Once the van reached an area beyond the immediate perimeter of Groom Lake, the unseen driver lowered the partition so they could see out the windshield and Ira drew back the curtains.
The mountains held a distant chill even if last night hadn’t been cold enough for frost. The few plants, cactus, yucca, and sage mostly, were stunted by their harsh environment as though life in the barren stretches was an experiment that was slowly failing. This was a land of rock in a thousand shades that changed and shifted as the sun rose higher. The dome of sky hinted that it stretched far beyond the horizon but seemed contained by the jagged hills.
Their destination was two hours from the main base, tucked at the end of a box canyon. Mercer recognized that the mounds of tailings, the material excavated from a mine shaft, had been spread evenly along the canyon floor to disguise that any work was taking place. The camp was nothing more than several battered mobile homes situated close to the towering canyon walls. An overhang of rock at the canyon’s lip kept the facility in perpetual shadow and hid it from aerial observation.
The camp was as forlorn as a West Texas trailer park, Mercer thought, although he’d worked in much, much worse. A tumbleweed skittered from between two trailers, whirled in a crosscurrent of wind, then dashed past the SUV like a frightened animal.
Then he spotted a natural cave at the end of the canyon. It was at least seventy feet wide and nearly half as tall. It appeared to stretch a hundred feet or more into the mountain. Powerful arc lights mounted on scaffolds lit the interior and highlighted the machinery at the top of a twenty-foot-square hole driven into the living rock. The two-story hoist allowed overburden to be dumped directly into trucks that spread it on the desert floor. Nearby were massive ventilator ducts to keep fresh air circulating underground and several box trailers for storage. Near the mouth of the cave were two large generators for power and the massive outlet of a down-hole water pump to handle drainage.
Mercer was impressed with the security as well as the efficiency of what Ira had created here. “Put in a golf course and some condos and you’d have a nice spot for a retirement community.”
“Hell Hollow Home for the Aged?”
Mercer laughed, grateful that the Ira he knew was coming back. “I was thinking Desolate Digs for the Near-Dead. Harry could be your spokesman.”
The Suburban braked at the first of the trailers. Ira stepped to the dusty ground as the trailer door swung open. The man standing at the threshold in jeans, cowboy boots, and a white T-shirt seemed as apropos as the tumbleweed that had crossed their path. As dried and tough as a piece of beef jerky, he squinted at Mercer and then nodded when he recognized Ira. “Howdy, Mr. Lasko. This our new boss?”
“Hey, Red.” What little showed of Red’s hair from under his hat was brown. “This is Mercer.”
“I heard of ya.” Red’s voice twanged like an untuned guitar. “You’re that fella what found a new diamond mine in Africa a couple years back.”
They shook hands while Ira continued the introductions. “Red Harding was the number-two man on the shift that lost half the crew during the cave-in.”
“You didn’t want to take over?” Mercer asked, needing to know now if this guy resented him for taking a job he felt he might have deserved.
“Hell, son” — Red was perhaps fifteen years older than Mercer, although it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he had fathered some children in his mid-teens — “comes a time in a man’s life where he don’t wanta give the orders no more. It’s a piece easier just takin’ ’em.”
“Tell me what happened?” Mercer invited.
Red paused, giving the question thought despite the days he’d already had to consider the cause of the cave-in. “A chunk of hanging wall that had no reason to crack loose cracked loose. Came down in a flat piece about eight feet thick that spanned the entire drive. Crushed everyone under it. Fifteen men.”
Mercer got the sense that Red wasn’t comfortable with this vague description of the accident. Not that he was holding anything back. It was just that there was something about it he didn’t understand. “You hadn’t bolted the hanging wall?” Hanging wall was mining parlance for the roof of a tunnel. Bolting was what it sounded like, screwing long bolts into the ceiling to help stabilize the rock.
“No need. We’re boring through some serious hard-rock. No water seepage, no fissures, nothing.”
“They’re bolting it now,” Ira offered.
Mercer expected no less.
After being shown his room in one of the trailers, Mercer changed into his miner’s coveralls while Ira was loaned a spare set by Red Harding. With no place to hide his pistol in the utilitarian room, Mercer decided he’d keep it with him. He tucked it against the small of his back under the coveralls and planted his helmet on his head.
Ira had to keep his baseball cap on to prevent the helmet Red had given him from slipping across his hairless scalp. He suffered the ignominy in silence.
The cavern was markedly cooler than the canyon, even with the excess heat generated by the diesel-powered equipment.
As they waited for the personnel lift to trundle up from underground, Mercer examined a fist-sized chunk of rock that had spilled from the ore shoot. He always marveled at the fact that in the millions, or even billions, of years since this innocuous lump of stone had solidified in the earth’s crust, not one human had ever seen it. He was the first to give it any thought at all. It made him feel like a Golden Age explorer peering at a newly discovered continent. He’d worked in mines since his teenage years in the granite quarries of Vermont, and that thrill had never left him.
The cage hoist arrived with a clang of bells and the three men stepped into the roomy car. The small scope of the project meant that one mine shaft could be used for hauling material from the depths as well as transporting the men to and from work and provide forced air ventilation through enormous ducts secured to the side of the hole.
The bells rang again and the bottom fell out from under them.
Ira clutched at a safety rail while Red and Mercer suppressed knowing smiles. The first descent into a mine was a terrifying experience that many could never repeat. Lasko finally released his grip on the railing when he’d regained his equilibrium.
“And I thought commuting to work around Washington was bad,” he said to cover his apprehension. “Is it always like that?”
Red shook his head. “The horizontal tunnel we bored off this shaft is eight hundred feet below us. In South Africa, some of the men work ten times deeper. To get them there quickly, you damn near free-fall the whole way.”
“Hell of a way to make a living,” Ira remarked as they dropped into impenetrable darkness.
Mercer ignored the sarcasm. “It sure is.”
Several minutes later, the rattling car slowed and a yellowish glow seeped up from around the elevator’s edges. They were nearing where men drilled and blasted toward the subterranean cavity the Department of Energy planned to use as their temporary storehouse.
Red threw open the gate when the car stopped bouncing at the end of its eight-hundred-foot tether. The chamber was the size of a railway tunnel and well lit. They were that much closer to the earth’s core, so the workings were appreciably warmer too, though not uncomfortably so. In ultradeep mines, ventilated air was forced through massive refrigeration units just to maintain a temperature of one hundred degrees. Littering the antechamber were hydraulic compressors for the drills, mechanical scrapers and other specialty equipment designed to operate in the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel.