AS HE’D PROMISED, PRESIDENT NATHAN ROSS WAS already there when the convoy arrived at the Golden Orient. Atkins saw him standing near the main entrance, talking to a rugged-looking man wearing white coveralls and a yellow hard hat. The two were surrounded by Secret Service agents and paratroopers, who were nervously scanning the surrounding hills with binoculars and spotter scopes.
Helicopter gunships circled the ridges, swooping low, then pulling up and swinging around for another pass. Army patrols had spread out in force, looking for snipers. The mine was about thirty miles from the Tennessee border, 140 miles north of Memphis.
Steve Draper, the president’s science adviser, hustled over when he saw Atkins and Holleran get out of the Humvee. He looked grim.
“You’ll want to hear this,” he said. “It’s not good.”
The mine was just as Atkins remembered it. The large, gray metal building that housed the entrance didn’t appear damaged. It was a different story with the wooden tower that supported the massive wheel and counter weight that lowered the miners’ cage into the shaft. Leaning at a precarious angle, several of its support timbers had snapped in two. The adjoining tower and fly wheel, also badly damaged, operated the “skip shaft,” which powered the conveyor belt that brought out the coal.
With the towers out of service, two diesel engines had been flown in a day earlier to operate the elevator and power two huge fans that pushed fresh air into the shafts.
Atkins couldn’t shake the foreboding that had been building in him ever since the towers had first come into view over a rise in the hills. Ten stories tall, they stood there like dark monoliths. His eagerness to go on the offensive notwithstanding, descending into that mine would be the hardest thing he’d ever done. The risks of taking a nuclear weapon to its depths were secondary. Now that he was actually there, the thought of going underground was enough to trigger in him an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, of being buried alive.
“John, what’s wrong?” said Elizabeth, staring at him. He looked white, faint. “Are you sick?”
“I just forgot how much I like this place,” he said. He tried to smile, but his dry lips felt like they’d split open. His morale wasn’t helped after he met the man who’d been brought in to lead the party into the Golden Orient.
Glen “Doc” Murray had arrived four hours earlier on a military flight from the Mine Safety Academy in Beckley, West Virginia, where he was chief instructor. He’d just returned from inspecting the mine with two other disaster specialists from the academy.
Murray was a big man, over six-foot-three, with a gaunt, sunburned face and a short white beard. He wore “bunker gear,” the heavy protective clothing of a firefighter. He took off his thick leather gloves and helmet and used a towel to wipe his face, which was caked with sweat and coal dust.
Murray nodded to the new arrivals and for a moment seemed to be sizing them up. He didn’t look impressed or reassured by what he saw.
“The earthquake broke things up pretty bad down there,” Murray said in a low-pitched Appalachian drawl. “Part of the man shaft has collapsed. Other sections run clear for a couple hundred feet, then break off where the earth shifted. The main air shaft is blocked in places.”
It was what Atkins had feared all along. The big quake had knocked the hell out of the mine. This was going to be more difficult than any of them had imagined.
Murray went on, “We got down about eight hundred feet and had to leave the man shaft and move over to one of the air shafts. We got down another five levels and cut back over to the skip shaft.”
Murray took out a small, spiral notebook and sketched what he was talking about. The mine descended twenty levels. Each level, separated by about one hundred feet, consisted of a series of three or four parallel tunnels, each about a thousand feet long. These were connected by intersecting or crosscut tunnels, forming a gridwork pattern on each level. The long tunnels provided access to the coal seams.
The coal was removed by the “room-and-pillar” technique. Miners cut or blasted it out of the seams, forming rooms that opened onto the tunnels. The crews left behind sufficient pillars to support the overlying rock, or “hanging wall.”
Murray drew four shafts. The first of these, the miners’ elevator, or “man shaft,” ran down the center of the mine and carried the work crews to and from the different levels. The coal conveyor, or “skip shaft,” was a tunnel that once housed a conveyor belt for carrying the cut coal up to the surface. The skip shaft tunnel slanted at a forty-degree incline and was about five feet high and six feet wide. The conveyor had long since been dismantled and removed. Like the rungs of a ladder, the coal tunnels ran between the skip shaft on one end and the main air shaft on the other.
