As Stratton drove slowly in among the buildings he spotted a barn with one of its double doors lying on the ground and what appeared to be rusting machinery of some description inside. The structure had enough room for the pick-up and he eased it in. When he shut off the engine a near-total silence descended.
Stratton pulled the high-powered flashlight from its box, climbed out of the cab and stepped into the sunshine. The air was warm and dry.
He took a walk around, his footsteps clearly audible as his boots crunched on the soft sandy soil. He inspected each building in turn. Most were completely empty with unreliable-looking floors, some had the odd piece of furniture and machinery and one shed contained dozens of rusting spades, picks, hammers and boxes of heavy spike nails. The mine had been closed for a hundred and thirty years, according to the Internet site, abandoned when the cost of extracting the gold had exceeded the value of the yield. There was apparently still a fair amount of the precious metal to be had but it would only become a viable operation again when it reached $1,000 an ounce at today’s money value which was apparently unlikely.
Stratton finally came to the towering wooden derrick that supported aloft the massive wheels that the trolley drag cables looped over before disappearing into the winch house. Near the foot of the derrick was the main entrance shaft itself. A thick metal pipe ran out of the mine into another building close by that contained a couple of rusting water pumps. Flooding had apparently been a problem at the mine’s lower depths and the water had had to be pumped out twenty-four hours a day.
He felt the heavy, sturdy timbers surrounding the entrance that was a good ten feet square and, turning on the flashlight, he walked inside, checking the ceiling and supports as he made his way cautiously down the gradual incline. It became noticeably cooler and only slightly narrower and three hundred feet inside the passage suddenly opened out into a low-ceilinged cavern which was a meeting point for three other tunnels. The ground was level at this junction, the tunnels leading off it steeper than the entrance shaft. Stratton checked the supports that surrounded and held up the centre of the cavern and decided that this would be a good place to set up the ‘kitchen’.
A distinct odour had gradually increased in strength the deeper he got and he remembered that one of the mine’s problems was rotting timber supports at the lower levels – below the water table – which produced dangerous gases. Just as he wondered if he should have added a canary to his shopping list there was a sound behind him and he quickly aimed the flashlight, catching a small ground squirrel in the beam. It was standing on its hind legs, its nose twitching as it inspected this uncommon visitor. The animal was a sign that the gas was not at a serious concentration and confirmed an assumption that the beams in the water-logged sections far below had probably long since rotted and given off all their gases.
Stratton dug a cracker out of his pocket from a packet he had been munching on during the drive and tossed it near the squirrel.
The miners had always fed the rats to encourage them to stay close by – a dead rat indicated the possibility of bad air. The cracker landed just in front of the squirrel, spooking it, and it took off up the shaft.
Stratton made a final and more thorough inspection of the cavern ceiling before trudging back up the entrance shaft and back out into the sunlight. An hour later he had hauled most of the equipment off the truck and down into the mine that was now illumin ated by the petrol lamps. In that time the sun had dropped below the trees but he cracked on, setting up the kitchen for the first recipe.
After putting on goggles and a pair of thick rubber gloves he picked up the heavy chunk of dry ice wrapped in a cloth, placed it in one of the large pots and put another pot in on top of it. He then carefully poured nitric acid into the top pot until it was half full, hung the glass thermometer on the side and put the lid on the pot. The liquid needed to chill to near zero before he could start and he set about crumbling up all the hexamine blocks until he had a couple of bin bags filled with fine chunks of the stuff. A couple of hours later the acid was cool enough and he started to add the hexamine to it slowly, making sure that the temperature did not get too high.
When the acid was saturated with a third of the HMT Stratton gave it a long, steady stir and let it stand for twenty minutes while he quarter-filled the third pot with water. He then began to ladle the white slushy substance from the acid into the water and every now and then used the sieve to scoop out the now cleaner particles from the water, placing them into the fourth, still empty pot. He continued this process until all the solids had been strained from the acid and he was left with a white mulch that he mixed with more water to remove as much of the acid as possible. The final phase of this part of the process was to sieve out the mulch once again and place it on the stretched-out tarpaulin to dry.
When Stratton had finished he estimated that it would take another two batches to process the rest of the hexamine. Due to the limited life of the dry ice he cracked straight on with it.
By early morning the tarpaulin was covered in the flaky white powder which, when dry, would become one of the most powerful high-explosive materials ever invented. It was known as RDX. The compound was fairly stable, although if a heavy enough piece of ceiling were to fall on it the explosion would probably be felt in Bakersfield. But considering that the ceiling had remained intact for the last hundred and thirty years Stratton felt the odds were in his favour.
He poured the used acid down one of the shafts, dumped the remaining ice, turned off the lamps and headed out of the mine. The acid fumes had gradually been getting to him and he needed to rest as well as let the air quality in the mine get back to what it had been. He climbed onto the front bench of the pick-up that was long and comfortable enough to suit his needs and within minutes was fast asleep.
Six hours later Stratton was awake again. After a quick bite he headed back into the mine with the thirty-two plastic sandwich boxes.
He lit the lamps, inspected the RDX to find that it was almost dry and set about removing the sandwich boxes from their cartons and taking off all their lids. Using a wooden spoon he half-filled each box with RDX. When all thirty-two were done he scooped the remaining explosive into a couple of bin bags and put them in a far corner for later.
Next, he opened the drum of ball-bearings and carefully spooned them into the sandwich boxes on top of the RDX, filling each container to the top, an average of two hundred balls in each, he estimated. Then he closed the lids tightly and stacked them to one side.
The sandwich boxes constituted the first phase of Stratton’s operation, although they were not quite complete. He stared at them, contemplating how much more work he had to do. For the first time since leaving LA he wondered if he was completely crazy and then reminded himself of his options. Fight or run. That was enough to get him back in focus and concentrate on the next task, which was to run a test of the RDX. Stratton had made this type of explosive on his special forces demolitions course but just in small amounts. It looked, smelled and felt right but there was only one way to make sure.
Only a little was needed but nevertheless he could not risk exploding it in the open and attracting attention – secrecy had been one of the main reasons for choosing this location in the first place. However, there were obvious risks with detonating even the smallest quantity inside the mine. The beams might be solid but he had no idea how unstable the rock above them was.
To reduce the risk of bringing down the roof in the kitchen Stratton constructed the test apparatus several hundred feet along one of the passages that led deeper into the mine. It was a simple device: a sledgehammer suspended from a beam on the end of a long piece of string looped through a bent nail, the head a couple of feet above a metal plate on the ground. The string led back up the shaft to what he considered to be a safe distance and, to test the tackle, he released the string, allowing the hammer to fall onto the plate. He returned with a piece of RDX no bigger than a pea, re-rigged the hammer, and placed the explosive compound on the metal sheet precisely where the hammer had struck. Satisfied that everything was in position he turned on the flashlight to light his way back up the tunnel when he saw the ground squirrel standing in front of him in its beam.
‘I’d head back up the tunnel if I were you, mate.’
The squirrel looked at him, twitching its nose, and as Stratton moved towards it the little animal scampered back up the shaft.
Stratton reached the safe point, only to find the squirrel waiting there for him. ‘If you’re going to stick around you might want to put your fingers in your ears,’ he advised.
The squirrel got up onto its hind legs as if in response and watched him.
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Stratton said as he took a last look around, shone his flashlight back up the shaft towards the entrance just in case he had to leg it, looked back at the taut string disappearing in the other direction around a slight bend, and released it. A second later there was a terrific boom, the noise accentuated by
