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Or a bullet.
Sergeant Matthew Iona didn’t hesitate. He jumped out of his cab with the bullhorn he’d been using to direct the others and pointed at the lava now lighting up the sky overhead. The two bulldozers were already moving out, the other excavator right behind them.
Iona jumped back in his excavator’s cab.
He knew he didn’t have much time to get the hell out. He gunned the engine. He was on a curve, and as he turned the wheel, the ground shook, hard, the first significant tremor since the eruption in the morning. Then another tremor hit, bigger than the one before.
The excavator tilted and went into a skid.
The brakes did nothing as the truck began to slip sideways into the eight-foot-deep trench he’d just helped dig. Iona was thrown hard against the steering wheel; he felt his ribs crack. The pain shot everywhere, like foot-long splinters.
Then he was pinned against the door.
The passenger door was too far away to reach. Every time he moved his right arm, the pain from his fractured ribs shot through him.
He had no way of knowing if his buddies in the vehicles ahead had seen what happened.
Somehow, he managed to get his window open. He caught his breath and felt he had a chance. He pumped the brakes again. And again.
The last thing he saw was the river of lava flowing right at him.
Coming way too fast.
Rolling fire, sparks and ash, screaming thunder.
CHAPTER 98
U.S. Military Reserve, Hawai‘i
Get out of the truck!Sergeant, get out now.”
Rivers and Briggs watched helplessly on Briggs’s phone as Matthew Iona’s truck slowly disappeared under an orange-red wave of lava.
They watched the boy die on a satellite phone, the same way they’d watched those pilots die on the monitor.
A boy—that was how General Mark Rivers thought of Sergeant Iona. Not as a soldier; as a boy. A college-age kid. And he had died not just for his country but for the whole world. He just hadn’t known it.
The soldier in the excavator a couple hundred yards ahead of Iona had started to go back. He realized it was too late but recorded the scene on his phone before getting back to his excavator and saving his own life.
Briggs stuffed his phone into a side pocket. This was hard totake. It was like war, only worse, because so many civilians were dying.
“I’m the one who sent him there,” Briggs said. “Iona worked for me.”
“And you work for me,” Rivers said. “You were both doing your jobs. The men who went into that cave, they were doing their jobs too.”
Rivers and Briggs waited to see if the lava would move in the direction they wanted it to, toward Waimea. If it did, that would be some consolation.
“Do you think the worst is over?” Briggs asked.
But they both knew that the death toll from the town on the other side of the island, Na‘alehu, would keep rising. It might take days or weeks to find out how many victims there were. Likely the whole town was gone. So were countless marine creatures who’d lived in the waters in and around South Point.
They already knew approximately how many had died at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The vog had cleared enough for them to send a helicopter, and it had landed ten minutes before.
The pilot found no one alive.
A day and night filled with death and dying and unimaginable suffering.
“No, Briggs,” Rivers said. “The worst is yet to come. Go do your job.”
