“We’ll have to be extra cautious,” Broadmoor agreed. He nodded toward the security guards on the dock, waiting to inspect the fishing boats. “Look at that. Six of them. They never sent more than two on any other delivery. The one with the medallion around his neck is in charge of the dock. Name is Crutcher. He’s a mean one.”
Pitt gave the guards a cursory glance to see if he recognized any that had gathered around the floatplane during his intrusion with Stokes. The tide was out, and he had to stare up at the men on the dock. He was especially apprehensive about being recognized by the guard he’d laid out in John Merchant’s office. Luckily, none looked familiar.
They carried their weapons slung over one shoulder, muzzle pointing forward in the general direction of .the Indian fishermen. It was all for show and intimidation, Pitt quickly perceived. They weren’t about to shoot anyone in front of observing seamen on a nearby cargo ship. Crutcher, a cold-faced, arrogant young man of no more than twenty-six or -seven, stepped up to the edge of the dock as Broadmoor’s helmsman eased the fishing boat along the pilings. Broadmoor cast a line that fell over the guard’s combat boots.
“Hi there, friend. How about tying us up?”
The cold-faced guard kicked the rope off the dock back onto the boat. “Tie up yourself,” he snapped.
A dropout from a Special Forces team, that one, Pitt thought as he caught the line. He scrambled up a ladder onto the dock, and purposely brushed against Crutcher as he looped the line around a small bollard.
Crutcher lashed out with his boot and kicked Pitt upright, then grabbed him by his suspenders and shook him violently. “You stinking fish head, mind your manners.”
Broadmoor froze. It was a trick. The Haida were a quiet people, not prone to quick anger. He thought with fearful certainty that Pitt would shake himself loose and punch the contemptuous guard.
But Pitt didn’t bite. He relaxed his body, rubbed a hand over a blossoming bruise on his buttocks and stared at Crutcher with an unfathomable gaze. He pulled off his stocking cap as if in respect, revealing a mass of black hair whose natural curls had been greased straight. He shrugged with a careless show of deference.
“I was not careful. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t look familiar,” said Crutcher coldly.
“I make this trip twenty times,” Pitt said quietly. “I’ve seen you lots before. Your name is Crutcher. Three deliveries back, you punched my gut for unloading the fish too slow.”
The guard studied Pitt for a moment, then gave a short laugh, a jackal laugh. “Get in my way again, and I’ll boot your ass across the channel...”
Pitt registered a look of friendly resignation and jumped back onto the deck of the fishing boat. The rest of the fishing fleet was slipping into the openings at the dock between the supply ships. Where there was no room, the boats tied together parallel, end to end, the crew of the outer boat transferring their cargo of fish across the deck of the one moored to the dock. Pitt joined the fishermen and began passing crates of salmon up to one of Broadmoor’s crew, who stacked them on flatbed trailers that were hitched to a small tractor vehicle with eight drive wheels. The crates were heavy, and Pitt’s biceps and back soon ached in protest. He gritted his teeth, knowing the guards would suspect he didn’t belong if he couldn’t heave the ice-filled fish crates around with the ease of the Haida.
Two hours later the trailers were loaded, then four of the guards and the crews of the fishing boats piled aboard as the train set off toward the mining operation’s mess hall. They were stopped at the tunnel entrance, herded into a small building and told to strip to their underwear. Then their clothes were searched and they were individually X-rayed. All passed scrutiny except one Haida who absentmindedly carried a large fishing knife in his boot. Pitt found it strange that instead of merely confiscating the knife, it was returned and the fisherman sent back to his boat. The rest were allowed to dress and reboard the trailers for the journey to the excavation area.
“I would think they’d search you for concealed diamonds when you came out rather than entering,” said Pitt.
“They do,” explained Broadmoor. “We go through the same procedure when we exit the mine. They X-ray you going in as a warning that it doesn’t pay to smuggle out a handful of diamonds by swallowing them.”
