DAY 13: MUKENKO
June 25, 1979
1. Diamonds
IN THE MORNING A FINE LAYER OF BLACK ASH covered the campsite, and in the distance Mukenko was belching great quantities of black smoke. Amy tugged at Elliot's sleeve.
Leave now, she signed insistently.
"No, Amy," he said.
Nobody in the expedition was in a mood to leave, including Elliot. Upon arising, he found himself thinking of additional data he needed before leaving Zinj. Elliot was no
longer satisfied with a skeleton of one of these creatures; like men, their uniqueness went beyond the details of physical structure to their behavior. Elliot wanted videotapes of the gray apes, and more recordings of verbalizations. And Ross was more determined than ever to find the diamonds, with Munro no less interested.
Leave now.
"Why leave now?" he asked her.
Earth bad. Leave now.
Elliot had no experience with volcanic activity, but what he saw did not impress him. Mukenko was more active than it had been in previous days, but the volcano had ejected smoke and gas since their first arrival in Virunga.
He asked Munro, "Is there any danger?"
Munro shrugged. "Kahega thinks so, but he probably just wants an excuse to go home."
Amy came running over to Munro raising her arms, slapping them down on the earth in front of him. Munro recognized this as her desire to play; he laughed and began to tickle Amy. She signed to him.
"What's she saying?" Munro asked. "What are you saying, you little devil?"
Amy grunted with pleasure, and continued to sign.
"She says leave now," Elliot translated.
Munro stopped tickling her. "Does she?" he asked sharply. What exactly does she say?"
Elliot was surprised at Munro's seriousness - although Amy accepted his interest in her communication as perfectly proper. She signed again, more slowly, for Munro's benefit, her eyes on his face.
"She says the earth is bad."
"Hmm," Munro said. "Interesting." He glanced at Amy and then at his watch.
Amy signed, Nosehair man listen Amy go home now.
"She says you listen to her and go home now," Elliot said.
Munro shrugged. "Tell her I understand."
Elliot translated. Amy looked unhappy, and did not sign again.
"Where is Ross?" Munro asked.
"Here," Ross said.
"Let's get moving," Munro said, and they headed for the lost city. Now they had another surprise - Amy signed she was coming with them, and she hurried to catch up with them.
This was their final day in the city, and all the participants in the Congo expedition described a similar reaction: the city, which had been so mysterious before, was somehow stripped of its mystery. On this morning, they saw the city for what it was: a cluster of crumbling old buildings in a hot stinking uncomfortable jungle.
They all found it tedious, except for Munro. Munro was worried.
Elliot was bored, talking about verbalizations and why he wanted tape recordings, and whether it was possible to preserve a brain from one of the apes to take back with them. It seemed there was some academic debate about where language came from; people used to think language was a development of animal cries, but now they knew that animal barks and cries were controlled by the limbic system of the brain, and that real language came from some other part of the brain called Broca's area. . . . Munro couldn't pay attention. He kept listening to the distant rumbling of Mukenko.
Munro had firsthand experience with volcanoes; he had been in the Congo in 1968, when Mbuti, another of the Vi?runga volcanoes, erupted. When he had heard the sharp explosions the day before, he had recognized them as bromides, the unexplained accompaniments of coming earthquakes. Munro had assumed that Mukenko would soon erupt, and when he had seen the flickering laser beam the night before, he had known there was new rumbling activity on the upper slopes of the volcano.
Munro knew that volcanoes were unpredictable - as witnessed by the fact that this ruined city at the base of an active volcano had been untouched after more than five hundred years. There were recent lava fields on the mountain slopes above, and others a few miles to the south, but the city itself was spared. This in itself was not so remarkable - the configuration of Mukenko was such that most eruptions occurred on the gentle south slopes. But it did not mean that they were now in any less danger. The unpredictability of volcanic eruptions meant that they could become life-threatening in a matter of minutes. The danger was not from lava, which rarely flowed faster than a man could walk; it would take hours for lava to flow down from Mukenko's summit. The real danger from volcanic eruptions was ash and gas.
Just as most people killed by fires actually died from smoke inhalation, most deaths from volcanoes were caused by asphyxiation from dust and carbon monoxide. Volcanic gases were heavier than air, the Lost City of Zinj, located in a valley, could be filled in minutes with a heavy, poisonous atmosphere, should Mukenko discharge a large quantity of gas.
The question was how rapidly Mukenko was building toward a major eruptive phase. That was why Munro was so interested in Amy's reactions: it was well known that primates could anticipate geological events such as earthquakes and eruptions. Munro was surprised that Elliot, babbling away about freezing gorilla brains, didn't know about that. And he was even more surprised that Ross, with her exten?sive geological knowledge, did not regard the morning ash-fall as the start of a major volcanic eruption.
Ross knew a major eruption was building. That morning, she had routinely tried to establish contact with Houston; to her surprise, the transmission keys immediately locked through. After the scrambler notations registered, she began typing in field updates, but the screen went blank, and flashed:
HUSTN STAIN OVRIDE CLR BANX.
This was an emergency signal; she had never seen it before on a field expedition. She cleared the memory banks and pushed the transmit button. There was a burst transmission delay, then the screen printed:
COMPUTR DESIGNATN MAJR ERUPIN SIGNATR MU-KENKO ADVIS LEAV SITE NOW EXPEDN JEPRDY DANGR REPET ALL LEAV SITE NOW.
Ross glanced across the campsite. Kahega was making breakfast; Amy squatted by the fire, eating a roasted banana (she had got Kahega to make special treats for her); Munro and Elliot were having coffee. Except for the black ashfall, it was a perfectly normal morning at the camp. She looked back at the screen.
MAJR ERUPTN SIGNATR MUKENKO ADVIS LEAV SITE NOW.
Ross glanced up at the smoking cone of Mukenko. The hell with it, she thought. She wanted the diamonds, and she had gone too far to quit now.
The screen blinked: PLS SIGNL REPLY.
Ross turned the transmitter off.
As the morning progressed they felt several sharp jolting earth tremors, which released clouds of dust from the crumbling buildings. The rumblings of Mukenko became more frequent. Ross paid no attention. "It just means this is elephant country," she said. That was an old geological adage: "If you're looking for elephants, go to elephant country." Elephant country meant a likely spot to find whatever minerals you were looking for. "And if you want diamonds," Ross said, shrugging, "you go to volcanoes."
The association of diamonds with volcanoes had been recognized for more than a century, but it was still poorly understood. Most theories postulated that diamonds, crystals of pure carbon, were formed in the intense heat and pressure of the upper mantle one thousand miles beneath the earth's surface. The diamonds remained inaccessible at this depth except in volcanic areas where rivers of molten magma carried them to the surface.
But this did not mean that you went to erupting volcanoes to catch diamonds being spewed out, Most diamond mines were at the site of extinct volcanoes, in fossilized cones called kimberlite pipes, named for the geological formations in Kimberley, South Africa. Virunga, near the geologically unstable Rift Valley, showed evidence of continuous volcanic activity for more than fifty million years. They were now looking for the same fossil volcanoes which the earlier inhabitants of Zinj had found.
Shortly before noon they found them, halfway up the hills east of the city - a series of excavated tunnels running into the mountain slopes of Mukenko.
Elliot felt disappointed. "I don't know what I was expecting," he said later, "but it was just a brown-colored tunnel in the earth, with occasional bits of dull brown rock sticking out. I couldn't understand why Ross got so excited." Those bits of dull brown rock were diamonds; when cleaned, they had the transparency of dirty glass.
"They thought I was crazy," Ross said, "because I began jumping up and down. But they didn't know what they were looking at."
In an ordinary kimberilte pipe, diamonds were distributed sparsely in the rock matrix. The average mine recovered only thirty-two karats - a fifth of an ounce - for every hundred tons of rock removed. When you looked down a diamond mine-shaft, you saw no diamonds at all. But the Zinj mines were lumpy with protruding stones. Using his machete, Munro dug out six hundred karats. And Ross saw six or seven stones protruding from the wall, each as large as the one Munro had removed. "Just looking," she said later, "I could see easily four or five thousand karats. With no further digging, no separation, nothing. Just sitting there. It was a richer mine than the Premier in South Africa. It was unbelievable."
Elliot asked the question that had already formed in Ross's own mind. "If this mine is so damn rich," he said, "why was it abandoned?"
"The gorillas got out of control," Munro said. "They staged a coup." He was laughing, plucking diamonds out of the rock.
Ross had considered that, as she had considered Elliot's earlier suggestion that the city had been wiped out by disease. She thought a less exotic explanation was likely. "I think," she said, "that as far as they were concerned, the diamond mines had dried up." Because as gemstones, these crystals were very poor indeed - blue, streaked with impurities.
The people of Zinj could not have imagined that five hundred years in the future these same worthless stones would be more scarce and desirable than any other mineral resources on the planet.
"What makes these blue diamonds so valuable?"
"They are going to change the world," Ross said, in a soft voice. "They are going to end the nuclear age."
2.War at the Speed of Light
IN JANUARY, 1979, TESTIFYING BEFORE THE Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, General Franklin F. Martin of the Pentagon Advanced Research Project Agency said, "In 1939, at the start of World War II, the most important country in the world to the American military effort was the Belgian Congo." Martin explained that as a kind of "accident of geography" the Congo, now Zaire, has for forty years remained vital to American interests - and will assume even more importance in the future. (Martin said bluntly that "this country will go to war over Zaire before we go to war over any Arab oil state.")
During World War II, in three highly secret shipments, the Congo supplied the United States with uranium used to build the atomic bombs exploded over Japan. By 1960 the U.S. no longer needed uranium, but copper and cobalt were strategically important. In the 1970s the emphasis shifted to Zaire's reserves of tantalum, wolframite, germanium - substances vital to semi conducting electronics. And in the 1980s, "so-called Type IIb blue diamonds will constitute the most important military resource in the world" - and the presumption was that Zaire had such diamonds. In General Martin's view, blue diamonds were essential because "we are entering a time when the brute destructive power of a weapon will be less important than its speed and intelligence."
For thirty years, military thinkers had been awed by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But Martin said that "ICBMs are crude weapons. They do not begin to approach the theoretical limits imposed by physical laws. According to Einsteinian physics, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second. We are now developing high-energy pulsed lasers and particle beam weapons systems which operate at the speed of light. In the face of such weapons, ballistic missiles traveling a mere 17,000 miles an hour are slow-moving dinosaurs from a previous era, as inappropriate as cavalry in World War I, and as easily eliminated."
Speed-of-light weapons were best suited to space, and would first appear in satellites. Martin noted that the Russians had made a "kill" of the American spy satellite VV/ 02 as early as 1973; in 1975, Hughes Aircraft developed a rapid aiming and firing system which locked onto multiple targets, firing eight high-energy pulses in less than one second. By 1978, the Hughes team had reduced response time to fifty nanoseconds - fifty billionths of a second - and increased beam accuracy to five hundred missile knockdowns in less than one minute. Such developments presaged the end of the ICBM as a weapon.
