Now he was on his way to quell a rumor among his men that the Yupik workers he’d employed to placate the local First Peoples were secretly sabotaging the big machines. There was no need for them to do that, he thought savagely. The borers were temperamental enough on their own. And the near-vertical portion of the tunnel they were working on wasn’t easy on them. Nevertheless, they had to get deep enough to establish a secure base for the long horizontal bore toward the Russian mainland.
“Which operator is making the most noise?” he asked his assistant.
“The one in the forward machine,” came the answer.
“Figures.” He’d have to stop all work in the monster machines following their leader to safely approach the forward borer. Another delay.
Gallagher stepped out of his demountable office, put his hard hat on and climbed into one of the company’s mine shuttle cars – a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, more commonly referred to as a Humvee. Unlike its lighter civilian equivalent, called a Hummer H1, this was originally military hardware and one of four the company had purchased cheap from one of the bases that had closed down in the early 2000s. With its four-wheel drive, it was an effective shuttle car to move engineers and miners from the surface to the main boring machines far below. This one had a utility tray at the back, sort of like a pick-up truck, that had never been used.
The thing was enormous, but that didn’t matter. The tunnels were going to be big enough to accommodate a three-lane highway and the Humvee was only going to be used to ferry people from topside to the lead boring machine. The one nicknamed Big Bertha after Seattle’s first female mayor, where the machine was first commissioned.
He turned the ignition and the vehicle’s 6.5L V8 turbocharged diesel engine roared into life. He dropped the park brake and put his foot down hard on the accelerator. For nearly six thousand pounds worth of light truck, the Humvee took off at a spritely pace.
Gallagher drove down the recently built construction road from the old base to the entrance to the first shaft of the boring tunnel. Blacktop had already started to break away from the new road base, where the unimaginably heavy boring machines were maneuvered through. Ten minutes later, he reached the entrance of the tunnel.
He gave his ID to the guard who approached his window. The man recognized him immediately and handed the card back to him and waved him through. Gallagher switched on his headlights and drove through.
Five minutes later, he came to a stop where several engineers and machine operators were standing around talking among themselves as though they didn’t have a care in the world. Perhaps they didn’t? It wasn’t their problem that over a hundred million dollars of boring equipment, including Big Bertha was sitting there doing nothing but costing the company a couple hundred thousand dollars a day. And while they were all enjoying a leisurely chat waiting for the machine operator at the head of the convoy to get a move on, he had to explain to the key stakeholders in the project that despite the already almost insurmountable cost overruns, they were still a long way off having to declare the Bering Strait Crossing a total boondoggle.
He switched off the ignition and climbed out of the Humvee. Each of his workers tensed, as though caught by the headmaster for truancy, as Gallagher approached. He shook his head. What did they think was going to happen? The forward machine operator had defiantly pulled the plug. He was bound to come down and get things moving again, today.
Gallagher looked at the group of engineers and machine operators. “All right, where is he?”
“Who?”
“The schmuck who decided today he’d found his balls and decided to cost the company a couple hundred thousand dollars in delays.”
“Bill’s sitting in his rig,” Mark, the tunnel manager for the day shift, said.
“What’s his problem, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He says the drilling head’s struck something.”
Gallagher shrugged. “The damned machine designed to slice right through granite for God’s sake. So, what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. You go talk to him.”
Gallagher, realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere talking to this bunch, walked toward the lead boring machine, past where the two smaller boring machines had stopped working and his assistant and the crews of both the rear borers followed. Gallagher approached the last of the gigantic tunneling machines.
He watched as the monstrous piece of heavy machinery lurched forward ahead of him. He heard the operator swear. It was immediately followed by a loud explosion, which shook the ground in the tunnel.
Gallagher ducked, instinctively expecting the roof to collapse. When it didn’t come down on him, he cautiously rose and looked toward the front of the tunnel, where the machine was toppling, almost in slow motion. The foreman couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing at first.
Then, with sudden understanding as the heavy machine disappeared into the newly created fracture in the tunnel wall, he yelled, “Run!”
Chapter Ten
Gallagher turned and ran with the rest of the crew toward the landward end of the tunnel. He expected the freezing sea to come pouring into the tunnel at any moment. Instead of icy saltwater, what followed him was a sustained blast of warm air, carrying dust and other debris. With the rest of his operators, he stumbled, choking, out of the mouth of the tunnel.
Dirt, filth and debris began raining down from above their heads, where the funnel of air spread out in the open and slowed down until it could no longer carry the weight of the dirt and debris it bore. The men stood in clumps, everyone with expressions of confusion.
What the hell just happened?
They waited a good thirty minutes for any signs of seawater running up to greet them. When it didn’t, Gallagher concluded that the collapse had not been from above, and they could reasonably expect to go and see without drowning.
He led the group back into the tunnel, running again with the hope of rescuing the crew of the forward machine and fighting the gale of hot air and debris every step. When they reached the spot where she’d last been seen, there was no sign of the borer. Only an abyss large enough to swallow her, and ahead, a wall of volcanic gabbro where the foreman would have expected sedimentary bedrock.
