“Maybe I wasn’t in school that day,” said Smith, “but what the hell is a caldera?”
“It’s a large volcanic crater,” Doc explained. “There’s a huge one beneath Yellowstone National Park. Between thirty-five to forty-five miles across. Absolutely massive. There is a nasty geological hot spot. Very similar to the Hawaiian Islands, actually, but this one’s on continental crust rather than oceanic crust. Geologic hot spots are when molten rock or magma continuously upwells from the mantle, burning a hole in the lithospheric plate above. That’s what causes eruptions on the surface of the Earth. What makes this one so bad is its size and location. Unlike in Hawaii, this one is not surrounded by ocean. It’s surrounded by America’s agricultural states. Shorthand answer is that we’re talking about a supervolcano.”
“Well… shit,” breathed Smith. “Sorry I asked.”
“Buckle up, because here’s more bad news. Each of the past three Yellowstone eruptions occurred between six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand years ago. The last one was six hundred and thirty thousand years ago, so we’re technically due. By best geological guesses, though, there is only a small chance it will erupt in our lifetimes.”
“Unless Valen uses his freaking machines,” said Tate.
“Yes.”
Duffy looked around. “Okay, but we had Mount St. Helens, right? I mean, bad, sure, but—”
Doc looked sick. “Kids, if the Yellowstone Caldera blew, we’d be looking at a force twenty-five hundred times that of Mount St. Helens. That’s a blast equal to twenty-seven thousand Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.”
No one spoke. No one could.
Doc nodded and turned the knife. “The last one laid down a layer of ash over most of the western central United States that is estimated to have been six hundred and sixty feet thick. That means the ash bed would have been thick enough to bury modern skyscrapers. And that doesn’t even count the ash released into the atmosphere. A supervolcano would change the climate, cooling the Earth. Maybe not into another ice age, but enough to affect crops.”
“ How bad?” asked Bunny.
Doc Holliday turned to him, and for once she was not wearing that perpetual smile. Maybe things had to get this bad for her to lose the jackal grin.
“How bad?” she echoed. “Let’s see. There would be about anywhere from three hundred to a thousand inches of ash over everything from Missoula to Denver and Boise to Rapid City. Gone. As much as thirty inches of it on the next ring outward, from Seattle to Chicago. Beyond that? Maybe as little as a couple of inches in New York. But all across the country’s fields and farms, there would be destructive hot ash; which would also choke the streams and rivers. We would lose years’ worth of crops, probably see a die-off of over ninety percent of animals like pigs, cows, and chickens. Timber and mining would stop. And you wouldn’t have enough people left to bury the millions of dead.”
“And,” I said into the absolute silence, “we may be out of time to stop it.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX
Gadyuka sat cross-legged on the bed with three laptops around her. Her flight to Paris was scheduled to depart in six hours, which gave her plenty of time to watch it all start. Plenty of time before planes departing New York would be affected. She would be eating in a sidewalk caf é near the Louvre before it all fell apart. After that? She would take her time making her way back home. Three or four weeks, with plenty of time to sightsee and watch history change via the media.
The news from Washington was stunning, and all of the coded messages from back home were filled with congratulations and praise. The ones from the highest offices hinted at promotion, medals, and some more substantial rewards.
The prudent part of her mind would have had her halfway back to Moscow by now, but where would the fun be in that?
Fun.
She thought about that. The word, the concept. Was this fun?
Gadyuka reached over to the bedside table for the glass of vodka and took a thoughtful sip. The effect would be fun. The New Soviet. A new party. Bigger and stronger than the one that had fallen when she was a little girl. Something that would outlive her, and would both dominate and stabilize the world. Yes, that would be fun.
But getting there…
Well, that was something else. Valen was falling apart, and her people on the ground out West told her that he was looking stressed and a little manic. Gadyuka was more than a little certain that her pet mad scientist did not necessarily want to live in the new world he was creating. That was something she could understand. It would be a problem for the New Soviet to have so many sleeper agents and others who had spent so much time in the West return to live in a true Communist society. Could they ever really adapt? And how could some, like Valen, reconcile what they had done with the peacefulness needed to be good citizens?
Could she do it? When she’d read the e-mails and those hints at substantial rewards, was that a clue of some kind? A warning? Were they testing her to see if she was motivated by financial gain rather than the good of the Party? In the old days many millions had died to try and erase that hunger from the hearts and minds of the people.
She sipped the vodka. It was Van Gogh. Not even a Russian brand. The stuff was made in Holland, for God’s sake. It was her favorite, and her next three favorite brands were Belvedere from Poland, 1.0.1 Vodka from California, and 42 Below, which came up from Australia. Gadyuka could not actually remember the last time she drank Russian vodka.
She would have to give all of that up. Her fine clothes, the freedom to buy anything she wanted anywhere she wanted. The food. Good lord, she would miss American food. And all these lovely vodkas. Gadyuka drained her glass and shimmied off the bed to get the bottle out of the ice bucket. She was halfway there when the door to her hotel room blew inward off its hinges. It slammed into her, lifted her, smashed her against the bureau. The TV leaned forward and fell, exploding in sparks as it landed, partly on the door and partly on her.
At first Gadyuka was too stunned to even understand what just happened. There was the smell of burned wood and plastic explosives in her nostrils and blood in her mouth. A fire alarm began screeching and the overhead sprinklers kicked on with a venomous hiss.
She looked up and there, moving slowly through the smoke, was a figure. A woman she did not recognize. Tall, slender, in her late fifties or early sixties, with a face like a fierce and unforgiving queen in an old painting. She was dressed all in black — pants, a formfitting top, gloves. The woman tossed a small detonator onto the floor and drew a slender, double-edged blade from a sheath behind her back.
“Get up,” said the woman in a heavily accented voice. It was not a Russian accent, not a Russian face.
“Wh-what…?” stammered Gadyuka as she reached into her thigh holster for her gun. The door completely hid the action.
“I said get up,” said the older woman.
Gadyuka fired four shots through the door.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN
“The real question,” said Junie Flynn, “is what would cause the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt?”
She and Doc Holliday were in the ORB alone now, with Bug on the screen. Echo Team had signed to try and cobble together a mission directive. Nevertheless, the holographic conference room was crammed with hundreds of images and lists of data and other information. Some of it swirling as MindReader made connections; others stable and as fixed in place as a bullet hole.