Black Sun Descending

by Stephen Legault

  They reached Fredonia thirty minutes later. Hayduke led the way in his Jeep through the small mill town and Silas had to admit, once they were following a jeep track south again toward the Grand Canyon, that the young man knew his way around the Southwest. The road they followed paralleled the dell cut by Kanab Creek. Eventually it would turn into one of the major side canyons of the Grand Canyon, but in Fredonia it was just a shallow swale.

  The driving became increasingly difficult, the gravel road narrowing but still passable. Several side roads turned off to the west, leading over sage brush flats and along terraces of red rock. Hayduke stopped his Jeep and jumped out, the pilfered map in hand. Silas stopped and walked up alongside him. The young man pointed to the place on the map where he believed they were. Silas had his GPS unit in hand and confirmed their location. “Then the Patriot One is just over that rise,” said Hayduke, pointing to the south. “Do you want to stash our rigs? What if Slim Jim is there working away right now?”

  Silas looked around. There were few places to conceal a pair of vehicles. “I don’t suppose you have one of those camouflage nets that Seldom Seen Smith had in The Monkey Wrench Gang ?”

  “Shit, no, but I’m going to get one.”

  “Alright, let’s just park them off the road up that side trail.” Silas pointed east. “Those junipers will give us a little cover from the road.”

  They drove up the side road, Silas being careful not to scrape the undercarriage of his Outback on the high center rocks. In a few minutes they were parked behind the stunted trees and surveying the country. “I think I see where the mine is at,” said Hayduke, using his binoculars. He handed them to Silas. “Down in that little grotto there.” Silas scanned but didn’t see anything. “Let’s pack some bags,” Hayduke said, setting to work.

  They each carried a small pack. Silas put food and three litres of lukewarm water in his, along with a few relevant topo maps, his GPS, his cell phone, a short length of rope and a few pieces of sling, a pair of carabiners, his snake bite and first aid kits, and a headlamp. He added his fleece coat; even though it was seventy degrees in the mid-afternoon, he knew it could grow cold if they returned after dark.

  Hayduke packed the stolen maps, water, beef jerky, a length of rope, a set of tools, a six-pack of beer, and his .357. Silas gave him a look when he saw the young man stowing the heavy pistol in the bag, but Hayduke ignored him.

  Hayduke was in the lead, walking along a low rise that paralleled the road. “I didn’t see any tracks on the road as we were driving in,” said Hayduke. Silas realized he hadn’t even been looking. “I doubt anybody is here, but it’s good to be careful.”

  When they came up over a hill in the sage desert, Silas was underwhelmed. “That’s it?” The Patriot One Mine consisted of three wooden buildings arranged around a cleft in a small grotto that appeared to drain toward Kanab Creek. Two of the buildings seemed to be a site office and a maintenance building. There were half a dozen abandoned pickup trucks parked around the buildings in various states of disrepair. A huge pile of slag—waste rock—was amassed near the entrance to the third building. Silas assumed this was the mine shaft itself. The building was crude in construction, two stories tall, with board double doors. It was bunched up against a low cliff.

  “I don’t see anybody,” said Silas. “Let’s go have a look.”

  Hayduke led the way, stopping from time to time to scan the property. They reached the mine site and Silas walked toward what he guessed was the office. It was the size of a single trailer, constructed from plywood and tarpaper. The door was fastened with a heavy Yale lock. Silas looked at Hayduke, who was taking off his pack. He first pulled out the .357 but Silas shook his head. Hayduke tucked the pistol into his waistband. He then took out the set of tools and selected a pair of bolt cutters. “This okay?” Hayduke asked. Silas nodded. Hayduke quickly cut the lock and it dropped into the red dust at their feet.

  Hayduke put the tools away and Silas pushed the door open. The room was dark and smelled like mothballs and dust. Silas felt for a light switch and found one. A set of florescent tubes flickered to life. They were caked with red dust and flies.

  “This place doesn’t get much use,” said Hayduke.

