“No,” answered his partner.
“Well, it’s still a stupid sport.”
“Yes.”
Five thousand feet later, Remo said, “I’m leaving before you talk my fool ear off.” He slashed through his strap with his fingernails and plummeted the last several yards to solid earth.
The skydiver’s parachute, freed of the extra weight, bobbed and lingered in the air for many seconds, then set the man on a hilltop near a small tree. He continued to sit there for a long time, thinking things over.
Remo snaked across the prairie until he found one of the dead victims. He gave the body a quick once-over, then relieved it of its equipment, wadding up the melted parachute and stuffing it back inside.
He had some phone calls to make.
It was amazing what a decent meal could do to lift your spirits. After they left the little Route 66 roadside store on that day weeks and weeks ago, Jacob Fastbinder made a meal from stolen groceries. Fastbinder’s tastes were a little more cultured than those of his American son. Jack would eat nothing but lunch-meat-and-mustard sandwiches for days at a time and be happy. Fastbinder had been raised in a wealthy German household, and he opened a half-dozen tiny cans that had been stacked on the gourmet shelf at the market. Oysters, caviar, pâté, all of it went onto tiny slices of pretty good rye bread. Fastbinder ate until he was near to bursting.
Satisfied, he began noticing the control panel of Jack’s Earth Drill. Various computers and gauges were bolted to a hastily constructed steel rack. There was a navigation system that, Jack explained, used what few digital seismological mappings were available for tracking their route in the subsurface. New features were mapped out in real time as Jack’s Earth Drill pinged the underworld with ultrasound.30
Fastbinder wasn’t the genius his young son was, but he was still a brilliant, educated engineer. He read the data on the displays easily enough, and he was shocked.
“Jack, why are we so deep? Where are we going?”
The teenager grinned excitedly. “Big cavern I mapped out on the way over. The place is the size of the Mall of America, and it’s like five miles down. Talk about a hideout. They’ll never find us there.”
“Five miles,” Fastbinder breathed. “That’s impossible.”
“That’s what the research says. I looked it up. The deepest mines are 12,700 feet deep, and that’s not even 2.5 miles. We’re going twice that.”
Fastbinder spotted an external temperature gauge. They were up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit already. The interior of the mole was sixty-eight and holding, but Fastbinder started sweating anyway.
“Why are we doing this thing, Jack?”
“I told you, it’s a good hideout.”
‘We’ll burn up.”
Jack’s eyes sparked. “It’s cool down there, Pops. That’s why I found it. There was this cool place I passed through on the way over. It’s a subsurface water shaft. Must come from some underground river closer to the surface. I figure an earthquake or something opened up a crack that went almost straight down, and the river started following it. It’s like a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall. I put a drone down there and got enough of a reading to show me that it’s a honking huge cavern system. The air-temperature reading I got was sixty-four degrees Eff. I guess the river cools it down.”
But Jack Fast had a more compelling reason for wanting to see the deep cavern. He showed his father the photographs that his drone probe had transmitted back to him. Photographs of people.
Jacob Fastbinder thought his son was joking, but that didn’t make sense. Jack Fast had always been a straight shooter, always telling his father the unadulterated truth. He had earned Fastbinder’s trust.
Still the elderly man experienced mounting fear as the hours stretched into a full day. Jack’s Earth Drill crawled inexorably down at a steep angle, effortlessly forging its impressive and beautiful tunnel system. She seemed robust enough, and Jack’s estimations of the tunnel strength were impressive.
Fastbinder hadn’t known real terror as he lay dying in the old antique Mighty Mole, but now, even when his son assured him he was safe, Fastbinder grew terrified. His claustrophobia mounted as they stared at the darkness endless hours—the brilliance of the static electricity would have blinded them without a near-black shield over the front and back windshields.
Then the ordeal was over. Fastbinder sat up out of a fitful nap, roused by uncanny silence and stillness.
“We’re here,” Jack Fast said. Now that the blinding electric bolts were turned off. Jack shoved back the tempered-glass blast shield and they looked upon a new world.
Jack’s Earth Drill had emerged atop a sand dune, and below them stretched a plain of sand, rock and white slime. JED’s spotlights revealed a wide river of crystal-clean water, and they could barely see the walls on the other side of it.
