Gold Mine

by Wilbur Smith

  "What effect would that have?" Manfred asked mildly.

  "As General Manager, the decision to work certain ground or not to work it is technically yours. In the very unlikely event that you encountered trouble beyond the fault, it would be no defence to produce a written instruction from me. just as if you murdered my wife you could not defend yourself by producing a written instruction from me to do SO." This again was true. Rod knew he was trapped. He could refuse, and wreck his career. Or he could comply and take the consequences whatever they may be.

  "No," said Manfred, "I will not give you a written instruction." "You bastard," Rod said softly.

  Manfred answered as gently. "I warned you that you would not be able to refuse to obey me." And the last twinge of remorse that Rod felt for his association with Terry Steyner faded and was gone.

  "You've given me three months to hit the Big Dipper.

  All right, Steyner. You've got it!" Rod turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

  Terry was waiting for him among the Protea plants on the bottom lawn.

  She saw his face and dropped all pretence.

  She went to meet him.

  "Rod, what is it?" Her hand on his arm, looking up into his eyes.

  "Careful!" he warmed her, and she dropped her hand and stood back.

  "What is it?"

  "That bloody Gestapo bastard," Rod snarled, and then, "I'm sorry, Terry, he's your husband."

  "What has he done?"

  "I can't tell you here. When can I see you?"

  "I'll find an excuse to get away later today. Wait for me at your apartment." Later she sat on the couch below the Paravano painting and listened while he told her about it. All of it, the report, the threat and the order to pierce the Big Dipper.

  She listened but expressed neither approval nor disapproval of his decision.

  Manfred turned away from the window and went back to his desk. Even at that distance there had been no doubt about his wife's gesture.

  The hand outstretched, the face turned up, the lips parted in anxious enquiry, and then the guilty start and withdrawal.

  He sat down at his desk, and laid his hands neatly in front of him. For the first time he was thinking of Rodney Ironsides as a man and not a tool.

  He thought how big he was, tall and as wide across the shoulders as a gallows. Any reprisal on Ironsides could not be physical, and it could not be immediate. It must be after the drive to the Big Dipper.

  I can wait, he thought coldly, there is time for everything in this life.

  Johnny and Davy Delange sat in the two chairs before Rod's desk. They were both awkward and uncomforteable up here in the big office with picture windows looking out over the Kitchenerville valley. I don't blame them, Rod thought, even I am not accustomed to it yet.

  Wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning, original paintings on the wood-panelled walls.

  "I have sent for you because you two are the best rock breakers on the Sander Ditch," Rod began.

  "Tin Ribs wants something," thought Davy, with all the suspicion of the union man for management.

  "We will now have a few words from our sponsor," Johnny grinned to himself. "Before we start the programme." Rod looked at their faces and knew exactly what they Were thinking. He had been on daily pay himself once. Cut out the compliments, Ironsides he advised himself these are two tough cookies and they are not impressed.

  "I am pulling you out of the stopes and putting you onto a special development end. You will take it in turns to work day and night shift. You will be directly responsible to me and there will be a security blanket on your activity." They watched him without reaction, their expressions guarded. Johnny broke the short silence.

  "One end, one blast a day?" He was thinking of his pay.

  Calculated on the amount of rock broken, he would earn little more than basic salary with a blast on one small face daily.

  "No." Rod shook his head. "Ultra-fast, multi-blast, and shaft sinkers" rates." And both the Delange brothers sat forward in their chairs.

  "Multi-blast?" Davy asked. That meant that they could shoot just as soon as they were ready. A good team could blast three maybe four times a shift.

  "Ultra-fast?" Johnny demanded. That was language Johnny understood.

  It was a term employed only in emergency, as when driving in to rescue trapped men after a fall.

  It was tact approval from management to waive standard safety procedure in favour of speed. Christ, Johnny exulted, I can shoot her four' maybe five times a shift.

  "Shaft sinkers" rates?" they asked together. That was a 20 percent bonus on stopers" rates. It was a fortune they were being offered.

  Rod nodded affirmative to their questions, and waited for the reaction which he knew would follow. It came immediately.

  The Delange brothers now began to look for the catch.

  They sat stolidly turning the deal over in their minds, like two cautious housewives examining a tomato for blemishes because the price was too cheap.

  "How long is this drive?" Johnny asked. If the drive was short, a few hundred feet, then it was worth nothing. They would hardly get into their stride before it was completed.

  "Close on six thousand feet," Rod assured him. They looked relieved.