  “Let’s have a look around and get out of here. I’ve got a bad feeling.” Silas went to a desk and opened a set of drawers, finding nothing more than a few old sheets of yellowed paper and dry pens. Hayduke found a file cabinet that squealed in protest when he opened it. “There’s nothing here, man. It’s a dry hole.”

  They searched the rest of the building but were losing hope. “Shit,” said Silas, pounding a hand on a desk.

  “Easy there, Professor,” chided Hayduke. “What did you expect? A sign on the way advertising what they were up to?”

  “Let’s check the other building.”

  They peered out of the door of the office before crossing the yard, around several old trucks, to the maintenance building. Hayduke cut another lock and they stepped inside. Large windows illuminated the building, making it unnecessary to find a light switch. Most of the room was empty. The only equipment in it was a front-end loader and a scooptram. Silas pondered the low-built, large-wheeled piece of equipment. Hayduke explained. “It’s for hauling rock out of a mine stope. That’s a horizontal shaft in a mine.”

  They continued to search the site. There was a drafting table near the back of the building. A lamp sat on it. Silas reached for it.

  “Hold on.” Hayduke moved forward.

  “What?”

  “Look around. Everything in here is dusty,” Hayduke explained. Indeed the red dust covered every surface. “But the table isn’t. Neither is the light.”

  Silas nodded. He carefully flicked on the light. The table was in fact wiped clear of dust. “What did they have sitting on this table?”

  Hayduke searched the area. He bent down and looked under the table. There was a map tube similar to the one he had liberated from the office in Page. He pulled it open and let the contents drop out. The young man spread the map out over the table. “What the fuck is this?”

  Silas looked at the diagram on the map. “It’s a survey of the mine site and surrounding area. Looks like about a dozen acres. It’s a land survey, not a geological plan. And look,” he pointed to the corner, “it was done by the Trust for Arizona Wildlands for the BLM.”

  “Those sons of bitches.”

  “Yeah,” said Silas. “They aren’t going to try to operate this mine. They’re trying to get bought out. What’s a property like this worth?”

  “I don’t know. A dozen acres? If they could prove it was operating and that they were going to take a significant loss as a result of the moratorium, then it could be worth millions.”

  “Here we were thinking they were trying to get this thing grandfathered into the moratorium when what they are really trying to do is swindle the government and these folks at the trust out of their money. I need to see something,” said Silas. He turned out the light, leaving Hayduke to put away the maps. Silas raced out the door into the dazzling sunlight and toward the mine building. It was a ramshackle affair, more leaning against the hillside than upright. He tried the door and found it held fast by a deadbolt lock. Silas kicked the door with his boot and the hinges broke loose. When he wrenched the door open the scent of stone breezed over him. He fumbled in his pack for his headlamp and put it on.

  The light created a wide circle at his feet. Heavy tire tracks could be seen in the red dirt on the floor. They looked about the same width as the scooptram that he had seen in the last building. Silas traced them with the beam of his light. They disappeared into the darkness of the mine stope. Rather than descending straight down, the mine shaft went off at a shallow angle into the hillside. Silas followed the tracks. He walked for a minute and then found what he was looking for: a heaping pile of slag had been dumped in the middle of the stope. Silas didn’t need a Geiger counter to know that what he was seeing was radioactive waste; every cell in his bo
dy tensed at the thought of it.

  He turned around to see if Hayduke had followed him but the young man was nowhere to be seen. “Josh?” he called. There was no answer.

  Silas started back up toward the entrance to the mine and got a few feet when he heard a shout and was stopped in his tracks by the crack of a pistol and the roar of Hayduke’s .357 Magnum. Silas began to run toward the opening of the mine, the sound of gunfire now reverberating through the mine shaft. The light of day was eclipsed as the door was swung shut and the stope plunged into darkness.

  SILAS PRESSED HIMSELF AGAINST THE wooden doors to the building that covered the entrance to the mine. He was breathing hard and he could feel his heart pounding in every inch of his body. He felt like his toes were pulsing. He tried to listen to what was happening outside the doors, but for the moment everything was perfectly quiet. He stood that way for a minute—it seemed like an hour—before he heard voices. His eyes bulged in the dark, his ear jammed up against the door.

