by A. G. Riddle
Craig is gracious, telling me how happy he is that I decided to take them up. As I suspected, Kane is nowhere to be seen, but there is another man there, younger, late 20s, about my age, and strikingly similar to Kane, especially the condescending smirk on his face. Craig confirms my suspicions.
“Patrick Pierce, this is Rutger Kane. You’ve met his father. I asked him to join us on the tour, as you’ll be working together.”
We shake. His hand is strong, and he squeezes like hell, almost grunting. The months in bed have weakened me, and I draw my hand away.
Kane Jr. seems satisfied. “Glad you’ve finally come, Pierce. I’ve been after Papa to find me a new miner for months; this damn war’s held me up long enough.” He sits and crosses his legs. “Gertrude!” He looks over his shoulder as the secretary reaches the door. “Bring coffee. Do you take coffee, Pierce?”
I ignore him, directing my flat statement at Craig. “My conditions were clear. I’m in charge in the mines — if, I take the job.”
Craig holds both his hands up, cutting Rutger off, and speaks quickly, hoping to placate both of us. “Nothing’s changed, Mr. Pierce. Rutger here has worked on the project going on a decade, practically grew up in those mines! You all probably have a lot in common, I imagine, ah, from what I hear. No, you all will work together. He’ll offer invaluable advice, and with his knowledge and your skill in mining, we’ll be through, or making smart progress, in no time.” He stops the secretary as she creeps in carefully with the tray. “Ah Gertrude, could you put the coffee in a Thermos? We’ll take it with us. Uh, and some tea for Mr. Pierce.”
The entrance to the mines is almost a mile from the Immari office — inside a warehouse along the harbor next to the Rock. Two warehouses to be exact, joined on the interior with two separate facades to make them look like two warehouses from the street. A warehouse this large would stick out and inspire curiosity. Two common-sized warehouse fronts, however, could easily go unnoticed.
Inside the oversized warehouse, four lighterskinned black men are waiting for us. Moroccans would be my guess. Upon seeing us, the four men silently set about removing a tarp from a structure in the middle of the warehouse. When it’s revealed, I realize it’s not a structure at all — it’s the opening to the mine. A giant mouth spreading out at each side. I had expected a vertical shaft, but that’s the least of the surprises to come.
There’s a car, an electric one. And two large rails leading down into the mine. Clearly they’re moving a lot of dirt out.
Craig points to an empty rail car and then toward the harbor and the sea beyond the warehouse door. “We dig by day and load out by night, Mr. Pierce.”
“You dump the dirt—”
“In the bay if we can. If the moon is full, we sail farther out.” Craig says.
It makes sense. It’s about their only option to get rid of so much dirt.
I walk closer and inspect the mine shaft. It’s supported by large timbers, just like our mines in West Virginia, but there’s a thick black cord running from timber to timber, stretching as far as I can see. There are two cords actually, one on each side of the mine shaft. At the far side of the opening to the mine, the left cord attaches to… A telephone. The right-side cord simply runs into a box attached to a post. It has a metal lever, like a switch box. Power? Surely not.
When the Moroccans throw the last of the tarps aside, Rutger strides over and chastises the men in German. I understand a bit, one word in particular: “feuer.” Fire. My skin crawls at the sound of it. He points at the car, then the rails. The men look confused. This is no doubt for my benefit, and I turn away, refusing to watch the show and their humiliation. I hear Rutger retrieving something, and there’s clanging on the rails. I turn to see him lighting a wick inside a round paper bag atop a mini railcar, no bigger than a plate. Rutger attaches it to a single rail, and several of the Moroccans help him with a slingshot device that sends the plate and flame whizzing into the dark mine. The paper protects the flame from instantly blowing out.
