by Peter Hernon
Atkins had already mentioned it to Weston. He’d had a brief conversation with him just before he left for the Pantex plant with Booker. He wanted to see how Weston would react when he casually told him that he’d seen the cracks himself and thought they looked pretty large. Weston hadn’t even blinked. He simply told him his observations might be useful later when they did a postmortem on the disaster. Then he walked away.
The man, Atkins realized listening to him here, was incredibly smooth. It wasn’t going to be easy to nail him.
A brigadier general from the 101st Airborne had begun to bring them up to date on the fighting when there was a sharp knock on the trailer’s metal door.
“You people better take a look at this,” said a paratrooper, whose face was streaked with black camouflage paint. He carried a machine gun.
They all poured out of the trailer into the cold, damp air. The shooting had stopped. The sound of patrolling helicopters echoed overhead.
Everyone’s eyes focused on the eastern sky, where the thick cloud cover had broken open.
Bands of brilliant lights were streaking across the horizon—blue, white, pale orange. Shimmering waves of color that seemed to change in hue and vividness as they rippled in the sky. The hills were rimmed in greenish light that seemed to hover just over the ridgeline.
The spectacle was riveting. The earthquake lights were brighter, the colors more vivid than the last time Atkins had seen them.
He felt the first movement then, a slight quiver.
Elizabeth looked at him.
The ground had started to shake.
NEAR BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 20
2:00 A.M.
GOVERNOR TAD PARKER FELT THE TREMOR.
His command post was in southern Kentucky twenty miles north of the Tennessee border. It was one of the sharpest tremors he’d experienced since the big earthquake.
They’d taken shelter in a remote, backwoods valley near Mammoth Cave, about twenty-five miles northeast of Bowling Green. For the last few days they’d let the hills screen them as much as possible, moving mainly by jeep and all-terrain vehicles. They’d changed position repeatedly, trying to avoid a confrontation with Army troops.
The governor was with a squad of the Kentucky National Guard. Fifty men. Most of the guard units in the state had ignored his call. Only five had turned out, and he’d had no complaints about their performance. About thirty men had taken positions in the hills around the mine. They could be overrun, but it wasn’t going to be easy. It was rugged country with a lot of good defensive positions. With any luck, they could delay the movement of the bomb for a long time.
And that was the best Parker could hope for. Delay.
He was under no illusions. There was little he could do to stop them.
When the latest tremor struck, Parker still hadn’t fallen asleep in his tent. He hadn’t been able to sleep more than a few hours in days. Getting out of his cot, he was unable to tie his boots. His hands fumbled with the knots.
Parker stepped outside his tent and saw the strange lights blazing in the sky. He stared at them for a long time. He’d heard about the eerie phenomenon. But this was the first time he’d actually seen it. He stood there, watching the bands of light swirling across the horizon. The spectacle fascinated him.
Once the ground started moving, the only thing that mattered was how long it would last. There’d been a few times during some of the earlier aftershocks when he’d almost screamed, thinking the shaking would never stop, that the earth would just go on heaving until everything on it—every building, church, home, and school was pulverized.
NEAR HICKORY, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 20
5:22 A.M.
“THAT WAS AT LEAST A MAG 5,” WALT JACOBS SAID with a professional’s cool detachment. Sitting with him in the rear of the Humvee, neither Atkins nor Elizabeth Holleran objected. The latest in a series of strong aftershocks that had started just before they left the river, it had snapped them sideways in their seats.
“They’re getting worse, aren’t they?” said Lauren Mitchell, who sat next to the driver.
“We’re getting more of them in the magnitude 4 or greater range,” Jacobs said. “The ground’s working up to something.”
Two hours earlier, an Army helicopter had landed in the front yard of Lauren’s home near Kentucky Lake with a message from John Atkins, telling her about the bomb and asking her to help them find a backroads route to the mine. She didn’t like leaving her grandson behind alone but had climbed aboard the chopper when a soldier agreed to stay with the boy.
After the strong tremor, she was starting to have serious second thoughts about her decision.
Using a radio headset, Lauren was giving directions to a convoy of ten vehicles as she led them on a cross-country journey from the river to the Golden Orient. Booker and the bomb were in the Humvee directly behind them. The other seismologists, Weston and Wren, followed in another all-terrain vehicle. They were flanked by a protective screen of M-1 tanks, three on each side.
Lauren wasn’t happy with the continued earthquakes. They scared her. So did the thought of going back to the mine, which had haunted her dreams for years. The Golden Orient had always been dangerous, deadly. A fifty-year history of methane explosions, roof cave-ins, and fires. Her husband had died there in a flash fire a decade before the mine closed, a victim of clean air regulations that made it unprofitable to produce high-sulfur-content coal.
They’d made slow progress since leaving the Mississippi, barely twenty-five miles in four hours. The backroads were muddy, washed out in places, and cut between steep hills covered with pine and scrub oak. The convoy had to make frequent stops as Army patrols fanned out in the dark looking for snipers.
During one halt, Elizabeth got out of the Humvee with Atkins. She told him what had happened the day before in the library annex, how someone had stolen her laptop computer from the equipment room.
