Trail of the Twisted Cros (5 page)

Winship shook his head.

“I figured as much. You want me up in New York, right?”

“Unless you’ve got some more logical place to start.”

Slayton said nothing. He read the message to Nixon again.

“One thing, Ben. What connection is there to the ‘colliery’?”

“I don’t know, and it’s our only clue just now.”

FAIRMONT, West Virginia, 8 September,
    7:00:00 a.m. EST

When the whistle sounded, the gang leader closed the steel mesh gate of the cage, and the last squad of the day shift, twenty-two
men in all, crowded onto the elevator platform and began their descent into the Lovebridge mine.

This final squad, preceded by four others, would travel seven hundred and thirty-two feet down the black shaft before hitting
bottom. If this day was one of average output, the men and the impressive assembly of machinery they operated would produce
8,376 tons of coal before the tiny overnight shift of maintenance and safety-standard workers began their descent about 11
o’clock that evening.

“First time on a real day in the pit, lad?”

The gang leader, a red-faced man by the name of Hughes, who would come out quite black-faced by day’s end, asked the question
of a thin boy of about eighteen who stood somehow apart from the other miners, even though it was a tight fit in the elevator.
The youngster was unaccustomed to his helmet light and was having difficulty turning it on, fumbling for the switch at the
back of his hard hat.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Hughes offered. He switched it on for him, slapped the boy across the shoulder blades,
and asked, “Now tell us your name, won’t you?”

“Frank,” the boy said nervously.

“How do you do, Frank,” Hughes boomed. “You got to learn to speak up in the pit, boy. Things is much better than they were
a coon’s age ago, but it’s still black as a witch’s bum down here, and sometimes when things happen, it’s good to be familiar
with the sound of your mate’s voice.”

Hughes slapped the boy again across the shoulder blades. The elevator was about halfway down the shaft now. Hughes and the
other men saw the lighted marker indicating the same.

“Frank!” The boy said it much louder, more exuberantly, the way Hughes had. “The name’s Frank LaRaja—”

“A Frenchy!” one of the others shouted. “I thought all them Frenchies was either gay boys or muff divers. Didn’t know them
Frenchies had any real men.”

“Shut your dirty face, you dumb fart-brain,” Hughes said. Then, to LaRaja, “You must become acquainted with our ways rather
quickly, I’m afraid. We believe, you see, in spendin’ our days in savage amusement. And—”

Hughes stopped himself. He sniffed at the air, sensing something foreign in this dank, compressed atmosphere, something dry
and acrid. He saw that most of the other men noticed the smell, too.

“Smoke,” someone said.

“Yeah, same here. I smell it, too.”

“No, it can’t—”

It was the last word any of them said. They all made sounds, the horrible, raw sounds of fear men make when trapped like rodents,
scurrying about some small bit of space, knowing that in a matter of seconds or perhaps minutes they will meet their violent
end.

The smell of smoke in a mine shaft is the terrible precursor of rapid death—for the lucky ones. Even in this day of mostly
mechanized mining, it remained necessary to send down scores of men each day to cut away at the coal face. More machinery
meant more generation of electricity; more production invariably meant more men, and therefore increased human error; more
production meant increased release of flammable gasses that would have to be controlled and neutralized by safety workers
in advance of the miners themselves.

Modernity, in some cases, meant both more comfort to the laboring—and more risk of deadly consequence. And in the mining industry,
even modernity and all the wondrous new safety techniques, developed by and forced upon the big companies, would never be
able to erase the grim links with the necessary crudities of the past, namely, the canary custom.

Before and after each production shift, safety workers pass through the network of tunnels with live canaries carried in small
bird cages. Canaries, being especially susceptible to gaseous poisoning, are the barometers of carbon, sulphur, and cadmium
vapor presence. If the canaries live, the tunnels are deemed safe from the potential of instant holocaust. If the canaries
die, the safety workers pump in adequate amounts of gaseous elements to neutralize the presence of combustibles in the air.

There is no substitute for the canary custom.

