Read Online Deep Fire Rising - v4 by Jack Du Brull - Free Book Online Page A

’em.”
    “Tell me what happened?” Mercer invited.
    Red paused, giving the question thought despite the days he’d already had to consider the cause of the cave-in. “A chunk of hanging wall that had no reason to crack loose cracked loose. Came down in a flat piece about eight feet thick that spanned the entire drive. Crushed everyone under it. Fifteen men.”
    Mercer got the sense that Red wasn’t comfortable with this vague description of the accident. Not that he was holding anything back. It was just that there was something about it he didn’t understand. “You hadn’t bolted the hanging wall?” Hanging wall was mining parlance for the roof of a tunnel. Bolting was what it sounded like, screwing long bolts into the ceiling to help stabilize the rock.
    “No need. We’re boring through some serious hard-rock. No water seepage, no fissures, nothing.”
    “They’re bolting it now,” Ira offered.
    Mercer expected no less.
    After being shown his room in one of the trailers, Mercer changed into his miner’s coveralls while Ira was loaned a spare set by Red Harding. With no place to hide his pistol in the utilitarian room, Mercer decided he’d keep it with him. He tucked it against the small of his back under the coveralls and planted his helmet on his head.
    Ira had to keep his baseball cap on to prevent the helmet Red had given him from slipping across his hairless scalp. He suffered the ignominy in silence.
    The cavern was markedly cooler than the canyon, even with the excess heat generated by the diesel-powered equipment.
    As they waited for the personnel lift to trundle up from underground, Mercer examined a fist-sized chunk of rock that had spilled from the ore shoot. He always marveled at the fact that in the millions, or even billions, of years since this innocuous lump of stone had solidified in the earth’s crust, not one human had ever seen it. He was the first to give it any thought at all. It made him feel like a Golden Age explorer peering at a newly discovered continent. He’d worked in mines since his teenage years in the granite quarries of Vermont, and that thrill had never left him.
    The cage hoist arrived with a clang of bells and the three men stepped into the roomy car. The small scope of the project meant that one mine shaft could be used for hauling material from the depths as well as transporting the men to and from work and provide forced air ventilation through enormous ducts secured to the side of the hole.
    The bells rang again and the bottom fell out from under them.
    Ira clutched at a safety rail while Red and Mercer suppressed knowing smiles. The first descent into a mine was a terrifying experience that many could never repeat. Lasko finally released his grip on the railing when he’d regained his equilibrium.
    “And I thought commuting to work around Washington was bad,” he said to cover his apprehension. “Is it always like that?”
    Red shook his head. “The horizontal tunnel we bored off this shaft is eight hundred feet below us. In South Africa, some of the men work ten times deeper. To get them there quickly, you damn near free-fall the whole way.”
    “Hell of a way to make a living,” Ira remarked as they dropped into impenetrable darkness.
    Mercer ignored the sarcasm. “It sure is.”
    Several minutes later, the rattling car slowed and a yellowish glow seeped up from around the elevator’s edges. They were nearing where men drilled and blasted toward the subterranean cavity the Department of Energy planned to use as their temporary storehouse.
    Red threw open the gate when the car stopped bouncing at the end of its eight-hundred-foot tether. The chamber was the size of a railway tunnel and well lit. They were that much closer to the earth’s core, so the workings were appreciably warmer too, though not uncomfortably so. In ultradeep mines, ventilated air was forced through massive refrigeration units just to maintain a temperature of one hundred degrees.