LAUREN MITCHELL WAS THE FIRST TO SPEAK AT THE public meeting, which was held that evening in the overheated gymnasium at Mayfield Senior High School. With a population of ten thousand or so, Mayfield was one of the larger towns in extreme southwestern Kentucky. Memphis was about 120 miles to the southwest. Approximately three hundred people were jammed into the high school’s small auditorium—men, women, children, all of them sitting nervously on bleacher seats or folding chairs, or leaning against the walls.
Lauren had organized the meeting virtually single-handedly. She’d talked to everyone she could think of about what she’d seen at Kentucky Dam. It hadn’t taken long to spread the word, and she’d gotten some help from the local radio station.
Lauren wasn’t the only one who’d heard the water blasting through the dam’s big gates. A lot of people who lived along the Tennessee River—some as far as five miles from the dam—had been awakened by the pounding roar. Many of them were in the gym. So were about a dozen sheriffs deputies and state troopers, who stood in the back.
Paul Weston and two other members of the Seismic Safety Commission sat at a table at the head of the basketball key. Weston, as usual, was formally dressed—suit, crisp blue shirt, paisley bow tie. Governor Tad Parker had ordered Weston to hold the meeting that evening. Parker, who was in the state capital at Frankfort, expected a full report.
Television crews from Memphis, tipped off about the session, had their cameras and lights on as Lauren walked to the stand-up microphone in front of the table. She wore jeans and a brown leather jacket and was holding a legal pad.
“I want to know, we all do, what’s going on,” she said. She described what she’d seen and how Tom Davis, the hydrologist in charge, had told her they’d almost lost the dam.
“We’ve spoken to Mister Davis,” Weston said. “He tells us he doesn’t recall making such a comment.”
“That’s not true,” Lauren said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “I know what I heard. What I don’t know is why someone would want to make Tom change his story. And where is Tom? I asked him to come tonight, and he told me he would. Have you already gotten to him?”
“That dam’s never been safer,” Weston said in a warm, friendly voice. “We’ve had four engineers go over it from top to bottom. We made another inspection just this morning. There are several minor cracks on an interior wall that need some patching. Those repairs are now being made. Everything else looks in fine shape.”
“If they were just minor cracks, why did Tom open those gates?” Lauren persisted.
Weston nodded understandingly and said, “I know some of you must have wondered what was going on up there during the draw off. Well, the fact is that Mister Davis was perfectly justified in opening the locks. He thought he had a… problem after that last quake. We may have some disagreement over what exactly he said to Ms. Mitchell here, but the bottom line is he did the right thing. Maybe he overreacted a little. In hindsight, we could have handled all this better. Let people know what we were doing and why. That’s why the governor was so eager to arrange this meeting tonight. He wants everyone here to know he understands how inconvenient it is for you folks to have 641 closed. We’ll get it open as soon as those repairs are made. Shouldn’t take more than a few more days, but we want to do it right.”
“What if there’s another earthquake?” Lauren said. “We’ve been getting shakes out here every day. Is that dam going to hold if we get another good one?” She got a round of loud applause. Many of those in attendance were farmers or people who owned small businesses along the Tennessee River. Marina operators like her, grocery store and gas station owners, who depended on tourists. Men and women alike, they favored flannel shirts, work boots, and quilted parkas.
“I can speak to that question,” Weston said. “I know you’re all concerned with the series of aftershocks we’ve been experiencing. That’s normal after a strong earthquake. The seismic activity could keep up for weeks or even months. But there’s no evidence we’ll get another big quake in the magnitude 7 or greater range any time soon. I’d stop worrying about that. It’s not going to happen.”
JOHN Atkins and Walter Jacobs had arrived at the gym just after Lauren Mitchell walked to the microphone. They’d driven to Mayfield straight from the mine after Jacobs got a cell phone call from Weston’s office, asking them to attend the meeting.
Atkins remembered Lauren from his visit a few days earlier to her boat dock and hadn’t forgotten the unnerving sight of all those frogs and snakes crawling out of the frozen ground near the lake. Surprised to see her, he was interested in what she was saying, but his mind was preoccupied.
Jacobs and he hadn’t had a chance yet to discuss with anyone what had happened in the Golden Orient. They wanted to return first thing in the morning with additional instruments to measure the heat and magnetic fields that were being generated in the mine. There were examples of such phenomena in the literature, but they were extremely rare. The ground was highly unstable.
