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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