At the far end of the room was the main tunnel, lit by a string of bulbs that vanished far into the distance. “How long is the drive?” Mercer asked.
“Twelve hundred feet,” Red said as he stepped over snaking coils of hydraulic lines and power cords as thick as his wrist. “The lab coats who told us where to dig wanted the access shaft sunk fifteen hundred feet from the pocket.”
“What about the sump under the hoist?”
“The shaft bottoms out three hundred feet below this level.”
Meaning they could store more than a hundred thousand cubic feet of water below the level of the drive. “Why so deep?”
“The lab coats again. They say we’re blasting toward an underground lake. When we cut through they want to keep as much water as possible. Some sort of irrigation project, right, Mr. Lasko?”
“That’s right, Red.” Ira gave Mercer a significant look. Red didn’t know the details of the project. Mercer cut short his questioning.
Once they stepped out of the well-lit antechamber, the three men switched on flashlights and continued deeper into the guts of the mountain. The ceiling was a roomy eight feet and the passage was fifteen feet wide. Mercer assumed it was sized to accommodate the nuclear containment casks. Under the beam of his light, the stone was a featureless gray.
Ira asked about the puddles of dirty water on the floor.
“You use water to cool and lubricate the drill bits. Nothing to worry about,” Mercer replied, then added, “It’s when you see clear water that you should be concerned. This far down any sediment in the water has been distilled as it percolates through the rock. Clean water means seepage.”
A thousand feet down the tunnel, they came to where part of the hanging wall had let go. The debris and the bodies had been removed so the area looked sanitized. The only evidence of the tragedy was that the ceiling was double its normal height. The break where the stone had split appeared clean, as if the section that collapsed had been a separate piece of rock waiting for eons for its support to be taken away.
Mercer looked at Red.
“Like I said,” the Texan drawled, “weirdest damned thing.”
The bolt heads recently shot into the stone were silver bright.
They continued deeper into the tunnel. Heavy beams supported on timber balks had been placed every twenty feet. They used wooden columns because the fibers made popping sounds long before they collapsed, giving workers plenty of time to reshore the area or, if need be, to clear out entirely.
As they neared the working face, the sound of mine work became a teeth-shattering combination of steel on stone and the grind of heavy equipment. They passed several small mechanical shovels and a string of ore cars mounted on solid wheels. The awkward train, with its low-slung electric tractor, resembled a metallic centipede. Nearby was an even stranger insectlike machine, a four-drill drifter. The drifter was a platform mounted on crawler treads that could precisely position four of the heavy rock drills. The drills themselves were roughly the same size as machine guns and had the same wicked appearance. Hydraulic cables snaked from the machine like arteries.
The men at the tunnel’s limit worked in pairs using slightly smaller hammer drills to bore more holes into the stone. Rock chips and lubricating water spewed from the hundred-pound tools in a stinging rain. Sullen rainbows caught in the lights seemed to resent being caged in this stygian realm.
Mining had come a long way from the days when men hand-packed sticks of dynamite into drill holes and hoped for the best. Advances in explosives and techniques meant miners could peel rock with near-surgical precision. Here the men used the drifter to drill out the larger holes at the center of an expanding spiral pattern. The rest of the holes were hand-drilled using notes on depth and angle determined by the shift boss. This intricate arrangement allowed the explosives in the middle to core out a void in the rock face. Timed with microsecond delays, the next ring of charges blew debris laterally into the cavity, expanding it and creating space for the rubble from still more shots. The explosions corkscrewed out like a blooming flower and gave the men unprecedented control over how much material they excavated with each shot.
Red broke away from Mercer and Ira to tap the shift boss on the shoulder. With the drillers working full out, it was impossible to hear over the din.
Even before he turned, Mercer recognized Donny Randall just from his size and the slope of his wide shoulders. His blocky head made his helmet look like a finger bowl.
They’d met once in Botswana, at a retirement party for the underground manager of the Orapa mine. Donny had been at the stylish affair because an incentive contest gave an invitation to the shift boss whose gang held the monthly record for most ore removed. He’d basically brutalized his way in. As he partied that night, one of his men was in a hospital bed recovering from a slenectomy while another was learning to eat without front teeth, all thanks to Donny’s pick handle.
Mercer had learned about this and some of his earlier exploits in South Africa later, although even then he could sense Donny’s brute stupidity and elemental savagery. As one of the only Americans there, Donny had tried to speak with Mercer. He’d been drunk when he’d arrived at the hotel ballroom and could only slur his words.
The incident was one of the few times Mercer’s memory had failed him and for this he was grateful. He couldn’t recall what was said during their minute-long conversation, but he did remember that Donny had been thrown out of the hotel by a half dozen guards, most of whom went home with bruises or black eyes as souvenirs.
Randall had a brutal face, heavy brows and a mouth perpetually twisted into a smirk. His nose looked so often broken and reset there was little cartilage remaining. His hair was dyed jet-black and he sported sideburns like a latter-day Elvis. His eyes were dark and disturbing. It wasn’t their shade that was so unsettling, it was their feral quickness. They twitched from person to person as though he was a cornered animal seeking escape, or a liar waiting to be found out.
Mercer knew him to be both.
Randall’s eyes finally settled on Ira and he gave a mock salute. The fact that Admiral Lasko signed the paychecks did little to impress him. Red indicated that they should move back down the drive to get away from the din.
“What are you doing back here?” Donny demanded of Ira. Like many paranoids, he never understood that his brusque suspicion contributed to the cycle of animosity he encountered.
Ira let the lack of respect slide. “I’m here with the new shift boss to replace Gordon and Kadanski. This is Mercer.”
Donny made no move to shake hands, nor did it appear he recognized the name or Mercer’s face.
“We’re down to sixteen men, including him.” Randall tossed his head in Mercer’s direction. His voice was a strange combination of menace and petulance. “Because you won’t get more miners you can’t expect me to make your schedule.”
“I’ve seen the progress reports,” Ira replied evenly. “Even when you had three shifts you guys weren’t making three shots a day.”
“That wasn’t my fault. Gordon and Kadanski didn’t know what they were doing. Hell, if I hadn’t picked up their slack we wouldn’t have moved ten feet from the main shaft.”
Red Harding’s derisive cough wasn’t necessary. Mercer knew Donny was blaming the dead men to cover his failure.
It had taken only moments, but Ira had had enough, remarkable since Mercer had rarely known him to get upset. Randall had that effect on people. Ira stiffened, his bearing becoming that of a thirty-year naval veteran dressing down a subordinate. “Mercer will be in charge from now on, so you don’t need to worry about my schedule. All you have to do is work where and how he says or you’re through. Are we clear?”