"Without the gigantic missiles, miniature, high-speed computers will be vastly more important in future conflicts than nuclear bombs, and their speed of computation will be the single most important factor determining the outcome of World War III. Computer speed now stands at the center of the armament race, as megaton power once held the center twenty years ago.
"We will shift from electronic circuit computers to light circuit computers simply because of speed - the Fabry-Perot Interferometer, the optical equivalent of a transistor, can respond in 1 picosecond (10 12 seconds), at least 1,000 times faster than the fastest Josephson junctions." The new generation of optical computers, Martin said, would be dependent on the availability of Type IIb boron-coated diamonds.
Elliot recognized at once the most serious consequence of the speed-of-light weapons - they were much too fast for human comprehension. Men were accustomed to mechanized
warfare, but a future war would be a war of machines in a
startlingly new sense: machines would actually govern the moment-to-moment course of a conflict which lasted only minutes from start to finish.
In 1956, in the waning years of the strategic bomber, military thinkers imagined an all-out nuclear exchange lasting 12 hours. By 1963, ICBMs had shrunk the time course to 3 hours. By 1974, military theorists were predicting a war that lasted just 30 minutes, yet this "half-hour war" was vastly more complex than any earlier war in human history.
In the 1950s, if the Americans and the Russians launched all the bombers and rockets at the same moment, there would still be no more than 10,000 weapons in the air, attacking and counterattacking. Total weapons interaction events would peak at 15,000 in the second hour. This represented the impressive figure of 4 weapons interactions every second around the world.
But given diversified tactical warfare, the number of weapons and "systems elements" increased astronomically. Modern estimates imagined 400 million computers in the field, with total weapons interactions at more than 15 billion in the first half hour of war. This meant there would be 8 million weapons interactions every second, in a bewildering ultrafast conflict of aircraft, missiles; tanks, and ground troops.
Such a war was only manageable by machines; human response times were simply too slow. World War HI would not be a push-button war because as General Martin said, "It takes too long for a man to push the button - at least 1.8 seconds, which is an eternity in modem warfare."
This fact created what Martin called the "rock problem." Human responses were geologically slow, compared to a high-speed computer. "A modern computer performs 2,000,000 calculations in the time it takes a man to blink. Therefore, from the point of view of computers fighting the next war, human beings will be essentially fixed and unchanging elements, like rocks. Human wars have never lasted long enough to take into account the rate of geological change. In the future, computer wars will not last long enough to take into account the rate of human change."
Since human beings responded too slowly, it was necessary for them to relinquish decision-making control of the war to the faster intelligence of computers. "In the coming war, we must abandon any hope of regulating the course of the conflict. If we decide to 'run' the war at human speed, we will almost surely lose, Our only hope is to put our trust in machines. This makes human judgment, human values, human thinking utterly superfluous. World War III will be war by proxy: a pure war of machines, over which we dare exert no influence for fear of so slowing the decision-making mechanism as to cause our defeat." And the final, crucial transition - the transition from computers working at nanoseconds to computers working at picoseconds - was dependent on Type IIb diamonds.
Elliot was appalled by this prospect of turning control over to the creations of men.
Ross shrugged. "It's inevitable," she said. "In Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, there are traces of a house two million years old. The hominid creature wasn't satisfied with caves and other natural shelters; he created his own accommodations. Men have always altered the natural world to suit their purposes."
"But you can't give up control," Elliot said.
"We've been doing it for centuries," Ross said. "What's a domesticated animal - or a pocket calculator - except an attempt to give up control? We don't want to plow fields or do square roots so we turn the job over to some other intelligence, which we've trained or bred or created."
"But you can't let your creations take over."
"We've been doing it for centuries," Ross repeated. "Look: even if we refused to develop faster computers, the Russians would. They'd be in Zaire right now looking for diamonds, if the Chinese weren't keeping them out. You can't stop technological advances. As soon as we know something is possible, we have to carry it out."
"No," Elliot said. "We can make our own decisions. I won't be a part of this."
"Then leave," she said. "The Congo's no place for academics, anyway."
She began unpacking her rucksack, taking out a series of white ceramic cones, and a number of small boxes with antennae. She attached a box to each ceramic cone, then entered the first tunnel, placed the cones flat against the walls, moving deeper into darkness.
Peter not happy Peter.
"No," Elliot said. Why not happy'
"It's hard to explain, Amy," he said.
Peter tell Amy good gorilla.
"I know, Amy."
Karen Ross emerged from one tunnel, and disappeared into the second. Elliot saw the glow of her flashlight as she placed the cones, and then she was hidden from view.
Munro came out into the sunlight, his pockets bulging with diamonds. "Where's Ross?"
"In the tunnels."
"Doing what?"
"Some kind of explosive test, looks like." Elliot gestured to the three remaining ceramic cones on the ground near her pack.
Munro picked up one cone, and turned it over. "Do you know what these are?" he asked.
Elliot shook his head.
"They're RCs," Munro said, "and she's out of her mind to place them here. She could blow the whole place apart."
Resonant conventionals, or RCs, were timed explosives, a potent marriage of microelectronic and explosive technology. "We used RCs two years ago on bridges in Angola,"
Munro explained. "Properly sequenced, six ounces of explosive can bring down fifty tons of braced structural steel. You need one of those sensors" - he gestured to a control box lying near her pack - "which monitors shock waves from the early charges, and detonates the later charges in the timed sequence to set up resonating waves which literally shake the structure to pieces. Very impressive to see it happen." Munro glanced up at Mukenko, smoking above them.
