Deep Fire Rising m-6

by Jack Du Brul

  Mercer was just turning away so he could get ready for his shift when a shadow on the rock wall caught his attention. He almost ignored it, figuring the blemish was the result of the camera’s low resolution, but he sat back down and studied the mark.

  Red sensed his sudden tension. “What is it?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “Nothing probably.” Mercer watched for another minute. The stain remained unchanged. And still he felt a premonition. The geologic reports said they were roughly thirty feet from the subterranean reservoir, so it couldn’t be water, but what was it?

  He made a quick decision. From a wall rack he grabbed a portable air cylinder and a mask with an integrated intercom. “Stay here and keep an eye on the camera. I’m going below.”

  “Sure you don’t want me down there with you?”

  “Positive. If that spot on the wall changes, tell me.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Probably an inclusion in the rock, but I don’t want anyone going down until I’m sure.” Mercer grabbed his hard hat and jogged from the trailer.

  The elevator operator was just climbing from his control booth when Mercer entered the cave. “Mike, fire up the skip and don’t leave your station. I might need you to haul me out fast.”

  “What’s up?” the worker asked even as he swung himself back into his elevated chair.

  “Possible pressure seepage.” Mercer slammed the cage doors closed and barely heard the warning bells before the car dropped away. He fitted the oxygen tank onto his back and checked his communications link with Harding. “You reading me, Red?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Any change?”

  “Nothing yet. You think the report was wrong and that we’ve already hit the water, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.” The motes of dust swirling in the beam of his light were like a snow flurry that became a full-blown blizzard as he plunged into the depths. His visibility was down to thirty feet by the time the elevator reached the substation eight hundred feet below ground.

  The geologic reports said they were well back from the underground lake, but he couldn’t discount that the blemish really was water seeping through the earth’s crust. The pressure behind it would be unimaginable, and the rock dam between the water and the tunnel could withstand only so much. If it was water, the next set of drill holes could easily cross that threshold and the whole thing would let go in a catastrophic flood. It was possible that even now the rock was breaking up and would explode.

  Mercer couldn’t risk sending his men down here until he was sure. The fear of drilling into an undetected aquifer was one more on the long list of mining dangers, one very few survived to talk about. More than cave-ins or fire, miners feared a flood in the shafts. He recalled the long three days he’d spent in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, consulting with local experts to rescue six trapped workers caught in an unexpected flood. Getting them out safely had been one of the closest calls he could remember.

  His emotions were torn between urgency and caution, but like so many times in his life, he let his dedication to his job push him on. He ran down the drive, his boots splashing through puddles and echoing dully in the tunnel’s confines. His breath hissed behind his face mask. The beam from his helmet lamp danced with each long stride.

  If they had hit water, he’d have to keep men out of the mine for a minimum of thirty-six to forty-eight hours to monitor the seepage rate. Then they would have to change their blasting techniques. Finding seepage this soon would slow them down dramatically.

  The vent fans were doing a good job clearing the air. As he approached the working face, his visibility had increased slightly. He stepped past the camera.

  “I see you, Mercer,” Red called over the radio.

  “How’s my butt look?” he joked to ease the strain in Red’s voice.

  “Your overalls make your ass look big,” Red teased back. “The spot hasn’t changed.”

  “I’m looking at it now.”

  From a tool locker built into one of the small electric bulldozers, Mercer grabbed a six-foot steel pry bar. The ground was a jumble of rocks, some as large as car engines, others reduced to pebbles by the explosives. Although the ceiling looked pretty good, he tested some fissures with the pry bar to make sure none of it would collapse on to him. He jimmied loose a few stones, dodging aside as they crashed to the floor. It took him a further ten minutes to safely approach the blemish. Red called down to tell him the air was cleared enough to breathe. Mercer removed his face mask and unlimbered the air tank.

  The beam of his light slashed across the spot and reflected off its slick surface. It looked like water had seeped from the reservoir through microfissures in the rock.