The arched concrete tunnel that penetrated the mound of mine tailings was about five meters high by ten wide, ample room for large trucks to transport men and equipment back and forth from the loading dock. The length stretched nearly half a kilometer, the interior brightened by long rows of fluorescent lighting. Side tunnels yawned about halfway through, each about half the size of the main artery.
“Where do those lead?” Pitt asked Broadmoor.
“Part of the security system. They circle the entire compound and are filled with detection devices.”
“The guards, the weapons, the array of security systems. Seems like overkill, just to prevent a few diamonds from being smuggled off the property.”
“Only the half of it. They don’t want the illegal laborers escaping to the mainland. It’s part of the deal with corrupt Canadian officials.”
They emerged at the other end of the tunnel amid the busy activity of the mining operation. The driver of the tractor curled the train of trailers onto a paved road that circled the great open pit that was the volcanic chute. He pulled up beside a loading dock that ran along a low concrete building in the shape of a quonset hut, and stopped.
A man wearing the white attire of a chef under a furtrimmed overcoat opened a door to a warehouse where foodstuffs were stored. He threw a wave of greeting to Broadmoor. “Good to see you, Mason. Your arrival is timely. We’re down to two cases of cod.”
“We’ve brought enough fish to grow scales on your workers.” Broadmoor turned and said in a low voice to Pitt, “Dave Anderson, the head cook for the miners. A decent guy but he drinks too much beer.”
“The frozen-food locker is open,” said Anderson. “Mind how you stack the crates. I found salmon mixed in with flounder your last trip. It screws up my menus.”
“Brought you a treat. Fifty kilos of moose steaks.”
“You’re okay, Mason. You’re the reason I don’t buy frozen fish from the mainland,” the cook replied with a wide smile. “After you’ve stored the crates, come on into the mess hall. My boys will have breakfast waiting for your people. I’ll write a check as soon as I’ve inventoried your catch.”
The wooden crates of fish were stacked in the frozen food locker, and the Haida fishermen, followed by Pitt, thankfully tramped into the warmth of the mess hall. They walked past a serving line and were dished up eggs, sausages and flapjacks. As they helped themselves to coffee out of a huge urn, Pitt looked around at the men sitting at the other tables. The four guards were conversing under a cloud of cigarette smoke near the door. Close to a hundred Chinese miners from the early morning graveyard shift filled up, most of the room. Ten men who Pitt guessed to be mining engineers and superintendents sat at a round table that was set off in a smaller, private dining room.
“Which one is your disgruntled employee?” he asked Broadmoor.
Broadmoor nodded toward the door leading into the kitchen. “He’s waiting for you outside by the garbage containers...”
Pitt stared at the Indian. “How did you arrange that?”
Broadmoor smiled shrewdly. “The Haida have ways of communicating that don’t require fiber optics.”
Pitt did not question him. Now was not the time. Keeping a wary eye on the guards, he casually walked into the kitchen. None of the cooks or dishwashers looked up as he moved between the ovens and sinks through the rear door and dropped down the steps outside. The big metal garbage containers reeked of stale vegetables in the sharp, crisp air.
He stood there in the cold, not sure what to expect.
A tall figure moved from behind a container and approached him. He was wearing a yellow jumpsuit. The bottoms of the legs were smeared with mud that had a strange b
luish cast to it. A miner’s hardhat sat on his head, and his face was covered by what Pitt took for a mask with a breathing filter. He clutched a bundle under one arm. “I understand you’re interested in our mining operation,” he said quietly.
“Yes. My name is—”
“Names are unimportant. We don’t have much time if you are to leave the island with the fishing fleet.” He unfolded a jumpsuit, a respirator mask and a hard hat and handed them to Pitt. “Put these on and follow me.”
Pitt said nothing and did as he was told. He did not fear a trap. The security guards could have taken him anytime since he set foot on the dock. He dutifully zipped up the front of the jumpsuit, tightened the chin strap of the hard hat, adjusted the respirator mask over his face and set out after a man he hoped could show him the source behind the violent killings.
