The War of Immensities (2 page)

The full array
of sensing equipment had been installed years ago—seismometers to
measure the shaking of the earth; geodometers to check for ground
swelling; tilt meters; stream gauges to record water temperature,
pH level and concentration of suspended minerals in the nearby
waterways; gas sensors to search out changes in escaping hydrogen,
CO2 and SO2 that might signal movement of magma below the
surface.

Ruapehu had
erupted briefly in 1995, Ngauruhoe not since 1975 when most of this
equipment had been installed and Jami dreamed of being the one who
was right there when the first minimal deviations began to occur in
the instruments, to be the one to make the calculations that would
confirm the oncoming eruption and—more deeply immersed in the same
fantasy—be the one to make the predictions concerning what was
about to happen.

It would be
dark soon and she had a long drive back. She was wearily wandering
from console to console, gathering paper, switching check-switches,
when suddenly everything switched off. Or seemed to...

Nausea gripped
her stomach as her head cleared from what seemed to be a moment of
unconsciousness and she was sweating and shaking all over. In the
room, for that vital second, everything remained quiet. She stood
in utter disbelief—the moment had passed and it was as if it had
never happened—and then suddenly the instruments went completely
berserk.

Jami stared.
There wasn’t any measurement of anything going on, just meters
waving needles madly, digital numerals flickering incoherently and
the chatter of the printers rushing to a crescendo. It was as if
the whole system went crazy for a moment, rather than registering
anything in particular.

She was a
short, slim girl of twenty-eight with the honey-coloured skin and
jet black hair that typified the Delhi region. She had initially
escaped village life and the dead city of Agra with its hordes of
beggars, one of which she might have been had she not won that
scholarship that got her to school in New Delhi. Then she won the
Jarayan Prize to university in America. She chose Geology because
she had never seen a mountain, much less an interesting rock. The
terrain of her childhood had been utterly flat and made entirely of
dust. And people... far too many people. Geology offered the
promise of eternal solitude.

Ten years
later, it seemed that she had used up all her good luck in that
initial burst. The solitude she found was not the type she wanted,
and she was weary of rocks and mountains too. Nothing ever
happened. Not when she was around. She had begun to believe that
nothing ever would.

So she stared,
unable to grasp the fact that she was right there, at the right
time. It became even more unbelievable when everything returned to
normal one second later. Like it had never happened, like an
aberration, like maybe she was fantasizing. The consoles hummed on,
almost apologetically.

Her slow
reaction, her bewilderment, prevented her from taking the obvious
step. The machines were meant to achieve their purpose without
human intervention and did so. She was irrelevant. The obvious
reaction occurred to her slower than it would have to a person who
was not a trained researcher. Instead of continuing to try and make
sense of readings that did not make sense, what she needed to do
was go to the window and have a bloody look.

And she turned
and ran through to the next room where a wide window faced toward
the three peaks. What she saw took her breath away. An enormous
black smoke plume was hurling itself thousands of feet into the sky
from Ruapehu right above her. Similar palls were launched from the
two smaller mountains beyond. It was really happening!

Already the
ground ash cloud was sweeping toward her at terrific speed. One
second after she witnessed the vision she had always dreamed of, it
was gone. The dust and ash hit the window explosively, splattering
night into the middle of the day. The impact caused the wall to
abruptly tilt at the ceiling level, and the whole room, befogged
with dust, seemed to move several feet to the South.

The building
started to shake. A roar rose in her ears until it caused her such
pain that she was forced to clamp her hands over them.

Jami staggered
back toward a corner and huddled in it. Death, she knew, would have
already occurred or it would not. She was still alive and therefore
safe, but that knowledge did not make it any less terrifying.

She was a
shivering bundle in the corner, trapped in a death-like night of
thunder and lightning and heat, and yet her mind was still working.
The lights began to flicker as the emergency power kicked in and
the fluorescence drew her out of her state of shock. She shook her
head, striving to overcome her fear, but frowning too, and
beginning to think again.