  Mercer bent closer. The rock itself wasn’t exactly wet to the touch. It almost felt like a snake’s skin, merely hinting at moisture. He returned to the toolbox to get a piece of chalk and traced the perimeter of the two-foot stain. The outline would give him a reference if more water filtered into the tunnel.

  Sitting back on his heels, he studied the spot, breathing slowly through his mouth because dust continued to flow past on the ventilation currents. For five minutes his concentration didn’t waver as he watched to see if the mark was growing. Had it expanded even a fraction of an inch he would have run from the mine as fast as he could.

  Red’s voice on the intercom finally drew his attention. “It’s water, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I think it’s stable.” Mercer stood. “There’s no indication of continued flow.”

  “You want us down there?”

  “Not yet. Give me a few more minutes.”

  Mercer turned his attention to the mounds of rubble displaced by Donny’s last explosive blast. The wet spot was low down on the left side of the tunnel so Mercer concentrated there, using the pry bar to pick through the debris. He was looking for evidence of how deeply they’d already mined into the waterlogged rock. Unwilling to risk any other men in the tunnel, he strained to roll some of the larger boulders by himself. His body was soon bathed in sweat.

  It took ten minutes to find the first chunk of stone showing water saturation. It was darker than the surrounding material, almost oily to the touch. Once he knew the appearance of the hydrostatically altered rock, he found several more farther down the drive. It became clear that Randall had ignored the evidence of seepage when he drilled the shot holes for his last charges. With the crews generally blasting three times during their shift, he wondered how many times Randall had knowingly risked his men by drilling into the dangerous formation.

  Mercer felt his body grow taut with rage. “Red,” he called into his comm link, his voice cracking like a whip. “It looks like Donny drilled his last shot holes knowing he’d hit seepage. Get a team together to check the overburden he sent up during his shift. I want to know if any of it shows further saturation.”

  “Roger. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want anyone else coming down without my express order. Get a portable seismograph ready. I want to take direct measurements of the working face. It looks like it’s holding, but there could be tremors I can’t feel.”

  “Okay.”

  “And find the Handle.” Mercer had returned to the rock face so he could move the camera closer to the damp spot.

  The water stain hadn’t expanded beyond the chalk outline he’d drawn. By releasing the counterpressure of rock against the water, it didn’t appear they’d increased the flow rate. Mercer was relieved and thankful. He bent close once again, moving so his face was an inch from the shiny stone. He deliberately stuck out his tongue to lick the grainy surface.

  And he recoiled at the alkaline taste.

  “What the…?” He licked another spot just to make sure of what his senses had just told him. The water percolating from deep inside the earth was salty. After being filtered through untold hundreds of feet of rock it should have been as clear as a mountain spring.

  “Not just salty,” he said
aloud, baffled. “It has the exact salinity of seawater.”

  Mercer had everyone working straight out for the next three hours. Ignoring Ira’s prohibition to draw attention to themselves, he had every light at the facility blazing away as sweep lines of men scoured the tailings recently excavated from the mine. With each empty pass his anger ebbed slightly.

  Sleep-dazed and pissed off when he’d been roused from bed, Donny Randall insisted he hadn’t seen any water when his men drilled the last holes on their shift, and it appeared evidence supported his claim of innocence. None of the overburden pulled out prior to the final blast showed that water had seeped past. Randall’s curses had evolved into snide comments by the time Mercer admitted that he’d been wrong about Donny putting his men in jeopardy.

  Randall sat in the command trailer wearing sweatpants, heavy boots, and a leather jacket over his bare chest. The trailer was only slightly warmer than the desert night. He was picking at his fingernails with a folding knife when Mercer entered. Randall’s dyed hair shimmered like an oil slick under the fluorescent lights. He dropped his feet off the desk when he saw Mercer. “Since you didn’t find shit, I’m going back to bed.” He stood over Mercer in an attempt to intimidate him. “I guess your Ph.D. and your thousand-dollar-an-hour consulting fee and the fact that Ira Lasko thinks the sun shines out your ass don’t mean much, huh?”

