Scimitar SL-2 (2004) Page 14

  Less than a minute later, there was a breakthrough. Missile Three came screaming in with sufficient force to knock down three skyscrapers. More burning magma came searing up through the underground channels—not yet a blast but close. The lava began to spill into the crater; steam and fire burst into the foggy skies.

  And then came Missile Four, arrowing straight down into the molten lava and exploding instantly, with the same force as the others, the same place, the same effect. The metal casing melted, but the warhead’s TNT did its work. It blew the crevice wide open, releasing a zillion cubic feet of compressed gases. At 0706 on Sunday morning, August 9, 2009, Mount St. Helens erupted with savage force for the second time in less than thirty years.

  The explosion leveled thousands of Douglas fir trees within roughly a 12-mile half-circle to the north. The crater, which contained the unstable carbuncle, was already tilted that way, and when the eruption came, it exploded northwards, leaving the area behind it, to the south and west, more or less unharmed, except for a rainstorm of ash.

  Again, as in 1980, the massive pyroclastic flow of molten lava surged down the upper slopes of the mountain, creating a terrifying nine-foot-high white-hot river of molten rock from the very core of the earth. It seemed to move slowly, but it was making 40 mph as it crackled and growled its way into Spirit Lake, burning everything in its path, wiping out the lake’s vegetation, boiling the water, sending hot steam up into the fog.

  Of the campers on the north side of the lake and on the lower slopes of the mountain’s pine forest—mostly kids and college students—none had a chance. A handful of burnt dust buried deep in volcanic rock would be all that remained of the soldiers, in a cruel and sadistic war no one even knew was being fought.

  The fog had cleared now around the little towns of Glenoma, Morton, and Mossyrock up on Route 12 and 508, and the pinnacle of Mount St. Helens could just be seen jutting up through the summit’s mist, belching fire and spewing thousands of tons of rock and red-hot ash hundreds of feet into the air.

  It looked awesome, like many displays of nature too frightening to contemplate. But every man, woman, or child in those picturesque little Washington townships knew they were witnessing havoc, pitiless destruction, and heartbreaking loss of lives. Everyone who stood helplessly watching knew there would be many, many empty places at dinner tables tonight, all over the American Northwest.

  The lava rolled over a total of fifteen cars parked around the lake’s perimeter, and the burning hot deposits of avalanche debris cascaded into the north fork of the Toutle River, almost damming it in some places. It completely blocked Coldwater Creek. A vast area of lateral blast deposits, thousands of tons of ash, spread over a distance of 200 square miles, choking rivers, burying forest and remote farmhouses.

  The warm, sleepy Sunday morning of August 9 would be remembered forever throughout this lonely rural corner of the 42nd State, as Mount St. Helens, the towering snowcapped sentinel of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, suddenly, without warning, reared and destroyed the very land that gave it grace.

  On that Sunday morning, those who had not witnessed the shocking 1980 eruption saw the real nature of the mountain. And it had little to do with grandeur or with the great silent peak that had dominated this southern part of the Washington State mountains—the bastion of strength, Queen of the Cascades.

  This was the real St. Helens—a colossal 8,000-foot-high black, unstable pile of rotten volcanic rubble, spewing forth dark-gray burning ash, white-hot rock, black smoke, and lava, vomited up from the basement of Hell. And it was bent on burning everything it could reach.

  Within minutes of the first major eruption, right after Scimitar-4, the fires began. Great hunks of molten rock and dense showers of red-hot ash were landing in the pine forests. The dead tinder-dry needles on the forest floor practically exploded into flame, and the trees took only moments longer to ignite. The inflammable resin inside the needles, boughs, and trunks of the Douglas firs popped and crackled into a giant, highly audible bonfire. From a distance, the blaze sounded like the eerie murmur of a battlefield.