At that moment, Ross emerged from the tunnel, all smiles. "We'll soon have our answers," she said.
"Answers?"
"About the extent of the kimberlite deposits. I've set twelve seismic charges, which is enough to give us definitive readings."
"You've set twelve resonant charges," Munro said.
"Well, they're all I brought. We've got to make do."
"They'll do," Munro said. "Perhaps too well. That volcano" - he pointed upwards - "is in an eruptive phase."
"I've placed a total of eight hundred grams of explosive," Ross said. "That's less than a pound and a half. It can't make the slightest difference."
"Let's not find out."
Elliot listened to their argument with mixed feelings. On the face of it, Munro's objections seemed absurd - a few trivial explosive charges, however timed, could not possibly
trigger a volcanic eruption. It was ridiculous; Elliot wondered why Munro was so adamant about the dangers. It was almost as if Munro knew something that Elliot and Ross did not - and could not even imagine.
3.DOD/ARPD/VULCAN 7021
IN 1978, MUNRO HAD LED A ZAMBIA EXPEDITION which included Robert Perry, a young geologist from the University of Hawaii. Perry had worked on PROJECT VULCAN, the most advanced program financed under the Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Division.
VULCAN was so controversial that during the 1975 House Armed Services Subcommittee hearings, project DOD/ ARPD/VULCAN 7021 was carefully buried among "miscellaneous long-term findings of national security significance." But the following year, Congressman David Inaga (D., Hawaii) challenged DOD / AR PD/VULCAN. demanding to know "its exact military purpose, and why it should be funded entirely within the state of Hawaii."
Pentagon spokesmen explained blandly that VULCAN was a "tsunami warning system" of value to the residents of the Hawaiian islands, as well as to military installations there. Pentagon experts reminded Inaga that in 1948 a tsunami had swept across the Pacific Ocean, first devastating Kauai, but moving so swiftly along the Hawaiian island chain that when it struck Oahu and Pearl Harbor twenty minutes later, no effective warning had been given.
"That tsunami was triggered by an underwater volcanic avalanche off the coast of Japan," they said. "But Hawaii has its own active volcanoes, and now that Honolulu is a city of half a million, and naval presence is valued at more than thirty-five billion dollars, the ability to predict tsunami activity secondary to eruptions by Hawaiian volcanoes assumes major long-term significance."
In truth, PROJECT VULCAN was not long-term at all; it was intended to be carried out at the next eruption of Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the world, located on the big island of Hawaii. The designated purpose of VULCAN was to control volcanic eruptions as they progressed; Mauna Lea was chosen because its eruptions were relatively mild and gentle.
Although it rose to an altitude of only 13,500 feet, Mauna Lea was the largest mountain in the world. Measured from its origin at the depths of the ocean floor, Mauna Loa had more than twice the cubic volume of Mount Everest; it was a unique and extraordinary geological formation. And Mauna Loa had long since become the most carefully studied volcano in history, having a permanent scientific observation station on its crater since 1928. It was also the most interfered-with volcano in history, since the lava that flowed down its slopes at three-year intervals had been diverted by everything from aerial bombers to local crews with shovels and sandbags.
VULCAN intended to alter the course of a Mauna Loa eruption by "venting" the giant volcano, releasing the enormous quantities of molten magma by a series of timed, non-nuclear explosions detonated along fault lines in the shield. In October, 1978, VULCAN was carried out in secret, using navy helicopter teams experienced in detonating high-explosive resonant conic charges. The VULCAN project lasted two days; on the third day, the civilian Mauna Lea Volcanic Laboratory publicly announced that "the October eruption of Mauna Lea has been milder than anticipated, and no further eruptive episodes are expected."
PROJECT VULCAN was secret but Munro had heard all about it one drunken night around the campfire near Bangazi. And he remembered it now as Ross was planning a resonant explosive sequence in the region of a volcano in its eruptive phase. The basic tenet of VULCAN was that enormous, pent-up geological forces - whether the forces of an earthquake, or a volcano, or a Pacific typhoon - could be devastatingly unleashed by a relatively small energy trigger.
Ross prepared to fire her conical explosives.
"I think," Munro said, "that you should try again to contact Houston."
"That's not possible," Ross said, supremely confident. "I'm required to decide on my own - and I've decided to assess the extent of diamond deposits in the hillsides now."
As the argument continued, Amy moved away. She picked up the detonating device lying alongside Ross's pack. It was a tiny handheld device with six glowing LEDs, more than enough to fascinate Amy. She raised her fingers to push the buttons.
Karen Ross looked over. "Oh God."
Munro turned. "Amy," he said softly. "Amy, no. No. Amy no good."
Amy good gorilla Amy good.
Amy held the detonating device in her hand. She was captivated by the winking LEDS. She glanced over at the humans.
"No, Amy," Munro said. He turned to Elliot. "Can't you stop leer?"
"Oh, what the hell," Ross said. "Go ahead, Amy."
A series of rumbling explosions blasted gleaming diamond dust from the mine shafts, and then there was silence. "Well," Ross said finally, "I hope you're satisfied. It's perfectly clear that such a minimal explosive charge could not affect the volcano. In the future you can leave the scientific aspects to me, and - "
And then Mukenko rumbled, and the earth shook so hard that they were all knocked to the ground.