At the very least, Atkins wanted to install a strain meter to see if he could get any readings that might help them analyze how much energy remained stored in the crust.
Standing there in the back of the gym, he remembered the heat, the strange, overpowering smell, and the sound welling up from the deep rock. Mainly he remembered how scared he was in that open elevator cage during the agonizingly slow ride up to the surface. They’d gotten the call to head back to Mayfield just about the time they’d climbed into the Explorer.
Distracted by his thoughts, he watched Lauren standing at the mike. She obviously wasn’t buying what Weston was telling her. Neither was anyone else in the gym. They all looked skeptical, worried. The children had picked up on the current of fear in the room. Some of the littlest ones were crying.
Atkins noticed a woman in an olive-green trench coat get up from a seat in the back of the gym and approach the microphone. She had dark blond hair.
Elizabeth Holleran.
She walked up to Lauren Mitchell, who was still standing at the mike. Paul Weston’s sudden anger was clear to see. It could be felt, measured.
Holleran smiled at Lauren and introduced herself. She nodded to the men seated at the table. Some of the same faces she’d addressed yesterday.
“You’re doing very well,” Holleran told Lauren, smiling at her. “Would you mind if I ask a few questions?”
“Not at all,” said Lauren, who looked pleased to get the help. “Be my guest.”
“This is starting to get interesting,” Jacobs whispered to Atkins. He was struck by Holleran’s poise as she approached Weston and the others. She was cool, steady under pressure.
“Doctor Weston, there’s a simple way of determining how serious the damage was to the dam. Then we can assess what’s been done to repair that damage. Could you tell us if there was any sideways movement or settling?”
“You have no standing before this panel,” Weston exploded. His earlier warmth completely gone, he looked like he wanted to come up out of his chair. “I promise you that I’m going to lodge a formal complaint with the head of your department at Cal Tech.”
“It’s an easy question, really,” Holleran said, ignoring the threat.
“Why don’t you answer the lady’s question instead of barkin’ her down,” someone shouted from the back of the auditorium.
“Damn right! Answer her question!” shouted another.
Atkins enjoyed watching Holleran in action and found himself wanting to cheer. It was a simple, albeit crucial question. She deserved an answer.
Holleran said, “For the benefit of anyone here who might not know this, the shock waves from a big earthquake like the one three days ago can cause large structures such as dams to sway or settle. A sideways movement greater than, say, seven or eight centimeters could cause serious damage. You’d need to do major repairs, provided repairs could even be made. It’s the same thing with settling. If the dam settled only a few centimeters, there’s no real harm. But if it was greater than seven, eight, or nine centimeters, you could have major, possibly fatal damage.”
Weston’s reddening cheeks looked wind-burned. He was leaning forward in his chair, arms folded, trying to appear patient, under control.
“This woman isn’t qualified to make…”
He was shouted down.
“Answer her question! Did that dam move sideways or settle?”
Several other loud voices were yelling for answers.
“We don’t have any information on that,” Weston said, changing his tone, trying to become more conciliatory. “The engineers who did the inspection are still working on their report.”
You better be right about that, Atkins thought. The one duty a seismologist owed the public at a time like this was absolute honesty, even, in his opinion, at the risk of starting a panic. He doubted Weston was telling these people everything he knew.
A few in the crowd starting whistling. “You’re lyin,’ mister,” someone yelled. “You got to know what’s happened to that dam. Hell, you just told us the engineers just finished inspecting it.”
“The information will be made available at the appropriate time.” Weston said, sitting back in his chair. He’d regained his composure. Hands palm down on the table, he looked at Holleran, his gaze unflinching.
“Do you remember what happened in the San Fernando Valley in 1971?” she asked.
“Oh, come on,” Weston said. “The two situations aren’t the same at all.”
“Let’s hope so,” Holleran said. She explained for the audience’s benefit that in 1971 an earthquake in the San Fernando Valley almost breached the Lower San Fernando Dam near Los Angeles. It came perilously close to failure and forced the evacuation of eighty thousand people. A thin wall of dirt was all that separated the valley from 15 million tons of water.
