by Jack Du Brul
“Tom wanted his light turned on, but providing a victim additional light is not a priority. It might make him feel more secure, but that’s not a necessity to save his life. Assessing the situation, the rock stability, gas levels, the victim’s medical condition. These are the things you focus on first.
“If you take anything away from this training seminar it is these two things.” Mercer’s voice carried a serious tone that seemed to seep into the stone walls. “First thing is to thank the stars you’re not a Chinese miner.” This got a few dark chuckles as they had spent part of a classroom session going over the horrors of the Chinese mining industry. “But seriously, know that if you are ever called upon to use the skills we’ve worked on together, then some fellow miner is having the worst day of his life—and his life is in your hands. Don’t make the situation worse by forgetting your training.”
Mercer let them think about that for a few seconds before smacking his hands together to break the hypnotic mood. “Okay children, I have taught you at least the basics, and despite a few gaffes that were not bullsheet, Hans…you’ve all passed the course.” A round of spontaneous applause broke out in the room. “And,” Mercer continued, “that means dinner tonight is on me.”
The miners roared their approbation, even if the local eatery was a kitschy overdecorated chain restaurant. It had thirty kinds of beer on tap, and all of them were cold.
They started moving off in a raucous gang, like schoolkids anticipating summer vacation. Mercer stood, watching them go.
Teaching mine rescue techniques wasn’t his primary job. Mercer was a prospecting geologist and mine engineer. He was the hired gun called in when big mining companies needed a second opinion before committing hundreds of millions of dollars to open a new pit or shaft, or when they needed guidance to maximize claims they were already working. Mercer was credited with finding billions of dollars’ worth of extractable ore, be it something as ordinary as bauxite deposits for aluminum smelting, or as exotic as the sapphires from a mine in India that was producing some of the finest gemstones ever discovered. His career had taken him to almost every corner of the planet and had made him a wealthy man, but one who did not forget the roots of his success. Mercer felt a responsibility to his profession to give back a little of his hard-won experience. In fact, his pay for the weeks here in Minnesota was less than a tenth of what he earned consulting. But some things in life weren’t about money.
“Dr. Mercer.”
“Just Mercer, Tom,” he said to the one student who’d hung back. “The doctor title is only used getting dinner reservations.”
“I just wanted to thank you for everything. It’s been real interesting.”
“Well, let me say this with all sincerity, I hope to God you never need to use what you’ve learned.”
It took a second for the young miner to catch Mercer’s meaning. “I hope the same thing. Thank you.” They shook hands. Tom Rogers turned for the long walk to the mine head, where the lifts to the surface were located. Mercer didn’t move. “You coming?”
“No,” Mercer said. “I want to check out the science team that’s leased out another part of the mine. I’ll see you at the restaurant.”
Mercer moved into a side chamber and killed the generator he’d rigged to run the lights and mini-fridge. The silence and darkness were profound. It was complete sensory deprivation—such an alien experience that most people couldn’t stand it for more than a few minutes. Many panicked in seconds. Mercer could have stood there for eternity. He flicked on his helmet light and moved off down the tunnel, away from where his men had vanished around a corner. They were headed to the main lifting station. Mercer made for the auxiliary elevator shaft, his step light even in steel-toed boots.
The science team wasn’t actually his primary interest. They were here at the Leister Deep Mine doing some research on climate change and cosmic rays. They needed to be underground and at this particular mine because the copper vein was situated below a thousand-foot-thick slab of iron ore. Though not commercially viable to mine, the ore acted as a shield to certain galactic rays while admitting others. It was, embarrassingly, a bit out of his field.
The problem with modern science, he mused, was that it had become so specialized that a geologist like him hadn’t the foggiest idea what was happening in a related field such as climatology. Both were earth sciences, but so widely divergent that the men and women down here could be doing voodoo incantations as part of their research for all he knew.
No, Mercer’s real interest was not in this particular research, but in Abraham Jacobs. Jacobs was one of the faculty advisers on the team, an éminence grise of Penn State University and later Carnegie Mellon, and was now retired but still consulted at a small private college in eastern Ohio. Far more than an adviser, Jacobs had been Mercer’s mentor during his time at Penn State while he had earned his doctorate in geology.
When asked about his background, Mercer liked to quip he was African American. People looked at his white skin and storm-gray eyes and usually cocked a questioning eyebrow, until Mercer would explain that he was born in Africa, to an American father and a Belgian mother. His parents were killed in a forgotten uprising in a forgotten part of what was then Zaire, and he was raised by his paternal grandparents. They were wonderful people who tended to all his childhood needs, but it was Abe Jacobs who really became Mercer’s role model and surrogate father.
They had drifted apart as Mercer’s career skyrocketed, only to reconnect in recent years. The two men, master instructor and star student, had tried to see each other now at least once a year. It had been eighteen months since their last visit—and Mercer was further burdened by guilt because monthly phone calls had degenerated to occasional texts—so he walked with an eager step down the lightless tunnel.