4: ERTS Houston
AT 1 A.M. HOUSTON TIME, R. B. TRAVIS FROWNED at the computer monitor in his office. He had just received the latest photosphere imagery from Kitt Peak Observatory, via GSFC telemetry. GSFC had kept him waiting all day fur the data, which was only one of several reasons why Travis was in a bad humor.
The photospheric imagery was negative - the sphere of the sun appeared black on the screen, with a glowing white chain of sunspots. There were at least fifteen major sunspots across the sphere, one of which originated the massive solar flare that was making his life hell.
For two days now, Travis had been sleeping at ERTS. The entire operation had gone to hell. ERTS had a team in northern Pakistan, not far from the troubled Afghan border, another in central Malaysia, in an area of Communist insurrection; and the Congo team, which was facing rebelling natives and some unknown group of gorilla-like creatures.
Communications with all teams around the world had been cut off by the solar flare for more than twenty-four hours. Travis had been running computer simulations on all of them with six-hour updates. The results did not please him. The Pakistan team was probably all right, but would run six days over schedule and cost them an additional two hundred thousand dollars; the Malaysia team was in serious jeopardy; and the Congo team was classified CANNY - ERTS computer slang fur "can not estimate." Travis had had two CANNY teams in the past - in the Amazon in 1976, and in Sri Lanka in 1978 - and he had lost people from both groups.
Things were going badly. Yet this latest GSFC was much better than the previous report. They had - it seemed - managed a brief transmission contact with the Congo several hours earlier, although there was no verification response from Ross. He wondered whether the team had received the warning or not. He stared at the black sphere with frustration.
Richards, one of the main data programmers, stuck his head in the door. "I have something relevant to the CFS."
"Fire away," Travis said. Any news relevant to the Congo Field Survey was of interest.
"The South African seismological Station at the University of Jo'burg reports tremors initiating at twelve oh four P.M. local time. Estimated epicenter coordinates are consistent with Mount Mukenko in the Virunga chain. The tremors are multiple, running Richter five to eight."
"Any confirmation?" Travis asked.
"Nairobi is the nearest station, and they're computing a Richter six to nine, or a Morelli Nine, with heavy downfall of ejecta from the cone. They are also predicting that the LAC, the local atmospheric conditions, are conducive to severe electrical discharges."
Travis glanced at his watch. "Twelve oh four local time is nearly an hour ago," he said. "Why wasn't I informed?"
Richards said, "It didn't come in from the African stations until now. I guess they figure it's no big deal, another volcano."
Travis sighed. That was the trouble - volcanic activity
was now recognized as a common phenomenon on the earth's surface. Since 1965, the first year that global records were kept, there had been twenty-two major eruptions each year, roughly one eruption every two weeks.
Outlying stations were in no hurry to report such "ordinary" occurrences - to delay was proof of fashionable boredom.
"But they have problems," Richards said. "With the satellites disrupted by the sunspots, everybody has to transmit surface cable. And I guess as far as they're concerned, the northeast Congo is uninhabited."
Travis said, "How bad is a Morelli Nine?"
Richards paused. "It's pretty bad, Mr. Travis."
5."Everything Was Moving"
IN THE CONGO, EARTH MOVEMENT WAS RICHTER scale 8, a Moreili scale IX. At this severity, the earth shakes so badly a man has difficulty standing. There are lateral shifts in the earth and rifts open up; trees and even steel-frame buildings topple.
For Elliot, Ross, and Munro, the five minutes following the onset of the eruption were a bizarre nightmare. Elliot recalled that "everything was moving. We were all literally knocked off our feet; we had to crawl on our hands and knees, like babies. Even after we got away from mine-shaft tunnels, the city swayed like a wobbling toy. It was quite a while - maybe half a minute - before the buildings began to collapse. Then everything came down at once: walls caving in, ceilings collapsing, big blocks of stone crashing down into the jungle. The trees were swaying too, and pretty soon they began falling over."
The noise of this collapse was incredible, and added to that was the sound from Mukenko. The volcano wasn't rumbling anymore; they heard staccato explosions of lava blasting from the cone. These explosions produced shock waves; even when the earth was solid under their feet, they were knocked over without warning by blasts of hot air. "It was," Elliot recalled, "just like being in the middle of a war."
Amy was panic-stricken. Grunting in terror, she leapt into Elliot's arms - and promptly urinated on his clothes - as they began to run back toward the camp.
A sharp tremor brought Ross to the ground. She picked herself up, and stumbled onward, acutely aware of the humidity and the dense ash and dust ejected by the volcano. Within minutes, the sky above them was dark as night, and the first flashes of lightning cracked through the boiling clouds. It had rained the night before; the jungle surrounding them was wet, the air supersaturated with moisture. In short, they had all the requisites for a lightning storm. Ross felt herself torn between the perverse desire to watch this unique theoretical phenomenon and the desire to run for her life.
In a searing burst of blue-white light, the lightning storm struck. Bolts of electricity crackled all around them like rain; Ross later estimated there were two hundred bolts within the first minute - nearly three every second. The familiar shattering crack of lightning was not punctuation but a continuous sound, a mar like a waterfall. The booming thunder caused sharp ear pains, and the accompanying shock waves literally knocked them backward.
Everything happened so fast that they had little chance to absorb sensations. Their ordinary expectations were turned upside down. One of the porters, Amburi, had come back toward the city to find them. They saw him standing in a clearing, waving them ahead, when a lightning bolt crashed up through a nearby tree into the sky. Ross had known that the lightning flash came after the invisible downward flow of electrons and actually ran upward from the ground to the clouds above. But to see it! The explosive flash lifted Amburi off his feet and tossed him through the air toward them; he scrambled to his feet, shouting hysterically in Swahili.
