Charon's landing

Hope. They opened satellite offices in London, Paris, New York, Washington, and San Francisco. And they started getting violent.

“Members of the group have been arrested in Mozambique with enough explosives to destroy the Cabora Bassa dam. In Brazil, they’ve taken responsibility for demolishing about ten million dollars’ worth of heavy equipment used in forest clearing. In Washington State, a PEAL activist is facing manslaughter charges after the steel spike he put into a tree caused a chainsaw to kick back and kill the logger operating it. Your own Secretary of the Interior had a sack full of dead spotted owls left on his doorstep. The bag had the PEAL logo on it. Nothing is beyond them.

“They’ve destroyed gas stations in Germany, Holland, and Belgium. They are suspected of breaking into a German chemical company and destroying several million dollars’ worth of experiments. They’ve broken into laboratories to release test animals, many of them infected with diseases or experimental vaccines with unknown side effects. In short, they are highly motivated, well funded, and dangerous, and their next target will undoubtedly be Alaska.”

The President was startled by Connie’s summation. “How can you be sure that they will target Alaska?”

“Because their ship, Hope, is currently anchored in Prince William Sound, just outside the safety zone set up around the tanker shipping lanes headed into Valdez. And because Jan Veorhoven is said to be aboard.”

“Have they taken any action?”

“Not yet, but I consider their very presence a threat, don’t you?”

“In light of what you’ve just said, yes,” the President agreed. “But there isn’t a goddamn thing we can do about it.”

“I know they have a legal right to be there, but I want to make sure they are number one on the suspect list if anything happens.”

“I’ll tell Dick Henna at the FBI to keep his ears open.”

“I talked to him as soon as I heard the Hope was headed to Alaska. He promised to stay on his toes.” Connie’s last remark was almost flippant, but her eyes had hardened and her mouth was pursed into a tight line. She was serious. And scared.

George Washington University Washington, DC

Mercer stood as the large group of students began a disinterested round of applause. He was sure that they weren’t applauding his presence, just the fact that they didn’t have to suffer through another lecture by their regular teacher, Professor Lynn Snyder. The one hundred and twenty students in the lecture hall were mostly freshmen, and though the school year was only a few weeks old, they had already developed a special loathing for Introduction to Geology. Professor Snyder’s presentation was as dry as the rocks she forced them to study.

Lynn Snyder had been a doctoral candidate at Penn State at the same time as Mercer, and despite the few years separating them, she looked fifteen years older. While he had gone to the U.S. Geological Survey after receiving his Ph.D. and later to the private sector as a consultant, Lynn had ducked immediately back into academia. It always amazed Mercer that so many Ph.D.’s spent their entire careers creating clones of themselves in a never-ending chain of teachers.

Lynn knew ninety percent of the class didn’t give a damn about geology. They signed up only to fulfill the school’s requirement for two semesters of science. Still, she hoped for that rare student who embraced the subject.

However, that special type of student was few and far between, so Professor Snyder hit on the idea of giving her classes a practical application of geology in the form of Dr. Philip Mercer. Mercer was a field man who’d proved that studying igneous inclusions and anticlines could mean millions of dollars in gold or oil or some other precious mineral for mining corporations and substantial finders’ fees for himself. Though his lecture taught nothing critical, it was usually entertaining and on the end-of-semester comment cards, his visit was always a highlight.

Mercer smiled at Lynn as he joined her on the lectern after his introduction. “Once more into the breach.”

“Knock ’em dead.” Lynn gave Mercer a playful pat on the arm.

Mercer adjusted the microphone and busied himself with a sheaf of notes he had no intention of using. His delay was a simple speaking tool to calm the audience and hold their attention for a few moments. The hundred students were spread throughout the lecture hall in GWU’s Funger Hall, one of the urban campus’s many classroom buildings. He thrust his left hand into the pocket of his light gray suit pants; his jacket was draped over a chair behind him on the dais. The room was at least eighty-five degrees despite the air conditioning. He fondly recalled the chilled air he’d felt in Alaska only four days ago.

“I know what you’re all thinking, ‘Great, a guest lecturer even more boring than Professor Snyder.’ ”

A co-ed’s voice called out seductively, “That’s not what I was thinking, handsome.”

A chorus of female whoops and cheers followed almost immediately. Mercer smiled sheepishly and adjusted his tie to cover his embarrassment.

As the cheering was dying down, Mercer leaned into the microphone and looked toward where the first voice had come. “You make me wish schools had never done away with spanking unruly students.”

Another few moments of cheering and laughter delayed Mercer’s lecture.

“How many of you are here because the university requires a year of science before they give you a poli-sci degree? And be honest.” A sea of hands were raised all across the hall. “And how many of you are genuinely interested in learning geology?” A few hands shyly went up before being lowered quickly.

“To those few who planned on learning today, I apologize, because I’m not a teacher. In fact, I don’t understand half of the things Professor Snyder will teach you this year. As she said in my introduction, I did get my Ph.D. at the same time as she did, but I had already graduated from the Colorado School of Mines. Her goal was to teach geology, while I wanted to apply it.”

He had a relaxed, unrehearsed speaking style that caught his audience’s interest as he spun tales of mining disasters and of wondrous treasures hacked from the earth. This was not the stuff of science as they’d expected but adventure stories told with a natural eye for the more fabulous elements of the tales. He talked about the fabled early days of the Kimberley diamond rush in South Africa where desperate paupers became overnight millionaires and of the Molly Maguires’ strike in the Pennsylvania coal fields that led to the establishment of the forty-hour workweek. He described what it was like to actually work miles below the earth in dust-choked shafts and dark tunnels where the constant strain of knowing gravity was pressing billions of tons of rocks down around you had driven many men insane.

Mercer spoke about the history of mining and quarrying, from the prehistoric days of scavenging shards of flint to make spear points to the earliest actual open pit mines where water-soaked wood wedges were used to cleave slabs of stone that became the temples and monuments along the Nile River. He talked about the ancient mines where children were forced to hand dig for ore, and their lives might last as much as a month but more often ended only days after entering a shaft. He talked about technological advances, about giant earth-moving equipment, huge machines that weighed as much as twenty thousand tons yet were still able to move under their own power. He talked about explosives, how four hundred pounds of dynamite registers seven on the Richter scale when set off on the surface and about Primacord fuses that burn at twenty-five thousand feet per second. He kept the students enthralled for an hour with stories and anecdotes from a world few of them ever knew existed.

When he finished, there was a smattering of applause centered at the back of the room, started by a single figure in the very last row. As the others stopped clapping, the lone figure, a woman, continued. Her applause was slow, almost taunting. A clap, a pause, and then another clap. And another pause.

The woman stood, strands of her hair escaping from under a red bandanna. Despite the oppressive heat in the hall, she wore a shapeless bush jacket over a dark T-shirt. Mercer couldn’t really make out any details of her face as she continued her desultory applause, but there was something compelling about her posture, an undercurrent of poise and confidence that her shabby clothes couldn’t hide.

“These stories are all very interesting, Dr. Mercer, quite entertaining actually, but you brag about your accomplishments with the evil candor of some Nazi scientist discussing the results of his genocidal experiments. I