“Any idea who it was?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see his face.” She’d tried to take a discreet look at every man who worked at the earthquake center. She didn’t detect anything unusual in their behavior or attitude toward her.
“It could have been anyone,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” Atkins said softly. “For starters, maybe someone wanted to check your E-mail messages.”
“But why?”
“What if they wanted to see if you’ve messaged anyone about those cracks we saw at the dam.” Atkins said. “Find out how much you know about that and whether you’ve told anyone.” Cracking a computer password wasn’t all that difficult, especially for an expert. Atkins knew hackers who could do it in less than twenty minutes.
“Weston?”
“Or his friend Marshal,” Atkins said. “I could see either of them wanting to take a look at whatever data you’ve got on that computer. Go on a fishing expedition. For all we know maybe they wanted to download the zipped files you got from Doctor Prable. Take a close look at his data and see if they could find something they could use against you later. Work up a case to discredit you if you try to go public with what happened at the dam.”
Atkins took Elizabeth by the shoulders, holding her tightly as he looked into her light gray eyes, which held such intelligence.
He’d lost one woman he loved. Sara. They’d gone into that building in Mexico City and gotten separated. He couldn’t allow that to happen again.
“I want you to stay close to me when we go into that mine,” he said. “No matter what happens, stay close to me.”
NEAR KALER, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 20
7:50 A.M.
AS HE’D PROMISED, PRESIDENT NATHAN ROSS WAS already there when the convoy arrived at the Golden Orient. Atkins saw him standing near the main entrance, talking to a rugged-looking man wearing white coveralls and a yellow hard hat. The two were surrounded by Secret Service agents and paratroopers, who were nervously scanning the surrounding
hills with binoculars and spotter scopes.
Helicopter gunships circled the ridges, swooping low, then pulling up and swinging around for another pass. Army patrols had spread out in force, looking for snipers. The mine was about thirty miles from the Tennessee border, 140 miles north of Memphis.
Steve Draper, the president’s science adviser, hustled over when he saw Atkins and Holleran get out of the Humvee. He looked grim.
“You’ll want to hear this,” he said. “It’s not good.”
The mine was just as Atkins remembered it. The large, gray metal building that housed the entrance didn’t appear damaged. It was a different story with the wooden tower that supported the massive wheel and counter weight that lowered the miners’ cage into the shaft. Leaning at a precarious angle, several of its support timbers had snapped in two. The adjoining tower and fly wheel, also badly damaged, operated the “skip shaft,” which powered the conveyor belt that brought out the coal.
With the towers out of service, two diesel engines had been flown in a day earlier to operate the elevator and power two huge fans that pushed fresh air into the shafts.
Atkins couldn’t shake the foreboding that had been building in him ever since the towers had first come into view over a rise in the hills. Ten stories tall, they stood there like dark monoliths. His eagerness to go on the offensive notwithstanding, descending into that mine would be the hardest thing he’d ever done. The risks of taking a nuclear weapon to its depths were secondary. Now that he was actually there, the thought of going underground was enough to trigger in him an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, of being buried alive.
“John, what’s wrong?” said Elizabeth, staring at him. He looked white, faint. “Are you sick?”
“I just forgot how much I like this place,” he said. He tried to smile, but his dry lips felt like they’d split open. His morale wasn’t helped after he met the man who’d been brought in to lead the party into the Golden Orient.
Glen “Doc” Murray had arrived four hours earlier on a military flight from the Mine Safety Academy in Beckley, West Virginia, where he was chief instructor. He’d just returned from inspecting the mine with two other disaster specialists from the academy.
Murray was a big man, over six-foot-three, with a gaunt, sunburned face and a short white beard. He wore “bunker gear,” the heavy protective clothing of a firefighter. He took off his thick leather gloves and helmet and used a towel to wipe his face, which was caked with sweat and coal dust.
Murray nodded to the new arrivals and for a moment seemed to be sizing them up. He didn’t look impressed or reassured by what he saw.
“The earthquake broke things up pretty bad down there,” Murray said in a low-pitched Appalachian drawl. “Part of the man shaft has collapsed. Other sections run clear for a couple hundred feet, then break off where the earth shifted. The main air shaft is blocked in places.”
It was what Atkins had feared all along. The big quake had knocked the hell out of the mine. This was going to be more difficult than any of them had imagined.
Murray went on, “We got down about eight hundred feet and had to leave the man shaft and move over to one of the air shafts. We got down another five levels and cut back over to the skip shaft.”
Murray took out a small, spiral notebook and sketched what he was talking about. The mine descended twenty levels. Each level, separated by about one hundred feet, consisted of a series of three or four parallel tunnels, each about a thousand feet long. These were connected by intersecting or crosscut tunnels, forming a gridwork pattern on each level. The long tunnels provided access to the coal seams.
The coal was removed by the “room-and-pillar” technique. Miners cut or blasted it out of the seams, forming rooms that opened onto the tunnels. The crews left behind sufficient pillars to support the overlying rock, or “hanging wall.”