  Mercer recoiled. He hadn’t realized that Randall did indeed know who he was.

  Donny laughed, misunderstanding Mercer’s movement. “Next time you want a lesson on mining, you come and ask me and I’ll tell you how it’s done.” The animal hatred flashed in his eyes once more and he poked a hardened finger into Mercer’s chest. “And the next time you question my ability you’d damn well better be right, because if you’re wrong again I’m going to beat you to an inch of your life. You hearing me?”

  Mercer didn’t consider the eighty pounds of weight or six inches of height he was giving to Randall. That wasn’t even a factor. The only thing keeping him from snapping Donny’s finger was that the move would only anger the larger man and the subsequent fight would likely end up destroying the trailer.

  “I didn’t think you were as tough as I’d heard,” Donny scoffed with a dismissive toss of his pomaded hair. He was almost out the door when Mercer’s comment stopped him dead:

  “I was wrong about you, Donny. I apologize.”

  “That’s more like it.” Randall laughed.

  Mercer’s face remained expressionless. “You’re not only the dumbest son of a bitch I’ve ever known, but I’ve watched you checking out the other men here and realized you used a pick handle on those boys in Africa because you’re also the most sexually confused.”

  Randall blinked, the nature of the insult taking a few seconds to register. To Mercer it was almost as if he could watch the thoughts ricochet in his mind like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper. Just as his eyes widened in comprehension, Red Harding and a half dozen other men stepped into the trailer. They’d just completed their last sweep of the mine tailings and had no idea what they’d walked in on.

  Randall paused for another heartbeat before deciding to let this drop, but he gave Mercer a murderous look. As if Mercer didn’t already know it wouldn’t end there. He almost smiled at Donny’s transparency.

  “What was that all about?” Red asked after Donny had skulked into the night.

  “Just Donny expressing his disappointment about how I sullied his character.”

  “Come again?”

  Mercer chuckled. “Randall was just trying to prove he can piss farther than me.”

  “Gotcha,” the wiry Texan said. “We’re ready to place the remote seismograph. You’re going to need a hand.” He pointed at the monitor showing the camera’s view of the water stain. “The spot hasn’t grown since we first saw it, so I think we’ll be okay for a quick trip down.”

  The fact that water wasn’t continuing to seep through the rock quelled only part of Mercer’s uneasiness. He was more bothered now by the nature of the water, although he hadn’t said anything about it. He was going to stick by his original decision to keep men out of the mine for at least a day.

  “All right. You coming?”

  “Damn straight.”

  Mercer nodded his appreciation. “Get one other man. Meet me at the skip in ten minutes.”

  “You going to call Admiral Lasko?”

  Mercer reached for the encrypted satellite phone on the desk. “That’s next on my list.” He waited until the men had left the trailer before placing the call.

  “Lasko.”

  “Ira, Mercer. We hit water.”

  A stunned moment, then, “How bad?”

  “It just looks like a small patch of saturation. It’s not growing, nor is any water wicking through.”

  A sudden realization hit the deputy security advisor. “You guys haven’t broken into the chamber, have you?”

  “No. It looks like we’re still some twenty-eight feet shy, but the water seems to have expanded past its cavity, at least in this one patch.”

  “Ah, is this common?”

  “Hard to tell,” Mercer said after a moment. “It all depends on the water pressure, the permeability of the rock, how long the water’s been there-”

  “Why would that have anything to do with it?” Ira asked sharply.

  “Given a few million years water will seep through just about anything. Knowing how long ago the void in the earth was filled would give me an idea how fast the water’s moving.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “I’ve got a camera monitoring the damp spot, and we’re about to place a portable seismograph to judge the rock’s stability.”

  “Good. How many men are down there now?”

