pounded her fist on the table. People glanced at them. Even the glassy-eyed waiters looked momentarily interested.
She started to get up, snatching the straps of her briefcase. To hell with this, she thought. Dietz had been all wrong about Atkins. He was a total jerk. She’d try someone else. Maybe Jacobs.
“No, please,” Atkins said, motioning for her to sit down. “Don’t go.”
Elizabeth Holleran took a breath. She sat back down again. Her eyes were flashing.
“The key issue, it seems to me, is to run a probability analysis of Doctor Prable’s data,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I doubt it’s accurate, but after what’s happened down here, I’d sure want to examine it. He’s talking about a period of maximum stress in another nine days. All my training and instincts tell me he’s way off base, that his work is seriously flawed. But I keep asking myself, what if in some crazy way he’s right? It doesn’t leave much time.”
“And you think he might be right?”
There was that irritating smile again, she thought.
“As a seismologist, I think that’s highly unlikely. But you had to know him, his intellect and integrity. I don’t see how we can afford not to check his theory out.”
She was still angry and a little dismayed with herself for wanting to continue talking to this man. She’d read about Atkins. She guessed he was in his mid-forties. He had a creased, ruddy face and big shoulders and hands. The nose was all wrong, pushed slightly off center and flattened at the bridge.
She took out two computer disks and laid them on the table.
“It’s all right there,” she said. “I would have asked Jim Dietz to take a look at them, but there wasn’t time. After that 7.1, I wanted to get right down here.”
Atkins noticed it first, how their beer glasses started shaking. It was almost imperceptible, then the movement became more pronounced. The glasses were rattling, jiggling on the table. The beer splashed out of them. The ground lurched, a sharp sideways motion. Not much, but strong enough to knock a plate-glass mirror down from the wall. It shattered on the floor.
Atkins figured a magnitude 3. Nothing major, but the restaurant erupted in screams. After the last few days, everyone was on edge. Even a minor aftershock was enough to start a stampede. People knocked over tables as they pushed and shoved their way to the front door.
“They’re going to run right over us,” Atkins said, sliding the table back against the wall. They were near the door, right in the path.
He slipped Elizabeth’s computer disks into his jacket pocket. There was another moderate shake, stronger than the first. A row of liquor bottles fell off the shelves behind the bar. Broken window glass rained down onto the street from the building’s upper stories.
“Don’t… go… out… there!” Atkins shouted. He heard the glass exploding on the pavement outside. “Stay off the street! You’re safer in here.”
It didn’t do any good. A heavyset man, who’d left his wife behind in his rush to get out, elbowed his way toward the door. An elderly woman fell, and Atkins had to push back two people who started to step on her. Elizabeth grabbed the woman by the shoulders and pulled her out of the way.
There was a pileup at the front door. Blows were being thrown as a couple dozen people frantically tried to push and shove their way outside. Atkins had seen it all before in Mexico City. The dead stacked up five and six feet deep around the doors of the high-rises. Trampled. The faces battered beyond recognition.
A solid-looking man in his mid-fifties, white hair and black blazer, collided with Elizabeth. In his haste to flee, he’d looped his arm through the strap in her briefcase. He was pulling her down.
Atkins slammed the man against the wall, freeing Elizabeth’s arm. Eyes bulging with fear, the man swung savagely at Atkins’ face. Ducking under the blow, Atkins hit him in the jaw and stomach, hard punches thrown from the shoulder. The man sat down, his back sliding against the wall.
Many of the patrons cowered under tables. The light fixtures over the tables were swaying. Atkins saw it, felt it in the restaurant. The quake had been nothing at all. But it was making people snap.
ABOARD HK-101, KENTUCKY NATIONAL GUARD BLACK HAWK
JANUARY 12
6:12 A.M.
SEEN FROM THE BELLY OF THE HELICOPTER, THE plowed muddy fields looked dotted with sand-piles. It was shortly after dawn, and they were clipping along the cotton fields of the Missouri boot heel at two thousand feet. In the shadowy light, it was easy for Atkins’ eyes to play tricks on him.
The strange starburst markings on the ground were a yellowish, powdery-white color. When the light was better, he noticed that the impressions looked smooth and feathered at the edges. Some were huge. They peppered the floodplain that spread out for miles on either side of the Mississippi.
His face glued to a porthole window, Atkins kept clapping his hands, trying to warm them in the biting cold. The team of six geologists on their way to southwestern Kentucky sat on bench seats in the helicopter’s unheated cargo bay. The big olive-green chopper belonged to the Kentucky National Guard.
Atkins knew he was looking at sand blows, but he’d never seen any that compared with these. Each one of those white splotches was a scar, the remains of a miniature volcano that had blown up during the great quakes of 1811 and 1812. The ground beneath them had turned to quicksand.
“Looks like the whole damn boot heel blew up,” Atkins said, shaking his head in disbelief as he tried to imagine what it must have been like.
The sand blows, the result of massive liquefaction, were among the most dramatic evidence that remained of the earthquakes that had also formed fissures and deep craters. There’d also been widespread landslides. The area of severe liquefaction covered 48,000 square kilometers, making it one of the largest earthquake liquefaction zones in the world. The only rival was in the Ganges river plain of India, the result of Himalayan earthquakes.
Liquefaction occurred when an earthquake shook wet soil that was loosely packed and fine-grained, usually a mix of clay and sand. It turned into a dense liquid that resembled quicksand. If the pressure was heavy enough, sand and water were pushed to the surface with such explosive force that they formed sand volcanoes or sand blows. Many were eight to twenty feet across. Some were well over a hundred feet. The hardened conical sides of the sand blows eventually disappeared, leaving all those white marks on the table-flat countryside.
The process had always fascinated Atkins. Jacobs opened his laptop and punched a few keys. The screen displayed various examples of the bizarre sand features, which he showed to Atkins and one of the National Guardsmen who sat beside him.
Jacobs gave directions to the pilot over a headset microphone. Atkins tried to wake up. He’d barely arrived at the airport on time.
On the way, he’d stopped off at the earthquake center. He got there at 4:30 A.M. and left a detailed E-mail message for Guy Thompson. Against his better judgment, he asked his friend to try to do a probability analysis of Prable’s earthquake projections. He also asked him to check the data against Jacobs’ observations. He’d left the two computer disks Elizabeth Holleran had given him. Convinced it was a waste of time, he’d told Thompson to try it only if he had the time. That wouldn’t be easy. Thompson was already working eighteen-hour days.
Atkins suddenly regretted what he’d done. Guy would have plenty of reasons to blow up, and he couldn’t blame him.
He remembered again how he’d stood in the street with Elizabeth Holleran after they left the Blue Sax. She thanked him for pulling that man off her. But she was still completely focused. She asked him again if he could have someone do a computer analysis of Prable’s earthquake data. A tough, good-looking young lady. But he still wished he hadn’t given those disks to Thompson. As soon as he got a chance, he’d try to call him and tell him to forget it.
Jacobs said, “We’re going to fly over the world’s largest sand blow then swing north about twenty miles to New Madrid.”
