“Then let’s move it,” Ross said.
Troop carriers armed with .50-caIiber machine guns flanked the convoy. They were going to leave the same way they’d come in, following back roads and cutting across open pastures. No one doubted that it was going to be a wild, dangerous ride.
Atkins, Elizabeth, and Murray jumped into one of the Humvees. “Tighten your belts to the max,” said the driver. He had a light blond mustache and a boyish face. “This road’s a bitch, and we’re gonna be making tracks.”
FRED Booker tucked up his legs and sat with his back against the wall. The stone was warm. The amount of heat being generated deep in the ground still amazed him. He unzipped his jumpsuit. He was already soaked to the skin with sweat, and it was getting more difficult to breathe. He thought about putting on his face mask, then smiled to himself. The damn thing was hot and uncomfortable and in a few minutes it wouldn’t matter anyway.
He had his headlamp turned on, a tapering wedge of light illuminating the darkness. The repeated tremors were knocking the hell out of the mine. He heard a tunnel collapse in the depths. Chunks of rock broke off the ceiling.
The temblors were coming with greater force.
He held three strands of non-1 detonating cord. He’d already connected them to an old-fashioned twist-action blasting machine, which rested on his lap. When the moment came, he’d give the handle a hard, clockwise twist. The twist would supply just enough electrical current to trigger the blasting caps attached to the plastic explosives he’d placed in quantity on Level 8. He’d wired thirty sticks in the short time since Atkins had left.
That was more than enough to seal all of the shafts.
Neutron was positioned ten feet away in the middle of the tunnel. The robot’s powerful mechanical arms were extended, holding up a section of the roof that had cracked wide open during the last strong shake. A block of stone the size of a garage door was sagging against the exposed steel roofing bolts. The bolts were starting to give way. The robot had pushed the slab back in place.
Booker took off his digital wristwatch and placed it on top of the blaster. Another ten minutes.
He’d detonate the plastic gel six seconds before the bomb exploded. He would have preferred to set it off two or three seconds before, but didn’t trust the precision of the timer. Better to take a few more seconds and play it safe.
The risk of firing too soon was that the explosions might trigger landslides or a massive cave-in. If that happened the bomb could be damaged before it detonated. Booker doubted that was likely. The weapon’s hard case was designed to withstand a severe impact long enough to hit a buried target. Years of field and laboratory tests had proven the strength of the design. And yet a bullet had easily punctured the case. That still worried him. So did the jury-rigged battery pack and timer he’d attached to the weapon.
He had less than eight minutes.
Booker took off his hard hat and placed it so the lamp shined directly on his watch face. It was a relief to take it off. He took one last look at Neutron, who stood ten feet from him. The robot had performed superbly. He hoped Jeff Burke would hear about that. He was sure John Atkins would tell him.
Booker remembered the old joke in the National Laboratory’s Robotics Lab: it was time to switch careers when you started talking to the robots.
He smiled.
He wasn’t going to talk to Neutron. He was going to sing—an old Appalachian song about working in coalmines. It had been years since he’d heard it, but he still remembered some of the lyrics.
He hummed the haunting bluegrass melody played by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, trying to remember the words. When he had them, he began to sing softly.
He looked at his watch. Five minutes.
NEAR KALER, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 20
4:23 P.M.
THE DRIVER HIT A CURVE ON THE NARROW, BACK-country gravel road at fifty miles an hour. The rear end of the Humvee fishtailed through the turn, narrowly missing two big trees that formed a corner where the road veered sharply left. They were descending a hill single file, engines groaning in low gear as helicopters swept overhead, looking for snipers.
By Atkins’ estimate, they had about seven minutes to get as far as possible beyond the hills that sheltered the Golden Orient.
Four miles!
They weren’t going to make it. Not over this kind of muddy, rugged terrain, where the road was knotted with switchbacks. There was no way. They rounded another curve, then made a tight S-turn. The side of the road fell sharply forty feet into dense woods, then dropped some more, becoming a sheer cliff. Far below them, a band of silver twisted through the trees. A shallow stream or river.
“How many miles have we gone?” Elizabeth asked. She sat next to Atkins. Both were clutching the Humvee’s roll bar, trying to hang on. They were pitched up and down, rocking like a carnival ride as the tires banged over ruts and washouts.
“Maybe two,” Atkins said.
The driver, focused completely on keeping the vehicle from spinning out, didn’t answer. The windshields were streaked with mud.
Strung out in a ragged line, the convoy hit the floor of a valley, smashed through a wire fence, and cut across a freshly plowed field, the tires throwing up rooster tails of reddish-brown dirt. If they could get beyond the next line of hills, they’d be out of danger.
Provided we’ve calculated correctly, Atkins reminded himself. He hoped that Guy Thompson’s people hadn’t screwed up when they ran their figures.
They’d concluded that a one-megaton bomb detonated at two thousand feet would have only minimal effect on the topography. The risk of significant ground subsidence extended up to a half-mile from ground zero. But they weren’t absolutely certain of these conclusions. There were too many exceptions and variables. Some of the one- megaton underground blasts at the Nevada Test Site had cracked and settled the earth up to two and three miles from the bomb crater.
Atkins had a more serious worry: if they’d made a mistake about the venting hazard, huge amounts of radioactive debris, mainly dirt and crushed rock, would be hurled miles into the sky.
And at the top of his fear list: What if the explosion actually triggered a major earthquake instead of stopping it? What if it ignited other quakes along the many faults that ran like deep furrows through the unstable basement rock in the Mississippi Valley?
From the start, that had always been their biggest concern. Fear of that possibility was partly to blame for Walt Jacobs’ death. It’s what had pushed him—Atkins was sure of it—to try to sabotage their effort. They’d never know for sure, or how much the death of his family had affected his reason.
The Humvee banged up into the air. All four wheels momentarily leaving the ground. The earth had shaken again and the floor of the valley started moving in undulating waves two and three feet high. They’d hit one of them, then another.
A jet of muddy water, black sand, and lignite or “wood coal” blasted into the sky. A foaming geyser shot into the air fifty yards to their left.
A sand blow. First one, then another, and another. All of them shooting thick fountains of muck as high as trees.
The convoy changed directions to steer away from it. The ground was churning, shaking. Yet another sand