  “None,” Mercer replied. “That’s one of the reasons I called. Until I get a better handle on this, I don’t want anyone working at the face.”

  Mercer expected a protest, but Ira agreed instead. “Good idea. For how long do you think? A couple of days?”

  “At least. The plug separating the tunnel from the reservoir is under strain, and until I can determine how safe it is, we can’t risk the men.”

  “Hold on a second, Mercer.” It sounded like Ira had clamped his hand over the phone’s receiver to speak with someone in his office.

  It was nine o’clock in D.C. Mercer wondered why Ira was working so late.

  “Okay, I’m back. There’s no sense you guys hanging around for two days, so I’m organizing helos to get you to the Area 51 air base. They’ll hold their regular personnel flight to Vegas for you. I’ve got someone working on getting you hotel rooms.”

  Mercer was grateful, and somewhat surprised Ira had had the same thought as he did earlier. Then again Ira was a master administrator and knew how to maintain peak performance from those under him. Forty-eight hours in Vegas was exactly what his men needed after months of continuous work. He laughed. “Just great. A few minutes ago the men thought I was the hero for giving them a few days off. No way I can top you sending them to Sin City.”

  “When you’re there,” Ira joked back, “you can pick up the tab at the strip joints they will no doubt visit.”

  The teasing tone evaporated on Mercer’s lips. “I’m not going with them. I want to stay and monitor the mine.”

  Ira’s reply carried the same seriousness. “You are going with them.”

  “Forget it,” Mercer said. “No offense to your hydrologists, but I’m the one in charge out here and I’m the one who has to be satisfied the tunnel is safe.”

  Ira’s smile resonated in his voice. “That’s why you and I are friends, Mercer. You’ll take responsibility even when you don’t need to. I’ve done that my entire life. Go to Vegas, for Christ’s sake. You can study the hydrology reports when you get back. You were hired to dig the tunnel, not oversee the entire project. Besides, I won’t be able to get Dr. Hood or Dr. Marie there until the day after tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “I don’t want anyone
going into that mine,” Mercer cautioned. While his work made him an expert in hydrology, he conceded that Gregor Hood knew this area much better. Until his arrival, there wasn’t much for him to do except stare at computer monitors. And whether he was at the mine or in Las Vegas, nothing could stop water from bursting through the rock plug if it was already unstable.

  “I’ll order some guards to the site. No one goes in or out. Take a couple of days off. If we’re that close to the underground cavern, you guys have earned it.”

  “All right.” Mercer felt himself relaxing. “You win.”

  “Choppers will be there in half an hour. Only takes fifteen minutes by jet to fly from Area 51 to Vegas. Hold on.” Ira again clamped a hand over the phone to speak with someone in his office. “Okay, thanks. Mercer, you’re booked in the Luxor Hotel. Sorry it’s not a suite, but you’re traveling on the government’s nickel. I’ll try to get away from Washington and meet you when Drs. Hood and Marie arrive.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you in a couple days.” Mercer paused. “And if you tell Harry I’m in Vegas for two days, I will kill you.” On Harry White’s list of life’s priorities, he ranked gambling below smoking and drinking but above eating and showering. Mercer was already planning on calling him from his hotel to rub it in.

  Ira laughed. “There are practical jokes, and then there’s downright cruelty. Your presence there is considered a national secret. You’re safe.”

  Mercer swiveled off his chair and started for the mine head. He remembered he wanted to tell Ira about the salinity in the water deposit, but figured it could wait until he talked it over with Gregor Hood. More than likely it meant nothing and he’d find the hydrologist had experience with similar abnormalities during his previous evaluation.

  Red was waiting with another miner, Ken Porter. At their feet was the seventy-pound armored case for the seismograph and its batteries. They heaved it by the handles and followed Mercer into the cage lift. No one spoke as the elevator dropped into the gloom. Normally miners whiled away the commute with jokes or games of dice on deeper shafts. For this descent they remained grim-faced and tense. They all understood the risks.