the cops why you wanted Elizabeth’s computer.” He knew he should have held off, waited until they were out of danger, but he couldn’t help himself. He was too angry.
Wren didn’t look in the least surprised or shaken, but his entire demeanor changed. The soft-spoken geologist, ever deferential to Weston and his superiors, spoke with bullet hardness.
“I wondered if you’d ever figure out it was me,” he said, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got another problem to deal with here, don’t we? We need to talk about the dam at Kentucky Lake and what you saw there. Those incredible cracks. I sure haven’t forgotten them. I doubt you have either. Weston says you told him you’d seen them. That was very indiscreet, Doctor Atkins. And Doctor Holleran makes several references to them in notes she typed in her laptop. Did you know it was Weston’s idea I steal your computer? I wish I’d thought of it myself. There’s some very interesting information stored in zipped files on your hard drive.”
He put his right hand in the pocket of his coveralls and took out a pistol.
Atkins recognized the automatic. It had belonged to Walt Jacobs. He’d lost sight of it after Jacobs had jumped to his death.
“I know,” Wren said. “First Jacobs pulls a gun on Doctor Booker, and now it’s my turn. Frankly, I wasn’t planning on using a pistol. Didn’t think I’d need one in a place like this where there are so many ways to get killed.” Wren looked at his watch. “We’ve got one hour, forty minutes, and counting until blastoff. Turns out maybe it was a lucky break we got separated from the others. Gives us a chance to work all this out in private. In a minute, I’m going back up that shaft with your extra foam tanks and see if I can get by that blowtorch up there. You won’t need yours anymore, and I wouldn’t want them to go to waste.”
Atkins carried one of the two forty-pound foam sprayers they’d brought into the mine.
Wren raised the pistol. He was less than five feet from Atkins. The stubby barrel was pointed at his chest. Staring at the black hole in the muzzle, Atkins felt helpless, unable to move. He and Elizabeth unstrapped their tanks and set them down.
THE weather had slowly improved. The thick clouds and gray overcast had broken up. As the morning slipped into afternoon, the sun started to shine again.
Ross found himself checking his watch every few minutes. Fighting continued in isolated pockets, but, for the most part, the Army had brought it under control. Despite nightmarish logistical problems, the evacuations were proceeding. Troops were out in the country, escorting thousands of people out of the danger zone. Some of the convoys were a mile long.
Steve Draper quickly chilled even this meager dose of good news. He’d just gotten a radio message from the mine.
“They’ve got trouble down there, sir. There’s been a fire. The flames have separated the group.”
“Where are they right now?” Ross asked. Draper had drawn a rough map of the mine to follow their progress. He pointed out the probable locations.
“Some of them are huddled in the skip shaft right about here,” he said, pointing to the map. “Just above Level 10. They’ve had a methane explosion down there. The fires are still burning. Three others are trapped on one of the lower levels.”
“Who is it?” the president asked.
“Atkins, Elizabeth Holleran, and the geologist from the Seismic Commission, Mark Wren.” Draper’s voice was husky. He knew the odds.
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Nothing, sir,” Draper said, shaking his head. “Doc Murray says they’re going to lay down some foam and see if they can get through the fire and reach them.”
“I don’t know if they should risk that,” Ross said slowly. For all anyone knew, Atkins and the others were already dead. It might be a fatal mistake to go looking for them. The more prudent course, Ross thought, would be for the survivors to keep looking for an escape route. The brutal truth was they were running out of time. The bomb was scheduled to detonate in about an hour and a half.
Ross stared hard at the ground, hands clasped behind his back. “How do they propose getting through the fire to look for Atkins?”
Draper smiled. He couldn’t help it, even at such a moment. “They’re sending down Neutron.”
WREN took a step toward Elizabeth, who’d been holding her hands behind her back. She threw a fistful of rock and coal dust in his face.
Staggering backward, rubbing his eyes with a gloved hand. Wren started shooting. He fired blindly, the gunshots echoing off the walls.
Atkins grabbed Elizabeth. They ran down the tunnel and turned left into a crosscut. A large picnic table was there, along with a few wooden storage boxes and hand tools. Atkins had noticed similar places during the descent. Murray had explained they were rest stations, where the miners ate lunch, took their breaks, drank coffee.
A long crowbar lay in the dust next to the table. Atkins picked it up. Nearly seven feet long with a pointed end, it was like the one Murray had carried. He couldn’t believe his luck. It wasn’t much, but at least he had something in his hands to fight with.
They turned a corner and entered another tunnel. It was lined on both sides with room-and-pillar cuts, black holes that looked like the eye sockets of a skull. They turned off their lamps and in the dark heard a noise, boots on gravel. Wren was coming after them.
“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.