Pitt followed the enigmatic mining engineer across a road into a modern prefabricated building that housed a row of elevators that transported the workers to and from the diggings far below. Two larger ones carried the Chinese laborers but the smaller one on the end was for the use of company officials only. The lift machinery was the latest in Otis elevator technology. The elevator moved smoothly, without sound or sensation of dropping.
“How deep do we go?” asked Pitt, his voice muffled by the breathing mask.
“Five hundred meters,” replied the miner.
“Why the respirators?”
“When the volcano we’re standing in erupted in the distant past, it packed Kunghit Island with pumice rock. The vibration that results from the excavating process can churn up pumice dust, which raises hell with the lungs.”
“Is that the only reason?” asked Pitt slyly.
“No,” replied the engineer honestly. “I don’t want you to see my face. That way, if security gets suspicious, I can pass a lie-detector test, which our chief of security uses with the frequency of a doctor giving urine tests.”
“Dapper John Merchant,” Pitt said, smiling.
“You know John?”
“We’ve met.”
The older man shrugged and accepted Pitt’s claim without comment.
As they neared the bottom of the run, Pitt’s ears were struck by a weird humming sound. Before he could ask what it was, the elevator stopped and the doors slid open. He was led through a mineshaft that opened onto an observation platform perched fifty meters above the vast excavation chamber below. The equipment at the bottom of the pit was not the typical type of machinery one might expect to encounter in a mine. No cars filled with ore pulled over tracks by a small engine; no drills or explosives, no huge earth-moving vehicles. This was a well-financed, carefully designed anal organized operation that was run by computers aided in a small way by human labor. The only obvious mechanization was the huge overhead bridge with the cables and buckets that lifted the diamond-bearing blue rock-clay to the surface and carried it to the buildings where the stones were extracted.
The engineer turned and stared at him through green eyes over the mask. “Mason did not tell me who you are or who you represent. And I don’t want to know. He merely said you were trying to trace a sound channel that travels underwater and kills.”
“That’s true. Untold thousands of various forms of sea life and hundreds of people have already died mysteriously in the open sea and along shorelines.”
“You think the sound originates here?”
“I have reason to believe the Kunghit Island mine is only one of four sources.”
The engineer nodded knowingly. “Komandorskie in the Bering Sea, Easter Island, Gladiator Island in the Tasman Sea, being the other three.”
“You guessed?”
“I know. They all use the same pulsed ultrasound excavation equipment as we do here.” The engineer swept his hand over the open pit. “We used to dig shafts, in an attempt to follow the largest concentration of diamonds. Much like miners following a vein of gold. But after Dorsett scientists and engineers perfected a new method of excavating that produced four times the production in one third the time, the old ways were quickly abandoned.”
Pitt leaned over the railing and stared at the action across the bottom of the pit. Large robotic vehicles appeared to ram long shafts into the blue clay. Then came an eerie vibration that traveled up Pitt’s legs to his body. He gazed questioningly at the engineer.
“The diamond-bearing rock and clay are broken up by high-energy pulsed ultrasound.” The engineer paused and pointed to a large concrete structure with no obvious windows. “See that building on the south side of the pit?”
Pitt nodded.
“A nuclear generating plant. It takes an enormous amount of power to produce enough energy at ten to twenty bursts a second to penetrate the rock-hard clay and break it apart.”
“The crux of the problem.”
“How so?” asked the engineer.
“The sound generated by your equipment radiates into the sea. When it converges with the energy pulses from the other Dorsett mines scattered around the Pacific, its intensity increases to a level that can kill animal life within a large area.”
“An interesting concept as far as it goes, but a piece is missing.”
“You don’t find it plausible?”
The engineer shook his head. “By itself, the sound energy produced down below could not kill a sardine three kilometers from here. The ultrasound drilling equipment uses sound pulses with acoustic frequencies of 60.000 to 80,000 hertz, or cycles per second. These frequencies are absorbed by the salts in the sea before they travel very far.”
Pitt stared into the eyes of the engineer, trying to read where he was coming from, but other than the eyes and a few strands of graying hair that trailed from under the hard hat, all he could readily see was that the stranger was the same height and a good twenty pounds heavier. “How do I know you’re not trying to throw me off the track?”
