Rain of Fire (3 page)

With an ostentatious look at her watch, she spun, “I was planning to cancel my afternoon seminar, but with you doing so much better, I think I’ll go ahead and teach.”

Stanton mumbled something she had to bend closer to hear.

“You and Hollis …” A bit of spittle escaped his mouth. “Now, no referee …”

How quickly he defined the animosity beneath the surface of every encounter she had with fellow scientist Hollis … or Dr. Delbert, as he insisted, though almost everyone he worked with had a Ph.D. The slight blond scientist peered at the world through wire-framed spectacles and pitched himself at the Institute as everybody’s friend … except Kyle’s. Although he was in his late thirties, he spoke in a breathless rush that people other than she interpreted as boyish enthusiasm.

“You’ll be back and keep us from each other’s throats,” she assured.

Stanton gave a strained bark. “Not by Monday.”

“Oh, God.” In this morning’s wake, she’d forgotten there were only six days to their funding meeting.

He gripped her hand. “Hollis came to me recently … asked me to make him … head of Institute … when I retire.”

Her heart began a rapid pattering like she’d just searched her purse and found her wallet missing. If Hollis were in charge, she had an idea what would happen to her Yellowstone funding.

“Watch your back,” Stanton warned. “Tell Hollis I said … you’re to chair the meeting.”

On the drive to the Institute, Kyle still couldn’t believe Stanton had been struck down. From his unfailing energy, she had assumed he would work well into his seventies.

That didn’t mean everyone else at the Institute was brain dead. Back in the nineties, when Stanton asked her to leave government bureaucracy and teach, she’d been re-reminded that academic funding was more about ass-kissing than science. It was especially difficult dealing with Hollis, who had joined the Institute two years ago from UCLA and seemed to think his prior credentials made him an instant shark in the Utah fishbowl.

This morning’s crisis having shattered her habitual control, she strode into the geology building and found Hollis in the seismograph lab before a computer terminal. The small-framed scientist turned toward the sound of her footsteps and hit a key that brought up his screen saver. A laughing Golden Retriever who looked a lot like Max filled the screen.

Kyle tried telling herself that if Hollis liked Goldens, he couldn’t be all bad.

“I’ve just come from Stanton,” she said coldly. “He’s in bad shape, but was able to talk about Monday’s meeting.”

Though Hollis pushed back his chair and stood, she was able to look down on his head with its bad comb-over. Sparse blond stubble on his jaw suggested he might be growing a beard, but his thin moustache bespoke a difficult time ahead.

Taking off his wire frame glasses, Hollis rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What did Stanton tell you?”

“He told me about your going behind my back asking him to make you Director. And he said for me to take charge at the meeting Monday.”

Hollis’s complexion took on a splotchy flush. “I’ll never be part of your inside track with Stanton …” His breath started to come fast. “All you have to watch is Yellowstone while I take care of the Wasatch where millions of people live. On Monday, I’m making a pitch for more support.”

Kyle slammed her hand on the top of the nearest monitor. “You know millions of dollars were spent in Salt Lake setting up a real-time seismic network for the 2002 Winter Olympics.” If the Wasatch Fault let go, reports from a network of sensors would arrive within seconds to guide rescue workers toward the worst damage.

“You’ve got all the resources you need, Hollis.” She ignored his penchant for being addressed as ‘Doctor.’ Figuring a good offense would be her strongest defense, “I’m going to propose a number of new recording sites in Yellowstone.”

“The Park Service needs to put their own people and money on it.”

“That’s for the Consortium to decide,” she bit out. “As long as I can make my case on Monday, I think they’ll agree inadequate resources are allocated to Yellowstone. You know perfectly well another eruption the size of the ones the park has seen in the past few million years would cause the equivalent of nuclear winter.”

How many times had she lectured along these same lines without her pulse rate going ballistic? How often had she fielded questions from students and the press without feeling the sense of foreboding she did today? She glanced again at the map showing the ‘Ring of Fire’ and hoped the Sakhalin shake hadn’t spawned others.

Turning back to Hollis, she went on, “Millions would die when crops failed around the world.” She’d parroted those words before too, but today she imagined a hungry little girl watching snow fall from a leaden summer sky.

“What’s got into you?” Hollis replaced his glasses and glared at her. “Stop being dramatic.”

He squared narrow shoulders and marched away down the aisle between computer terminals. The oscilloscope hooked to a portable seismograph on the table showed a small excursion, a dutiful record of him slamming the door.

At 4
PM
Kyle finished teaching her Earthquake Risk seminar and headed for her office. Passing Hollis’s door, she heard him on the phone, “… talking about ridiculous things like nuclear winter …”

Her face went hot. Torn between eavesdropping further and walking away, she decided on neither. Instead, she stepped to his door and leaned against it, her arms folded across her chest. She cocked one of her brows in an expression of disdain.

Hollis flushed. “I’ll have to phone you back.” He fumbled the receiver and almost dropped it.

“To whom were you talking about me?”

He shook his head.

“More behind the back stuff?” She pointed her slender index finger at Hollis. “Whoever it was, you know what I said was not the least ridiculous. Even the park rangers tell the tourists about the possibilities.”

She went on down the hall, trying to believe her sense of impending disaster stemmed from Stanton’s collapse.

