“Roger. Anything else?”
“Yeah. I don’t want anyone else coming down without my express order. Get a portable seismograph ready. I want to take direct measurements of the working face. It looks like it’s holding, but there could be tremors I can’t feel.”
“Okay.”
“And find the Handle.” Mercer had returned to the rock face so he could move the camera closer to the damp spot.
The water stain hadn’t expanded beyond the chalk outline he’d drawn. By releasing the counterpressure of rock against the water, it didn’t appear they’d increased the flow rate. Mercer was relieved and thankful. He bent close once again, moving so his face was an inch from the shiny stone. He deliberately stuck out his tongue to lick the grainy surface.
And he recoiled at the alkaline taste.
“What the…?” He licked another spot just to make sure of what his senses had just told him. The water percolating from deep inside the earth was salty. After being filtered through untold hundreds of feet of rock it should have been as clear as a mountain spring.
“Not just salty,” he said aloud, baffled. “It has the exact salinity of seawater.”
Mercer had everyone working straight out for the next three hours. Ignoring Ira’s prohibition to draw attention to themselves, he had every light at the facility blazing away as sweep lines of men scoured the tailings recently excavated from the mine. With each empty pass his anger ebbed slightly.
Sleep-dazed and pissed off when he’d been roused from bed, Donny Randall insisted he hadn’t seen any water when his men drilled the last holes on their shift, and it appeared evidence supported his claim of innocence. None of the overburden pulled out prior to the final blast showed that water had seeped past. Randall’s curses had evolved into snide comments by the time Mercer admitted that he’d been wrong about Donny putting his men in jeopardy.
Randall sat in the command trailer wearing sweatpants, heavy boots, and a leather jacket over his bare chest. The trailer was only slightly warmer than the desert night. He was picking at his fingernails with a folding knife when Mercer entered. Randall’s dyed hair shimmered like an oil slick under the fluorescent lights. He dropped his feet off the desk when he saw Mercer. “Since you didn’t find shit, I’m going back to bed.” He stood over Mercer in an attempt to intimidate him. “I guess your Ph.D. and your thousand-dollar-an-hour consulting fee and the fact that Ira Lasko thinks the sun shines out your ass don’t mean much, huh?”
Mercer recoiled. He hadn’t realized that Randall did indeed know who he was.
Donny laughed, misunderstanding Mercer’s movement. “Next time you want a lesson on mining, you come and ask me and I’ll tell you how it’s done.” The animal hatred flashed in his eyes once more and he poked a hardened finger into Mercer’s chest. “And the next time you question my ability you’d damn well better be right, because if you’re wrong again I’m going to beat you to an inch of your life. You hearing me?”
Mercer didn’t consider the eighty pounds of weight or six inches of height he was giving to Randall. That wasn’t even a factor. The only thing keeping him from snapping Donny’s finger was that the move would only anger the larger man and the subsequent fight would likely end up destroying the trailer.
“I didn’t think you were as tough as I’d heard,” Donny scoffed with a dismissive toss of his pomaded hair. He was almost out the door when Mercer’s comment stopped him dead:
“I was wrong about you, Donny. I apologize.”
“That’s more like it.” Randall laughed.
Mercer’s face remained expressionless. “You’re not only the dumbest son of a bitch I’ve ever known, but I’ve watched you checking out the other men here and realized you used a pick handle on those boys in Africa because you’re also the most sexually confused.”
Randall blinked, the nature of the insult taking a few seconds to register. To Mercer it was almost as if he could watch the thoughts ricochet in his mind like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper. Just as his eyes widened in comprehension, Red Harding and a half dozen other men stepped into the trailer. They’d just completed their last sweep of the mine tailings and had no idea what they’d walked in on.
Randall paused for another heartbeat before deciding to let this drop, but he gave Mercer a murderous look. As if Mercer didn’t already know it wouldn’t end there. He almost smiled at Donny’s transparency.
“What was that all about?” Red asked after Donny had skulked into the night.
“Just Donny expressing his disappointment about how I sullied his character.”
“Come again?”
Mercer chuckled. “Randall was just trying to prove he can piss farther than me.”
“Gotcha,” the wiry Texan said. “We’re ready to place the remote seismograph. You’re going to need a hand.” He pointed at the monitor showing the camera’s view of the water stain. “The spot hasn’t grown since we first saw it, so I think we’ll be okay for a quick trip down.”
The fact that water wasn’t continuing to seep through the rock quelled only part of Mercer’s uneasiness. He was more bothered now by the nature of the water, although he hadn’t said anything about it. He was going to stick by his original decision to keep men out of the mine for at least a day.
“All right. You coming?”
“Damn straight.”
Mercer nodded his appreciation. “Get one other man. Meet me at the skip in ten minutes.”
“You going to call Admiral Lasko?”
Mercer reached for the encrypted satellite phone on the desk. “That’s next on my list.” He waited until the men had left the trailer before placing the call.
“Lasko.”
“Ira, Mercer. We hit water.”
A stunned moment, then, “How bad?”
“It just looks like a small patch of saturation. It’s not growing, nor is any water wicking through.”
A sudden realization hit the deputy security advisor. “You guys haven’t broken into the chamber, have you?”
“No. It looks like we’re still some twenty-eight feet shy, but the water seems to have expanded past its cavity, at least in this one patch.”
“Ah, is this common?”
“Hard to tell,” Mercer said after a moment. “It all depends on the water pressure, the permeability of the rock, how long the water’s been there—”
“Why would that have anything to do with it?” Ira asked sharply.
“Given a few million years water will seep through just about anything. Knowing how long ago the void in the earth was filled would give me an idea how fast the water’s moving.”
“Oh, right.”
“I’ve got a camera monitoring the damp spot, and we’re about to place a portable seismograph to judge the rock’s stability.”
“Good. How many men are down there now?”
“None,” Mercer replied. “That’s one of the reasons I called. Until I get a better handle on this, I don’t want anyone working at the face.”
Mercer expected a protest, but Ira agreed instead. “Good idea. For how long do you think? A couple of days?”
“At least. The plug separating the tunnel from the reservoir is under strain, and until I can determine how safe it is, we can’t risk the men.”
“Hold on a second, Mercer.” It sounded like Ira had clamped his hand over the phone’s receiver to speak with someone in his office.
It was nine o’clock in D.C. Mercer wondered why Ira was working so late.
“Okay, I’m back. There’s no sense you guys hanging around for two days, so I’m organizing helos to get you to the Area 51 air base. They’ll hold their regular personnel flight to Vegas for you. I’ve got someone working on getting you hotel rooms.”