The message was quickly repeated, then the helicopter moved off, climbing rapidly. It was headed due east, toward the uranium processing plant.
“There it is!” Bobby yelled. They were on a slight rise. A chalky cloud, so faint as to be almost indistinguishable in the predawn gray, was drifting toward them. Still several miles away, it seemed to spread out as it rose higher in the sky.
Lauren already had the Chevrolet turned around. At the first fork in the road, she headed south. The two-lane blacktop was torn to hell and the car’s chassis and springs took a beating, but she kept the speed at fifty miles an hour.
She glanced at the fuel gauge, the first time she’d remembered to do so.
The red needle was nudging toward empty.
She knew there was a small town up ahead. Hammonds. It had a gas station.
When she arrived, ten or twelve cars and trucks were pulled in close to the station’s single tank. The owner was operating a cash and carry business. His brick filling station was in shambles, but the lone pump was still working. He carried a rifle in the crook of his arm.
Lauren figured she’d driven about thirty-live miles since the helicopter had warned them. Surely they were out of danger, but she kept nervously watching the sky for a yellow cloud.
When it was her turn at the pump, the owner asked for cash in advance. Twenty dollars a gallon. Dressed in a soiled hunting jacket, he had a full black beard and was chewing a plug of tobacco.
“Dammit, Tom. This ain’t right and you know it. You’re robbing folks.”
The man who was waiting in line behind Lauren had gotten out of a battered red pickup. His voice was laced with anger.
Lauren had fifteen dollars. She handed it to the man with the rifle.
“Please,” she said. “Just let me have two gallons.” That would be enough to get home.
“You heard the price. That’ll buy you three-quarters of a gallon.” He pumped it out to the nickel.
“Tom, some people are going to die if they can’t drive,” the man behind her said. His words were cold, hard. He was bareheaded, maybe sixty years old, and had a leathery face.
“Mind your own business, Harris,” the man said. “I’ll run my business how I see fit.”
More angry words were exchanged. The bareheaded man took a few steps closer to the station owner, pulled a short-barreled pistol from the pocket of his jacket, and held it to the man’s head. The owner’s eyes bulged. He dropped his rifle.
“Take five gallons, lady,” the man said. “Then you and the boy get the hell out of here.”
OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
JANUARY 13
3:40 A.M.
THE CLOUD OF DUST SHOWED CLEARLY ON BURKE’S television monitor as he followed Neutron’s progress through the massive building. A piece of the concrete roof had almost fallen on the robot.
“That was close,” Booker said.
Burke nodded, studiously working the controls. Neutron had opened the fire door and moved into another part of the D-4 building. The uranium and plutonium storage areas were divided into dozens of separate vaults.
With Burke operating the control panel, Neutron began pouring a thick spray of foam over the storage bunker. There was just enough left in the canisters for one good soaking.
The ground shook again. Another bad one, the movement was horizontal, a sharp back-and-forth motion. Booker saw the front wall of D-4 start to buckle.
“Get out of there!” the fire captain shouted at them over a loudspeaker. “Pull back!”
The huge building was teetering.
“What about it, Jeff?” Booker asked his friend. If that front wall fell, they’d be crushed.
“I’m not leaving the robot,” Burke said. “I’ve got seven years of work tied up in that machine.”
They were experiencing a swarm of aftershocks, each stronger in intensity. Another part of the roof fell in. Booker heard it crash loudly to the ground.
The walls were starting to sway.
“Come on, Jeff!”
Burke hadn’t moved. Booker doubted he’d even heard him as he hunched over his laptop monitor, manipulating the controls.
Booker was getting ready to grab his friend and pull him to safety when he saw the robot emerge from the rubble. Rolling through a cloud of dust, the machine was using its powerful mechanical arms to clear a path through a pile of concrete and twisted steel that blocked D-4’s front door.
“I was worried about the durability of the metal framing,” Burke said, still staring at his computer keyboard. “I don’t think—”
“Jeff, let’s go!”
Burke started after Booker. Moving quickly on its omnidirectional platform, the robot followed them.
NEAR BLYTHEVILLE, ARKANSAS
JANUARY 13
6:44 A.M.
ATKINS GLANCED AT HIS WATCH. IT HAD BEEN WELL over four hours since the quake, and they still didn’t have a seismograph up and running at the epicenter. He clenched his hands on the wheel of the Explorer. It was incredible, from his perspective the geological equivalent to suffering a heart attack and waiting four hours before checking into the hospital for some tests. He could feel his chest tightening, the pressure building at his temples.
Distant seismographs were recording the aftershocks, but there was no substitute for having an instrument right at the epicenter. They wouldn’t miss any of the smaller aftershocks that way, the swarms of magnitude 2 and 3 earthquakes that other seismographs might not pick up. Knowing about those small quakes was important in gauging how much seismic energy remained locked along the fault.
They simply had to get it up and running. It was damned important. Atkins felt like grabbing the seismograph, running out into a field, and setting it up. Just pick a spot. Any spot.
Stop it, he told himself. They needed to find a suitable place or they’d blow everything.
He threw the Explorer into reverse, backed up a couple hundred yards, and turned down a dirt trail he’d noticed a few minutes earlier. He wanted to get off the main highway. He drove slowly, looking for a place. A quarter mile down a muddy path for tractors, he crossed a dry creek bed. A weather-beaten picnic table was off to the side under a stand of poplars. It would make a good platform for the seismograph.
“How about right here?” he said.
“Looks fine,” Elizabeth said. Within minutes, she had the instrument hooked up. She was much more skilled than Atkins with the seismograph. About the size of a briefcase, the rugged device was powered by two small solar panels and also had a backup battery pack. The data was digitally recorded on disk.
Atkins ran a quick field test: the starter, pendulum, and timing circuits were all functional as was the backup analogue recording drum and film. Elizabeth plugged a laptop computer into a port on the side of the machine so they could monitor the data visually. The battery supply was good for forty-eight hours.
Atkins wished they’d brought along a gravimeter, a portable machine that could measure changes in gravitational strength triggered by the rise or fall of the land during an earthquake. The instrument could also detect variations in rock densities and was another tool to try to zero in on how much strain energy remained locked in the ground.