The workmen gathered around the perimeter of the hole, trying to peer down into the abyss. However, the still-flowing heated blast drove them back. From what they could tell in brief glimpses with safety goggles protecting their eyes but not the skin of their faces, the machine was not visible.
It appeared the borer had broken into a previously undetected underground cavern. There was no telling how deep it was without specialized equipment, and no chance to form a rescue party from here. The whole crew were presumed dead. The foreman’s day was now officially a disaster, but nothing like the poor men who’d gone down with the borer.
“Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing we can do,” he said, with a defeated sigh. The source of the hot air and the detritus it carried was above his pay grade. Let the bigwigs figure it out. He’d have all he could handle keeping his crew from mutinying.
Three hours later, a mine rescue team, two senior engineers, two geologists and one anthropologist arrived. They had been flown in from Anchorage to Wales by a fixed wing aircraft and then from Wales to Big Diomede Island by helicopter. Not a bad effort, Gallagher realized, to pull a group of experts to such a remote part of the world within such short notice.
The mine rescue team donned protective equipment, breathing apparatus, and made their way into the boring tunnel. At the same time the senior engineers, geologists and bigwigs began to try to figure out what happened, what was continuing to happen, and what to do next. Meanwhile, the entire construction camp was being buried under a layer of red sand, grit, and more. The foreman didn’t know what to make of the miscellaneous small animals, bush fragments, and oddest of all, bones from both large and small animals being brought up from the cavern by the howling wind. Neither did anyone else.
Gallagher sat in on the frequent meetings, but seldom had anything to contribute. It was his suggestion, though, that brought in a forensic anthropologist to identify the bones. Most were cattle and coyote, which meant they could have originated anywhere on the mainland. That in itself was odd enough. Another oddity – there were no reindeer bones. Reindeer were prevalent in both the Russian and Alaskan peninsulas. Even many of the surrounding islands, such as the Aleutian Islands, had had reindeer introduced and were still herded as a source of subsistence meat.
Oddest of all were the human bones. Not so much those that were of obvious prehistoric origin. The Diomede islands, after all, were thought to be one of the last exposed portions of the land bridge between Asia and North America that existed during the Pleistocene period. The anthropologist was stunned by the size of some of the bone fragments though. They suggested that the origins of those bones were much more modern.
Other than providing a little more information, it made no difference to the foreman’s dilemma. He needed to get his crews working again, but before he could do that, he needed more information about that cavern. Would moving the bore hole a few feet or yards to the side save the project? Or would it risk losing another crew and costly machinery? Until someone could tell him that, he was at a standstill.
The engineers couldn’t tell him that, though, until the freakish gale stopped. And the geologists couldn’t tell him when that would happen. They couldn’t even tell him why it was happening. Frustration mounted among the crew, the experts, and the various stakeholders in the project. Nearly eight hours after the original incident, they were still waiting for answers, while the geyser of hot air and copper-colored dust continued unabated.
As the senior engineer from the overall general contractor for the joint Russian/Canadian/American project made his way from his latest inspection of the sinkhole toward the main construction trailer, Gallagher was startled to see a traditional American ten-gallon Stetson cowboy hat drifting down through the fall of debris. It landed close to his feet. He picked it up, dusted it off, and tried it on for size. It fit.
Gallagher grinned. He shook his head over the ridiculousness of his day. “Can someone please tell me why we haven’t heard from the mine rescue team yet?”
Chapter Eleven
The Pentagon
The Secretary of Defense read her morning briefing. At the end of a long list of notes requiring her attention and action for the day, there was a curious incident of an enormous earth-boring machine disappearing into an abyss off Big Diomede Island that caught her eye. It wasn’t likely to be anything for her office to worry about, but interesting all the same.
She called in one of her more trusted science advisors. She showed him the location of the Gordoye Dostizheniye on a map and asked if the two incidents could potentially be related.
The science advisor answered without questioning why the Secretary of the world’s largest military was concerned about a Russian shipwreck and a mining accident. “Highly doubtful. It’s fifteen miles between the two locations by sea, isn’t it?”
“I think so. Could both of the incidents have been caused by the same underground event?”
“I don’t see how. The report from Big Diomede mentioned that the air coming from the cavern was hot and full of dry red sand and dust. Even if it were water and sea sand coming out of there, the sea temperature in the Bering Strait is barely above freezing now. The disparate temperatures suggest there’s no relationship.”
The Secretary nodded. “You’re right. That will be all.”
After he left, she studied the satellite images of the Bering Sea. A puzzled frown formed between her brows. She didn’t like coincidences. She especially didn’t like this coincidence, touching as it did on a sensitive matter. She called in her Deputy Secretary.
“I need someone to comb recent news articles for strange weather and geographical phenomena in North America and the Pacific.”
“I’ll get one of the staff on it,” he answered. “When do you need the results?”
