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By even her dead reckoning they had passed the tiny island a half hour ago. They were still picking up scraps of communication, but she couldn’t raise the ship. She jotted a note asking what Fred thought they should do — keep going in the belief that the headwinds had been stronger than estimated and hope the island was still ahead of them, or double back and try to approach on a different vector. She also wrote down that they had an hour of fuel remaining.

Noonan took a few minutes to reply, but soon enough the pulley squealed behind her. He’d written, “I didn’t screw up. Howland is ahead of us.”

That was good enough for her. They continued onward, even after the chatter from the Coast Guard ship eventually faded to a static-laced silence.

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan flew into the pages of history and remain one of aviation’s most enduring legends. Earhart flew true that leg of the flight, taking her modified Lockheed twin-engine beauty on the exact route Noonan provided. And for his part, Fred Noonan, once a navigation instructor for the storied Pan Am flying clippers, directed them exactly right according to the equipment he had.

What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known, was that an electromagnetic force was acting on his mechanical chronographs. Without accurate time, his sun and star shots were off by well over a degree within the first hour of the flight, and the error increased throughout the journey. The radio signals they’d picked up from the cutter Itasca had reached them over a freak skip across the ionosphere. They were never even close to Howland. And all this was caused by their cargo — what Mike Dillman had called “geological samples.” They emitted the subtle electromagnetic force that turned what would have been a moderately interesting milestone in aviation history into an event of almost mythic proportions.

1

Leister Deep Mine, Minnesota
Today

For the trapped miner the blackness was an absolute. It was his entire world. It filled every nook and cranny in the collapsed tunnel. It was a clammy presence on his skin, like he was pressed up against a corpse. The black had weight, like it was squeezing him as though he wore a too-tight diving suit. And that weight intensified every time he breathed, for the black invaded his lungs, crushing them, making him feel like he was taking in a warm liquid that he had to cough out. It coated the back of his throat like a noxious oil, slick and cloying. It filled his ears, jamming them so even when he screamed as loudly as possible, it sounded like a distant echo of a child’s whimper.

The black. It was his entire world, and if rescue didn’t come soon he was certain that it would begin to invade his mind as it had already subsumed his body.

Fifty yards and a world away, Hans Gruber, a taciturn German who was sick of the jokes people made about his name, picked his way past a jumble of crushed rock — detritus from the cave-in that littered the floor of the shaft some one thousand feet below the midwestern prairie. He wore heavy work clothes that were streaked and caked with dirt. An oxygen tank was strapped to his back although he and his team hadn’t detected any poisonous gases. The LED lamp on his helmet cast a bright blue cone in the otherwise stygian realm in which he worked.

Making the going even tougher were the four-foot-long steel bolts that had once held the collapsed ceiling together. There were hundreds of them sticking up in the rubble that blocked the tunnel, and each one seemed to snag at his clothes and tear at his skin like skeletal fingers. The dust was mostly settled since the cave-in, but motes still hung suspended. The air was perfectly still — a sure sign that the ventilation was not working in this section of the mine. Another in a long string of omens.

Behind him the rest of his crew was busy with the screw jacks. A steel forest had grown in their wake. His men had erected dozens of polelike jacks to help stabilize the hanging wall over their heads and hold back, at least until they could finish with the rescue, the millions of tons of rock above them.

Three hours earlier, on what was otherwise a normal Tuesday in the mines, a crew was shoring up the roof in this section of tunnel by drilling holes into the ceiling and then using a pneumatic tool to twist the screw bolt into the living rock, binding the otherwise unstable matrix until it was no longer a threat to those who had to work under it. This mine was known for poor rock conditions, but men had worked it successfully for years without a fatality from a cave-in. The techniques and safety protocols were perfected and the men followed them to the letter, and yet Mother Nature and gravity care not for proper preparations. Without so much as a groan, a fifty-foot-long section of ceiling at least six feet thick had crashed to the floor of the tunnel. Fortunately the men coming behind the “screw crew” to fill the holes with grout to prevent the metal from rusting in the hot humid air hadn’t yet reached the site of the collapse, so none of them were struck by the fall. But there were miners on the far side, and it was up to Gruber and his rescue team to reach them.

As the point man, it was Gruber who wielded the fifteen-pound steel bar and jabbed at the ceiling, prying at loose stones still hanging dangerously above them. The roof over their heads was a fractured mass of stone that could collapse at any second. With each poke and thrust, head-size chunks of stone fell to the scree-littered ground. Many times they would bounce toward Gruber, and he would need to jump aside.

It was hot, filthy work, and sweat cut runnels through the dust, smearing his face. He paused to check on the man directly behind him.

The second rescue worker gave him a nod of encouragement and a thumbs-up. “Yippee-ki-yay, Hans.”

For once Gruber didn’t mind the Die Hard reference. He got back to work, probing and jabbing and inexorably moving deeper and deeper into the collapsed section of the mine. There were three men waiting for him someplace ahead. Odds were they had been horribly crushed, their bodies nothing more than tissue stains, but there was always the chance one or more had been beyond the avalanche and unharmed. It was Gruber’s job today to defy the odds and pull them out alive. It was the hope of rescue that allowed men to overcome the twin primal fears of darkness and enclosed spaces, and venture into the hellish mazes of underground mines. Like soldiers behind enemy lines knowing their buddies were looking for them, miners too needed that promise of salvation in order to hold out until help arrived.

Gruber jabbed at yet another weak spot in the ceiling and caused a mini-avalanche of loose rock and at least one boulder to fall. Pebbles rained off his miner’s helmet, and for a few seconds the air filled with thick choking dust. He opened the tap on his air tank and took a few purifying breaths before stowing the mask. That air was for the men he was to rescue, he chided himself, not for his own comfort. He crawled on, climbing up and over a taller hillock of stones and debris, pressing himself nearly to the top of the tunnel, his heels scraping the hanging walls as he wriggled forward on his belly. The passage ahead appeared completely blocked.

So far they hadn’t had to shift a lot of material, but it seemed now they would have to laboriously clear the tunnel one stone at a time.

Gruber reached and stretched and pressed hard against the wall of junk rock and felt the pile blocking the top couple of feet of the passageway shift. He dug his feet into the debris and pushed even harder, his gloved fists like the blade of a bulldozer as he used his tremendous strength to push the obstruction back and finally down the far side of the hillock.