“The governor wants you all to know he’s making absolutely sure the dam is safe,” Weston said, forcing a smile. He figured he better end this as quickly as possible. “We’ll be back to you with more information, everything you want, as soon as we get it.” He gathered his papers and started to stand up.
A heavyset bearded man in a down vest grabbed Weston’s arm. Two state troopers immediately ran toward him.
“Here it comes,” Atkins told Jacobs.
The man pushed one of the troopers away. Two others grabbed him from behind. Then everyone was up. There were shouts, screams, the slam of folding chairs being overturned. Someone threw a punch. The deputies and troopers moved in to restore order.
ATKINS approached Elizabeth Holleran, who was talking to Lauren. They turned and walked quickly out of the gymnasium. Atkins followed. He wanted to see if Holleran was all right. One of the troopers had given her a pretty good shove, trying to get at the bearded farmer.
He caught up with Holleran and Lauren at the far end of the parking lot, which was jammed with cars and pickup trucks. He saw them stop next to a late-model station wagon with its headlights on and engine running. They were talking to the driver.
The woman sitting behind the wheel saw Atkins approaching. She stopped talking, backed up quickly, and drove off the lot, gravel flying from the rear wheels. She almost sideswiped another car that was also trying to leave.
Atkins said to Holleran, “Are you okay? I saw what happened—”
“That was the wife of the hydrologist who works out at the dam,” she said, interrupting him. “The man who told Lauren the dam was in trouble.” She started to introduce Atkins to Lauren Mitchell.
“We’ve already met,” he said, shaking Lauren’s hand. “I was out at her boat dock the day before the quake.”
“He wants someone to go to the dam right now,” Lauren said. “He says the damage is a lot worse than anyone’s letting on. He thinks it’s all a cover-up, that the cracks can’t be repaired.”
She explained that the hydrologist had left a door open so that someone could slip inside the dam for a firsthand look at what was going on. The catch was that they’d need a boat to get to it. The door allowed access to an equipment platform and was on the side of the dam facing the lake.
“How can you get out there?” Atkins said.
Lauren said, “I’ve got a boat. It’s a little rough out on the water, but I can take you.”
“When?” Holleran asked.
“How about right now.”
Taking Lauren’s car, they drove to her marina. She gave each of them a snowmobile suit and slipped into one herself. It would be bitter cold on the lake.
“How long has it been this choppy?” Atkins asked as they walked along the boat dock. They were heading to the roofed enclosure where Lauren’s twenty-foot outboard was tied up.
“Ever since the first earthquake.” she said. “It’ll calm down for a while then kick right up again.”
The lake was about three miles wide at that point. Far off in the darkness, Atkins thought he could make out tiny pinpricks of lights on the opposite shore. The water slapped hard at the dock, splashing over the wooden walkway. Floating on oil drums, the dock was rocking, pitching up and down like a buoy. Atkins had to grip the handrails tightly to keep his balance.
He didn’t doubt that the repeated aftershocks were causing the water turbulence.
He looked out at the lake. He wasn’t looking forward to going out there in an open boat.
“We’ll need to be real careful when we get up near the dam,” Lauren said, handing each of them a life vest and showing them how to tie it on. “The water’s pretty rough on that end. We don’t want to get caught in the current up there.”
Lauren climbed down into the V-bottom and started the big 150-horsepower Mariner outboard, which roared to life in a plume of blue smoke. She sat at a steering wheel in the middle of the cockpit. Holleran sat on a bench seat in the stern.
Atkins untied the bowlines and hopped aboard. The current spun the boat around like a wood chip. Lauren gunned the engine and pulled away from the marina. They had to go about two miles down the lake. Atkins sat next to Holleran and tried to keep his face out of the spray that kicked up over the gunwales every time they plowed through a wave.
Lauren was as good as her word. It was a bone-jarring ride made all the more uncomfortable because she hugged the rocky shoreline, where the wave action was rougher. She wanted to keep out of open water as much as possible so they wouldn’t be seen as easily. About halfway to the dam, the main channel forked. Lauren steered down the smaller arm, where it would be even harder for anyone to spot them from the dam.
The trip reminded Atkins of some rafting he’d done on the Colorado River back in his grad school days. They ran Class IV white water all the way down the canyon.
Holleran was holding on to her seat for dear life. Every time they pancaked down on a wave, they were almost pitched off their seats. She had to shout to make herself understood over the engine.
