were screams and more shots, the sounds of chaos and panic.
The tunnel was long and straight, with perpendicular tunnels every fifty feet going off to the right, opening into more parallel tunnels. The bituminous seam to the left squeezed down and had been abandoned before being fully mined out, leaving many dead-end tunnels, stopes, and a web of dark seams.
More gunshots came from behind, the sounds echoing crazily through the confined spaces. The air was dead and heavy, the walls gleaming with moisture, furred with white nitre. The tunnel took a broad turn. Ford caught up to Julie Thibodeaux, who was falling behind, slipped his arm around her, and tried to help her along.
More distant shots. Wardlaw was making a last stand, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Ford though sadly, surprised at the man’s courage and dedication.
The mine opened up into a vast room with a low ceiling, the main seam itself, which was held up by massive pillars of unmined coal left standing to hold up the ceiling. The pillars were twenty feet on a side, black glistening faces of peacock coal shimmering in the light, the mine a mazelike warren of pillars and open areas in no regular arrangement. Ford paused to eject the magazine and saw it was fully loaded with thirteen 9 mm rounds. He shoved it back in.
“We stay together,” said Hazelius, dropping back. “George and Alan, you two help Julie—she’s having trouble. Wyman, you stay back and cover our rear.”
Hazelius grasped Kate’s shoulders in both hands and looked into her face. “If something should happen to me, you’re in charge. Got it?”
Kate nodded.
THE GROUP OF MEN WITH EDDY were pinned down by gunfire from behind the first pillar of coal.
“Cover!” Eddy screamed, aiming his Blackhawk at where he had seen the last flash of light and squeezing off a round to suppress the incoming fire. More shots rang out from behind as others poured in, concentrating their fire at where the gunflashes had come from. Beams from a dozen flashlights flickered down the tunnel.
“He’s behind that wall of coal!” Eddy cried. “Cover me!”
Scattered gunfire struck the wall, spraying chips of coal.
“Hold fire!”
Eddy rose and ran to the broad pillar, which extended for at least twenty feet before turning. Flattening himself against the far side, he indicated with a hand signal for several other fighters to go around the other side. He crept along the ragged face of coal, weapon at the ready.
The shooter anticipated their move and bolted for the next pillar.
Eddy raised his gun, fired, missed. Another shot rang out just before the man reached cover. He fell and began crawling. Frost came around from behind the other side of the pillar, handgun in both hands, and fired a second and third shot into the crawling man, who hunched up. He walked over and put a final bullet in his head at point blank range.
“All clear,” he said, sweeping the tunnels with his flashlight. “Just one. The rest fled.”
Russell Eddy lowered his gun and walked to the center of the tunnel. People were crowding in through the open door and filling up the space, their voices loud in the confined quarters. He held up his hands. Silence fell.
“
He could feel the surge of the crowd behind him, he could feel their energy, like a dynamo powering his resolve. But there were too many. He needed to go in with a smaller, more mobile group. He turned and shouted over the grinding hum of the machinery: “I can only take a small group into the tunnels—and only men with guns. No women, no children. All men with firearms and experience, step forward! The rest fall back!”
About thirty men shouldered their way forward.
“Line up and show me your weapons! Hold them up!”
With a cheer, the men held up their weapons—rifles and handguns. Eddy walked down the line, looking at each man in turn. He eliminated a few with muzzle-loading antique replicas, a couple of teenagers with single-shot .22 rifles, two who looked demented. Two dozen were left.
“You men, you come with me to hunt down the Antichrist and his disciples. Stand over there.” He turned to the rest. “The rest of you: your work is back there, in those rooms we just came through. God wants you to
With a roar, the crowd broke, hungry for action, and poured back through the open door, swinging sledgehammers, axes, baseball bats. The sounds of bashing came from the room beyond.
The machine seemed to scream in agony.
Eddy grabbed Frost. “You, Mike, stay at my side. I need your experience.”
“Yes, Pastor.”
“All right, men—let’s go!”
71
HAZELIUS LED THE GROUP THROUGH THE broad tunnels cut through the massive seam of coal. Ford covered their rear. Falling back, he peered into the darkness and listened. The shooting between Wardlaw and the mob had ended, but Ford could still hear the mob’s shouts as they pursued them through the tunnels
They stayed to the left, as Wardlaw had advised, sometimes getting hung up in dead-ends and blind leads, which forced them to backtrack. The mine was vast, the great bituminous seam going on forever in three directions. A maze of curving, crisscrossing tunnels had been cut in the seam, leaving square blocks of coal in a room-and-pillar arrangement, creating a labyrinthine sequence of spaces that connected with each other in unpredictable ways. The mine floor was crisscrossed with railcar tracks from 1950s mining operations. Rusting metal carts, rotting rope, broken engines, and heaps of discarded coal lay about. They had to wade through pools of slimy water in the low spots.
The deep-throated scream of Isabella followed them as they ran through the tunnels, like the agonizing bellows of a mortally wounded beast. Whenever he stopped to listen, Ford could also hear the clamoring pursuit of the mob.
After running for over a quarter hour, Hazelius called for a short rest. They collapsed on the damp ground, heedless of the black coal muck. Kate hunkered down next to Ford, and he put his arm around her.
“Isabella’s going to blow at any moment,” Hazelius said. “It could be anywhere from a large conventional bomb to a small nuke.”
“Jesus,” said Innes.
“A bigger problem,” said Hazelius, “is that some of the detectors are filled with explosive liquid hydrogen. One neutrino detector has fifty thousand gallons of perchloroethylene and the other a hundred thousand gallons of alkanes—both flammable. And look around—there’s a hell of a lot of burnable coal left in these seams. Once Isabella blows, it won’t be long before the whole mountain goes up in flames. There’ll be no stopping it.”
Silence.
“The explosion could trigger cave-ins, too.”
The cacophony of the pursuing horde echoed down the tunnels, punctuated by the occasional gunshot, rising over the wobbling, grinding, vibrating hum of Isabella.
The mob, Ford realized, was gradually catching up. “I’m going to drop back a little and fire a few rounds in their direction,” he said, “To slow them down.”
“Excellent idea,” said Hazelius, “But no killing.”
They moved on. Ford hung back in a side tunnel, where he switched off his light and listened intently. The sounds of the pursuing mob rolled through the caverns, faint and distorted.
Ford moved down the tunnel by feel, his hand on the wall, memorizing his path. Gradually the sounds became louder, and then he could see, at the edge of sight, the faint bobbing glow of half a dozen flashlights. He removed the pistol, and crouching behind a pillar of coal, pointed it obliquely at the ceiling.
The pursuers closed in. Ford squeezed off three 9 mm Parabellum rounds in rapid succession, and they thundered through the confined space. Eddy’s mob fell back, firing wildly into the dark.
Ducking into a dark passageway, Ford laid a hand on the far wall and, using it as a guide, moved quickly past two more tunnel openings. A second group of searchers was coming up—they seemed to have broken up into smaller teams—but this group was now moving cautiously because of the gunshots. He fired five more times, to slow them down.
Retreating—still with one guiding hand against the wall—he counted off three more pillars before he felt safe