“Yesterday,” she answered.
Chapter Twelve
The Deputy Secretary dutifully assigned a junior staff member to the task, telling him there was no hurry. Afterward, he left the Pentagon and drove across the Potomac toward downtown D.C. On his way, he dialed a number from memory.
A man answered on the third ring. “Yes?”
“We may have a problem. Meet me at Tosca, in the bar.”
Satisfied that he’d be met, he made his way across the 14th Street Bridge and skirted the National Mall on his way to the restaurant. Once there, he seated himself on the next-to-last barstool near a wall and waited for his contact to arrive.
Shortly after, the contact took the last chair. As they perused the menus and savored their first glasses of wine, the contact spoke softly. “What’s up?”
“She’s interested in the ship,” the Deputy Secretary answered.
“How would she even know about it? You’re being paranoid.” His contact gave a slight shrug. His job was to monitor the Secretary, and notify his boss if she showed any sign that she had recent knowledge of their project. She hadn’t been involved with the group for many years, and as far as they knew, she wasn’t aware it still existed or had the same agenda it always had. If she was aware, they didn’t know if they could trust her now. But this didn’t seem like much of a threat, or any reason to believe she knew more than she should.
“No. She’s researching geographical phenomena,” the Deputy Secretary insisted.
“What difference does it make? The stone’s gone. The whole damned ship is gone. We have to start over, so stop worrying.”
“It concerns me,” the Deputy Secretary answered.
“I’ll take care of it,” his contact stated firmly. “There’s no need for you to concern yourself further. Do I make myself clear?”
“There’s something else, you need to know.”
“What?”
“The Secretary of Defense received a report today that might change everything.”
His contacted nodded. “I’m listening. What was in the report?”
“There was an accident at the Transcontinental World Link. Apparently, the tunnel boring machine punched through something it wasn’t supposed to and disappeared into some sort of abyss.” The Deputy Secretary swallowed. “It’s unlikely, but I wondered if there was a connection.”
The contact laughed. “Forget about it. I already have a man working there. He’ll take care of it.”
“Are you certain?”
“Of course, I’m bloody well certain. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”
Downing the rest of his wine in one swallow without regard to the fine vintage, the Deputy Secretary slammed down his wineglass. “Don’t let your confidence lead you to make a serious mistake,” he snarled. “I’ve lost my appetite. I think we’re done here.”
His contact returned the snarl with a supercilious smile. “Don’t forget. We put you where you are, my friend. Don’t let your ambition lead you to believe you can have us remove her without good cause. She was once a friend.” With that, he set his own wineglass down gently and left, leaving the Deputy Secretary to pay the tab.
Chapter Thirteen
Bering Strait
Sam watched as the Russian Admiral-Gorshkov-class frigate continued its grid survey of the area toward the northern end of the Bering Strait. It had arrived overnight and had been uninterested in any communications with him or any one of the other search vessels for that matter. Not that it bothered him. What was he supposed to tell them? It looks like the Gordoye Dostizheniye was swallowed by a sinkhole, but there’s no evidence of her wreckage anywhere? No. It wouldn’t be an easy conversation. Besides, the Secretary of Defense was still waiting for him to update her with his progress. One hard conversation would do him for today.
With a new hot coffee in his hand he briskly climbed the series of steps and entered the bridge of the Maria Helena. The ship
was currently at anchor. At the navigation table Matthew was calculating whether or not they had enough fuel to continue their original project, or if they needed to divert to Anchorage to refuel – presuming the rescue mission was officially canceled.
Sam said, “I’ve spoken with the Coast Guard. They’ve changed the search to a retrieval mission. No longer a rescue mission.”
Matthew looked up. “It’s been two days since the ship went under. That’s fair enough. Are we staying on to help, or returning to our original project?”
“Most likely we’ll return to our original plan.”
Matthew asked, “Have you spoken to the Secretary of Defense?”
“It’s on my list.” Sam took a gulp of coffee. “Any news from the Russian frigate?”
“Yes. I spoke with its captain about an hour ago on the radio. I told him what we’d found and what we think has happened.”
“And?”
“He told me he thought I was lying and that he would conduct his own investigation.”
“What the hell does he think’s going on?”
Matthew laughed and shook his head. “I know, right! It was a cargo ship that went under. Yet they’re treating it like there’s been some sort of clandestine plot to steal state secrets.”
Sam didn’t laugh. Instead, he felt like he’d been kicked in the guts, as he recalled the Secretary of Defense’s insistence that he beat the Russians to the wreckage and retrieve shipping container numbered 404. He forced himself to grin. “Yeah, go figure. Oh well, it won’t be our problem much longer.”
“Good.” Matthew returned to his charts.
Sam picked up the satellite phone next to the helm and brought up the Secretary of Defense’s number. He pressed enter and the phone rang.
“Did you retrieve it?” she asked, immediately.
So, small talk was out. Sam stepped out onto the aft balcony and paced. “No. I couldn’t find it.”
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3 Page 32
