Even as the rocks skittered and jumbled down deeper into the mine he heard a weak voice cry for help.
With a flash of excitement, Gruber realized he had reached the end of the cave-in.
“I think we have one!” the German shouted. He crawled faster, thrusting his head through the debris as though the earth itself was birthing him.
His light revealed that the tunnel beyond was all but unobstructed. Twenty feet farther in he saw the hulking pneumatic drill machine the miners had been using to bolt the ceiling. And between him and it lay one of the men. The miner’s helmet was lying a few feet away, and it looked like one of his legs was pinned.
Gruber wiggled and fought until the rock finally released him, and he slid down the pile of shattered stone and crawled over to the trapped miner. Overhead, the ceiling appeared to be solid and undamaged.
“It’s okay,” he told the man.
The miner looked to be in shock. He’d been in darkness so long that Gruber’s light seemed to blind him.
“Thank God,” the man finally said. Gruber held a canteen to the miner’s lips and let the man drink thirstily. So much so that he started to choke, and half the fluid he took down came back up again.
“Let’s look at your leg. How does it feel?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” the miner replied with a cough. “It’s just pinned.”
“We’ll have you out and in a bar before you know it.”
“Can you find my helmet and turn on the light? It’s been so dark…” The miner’s voice trailed off.
“Sure thing, my friend. What’s your name?”
Gruber stretched out to grab the man’s helmet.
“I’m Tom Rogers.”
Hans flipped the switch to turn on the lamp.
“Boom!” The voice was so loud it echoed.
“Vas?” Gruber gasped, and looked about.
“I said boom,” the second rescuer repeated; it was the man who had given Gruber encouragement just moments before. “You just killed yourself, Tom there, and most importantly you killed me.”
“Nein,” Gruber protested. “Das ist bullshit.”
“Das ist nicht bullsheet,” the man replied, mimicking Gruber’s excited German accent. The second rescuer finished climbing through the tiny aperture and slid down to the tunnel floor on his butt, planting his feet firmly when he landed. When he spoke again any teasing in his voice had evaporated. “Check your gas detector.”
Sheepishly, Gruber peeled back the cloth cover of the device hanging in a bag over his shoulder. The detector wasn’t switched on for this training exercise, but pieces of paper like a tear-off pad had been affixed over the digital display. As they had progressed through the rescue, Gruber had checked the meter at various way points by tearing off the topmost sheet. The page below had always said “clear.” This time he tore off the penultimate piece of paper. Below it was written “Methane at explosive concentrations.”
“But I didn’t cause any sparks,” Gruber protested. “I left the pry bar up on top of the debris, and there is no metal on me that could cause a spark. The methane could not explode.”
By now the “trapped” miner, Tom Rogers, had regained his feet and was dusting off his coveralls. Like Hans Gruber, Rogers was another trainee, and he leaned in eagerly to see what had gone wrong. Other than Hans giving him water too fast, which he’d spit back out to indicate the gaffe to his classmate, he thought Gruber had performed a textbook rescue.
“Look at Tom’s headlamp,” the rescue instructor said.
“The electronics are vacuum sealed,” Gruber said. “The lamp cannot cause an explosion.”
Philip Mercer pulled off his goggles and headgear, and fixed his gray eyes on Gruber in a serious stare. “That’s why I said to look at it,” he said with just a trace of irritation.
This was the twentieth time Mercer had led the miners on this, their final test, with each person taking point to show off what they had learned after two weeks of classroom instruction and field training. Mercer was justifiably tired.
Gruber examined the lamp under the white aura of his own. “Scheisse,” he cursed when he saw his mistake.
“That’s right,” Mercer said, pointing to the lamp. “The lens is cracked. That allowed methane to seep into the light, and when you flipped the switch the initial arc of electricity ignited, turning us into so much roast schnitzel.” He patted Gruber on the back. “Let’s go back to the others.”
Mercer let the two students precede him out of the seemingly isolated chamber and then clambered out himself. He was grateful that Hans had been the last of the nineteen men and one woman he’d agreed to train as he himself had once learned mine rescue techniques from South Africa’s fabled Proto Teams.
Mercer had designed the curriculum himself, and with the help of the mine’s owner had built several subterranean obstacle courses to challenge his students. He’d built this one by loading a particularly tall shaft with overburden brought down from the slag heaps on the surface. Another course he had rigged with smoke machines to simulate fire, while a third could be flooded using seep water pumped up from a lower level. In all, Mercer had shown them the basics of what they would find in a real-world mine rescue. He’d been in on enough actual rescues to know you can’t plan for everything, and the ability to think on one’s feet was as crucial as being well practiced.
Mercer still received cards from many of Los 33, the Chilean miners he’d help rescue back in 2010, and expected he would for many years to come. It had been his gut call, in coordination with a local engineer, as to where to drill the escape shaft 2,300 feet into the bedrock in order to save the thirty-three men who’d been trapped for a record-setting sixty-nine days. In a life and career filled with proud moments, Philip Mercer had to concede that that was one of the best.
The rest of his students were waiting in a panic shelter carved into the side of a main tunnel about a hundred yards from where he’d constructed the “cave-in.” The shelter had once been provisioned to last forty men a week in case of an emergency, but this former copper mine had been abandoned in the late eighties when it became too expensive to work profitably. An adjacent rock quarry was still going strong, but the Leister Deep Mine was played out.
The room was just barren stone walls and a smoothed-out rock floor. Power was supplied by a jury-rigged system using wires Mercer had run off a generator that he’d jacked into an old ventilation conduit. He wasn’t sure if the exhaust actually made it to the surface a thousand feet above them, but carbon monoxide levels hadn’t risen, so he figured he’d done something right.
These people had come from all over the world to study rescue techniques from him, and for the most part he’d been pleased with their progress. All of them were type A’s, especially Kara Hawkins, the sole woman. She was a shift foreperson at a newly reopened Nevada silver mine who had arrived here on a Harley Softail Heritage Classic wearing full black leathers over her six-foot frame and dispelled any question of her sexual preference by sharing a bed with José Cabrillo, a mine engineer from Bolivia who looked and sounded like a young Ricardo Montalban.
“Well?” Gerhard Werner asked when Hans appeared with Tom and then Mercer. The two Germans were longtime friends who worked at the same mine back home.
Hans slashed a finger across his throat. “Kaput.”
“Gather round,” Mercer called, wiping sweat from his face with a towel and then swigging from a water bottle someone had handed him. The water was cold thanks to the fridge they’d lugged down. And like a sports team they all took a knee to listen to their coach. “Half the class made the same mistake.”