“You… can… hear… it!”
In the distance. Atkins heard the waves hitting the dam, the noise carrying over the roar of the outboard.
They finally came out of the long cove. The dam loomed up in front of them three hundred yards away. A massive, chalk-colored wall of rough stone and sloping, poured concrete. Streetlights illuminated the top where the two-lane highway ran.
Lauren cut her speed and let the waves and current wash them into an eddy about forty yards from the western end of the dam. A narrow, curving spit of land jutted out at a right angle from the base of the dam and served as a breakwater, creating a pool where boats could anchor. It was relatively sheltered from the lake’s open water.
Skillfully handling the wheel and throttle, Lauren eased up close enough to the shore for Atkins to jump out and tie the bow lines to a mooring post. A thick stand of pine trees shielded them from view from the dam.
They’d have to climb up a wall of broken stone to get to the door that Tom Davis had left open. The door opened from the inside and gave access to heating and air-conditioning units located on a steel platform that jutted from the dam’s outer wall. It was about forty feet up from the water.
Lauren stayed with the boat. Holleran and Atkins started climbing the pile of broken rock, carefully working their way across the face of the dam to the platform. They were soon out over the water, the waves crashing below them against the wall of stone.
Holleran, a strong climber, easily made it to the platform and pulled herself over a low railing. Atkins was right behind her. She opened the metal door. Slipping inside, they found themselves in a darkened service tunnel.
Atkins was relieved to get in out of the biting wind and cold. Water poured off his snowmobile suit. He wiped it from his face and eyes.
Turning on flashlights, they walked about thirty yards down the tunnel. There they heard heavy machinery, the pounding of pneumatic drills and truck engines. It sounded like a construction site. The tunnel—it was more of a catwalk—ended at a ladder. They climbed down to a lower level about twenty feet below them.
They were inside the huge double wall of the dam. The space was about fifty yards wide at the base with concrete walls that soared up on each side, tapering in the darkness high above them.
From the catwalk, which was in shadows, they were able to peer around a pillar of reinforced concrete. The scene below almost made them gasp. Five cement trucks were lined up bumper to bumper. At least thirty men, maybe more, were working under the bright illumination of portable lights. Drills and jackhammers were pounding. Blue and orange sparks showered down from tall scaffolding where six men were welding steel reinforcement plates against the wall.
Atkins pointed to the wall that faced the lake. Four large cracks fanned out across the concrete like the tributaries of a river, each of them more than fifty feet long. Water was seeping from two of them. They were pumping it out. It was impossible to tell how deep the fissures were. One of them extended into the wall. One of them looked at least six inches wide.
“I wouldn’t call those minor surface cracks,” Holleran said, shouting out the words. She remembered how Weston had described them a few hours earlier.
Realizing at once what those gaping cracks signified, Atkins felt a cold fear well up in him. The dam was in serious danger of failure. If another moderate to strong quake hit before they finished making the repairs, it was going to collapse. He wasn’t a structural engineer, but he didn’t see how it could survive. He couldn’t begin to comprehend what it would mean if those walls gave way and the lake water poured out into the Tennessee River.
“Weston must have known this,” he said.
He couldn’t believe, seeing this, that the man had lied so blatantly.
“Let’s see if we can get a little closer,” Holleran said.
“That’s not a good idea,” Atkins said. “They might see us.”
“You can stay here, but I’m going,” Holleran said firmly. “I want a better look at those cracks.”
“Are you always like this?” Atkins said angrily. He felt like grabbing her so she couldn’t move.
“You’re damn right I am,” Holleran snapped. She’d had enough of Atkins’ arrogance. She’d put up with it at the restaurant in Memphis, but not here.
She’d just started to reach for the ladder to descend to another catwalk when the ground shook. The tremor lasted four or five seconds. Maybe a magnitude 3, Atkins thought.
They scrambled back up the ladder to the service tunnel. They hit the door on the run and got out on the equipment platform. They were scrambling over the railings when someone shouted at them from the top of the dam.
“Don’t move down there!”
“Keep going!” Atkins yelled to Holleran, who was in front of him.
There were more shouts from the dam. Someone had a bullhorn. A booming, amplified voice ordered them to halt.
