part of it. A geode of some sort. After photographing it and recording its exact position, they finished their dive, and later on that day reported the find to their employer.
Now, they had returned to the site of their discovery. They had been underwater for nearly an hour, carefully working a custom-made net around the sphere and fastening the net itself to a hook suspended from the end of a large crane mounted in the center of the barge’s deck. The basket net, designed specifically for this purpose, resembled the macramé seines that generations of Japanese fishermen had once secured around glass floats, but it was woven from a plastic fiber stronger even than steel.
Having secured their net, and satisfied that the heavy mesh would not slip, the woman activated a signaling device fastened to her weight belt.
On the tug, the crew set to work to lift the geode from the ocean floor.
One of the men, catching a whiff of sulfur in the air, wrinkled his nose, then decided it was nothing more than the noxious odor the tug’s bank of batteries sometimes threw off.
As they concentrated on operating the crane, none of the crew noticed the smoke that was starting to drift through the first tiny rifts in the face of the cliff two hundred yards away.
A hundred feet down, the two divers backed thirty feet away from the geode, then turned to watch as the cable from the crane tightened. For a breath-held moment nothing moved. Then the geode—nearly three feet across—abruptly came free from the lava, shooting upward a few yards before dropping instantly back almost to the bottom, like a yo-yo on a string. A momentary pause. Then it began a slow, steady vertical journey toward the surface, while the two divers made their way back to the place where it had lain.
The crane was just swinging the geode onto the deck of the barge when the face of the cliff gave way. As a gout of brilliant yellow lava spewed out, exploding into millions of fragments when it hit the surface of the sea a split second later, the crane operator screamed a warning. Within seconds the hawsers had been cut, the anchors and their chains abandoned, and the tug was running directly out to sea.
The water, dead calm only a few seconds before, churned around the tug, reacting to the explosive force of the fast-growing gush of lava now pouring forth from the crumbling face of the cliff.
“What about the divers?” someone yelled.
But even as he spoke, the terrified crewman knew the answer to his question.
The divers were just peering into the depression in which the geode had rested when they felt the first subsonic vibration. In the instant that surprise became panic and they reached for their belts to release their weights and make an emergency ascent, it was already far too late.
A rift suddenly opened in the ocean floor, and as the boiling magma burst into the sea, the water itself seemed to explode into a hellfire cauldron of sulfuric acid, boiling water, and steam. A fusillade of shrapnel-size fragments of volcanic glass shot in every direction. An instant after the divers had been killed by the steam, acid, and boiling seawater, their bodies were shredded by the silicate fragments, which tore through them like millions of white-hot scalpels.
Within seconds, nothing was left of them.
A mile out to sea, the crew of the tug gazed in awe at the spectacle behind them.
The shoreline had disappeared, lost in a dense fog of steam mixed with poisonous gases and volcanic ash that hung like a curtain where only a few minutes ago the face of the cliff had been. The sea, whipped by a building wind, was heaving, and overhead dark clouds gathered as if the forces that had unleashed the fury of the mountain now had summoned a storm.
Using binoculars, the crew scanned the water for any sign of the two divers, but even as they searched, they knew they were bound to fail. They had barely escaped with their own lives. As the storm built and the seas became great, heaving swells, the captain of the tug turned back toward Hilo and the safety of the harbor.
On the barge, three men secured the geode to the deck, silently wondering if it had been worth the lives it had cost to collect it.
PROLOGUE
LOS ANGELES
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Everything was supposed to be getting better, not worse.