Deep Fire Rising Page 6

  Standing six feet six, with a build to match, Randall delighted in fighting any man who challenged him, though he preferred to use the handle of a pickax rather than his fists, thus his moniker. Mercer had heard that he’d killed at least six men in the mines around Johannesburg and had beaten dozens more. It was also in South Africa that Randall had found another application for his two-inch-diameter piece of hardened hickory. He’d use it to sodomize workers too young or too small to defend themselves. Because of the permissive attitude of the courts, he hadn’t been tried for any of his acts. He’d left the country when Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency. Some said he was asked to go, but Mercer believed the story that he’d fled from a mob of black miners who’d wanted to give him a Soweto necklace—a burning tire around his neck.

  His name had come up from time to time in the years since, but Mercer hadn’t known Randall had returned to the States. The last he’d heard, Donny was in a Russian prison following an attempt to steal diamonds from the Mir mine in northern Siberia.

  Mercer finally stopped staring at the top of Ira’s bald head and allowed his eyes to sweep across Dr. Marie. If she thought all mine engineers were like Randall, no wonder she’d been chilly toward him. “I’ll help with your project,” he said, and Ira looked up, “on the condition that I can square things with De Beers—”

  “We’ll take care of that.”

  “—and that you make sure Randall knows I’m in charge. You’ve got enough men for two shifts working eight- to ten-hour days. Once we’re settled I don’t even want to see that son of a bitch.”

  Ira and Briana Marie realized the emotion in Mercer’s voice wasn’t fear of Don Randall. It was fear he’d kill him.

  “Thank you, Dr. Mercer,” Briana said. “You don’t know what this means to us.”

  “I knew I could count on you,” Ira added, a couple of the tension lines in his forehead subsiding. This time he filled three tumblers with Scotch and they toasted each other.

  The following morning, Mercer and Ira boarded a Chevy Suburban identical to the one that had taken him to Andrews Air Force Base. He idly hoped the government received a volume discount on the massive SUVs.

  There was one difference, he quickly discovered. This vehicle had heavy curtains drawn over the windows and an opaque screen dividing them from the driver. Despite what he’d seen the evening before, it was obvious he wasn’t cleared to view other parts of Area 51. Then he thought that maybe Ira wasn’t cleared either. An interesting notion.

  When he asked about Dr. Marie, Ira explained that she now worked out of Washington and had only come to Nevada for the briefing the night before. She wouldn’t be needed at the secret repository until well after the tunnel had been excavated. As the darkened truck rolled away from the base the two men passed the time drinking a thermos of coffee and reminiscing about their first meeting in Greenland almost a year ago.

  Once the van reached an area beyond the immediate perimeter of Groom Lake, the unseen driver lowered the partition so they could see out the windshield and Ira drew back the curtains.

  The mountains held a distant chill even if last night hadn’t been cold enough for frost. The few plants, cactus, yucca, and sage mostly, were stunted by their harsh environment as though life in the barren stretches was an experiment that was slowly failing. This was a land of rock in a thousand shades that changed and shifted as the sun rose higher. The dome of sky hinted that it stretched far beyond the horizon but seemed contained by the jagged hills.

  Their destination was two hours from the main base, tucked at the end of a box canyon. Mercer recognized that the mounds of tailings, the material excavated from a mine shaft, had been spread evenly along the canyon floor to disguise that any work was taking place. The camp was nothing more than several battered mobile homes situated close to the towering canyon walls. An overhang of rock at the canyon’s lip kept the facility in perpetual shadow and hid it from aerial observation.

  The camp was as forlorn as a West Texas trailer park, Mercer thought, although he’d worked in much, much worse. A tumbleweed skittered from between two trailers, whirled in a crosscurrent of wind, then dashed past the SUV like a frightened animal.

  Then he spotted a natural cave at the end of the canyon. It was at least seventy feet wide and nearly half as tall. It appeared to stretch a hundred feet or more into the mountain. Powerful arc lights mounted on scaffolds lit the interior and highlighted the machinery at the top of a twenty-foot-square hole driven into the living rock. The two-story hoist allowed overburden to be dumped directly into trucks that spread it on the desert floor. Nearby were massive ventilator ducts to keep fresh air circulating underground and several box trailers for storage. Near the mouth of the cave were two large generators for power and the massive outlet of a down-hole water pump to handle drainage.

  Mercer was impressed with the security as well as the efficiency of what Ira had created here. “Put in a golf course and some condos and you’d have a nice spot for a retirement community.”

  “Hell Hollow Home for the Aged?”

  Mercer laughed, grateful that the Ira he knew was coming back. “I was thinking Desolate Digs for the Near-Dead. Harry could be your spokesman.”

