PROLOGUE
Her death was her own damn fault.
He’d done everything right—research, surveillance, charge level, timing. His planning and execution had been perfect, his actions beyond reproach, which was why not a single question would come his way.
He was sure of it.
The notion had come to him when the vibrations first coursed through his body two months ago. He’d been out for a late-summer hike on Behind the Rocks Trail, following its serpentine path through the maze of red sandstone fins jutting skyward south of town, where the tall slabs of rock sliced the landscape into linear strips of windswept dunes separated by shadowed slot canyons.
He knew Utah’s politicians had long fed voters the same tired line—that the citizens of the state could sell their souls to the petrochemical industry while still attracting millions of tourists to southern Utah’s incomparable canyon country. In recent years, however, young environmentalists from the Wasatch Front had disputed the politicians’ claim. Hoisting the torch of Edward Abbey above their heads, the conservation warriors declared that if the oil and gas giants were allowed to continue mauling the land with their bulldozers and excavators, soon nothing would be left of Utah’s stunning red rock country but savaged earth.
The tremors from the thumper truck surged along the ground every few seconds during his hike, pulsing upward through his legs and reverberating in his torso. With each mini earthquake came the same question, over and over again. Could he really send a seismic wake-up call to every citizen of Utah? Thump. Could he? Thump.
In the ensuing weeks, the truck’s pulses became a living thing inside him, a thrumming reminder of what he was prepared to do, and why.
He purchased a used laptop from the classifieds, wiped its hard drive clean, and conducted research only through his secret online portal. He made his purchases in cash at gun shops and farm and ranch stores in nearby towns, collecting everything his research told him he needed.
By early November, the cottonwoods along the Colorado River through Moab glowed with late autumn gold, the trees resplendent in the slanted fall sunlight. On the crisp, clear morning the massive thumper truck trundled through town, its passage noted by a handful of sign-waving activists, the brilliant yellow cottonwood leaves snapped free of their branches by the thousands, fluttering to earth in shimmering cascades. The truck turned off the highway twenty miles north of Moab and crawled across public land on a winding two track to Yellow Cat Flat, hard against the northern border of Arches National Park.
A few final leaves clung to the skeletal limbs of the cottonwoods in town when the year’s first winter storm drew a bead on southern Utah a week later. He checked the truck’s timetable on the O&G Seismic website as the storm bore down, set to bring decreasing temperatures, whipping winds, and icy sleet to canyon country. According to the schedule, the truck would be thumping its way across the broad desert flat just outside the park throughout the storm.
* * *
He checked his drill and tested the detonator and timer batteries. He apportioned the blasting powder with care, making sure his measurements were exact.
The storm crossed into Utah late in the afternoon. Dense clouds gathered over the state as darkness fell, bringing heavy snow to the northern mountains and sleet to the high desert lands in the south. He deleted his secret online account and drove over the Colorado River bridge after nightfall, slowing to toss the laptop into the roiling waters below.
Biting gusts of wind and frigid blasts of sleet struck him when he shouldered his pack and set out on foot, clicking on his headlamp and hiking into the empty desert. He wended his way through sage and rabbitbrush, the bluffs and promontories at the heart of Arches National Park looming above him, black against the overcast sky in the midnight darkness.
He finished hand-drilling the hole in the sandstone arch as the sky lightened with dawn. The arch soared across the desert, connecting humped ridges of slickrock. He tamped the blasting powder into the drill hole, sank the parallel detonation prongs into the charge mixture, and backed away, unspooling the thin detonator cord as he went. He crouched in a shallow pothole two hundred feet from the rock span, plunger in hand.
The first thump of the day pulsed through him in his hiding place at 7:30, right on schedule. A second thump coursed through him from the north seconds later, then another, and another. Needles of wind-driven sleet gathered on his shoulders as the inexorable beat of the pulses continued. Trembling with anticipation, he wrapped his fingers around the plastic plunger handle, preparing to press it downward.
A light tap-tap-tapping noise reached him—the sound of running steps, propelled by the squalling wind. He stiffened and checked his watch: 7:35. He leaned forward, eyes wide and heart pounding.
She appeared a hundred yards beyond the arch, her blue jacket and black tights stark against the gray clouds. She ran through the swirling sleet with the easy gait of a gazelle, crossing the spine of rock high above the desert floor, headed straight for the stone span.
He nearly leapt to his feet and screamed at her to stop. But he had a job to do. He knelt in place, his head ducked, convinced she wouldn’t dare venture onto the arch itself.
She slowed and edged down the sloping ridge of stone—and stepped from the solid rock onto the narrow span.
The digital numbers on his watch flicked from 7:35 to 7:36. Timing was critical if his alibi was to hold up. He tightened his fingers around the plunger handle, his breaths coming in strangled gasps.
She extended her arms from her sides and placed one foot directly in front of the other, her pace slow and deliberate. She was fifteen feet out on the arch when, finally, he could contain himself no longer.
He rose from the depression and revealed himself to her, convinced the mist and sleet between them would make it impossible for her to see his face clearly. Surely, having been spotted, she would retreat.
The plunger, forgotten in his hand, slipped from his fingers. Its handle struck his shoe. It depressed little, if any—but a sharp, concussive crack sounded from the arch.
The woman dropped her arms, her gaze fixed on the bridge of stone extending through the air in front of her.
The middle of the span cleaved in two. Dark lines shot like black lightning down its entire length. For an instant, the arch maintained its shape, suspended in the sky. Then it fractured into dozens of jagged chunks of stone.
“No!” he cried out.
Too late.
The woman screamed and grabbed at the air with outstretched fingers as she fell with the pieces of the shattered arch to the desert floor five stories below.
PART ONE
“League on league of red cliff and arid tablelands,extending through purple haze over the bulging curve ofthe planet to the ranges of Colorado—a sea of desert.”
—Edward Abbey, describing Arches National
Monument, soon to become Arches National Park,
in Desert Solitaire, 1968
1
Thump.
