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“Anywhere on the army base’s side of Mauna Loa,” Daws said.
MacGregor sighed. “What a goddamn mess.”
“Yes, sir, it is,” Daws said. “Contact with lava will generate an explosive cloud of steam and organic debris rising nine to fifteen thousand feet into the air. That of course is stratospheric levels, which means global circulation. We anticipate most of the particulate material will fall back to the island of Hawai‘i within a few hours, but forty-three percent of the material will be carried off by the jet stream, where it will circulate for as long as twelve months.”
Now Daws was the one who sighed. “By and large, however, most of it will slowly descend to lower altitudes over a period of weeks and eventually come down to the ground like rain.”
Mac said, “Sounds more like acid rain to me.”
“I guess you could think of it that way.” Daws swallowed. “The distribution of the flyMuscais worldwide. The infectivityof the tobacco mosaic virus is very broad-based. We do not know its full range. It does not kill every plant, but we believe that this process of fragment incorporation will occur in other plant viruses. As a result, all, or nearly all, plants in the biosphere will die.”
There was an almost kinetic energy to the silence in the room now. Mac felt the urge to get up and open a window, though he suspected that if he did, one of the soldiers outside would arrest him. Or shoot him.
“Given several years of research, it would be possible to develop resistant plant strains,” Daws continued. “But we do not have years. The viruses will kill every plant on Earth within two months. All animal life, including human life, will die of starvation soon after. A conservative forecast is one point four billion death events in the first five weeks, and three point one billion in the first eight weeks. Nearly everyone will be dead by four months. A few isolated individuals may be able to hold out by hoarding, but not for long.”
Mac said, “I understand what happens if the virus escapes those canisters and what it will do to the biosphere. But what happens if humans are somehow contaminated before that? Can it be transmitted from one person to another?”
“You mean if a spill happens before lava ever gets near those canisters?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Butifit does,” Mac said.
“We believe that the results would be a variation of typical radiation poisoning, affecting some more quickly than others. Some might die immediately, as if their personal biosphere had been poisoned. It might take close contact; it might not. It might take longer for some than for others. But they’re all going to die from the same black death.”
Mac stared at Robert Daws, trying to comprehend the magnitude of what he was hearing. Daws had delivered the information as dispassionately as a weatherman reporting that a cold front was moving in. Mac looked around at the scientists seated at the table. They hadn’t even reacted. Because they already knew.
So this is how the world is going to end.
“But if it is released into the atmosphere, in five months or thereabouts, no life-forms will exist on the planet except some insects and bacteria,” Daws said. “The Earth will essentially have died.”
Now he was done. No one spoke for over a minute. Finally Mac took it upon himself to state the obvious, if only for his own benefit: “We have to find a way to stop or divert the flow of lava.”
Daws nodded. “Before the end of the week,” he said. He was looking directly at Mac now, as if it were just the two of them in this room. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Just the one I keep asking,” Mac said. He turned to the men at the table. “How in God’s name was this allowed to happen?”
CHAPTER 22
The men at the table stared back at him.
“Excuse me?” one of them finally said.
“You heard me,” Mac said.
Briggs cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said, “there’s plenty of blame to go around. Blame the army. Blame the Cold War. Blame your congressperson for not appropriating the money. Blame Hawai‘i for protecting its tourist trade. Blame the tree-huggers for blocking the construction of dump sites forty years ago when we could still have moved this stuff out. Blame all the people who looked at one piece of the puzzle and not the whole problem. We’ve inherited this mess from the 1950s, with plenty of help from the ’70s and ’80s. The whole thing has been a slow-moving train wreck.”
They all looked through the window and watched as six U.S. Army CH-47 Chinooks—tandem-rotor, heavy-lift helicopters—slowly descended, mini-excavators hanging beneath and backhoes in the cargo bays.
Briggs said, “We’re going to build a dike.”
He sounded like Noah announcing he was going to build an ark.
“How big?”
“Twenty feet high, maybe a quarter of a mile long.”