A minute later we hear the distant poof of an explosion. Firedamp. Probably a methane pocket. Rutger motions for the Moroccans to send another volley, and they rush to the rail with another plate-car carrying a paper bag full of flame. I’m impressed. In West Virginia, I’m sorry to say, we use donkeys. On a good day, you strap the flame to the donkey’s back, slap him on the ass, and find him at the end of the mine — alive and wandering in the dark. On bad days you smell the barbecued flesh as you enter the mine, a sick smell of hair and organs fried with muscle and fat. I could never bring myself to eat the animal once we reached it, but I was almost alone in that. The mines are deep and the wages are paltry. Good meat is hard to come by. Every now and then a donkey would charge out alive and on fire, like some bad omen from a Biblical tale. But that was rare; hitting a methane pocket is like finding a live grenade — the explosion is instant and total. If the flame doesn’t kill you, the cave-in will.
This is a dangerous mine.
We hear the poof of the second volley, deeper this time.
The Moroccans load and launch a third trial.
We wait a bit, and when no sound comes, Rutger throws the switch on the box and gets behind the wheel of the car. Craig slaps me on the back. “We’re ready, Mr. Pierce.” Craig takes the passenger seat, and I sit on the bench in the back. Rutger cranks the car and drives recklessly into the mine, almost crashing into the rails at the entrance but swerving at the last minute to straddle them and then straighten the car as we plow deeper into the earth like characters out of some Jules Verne novel, maybe Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The tunnel is completely dark except for the car’s dim headlamps, which barely illuminate the area ten feet ahead of us. We drive at high speed for what seems like an hour, and I’m speechless, not that I could say a word over the racket of the truck in the tunnel. The scale is staggering, unimaginable. The tunnels are wide and tall, and much to my chagrin, very, very well made — not treasure-hunting tunnels; these are subterranean roads made to last.
The first few minutes into the mine is a constant turn. We must be following a spiral tunnel, like a corkscrew boring deep into the earth, deep enough to get under the bay.
The spiral deposits us into a larger staging area, no doubt used to sort and store supplies. I barely get a glimpse of crates and boxes before Rutger floors the car again, roaring down the straight tunnel with even more speed. We’re on a constant decline, and I can almost feel the air growing more damp with each passing second. There are several forks in the tunnel, but nothing slows Rutger down. He drives madly, swerving left and right, barely making the turns. I grip the seat. Craig leans over and touches the youth’s arm, but I can’t hear his voice over the deafening racket of the car’s engine. Whatever is said, Rutger doesn’t care for it. He brushes Craig’s arm off and bears down harder than ever. The engine screams and the tunnel zooms by in flashes.
Rutger’s putting on this little thrill ride to prove he knows the tunnels in the dark, that this is his territory, that he has my life in his hands. He wants to intimidate me. It’s working.
This mine is the biggest I’ve ever been in. And there are some giant mines in the mountains of West Virgina.
Finally, the tunnel opens onto a large, roughly shaped area — like a place where the miners had searched for direction and made several false starts. Electric lights hang from the ceiling, illuminating the space, revealing pockmarks and drill holes along the walls where blasts had started new tunnels, but were abandoned. I see a stack of the other black cord, laying in a bundle next to a table that holds another phone, no doubt connected to the surface.
The rail lines end here as well. The three mini rail cars sit in a row at the line’s termination point near the end of the room. The top part of two of them have been blown away, no doubt as they hit methane pockets along the way. The third sits quietly at the front of the other two; its flame jumps wildly as it claws for drifting pockets of oxygen in the dank space.
Rutger kills the engine, hops out, and blows out the the candle.
Craig follows him out of the car and says to me, “Well, what do you think, Pierce?”
“It’s quite a tunnel.” I look around, seeing more of the strange room.
Rutger joins us. “Don’t play coy, Pierce. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I never said I had.” I direct my next words at Craig. “You’ve a methane problem.”
“Yes, a rather recent development. We only began hitting pockets in the last year. Obviously we were a bit unprepared. We had assumed that water would be the biggest danger on this dig.”
“A safe assumption.” Methane is an ever-present danger in many coal mines. I never would have expected it down here, a place with seemingly no coal, oil, or other fuel deposits.