  “Just shoot the son of a bitch,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

  A man muttered something and there was the sound of something being dragged. “We shoot him and the fucking cops will know. They’ll find him and then we’re fucked. I got something better.” The voices were right outside the door now.

  Silas stepped back as the thin bar of light that seeped into the mine was blocked by someone adjacent to the door. He looked behind himself, his headlamp cutting a narrow band into the inky darkness of the mine stope. He walked a few more feet, turned off the light, and tried to conceal himself in the darkness.

  The door swung open. Jim Zahn stood haloed by sunlight. He had a pistol in his hands. “I see you there,” he spat. “Just stay there and I won’t have to shoot you too.”

  Next Balin Aldershot appeared with Hayduke tied up. His wrists were bound behind him and he was struggling. “Calm down or Jim will shoot you again,” he said. He pushed Hayduke into the darkness. The young man no longer had his pack on and as far as Silas could tell he had lost his pistol. He stumbled and fell into the red dust of the mine. Balin leveled his pistol toward Silas. “Stay put now.”

  Balin stepped back and pushed the door closed. Hayduke tried to stand but couldn’t. Silas rushed to him. They heard a truck engine cough and then roar to life. The doors to the mine buckled as the vehicle was driven against them. “They’re going to bust the doors,” Silas said, hooking an arm under Hayduke’s bulk.

  “Worse,” grumbled Hayduke, struggling to his feet. “We got to get down the hole.”

  “You’re shot?”

  “In my leg. It ain’t nothing.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “A little. But we got to move!” Hayduke stumbled to his feet and twisted toward the depths of the mine.

  “What’s going on?” said Silas and he helped the man half run, half limp down into the gloom. He fumbled with his headlamp and turned it on. The beam was barely sufficient to cut through the dust and darkness.

  “They’re going to blow the place!”

  Silas and Hayduke followed the orb of light down the stope, past where Silas had discovered the uranium slag and deeper into the mine. They had been hobbling along for less than a minute when the blast came. The sound of it deafened them in the narrow confines of the mine, and the concussion of the explosion took them off their feet and sent them flying down the steep shaft. They landed face first in the rock and dust. There was no fireball, but even a few hundred yards into the mine shards of wood clattered around them. A wall of thick dust, permeated with radioactive waste, choked the tunnel.

  SILAS CAME TO with his ears ringing. His headlamp had gone out. He felt around for it on his head and it wasn’t there. He opened his eyes but couldn’t see anything. “Hayduke?”

  There was no response. Silas felt around more and found the young man’s body next to his. “Hayduke!” Silas shoved him. There was no response.

  He felt for the headlamp again and found it amid the rubble on the floor of the mine. He tried to turn it on but it had popped open, the batteries ejected with the force of the blast. Silas closed his eyes in the perfect darkness and tried to find them. Eventually the three tiny AAA batteries came to hand and he inserted them and got the light working by banging it against his thigh a few times. He shone the light on the body next to him. He rolled the heavy man over to look at his face. He listened for breathing and heard a faint gasp, then Hayduke’s eyes popped wide open and he sat up, fumbling with his belt as if reaching for his pistol. “What the fuck happened?”

  “They blew the doors to the mine. I bet the whole thing has come down on top of the mouth of this shaft.”

  Hayduke was still fumbling around.

  “They took your gun.”

  “Motherfuckers. They shot me too, didn’t they? Someone is going to pay for this.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “You mean, besides having been shot and blown up? Yeah, fine. I bet you’re glad you didn’t have to do mouth-to-mouth, hey?”

  Silas shook his head in disbelief. “I’m going to go and check to see if there is a way out.”

  “Watch it. Those bastards might still be waiting.”

  “I will.”

