Bell was shaken, and the adrenaline spike left his mouth dry and his stomach knotted. It took a few seconds to remember he was still a target. He rolled off the side of the truck and dropped to the soggy ground. He pulled his .45 from a slender holster at the small of his back and looked around the truck’s torn fender. The rim of the man-made canyon was several hundred feet above him and at least a thousand feet away. For an expert marksman, the shot wasn’t a challenge, but there was no one above him peering down through a telescopic sight of a sniper rifle. He saw no one at all. The truck that had forced him off the road was gone.
Wary, Bell watched for several minutes, checking left and right to see if someone was trying to outflank him. There was nothing, just the constant rain. Behind him, the far rim of the canal was too distant for a marksman to make an accurate shot in these conditions.
He turned back to where his truck had been shoved off the road and was looking at the exact spot when the explosion came. The earth along the ridge lurched upward like a muscle in spasm. And then, in a line stretching many hundreds of feet, the ground erupted as a string of explosives linked by a fast-burning fuse were touched off. Seconds later, Bell heard and felt the concussive whoomph of the simultaneous blasts.
What followed next was the true horror. A slab of the hill detached itself from the earth and began to rumble down into the canal in an avalanche of mud and dirt and rock that looked as thick and wide as the horizon itself. It thundered toward Bell with the force of a tsunami and the throaty roar of a hundred locomotives.
When it hit, he would be smeared like paste and buried under twenty feet of rubble and muck. He couldn’t outrun the wall of accelerating debris and thought he had a better chance bracing himself behind the truck. But he knew that was a losing proposition. The avalanche would strike the tanker like a sledgehammer on a child’s toy.
Then came inspiration born out of desperation. While the truck would tumble and rattle and likely get broken up, there was a chance the water tank would survive. Bell scrambled around the vehicle, trying not to think about what was coming. The cap for filling the tank was located on top of it and was big enough to feed a large-diameter hose through it, like those for locomotives.
The landslide had a deeper rumble than the storm, a sound like the growl of a predator on the hunt, and it seemed to fill all five of Bell’s senses.
He undogged the filler cap’s locked lid and dove inside. Gravity slammed the lid closed, and Bell had just seconds to jam the pistol into the front of his pants and ball himself around it while lying in the residual water pooled at the tank’s bottom. Moments later, the wall of mud and rock hit the bottom of the canal, gushing outward and slamming into the overturned Gramm-Bernstein. Bell crashed into the rear bulkhead, taking the impact with his feet and backside.
Unbeknownst to him, the tank was ripped from its mounts by the initial blow. The wave of earth buried the rest of the truck, tearing it apart so thoroughly that it looked like it had gone through a woodchipper.
But the tank was somewhat spared. Its volume of air meant that it was lighter than the surrounding muck so that as it was borne along, spinning and tumbling, it also rose up through the quagmire with each passing second.
Bell took the pounding of his life. He was flung like a puppet, bouncing off the walls, and was battered by the sloshing water like he was caught in a hurricane at sea. It was all made worse because of the darkness, an inky black deeper than any night. Had he left his gun in its holster, the pummeling his body was taking would have driven the weapon so hard into his kidneys his urine would be red for months. Through it all, he kept his hands cradling the back of his head and never uncoiled his body.
That was until a particularly hard tumble dashed his forehead against the water tank, and he lost consciousness.
The big cylinder finally came to a rest as the tidal wave of mud and rock lost its momentum by spreading across the bottom of the cut in a two-story pile of debris that covered dozens of acres.
Bell didn’t awaken for more than an hour, and, when he did, he wished for a coma’s sweet embrace. He ached. Everywhere. His head and neck especially. He lay in the pooled water, soaked through to the skin with a depth of cold that seeped into his very bones. He was shivering in an absolute blackness that felt as heavy and cloying as molasses.
He touched the lump on his forehead. His hand came away wet, to be expected, warm and sticky and smelling like an old penny. He was bleeding. And he had no idea where he was. He was in a metal tank of some sort, but beyond that . . .
He had no idea how he’d gotten here. He remembered nothing.
The panic hit, sending a jolting shock across every nerve ending in his body. For a moment it felt like he had the worst case of sunburn in his life. His heart rate accelerated dangerously as adrenaline flooded his system with a near overdose of chemicals. He breathed in rapid gulps that filled his lungs but provided no oxygen.
He’d lost his memory. He