“Any calls?” she asked Xi Hong, as she passed his open door next to hers. She and the Chinese postdoctoral researcher shared a phone line in a triumph of bureaucratic false economy.

Xi shook his head. All the while, he maintained a squint at vertical rows of characters on his computer monitor. In one of his trademark moments, Hollis had suggested Xi was a spy for Mainland China.

As she started to go into her office, Xi roused. “There is a note here from the department secretary.” He passed it to her with a grave look. “Leila says the CT scan shows area of damage in Stanton’s brain from stroke.”

Kyle took the message and scanned it, but there was no more than he had said.

She went into her small cluttered space and sank into the swivel chair. Raising her long legs, she propped feet clad in slim black flats on the desk, crossed her ankles, and leaned back. In the familiar, rewarding hubbub of teaching, she had managed to set aside thoughts of Stanton’s misfortune, but now, with her eyes stinging, she crumpled the note and threw it at the wall.

Why him? And why
now
for his good fortune to run out?

On her office credenza rested what Kyle liked to think of as her lucky piece, a colorful chunk of the bright green copper mineral malachite. When she was growing up under the watchful eye of her grandmother near the great open pits of Globe, Arizona, Franny’s second husband, Zeke, worked in the mines. He had learned early on that bringing a sample of deep-blue azurite or soft, turquoise-hued chrysocolla from the tailings piles outside the mine brought delight to Kyle’s young eyes. By the time she was in junior high, her rock collection outstripped his capacity to identify samples. The malachite was the first specimen Zeke had given her; the mass of emerald hue striped with deeper green was worn smooth from touching.

As she worried the stone with her thumb, her thoughts returned to Stanton and the people who needed to know what had happened to him. Though the thought of telling others made her feel hollow, and served to make his collapse all too real, she lifted the phone.

For the next hour, she tried to swallow her sorrow and placed calls all over the world: California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Bolivia, Japan, and the Philippines. She spoke in a controlled voice to Consortium members at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington State, researchers at a number of universities, and some of Stanton’s contacts in foreign governments.

In the home stretch, she realized she had saved the hardest task for last, that of informing former Utah student Wyatt Ellison, now a Yellowstone Ranger. Perhaps because he was older than most graduates, fortysomething Wyatt was a friend to both her and Stanton.

Imagining the crestfallen look on Wyatt’s lean and craggy face, she tried his office in the Resource Center near Park Headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs. As it was after five, she also tried his park housing. Getting no answer and nothing on his cell phone, she decided not to break the news by email.

As she replaced the phone, Kyle picked up her lucky malachite again. Turning it in her hands, she figured Stanton needed it more than she did.

R
anger Wyatt Ellison crawled through golden reeds along Yellowstone’s Lamar River. Though the ground was cold in the northern range, he didn’t mind. Time spent in the field was always good, especially on a fall day when the summer tourists had retreated from the park like a receding tide. It didn’t even matter that a heavy-looking gray cloud sailed toward the valley, trailing a gauzy scarf of precipitation.

From his position in the river bottom, Wyatt could see mountains rising on both sides. To the southwest was the long shoulder of Specimen Ridge, crowned by Amethyst Mountain. On the slopes was a fossil forest of upright stone trees.

Though Wyatt had come late to the study of the earth, he liked to say he got there as fast as he could, arriving in the park a year ago at age forty-four to become their oldest rookie geologist. Today’s excursion wasn’t about rocks, though.

Ahead of him in an abandoned chute of the Lamar, Alicia Alvarez with the Wolf Advocates wriggled through scrubby vegetation. He appreciated the way her parka rode up over rounded hips, revealing designer jeans streaked with dirt. Following her lead, Wyatt crawled up a gravel bank and peered over the river-rounded cobbles.

There they were, five darker specks contrasting with golden autumn grass. The Specimen Ridge Pack trotted across the sage-dotted slope below the treed ridge where they’d denned last spring. Though Wyatt had watched them before from up by the highway at Yellowstone Institute’s Buffalo Ranch, Alicia’s association with the non-profit organization allowed her to work in closer. Her father, a South Texas banker and cattleman, made regular contributions to the wolf’s cause.

In 1923, rangers had deliberately destroyed the last known den in Yellowstone, to leave the park without its most significant predator. Without a mechanism to take out the weak and sick, the winterkills became cruel. Fortunately, because of the hard work of people like Alicia, the 1995 re-introduction of wolves had begun to change the balance.

Beside Wyatt on the bank, the transplanted Texan’s chocolate eyes looked out forthrightly from a bronzed face framed with midnight hair. Her wide, generous mouth wore a smile as she pointed a manicured finger. “See the alpha male,” she whispered.

The largest member of the pack, with a coat so dark he looked black, held his tail high. The other wolves indicated subordinate status by adopting a slouching posture.

While Alicia set up her Bausch & Lomb spotting scope on a tripod, Wyatt reckoned the cost of her optics at more than he brought home in two weeks. Next, she reached for the Nikon slung over her back and uncapped her 1000-mm lens. Wyatt moved to man the scope, adjusting the focus for his nearsighted eyes.

Once the image sharpened, his first impression was of the alpha male’s smoky ruff. Such a coat this early in the fall might mean they were in for a tough winter. A scattering of snow already spotted the talus beneath the cliffs on Specimen Ridge and pale hoarfrost coated the trees below.