  Thousands of acres burned ferociously, spreading with terrifying swiftness before the west wind that billowed gently off the Pacific, dispersing the fog, fanning the flames. Every five minutes, there was another grim and furious roar from the summit, and another plume of fire and ash ripped into the powder-blue sky, and another obscene surge of magma rolled over the crater and on down the mountainside.

  By 0830, every household, every car full of tourists, every truckload of outdoor sportsmen inside a 25-mile radius knew that Mount St. Helens had erupted. The radio stations were cobbling together news bulletins based on almost nothing except the incontrovertible fact that the damn mountain just blew its goddamned head off. Again.

  Volcano experts from all over the area were being rounded up, electronically, and interviewed. All of them admitted to absolute bewilderment, and by 0900, radio and television newsrooms were desperate for information. The State Police had placed a ban on media helicopters, and it was impossible to get near the mountain.

  The “experts” who were permanently monitoring the volcano were impossible to find, and the university study groups, collecting data in the foothills below the crater, were dead. Most of the observation posts to the north of the mountain were devastated, the buildings on the high ridges reduced to burned-out hulks, the low ones swept away by the incinerating magma.

  Trees smashed by the blast leaned at ridiculous angles against the others that had withstood the explosion. These now formed enclosed, towering pyramids of volatile, combustible dry pine branches lit from within, as the fire raced across the dead needles on the forest floor.

  From above, they looked like scattered furnaces, burning to red-hot flash points and instantly setting fire to anything made of wood and resin within spitting distance.

  By lunchtime, the President had declared southwest Washington State a disaster zone and Federal help was on its way. The trouble with volcanoes, however, is that there are no half-measures, no wounded, no traumatized persons—and no witnesses. The fury of this type of assault on the planet is too formidable.

  If you’re near enough to cast light on the actual event from a close-up position, your chances of survival are close to zero. It was no different at the base of Mount St. Helens on that Sunday morning…except for one big four-wheel-drive-vehicle that had been parked all night on the northwest shore of Spirit Lake. This contained a selection of sporting rifles, fishing rods, and four sportsmen, three of them local—one from Virginia.

  The leader of the little expedition was Tony Tilton, a former attorney from Worcester, Massachusetts, currently President of the Seattle National Bank. Accompanying him was the legendary East Coast dealer of marine art Alan Granby, who had moved west with his wife, Janice, after a money-grabbing private corporation threatened to build a massive wind farm opposite their backyard on the shores of Nantucket Sound.

  The third member of the party was another East Coast native, the eminent broadcaster and political observer Don McKeag, who had finally abandoned his show on a local Cape Cod radio station for a huge network contract that required him to live and work out of Seattle—the “Voice of the Northwest.”

  The fourth serious sportsman in that accomplished little group was the big-game fisherman, duck hunter, and car racer Jim Mills from Middleburg, Virginia. They were on a weeklong hunting, shooting, and fishing trip, and they’d been camped by the lake all night, ready for an assault on the superb trout that made Spirit Lake their home.

  There was one prime difference between these four and the rest of the sportsmen scattered around the lake in the warm summer months. Tony Tilton and his wife, Martha, had been cruising in the eastern Caribbean when the Montserrat volcano exploded in 1997, burying two towns, wrecking the entire south side of the island, and showering everything within 40 miles with thick, choking volcanic ash. Tony Tilton had stood on the foredeck of his chartered yacht and watched the towering
inferno belch fire from the Soufriere Hills.

  Etched in Tony’s memory was the speed with which the mountain unleashed its wrath upon the island. He had seen the blast, watched the roaring plume of burning ash and smoke burst upwards, hundreds of feet into the sky. Almost simultaneously, he had seen the great glowing evil of the magma begin its fatal roll down three sides of the mountain. A trained attorney, he had the lawyer’s grasp of facts, and the banker’s eye for the minutiae. In Tony’s opinion you had approximately fourteen minutes to get the hell away from that mountain or perish.

