Peter Hernon - 8.4

“I want you to stay here. Keep your light out,” Atkins whispered.

“Forget it,” Elizabeth answered. “I’m coming with you.”

Groping their way down the tunnel in the dark, they came to another crosscut. Atkins knew they couldn’t afford to play hide-and-seek for long. They might get lost, and besides, there wasn’t time. Every second mattered.

“John, I’m happy as hell to leave you two in peace down here,” Wren said, his voice booming out in the darkness. “I’m going to end this foolishness and head back to the skip shaft. Maybe I can get past that fire up on the next level and join the others. Wish me luck.”

“We’ve got to follow him,” Atkins told Elizabeth. “If we’re going to get out of this, we’ll need those extinguishers.”

Using their headlamps, switching them on seconds at a time, they made their way back to the main tunnel. They saw Wren’s light about fifty yards in front of them, swaying from side to side. He was running.

“Maybe we can get in front of him,” Atkins said. They ran down another tunnel, slowing at every crosscut.

Atkins was sure Wren could hear them. Their footsteps were loud on the hard, tamped-down rock of the tunnel floor. Gunfire suddenly exploded in front of them. Three shots. Something stung Atkins’ right forearm just below the elbow. He’d been hit. He couldn’t tell if it was a bullet or a rock fragment. He felt a stab of pain when he moved his arm.

He pushed Elizabeth down behind one of the pillars that supported the roof.

They turned off their headlamps.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Wren said. “Let’s settle this quickly. Doctor Weston will breathe a lot easier if he knows you’re dead. The fact is he’s hoping I’ll get killed, too, so he can blame those cracks at the dam on my negligence. He’ll say I was taking payoffs, not doing the regular inspections. The very thing he’s guilty of himself.”

Atkins heard Wren’s footsteps as he came closer to their hiding place. Before they’d turned off their headlamps, he’d noticed a pattern of large cracks extending across the roof of the tunnel. It wouldn’t take much for the whole thing to cave in, another good tremor. He remembered how Murray had chipped away at the roof with a crowbar. A few light taps had caused an entire section to collapse.

Atkins gripped the crowbar in both hands and hefted it. His arm burned and was starting to stiffen up.

Do it near the rib, where the roof and wall meet, he told himself, recalling what Murray had said.

He peered around the pillar and saw the light from Wren’s helmet coming toward him, moving in rhythm to his footsteps.

“Frankly, if I were you, I’d have waited for the bomb to go off,” Wren said. “You won’t feel a thing. You’ll just turn into gas, probably some form of hydrocarbon. You should have stayed hidden. Now I’ve got to shoot you.”

BOOKER made the last adjustments on Neutron’s control panel. The robot was armed with Murray’s forty-pound canister of fire-fighting foam and the twenty-pound canister that Jacobs had carried.

“You’re sure that thing’s fireproof?” Murray asked.

“He’ll roll right through it,” Booker said. “The trick will be getting him down the skip shaft. It’s hard to gauge distances by remote control. I don’t want him to pitch forward. Then we’d be in trouble.”

Booker, Murray, and Weston were crouched in the skip shaft thirty yards up from the fire that was still pouring out of the main tunnel on Level 10. They’d managed to climb up as far as Level 9. The tunnel was partially smoke filled, but there was no sign of an active fire. A few yards beyond that point, another cave-in had blocked the shaft.

Murray was sure another fire was burning somewhere else in the mine. The rock that blocked the skip shaft was warm to the touch.

They had their emergency air tanks turned on. Their masks were fitted with transistor-sized radio receivers and speakers that allowed them to talk to each other.

Weston wasn’t saying much. He was preoccupied with worries. He knew what Wren had in mind for Atkins and Elizabeth. They’d discussed it in detail before they made their descent into the mine. If the two raised any questions about the cracks that had opened up in the dam at Kentucky Lake before the big quake, there might be serious trouble. One thing might lead to another, all of it bad. He’d read enough of Elizabeth’s computer files to know she’d written extensive notes on what she’d seen at the dam.

He also recalled Atkins’ veiled threat about the cracks a few days earlier. Weston thought Atkins was feeling him out, trying to see how he’d react.

Fortunately, he’d kept no records of the money he’d received during the last six years from a contractor who’d done routine maintenance on the dam. He’d allowed the contractor to pad his bills, not much, just a few percentage points here and there, but over time it added up to nearly $2 million. There was no paper trail, and the work hadn’t had any bearing on the disaster. No dam in the world could have withstood an 8.4 quake. And yet if an inquiry began, it could ultimately lead right to his door. He had to downplay the seriousness of those cracks when they first appeared.

In a sense, the disaster was a godsend. It had washed away the evidence. All he needed to say about the cracks was the truth, at least part of it, that they’d tried to have them repaired before the earthquake struck. An evacuation order might have started a panic. They’d done everything they could, but a horrendous act of nature had doomed their efforts.

The key was to make sure Atkins and Elizabeth Holleran never talked. And if everything went extremely well, maybe Wren would also die down there. Wren and Stan Marshal had both received kickbacks from the contractor. Marshal had panicked and tried to kill Atkins and Elizabeth Holleran by blowing them up during those seismic reflection tests. It was crude, stupid, and careless. Badly frightened, Marshal would keep his mouth shut, but Wren was another matter. The man was quite capable of asking for more money. Weston knew it was only a matter of time before he’d have to deal with him.

All things considered, this could work out splendidly. He just needed to survive.

“How much time do we have?” Weston asked.

“About an hour and a half,” Murray said.

With Booker operating the controls, the robot slowly started to descend the steep incline of the skip shaft, clasping the heavy canisters of foam with its clawed “man extenders.” It was briefly lost to view as it rolled through the flames and smoke that continued to dart out of the tunnel on Level 10. Booker glimpsed the robot’s orange helmet through the swirling smoke. Then, suddenly, it reemerged from the inferno.

Outfitted with its television monitor, audio receiver, and powerful spotlights. Neutron gave Booker a clear image of its progress down the shaft.

“It’s coming up on the entrance to Level 11,” he said. “There’s some smoke down there, but it doesn’t look too bad.” He carefully guided Neutron out of the shaft and into the coal tunnel.

Watching the television monitor, he saw a miner’s headlamp burning far down the tunnel. It seemed to be moving.

Then he heard what sounded like small explosions. Three of them. The sound was clear, unmistakable.

“Those are gunshots,” he said.

HIS HEADLAMP TURNED OFF, ATKINS FELT A SHARP pain in his right arm and shoulder as he reached around the stone pillar with the long crowbar and chipped hard at the tunnel’s roof. He’d gauged the distance carefully before he’d switched off his lamp and hoped he was hitting the right place as he dug into the rock again and again, prying at it, wincing at the effort. His arm felt like hot needles had been shoved up under the skin.