All around them trees were cracking, splitting and hissing clouds of moisture as the lightning bolts shot upward through them. Ross later said, "The lightning was everywhere, the blinding flashes were continuous, with this terrible sizzling sound. That man [Amburi] was screaming and the next instant the lightning grounded through him. I was close enough to touch him but there was very little heat, just white light. He went rigid and there was this terrible smell as his whole body burst into flame, and he fell to the ground. Munro rolled on him to put out the fire but he was dead, and we ran on. There was no time to react; we kept falling down from the [Earthquake] tremors. Soon we were all half-blinded from the lightning. I remember hearing somebody screaming but I didn't know who it was. I was sure we would all die."
Near camp, a gigantic tree crashed down before them, presenting an obstacle as broad and high as a three-story building. As they clambered through it, lightning sizzled through the damp branches, stripping off bark, glowing and scorching. Amy howled when a white bolt streaked across her hand as she gripped a wet branch. Immediately she dived to the ground, burying her head in the low foliage, refusing to move. Elliot had to drag her the remaining distance to the camp.
Munro was the first to reach camp. He found Kahega trying to pack the tents for their departure, but it was impossible with the tremors and the lightning crashing down through the dark ashen sky. One Mylar tent burst into flames. They smelled the harsh burning plastic. The dish antenna, resting on the ground, was struck and split apart, sending metal fragments flying.
"Leave!" Munro shouted. "Leave!"
"Ndio mzee!" Kahega shouted, grabbing his pack hastily. He glanced back toward the others, and in that moment Elliot stumbled out of the black gloom with Amy clinging to his chest. He had injured his ankle and was limping slightly.
Amy quickly dropped to the ground.
"Leave!" Munro shouted.
As Elliot moved on, Ross emerged from the darkness of the ashen atmosphere, coughing, bent double. The left side of her body was scorched and blackened, and the skin of her left hand was burned. She had been struck by Lightning, although she had no later memory of it. She pointed to her nose and throat, coughing. "Burns. . . hurts. . ."
"It's the gas," Munro shouted. He put his arm around her and half-lifted her from her feet, carrying her away. "We have to get uphill!"
An hour later, on higher ground, they had a final view of the city engulfed with smoke and ash. Farther up on the slopes of the volcano, they saw a line of trees burst into flames as an unseen dark wave of lava came sliding down the mountainside. They heard agonized bellows of pain from the gray gorillas on the hillside as hot lava rained down on them. As they watched, the foliage collapsed closer and closer to the city, until finally the city itself crumbled under a darkly descending cloud, and disappeared.
The Lost City of Zinj was buried forever.
Only then did Ross realize that her diamonds were buried forever as well.
6. Nightmare
THEY HAD NO FOOD, NO WATER, AND VERY LITTLE ammunition. They dragged themselves through the jungle, clothes burned and torn, faces haggard, exhausted. They did not speak to one another, but silently pressed on. Elliot said later they were "living through a nightmare."
The world through which they passed was grim and colorless. Sparkling white waterfalls and streams now ran black with soot, splashing into scummy pools of gray foam. The sky was dark gray, with occasional red flashes from the volcano. The very air became filmy gray; they coughed and stumbled through a world of black soot and ash.
They were all covered with ash - their packs gritty on their backs, their faces grimy when they wiped them, their hair many shades darker. Their noses and eyes burned. There was nothing to do about it; they could only keep going.
As Ross trudged through the dark air, she was aware of an ironic ending to her personal quest. Ross had long since acquired the expertise to tap into any ERTS data bank she wanted, including the one that held her own evaluation. She knew her assigned qualities by heart:
YOUTHFUL-ARROGANT (probably) / TENUOUS HUMAN RAPPORT (she particularly resented that one) / DOMINEERING (maybe) INTELLECTUALLY ARROGANT (only natural) / INSENSITIVE (whatever that meant) / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT ANY COST(was that so bad?)
And she knew her Late-stage conclusions. All that flop-over matrix garbage about parental figures and so on. And the last line of her report: SUBJECT MUST BE MONITORED IN LATE STAGE GOAL ORIENTED PROCEDURES.
But none of that was relevant. She had gone after the diamonds only to be beaten by the worst volcanic eruption in Africa in a decade. Who could blame her for what had happened? It wasn't her fault. She would prove that on her next expedition....
Munro felt the frustration of a gambler who has placed every bet correctly but still loses. He had been correct to avoid the Euro-Japanese consortium; he had been correct to go with ERTS; and yet he was coming out empty-handed. Well, he reminded himself, feeling the diamonds in his pockets, not quite empty handed.
Elliot was returning without photographs, videotapes, sound recordings, or the skeleton of a gray gorilla. Even his measurements had been lost. Without such proofs, he dared not claim a new species - in fact, he would be unwise even to discuss the possibility. A great opportunity had slipped away from him, and now, walking through the dark landscape, he had only a sense of the natural world gone mad:
birds fell screeching from the sky, flopping at their feet, asphyxiated by the gases in the air above; bats skittered through the midday air; distant animals shrieked and howled. A leopard, fur burning on its hindquarters, ran past them at noon. Somewhere in the distance, elephants trumpeted with alarm.
They were trudging lost souls in a grim sooty world that seemed like a description of hell; perpetual fire and darkness, where tormented souls screamed in agony. And behind them Mukenko spat cinders and glowing rain. At one point, they were engulfed in a shower of red-hot embers that sizzled as they struck the damp canopy overhead, then turned the wet ground underfoot smoky, burning holes in their clothing, scorching their skin, setting hair smoldering as they danced in pain and finally sought shelter beneath tall trees, huddled together, awaiting the end of the fiery rain from the skies.