There were two air shafts, which Murray drew in the notebook. The main one was virtually identical to the skip shaft in its dimensions and angle of incline. It was used to circulate air throughout the mine and also made a good escape route in an emergency. The secondary air shaft ran up vertically through the mine, roughly paralleling the elevator shaft. Carved out of the rock, the shaft was four feet wide.
“We took the skip shaft down to the eighteen-hundred-foot level,” Murray said, drawing the position where they’d halted and turned back. “The man shaft is completely gone, caved in. But there’s a deep crack that’s opened up at that level. A fissure. I couldn’t tell how far down it goes. We started picking up a little methane and decided to pull out. My hope is we can ventilate the shafts awhile longer and clear out some of that gas.” He closed the notebook and put it back into a pocket in his bib coveralls.
“The bottom line here is I think I can get you down eighteen hundred feet—if we’re lucky and nothing else collapses. Is that deep enough for what you’ve got in mind?”
“It’ll have to be,” Booker said. He’d gone over the numbers several times with Thompson and Atkins. Based on the record of previous underground shots, a depth of two thousand feet would provide maximum seismic impact on the fault.
“How big is that bomb?” Murray asked.
“Approximately four feet by two and a half. It weighs 420 pounds,” Booker said.
Murray whistled between his teeth. “We’ll talk about that later,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you people there are a lot of ways to die in this old mine. And I’m not even including the methane, which is worry enough. Some of the roofs and wall ribs have caved in. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but whenever the ground moves, we’ve got more problems.”
Murray leaned over and spat. A wad of chewing tobacco bulged out his left cheek. “You got any other place to explode this bomb?”
“It’s got to be here,” said Steve Draper. “We don’t have any other options.”
Arms folded across his chest, Murray nodded as if to say he’d expected that answer. He seemed to be contemplating his boots, which were crusted with white powder.
Atkins noticed the president’s furrowed brow. He was following Murray’s description intently.
“Let’s talk about the methane,” Murray said. “You get a methane concentration of five to fifteen percent, you’re gonna risk an explosion. When we got down to eighteen hundred feet, we were reading three percent methane and it was starting to nudge up a little. That can be bad news.” He had a question for them. “You know what it’s like if you’re in one of those shafts and methane explodes below you?”
No one answered.
Murray said, “It’s like sitting inside a shotgun barrel.” He let his words hang there a moment, then asked how many were going.
“Six,” Atkins said. It was the absolute minimum. If anything happened to some of them, the others might still be able to get the job done. Booker was the only absolutely essential member of the group. Atkins wasn’t excited at the prospect of making the descent with Weston, but he had to admit that Weston had been acting with unusual restraint. He was listening attentively and was not trying to run the show.
“Make that seven,” Booker said. “I want to take a robot with us. It can carry the weapon and other supplies.” He’d already made arrangements with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to have the robot and other equipment sent to the mine. The president himself had ordered the transportation. The helicopter was expected any minute.
“Can it maneuver?” Murray asked. He looked skeptical.
“On a dime,” Booker said. “It can go anywhere we can. It’s forty inches tall. The arms are retractable.”
“Does this robot of yours have a name?” Murray said. His crinkled face broke into a frown.
“Neutron,” said Booker.
“That’s perfect,” Murray said, still frowning. “I don’t like it, but as long as I don’t have to tell it what to do, I don’t have a problem.” He spat again and cleared his throat. “In a couple minutes, I’ll give you some instructions on the breathing apparatus and other equipment you’ll be carrying. Listen hard and pay attention. Your life could depend on what I’m going to tell you.”
Murray looked at his watch. His arms, hands, and wrists were thick-boned, the forearms wrapped with coils of muscle. “If you still want to do this, we’ll start down in another hour.”
“JEFF, great to see you.”