Craig motions above us. “You’ve no doubt noticed that the mine is on a constant grade — about 9 degrees. What you should know is that the sea floor above us slopes at roughly 11 degrees. It’s only about 80 yards above us here — we believe.”
I realize the implication instantly, and I can’t hide my surprise. “You think the methane pockets are from the sea floor?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Rutger smirks like we’re two old women, gossiping about the boogie man.
I inspect the roof of the room. Craig hands me a helmet and a small backpack. Then he clicks a switch on the side, and the helmet lights up. I stare at it a moment in wonder, then put it on, deciding to deal with the larger mystery at hand.
The rock on the ceiling is dry — a good sign. The unspoken danger is that if a methane pocket exploded, and that pocket was large enough to stretch to the seafloor, you’d get an extremely large explosion, followed by a flood of water that would collapse the entire mine almost instantly. You would either burn, drown, or be crushed to death. Maybe a combination. One spark — from a pick ax, from a falling rock, from the friction of the car wheels on the rails, could send the whole place up.
“If the gas is above, between this shaft and the sea, I don’t see another way. You’ll have to close her off and find another way,” I say.
Rutger scoffs. “I told you Mallory, he’s not up to it. We’re wasting our time with this gimp American coward.”
Craig holds a hand up. “Just a minute, Rutger. We’ve paid Mr. Pierce to be here; now let’s hear what he has to say.”
“What would you do, Mr. Pierce?”
“Nothing. I’d abandon the project. The yield can’t possibly justify the cost — human or capital.”
Rutger rolls his eyes and begins wandering around the room, ignoring Craig and me.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Craig says.
“You’re looking for treasure.”
Craig clasps his hands behind his back and walks deeper into the room. “You’ve seen the size of this dig. You know we’re not treasure hunters. In 1861, we sank a ship in the Bay of Gibraltar — The Utopia. A little inside joke. We spent the next five years diving at the wreckage site, which was a cover for what we’d found below it — a structure, nearly a mile off the coast of Gibraltar. But we determined that we couldn’t access the structure from the seafloor, it was buried too deep, and our diving technology simply wasn’t advanced far enough, couldn’t be advanced far enough, quickly enough. And we were frightened of drawing attention. We had already lingered far too long at the site of a sunken merchant ship.”
“Structure?”
“Yes. A city or a temple of some sort.”
Rutger walks back to us and turns his back to me, facing Craig. “He doesn’t need to know this. He’ll want more pay if he thinks we’re digging for something valuable. Americans are almost as greedy as Jews.”
Craig raises his voice. “Be quiet, Rutger.”
It’s easy to ignore the brat. I’m intrigued. “How did you know where to sink the ship, where to dig?” I ask.
“We… had a general idea.”
“From what?”
“Some historical documents.”
“How do you know you’re under the diving site?”
“We used a compass and calculated the distance, accounting for the pitch of the tunnel. We’re right under the site. And we have proof.” Craig walked to the wall and grabbed the rock — no, a dingy black cloth, which I thought had been rock. He pulls the blanket to the floor, revealing… a passageway, like a bulkhead in a massive ship.
I move closer, shining my headlamp into the strange space. The walls are black, clearly metal, but they shimmer in a different, indescribable way, almost as if they are alive and reacting to my light, like a mirror made of water. And there are lights, twinkling at the top and bottom of the passageway. I peer around the turn and see that the tunnel leads to some sort of door or portal.
“What is this?” I whisper.
Craig leans over my shoulder. “We believe it’s Atlantis. The city Plato described. The location is right. Plato said that Atlantis came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean and that it was an island situated in front of the straits of the Pillars of Heracles—”
“Pillars of Heracles—”
“What we call the Pillars of Hercules. The Rock of Gibraltar is one of the Pillars of Hercules. Plato said that Atlantis ruled over all of Europe, Africa, and Asia and that it was the way to other continents. But it fell. In Plato’s words: ‘there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all the warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.’”
