Disaster struck on the fifth day. The sun had just come up when Liu Xin was shaken awake by Aygul, who was out of breath, wild-eyed, and almost feverish. His trouser legs were soaked through with dew. He held a laser-printed photograph in front of Liu Xin’s face, so close it blocked his vision entirely. It was a false-color infrared sensor image returned from the satellite, a vibrant abstract painting he couldn’t understand, so he just stared in confusion. “Come!” Aygul shouted, and dragged Liu Xin out of the tent by the hand.
Liu Xin followed him up a hill on the north side of the valley, his confusion growing all the while. First, this was the safest direction, separated from the main seam by more than a kilometer. Second, Aygul had led him nearly to the top of the hill, but the curtain ring was far, far beneath them. What was there to go wrong here? When they reached the top, Liu Xin was about to gasp out a question when Aygul pointed in a different direction, to a place even farther off. Liu Xin laughed in relief—there was no disaster. The mine was directly ahead of where Aygul pointed, and between that hill and the one beneath their feet was an even slope that led to a meadow at the bottom. That was Aygul’s target. The mine and the meadow seemed peaceful at this distance, but after a longer look Liu Xin saw something strange about the meadow: in one circular spot, the grass appeared darker than the surrounding area, a difference only noticeable upon careful observation. He felt his heart seize, then he and Aygul raced down the hill to that patch of darker green.
When they got there, Liu Xin examined the round patch of grass, which had wilted to the ground as if it had been scalded. He put his hand on it and felt heat emanating from the ground. In the center of the circle a puff of steam rose in the light of the rising sun….
After a morning of emergency drilling and the dispatch of another thousand-odd ground rats, Liu Xin confirmed the nightmarish fact: the main seam had caught fire. The scope of the fire was unknown for the time being, since the ground rats had a maximum below-ground speed of around ten meters per hour. However, with the fire so much deeper than the test seam, the fact that its heat was radiating above ground meant it had been burning for quite some time. It was a big fire.
The strange thing was that the thousand meters of earth and stone between the main seam and the test seam was whole and unbroken. The ground fire had ignited on either side of the thousand-meter buffer zone, leading someone to suggest that it was unrelated to the experiment. But that was no more than self-delusion; even the person who had said it didn’t really believe the two weren’t in some way connected. Deeper exploration cleared up the matter late that night.
Eight narrow coal belts extended from the test seam. Only half a meter at their narrowest point, they were hard to detect. Five of them were bisected by the fire curtain, but the other three led downward and just skirted the curtain’s bottom edge. Two of these terminated, but the last one led directly to the main seam a kilometer away. All of them were actually ground fissures that had been filled up by coal; their connection to the surface provided them with an excellent supply of oxygen. The one linking the test seam and the main seam thus acted as a fuse.
None of the three was marked on the materials Li Minsheng had provided, and in fact, such long and narrow belts were extremely rare in the field of coal geology. Mother Nature had played a cruel joke.
“I had no choice. My kid’s got uremia and needs continual dialysis. The money from this project was too important to me, so I didn’t fight you as strongly as I could have….” Li Minsheng’s face was pale, and he avoided Liu Xin’s eyes.
The three of them stood atop the hill between the two ground fires. It was another early morning. The entire meadow between the mine and the peak was now dark green, apart from the previous day’s circular area, which was now a burnt yellow. Steam wafted from the ground, obscuring their view of the mine.
Aygul said to Liu Xin, “My fire brigade from Xinjiang has landed in Taiyuan with equipment, and they’ll be here soon. Teams from elsewhere in the country are headed here too. The fire looks to be spreading fast.”
Liu Xin looked silently at Aygul for a long moment before he asked in a low voice, “Can you tame it?”
Aygul shook his head.
“Then tell me: How much hope is there? If we seal off the vents, or inject water to quell the fire…”
Again, Aygul shook his head. “I’ve been doing this my whole life, but ground fire still consumed my hometown. I told you that where ground fire is concerned, you’re still just a child. You don’t know what it is. That far underground it’s slipperier than a viper, wilier than a ghost. Mortals can’t stop it from going where it wants. Under our feet is a huge quantity of high-quality anthracite, and this devil’s been coveting it for millions of years. Now you’ve released it, and given it limitless energy and power. The ground fire here will be a hundred times worse than in Xinjiang.”
Liu Xin shook the Uighur man by the shoulders in desperation. “Tell me how much hope we have! Tell me the truth, I beg you!”
“Zero,” Aygul said with a slow shake of his head. “Dr. Liu, you can’t atone for your sins in this lifetime.”
An emergency meeting was held in the main bureau building attended by the bureau leadership and the heads of the five mines, as well as a group of alarmed officials from the city government, including the mayor. The meeting’s first act was to establish an emergency command center headed up by the director, with Liu Xin and Li Minsheng as members of the leading group.
“Engineer Li and I will do our utmost, but I’d like to remind you all that we’re now criminals,” Liu Xin said, as Li Minsheng sat silently, head bowed.
“Now’s not the time for recrimination,” the director said. “Act, and think of nothing else. Do you know who said that? Your father. Once, back when I was a technician on his squad, I ignored his warning and enlarged the extraction range so I could meet production targets. As a result, a huge quantity of water entered the works, trapping more than twenty squad members in the corner of a passageway. Our lamps had gone out, and we didn’t dare strike a lighter, afraid of gas on the one hand and of using up the oxygen on the other, since the water had sealed us off completely. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, it was so dark. Then your father told me he remembered there was another passageway above us, and our ceiling was probably not all that thick. Next thing I heard was him scratching at the ceiling with a pick. The rest of us felt around for our picks and joined him, digging in the darkness. As the oxygen level dropped, we began to feel woozy and tight-chested. And on top of that there was the darkness, an absolute blackness no one on the surface is able to imagine, but for the glint of picks striking the ceiling. Staying alive was sheer torture, but it was your father who kept me going. Over and over he said to me in the darkness, ‘Act, and think of nothing else.’ I don’t know how long we dug, but just when I was about to faint from lack of breath, a chunk of the ceiling fell in and the glare of the explosion-proof lamps from the overhead passageway shone through the hole…. Later your father told me that he had no idea how thick the roof was, but it was the only thing we could do: act, and think of nothing else. Your father’s words have been etched ever deeper on my brain over the years, and now I pass them on to you.”
Experts who had rushed from all over the country to attend the meeting soon drafted a plan for fighting the fire. The options at hand were limited to just three. First, cut off the underground fire’s oxygen. Second, use a grout curtain to cut the path of the fire. Third, inject massive quantities of water underground to quench the fire. These three techniques were to proceed simultaneously, but the first had been demonstrated ineffective long ago. Air vents supplying oxygen to the fire were difficult to pinpoint, and they would be hard to seal off even if located. The second method was effective only against shallow coal-seam fires and was much slower than the pace of the underground fire’s advance. The third method was most promising.