Murray drew four shafts. The first of these, the miners’ elevator, or “man shaft,” ran down the center of the mine and carried the work crews to and from the different levels. The coal conveyor, or “skip shaft,” was a tunnel that once housed a conveyor belt for carrying the cut coal up to the surface. The skip shaft tunnel slanted at a forty-degree incline and was about five feet high and six feet wide. The conveyor had long since been dismantled and removed. Like the rungs of a ladder, the coal tunnels ran between the skip shaft on one end and the main air shaft on the other.
There were two air shafts, which Murray drew in the notebook. The main one was virtually identical to the skip shaft in its dimensions and angle of incline. It was used to circulate air throughout the mine and also made a good escape route in an emergency. The secondary air shaft ran up vertically through the mine, roughly paralleling the elevator shaft. Carved out of the rock, the shaft was four feet wide.
“We took the skip shaft down to the eighteen-hundred-foot level,” Murray said, drawing the position where they’d halted and turned back. “The man shaft is completely gone, caved in. But there’s a deep crack that’s opened up at that level. A fissure. I couldn’t tell how far down it goes. We started picking up a little methane and decided to pull out. My hope is we can ventilate the shafts awhile longer and clear out some of that gas.” He closed the notebook and put it back into a pocket in his bib coveralls.
“The bottom line here is I think I can get you down eighteen hundred feet—if we’re lucky and nothing else collapses. Is that deep enough for what you’ve got in mind?”
“It’ll have to be,” Booker said. He’d gone over the numbers several times with Thompson and Atkins. Based on the record of previous underground shots, a depth of two thousand feet would provide maximum seismic impact on the fault.
“How big is that bomb?” Murray asked.
“Approximately four feet by two and a half. It weighs 420 pounds,” Booker said.
Murray whistled between his teeth. “We’ll talk about that later,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you people there are a lot of ways to die in this old mine. And I’m not even including the methane, which is worry enough. Some of the roofs and wall ribs have caved in. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but whenever the ground moves, we’ve got more problems.”
Murray leaned over and spat. A wad of chewing tobacco bulged out his left cheek. “You got any other place to explode this bomb?”
“It’s got to be here,” said Steve Draper. “We don’t have any other options.”
Arms folded across his chest, Murray nodded as if to say he’d expected that answer. He seemed to be contemplating his boots, which were crusted with white powder.
Atkins noticed the president’s furrowed brow. He was following Murray’s description intently.
“Let’s talk about the methane,” Murray said. “You get a methane concentration of five to fifteen percent, you’re gonna risk an explosion. When we got down to eighteen hundred feet, we were reading three percent methane and it was starting to nudge up a little. That can be bad news.” He had a question for them. “You know what it’s like if you’re in one of those shafts and methane explodes below you?”
No one answered.
Murray said, “It’s like sitting inside a shotgun barrel.” He let his words hang there a moment, then asked how many were going.
“Six,” Atkins said. It was the absolute minimum. If anything happened to some of them, the others might still be able to get the job done. Booker was the only absolutely essential member of the group. Atkins wasn’t excited at the prospect of making the descent with Weston, but he had to admit that Weston had been acting with unusual restraint. He was listening attentively and was not trying to run the show.
“Make that seven,” Booker said. “I want to take a robot with us. It can carry the weapon and other supplies.” He’d already made arrangements with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to have the robot and other equipment sent to the mine. The president himself had ordered the transportation. The helicopter was expected any minute.
“Can it maneuver?” Murray
asked. He looked skeptical.
“On a dime,” Booker said. “It can go anywhere we can. It’s forty inches tall. The arms are retractable.”
“Does this robot of yours have a name?” Murray said. His crinkled face broke into a frown.
“Neutron,” said Booker.
“That’s perfect,” Murray said, still frowning. “I don’t like it, but as long as I don’t have to tell it what to do, I don’t have a problem.” He spat again and cleared his throat. “In a couple minutes, I’ll give you some instructions on the breathing apparatus and other equipment you’ll be carrying. Listen hard and pay attention. Your life could depend on what I’m going to tell you.”
Murray looked at his watch. His arms, hands, and wrists were thick-boned, the forearms wrapped with coils of muscle. “If you still want to do this, we’ll start down in another hour.”
“JEFF, great to see you.”
Booker had hurried over to a helicopter as it landed on the mine’s gravel parking lot. It took off quickly as soon as Jeff Burke was on the ground and his equipment unloaded. Booker pumped his friend’s hand.
Burke had arrived straight from the ORNL. He came bearing gifts. “I’ve got Neutron,” he said. “Everything you asked for.”
The small robot was covered in plastic sheeting. So were the two boxes of explosive charges that had also been shipped from Oak Ridge. Booker planned to use them to seal up the mine before the bomb was detonated.
Booker couldn’t help smiling. Burke had fitted Neutron with an oversized football helmet. It was bright orange, the color of his favorite college team, the University of Tennessee. His alma mater. It even had a big UT logo on the side.
“I couldn’t find a miner’s helmet big enough to go over the actuator housing,” Burke said. “I wanted to protect it. This was the best I could come up with.”
“And so you just happened to find that helmet,” Booker said.
“What can I say. It fit,” Burke said, grinning.