  "Where is it headed?" Davy discovered the rub.

  "We are going to drive through the Big Dipper to intersect on reef at 6,000 feet." "Jesus!" said Johnny. "The Big Dipper!" He was awed but unafraid. It excited him, the danger, the challenge. Had he been born earlier, Johnny Delange would have made a fine Spitfire pilot.

  "The Big Dipper," Davy murmured, his mind was racing.

  Nothing in this world or beyond would entice Davy Delange to drive through the Big Dipper. He had an almost religious fear of it. The name alone conjured up all sorts of hidden menace and unspeakable horror. Water. Gas. Friable ground, faults. Mud-rushes. All a miner's nightmare.

  There was no question of him doing it, yet the money was too good to pass up. He could net ten or eleven thousand rand on those terms.

  "All right, Mr. Ironsides," he said. "I'll take the first night shifts. Johnny can start the day Shifts." Davy Delange had made his decision. He would work until his drills hit the greenish-black serpentine rock of the dyke. He would then walk out of the drive and quit. He would go up to, but not beyond the dyke.

  Afterwards, any of the other mines would snap him up, he had an impeccable record and he would force Johnny to follow him.

  "Hey, Davy!" Johnny was delighted, he had expected Davy to turn the deal down flat.

  Now he would be able to buy the Mustang for certain and perhaps an MGB GT for Hettie and take a holiday to Durban over Christmas, and Rod was puzzled by Davy's easy agreement. He studied him a moment and decided that he had ferrety eyes. He's a sneaky little bastard, Rod decided, I'll have to watch him.

  It took one shift only to prepare for the development.

  Rod selected the starting point. The main haulage curved away from the shaft on 66 level. 1,000 feet along this tunnel there was a chamber that had been cut out as a loco repair station but which was now out of use.

  Two large batwing ventilation doors were fitted to the opening of the chamber to provide privacy and behind them the chief underground surveyor set up his instruments and marked out the head of the tunnel that would fly arrow straight a mile and more through the living rock to strike through the Big Dipper into the unknown.

  The area surrounding the head chamber was roped off and sign-posted with "warnings.

  DANGER INDEPENDENT BLASTING The mine captains Xfere instructed to keep their men well away, and all loco traffic was re-routed through a secondary haulage. On the doors of the chamber another notice was fixed.

  FIERY MINE PROCEDURE IN FORCE NO NAKED LIGHTS BEYOND THIS POINT

  Owing to small deposits of coal and other organic substance in the upper stratas of rock, the Sander Ditch was classed as a fiery mine and subject to the government legislation covering this subject. No
matches, lighters or other spark-generating devices were allowed into a new development end, because the presence of methane gas was always suspected.

  Colourless, odour less tasteless, detectable only by test with a safety lamp, it was a real and terrifying danger. A nine percent concentration in air was highly explosive.

  Stringent precautions were taken against accidental triggering of methane that may have oozed out of a fissure or cavity in the rock.

  From the main compressed air-pipes running down the corners of the shaft were taken leads to air tanks in the haulage, ensuring that sixty pounds per square inch of pressure was available for the rock drills.

  Then drills, pinch bars hammers, shovels, and the other tools were unloaded from the cage at 66 level and stored at the shaft head.

  Lastly, explosive was placed in the red lockers at the head of the development, and on the evening of October 23rd 1968, thirty minutes after the main blast, Davy Delange and his gang disembarked from the cage and went to the disused loco shop.

  Davy, with the surly little Swazi boss boy beside him, stood before the rock wall on which the surveyor had marked the outline of the tunnel.

  Behind him his gang had fallen unbidden to their labour, each man knowing exactly what was expected of him.

  Already the machine boys and their assistants were lugging their ungainly tools forward.

  "You! You! You! You!" Davy indicated to each of them the hole on which he was to begin and then stepped back.

  "Shaya!" he commanded. "Hit id" And with a fluttering bellow that buffeted the eardrums the drive began.

  The drilling ceased and Davy charged the holes. The fuses hung like the tails of white mice from their holes.

  Each length carefully cut to ensure correct firing sequence.

  "Clear the drive!" The boss boy's whistle shrilled, the tramp of heavy boots receded until silence hung heavy in the chemically cleaned air.

  "Cheesa!" Davy and the boss boy, with the igniters burning like children's fireworks in their right hands, touched them to the hanging tails until the chamber was lit by the fierce blue light of the burning fuses. The shadows of the two men flickered gigantic and distorted upon the walls.

  "All burning. Let's go!" And the two men walked quickly back to where the gang waited along the haulage.

