Shock Wave(195)

Haste was vital. The only reason the guards had not fired on the helicopter or yacht was because they were afraid to damage Dorsett property. Now the guards were only a hundred meters away and closing in.

Giordino was so engrossed in keeping his eyes on their pursuers and his mind on what was delaying his friends that he failed to notice the sound of dogs barking from all parts of the island or the sudden flight of birds ascending and flying in confused circles in the sky. Nor did he sense an odd humming sound or feel the quivering on land and see the sudden agitation of the lagoon's waters as the sound waves of staggering intensity, driven by an immense velocity, slammed into the subterranean rock of Gladiator Island.

Only when he was within a few steps of the door to the main salon did he glance over his shoulder at the guards. They were standing transfixed on the dock whose planking was curling like waves across a sea. They had forgotten their quarry and were pointing to a small cloud of gray smoke that had begun to rise and spread above Mount Scaggs. Giordino could see men pouring like ants from the tunnel entrance in the volcano's slope. There seemed to be some activity inside Mount Winkleman as well. Pitt's warning about the island going up in smoke and cinders came back to him.

He burst through the doorway of the salon, stopped dead and expelled a low moan of emotional agony at seeing the blood oozing from the wounds in Pitt's chest and waist, the puncture in Maeve's midriff and the body of Deirdre Dorsett bent back almost double over the coffee table.

"God, what happened?"

Pitt looked up at him without answering. "The eruption, has it started?"

"There's smoke coming from the mountains, and the ground is moving."

"Then we're too late."

Giordino immediately knelt beside Pitt and stared at Maeve's wound. "This looks bad."

She looked up at him, her eyes imploring. "Please take my boys and leave me."

Giordino shook his head heavily. "I can't do that. We'll all go together or not at all."

Pitt reached over and clutched Giordino's arm. "No time. The whole island will blow any second. I can't make it either. Take the boys and get out of here, get out now."

As if he had been struck by a bombshell, Giordino went numb with disbelief. The lethargic nonchalance, the wisecracking sarcasm, fled from him. His thick shoulders seemed to shrink. Nothing in his entire life had primed him to desert his best friend of thirty years to a certain death. His expression was one of agonized indecision. "I can't leave either of you." Giordino leaned over and slipped his arms under Maeve as if to carry her. He nodded at Pitt. "I'll come back for you."

Maeve brushed his hands away. "Don't you see Dirk is right?" she murmured weakly.

Pitt handed Giordino Rodney York's logbook and letters. "See that York's story reaches his family,"

he said, his voice hard with glacial calmness. "Now for God's sake, take the kids and go!"

Giordino shook his head in torment. "You never quit, do you?"

Outside, the sky had suddenly vanished, replaced by a cloud of ash that burst from the center of Mount Winkleman with a great rumbling sound that was truly terrifying. Everything went dark as the evil black mass spread like a giant umbrella. Then came a more thunderous explosion that hurled thousands of tons of molten lava into the air.



Giordino felt as if his soul was being torn away. Finally, he nodded and turned his head, a curious understanding in his grieved eyes. "All right." And then one last jest. "Since nobody around here wants me, I'll go."

Pitt gripped him by the hand. "Goodbye, old friend. Thank you for all you've done for me."

"Be seeing you," Giordino muttered brokenly, tears forming in his eyes. He looked like a very old man who was shrouded in solemn and heart-wrenching shock. He started to say something, choked on the words and then he snatched up Maeve's children, one boy under each arm, and was gone.



Charles Bakewell and the experts at the volcanic observatory in Auckland could not look into the interior of the earth as they could the atmosphere and to a lesser degree, the sea. It was impossible for them to predict the exact events in sequence and magnitude once the acoustic wave traveling from Hawaii struck Gladiator Island. Unlike most eruptions and earthquakes, these gave no time to study precursory phenomena such as foreshocks, groundwater fluctuations and changes in the behavior of domestic and wild animals. The dynamics were chaotic. All the scientists were certain of was that a major disturbance was in the making, and the smoldering furnaces deep within the island were about to burst into life.

In the event, the resonance created by the energy from the sound wave would shake the already weakened volcanic cores, triggering the eruptions. Catastrophic events followed in quick succession.