To keep the huge A320 aloft, the crew gunned the right wing engine and finessed the control surfaces. They tried restarting the left engine when the right engine began oscillating wildly as it ingested air choked with rock powder. That engine flamed out, too. The roar of the spinning turbine died away. In the cabin, silence overwhelmed the interior, cut through by the sinister grinding noise of solid ash particles on the metal skin of the jet.
The force of gravity evaporated from under the passengers as the nose of the aircraft pitched steeply down, rendering terrified people weightless for a few moments. In the cockpit, the flight crew forced the aircraft into an emergency dive to maintain airspeed to insure adequate airflow over the wings so they could keep control the aircraft. With an eye on the altimeter, they bullied their controls in a mad effort to restart at least one of the engines.
“This is the captain.” The pilot steeled himself to address his passengers calmly. “Please take emergency precautions. Be sure your seatbelt is fastened. Lean forward and grasp the seatback ahead of you. Drop your head down between your arms and stay down.”
The plane lost altitude for an eternity, winging powerless northward over the broad sweep of the nation’s fourth largest state. The crew deployed the landing gear to create wind resistance to slow the descending jet. The altimeter numbers plunged down, down and still the engines refused to start. Visibility on the flight deck was fast disappearing. The forward windows were glazing over, pitted by countless particle strikes.
Pitch darkness switched to daylight in a millisecond as the Airbus breached a pocket of clear air. Below, just seconds away, was a divided country, flat open grassland plains to east, forested foothills and glacier-robed peaks to the west. The crew nursed the plane toward open ground, decreased the angle of descent, and swooped in over an ocean of grass. Ailerons fully elevated, the plane’s nose rose skyward. The Airbus presented its aluminum belly to the earth’s surface. The high-speed emergency glide procedure had been executed perfectly, textbook precise, but airspeed exceeded 250 miles per hour as the Airbus altimeter numbers ran out.
“Brace yourselves, brace for impact,” the Airbus captain yelled over the address system.
White fear evaporated from Liz’s body, replaced by a decade-old image of her daughter in diapers, splashing through a child’s plastic wading pool. She smiled into the joyous face of toddler Pelee the instant before all her senses quit her.
Chapter Forty-Five
In a men’s room stall in the terminal complex at Salt Lake City International Airport, Germaine grabbed for the latch when the door rattled violently and the stall walls rippled and chattered. “Quake,” he blurted out to no one. Claustrophobic within the undulating walls, he yanked the door back and raced out of the rest room into the airy spaces of the concourse. Pulling his smartphone from a pocket, he auto-dialed the Yellowstone geo offices. He couldn’t get through. He dialed again. Nothing.
“Come on, damn it,” he barked at the device in his hand.
Beyond the boarding area at the far northern end of Concourse C and across the tarmac and runways, the sprawling Utah metropolis founded by Brigham Young stretched its western hide against the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Range and dipped its toes into the shallow salty inland sea that the Mormon populous treasured. In the bright, dry western light, the cityscape tucked in beneath the mountains was a gemstone to behold.
Again there was no connection with Yellowstone. Germaine dialed the offices of the Cascade Volcano Observatory across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon, and punched extension numerals for the Volcano Hazards Team warren.
“CVO.”
“Germaine Yardley here, on my way back from Yellowstone.”
There was silence for a long second. “Jesus, where are you?”
“I’m in Salt Lake City.”
“Not Salt Lake!” howled the voice on the line.
“I just got here so I could catch….”
“To hell with it, sir, you’ve got minutes to get out of there.”
Germaine froze. “What?”
“Are you on the interstate?”
“No, I’m in the terminal.”
“For God’s sake, man.”
Germaine pulled the little communication device from his ear and stared at it as if it were a scorpion. A fist of insight staggered the professional. He reached for the tempered wall glass to steady his body.
“It’s the caldera?”
Silence reigned on the other end of the line too long. “Yes.”
The CVO’s computer wizard, the man whose data and graphic skills Liz was so enamored of, slipped the smartphone into his pocket. No need to talk a second longer.
Scores of people were milling about and seated in the boarding area. The man eyed the strangers, the same faceless travelers he had seen in airports dozens of times. Their faces exhibited flesh tones, color. His hands were suddenly the blue-gray hue of a cadaver.
At the corner of his eye, Germaine detected motion through the glass, a United Airlines jet on its approach for landing. He followed its path a moment, when his gaze shifted to something indistinct farther off, at the horizon. Beyond the lofty Wasatch Range, blue infinity was being devoured by the devil’s darkness. A malignancy was spreading low and quick, sucking down the brightness from the day.
The hands shook with the palsy of fear; he could do nothing to stop them. Instinct prodded him to turn and run, run fast, but there was no outrunning that smudge on the horizon. No car was fast enough. One couldn’t get a jet aircraft off the ground in time. Hiding was folly.
The sky to the north was lost to shades of night. The mountains, in full sun, were radiant in contrast to the swelling blackness. People in the terminal area took notice as the daylight shifted to dusk in seconds and an angry, tumultuous cloud wall breached the summits of the peaks.
Shouts rang out in the terminal. “Look at that. Look at that!”
The CVO veteran stood rigid, a fossil, watching the approach of geological hell. He understood what was coming at breakneck speed—a pyroclastic surge-cloud a mile tall, incandescent, unimaginably dense yet super fluid and hot beyond measure. Nothing on the surface of the earth could withstand the power of it, as he knew all too well.
The cloud front breached the Wasatch in seconds and descended on the city, witnessed by thousands of citizens going about their pedestrian lives. The force of the blast wall scoured the mountains clean of every living cell. The city fared no better. The Mormon Temple, Capitol Theatre, the Pioneer Memorial Museum, Brigham Young’s Beehive House, schools, businesses, churches, all were smashed to powder and every human life within incinerated.
Germaine instinctively closed his eyes at the last second and vanished in a mist of tiny glass shards.
The great city on the lake was sterilized and leveled. Debris from the eruption and material ripped from the mountains swept into Great Salt Lake. The shallow sea that lapped at the city’s parks and streets began filling in with millions of tons of volcanic fallout. The water level would rise dramatically over the course of the day. The vast lake would spread out over hundreds of square miles of salt flats and drowned what had once been city streets.
Chapter Forty-Six
Otatso Creek chattered loudly as snowmelt from the glaciers in Glacier National Park fattened the stream’s volume now that spring was underway in the high country. Benjamin White Elk had followed the Otatso far upstream during the frosty morning, checking for animal sign to see if grizzly bears had been foraging after emerging from their winter dens.