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More than ever he felt as if he were burning up. Everyone’s eyes were on him, including Leilana’s, but what he felt was more than embarrassment; he was sure of that.
“You need to come with us,” the man growled at him.“Now.”
Another man yelled, “Everybody else, stay where you are and do not try to leave.”
The crowded bar had gone silent, but not for long.
“Fuck you, Iron Man,” a big guy standing at the bar, a native in a floral shirt, said.
“You don’t want to make trouble, sir,” the first stormtrooper said.
“How do you know?” the big guy asked.
He tried to shove a couple of the stormtroopers, but they knocked him back hard, right into Noa. It was like getting hit by a car.
They both went down.
Noa heard yelling all around him. Somebody else went down. There were more shouts; Noa thought he could hear more men coming through the door.
There was a scuffle above him and then somebody fell on Noa, knocking the last air out of him. He struggled to get himself out from underneath the men pinning him to the sawdust-covered floor.
As he twisted his body, he could see the table where he’d been sitting with Leilana.
She was gone.
Sergeant Noa Mahoe’s last thought before he passed out was that he felt like someone had set him on fire.
CHAPTER 53
Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawai‘i
Mac thought about the canisters constantly.
Mostly he wondered how the army could do everything it was doing and build everything it was building at Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea and yet not have been able to figure out a way to get the canisters the hell out of here.
He thought about the canisters when he and the team were trying to devise one final set of schemes to keep the contents from escaping into the atmosphere if the lava reached them, but they were as helpless to stop that as the rest of planet would eventually be.
A planet whose inhabitants had no idea what might be about to happen on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
No matter how old you were, you grew up fearing that a nuclear war would blow up the world.This,Mac thought now,is that.
He vaguely remembered learning in Catholic school about the ten plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament, how some of them had destroyed certain groups while sparing others.
But this plague would spare nothing and no one in the end; it would destroy all the life on the planet. At first, it had been impossible for Mac to wrap his mind around that fact, make sense of it in a rational way.
No longer.
The end.Mac thought that the real Ice Tube was the one inside him; knowing the magnitude of the situation as the clock continued to relentlessly wind down was like a cold grip on his heart.
His sons—they were his heart.
He stared now at one of the pictures of them on his desk, a black-and-white photograph in a small silver frame of his boys and him on a fishing trip in Montana. When he looked up, he was startled to see Jenny standing in the doorway.
“Hey,” she said. “You okay?”
“Not even close.”
She came around the desk and looked at the photo in his hand.
