A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [137]
…higher and higher the debris piled on the canyon floor, twenty, thirty feet…far over any scout.
Waves of concussion stirred up with angry dust and dislodged thousands more tons of rock. The waves careened through holes and fissures…
…and found the cave with eight hundred tons of dynamite.
The mining operation was lifted from the ground and hurled over space. Now a torrential rock fall as the canyon gave up great hunks.
The ranch house was eviscerated.
The last of the screams came from the patriots as their horseshoe of gun emplacements simply skidded off its moorings and plunged down.
Now the artillery shells and missiles and ammunition in the storage cave belched thunder after thunder after thunder.
Now death…now death…
Chapter 38
NAVAL AIR STATION-SOUTH WEYMOUTH
AT THE SAME TIME
Air Force One moved to South Weymouth so that its departure would not gum up the air traffic around Boston and Providence.
President Thornton Tomtree boarded and went directly up to his office to put final touches on his Labor Day speech to the Eagle Scouts.
Darnell Jefferson oversaw the placement of personnel and that all systems were functioning. Working in a tighter proximity than the White House, the people aboard seemed doubly busy. Beyond Air Force One and two thousand feet lower, a long white plume trailed from the press plane.
Chief of the Secret Service presidential detail, Rocco Lapides, opened the door of his outer station to allow Darnell Jefferson in. Darnell was extremely wobbly, Lapides noted, as he knocked on the President’s door.
“Lapides, don’t answer the door until I tell you. We have to keep the lid on some news for ten or twenty minutes,” Darnell rasped.
No inquiries, ears, eyes, and mouth covered, the Secret Service man took his instructions.
“Mr. President,” Darnell said, addressing Thornton formally, as he always did in the presence of a third party.
“Everything in order?” Thornton asked.
“Not exactly.”
“You look horrible. What did you do? Tie one on last night?”
“We have received confirmed reports of a cataclysmic event. One of the columns of Eagle Scouts moved up a canyon, and the canyon walls collapsed on them.”
“Jesus! How long ago?”
“Maybe forty minutes. The Navajo police say it struck like a nuclear bomb. They flew a chopper to it, but there was such a cloud of dust over the area, they were prevented from taking a close-down look.”
“Oh, my God!” Lapides said, breaking his vow of silence.
“Just how many of these scouts were involved?”
“We don’t know, sir. We’re trying to glean a number. So far the news is frozen, except for a Four Corners emergency network in to us. Mendenhall and I set up a communications system. The press plane smells something—”
“They always smell something!”
“Mendenhall is holding them off. As soon as we have a hint of any casualties, you should have a tactic for announcing it to the people.”
Tomtree tried to screw down his focus to laser sharpness, winging through a dozen possible scenarios to hold the information from pouring over the floodgates. Thank God it was an accident! Tomtree immediately thought of his personal position in all of this. In a week he was to announce he was running for reelection in 2008 in order to short-circuit any overly ambitious Republicans from the Baptist crowd.
Mendenhall, who could perspire on an iceberg, was drenched as he came in.
“CIA satellite confirmation,” he rasped. “The canyon walls collapsed along a two-mile stretch. The path is under millions of tons of fallen rock.”
They all feared the next question:
“How many scouts were in the canyon?”
“We aren’t sure, Mr. President. There were three columns converging on Mexican Hat for a total of fifteen-sixteen hundred Eagle Scouts.”
“Well, goddammit, divide fifteen hundred by four. That’s four hundred in that column. That doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, they’ve all been hurt. In any event, it was a natural disaster. I should be able to rally a great