  The detonations sucked at their ears, and thrust against their lungs, so that afterwards the silence was stunning.

  Davy checked his wristwatch. By law there was a mandatory thirty minutes" wait before anyone could go back to the face. There may be a hang-fire waiting to blow the eyes out of someone's head. Even if there were not, there was still the cloud of poisonous nitrous fumes that would destroy the hair follicles in a man's nostrils and render him still more vulnerable to the fine particles of rock dust that would seek to enter his lungs.

  Davy waited those thirty minutes, by which time the ventilation had sucked away the fumes and dust.

  Then, alone, he went up the haulage. With him he carried his safety lamp, its tiny blue flame burning behind the screen of fine gass wire mesh. That mesh was flash proof and insulated the flame from any methane in the air.

  Standing before the raw circular wound in the rock wall, Davy tested for methane gas. Watching the blue flame for the tell-tale cap.

  There was no sign of it, and satisfied he extinguished the lamp.

  "Boss boy!" he yelled, and the Swazi came up uncoiling the hose behind him.

  "Water down!" Only when the rock face and all the loose rubble below it were glistening and dripping with water was Davy satisfied that the dust was laid sufficiently to bring up his gang. "Bar boys!" he yelled, and they came up, carrying the twelve-foot-long pinch bars a tool like a giant crowbar.

  "Bar down. Make safe!" And the bar boys attacked the bunches of loose rock that were flaking and crumbling from the hanging wall. Two of them manipulating one bar between them, with the steel point striking sparks from the rock. The dislodged fragments rained down, heavily at first and then less and less until the rock above their heads was solid and clean.

  Only then did Davy scramble over the pile of rubble to reach the face and begin marking in the shot holes.

  Behind him his gang were lashing the stuff into the waiting coco pans and his machine boys were dragging the drills up to the face.

  Davy's gang made three blasts that first night. As he rode up in the cage into a pink, sweet-smelling dawn, Davy was satisfied.

  "Perhaps tonight we will get in four blasts," he thought.

  In the Company change house he showered, running the water steaming hot so his skin turned dull angry red, and he worked up a fat white lather of soap suds over his head and at his armpits and crotch.

  He rubbed down with a rough thick towel and dressed quickly. Crossing the parking lot to his battered old Ford Anglia he felt happy and good-tired; hungry and ready for bed.

  He drove into Kitchenerville at a steady forty miles an hour, and by this time the sun was just showing over the Kraalkop ridge. The dawn was misty rose, with long shadows against the earth, and he thought that this was how it would be in the early mornings on the farm.

  On the outskirts of the town Johnny's Monaco roared past him going in the opposite direction. Johnny waved and blew the horn, shouting something that was lost in the howl of wind and motor.

  "They'll catch him yet." Davy shook his head in disapproval. "The speed limit is forty-five along here." He parked the Anglia in the garage and let himself in through the kitchen door. The Bantu maid was busy over the stove.

  "Three eggs," he told her and went through to his bedroom. He shrugged off his jacket and threw it on the bed. Then he returned to the door and glanced quickly up and down the passage. It was deserted, and there was no sound besides the clatter of the maid in the kitchen.

  Davy sidled into the passage. The door to Johnny's bedroom was ajar, and Davy moved quietly down to it. His heart was pounding in his throat, his breathing was stifled by his guilt and excitement.

  He peered around the edge of the door and gasped aloud.

  This morning it was better than usual.

  Hettie was a sound sleeper. Johnny always maintained it would take a shot of Dynagel to wake her. She never wore night clothes and she never rose before ten-thirty in the morning. She lay on her stomach, hugging a pillow to her chest, her hair a joyous tangle of flaming red against the green sheets. The morning was warm and her blankets had been kicked aside.

  Davy stood in the passage. A nerve in his eyelid began to twitch, and under his shirt a drop of perspiration slid from his armpit down along his flank. On the bed Hettie mumbled unintelligibly in her sleep, drew her knees up and rolled slowly onto her back. One arm came up and flopped limply over her face, her eyes were covered by the crook of her elbow.

  She sighed deeply. The twin mounds of her bosom were pulled out of shape by their own weight and the angle of her arm. The hair in her armpit and at the base of her belly was bright shiny red-gold. She was long and smooth and silky white, crowned and tipped with flame.

  She moved her body languorously, voluptuously, and then settled once more into slumber.

  "Breakfast ready, master," the maid called from the kitchen. Davy started guiltily, then retreated down the passage.