There’d been a fire. Some miners had been killed.
“I don’t know the details,” Jacobs said. “But it must have been pretty bad. They reopened it a couple years later, but then air pollution regs closed them down again. Too much sulfur in the coal. Most of the mines in this part of the country had to shut down for the same reason.”
“How far down do you want to set up the seismometer?” Atkins asked. He wasn’t looking forward to this.
“A couple hundred feet,” Jacobs said. “That ought to filter out all the surface noise. You don’t gain anything by going much deeper.”
A gate blocked the private road to the mine. The facility covered five miles of forested hill country. One of the arms of Kentucky Lake was twenty miles due east.
Jacobs called the mine’s security office with his cell phone. Ten minutes later an elderly guard arrived in an aging pickup. He wore a holstered pistol and red suspenders. His cheeks and chin were covered with white stubble.
“I been expectin’ you all morning,” he said curtly, getting out of the truck to unlock the gate. “Follow me.”
“Friendly guy,” Atkins said softly.
“They warned me about him,” Jacobs said. “He’s been here forty years. Lost his job when the mine shut down. Stayed on as a guard.”
They drove up a gravel road that dead-ended at a parking lot. The mine entrance was inside a corrugated metal building with massive doors. A ten-story derrick that operated the elevator cables towered over it.
With each of them gripping the seismograph’s metal carrying case, Jacobs and Atkins followed the guard through a side door. The old man flipped a breaker switch. Overhead lights flashed on. Atkins heard heavy machinery groan to life somewhere above them, high up on the derrick tower.
The elevator was a metal cage large enough to accommodate fifty men.
The guard handed each of them a scuffed miner’s helmet.
“The levels are marked on the wall in red numbers,” he said. “Just push the buttons to go up or down.”
“Are you going with us?” Atkins asked.
“No, sir,” the guard said. He hesitated. His tone softened. “I don’t think you boys ought to be going down there.”
“Why not?” Atkins asked. The man was staring at them, wide-eyed, not blinking.
“Something ain’t right.” He looked like he wanted to say more but changed his mind. “You get in any trouble, hit the big yellow button on the elevator control panel. It’ll sound an alarm.”
“What happens then?” Jacobs asked.
“I’ll call for help,” the guard said. “You’ll have to wait ‘til it gets here. That could take a while.”
He slammed shut the elevator’s metal grill. Jacobs pressed the red button for Level 2. The cage started down with a rust-grinding lurch. There were twenty levels, descending two thousand feet. A single light bulb burned over their heads.
“I wonder what he wanted to tell us,” Atkins said.
“I’m kinda glad I didn’t find out,” Jacobs said. “Mines spook me enough as it is. I never could have worked in one.”
As they slowly descended, it occurred to Atkins that this was the deepest he’d ever gone into the earth. A geologist for more than twenty years, he’d spent his entire life on the surface. The profession hadn’t taken advantage of these man-made deep spots in the earth.
Reaching Level 2, they carried the seismograph about twenty feet into the coal tunnel. They could see only as far as the lights on their helmets penetrated the darkness. It was cool, almost cold, the only sound being the steady dripping of water from the rocks.
They got the battery-driven seismograph up and running in about ten minutes. Jacobs plugged a small laptop computer into the unit. It was an analogue machine. The seismic activity appeared digitally on the computer screen.
“Jesus Christ, John! Look at this,” Jacobs said, playing a flashlight on the screen. “This ground’s alive.”
The readouts startled Atkins. He’d never seen such intense seismic activity. All of it was way under magnitude 2. The waves were too weak to be felt, but they were coming in ten- to twenty-second intervals.
“I can’t wait to get a directional reading on this,” Jacobs said. They’d need to let the seismometer run awhile to harvest enough data to get a precise fix on the source of the waves and their direction.
Atkins felt something brush his cheek. He looked up and saw coal dust falling from the ceiling of the shaft.
“Do you smell that?” Jacobs asked.
Atkins straightened up. He smelled the faint, unmistakable odor of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide. The foul gas that made the air around Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano so tough to breathe. Atkins had been to the volcano several times. He’d recognize that distinctive odor anywhere.
Hydrogen sulfide was usually associated with volcanoes. Pockets of the gas formed deep underground and were released like champagne bubbles during eruptions. There’d been reports of strange odors seeping from the ground. He remembered how the farmer, Ben Harvey, had complained that his well water smelled bad.
“We must be getting some venting,” Jacobs said, referring to a natural vent or crack that allowed the odors to escape from the ground. But that didn’t explain what was causing the smell.
“Hold on, listen!” Atkins said.
A faint rumbling came from the depths of the mine. It was hard to pinpoint the exact source, like trying to locate a sound underwater. It seemed to be coming from all directions at once, the sound rising up from the deep earth—distant, strange, unreal.
Atkins had never heard anything like it. He had an overpowering urge to get out of there fast. He felt trapped.
A loud groan reverberated in the tunnels, the sound echoing back off the walls, building like thunder. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the rumbling stopped. It was as if someone had thrown a switch. The silence was total.
Atkins felt his heart pounding in his chest. He was pouring sweat. It stung his eyes. He’d kept waiting for a tremor, tensing for it.
“Maybe we ought to go a little deeper,” Jacobs said.
Atkins looked at his friend for a moment. Neither spoke.
“All right,” Atkins said. “Let’s do it.”
They picked up the seismometer and computer and got back into the elevator cage. Jacobs pushed the button for Level 10, halfway to the bottom of the shaft. The big car started to descend. They were going down another eight hundred feet.
The farther they descended, the stronger the smell became. By the time they reached Level 8, both of them had pressed handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths. The odor was almost overpowering.
Jacobs waved his hands to indicate they’d gone far enough. He was coughing.
The elevator cage was open on the sides. Atkins touched the rock wall. The rough stone was almost hot. Then he noticed that his feet were getting warm. The cage’s steel floor was heating up. Warm air was blasting up from the bottom of the mineshaft.
MAYFIELD, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 12
7:30 P.M.
LAUREN MITCHELL WAS THE FIRST TO SPEAK AT THE public meeting, which was held that evening in the overheated gymnasium at Mayfield Senior High School. With a population of ten thousand or so, Mayfield was one of the larger towns in extreme southwestern Kentucky. Memphis was about 120 miles to the southwest. Approximately three hundred people were jammed into the high school’s small auditorium—men, women, children,
