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
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.”