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CHAPTER 69
Above Mauna Loa, Hawai‘i
Monday, April 28, 2025
Leah Cutler screamed as fluorescent orange streaks shot up out of the summit and rocks hit the state-of-the-art helicopter like artillery fire. Although the chopper had been built with war in mind, no one inside could tell how much damage was being done.
“What’s happening?” Brett yelled.
“Incoming!” Jake Rogers yelled from the cockpit. “Lava bombs!”
They were flying through the darkness created by the ash and smoke from the volcano; the sun had risen, but the only light around them came from the streaks of orange and red that occasionally flashed up from the mountain.
“Lava must have reached the water table!” Oliver said. “When the lava is rising, rocks break off and plug vents. Water starts toboil, and the pressure builds.” Oliver stared at the scene below, trying not to show the fear he was feeling. Oliver was as scared as his wife was; he just wasn’t screaming. “The result is what we’re experiencing!” Oliver added, still yelling to make himself heard over the engine and the storm.
“Not the Big One?” Brett said.
“Big enough,” Oliver Cutler said.
Jake Rogers said, “I gotta take us up.”
“Not yet!”Brett said. “These pictures are unbelievable. Keep shooting,” Brett said to the Cutlers’ cameraman, Morgan, who was lying on his belly, a harness strapped firmly to his leg, leaning out the open door even as rocks kept flying around the helicopter, occasionally crashing into it. It was as much a rock fight as a firefight.
Morgan had told the Cutlers once that his specialty was doing crazy shit, and that’s what he was doing now. He was nearly halfway out the door. “My pleasure!” Morgan shouted, his camera focused on the incredible scene below them.
Jake Rogers was a career daredevil himself. It was why he’d nearly died up here with that wimp cameraman from CBS. Now he was frantically trying to get the helicopter under control and out of the special effects all around them.
They think this is a movie,Rogers thought.
He was almost directly over Mauna Loa, knowing he was too low, when the explosion occurred.
The helicopter dropped suddenly and violently, losing altitude when Rogers knew he needed to be gaining it, despite what that crazy bastard Brett said.
It was as if the Airbus H225M had a mind of its own.
Rogers was a veteran pilot and knew that when the battle was man versus machine, the machine almost always won.
“This isn’t just a lava storm!” Rogers shouted over the noise of the blades and the big engine. “There’s ash all around us, forfuck’s sake! I gotta get out of here before it damages the rotors and this thing drops like one of these rocks.”
“Are you kidding?” Morgan yelled and kept shooting. “This view is freaking awesome.”
The Airbus lurched and dipped again, more violently than before.
“Oliver!” Leah Cutler screamed. “We need to get out of here.Now!”
But she could see the same wild-eyed excitement on her husband’s face that she saw on J. P. Brett’s. And she understood with great clarity why they were really here. It wasn’t a sense of honor or duty that had brought them to Hawai‘i. Despite the clear and present danger all around them, Brett and Oliver were here for this crazy roller-coaster ride through the sky, even though it felt to Leah like the planet was exploding around her. Before, no matter where on the globe they’d been, she had seen storms like this, explosions of color, only from a distance.
But now she was in the picture, and she was afraid they were going to die.
The Italians next to her were speaking to each other in their own language, looking as frightened as Leah Cutler, leaning back as far as they could and trying to tighten their seat belts.
The Airbus dipped another few hundred feet. Above the holler of the engine, Leah Cutler heard the pilot cursing. The scientist named Sparma murmured,“Gesù, Maria, e Giuseppe.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Somehow Morgan leaned out a little farther.
“You feel that?” Morgan shouted, pointing down at the scene below them.