Booker had hurried over to a helicopter as it landed on the mine’s gravel parking lot. It took off quickly as soon as Jeff Burke was on the ground and his equipment unloaded. Booker pumped his friend’s hand.
Burke had arrived straight from the ORNL. He came bearing gifts. “I’ve got Neutron,” he said. “Everything you asked for.”
The small robot was covered in plastic sheeting. So were the two boxes of explosive charges that had also been shipped from Oak Ridge. Booker planned to use them to seal up the mine before the bomb was detonated.
Booker couldn’t help smiling. Burke had fitted Neutron with an oversized football helmet. It was bright orange, the color of his favorite college team, the University of Tennessee. His alma mater. It even had a big UT logo on the side.
“I couldn’t find a miner’s helmet big enough to go over the actuator housing,” Burke said. “I wanted to protect it. This was the best I could come up with.”
“And so you just happened to find that helmet,” Booker said.
“What can I say. It fit,” Burke said, grinning.
Booker introduced Atkins and Elizabeth Holleran to his old friend. The president and Steve Draper came over to join them.
Using the robot’s control panel, Booker put Neutron through several maneuvers, which included manipulating the robot’s powerful hydraulic “human extender” arms to lift the MK/B-61. The demonstration impressed Doc Murray. Neutron easily carried the four-foot-long, cylindrically shaped weapon.
“Not bad,” Murray said. “I can see why you want that little guy to come along with us.”
Booker then turned to a discussion of the arming-and-firing procedure he planned to follow with the MK/B-61.
It was Elizabeth’s first good look at the weapon and its gleaming, stainless-steel housing. Like Atkins, she was struck by its small size. She’d expected something much larger for a one-megaton nuclear bomb. Atkins was right. He’d compared it to an elongated trash can.
Ross was among those who listened, hanging on Booker’s every word. They were shielded from the flanking hillsides by a double row of military trucks. Several more squads of troops had moved into the woods that sloped up from the mine. There’d been a few shots earlier, but for the time being all firing had ceased.
Booker used sheets ripped from a yellow legal pad to sketch out the bomb’s firing system.
Atkins took notes as he tried to keep warm. The sun had broken through the gloom, but it wasn’t enough to take the chill out of the air. He tried to concentrate and stay awake. After the trip from Texas and now this, he needed sleep, craved it. Even half an hour would have been a blessing. When this was over, he was going to lock himself up in a hotel room with Elizabeth and not come out for days.
Booker’s plan was to use a time-delay fuse, which he’d set once they were in position in the mine. There was less risk of error or mechanical breakdown that way, he explained. The firing signal from the timer would release an electrical charge stored in the capacitors, which would set off the detonators. That blast, in turn, would ignite the high explosives that encased the nuclear pit.
The mechanics of the time-delay fuse were fairly simple: the electrical charge from the capacitors would open two normally closed contact circuits and close two other circuits that were normally open. The process would send an electrical pulse across a bridge wire, triggering the detonators.
“How much time are you giving yourself to get out?” Ross asked.
“Four hours,” Booker said.
“Is that enough?”
Atkins wondered the same thing. Based on what Doc Murray had seen in the mine, the sooner they got out of there, the better. Four hours didn’t give them much leeway in case something went wrong.
“It better be,” Booker said. “Once the timer is set, you can’t turn it off without going back. I don’t think we’ll want to do that. For that matter, I don’t think we’ll get the chance.”
During their descent, Booker would set explosives at key points in the mine. They’d be timed to go off exactly one minute before the blast. The plastic charges were designed to seal off all four shafts to prevent any radioactive material from venting into the atmosphere.
“I’ll use gelatin dynamite, a mixture of nitroglycerin and sodium nitrate,” Booker said. “It’s incredibly dense, highly stable, and water resistant. It makes a hell of an explosion.”
“How do you plan to detonate it?” Atkins asked.
