Frozen Fire (41 page)

Marty shot Sam a murderous look but even without that Sam’s stomach would have still plummeted to somewhere around his kneecaps.

“Dr. Briscoe, the director of national intelligence will see you in her office. These officers will escort you.”

It took Sam a few seconds to process the fact that he wasn’t about to take a one-way ride on the Gitmo Express. “She’s goin’ to see us?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what I said. There’s a car waiting outside. Please go with these officers.”

“Thanks, man,” Sam said, grabbing his backpack off the floor and practically galloping to the door. He stuck his hand out to the cop. “No hard feelings.”

The cop looked at Sam’s hand, then at his face, and didn’t say a thing.

Dropping his hand to his side, Sam looked at Marty, who had joined him at the door. Without another word, they took the neon-orange adhesive-backed temporary security tags they were handed and stuck them onto their shirts, then left the room behind one of the military police officers. The other closed ranks behind them.

No one spoke as they climbed into a large SUV parked outside the rear entrance of the building with its roof-mounted blue lights flashing. The short trip through the streets and mostly empty parking lots of the base was quick. They entered a nondescript building, then were whisked through security and escorted into the elevator and to the top floor in near-complete silence.

No pissed-off girlfriend, no phalanx of university brass, no team of armed and annoyed military police officers could ever be as intimidating as the three people facing Sam when he walked into Director Lucy Denton’s office.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Briscoe, Dr. Martin. I’m Lucy Denton. This is Mr. Taylor, and this is Ms. Clark, secretary of national security for Taino,” the director said, not rising from her place behind her desk. “Please have a seat.”

Looking around, Sam had to admit that the office of the director of national intelligence was almost comfortable. The room’s color scheme was just a little too cool, the chair’s seat just a little too short, the tight, exhausted faces of the two women and dead-eyed gaze of the one man just a little too grim.

Lucy Denton smiled at Sam. She seemed almost friendly. He didn’t know much about her. In interviews and articles, her background was never discussed, just alluded to in vague terms. So Sam, like most members of the public, knew her only as Queen of the Spooks, with the face of an angel and, reputedly, the compassion of one of Hell’s coldest minions.

“Dr. Briscoe, Dr. Collins, let me thank you for making the trip to see
me. I apologize for the somewhat chilly reception you received initially, and I’m very glad that you persevered. Rest assured, there won’t be any charges filed.”

Still a little stunned, Sam nodded once to accept her thanks and apology, surprised not only that she had offered either, but that she’d done so with such cool grace. Between the situation in the Caribbean and his own audacity in barging up to Washington to bang on doors until someone listened to him, he was damn near shaking in his boots. Lucy Denton’s controlled calmness was downright eerie under the circumstances.

“You’re an atmospheric scientist, Dr. Briscoe?’”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re a geologist, Dr. Collins?”

“Sort of. I study the geochemistry of Eastern Caribbean trenches. It pulls in a lot of disciplines.”

She nodded. “And you’re both here because you are aware of the atmospheric anomaly we’re experiencing in the wake of the plane crash near Taino?”

What brand of bullshit is this?
Sam and Marty glanced at each other.

“With all due respect, Director Denton, that’s no anomaly and it’s not related to the crash. It’s a methane eruption,” Marty said, looking steadily at her. “That area of the seafloor sits on top of a huge bed of methane hydrate, and this morning’s seismic activity must have opened some sort of fissure that’s allowing the methane to escape.”

“What seismic activity?” she asked.

Sam thought Marty made an admirable attempt to keep the disgust off his face as he replied. “There were two seismic events in that exact region this morning. It appears that the first underwater event—I’m calling it an explosion—”

“Excuse me, but why would you call it an explosion?” Director Denton’s expression didn’t change, but from the corner of his eye, Sam caught Victoria Clark glance quickly at the third man in the room, Tom Taylor.

“Because that’s what it seems like to me. The signature of the event indicated that it definitely wasn’t an earthquake,” Marty said bluntly. “Neither was the second event, the one that opened up the fissure. The first event happened in an area where there are a lot of underwater cliffs. It most likely triggered a small landslide. The second event could have been another explosion, or part of the wall collapsing spontaneously. With all the activity that was already under way, it’s hard to tell. But the combined effect would
have caused a change in subterranean pressures, which could destabilize parts of the ocean floor, opening a fissure or widening a shallow one that already existed.”