Munro planned from the first moments of the eruption to head directly for the wrecked C-130 transport, which would afford them shelter and supplies. He estimated they would reach the aircraft in two hours. In fact, six hours passed before the gigantic ash-covered hulk of the plane emerged from the murky afternoon darkness.
One reason it had taken them so long to move away from Mukenko was that they were obliged to avoid General Muguru and his troops. Whenever they came across jeep tracks, Munro led them farther west, into the depths of the jungle.
"He's not a fallow you want to meet," Munro said. "And neither are his boys. And they'd think nothing of cutting your liver out and eating it raw."
Dark ash on wings and fuselage made the giant transport look as if it had crashed in black snow. Off one bent wing, a kind of waterfall of ash hissed over the metal down to the ground. Far in the distance, they heard the soft beating of Kigani drums, and thumping mortar from Muguru's troops.
Otherwise it was ominously quiet.
Munro waited in the forest beyond the wreckage, watching the airplane. Ross took the opportunity to try to transmit on the computer, continuously brushing ash from the video screen, but she could not reach Houston.
Finally Munro signaled, and they all began to move forward. Amy, panicked, tugged at Munro's sleeve. No go, she signed. People there.
Munro frowned at her, glanced at Elliot. Elliot pointed to the airplane. Moments later, there was a crash, and two white-painted Kigani warriors emerged from the aircraft, onto the high wing. They were carrying cases of whiskey and arguing about how to get them down to the jungle floor below. After a moment, five more Kigani appeared beneath the wing, and the cases were passed to them. The two men above jumped down, and the group moved off.
Munro looked at Amy and smiled.
Amy good gorilla, she signed.
They waited another twenty minutes, and when no further Kigani appeared, Munro led the group to the airplane. They were just outside the cargo doors when a rain of white arrows began to whistle down on them.
"Inside!" Munro shouted, and hurried them all up the crumpled landing gear, onto the upper wing surface, and from there into the airplane. He slammed the emergency door, arrows clattered on the outer metal surface.
Inside the transport it was dark; the floor tilted at a crazy angle. Boxes of equipment had slid across the aisles, toppled over, and smashed. Broken glassware crunched underfoot. Elliot carried Amy to a seat, and then noticed that the Kigani had defecated on the seats.
Outside, they heard drums, and the steady rain of arrows on the metal and windows. Looking out through the dark ash, they glimpsed dozens of white-painted men, running through the trees, slipping under the wing.
"What are we going to do?" Ross asked.
"Shoot them," Munro said briskly, breaking open their supplies, removing machine-gun clips. "We aren't short of ammunition."
"But there must be a hundred men out there."
"Yes, but only one man is important. Kill the Kigani with red streaks painted beneath his eyes. That'll end the attack right away."
"Why?" Elliot asked.
"Because he's the Angawa sorcerer," Munro said, moving forward to the cockpit. "Kill him and we're off the hook."
Poison-tipped arrows clattered on the plastic windows and rang against the metal; the Kigani also threw feces, which thudded dully against the fuselage. The drums beat constantly.
Amy was terrified, and buckled herself into a seat, signing, Amy leave now bird fly
Elliot found two Kigani concealed in the rear passenger compartment. lb his own amazement he killed both without hesitation, firing the machine gun which bucked in his hands, blasting the Kigani back into the passenger seats, shattering windows, crumpling their bodies.
"Very good, Doctor." Kahega grinned, although by then Elliot was shaking uncontrollably. He slumped into a seat next to Amy.
People attack bird bird fly now bird fly Amy want go.
"Soon, Amy," he said, hoping it would prove true.
By now, the Kigani had abandoned their frontal assault; they were attacking from the rear, where there were no windows. Everyone could hear the sound of bare feet moving over the tail section and up onto the fuselage above their heads. Two warriors managed to climb through the open aft cargo door. Munro, who was in the cockpit, shouted, "If they get you, they eat you!"
Ross fired at the rear door, and blood spattered on her clothes as the intruding Kigani were knocked out backward.
Amy no like, she signed. Amy want go home. She clutched her seat belt.
"There's the son of a bitch," Munro shouted, and fired his machine gun. A young man of about twenty, his eyes smeared with red, fell onto his back, shuddering with machine-gun fire. "Got him," Munro said. "Got the Angawa" He sat back and allowed the warriors to remove the body."
It was then the Kigani attack ended, the warriors retreating into the silent bush. Munro bent over the slumped body of the pilot and stared out at the jungle.
"What happens now?" Elliot asked. "Have we won?"
Munro shook his head. "They'll wait for nightfall. Then they'll come back to kill us all."
Elliot said, "What will we do then?"
Munro had been thinking about that. He saw no possibility of their leaving the aircraft for at least twenty-four hours.
They needed to defend themselves at night and they needed a wider clearing around the plane during the day. The obvious solution was to burn the waist-high bush in the immediate vicinity of the plane - if they could do that without exploding the residual fuel in the airplane tanks.
"Look for flamethrowers," he told Kahega, "or gas canisters." And he began to check for documents that would tell him tank locations on the C-130.
Ross approached him. "We're in trouble, aren't we."
"Yes," Munro said. He didn't mention the volcano.
"I suppose I made a mistake."
"Well, you can atone," Munro said, "by thinking of some way out."
