“This leg will go nine miles to the south of us,” Teddy said. “It’ll connect the water supply to an identical piece in Brooklyn. Everything moves around here on railroad cars, lugged down the same hole you came in, and then assembled once on the ground.”
Mike turned to check on my progress. He looked over my head. “And behind us? What’s that?”
“The other half of the tunnel-a thirteen-mile piece. It comes via the Bronx from upstate-that entrance we looked at last night-and connects to here through a tube under Central Park.”
More than twenty treacherous miles of cavernous tentacles and only one way to get back out to Thirtieth Street. I looked down again as frigid water sloshed over the top of my boots.
Teddy pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and removed a cigarette, lighting it as I caught up to him. “The crime-scene guys are waiting for you farther inside the tunnel, at the mole. That’s where the explosion was.”
“What’s a mole?” I asked.
“It’s the machine that actually bores the hole through the rock. Never been used in the States before,” Teddy said. “It’s how the Chunnel was dug between England and France. Until then, every tunnel in the world was built the same way the Romans did centuries ago-blast and drill, drill and blast. Slow as molasses.”
“And with this?”
“It’s a monster,” he said, his huge feet swallowed by the soft mud, water dripping from the ancient schist over our heads. “Weighs three hundred tons. Brought it below in parts and put it together just like we build the trains. You’ll see-it drills its way through the rock, leaving the walls as smooth to the touch as ice, and it’s three times as fast as the old system. That’s how come so many hogs are out looking for work.”
I could see a moving beam in the far distance. It looked as if someone was holding a flashlight, waving it slowly around and around in a circle. Behind me a machine rumbled into motion.
“Get off the tracks,” Teddy said. “Off to the side. That’s the signal to send one of the trains down to the mole.”
I grabbed for Mike’s shoulder and stepped over to the rounded wall of the tunnel, pressing myself against the cool, wet surface. I coughed again as the residual dust from the blast was stirred up by the wheels of the railroad car. The small mask that Golden had handed me hung on a string around my neck. I couldn’t bear to put it over my mouth for fear-which I knew was irrational-that it would muffle any sound I might try to make.
“Where’s he going?” Mike asked.
“It’s a muck car. Once the mole drills into the bedrock, the debris-the muck-has to be hauled out of here. Goes up a conveyer belt behind the shaft.”
“Why not just repair the old water tunnels?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be easier than doing all this?”
Teddy shook his head. His voice boomed back at me. “Call it metal fatigue or whatever you want, but the entire infrastructure that brings the water to the city could go at any minute.”
I looked overhead at the giant bolts-supersize like everything else in this dark dungeon-that seemed to hold the bedrock in place above me.
“They were built with valves back then, Alex. Think of big floodgates inside the tunnels that were supposed to be opened and closed whenever they needed fixing.”
The mud was covering my boots up to the ankles. It felt as though I were walking in quicksand. “So-?”
“Gets to the point, a hundred years later, where the valves can’t take the pressure of billions of gallons of water. Nobody’s even sure that if they could be turned off at this point, they could ever be turned on again. And nobody wants to try to find out,” Teddy said. “Hell, the aqueduct that services the old tunnels upstate leaks so bad it’s made a sinkhole that could swallow up half the town.”
Check and check again. Manhattan without a drop of water, and the entire island sinking back down below the Hudson and East rivers.
“So Duke Quillian wasn’t scheduled to man the evening shift last night?” Mike asked.
“Nah. He wasn’t set to work again until next week. I don’t know what he was doing down here. But you’ll see the list of names. We gave it to your buddies this morning. Those two kids from Tobago were in working the blowpipes. They were the only ones signed out to be in this stretch of the tunnel.”
“What’s a blowpipe?” I asked. “What were they doing?”
“We did some blasting yesterday morning. When that’s done and it’s mucked out, then the next crew comes in with blowpipes. They wash the dirt out of the holes by blasting water and air into them. That’s what those cousins were doing when the explosion happened. No clue what Duke was up to, though.”
We seemed to be walking for the better part of a mile, slogging through mud while water dripped everywhere. Huge ventilation pipes snaked along the curved walls of the vault, and below them, row upon row of black cable-the source of electricity that powered the dig-hung from hooks that had been drilled into the bedrock.
I stopped when another coughing fit seized me.
“You all right?” Mike asked, again expressing his concern but obviously anxious to press forward.
“She’ll live. It’s just the dust, Mike,” Teddy said. “You need to be down here longer than this to get a real lung disease, like the rest of us have.”
I knew he meant well, but his humor wasn’t comforting.
“That odor,” I said, stifling a gag at the sweet, pungent scent. “Is that gas?”
“Dynamite. Gelatin dynamite, it’s called,” Teddy answered. “Water-resistant. We use tons of it down here.”
“Thank Alfred Nobel,” Mike said. “Nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth. Now all you have to do, Coop, is figure out why the dynamite made an unscheduled appearance last night.”
We were getting closer to the scene. Shovels and rakes and sifting screens, the tools of the bomb-squad investigators, were stacked against the wall.
“There’s KD,” Mike said, calling out as he recognized another of the task force cops, Jimmy Halloran, a guy whose baby face had earned him the nickname Kid Detective.
Mike and Teddy finished greeting the team that had been brought in for the site briefing, and I added my wet handshake when I caught up.
The large men were dwarfed by the enormous piece of machinery that loomed behind them in the tunnel. This was the fantastic mole that was eating its way through the ancient bedrock under New York at the rate of one hundred feet a day.
KD was bringing Mike up to speed. “Nope. No blast was scheduled last evening. So far as anybody knew, you had the two cousins up on this end with blowpipes, cleaning up the day’s mess. We got the names of the eight other men who worked the shift, but they all say they didn’t hear anything before the explosion.”
“Somebody been talking to them?”
“Yeah, they’ve been in interviews with guys from the squad the whole day.”
“What would you expect them to have heard before it went off?” I asked.
“You gotta excuse her,” Mike said. “Digging ditches wasn’t a required course at Wellesley.”
“There are blasts in the tunnel almost every day,” Teddy said, reaching in his plastic bag for another cigarette. “The guys prep the walls by jacklegging a drill ten feet in and making a grid. It ain’t exactly a haphazard occurrence.”
“And the site is cleared of all workmen, right?” KD asked.
“You bet. You gotta be three miles down the tracks if you don’t want to wind up airborne to Brooklyn. There’s a three-minute warning that’s sent out, and a follow-up with a minute to go. Nobody in his right mind doesn’t get the hell out of range.”
The empty railroad train that had passed us on the way down to this spot had coal cars like those on a Lionel train set. They were open on top, and when ready to dump their load, they tipped over on one side and poured out the coal.
KD Halloran stepped sideways and tapped Hal Sherman on the back. The NYPD’s best crime-scene investigator was kneeling in the mud, meticulously photographing the splintered remains of the wooden ties that had caught fire in the blast.