“Doesn’t that happen all the time with submarine earthquakes?” Director Denton asked.

Marty shifted in his chair. “Not like this. Not into a methane bed. See, a sudden opening into a methane hydrate bed would allow seawater to mingle with the crystals and change them to a gaseous state
in situ
. At those depths, gas would be expelled as if it were under high pressure—because it is.” He fumbled and caught himself. “Under extremely high pressure, I mean. The water would continue to fill the void left in the cavity.” He stopped and shrugged.

“Then what?” Tom Taylor asked.

“I’m not sure,” Marty replied after a minute. “The thing is, there are a whole bunch of things going on down there right now that no one has seen before. We can only go on conjecture and hypothesis. I think this activity is putting stress on otherwise relatively stable fault lines, as well as on features we call ‘pockmarks,’ which are essentially partial tunnels into the clathrate beds.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds, then Sam looked at Marty. “In English this time.”

Marty gave him a tight smile and turned back to face Lucy Denton. “Okay, in plain words, I think the second event happened because an existing fault gave way. Considering that the Caribbean is a highly seismic area with several tectonic plates rubbing against each other, especially right there, it’s something that could be repeated. And that could be a problem.”

“So what you’re saying is that more of these events could happen, which could open more of these fissures and release more methane into the ocean and atmosphere?” Lucy Denton asked.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

Hardly aware he was holding his breath, Sam looked at the three officials in the room, one from Taino and two from the U.S., waiting for a reaction that, after a minute, he realized wasn’t going to happen.

What the hell is wrong with you people?

“Director Denton,” Sam said earnestly, “the size and volume of the methane-hydrate beds down there haven’t been fully determined. All we know is that a serious amount of methane is entering the atmosphere right
now. If a pockmark collapses, we’ll have more. This is serious trouble, y’all.
Serious
trouble. Like on a planetary scale.”

“Feel free to elaborate on that, Dr. Briscoe,” Tom Taylor said dryly.

“Well, thank you, I will.” Sam stood up and paced to the nearest wall, then turned abruptly and jammed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “Okay. Here’s something to feed the number crunchers: The earth’s atmosphere contains approximately three gigatons of methane. That’s three
billion
metric tons. Nine zeroes. Big number. But it’s still only considered a trace element. That three gigatons translates to about seventeen hundred parts per billion. Breathing that in the standard mixture of everything else in the atmosphere isn’t a problem. Problems happen when that number rises too high. For instance, sediment cores dating back to about fifty-five million years ago indicate an event in which a few
thousand
G-tons of methane were released into the atmosphere and the ocean in a relatively short time frame. The event is called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum because it warmed up the oceans by about five degrees Celsius at intermediate depths.”

He looked at them to determine if they were following him, then caught himself.

They’re not college freshman. They have a stake in this
.

Taking a quick breath, he continued. “The best guess is that the release took roughly one thousand years. I know. That sounds like a long time. But the effect of atmospheric methane fluctuations gets more interesting when you look at something called the Permian Mass Extinction, which happened about 250 million years ago, when only some of the very earliest dinosaur-type critters were draggin’ their tails through the swamps.” He stopped and shrugged.

“To save you a lot of technospeak, I’ll describe the event by sayin’ that the oceans burped, so to speak, on a huge scale. There’s a pretty damned tootin’ high level of confidence that that burp—which was a
rapid
increase in the level of atmospheric methane—is what killed off about ninety-five percent of the marine species that existed at the time and about seventy percent of the land species, and it happened pretty damned tootin’ fast. Marty here can provide more information on this, but some scientists have speculated that what caused that ‘burp’ was a clathrate ‘melt’: an enormous release of undersea methane hydrate, which is
exactly
what we’ve got goin’ on down near Taino. And when I say enormous, I’m talkin’ to the tune of maybe
ten thousand
gigatons. That’s thirteen zeroes, in case you’re interested. To put that in
perspective, the atmospheric level of methane sittin’ on top of Taino right now is
170,000 parts
per billion—one hundred times what it should be. Now, yes, that’s gonna diffuse, eventually, but that’s still a hell of a lot of methane. Pardon the language. If that fissure keeps spewin’ the way it is, we’re in for a real mess of trouble.”