Mercer had accepted this offer to teach mine rescue in the Leister Deep because he knew Abe would be here helping on the research project. According to their last communication, Abe would be arriving today, while the principal investigator and her postdocs and undergrads had been here setting up the experiment over the course of the past week.
Mercer came to a lighted nexus point where several tunnels came together. The secondary lift was a utilitarian cage behind a steel accordion door and was only in working condition because the bulk of the abandoned mine’s upper levels had been turned into a climate-controlled storage facility totaling some eight million square feet. Down where Mercer had taught his course, and deeper still where the scientists worked, the air was too humid for storage, but since part of the facility was occupied, all of its safety and operations gear had to work properly no matter where it was located.
He stepped onto the open mesh floor of the lift cage and closed the door behind him. Below his feet was a profound blackness that seemed to want to suck him into its embrace. He depressed the control handle, and the elevator slid out from the glow of the subterranean crossroads and plunged downward. Had he wanted, Mercer could have brushed the rock of the shaft as the car dropped deeper into the earth. The stone was roughhewn, and it always amazed him that whoever had excavated this shaft had been the first creature ever to have laid eyes on this particular rock.
That concept gave him pause while he was in the field searching for the next mother lode, splitting open stones with a rock hammer and knowing that what he was looking at had never once seen the light of day. More than most, Mercer understood that humanity was a blip on the geologic timeline.
He descended another five hundred feet. From the dim light filtering up from below, Mercer could see that he was nearing the mine’s deepest complex of tunnels. He eased off the controls to slow the elevator and flicked it off when the car matched the depth of another accordion door. Beyond was a well-lit chamber much like the one above. Unlike a commercial elevator with automatic safety clamps, this one bobbed for several seconds, a sensation first-timers found very disconcerting. Mercer paused so the tension in the fifteen-hundred-foot cable could equalize before sli
ding open the door and stepping out into the tunnel.
He had been given two gifts by genetic luck. One was a near-photographic memory, and the other was a spatial sense that allowed him to understand the three-dimensional mazes that were hard-rock mines, and the ability to move about them without fear of getting lost.
Unlike the level where he’d been teaching, there was a lot of equipment stacked about even though this was the secondary lift. The big main elevator was a quarter mile away and could easily transport the massive ore buckets that had once been pulled from this depth as well as the heavy equipment that had been lowered down to mine it. Human nature being what it was, it appeared the scientists preferred using this man-scaled lift to get to work versus the barn-size primary hoist that had transported much of their gear.
Mercer saw they had even brought down electric golf carts and a couple of Segway people movers with fat off-road tires to handle the rough floor. They were plugged into a charging station that ran off the mine’s mains.
There’s a first time for everything, he thought, as he looked around furtively. Mercer unplugged and then stepped onto one of the two-wheelers, thumbing the “start” button and almost killing himself because he was leaning back slightly and the Segway tried to lurch out from under him. He centered his weight better, and the gyroscopes stabilized the platform. He took a firmer grip on the handlebars, leaned forward, and was amazed at how smoothly the awkward machine moved. In seconds he was weaving it from side to side down the tunnel like a veteran rider.
This section of the mine had been carved using the “room and pillar” technique. Mercer thought it an odd choice, since usually coal was taken from the earth in that way. The rooms were vast, tens of thousands of square feet, and they were supported at regular intervals by pillars of unmined ore that formed columns to hold up the roof. Mercer zipped silently through several such yawning caverns, until he approached the side chamber where he knew the scientists had set up their experiment. Outside the chamber were a half dozen golf carts and Segways as well as mechanical transporters fashioned for use in low-ceilinged spaces. These were real mining machines, designed so the operator sat in a cage off to the side of the vehicle rather than a cab atop it. They were old and dented, with fading paint, relics of a time when the mine was in operation. Lord knew how the team of eggheads had gotten them running, but the flatbeds had been used to haul the bulk of their scientific apparatus from the main lift.
Mercer left his Segway next to the others and stepped over to look at one of the transporters. It had a forward cab with a diesel engine behind it, and an articulated bed that had to have been fifty feet long. There were multiple sets of small solid rubber wheels, which filled Mercer’s mind with an image of a rudimentary mechanical centipede.
The thought was interrupted by a sudden sound—one Mercer had first heard on the day his parents had been mowed down by African rebels. He had heard it many times since. It was the staccato ratchet of automatic weapons fire.
2
Instinct and experience told Mercer he was hearing machine pistols like an Uzi, but more likely the popular Heckler & Koch MP5s. The H&K was the preferred weapon of elite fighting forces like Delta or the SEALs. The weapons’ sound had been suppressed with very good silencers, not some jury-rigged contraptions, but precision milled tubes with the correct sequence of baffles and discharge holes.
The incongruity of hearing suppressed gunfire deep in an underground mine didn’t slow Mercer’s reflexes. He had launched himself over the transporter’s bed even before the machine pistols went silent. He snuggled up to the wheeled train as best he could, snapping off his miner’s lamp and peering into the darkness between the close-set tires. His body was awash in adrenaline and his heart rate was spiking, and yet he was able to keep his breathing calm and deliberate.