"I'll see what! can do," she said seriously, and went aft. Fifteen minutes later, she screamed.
Munro spun back into the passenger compartment, his machine gun raised to fire. But he saw that Ross had collapsed into a seat, laughing hysterically. The others stared at her, not sure what to do. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her: "Get a grip on yourself," he said, but she just went on laughing.
K¨¢hega stood next to a gas cylinder marked PROPANE. "She see this, and she ask how many more, I tell her six more, she begins to laugh."
Munro frowned. The cylinder was large, 20 cubic feet. "Kahega, what'd they carry that propane for?"
Kahega shrugged. "Too big for cooking. They need only five, ten cubic feet for cooking."
Munro said, "And there are six more like this?"
"Yes, boss. Six."
"That's a hell of a lot of gas," Munro said, and then he realized that Ross with her instinct for planning would have grasped at once the significance of all that propane, and Munro also knew what it meant, and he broke into a grin.
Annoyed, Elliot said, "Will someone please tell us what this means?"
"It means," Munro said through his laughter, "it means things are looking up."
Buoyed by 50,000 pounds of heated air from the propane gas ring, the gleaming plastic sphere of the consortium balloon lifted off from the jungle floor, and climbed swiftly into the darkening night air.
The Kigani came running from the forest, the warriors brandishing spears and arrows. Pale white arrows sliced up in the fading light, but they fell short, arcing back down to the ground again. The balloon rose steadily into the sky.
At an altitude of 2,000 feet, the sphere caught an easterly wind which carried it away from the dark expanse of the Congo forest, over the smoking red volcanic heart of Mount Mukenko, and across the sharp depression of the Rift Valley, vertical walls shimmering in the moonlight.
From there, the balloon slid across the Zaire border, moving southeast toward Kenya - and civilization.
Epilogue: The Place of Fire
ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1979, THE LANDSAT 3 Satellite, at a nominal altitude of 918 kilometers, recorded a 185-kilometer-wide scan on Band 6 (.7 - .8 millimicrons in the infrared spectrum) over central Africa. Penetrating cloud cover over the rain forest, the acquired image clearly showed the eruption of Mount Mukenko still continuing after three months. A computer projection of ejecta estimated 6 - 8 cubic kilometers of debris dispersed into the atmosphere, and another 2--3 cubic kilometers of lava released down the western flanks of the mountain. The natives called it Kanya4feka, "the place of fire."
On October 1, 1979, R. B. Travis formally canceled the Blue Contract, reporting that no natural source of Type IIb diamonds could be anticipated in the foreseeable future. The Japanese electronics firm of Monkawa revived interest in the Nagaura artificial boron-doping process. American firms had also begun work on doping; it was expected that the process would be perfected by 1984.
On October 23, Karen Ross resigned from ERTS to work for the U.S. Geological Survey EDC in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where no military work was conducted, and no fieldwork was possible. She has since married John Bellingham, a scientist at EDC.
Peter Elliot took an indefinite leave of absence from the Berkeley Department of Zoology on October 30. A press release cited "Amy's increasing maturity and size. . . making further laboratory research difficult. . ." Project Amy was formally disbanded, although most of the staff accompanied Elliot and Amy to the Institut d'Etudes Ethnologiques at Bukama, Zaire. Here Amy's interaction with wild gorillas continued to be studied in the fold. In November, 1979, she was thought to be pregnant; by then she was spending most of her time with a local gorilla troop, so it was difficult to be sure. She disappeared in May l980.*
The institute conducted a census of mountain gorillas from March to August 1980. The estimate was five thousand animals in all, approximately half the estimate of George Schaller, field biologist, twenty years before. These data confirm that the mountain gorilla is disappearing rapidly.
Zoo reproduction rates have increased, and gorillas are unlikely to become technically extinct, but their habitats are shrinking under the press of mankind, and researchers suspect that the gorilla will vanish as a wild, free-roaming animal in the next few years.
Kabega returned to Nairobi in 1979, working in a Chinese restaurant which went bankrupt in 1980. He then joined the National Geographic Society expedition to Botswana to study hippos.
Aid Ubara, the eldest son of the porter Marawani and a radio astronomer at Cambridge, England, won the Hersko?vita Prize in 1980 for research on X-ray emissions from the galactic source M322.
At a handsome profit, Charles Munro sold 31 karats of blue Type IIb diamonds on the Amsterdam bourse in late 1979; the diamonds were purchased by Intel, Inc., an American micronics company. Subsequently he was stabbed by a Russian agent in Antwerp in January 1980; the agent's body was later recovered in Brussels. Munro was arrested by an armed border patrol in Zambia in March 1980, but charges were dropped. He was reported in Somalia in May, but there is no confirmation. He still resides in Tangier.
A Landsat 3 image acquired on January 8, 1980, showed that the eruption of Mount Mukenko had ceased. The faint signature of crossed laser beams, recorded on some earlier satellite passes, was no longer visible. The projected intersection point now marked a field of black quatermain lava with an average depth of eight hundred meters - nearly half a mile - over the Lost City of Zinj.
*In May 1980, Amy disappeared for four months, but in September she returned with a male infant clinging to her chest. Elliot signed to her, and had the unexpected satisfaction of seeing the infant sign back to him Amy like Peter like Peter. The signing was crisp and correct and has been recorded on videotape. Amy would not approach closely with her infant; when the infant moved toward Elliot, Amy grabbed him to her chest, disappearing into the bush. She was later sighted among a troop of twelve gorillas on the slopes of Mt. Kyambara in northeastern Zaire.