Pitt could not see the tight smile behind the respirator mask, but he guessed it was there. “Come along,” said the engineer. “I’ll show you the answer to your dilemma.” He stepped back into the elevator, but before he pushed the next button on the panel, he handed Pitt an acoustic-foam helmet. “Take off your hard hat and set this over your head. Make certain it’s snug or you’ll get a case of vertigo. It contains a transmitter and receiver so we can converse without shouting.”
“Where are we headed?” asked Pitt.
“An exploratory tunnel, cut beneath the main pit to survey the heaviest deposit of stones.”
The doors opened and they stepped out into a mineshaft carved from the volcanic rock and shored up with heavy timbers. Pitt involuntarily lifted his hands and pressed them against the sides of his head. Though aft sound was muffled, he felt a strange vibration in his eardrums.
“Do you hear me all right?” asked the engineer.
“I hear you,” answered Pitt through the tiny microphone. “But through a humming sound.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“What is it?”
“Follow me a hundred meters up the shaft and I’ll show you your missing piece.”
Pitt trailed in the engineer’s footsteps until they reached a side shaft, only this one held no shoring timbers. The volcanic rock that made up its rounded sides was almost as smooth as if it had been polished by some immense boring tool.
“A Thurston lava tube,” Pitt said. “I’ve seen them on the big island of Hawaii.”
“Certain lavas such as those basaltic in composition form thin flows called pahoehoe that run laterally, with smooth surfaces,” clarified the engineer. “When the lava cools closer to the surface, the deeper, warmer surge continues until it flows into the open, leaving chambers, or tubes as we call them. It is these pockets of air that are driven to resonate by the pulsed ultrasound from the mining operation above.”
“What if I remove the helmet?”
The engineer shrugged. “Go ahead, but you won’t enjoy the results.”
Pitt lifted the acoustic-foam helmet fro
m his ears. After half a minute he became disoriented and reached out to the wall of the tube to keep from losing his balance. Next came a mushrooming sensation of nausea. The engineer reached over and replaced the helmet on Pitt’s head. Then he circled an arm around Pitt’s waist to hold him upright.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
Pitt took a long breath as the vertigo and nausea quickly passed. “I had to experience the agony. Now I have a mild idea of what those poor souls suffered before they died.”
The engineer led him back to the elevator. “Not a pleasant ordeal. The deeper we excavate, the worse it becomes. The one time I walked in here without protecting my ears, my head ached for a week.”
As the elevator rose from the lava tube, Pitt fully recovered except for a ringing in his ears. He knew it all now. He knew the source of the acoustic plague. He knew how it worked to destroy. He knew how to stop it—and was buoyed by the knowledge.
“I understand now. The air chambers in the lava resonate and radiate the high-intensity sound pulses down through rock and into the sea, producing an incredible burst of energy.”
“There’s your answer.” The engineer removed his helmet and ran a hand through a head of thinning gray hair. “The resonance added to the sound intensity creates incredible energy, more than enough to kill.”
“Why did you risk your job and maybe your life showing me this?”
The engineer’s eyes burned, and he shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jumpsuit. “I do not like working for people I cannot trust. Men like Arthur Dorsett create trouble and tragedy-if you two should ever meet, you can smell it on him. This whole operation stinks, as do all his other mining operations. These poor Chinese laborers are driven until they drop. They’re fed well but paid nothing and forced to slave in the pit eighteen hours a day. Twenty have died in the past twelve months from accidents, because they were too exhausted to react and move out of the way of the equipment. Why the need to dig diamonds twenty-four hours a day when there is a worldwide surplus of the damned stones? De Beers may head a repugnant monopoly, but you have to give them credit. They hold production down so prices remain high. No, Dorsett has a rotten scheme to harm the market. I’d give a year’s pay to know what’s going on in his diabolic mind. Someone like you, who understands the horror we’re causing here, can now work to stop Dorsett before he kills another hundred innocent souls.”
Shock Wave dp-13 Page 24