Thirty feet ahead was the entrance to the antechamber where Abe and the others would be working. Mercer could just discern a lessening of the mine’s absolute blackness. To call it light was being too generous, but there was a faint corona far beyond the opening and a few stray photons leaked out. Screams echoed from the entrance¸ followed by another burst from the machine pistols. Mercer saw the shadow of flickering light, the telltale muzzle flash of autofire.
This time when the weapons fell silent, there were no more screams. He had no idea what was happening and wished it was some elaborate joke, but he knew it wasn’t. Mercer remained motionless and silent, straining to see anything.
About one minute after the second burst and Mercer was beginning to move closer, when he saw a sudden shift in the darkness. The patch of less-black space—the entrance to the experiment chamber—blinked four times. It was the silhouettes of four men walking out of that room. They displayed no light whatsoever, but the speed with which they emerged and the precise interval between them told Mercer they were acting as though they could see.
They had to be using thermal imaging, or they were wearing light emitters in the ultraviolet band with goggles that could distinguish it. With such equipment, the tunnel would look illuminated while the men themselves remained in absolute darkness. The military used the system sparingly, because an enemy with the right goggles could easily see the UV light from the emitters.
Their shoes made barely a whisper as they jogged through the massive room and disappeared into the forest of support pillars. Mercer slithered from where he’d hidden, moving cautiously in the dark. He didn’t dare turn on his headlamp. He inched closer to where the gunmen had emerged, making certain each of his footsteps was firmly on solid ground before transferring his weight. When he reached the entrance he could better see the glow of distant light that had found its way around several walls. He went down a short corridor that twisted left, then right, and then left again. Around each bend he was rewarded with more light until he finally emerged into a circular chamber with three sets of yellow construction lights atop spindly tripods. One of them had been knocked over and only shone a weak beam that still managed to capture some of the horror. That lamp reflected off a smear of blood on the stone floor as bright as lipstick.
The other lights painted a sickening tableau. There had been six people down here. Four men and two women. One of the women was nearest the felled light, and it was blood from a wound in her neck that was caught in its beam. By the slashes and swirls it looked as though the woman had convulsed as her heart pumped her life out of her shredded carotid. The second woman had taken several bullets to the chest, her body tossed back onto a table loaded with computers and scientific gear so that her feet dangled above the floor.
The men had fared just as poorly. Two looked like they had been hit in the back, most likely during the opening pulse of lead when the gunmen had entered the chamber. Another appeared to have been running laterally across the room and took several shots into his thigh, hip, and torso before augering into a stack of gas cylinders like those used by welders.
The fourth man was Abe Jacobs. It looked to Mercer like he had tried to use his body to shield the woman who had bled out. His chest was a bloody mess, and his full beard—a source of pride that hung down past his neck—was stained like red steel wool. In the middle of the room was a heap of thick glass that had been shattered. Hoses ran from the pile to a central mixing control that looked like an oilfield manifold, which itself was fed from several of the gas cylinders. These were the remains of a cloud chamber they were using in their experiments. Nearby was a copper box with a hinged lid whose function he couldn’t guess.
Mercer took all of this in with a quick sweep. He rushed to Abe’s side, dropping to his knees and grabbing for the old man’s hand, but it was futile. Abe had probably been dead even before his body had hit the hard stone floor.
Mercer expected tears but none came. Instead he felt a hot anger building in the pit of his stomach. He stood and quickly checked the others. Had there been a chance to save any of them he would have remained to dress wounds and comfort the victims, but there was nothing he could do for
any of these people. At least, not by sitting in this chamber.
With hands made sticky by blood, Mercer ran out of the room and back into the main chamber. His miner’s lamp couldn’t penetrate more than a couple of feet, so the darkness beyond the beam was an unknown world of inky shadow where one of the gunmen could be lurking in wait for any sign of pursuit. Mercer glanced above his head and saw that the science team had strung lights from the main shaft to their science chamber. These people weren’t miners accustomed to the black. They would want as much light down here as possible.
The assault team had smashed the bulbs as they approached, which told Mercer they were likely retracing their steps using thermal imagers tracking the still-hot filaments. Mercer wore thick coveralls that trapped a massive amount of heat, and his body was only about fifteen degrees cooler than the mine’s musty air. The commandos wouldn’t be able to see him until he was practically on top of them.
He leapt aboard the Segway and leaned as far forward as he dared, the gawky wheeled platform taking off, if not like a shot, then a lot faster than Mercer could run for the mile he needed to cover to reach the main lift. The wind across his face told him he was moving at a good clip.
Now it was calculations of relative speeds and distances. How quickly would the gunmen want to make their escape without making noise? Full tilt, would be Mercer’s guess. Meaning they would be running flat out, hampered only by the need to wear the thermal imaging goggles. Call it a seven-minute mile. They had a two-minute head start even before Mercer went to check on Abe and the others. Another minute lost.
The math was irrefutable. He couldn’t catch up to them. His only hope was they were somehow delayed in getting into the three-story-tall main lift cage.