Lauren already had the engine revving when they reached the boat. Atkins untied the lines and jumped in. Lauren gunned the outboard and turned in a tight circle. She shot out of the protected eddy and headed back into open water.
“We’ve got company,” she shouted over her shoulder.
Two boats were angling toward them across the lake. They were coming from the opposite end of the dam. Even in the darkness, Atkins saw the white rooster tails the engines threw up behind them.
Lauren had the throttle wide open. She was still hugging the shore, fighting the strong current. This wasn’t even going to be close. The boats were going to overtake them long before they got back up into the cove.
Suddenly they were pitched sharply to the left. It was as if something had given the boat a hard sideways shove.
Holleran and Atkins both understood what had happened. Another quake had struck, stronger than the one they’d had a few minutes earlier.
The effect on the lake was instantaneous. Waves rose up in front of them. The suddenness of it all was breathtaking.
Lauren turned in toward shore. It wasn’t far. Maybe thirty yards. Atkins and Holleran were bailing with their hands. The boat had taken on a lot of water when it was pitched to the side. They’d almost swamped.
“Get your life jackets strapped on!” Lauren screamed at them. “Do it now! Make sure they’re tight!”
Atkins looked across the lake. He could see only one of the boats. It had flipped over on its side and was heaving up and down in the waves, stern up. He couldn’t see anyone in the water. There was no way anyone could survive out there, even in a life jacket. It wasn’t much better closer to shore.
A wave crashed over their boat, flooding the engine. They began to roll over.
“Get out and try to hold on to the side,” Lauren yelled as they all went into the water. “Stay with the boat! Whatever happens… stay… with… the… boat!”
Atkins and Holleran worked their way to the same side of the hull as Lauren. They began kicking, trying to keep the shore in view as they rose and fell with the waves. They were being pulled farther out into the lake.
“We’ve got to try to swim for it!” Atkins shouted.
“I don’t think I can,” Lauren said. “Can’t move… I can’t move my arms.”
Her teeth were chattering. It was hard for her to talk. Hard to think in the cold. Wet and chilled to the bone, she’d been freezing ever since they’d left the dam. She was losing the feeling in her legs and arms. Her body chemistry was starting to shut down.
Atkins looped his arm through the straps of her life jacket.
“Go for it, Elizabeth!” he shouted.
The boat was lifted up on a swell. Atkins got a good look at the shore. He fixed on a tree. It was barely ten yards away. So close he could see the individual branches hanging out over the water. He tucked up his legs and pushed off as hard as he could against the side of the overturned boat. He saw Elizabeth do the same and then she was lost from view.
“Kick!” he screamed to Lauren. “Kick as hard as you can. Keep kicking!”
The water was very cold. Atkins tried to keep his eyes locked on the tree. Every time a wave lifted them up, he tried to get his bearings, focusing on a point midway up the trunk. He told himself to keep staring at it. His arms were starting to get heavy. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep this up. He could feel Lauren next to him. She was kicking, flailing with her arms. They weren’t making any headway. The waves were driving them into the shore, then pulling them back out.
Gripping the straps of Lauren’s life jacket, Atkins started thrashing with his right arm. He kept kicking. He thought he was going to drown, that his clothes and boots were going to pull him down. He kicked with his legs and beat at the water with an arm that felt like a lead weight. They were closer to the rocks. He bit down hard on the life jacket strap and clawed his way toward them with both arms, trying to keep his head up.
His right leg grazed something in the water. Rocks. He touched bottom with both feet and pushed off and managed to grab hold of a tree root that was sticking out of the bank. He held on to it until he caught his breath, then pulled and fought his way up onto the muddy ground, dragging Lauren with him.
Collapsing there, he rolled over on his back and felt his legs start to cramp. Sick to the stomach, he coughed up some water and vomit. His legs cramped, the pain stabbing into his calves like nails. He realized he would have drowned if that had happened a few seconds earlier. He kept looking up at the black sky, his left arm clasping Lauren’s life jacket. He spat up more water. It was good to breathe.
“Are you all right?” Lauren was on her knees, looking at him, her hands cradling his head. She was shivering in the cold air.
He nodded and clenched his teeth against the pain in his legs. The cramps started to ease off.
He saw Holleran. She was hunched over behind them, kneeling on the ground. Water was pouring off her clothing. Her long hair hung limp over her shoulders. She was the first to get up.
