As distasteful as it was for Keene to have to admit it to himself, having the numbers reduced did simplify things. The normal load for a minishuttle of the type at Montemorelos was twelve persons—which had been the size of the party that visited the Osiris. As things were, they had fifteen adults plus Robin. By throwing out inessential equipment and eliminating fuel for reentry, Joe felt they could accommodate the extra. But he wouldn’t have wanted to push things any further than that.
While the others were loading the last items, Keene went out the back of the admin building to stare one last time over the landing field and toward the pad area, where so much of the latter years of his life had been invested. Although night was coming on, the flaming sky was creating enough of a lurid light to see. The scene looked like the aftermath of a battle with the litter of abandoned military equipment, vehicles, and a number of wrecked aircraft, including a cargo plane that had been picked up by the wind and cartwheeled into one of the heavy transporters on the tracks bordering the landing field. As he watched, something burst like a falling bomb somewhere near the far end of the main runway, toward the ruins of the pads. Boots crunched on the concrete behind him. It was Mitch.
“We’re ready to go, Lan.” He stopped beside Keene and followed his gaze. “End of the dream, eh?”
“Maybe the beginning of another,” Keene said.
“You mean out at Kronia?”
“That’s where the ball will be for a while now.”
Mitch looked at him. “Is the Osiris still going to be up there, really?”
Keene sighed. That was something he hadn’t wanted to think about. It wasn’t on the list of things he could change. “Let’s just play things the way that’s got us this far, Mitch,” he answered. “One crisis at a time.”
They walked back through the building to the waiting truck. Keene decided to let Vicki spend some time introducing herself to the others and rode up front again with Legermount and Mitch.
* * *
For once, fortune seemed to have worked in their favor, and on regaining Highway 281 they found that the tide had cleared it rather than introducing new obstacles. Although the meteorite bombardment continued to increase, they made the sixty-odd miles to the border in close to two hours and, setting the last of their immediate worries to rest, the bridge across the Rio Grande at Reynosa was still passable. And more, the coastline now to the east of them bulged seaward, taking it farther away, which would give them an additional margin of distance when the tide returned to its next high point.
51
They were a few miles into Mexico, when the entire western sky lit up for ten or twenty seconds in a sheet of yellow that illuminated the surroundings like an eerie, off-color dawn coming from the wrong direction. It could only be what the scientists had feared early on: A huge area of hydrocarbon-vapor-saturated atmosphere had ignited. Legermount halted to stare incredulously. Mitch was equally stupefied. Keene felt as if his insides were turning cold. “Get out of here!” he shouted at them. “We can’t stay exposed out here. Get under a bridge or something.”
Mitch shook himself back to reality. “How long have we got?”
“If that thing is a hundred miles away . . . maybe ten, twelve minutes.”
They pressed on, but nothing like a bridge or flyover materialized. When they had left it as long as they dared, Keene directed Legermount to steer off the highway at the bottom of a cutting they were in, and to park as close as he could get against the rock face forming its side. Keene ran around to the back and threw open the door. “Everybody get out and get down! Cover your heads and your ears! There’s a shock coming in, and it’s going to be a big one!”
Bodies tumbled out and scattered to find niches among the rocks and sand gulleys along the verge. Keene waited to help Vicki and Robin down, and then guided them to a muddy fissure near the base of the cutting face, which Colby and Reynolds were hastily scraping deeper with entrenching tools. They threw themselves in, hands and whatever padding they could find clamped over their ears, Keene using his body to shield Vicki protectively. Even so, the pressure wave when it arrived was excruciating, and he heard Cynthia scream with the pain. In its wake came a howling wind that tore dust off the ground in sheets, blowing branches and whole trees past the end of the cutting and pinning the truck on two wheels against the rock. Out in the open, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. As things were, it was two hours before the tempest fell sufficiently for them to risk moving again.