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

Littering the antechamber were hydraulic compressors for the drills, mechanical scrapers and other specialty equipment designed to operate in the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel.
    At the far end of the room was the main tunnel, lit by a string of bulbs that vanished far into the distance. “How long is the drive?” Mercer asked.
    “Twelve hundred feet,” Red said as he stepped over snaking coils of hydraulic lines and power cords as thick as his wrist. “The lab coats who told us where to dig wanted the access shaft sunk fifteen hundred feet from the pocket.”
    “What about the sump under the hoist?”
    “The shaft bottoms out three hundred feet below this level.”
    Meaning they could store more than a hundred thousand cubic feet of water below the level of the drive. “Why so deep?”
    “The lab coats again. They say we’re blasting toward an underground lake. When we cut through they want to keep as much water as possible. Some sort of irrigation project, right, Mr. Lasko?”
    “That’s right, Red.” Ira gave Mercer a significant look. Red didn’t know the details of the project. Mercer cut short his questioning.
    Once they stepped out of the well-lit antechamber, the three men switched on flashlights and continued deeper into the guts of the mountain. The ceiling was a roomy eight feet and the passage was fifteen feet wide. Mercer assumed it was sized to accommodate the nuclear containment casks. Under the beam of his light, the stone was a featureless gray.
    Ira asked about the puddles of dirty water on the floor.
    “You use water to cool and lubricate the drill bits. Nothing to worry about,” Mercer replied, then added, “It’s when you see clear water that you should be concerned. This far down any sediment in the water has been distilled as it percolates through the rock. Clean water means seepage.”
    A thousand feet down the tunnel, they came to where part of the hanging wall had let go. The debris and the bodies had been removed so the area looked sanitized. The only evidence of the tragedy was that the ceiling was double its normal height. The break where the stone had split appeared clean, as if the section that collapsed had been a separate piece of rock waiting for eons for its support to be taken away.
    Mercer looked at Red.
    “Like I said,” the Texan drawled, “weirdest damned thing.”
    The bolt heads recently shot into the stone were silver bright.
    They continued deeper into the tunnel. Heavy beams supported on timber balks had been placed every twenty feet. They used wooden columns because the fibers made popping sounds long before they collapsed, giving workers plenty of time to reshore the area or, if need be, to clear out entirely.
    As they neared the working face, the sound of mine work became a teeth-shattering combination of steel on stone and the grind of heavy equipment. They passed several small mechanical shovels and a string of ore cars mounted on solid wheels. The awkward train, with its low-slung electric tractor, resembled a metallic centipede. Nearby was an even stranger insectlike machine, a four-drill drifter. The drifter was a platform mounted on crawler treads that could precisely position four of the heavy rock drills. The drills themselves were roughly the same size as machine guns and had the same wicked appearance. Hydraulic cables snaked from the machine like arteries.
    The men at the tunnel’s limit worked in pairs using slightly smaller hammer drills to bore more holes into the stone. Rock chips and lubricating water spewed from the hundred-pound tools in a stinging rain. Sullen rainbows caught in the lights seemed to resent being caged in this stygian realm.
    Mining had come a long way from the days when men hand-packed sticks of dynamite into drill holes and hoped for the best. Advances in explosives and techniques meant miners could peel rock with near-surgical precision. Here the men used the drifter to drill out the larger holes at the center of