He had been gratified to hear the woman from Taino, Victoria Clark, give a little gasp of shock when he mentioned the numbers. Director Denton, however, just blinked, and Tom Taylor glanced at his watch.

“If you don’t mind, could you define ‘pretty damned tootin’ fast’?” Taylor asked.

Sam glared at him for a minute as politely as he could, then let out a frustrated breath. Marty began talking before Sam could get a word out.

“Mr. Taylor, what Sam and I are talking about here is considered fast in geologic time, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is that during both events nearly all terrestrial and marine life on earth was killed very rapidly, in real time. Especially near the coastlines. And the reason they died is because oxygen-dependent creatures
can’t breathe methane
.” Marty paused. “We can’t say for sure exactly how fast the gas was released during the Permian event, but it was fast. Bubbles don’t linger, they rise and burst. The release was massive and sudden, and so were the results.”

“Okay, I’ve got a better analogy than an ocean burp,” Sam said. “Different gas but the same result. Do y’all remember hearing about a real nasty event in Africa about a decade ago, at Lake Nyos in Cameroon? No? Well, a whole village, about eigh teen hundred people and all their animals, got wiped out overnight by a massive carbon dioxide release from the bottom of a volcanic lake. A 350-foot-tall fountain of carbon dioxide and water erupted in the middle of the lake, creating a wave that surged seventy-five feet up the shores. The cloud killed things in a radius of fifteen miles. The eruption in Cameroon lasted for a few hours, but its effect was immediate. Everything in the village was alive at sunset and dead by morning, okay? Could have killed them all in ten minutes, could have taken an hour or two, but they all died.”

Sam tossed up his hands and stalked away from the desk and their carefully bland faces. “Think about it. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the wind currents were different; so were the ocean currents. Everything was different then. The continents weren’t where they are now and there was only one anyway. Didn’t matter.” He stopped pacing and threw his arms open wide, his voice rising. “The methane stuck around in the atmosphere,
migrated around the entire planet pretty damned quickly, displacin’ the oxygen as it moved, and things began dyin’ off. It took a little while but pretty soon plants, critters, anything that needed oxygen was turnin’ back to pure carbon.”

He crossed the room again and, placing his hands on Lucy Denton’s desk, leaned onto them and nearly into her face. To her credit she didn’t flinch. She didn’t even blink.

“Ma’am, what Marty and I are tellin’ you is that
methane doesn’t just go away
.” He straightened up and took a deep breath.

At last, Victoria Clark spoke up. “It has to diffuse as it mixes with the air, though. Doesn’t it? The concentration—”

Sam nodded, cutting her off. “Sure, Ms. Clark, it will diffuse if there isn’t much of it. But there’s a lot of it comin’ out of your waters right now. The long-term effects are going to be nasty, but the short-term effects are downright scary as hell.” He paused. “They’re linked. The long-term and short-term effects are linked. There’s something called the ‘Clathrate Gun Hypothesis,’ which someone came up with after studying that Permian event I just told you about. The theory is that if a methane-hydrate release achieves a critical mass, it could create an uncontrollable feedback loop; the warming atmosphere will cause the oceans to warm, which will cause more methane to be released. Okay, the loop is a hypothesis, but what methane will do to the temperature of the atmosphere is a
fact
. Methane lingers in the atmosphere
as methane
for about eight years, and it’s about twenty times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is. And after those eight years, it oxidizes to
become
carbon dioxide, and that remains in the atmosphere for about a century.”

He paused and stared straight at Victoria Clark. “That means the effect of the releases that are happenin’
right now
off your little island will be with us forever. So not only will what’s bubblin’ up out of the ocean kill a lot of things that try to breathe while they’re caught in that plume blowin’ off your island, Ms. Clark, but all that methane is goin’ to hang around for years, as obvious as a horse turd in the milk pitcher.” He caught himself and grimaced. “Beg pardon, again. But my point is, what’s happenin’ is goin’ to kill a lot of people in the path of that plume right quick, and make life damned miserable for the rest of us for a long time.”