  And now, twelve years later, on that early Sunday morning on the shores of Spirit Lake, Tony heard a strange and sudden wind, a wh-o-o-o-o-sssh through the dense foggy air above the water. Instinctively he had glanced up but seen nothing.

  Less than twelve seconds later, he heard a dull, muffled roar from way up on the mountain, but again he could see nothing up the slopes through the fog. He heard the wind again, and another shuddering distant thump from the summit of the mountain. It was louder this time, but perhaps only because Tony was already on high alert.

  That did it for the Seattle Bank President. He turned to Don McKeag and said sharply, “Get in the wagon, Donnie. And don’t speak. Just get in.” Then he yelled towards the tent “ALAN, JIMMY…. GET UP AND GET IN THE WAGON…RIGHT NOW…WE’RE IN BIG TROUBLE.”

  Alan Granby, a big man, but as light on his feet as the late, great Jackie Gleason, understood immediately. He and Jimmy had slept fully dressed and they both came scrambling out of their tents, alerted by the obvious tension in Tony Tilton’s voice.

  The engine of the wagon was already running, and they both jumped into the rear seats. Tony hit the gas pedal and they burned rubber on the warm shores of the lake, heading west, through the short forest trail that led to Route 504. The trail was straight and relatively smooth and the wagon was moving at almost 70 mph when they heard the third explosion right behind them, followed quickly by another.

  “What in the name of hell was that?” asked Don McKeag.

  “Nothing much,” said Tony. “Except I think Mount St. Helens just erupted.” By now they were on the country road, which would lead north up to the town of Glenoma and the much faster Route 25. And all around them were strange glowing lights falling into the trees like a meteor shower.

  But the brightness had gone out of the day. Alan Granby glanced at the sky. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say this was the start of a partial eclipse of the sun.”

  At that moment, they felt an earth-shuddering rumble beneath the wheels of the wagon, and a howling wind screamed through the forest, like a hurricane. Tony hammered the wagon up deserted Route 12, heading north and conscious of the burning debris beginning to litter the road.

  “Let’s hope I don’t get into reverse by mistake,” he muttered. “I got a feeling anyone left back there might not make it.”

  The miles whipped away beneath their wheels, and now the sky was darkening into a thick, high gunmetal-gray cloud above them. Yet through the rear window they could discern a terrible glow in the sky. In eleven minutes, they had put twelve miles between themselves and the lower slopes of Mount St. Helens. Up ahead it looked slightly brighter, and Don, ever the journalist, suggested they pull over after another couple of miles and take a look back at the mountain, and the fires, and the scorched earth they had somehow escaped.

  “Any of you guys fancy a short hunting-fishing trip next year to Indonesia?” asked Tony. “You know…a nice little base camp on the slopes of Krakatoa…I’m getting to be a real pro at volcano escape…”

  Three Hours Later.

  “Good morning, everyone, this is Don McKeag, reporting firsthand from the front line of our statewide catastrophe. During the sudden and devastating eruption of Mount St. Helens, I was in a hunting camp right in the foothills of the volcano as it was about to detonate.

  “I think I can say honestly, it is nothing short of a miracle that I am here talking to you this morning…because I was spared from certain death by the quick thinking of my friend Tony Tilton who somehow drove us to safety…through the fires and the volcanic ash…out in front of the molten lava…away from the cataclysmic explosion.

  “For my regular weekday morning program, you know I always take calls and discuss the politics of this great state…Today I’m changing the formula…I just want to sit here, catch my breath, and try to explain what it’s like, literally, to escape from the jaws of hell…. So far, we’re getting reports of perhaps a hundred of our fellow citizens who never made it…To their families I want to express my deepest, most profound sorrow and sympathy…I might very easily have been one of them….”

  As Donnie spoke in measured, yet inevitably dramatic, tones, every fireman in southwest Washington State was engaged in fighting the fires along the periphery of the central blaze. It was pointless to even think about entering the interior zone below the north face of the mountain or about running a fleet of ambulances into the inferno. There would be no injured.