And now, at this moment, twenty-two men crowded together on a descending elevator cage, twenty-two men sniffing at the darkness
with the white heat of terror in their eyes, knew what the canaries were blessed never to experience.

Hughes caught sight of the two-hundred-foot marker. Two hundred more feet, and the acrid fumes were growing stronger.

Then came the explosion.

A small, muffled explosion, followed by a powerful rumbling from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Lovebridge.

Another explosion, far more powerful. Then another.

The men trapped in the elevator were mad with fright. The young LaRaja thought fleetingly of his pregnant wife.

The fire came next. Roaring out of some side shaft, rising insanely up the main shaft toward the elevator, flames seemingly
angered by the temporary impasse of twenty-two shrieking men on a wooden elevator platform.

Another series of explosions, so deafening and powerful that their echoes caused the soft stone walls of the elevator shaft
to begin splintering.

Below their feet now, the fire licked at the men, inching through the foot-thick floor of the elevator.

Then the chains holding the elevator cage snapped: first one, tilting the floor and allowing great sheets of fire to escape
upwards, through the clutch of men, burning through twill cloth and human flesh.

Another chain snapped, and a half-dozen men slipped off the edge of the burning platform, disappearing through the solid wall
of yellow and white flame that filled the shaft.

A third chain went. Hughes lost his footing and went silently to his death, a strange look of resignation on his face.

LaRaja reached out to Hughes, instinctively, saw the fingers of the older man disappear into the flaming abyss, and then went
over the edge himself.

Finally the entire elevator cage simply dropped straight down to the floor of the pit, landing with a thundering noise muffled
by the bellowing path of flames seeking the air.

Elsewhere below ground, clusters of miners were being killed instantly, or entombed in tiny recesses of the mine face for
a slower death.

There would be no rescue for these men. Everywhere in the vast Lovebridge mine, the devastation of the explosions took the
form of an insatiable flood of fire storms.

Above ground, the devastation was slower, but it would be every bit as complete.

As the alarms began sounding across the city of Fairmont, as miners’ wives began frantically tuning to radio and television
stations only now beginning to get reporters to the scene of the tragedy… the looters were looking over their shoulders; and
finding no one to impede their vulturous instincts, they began their own terror of wanton destruction, multiplying the sorrows
taking hold of the community on which they fed.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 7:18:03 a.m. EST

“Now,” Winship said, lighting a pipe. He broke a wooden match in two in the process. “You’ve had time to look at the transmission.
The Air Force is flying out the original. But even so, what are your thoughts?”

Slayton had read the transmission a dozen times or more, and still his mind could not focus clearly. He had only the words
“colliery” and the use of the word “post” as indicators of a British inflection on the part of the writer.

“This comes… let’s see now, two days after Rogers was put away up in Danbury,” Slayton said.

Winship tapped his fingers impatiently on the desk top.

“I give you the best damned job in Treasury, and that’s all you can give me off the top of your head?” he asked.

“Well, this too,” Slayton answered him. “Whoever is behind it makes a damned curious choice for a messenger. I’m reminded
of the ‘Ransom of Red Chief.’ “

“The story of the kid who was kidnapped and no one bothered to pay off on him because he was such a hellion, and the kidnappers
wound up having to pay the brat’s old man?”

Slayton nodded. “I mean, who cares about the welfare of Nixon? Why not Ford, if it had to be an ex-President?”

“There is the matter of the Lovebridge coal mine,” Winship said.

“I know. I’m just joking about Nixon.”

“No jokes.”

Slayton shrugged his shoulders.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “Just buying time to think. I don’t know, of course, whether we have a kook here,
or a conspiracy that means something.”

“We’ve assumed the worst, of course,” Winship said. “Carter and Ford security has been fortified under national emergency
procedures—”

“The afternoon ‘post’ up in New York to Nixon?”

“All Nixon’s mail goes through the General Post Office internal security sorting division.”

“Of course,” Slayton said. He rubbed his chin. “Any chance of something slipping through the cracks there?”

“Hardly,” Winship said. Then he thought it over. “Well, maybe.”

