He repeated his message in English, then in Chinese. When he was finished, he was so hoarse he could barely speak.
Wide-eyed Americans climbed out of the trucks. Crane loved and hated people. They were capable of gallantry and ignominy all at the same time. “You were briefed on the plane,” he croaked. “You know what to do. Get with it!”
The area calmed to an eerie silence as the truck drivers turned on their high beams to illuminate the area. Lame joined Crane in the center of the pantomime.
“The sensors are in place,” she whispered. “And you were right. The information we’re pulling out of the ground will be the best education I or your computers could ever have. We’re standing on a living, breathing seismic heart.”
He nodded, looking skyward. “Make sure the data is transmitting to the computers,” he whispered in return, “then see to the satellite transmission back home.”
“You keep looking up,” she said.
He was shaking his head. “My arm,” he whispered. “This bastard’s not finished with us yet. The people have got to be taken from here as soon as possible. We’ll load trucks with the injured and get them right down to the docks.”
“F’ai entendu quelqu’un,” someone called excitedly from farther down the square. Then someone else, “F’ai entendu!”
“Dig!” Crane called through cupped hands. “Becher!”
They worked diligently, quietly, everyone pulling together. Crane moved over the face of the cataclysm, trying to take back the lives that the monster would have for its own. As he went, he spoke with his workers, explaining void-to-volume ratios for air in collapsed buildings and the likeliest places to find survivors. He helped with the unloading and placement of the amplified listening equipment, thermal-imaging cameras, and fiber-optical visual probes stuck directly into wreckage that helped find more people, the living and the dead. Surveillance technology sometimes came in handy. He felt neither good nor bad about what he was doing, only urgent. His obsession brought him here; his anger held him fast.
Soon people—remarkably, many of them alive—were being brought out of the rubble. Her computer work on line, Lanie joined the others to help with the triage of patients, field-dressing wounds, then getting them into the trucks. Weary hours passed. She looked up once and saw Crane through the confusion, giving orders like a general. A woman following two stretcherbearers and their burden, broke away and ran to Crane, throwing her arms around him and hugging and kissing him in gratitude. A look of horror swept over his face and he stiffened, pushing her away as if afraid of the contact.
Lanie labored under the most intense fear she’d ever known. She’d been too naive to be scared at Sado. Here, she knew what they were up against. She felt on knife edge. She wanted to trust Crane’s good sense to see them through, but she had begun to learn that the man had no sense at all, only cunning. His continual looking toward the sky didn’t help her feel any better.
Then she saw it, and her whole body tensed in shock. Lightning, pale pinkish lightning, was jumping from the monolith of the mountainside to the clouds and back again. Suddenly it seemed to be springing from everywhere, crackling loudly, like cannon fire.
She ran through the confusion of increasingly desperate and tired workers, finding Crane amidst the partially cleared wreckage of a large house whose top floor was simply gone, its staircase leading to nowhere. A teenage boy lay at the foot of the staircase, his legs pinned beneath a wooden beam. Several workers were improvising a hoist to raise the beam while Crane and a USC intern knelt beside the boy.
“Crane,” she said. “The sky—”
“Not now,” he said, then turned to the workers who were in the process of levering up the beam with another crossbeam. “Don’t take it off.”
“Why not?” the intern asked. “His injuries seem minor. We can get him on a truck and—”
“Good lesson, doctor,” Crane said. “Ever heard of crush syndrome?”
The young man, smeared with mud and soot, just stared. “In a case like this,” Crane said, “we’ve got to treat in situ before we risk moving him. He’s had almost ten hours under this beam to build up toxins where the blood flow was cut off. You pull him out of here now, he’d walk away fine and be dead of a heart attack in an hour.”
“What do we do?”
“We flood him with fluids and antitoxins intravenously, pump him up. When we move the beam, his body’s prepared to deal with the toxin rush into the system.”
“I’ll get the gear,” the young man said, hurrying off.
“Okay, talk to me,” Crane said to Lanie as he bent to the boy, brushing strands of hair out of his face.
“F’ai peur,” the boy whispered.
“Moi aussi, mais pas trop,” Crane replied, then looked at Lanie.
“The lightning,” she said. “It’s jumping up from the island.”
Crane, his face a mask, rose without a word and moved out of the debris to look upward as the intern hurried back into the wrecked house to start an IV.
Lightning crackled all around them, played up and down the rumbling mountain like fiery rain. “Everyone’s got to go,” he said.
“What is it?” Lanie asked as he walked off.
“St. Elmo’s Fire,” he called over his shoulder. He began shouting at his people to gather up whoever was left and get them to the docks.
Lanie ran to catch up.
“The whole atmosphere’s charged with static electricity,” he said. “Something’s going to happen.”
Suddenly, Le Precheur was all motion; people climbed onto the trucks or simply ran in panic. The rumbling got louder, more intense as heavy ash rained down on them. Lanie focused on Crane to avoid thinking about the danger and ran to keep up as he darted back to the house they’d just come from.
They moved into the wreckage. “Get out of here, doctor,” he said, taking the IV from his hand.
“But my patient—”
“Get the hell out of here now!” He turned to the workers as the doctor left. They were busy propping the lever beam atop a rock, making a fulcrum.
“Sauve qui peut!” he yelled, and the men, frightened already, hurried out.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Crane said to Lanie, his eyes intent on the plastic fluid bag he held. “Go … go!”
“Not without you.”
“I’m giving you an order, lady.”
“You’ve probably seen how well I respond to orders,” she said. “Look, you may as well save your breath.”
His jaw muscles tightened. “Get on that lever. When I give you the word, push with all your strength and I’ll drag him out, okay?”
She moved in the confined space to the crossbeam and waited, listening to the sounds of trucks roaring off for the docks and the mountain snarling and spitting.