“With fuse tubing and a blaster,” Booker said. “I wouldn’t risk running wire for the weapon, but I don’t see any other alternative for the explosive charges. They’ve got to be connected to a fusing network.” He explained how he’d use a special nonelectrical or “non-1” fuse that consisted of plastic tubing filled with explosives. About the size of the clear tubing used in aquarium tanks, non-1 didn’t emit sparks that could ignite dangerous gases. It had long been a popular detonation device in mines.
“We’ll use a PAL arming system for the bomb,” the physicist went on. The letters, he explained, stood for Permissive Action Link, which consisted of a code that had to be set by punching in the right sequence of numbers before an electromagnetic lock would open, arming the weapon.
“We’ve come a long way with PALs,” said Booker. “The coding can be transmitted automatically once a missile has been launched. On this shot, we’re going to do it the old-fashioned way.”
Booker programmed the weapon with an eight-digit number randomly selected from a coding device a presidential aide carried in the “black box,” actually a battered, black leather briefcase. When they were ready to “arm enable” the weapon underground, Booker would punch in the same sequence of numbers.
For safety redundancy, they also used a fail-safe color coding system. Booker turned a red arming switch on the side of the bomb’s hard case. Later, in the mine, he’d flip a corresponding green switch, which would arm the weapon.
An array of monitoring devices would be set up near ground zero. Electrical cables would be run from the equipment four miles to the red shack, an Army trailer, where Guy Thompson and other seismologists would track the explosion and its seismic effects. Thompson was already there, setting up.
Everyone would be withdrawn from the area two hours before the bomb was detonated. Two helicopters would be kept on standby with their engines running, ready to fly the party to safety as soon as they emerged from the mine.
“I’ll be waiting for you when you get out of there,” Ross promised.
“I beg to differ, Mister President,” said his Secret Service chief, Belleau. “You can’t be anywhere near here once they arm that weapon.”
“I’m afraid I outrank you on this one, Phil,” the president said in a soft, firm voice. He turned to the team that was going to make the descent. He shook hands with each of them, first Elizabeth, then Atkins, and the others.
“I’ll be praying for you all,” he said. He looked right at Belleau. “And when you come out of that mine, I’ll be here.”
DOC Murray laid the equipment out on the ground. Elizabeth, Atkins, and the others had gathered around him. There was time for only one safety session. So Atkins and the others listened to Murray as they’d never listened to anyone in their lives.
Murray picked up an apparatus that looked like a small oxygen tank. It was equipped with a mask.
“We call this a Drag-B,” he said, demonstrating how the tank was strapped over the shoulders. The face piece slipped over the head like a scuba mask. “The full name is a Drager BG-174 Long Duration Closed Circuit Breathing Apparatus. It’s the most important piece of equipment you’re going to carry. The canister holds forty pounds of air, enough for four hours. It’s got a scrubber that takes out the carbon monoxide. If I tell you to put the mask on, get it over your face as fast as you can. Your life will depend on it. You’ve got to know how to do this in the dark. We’ll run a little practice drill once we get down into the mine.”
Murray may have looked country, tall and rawboned with a mountain twang to his voice, but Atkins had found out from Draper that he had a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla School of Mines.
Murray spent several minutes with each of them, demonstrating how to get the face mask on. Atkins had to try twice before he did it properly. Elizabeth got it right the first time.
“The main thing is to put it on as soon as I tell you,” Murray said. “You don’t want to wait for smoke. Carbon monoxide could already be present in the air. You won’t see it or smell it.”
Murray got them outfitted with hard hats and lamps. The five-pound battery for the lamp hung from a web belt. The lamp itself was attached to the helmet. Murray and Atkins would carry state-of-the-art dry foam sprayers in case they had to fight fires. The forty-pound canisters strapped to their backs. Each also would carry a hundred-foot coil of rope.
“Remember that the air shafts and skip shaft are your primary escape routes,” Murray said. “Once we go below ground, you’ll see they’re all marked with green reflectors.”
“What’s the worst thing that can happen down there?” Weston asked.
Murray didn’t hesitate.
“Fire,” he said. “I’ve been in three fires in coal mines. I don’t want to go through another one. I’m all out of luck.”