Peter Hernon - 8.4

He still hadn’t figured out what had happened. A freak radio signal might have triggered the premature detonation just as Marshal and Wren had suggested. That kind of thing happened often enough during highway blasting, often with tragic results. And yet Atkins still had his doubts and that bothered him.

One thing remained fixed in his mind: there was no way in hell he would have gone into a mine with Marshal. Weston must have realized that.

Looking well-groomed even in a dirty jumpsuit, Weston was clean shaven, something Atkins hadn’t managed for several days. He’d been wearing the same clothes for nearly a week—a pair of twill trousers, cotton sweater, and an insulated parka. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d changed or had a shower.

Weston started with the announcement that the Seismic Commission had broken all ties with the governor of Kentucky. “If I could make a personal comment,” he said. “I believe the course he’s taken is treasonable. I also believe it’s tragic. I liked the man.”

He then made a stunning comment. He said he’d come to agree with the minority viewpoint, believing that a deep explosion was their only viable chance to break the lethal cycle of earthquakes. He said he’d gone on record with this in a letter to the president.

“I want to apologize to anyone who feels I was short-tempered or… unreasonable these last few days,” he said, looking straight at Atkins and Elizabeth. “I’ve got to be honest. I doubt this will work, but I can’t think of any other option. I keep coming back to Doctor Holleran’s data about previous earthquakes. It’s what finally convinced me we’ve got to try something. The paleoseismic record of those earthquakes was overwhelming. I couldn’t ignore it.”

“Wow,” Elizabeth said softly to Atkins. “I knew about Walt. I wanted to let him tell you himself. But Weston’s a real surprise.”

It was interesting, but it didn’t change anything, Atkins thought. After this crisis passed—if it passed—he still meant to call for an investigation about those cracks they’d seen in the Kentucky Dam. He figured he owed it to the people who’d drowned when the dam was swept away. Weston should have called for an evacuation. He hadn’t done so, and Atkins vowed he wouldn’t let the matter drop.

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.

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.

“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.