  The Suburban braked at the first of the trailers. Ira stepped to the dusty ground as the trailer door swung open. The man standing at the threshold in jeans, cowboy boots, and a white T-shirt seemed as apropos as the tumbleweed that had crossed their path. As dried and tough as a piece of beef jerky, he squinted at Mercer and then nodded when he recognized Ira. “Howdy, Mr. Lasko. This our new boss?”

  “Hey, Red.” What little showed of Red’s hair from under his hat was brown. “This is Mercer.”

  “I heard of ya.” Red’s voice twanged like an untuned guitar. “You’re that fella what found a new diamond mine in Africa a couple years back.”

  They shook hands while Ira continued the introductions. “Red Harding was the number-two man on the shift that lost half the crew during the cave-in.”

  “You didn’t want to take over?” Mercer asked, needing to know now if this guy resented him for taking a job he felt he might have deserved.

  “Hell, son”—Red was perhaps fifteen years older than Mercer, although it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he had fathered some children in his mid-teens—“comes a time in a man’s life where he don’t wanta give the orders no more. It’s a piece easier just takin’ ’em.”

  “Tell me what happened?” Mercer invited.

  Red paused, giving the question thought despite the days he’d already had to consider the cause of the cave-in. “A chunk of hanging wall that had no reason to crack loose cracked loose. Came down in a flat piece about eight feet thick that spanned the entire drive. Crushed everyone under it. Fifteen men.”

  Mercer got the sense that Red wasn’t comfortable with this vague description of the accident. Not that he was holding anything back. It was just that there was something about it he didn’t understand. “You hadn’t bolted the hanging wall?” Hanging wall was mining parlance for the roof of a tunnel. Bolting was what it sounded like, screwing long bolts into the ceiling to help stabilize the rock.

  “No need. We’re boring through some serious hard-rock. No water seepage, no fissures, nothing.”

  “They’re bolting it now,” Ira offered.

  Mercer expected no less.

  After being shown his room in one of the trailers, Mercer changed into his miner’s coveralls while Ira was loaned a spare set by Red Harding. With no place to hide his pistol in the utilitarian room, Mercer decided he’d keep it with him. He tucked it against the small of his back under the coveralls and planted his helmet on his head.

  Ira had to keep his baseball cap on to prevent the helmet Red had given him from slipping across his hairless scalp. He suffered the ignominy in silence.

  The cavern was markedly cooler than the canyon, even with the excess heat generated by the diesel-powered equipment.

  As they waited for the per
sonnel lift to trundle up from underground, Mercer examined a fist-sized chunk of rock that had spilled from the ore shoot. He always marveled at the fact that in the millions, or even billions, of years since this innocuous lump of stone had solidified in the earth’s crust, not one human had ever seen it. He was the first to give it any thought at all. It made him feel like a Golden Age explorer peering at a newly discovered continent. He’d worked in mines since his teenage years in the granite quarries of Vermont, and that thrill had never left him.

  The cage hoist arrived with a clang of bells and the three men stepped into the roomy car. The small scope of the project meant that one mine shaft could be used for hauling material from the depths as well as transporting the men to and from work and provide forced air ventilation through enormous ducts secured to the side of the hole.

  The bells rang again and the bottom fell out from under them.

  Ira clutched at a safety rail while Red and Mercer suppressed knowing smiles. The first descent into a mine was a terrifying experience that many could never repeat. Lasko finally released his grip on the railing when he’d regained his equilibrium.

  “And I thought commuting to work around Washington was bad,” he said to cover his apprehension. “Is it always like that?”

  Red shook his head. “The horizontal tunnel we bored off this shaft is eight hundred feet below us. In South Africa, some of the men work ten times deeper. To get them there quickly, you damn near free-fall the whole way.”

  “Hell of a way to make a living,” Ira remarked as they dropped into impenetrable darkness.

  Mercer ignored the sarcasm. “It sure is.”

  Several minutes later, the rattling car slowed and a yellowish glow seeped up from around the elevator’s edges. They were nearing where men drilled and blasted toward the subterranean cavity the Department of Energy planned to use as their temporary storehouse.

  Red threw open the gate when the car stopped bouncing at the end of its eight-hundred-foot tether. The chamber was the size of a railway tunnel and well lit. They were that much closer to the earth’s core, so the workings were appreciably warmer too, though not uncomfortably so. In ultradeep mines, ventilated air was forced through massive refrigeration units just to maintain a temperature of one hundred degrees. Littering the antechamber were hydraulic compressors for the drills, mechanical scrapers and other specialty equipment designed to operate in the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel.

  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?”