  Silas walked back up the stope, his legs feeling like sacks of concrete. There were bits of burning pieces of wood in the shaft and a thick, oily smoke hung in the air. He was glad he was still taking his medication for his thyroid from his first encounter with uranium waste. He pulled a bandana from his back pocket and tied it around his face. He walked another fifty yards and stopped. A pile of rocks, wood, and metal barred his path. There was a wheel of an old truck amid the rubble. There was no way around it. Silas tried to climb over the wreckage, but the space between the crumbling top of the mine stope and the smoldering material was less than six inches. He tried to push and then pull some of the material aside, but it had been blown by the force of the blast and embedded into the soft limestone.

  He stood, his left hand to his face, pressing the handkerchief there, and then turned and went back to Hayduke.

  “There’s no way out. We’re stuck in here.”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO do?” Silas was looking at the gunshot wound on Hayduke’s thigh. He had torn open the young man’s jeans and was applying a compress from his first aid kit. The wound was a clean in-and-out and Silas had stopped the bleeding, but he knew that fragments of the torn jeans were likely in the wound and would cause an infection if not removed.

  “If we can’t go up, let’s go down.”

  “Do you know anything about this mine? How long it operated?”

  “Nope. Nothing. It looks like a going concern.”

  “I don’t think it was producing. Must be a remnant. That’s why they were trucking radioactive material into the mine. They wanted it to look like it was a producer so they could get in line for a big payday.”

  “Well, even if it is an old mine, there’s got to be more than one way out.”

  “I hope so. My cell phone doesn’t work down here. How’s the leg? Can you walk?”

  “I think so.”

  Silas helped Hayduke up. “Here,” he said, picking up a cast-off piece of wood from the floor of the mine. “Use this.” Hayduke fitted the piece of wood under his arm to form a crude crutch. “What happened out there?” Silas and Hayduke made their way farther into the darkness, the beam of Silas’s headlamp creating a small circle that they followed down the stope.

  “They got the drop on me. I was putting away that shit that we were looking at, those maps, and rushed out to catch up with you. They were there. All three of them.”

  “Slim Jim, Balin, and Terry?”

  “Shit, that woman is a bitch. She had her own piece and almost took my head off with it.”

  “I heard a bunch of shots.”

  “Yeah, I pulled my gun and she got a shot off with a little .22. I got one round off and that sent them scattering. Balin and Slim Jim, they had nines, and put a few rounds into the building aro
und me. I think it was Jim that pegged me. I tried to get back inside, but they had me flanked. The only thing I could do was drop my piece. It’s a thousand-dollar pistol. Fuckers. That Aldershot woman wanted to put one between my eyes, but the other two already had an old truck packed with ammonium nitrate. They had come here to blow the place. I think they followed us.”

  “How did they know? Ted?”

  “Maybe Ted. But I stole the map. It was a stupid move. Amateur. I should know better, goddamn it. They knew where we were going.”

  Silas was silent for a while as the stope leveled out. The shaft was narrow, less than six feet across. It was roughly hollowed out and propped with crudely cut pine logs. The ceiling was low and in places they had to duck to move forward. They passed piles of mining waste: old equipment from the 1950s and ’60s along with barrels and tins of discarded fuel, oil, and grease. “What are we looking for?” Silas asked.

  “A way out.” Silas gave Hayduke a sideways glance. “We’re looking for some kind of air shaft or vent, maybe a back door. Some kind of back entrance that they might have dug.”

  “This doesn’t look like a complicated enterprise. If it’s operated at all since the 1960s, I’d be surprised. I bet if we look at the records we’ll see that Zahn had this place for a while. When the Department of the Interior started looking at shutting down uranium mining on the Arizona Strip, he fired things back up to get in line for the buyout.”

  They came to a dead end in the horizontal passage. The pit props held up a low roof. On either side the tunnel had collapsed. There was no way to move forward. Hayduke sat down on the ground to rest his leg. “Hurts like a son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Didn’t you get shot in Iraq?”

  “Sure, but it’s not like you get used to it.”

  “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Back up a ways. I want to check something.”

  “Don’t go too far—”

  “Hayduke, are you alright?”