Her glimpse of
the eruption was only momentary but its impression was deeply
burned into her memory. The hail of rocks on the roof began to rise
toward a crescendo. It seemed that at any minute the structure
might collapse but the building was reinforced and could stand up
to this and a lot more. She was safe and there were things to do.
Important things to do. She was on her feet and made her way
unsteadily back into the console room.

The instruments
hummed on as if nothing was happening when plainly everything was.
The printers had stopped. All the dials were reading normally.
Three volcanoes were in full eruption, one of them was massive and
less than two kilometres away and the most sophisticated monitoring
system in the world didn’t seem to know it. Ridiculous.

Jami forced her
way to the table and chair at the centre where a yellow telephone
reminded her of the next obvious step. She picked it up and was
automatically connected to a switchboard. Right now, she knew, the
alarms would be going off at the University, at the Bureau of
Meteorology, at the National Parks Emergency Service, police, fire
stations, hospitals, all around. The initial burst of activity in
the equipment would have done that but now they would be waiting
for some sort of confirmation, especially since everything had
apparently returned to normal. Power surge, they would be
thinking.

“Central
monitoring,” came the voice—a real human female voice, not a
tape.

“Ruapehu. She’s
blown,” Jami replied breathlessly.

“Which services
are you requiring?”

“All services,”
she said, trying to remember the right codes. “Level 5, Red
alert.”

“State your
name and location please.”

“Jami Shastri.
Whakapapa Monitoring Station. Number 3788810. Confirm. We have a
Level 5 Volcanic event going on here...”

The cloud had
already extended beyond the blown-down zone, beyond the monitoring
station, beyond the valley and the lake, beyond the mountain range
itself. A black snowfall, fiercely hot, centimetres deep, began to
pockmark the landscape. The debris that tumbled into the many
rivers and innumerable creeks that flowed from the Tongariro
National Park rushed downstream in all directions with ferocious
turbulence until it was blocked by the dams it formed itself.

From the three
craters on the plateau, a black pall of fiery rock, lava and ash
soared far into the sky. Casualties occurred up to ten kilometres
away although mostly due to peripheral accidents—cars running off
roads in the sudden black fog, people crushed by falling objects or
caught in the flooding as the mud surged down the mountain sides.
Within a kilometre, people, animals and trees simply vanished,
scorched out of existence. The fiery, hot ash blanketed the
terrain, suffocating everything, and with it a hail of boulders and
mud rained down upon the shocked world below the mountains.

In the nearby
town of National Park, the end of a sunny day suddenly turned
totally black, as the towering cloud, billowing and flat-topped,
deepened the gloom that spread across the land. Lightning burst
from the cloud continually as the ground was veiled in the fallout
from the pall. Its hurricane wave of scalding gases and fire-hot
debris travelled at 200 kilometres per hour as it swept down upon
Ohakune. The pillar plumed eastward into a widening dark cloud.

At Napier, 150
kilometres away to the east, a spectacular sunset was suddenly
obliterated by unrealistic blackness and with that unscheduled
night came a fog of choking ash. A third of the North Island of New
Zealand was brought to a complete stand-still by the ash fall. Days
later, the silt would reach the ocean via the rivers after causing
devastating floods, closing the waterways to deep-draft ships. The
cloud crossed the Pacific to South America in four days.

Within an hour,
the rescue teams were moving in—by road, by helicopter, on foot. Up
to a kilometre from the craters, the 1000 degree ash and the
atmospheric heat made the air unbreathable. On the first night they
could get no closer but there was more than enough for them to
handle at that distance. Dozens of people, injured by fallen
buildings or trees or crashed vehicles, were picked up and conveyed
to nearby hospitals. Dazed and injured people walked out of the fog
of ash into the hands of rescue teams. They knew that over fifty
people remained in the critical quadrant, most of whom would surely
be dead. Deaths already amounted to thirty on the periphery of the
blast area, and injuries over a hundred.

