The Devil Colony (Sigma Force 7)

“He was insistent,” Dr. Cooper pressed. “Said it was important.”

“Everything’s important with Dr. Tanaka,” he mumbled under his breath, not bothering to hide his disdain.

Still, a bit of excitement entered Dr. Cooper’s voice. “Riku believes the neutrinos might be geoneutrinos.”

He looked sharply at her. “That’s impossible.”

Most neutrinos came from the background radiation of the universe: from solar flares, from dying stars, from collapsing galaxies. But some neutrinos—called geoneutrinos—originated from the earth itself: from decaying isotopes in the ground, from cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere, even from the explosion of atomic bombs.

“That’s what Riku believes,” she insisted.

“Nonsense. It would take the equivalent of a hundred hydrogen bombs to generate a neutrino blast of this magnitude.”

Jun crossed toward the door, moving too suddenly. Pain jolted up his right leg, a flare of sciatica.

Maybe I’d better get down there.

The desire came not so much from a need to find out if Dr. Tanaka was right, but from a wish to prove that the young physicist was wrong. It would be a rare failing, one Jun didn’t want to miss.

Remaining behind to finish her own work, Dr. Cooper held the door for him. He did his best to hide his hobble as he marched out the door and headed for the elevator that descended from the topside offices to the subterranean labs. The elevator shaft was new. Prior to its construction, the only access to the mountain’s heart was via a truck tunnel or mine train. While this approach was swifter, it was also unnerving.

The cage dropped like a falling boulder, lifting his stomach into his throat. Plagued by claustrophobia, he was all too aware of the meters of rock rising over his head. When at last he reached the bottom of the shaft, the doors opened into the main control room for the detector. Divided into cubicles and offices, it looked like any laboratory on the surface.

But Jun wasn’t fooled.

As he stepped out of the elevator, he kept his back hunched, sensing the weight of Mount Ikenoyama above him. He found the shift-duty physicist standing beside a wall-mounted LED monitor near the back of the main hall.

Dr. Riku Tanaka was barely into his twenties, hardly over five feet in height. The wunderkind of physics held dual doctorates and was here working on his third.

At the moment the young man stood stiffly, hands behind his back, staring at a spinning map of the globe. Trails of data flowed in columns down the left half of the screen.

Tanaka held his head cocked, as if listening intently to some sound only he could hear, whispers that perhaps held the answers to the universe’s secrets.

“The results are intriguing,” he said, not even turning, perhaps catching Jun’s reflection in one of the dark monitors to the side.

Jun frowned at the lack of simple courtesy. No bow of greeting, no acknowledgment of the hardship of his coming down here. It was said the young man suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. But Jun personally believed his colleague was simply rude and used such a diagnosis as an excuse.

Jun joined him at the monitor and treated him as brusquely. “What results?”

“I’ve been gathering data from neutrino labs around the world. From the Russians at Lake Baikal, from the Americans at Los Alamos, from the Brits at Sudbury Observatory.”

“I’ve heard,” Jun said. “They all recorded the spike in neutrinos.”

“I had those other labs send me their data.” Tanaka nodded to the scrolling columns. “Neutrinos travel in a straight line from the source of their creation. Neither gravity nor magnetic fields deflect their path.”

Jun bristled. He didn’t need to be lectured on such fundamentals.

Tanaka seemed unaware of the affront and continued: “So it seemed a simple matter to use that data from various points around the globe and triangulate the primary source of the blast.”

Jun blinked in surprise. It was such a simple solution. His face flushed. As director here, he should have thought of that himself.

“I’ve run the program four times, refining the search parameters with each pass. The source definitely appears to be terrestrial.”

Tanaka tapped at a keyboard below the monitor. On the screen, a narrowing set of crosshairs fixed to the globe. First, encompassing the Western Hemisphere, then North America, then the western half of the United States. With a final few taps, the crosshairs sharpened and the global image zoomed into a section of the Rocky Mountains.

“Here is the source.”

Jun read the territory highlighted on the screen.

Utah.

“How could that be?” he choked out, finding it hard to fathom these impossible results. He remembered his earlier words with Dr. Cooper, how it would take a hundred hydrogen bombs to generate a neutrino blast of this magnitude.

At his side, Tanaka shrugged, his manner insufferably calm. Jun restrained a desire to slap the man, to get a reaction out of him. Instead, he stared at the screen, at the topography of the mountains, with a single question foremost in his mind.

What the hell is going on out there?

Chapter 7

May 30, 3:52 P.M.

Utah Wilderness

Hank leaned low over the mare’s withers, avoiding low-hanging branches as the horse raced downhill through a forest of Douglas firs, western spruce, and lodgepole pines. Still, he got battered and scraped. Behind him, clutching tightly around his waist, Kai fared no better.

He heard her sudden cries of pain, felt her bounce high out of the saddle they shared, but mostly he sensed her terror, her fingers digging into his shirt, her breath ragged.

Hank gave Mariah free rein, trusting her footing and eye for the terrain. He corrected her only with sudden tugs on the lead to keep her path within the shelter of the forest. His dog, Kawtch, kept up with them, racing low to the ground, taking a more direct path through the trees.

Behind them, the military helicopter gave chase, thundering above the treetops. The woodland canopy offered some protection, but Hank was growing more certain that the hunters were tracking them by body heat, using infrared.

Off to the left, a spate of gunfire shredded needles and branches from a spruce tree. Splinters stung his exposed cheek. The hunters’ aim was getting better. As the roar of the chain guns died away, a sharp cry burst forth behind him.

“Professor!” Kai called out. She risked freeing an arm and pointed.

Ahead, a meadow cut across their path, bright with sunshine. It was wide and grassy, dotted by a few scraggly junipers and a handful of granite outcroppings. The forest continued beyond the meadow, but how to reach it? Out in the open, they’d be picked off easily.