  The only thing that could be done now was to try and stem the blazing forest, to stop it spreading outwards to wreak havoc and misery upon unsuspecting home owners. Soon they would have crop sprayers in the skies dumping hundreds of tons of water on the parts of the forests that remained intact. Others were out there, pumping and spraying great tracts of forest, trying to stop the searing heat from evaporating the water before the fires even arrived.

  By mid-Sunday afternoon, the disaster was big national news. CNN had pictures, as did Fox News and most of the networks. By Sunday evening, all of the twenty-four-hour news channels were struggling with the story. They were without any fresh information, new facts, or revelatory opinions. Yes, Mount St. Helens had made a titanic eruption early on Sunday morning. Yes, there was a lot of fire and fury, ash, molten rock, and lava. And yes, anyone trapped in the immediate vicinity of the mountain was most certainly dead. And yes, there were God knows how many forest fires raging all around the northern territories beyond the volcano. Eyewitnesses from close up: zero, except for Don McKeag and his three friends.

  Volcanoes traditionally do anything they damn well please, ruling out the possibilities of indignant editorials proclaiming in time-honored cliché, WHY THIS MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Or, DID THEY DIE IN VAIN? Or, WAS THIS AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN? Or even that cringe-making old favorite, HEADS MUST ROLL! Instead, the news and feature rooms turned, admittedly with a mixture of reluctance and relief, to the “experts,” many of whom had died on the mountain, but some who were ready to cast a light on an occurrence about which they had not the remotest clue.

  Yes, there had been steam and even some gases leaking from the crater on the summit in recent weeks. Yes, there had been signs of fire, ashes, and black smoke bursting into the atmosphere. And no, it would not have been a tremendous surprise if Mount St. Helens had erupted in the next five years. The giant carbuncle was indeed a significant factor.

  What baffled the professors was the sheer speed of the eruption, so sudden, so unexpected, so utterly without warning. This was a new concept for volcanologists all over the world. No angry early blasts, no torrents of high sparks and sinister rumbles, not even the sight of molten lava creeping out over the rim of the crater. Nothing. This was the Whispering Death of Mount St. Helens. Unseen. Unsuspected. Unannounced.

  CNN rustled up a young volcanologist from the University of California in Santa Cruz. He had never even seen Mount St. Helens, and had not been born when it erupted in 1980. His father was not born when Lassen Peak, the only other comparable volcanic eruption in the U.S., let fly in 1914. But the recently qualified Simon Lyons from Orange County spoke with the unwavering authority of those sufficiently youthful still to have the answers to everything.

  “Any halfway decent student of geohazardous situations must have known this volcano could have erupted at any time,” he said. “That carbuncle was growing at a very fast rate, maybe a half-mile across in the last two years. That’s the sign we’re all look
ing for. That’s the sign of the encroaching magma, surging up from the core of the earth. You see a carbuncle being force-fed with lava from below, right there, you’re looking at a volcano fixing to blow.”

  “Then you blame those study groups based on mountain, supposedly monitoring it for the benefit of us all…using Federal funds?”

  “Yes, sir. I most certainly do. Incompetence. Ignorance of the value of the data. Ought to be anathema to a real scientist.”

  Professor Charles Delmar, of the University of Colorado, was older, more experienced, and more circumspect. Fox News got ahold of him, and he was the first to admit he could throw little light on the eruption.

  He said the photographs he had been shown suggested the Sunday morning blowout on the summit of the mountain had been aimed to the north, which suggested the carbuncle itself had given way to the pressure of the magma below. Professor Delmar found that “most unusual” simply because there were no other reported symptoms of eruptions from that precise location. There had been evidence of steam gouts and some smoke, but that was reportedly emanating from the mountain peak, not from cracks in the carbuncle, which would have been an indication of pressure underneath the dome of lava rock.