Jami Shastri
was found, dazed but unharmed, at the monitoring station two hours
after the eruption. She thrust a satchel containing the print-outs
and data disks into her rescuers’ arms, refused to leave, refused
medical assistance, and demanded her data be taken directly to
Auckland University where it could be analyzed. Her demand proved
impossible for the moment since Auckland was coincidentally
fogbound at the time and all traffic was being directed south. Soon
the white cold fog from the north collided with the black hot fog
sweeping up from the south and a black rain began to fall
constantly on the towns right around the Bay of Plenty to North
Cape.

In a deep coma
and suffering multiple broken bones, Kevin Wagner arrived at the
emergency medical centre being established in the town of Turangi
on neighbouring Lake Taupo, brought in five hours after the blast
by the men who rescued him from the surging river that had once
been a trickling stream. Theirs had been a terrifying journey
through a smoke-filled night on treacherous roads. The flood waters
from the rising river had forced them to divert and they found the
road broken by landslides and fallen trees. Along the way, they had
picked up four other casualties as they forced their way through a
chaotic and unfamiliar landscape.

Wagner’s
condition was critical but stable, and he was soon dispatched by
helicopter to Wellington which, lying south-west of the thermal
zone, escaped all of the worst effects of both the meteorological
white fog and the volcanic black one.

By morning, the
ash pall that veiled the ground from the air began to dissipate and
fall to earth. The rescue helicopters probed deeper into the zone,
searching for survivors. Beneath them now was a world that only
knew the colour grey. All along the plateau between the three
peaks, felled trees lay in sweeping rows like scattered straw,
stripped completely of their leaves and branches. The entire
plateau was a desert of grey mud.

Wayne Higgins
was flying a Hughes 500 four-seater helicopter that he used to
provide joy-flights for the tourists, but now the seats had been
dragged out. Air Rescue had allocated him a crewman, Jim Rogan, who
squatted in the doorway, the yellow helmet on his head his sole
protection from the downdraft, his visor failing to keep the dust
out of his eyes. As they swept around the steaming slopes of
Ruapehu, Rogan spotted the glimpse of colour far to the left.

“Over there.
Turn 60 degrees left,” he shouted into the intercom over the
constant crackle of interference.

The colour was
gold and green metal protruding from the broad pool of ash and as
soon as he saw it, Rogan guessed it was a helicopter. As the
chopper banked in toward it, Rogan could see it was a section of
fuselage, but there was no evidence of rotors or tail as he might
have expected. There was no other wreckage visible that he could
see, the rest was swamped in the grey layer of ash that had settled
upon the snow.

“It looks
soft,” he said to Wiggins. “Better not land.”

It had snowed
the night before, and the effect of the layer of hot grey ash on
top of the powder snow was likely to cause all manner of strange
effects. Officially, there had been eleven centimetres of snow and
about five centimetres of ash, but in a drift ravine like this,
there was no telling how deep either might be. The effect of heat
on cold might have melted the surface briefly then refrozen it as
ice creating an illusion of firm footing when in fact you could
slip ten metres below the surface and be lost.

Rogan hooked
himself to the winch cable as Wiggins brought them in to a point
where he hovered without quite touching the ground. The rotors set
off a blizzard of black snow, blotting out all visibility. Into the
midst of it, Rogan stepped out onto the landing strut and then
jumped blind.

His landing was
unreasonably soft, as if jumping into a bed of feathers. He righted
himself but still couldn’t see anything—had no idea which direction
the wreckage lay.

“Okay, take it
up slow, Wayne.”

He waited while
the chopper moved away; carefully ensuring that he had plenty of
slack on the cable. The ash was heavier than most dust or snow and
settled immediately the wind was off it.

Rogan, wading
almost knee deep in the ash, plunged toward the wreckage
unsteadily, the cable dragging behind him like a long tail. It was
a section of the side of the fuselage that he could see—beyond he
could make out a furrow where the wreck had slid almost a hundred
metres downhill since impact. The rest of the helicopter might be
anywhere. Rogan pushed his way forward, shovelling ash with his
hand, in the direction in which the fuselage seemed to widen, and
where he hoped he might find a door.