Craig paced away from the strange structure. “This is it. We’ve found it. You see now why we can’t stop here, Mr. Pierce. We’re very, very close. Will you join us? We need you.”
Rutger laughs. “You’re wasting your time, Mallory. He’s scared to death; I can see it in his eyes.”
Craig focuses on me. “Ignore him. I know it’s dangerous. We can pay you more than $1,000 per week. You tell me what it’s worth.”
I peer into the tunnel, then inspect the ceiling again. The dry ceiling. “Let me think about it.”
CHAPTER 82
Snow Camp Alpha
Drill Site #5
East Antarctica
“What’s our depth?” Robert Hunt asked the drilling tech.
“Just passed 6,000 feet, sir. Should we stop?”
“No. Keep going. I’ll report in. Come get me at 6,500 feet.” They had hit nothing but ice for over a mile — the same as the last four drilling sites.
Robert pulled his parka tight and walked from the massive drilling platform toward his field tent. He passed a second man on his way. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t remember his name. The two men they had given him were quiet; no one said much about themselves, but they were hard-working and they didn’t drink — the best you could hope for in drill operators in extreme conditions. They were both dumb as a sack of hammers, but it likely wouldn’t matter.
His employer would probably give up soon. Hole number five looked like the four before it: nothing but ice. The whole continent was a giant ice cube. He remembered reading that Antarctica had 90% of the world’s ice and 70% of its freshwater. If you took all the water in the world, in every lake, pond, stream and even water in the clouds, it wouldn’t come out to even half of the frozen water in Antarctica. When all that ice melted, the world would be a very different place. The sea would rise 200 feet, nations would fall, or more accurately, drown. Low-lying countries like Indonesia would disappear from the map. New York City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and most of Florida — also gone.
Ice seemed to be the only thing Antarctica had in abundance. What could they be looking for down here? Oil was the logical answer. Robert was, after all, an oil rig operator. But the equipment was all wrong for oil. The bore diameter was wrong. For oil, you wanted a pipe line. These bits were making holes big enough to drive a truck through. Or lower a truck. What could be down there? Minerals? Something scientific, maybe fos
sils? Maybe some ploy to stake a claim on the land? Antarctica was massive — 17.5 million square kilometers. If it was a country, it would be the second largest in the world — Antarctica was just 20,000 square kilometers smaller than Russia, another hell-hole he had drilled — with much more success. Antarctica had once been a lush paradise around two million years ago. It stood to reason that there would be an unimaginable oil reserve under the surface and who knows what else—
Behind him, Robert heard a loud boom.
The pylon sticking out of the ground was spinning wildly — the bit was hitting no resistance. They must have hit a pocket. He had expected this — research teams had recently found large caverns and gaps in the ice, possibly underwater fjords where the ice ran over the mountains below.
“Shut it down!” Robert yelled. The man on the platform couldn’t hear him. He ran a hand across his throat, but the man just looked dumbfounded. He grabbed his radio, and shouted, “Full stop!”
On the platform, the long pipe sticking out of the ground was starting to wobble, like a top starting to lose its balance.
Robert threw the radio down and ran toward the platform. He pushed the man out of the way and entered commands to stop the bit.
He grabbed the man, and they ran from the platform. They had made it almost to the housing pods when they heard the platform shudder, buckle, and capsize. The drilling column had broken off and spun wildly in the air. Even 200 feet away, the noise was deafening, like a jet engine roaring at full speed. The platform sank into the snow and the bit came forward, digging into the ice like a twister on the Kansas plains in Tornado Alley.
Robert and the other man lay face-down, enduring the shards of ice and snow raining down until the bit finally came to a stop.
Robert looked up at the scene. His employer wouldn’t be pleased. “Don’t touch anything,” he said to the man.
Inside the living pod, Robert picked up the radio. “Bounty, this is Snow King. I have a status update.” Robert wondered what to report. They hadn’t hit a pocket. It was something else. The bit would have chewed through any kind of rock or ground, even frozen. Whatever they had hit had taken the bit clean off. It was the only possibility.
