocco’s west coast. They’re Spanish owned and are considered a vacation getaway for snowbound Europeans. La Palma is the westernmost of the islands and, in terms of geology, the youngest and the most volcanically active. The latest eruption was in 1971, but the one that concerns us occurred in 1949.
“That year, the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which dominates the southern third of the island, erupted over the course of several days. This in itself isn’t unusual. She generally pops every two hundred years or so. What made the ’forty-nine eruption unusual is the four-meter-wide crack that appeared along the center of the island. The western flank of the island, a chunk of rock about a hundred twenty cubic kilometers in size, slipped a few feet toward the sea and stopped.”
“Why did it stop?” the president asked.
“Because Mother Nature wanted us to dodge a bullet, sir. There are two geologic features that make La Palma particularly dangerous. The first is that the composition of the island’s soils allows for it to build up in very steep slopes. In fact La Palma is one of the steepest islands in the world. By rights, the slab of rock should have kept sliding down into the water. We got incredibly lucky. But maybe not for long.
“About ten years ago, a British scientist named Robert Wright floated the idea that a significant eruption could further loosen that slab of rock, allowing it to crack through completely and crash into the ocean. Such an event would produce a catastrophic wave, a phenomenon called a mega-tsunami. The supposition garnered a few doomsday headlines when he published his research, but no government took the idea seriously and certainly no large-scale analyses have taken place.”
“What is a mega-tsunami?” asked the Joint Chiefs chairman.
“Though commonly called tidal waves, a tsunami has nothing to do with tides. Generally they’re caused by undersea earthquakes and their size is limited by the amount of crustal displacement, which is fortunate because rock can only take so much strain before it snaps. That’s why we’ll never experience an earthquake much above eight-point-six. Most geologic faults slip long before they contain enough energy to cause a quake of even magnitude seven. Therefore an undersea earthquake will cause a tsunami of corresponding size. If a fault drops twenty feet, the wave will top out around twenty feet.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.” This came from the caustic director of the CIA, Paul Barnes.
Mercer rounded on him, not bothering to keep the anger from his voice. “Tell that to the three thousand residents of Papua, New Guinea, who were killed by such a wave in 1998.” He turned his attention back to Morrison but kept an eye on the president. “In contrast, a mega-tsunami is caused by a rockslide, and the only limit to the size of the wave is the amount of debris that hits the water. Petroleum geologists working in Alaska in the 1950s found evidence of such a wave in Letuya Bay. Ringing the bay was a line where the old-growth forests inexplicably ended. It was as if some force had ripped out every tree up to about five hundred fifty feet above sea level.”
“Five hundred fifty feet?”
“That’s the height of the wave created when a huge chunk of granite sheered away from a cliff and hit the bay.”
“That’s impossible,” Barnes opined.
Mercer shifted his gaze to the president. “Three years later a group of fishermen were caught in a tsunami more than a hundred feet tall in the same area. Only a handful survived.”
The president looked grave. “And you’re saying that another eruption in the Canaries will cause such a mega-tsunami?”