“I don’t see them,” she said. “They just disappeared.”
Atkins, still sucking air into his lungs, didn’t understand. Then he realized she was talking about the two boats that had been chasing them. Pulling himself up to a sitting position, he looked out at the lake. The waves were as tall as any he’d ever seen in the ocean. He could hear them beating against the dam, the sound carrying back to them over the water.
The moon suddenly appeared from behind the clouds, a full yellow disk.
THEY walked from the lake to the highway and then in their sodden clothing followed it about a mile to Lauren Mitchell’s marina, where they dried off and huddled in front of a propane space heater. They put on new snowmobile suits.
Atkins knew he needed to do something about the dam, start warning people that the damage was far worse than anyone was letting on. First he called Guy Thompson in Memphis. Thompson was excited. He’d been working with Prable’s earthquake data nearly nonstop for a full day.
“I’ve run his probability assessment over and over, and I’ve got to tell you, John, I can’t punch a hole in it,” he said. “His correlations look right on.”
Thompson had found only one shortcoming with Prable’s projections. He’d made an error in calculating solar activity, one of the indices critical to his prediction of a major earthquake along the New Madrid Fault. He wasn’t to blame for the mistake. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had only recently issued a correction in an earlier projection of sunspot activity.
Prable had based his calculations on a date for a peak flare occurring on or about January 20. That date had now been revised.
Thompson told Atkins the rest of it.
“Peak solar activity and flares will occur later today, John. The projection is for a larger number of sunspots than anticipated. The solar wind’s gonna be howling. Plasma density levels are going to spike. We’re gonna get a real heavy gravitational pull.”
Atkins did some mental calculations. That would be about 4:00 in the morning. He quietly mentioned this to Elizabeth, who just stared at him and nodded. Wrapped in a woolen blanket, she was just starting to warm up.
“So what do you make of this?” Thompson asked.
“I don’t know,” Atkins said. “I wish to God I did.” He was still reluctant to put much credence in Prable’s data. The effects of solar activity and gravitational pull on earthquakes simply weren’t known. It was all new territory.
“Something’s happening in the ground,” Thompson said. “The seismographs are really picking up over in your area.”
Atkins stood by the telephone, aware of Thompson’s silence on the other end of the line. As his mind raced, he felt that someone was sitting inside his body, that someone else was holding the phone. He had a pestering fear about how he’d feel when he was back inside himself again.
THEY’D just taken off from Mayfield and swung out to the east a few miles before the UH-60 pilot pointed the nose of the National Guard helicopter due south and leveled off. It was 12:25 A.M. The sky had cleared. The moon and stars blazed in the darkness. Walter Jacobs and two other seismologists were flying back to Memphis to get more seismic equipment. Jacobs wanted to run some measurements in the coalmine.
Unable to find Atkins after the meeting at the gymnasium, he’d decided to leave without him. This was too important to wait. He wanted to be back at that mine first thing in the morning.
Jacobs and the other two men, both USGS geologists, were seated on benches in the rear of the big helicopter. A crewman, a young soldier bundled in a hooded parka, was up by the closed cargo door, staring out the portholes.
He was the first to notice it—a rippling wave of bright, bluish-red light that seemed to rise out of the ground and hover over the dark hills.
Then the pilot saw it.
“Sweet Jesus,” he announced over the intercom. “Check out the light show off the starboard side.”
The pilot, a retired Air Force major with extensive flying time, barely got the words out. He’d never seen anything like it. Unearthly, strangely beautiful lights pulsing in broad shimmering bands that grew in strength and intensity. Shades of blue, white, and reddish-orange swirling and streaming ever higher in the eastern sky.
“Is that the northern lights?” the crewman asked, speaking into his radio headset.
“No way,” the pilot said, his voice sounding brittle over the speaker. “This is much brighter, stronger. And it’s coming from the east, not the north.”
Walt Jacobs had unfastened his safety harness and crawled up to the porthole. The crewman moved away so the geologist could take a look. The lights were streaking like neon.
“What is it?” the crewman yelled, shouting to make himself heard over the droning rotors. Jacobs kept staring out the porthole.
“What are you seeing out there?”
Jacobs couldn’t take his eyes away from the spectacle. He heard himself say, “Earthquake lights.”