Agent for a Cause

It looked like the vultures still gathered over their perceived kill in the basin had seen enough and they started to break away. I tore my helmet off and cast it aside and I heard Anna do the same. I raised my finger to point at the far-off chopper, "That one has Kevin on it."

"What are you going to do?" Anna asked.

I brought my wrist up and started manipulating the dials on my watch.

"Remember how I was telling you that this is a 500 year cycle volcano and that we were in year 312?"

"Yes?"

"Well I lied and I do apologize for that. We're in year 512. I was planning on moving this summer anyway."

I pressed the dial and it moved inward with a click. I took a lot of effort in the preparation of my getaway places and none so much as I had with this place. In a centric ring around the outside perimeter of the caldera floor, core charges uniformly spaced apart, blew.

Within two seconds another ring within the first ring blew and so on and on until the blasts culminated with a single larger eruption directly under the house in the center of the caldera.

Each core charge had been drilled down approximately half way through the hard crust and when the charges blew the bottom half of the crust at the core charge locations slumped off away into the magma chamber. Hot pressurized gases that had been in the making for hundreds of years erupted out of the core holes shooting straight up into the sky like angry geysers full of molten ash instead of water.

The entire caldera, in half a minute, looked as if someone had turned on a giant sprinkler. The black choppers had no chance. Desperately they tried to pull free of the caldera and gain elevation, but the ash columns were already a mile above them in the air. Some of the choppers exploded in midair from the extreme heat of the escaping gases, most of them fell to the volcano floor, their air intakes hopelessly clogged with ash.

The floor had already begun to crack up radiating out from the drill holes. In the center where the house had been a large ash column erupted as the crust broke up and sank into the seething red magma below. It was bittersweet to see the place that I had first experienced so much ecstasy with Anna disappear for forever, but I prided myself on the in depth planning I had done, which had ensured that the home in the basin hadn't been our final resting place.