Slayton returned to the transmission, studying it once again, as if some clue might spring up at him from the brittle photo
paper. Nothing.

“What we have here,” he finally said, “is a substantial possibility of an actual homegrown terrorist sortie.”

“Our first.”

“And undoubtedly not our last. The only thing going for us at all here is that this time, at least, our all-American terrorists
make themselves fairly visible. We don’t have too many folks stepping out in brown shirts. Yet.”

Slayton kept studying the document transmission as he spoke.

“What was it Marcuse said about America’s political drift?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Winship humphed. “I was never enamored of the fellow. He had the damndest knack of seeming to legitimize
anarchy.”

Slayton paid no attention to Winship’s remarks.

“He said, ‘America is the only country in the world that will go fascist democratically.’ You take Rogers. Here’s a guy who
represents Adolf Hitler, for god’s sake, and he’s a nice young man anybody in Muncie, Indiana, would be proud to serve Sunday
dinner to, so long as they weren’t fussy about their politics.

“Rogers is jailed, and he draws this enormous crowd of people to witness the great event. Television, of course, gives him
the platform and the power to reach out to Middle America, where the money and the votes are—”

“And the rotten core of our whole bourgeois system? Come off it, Ben. Get yourself beyond sophomore polemics, boy.”

“I don’t mean anything but this: we’ve lost a sense of outrage somewhere when we’re confronted by a Johnny Lee Rogers. He’s
a sly entertainment for us. Part nut-job and part front man for unspoken bitterness lying in quiet, so long as most of us
are bringing home a paycheck. Imagine, if you will, someone like Johnny Lee Rogers, someone with the media savvy and the looks
and all, the brains—but without those idiots around him in the swastikas. You think Rogers can draw a crowd now. Imagine the
crowd under more palatable conditions!”

Winship tapped his fingers again. “Has this analysis got any bearing on what we’ve got to do about this mine blast threat?”

“Of course. What you do about the mine blast is shut down the mine for the day. The threat is very specific.” Slayton put
his finger under the part that read
7 a.m. tomorrow
.

“They’ll never go along with it.”

“They’ll have to, if you mean the ownership of the mine. Tell them they’ll be responsible for the release of a convicted Nazi
murderer—which maybe they won’t care about—and then tell them we’ll tell the press, which maybe they will care about.

“Meanwhile,” Slayton said, popping a mint into his mouth, “we’re faced here with a possibility that’s pretty clear, from my
analysis.”

“Which is?”

“Elementary, my dear Winship.”

Slayton savored his ideas for a second. But before he could explain them, an aide to Winship entered the office without a
knock. He advanced directly to his superior and said:

“Sorry, sir, but I knew you would have to see this right away.”

Winship read a bit of tape, the half-inch strip bordered top and bottom in the red that issues from top secret teletypes under
Treasury Department guard at sensitive command posts in Washington and foreign embassies. He wiped his brow and gave the tape
to Slayton.

“Why this is on the ticker, I’ll never know. It’s no secret to the people of Fairmont,” he said.

Slayton read the message, a terse announcement of the mine explosion at Loveridge. He looked again at the transmission of
the Nixon message.

“My God,” Slayton said, “it was supposed to be tomorrow!”

“So what was your big theory?” Winship asked.

Slayton had leaped from his chair. He was buttoning his jacket.

“It still might fit, Hammy. We’ll get to that later. Right now, I need to stay on top of things. Here’s what you do. Get hold
of the classified advertising honcho at the
Washington Star
and tell him to meet me at the newspaper office pronto.”

He was out the door before Winship could get out a single flustered, “But… but…” His only choice was to follow the lead of
his headstrong special agent, a subordinate in name only. Winship and Slayton were a team of two equals with differing abilities
and styles, two men with that rare quality of working together almost telepathically, despite their wide differences.

Winship depressed the button of his desk top intercom. “Fran,” he barked. Then he felt helplessly foolish. He looked at his
wrist watch. His secretary wouldn’t be in for another ninety minutes.