Read Online Red Helmet by Homer Hickam - Free Book Online Page A

growled. “Turns out Rhonda added her two potatoes in the pot too. I got on Bashful’s case about it, but he was only repeating what others had said—and it started with you!”
    Bossman’s helmet light rocked up and down. “You’re right, Cable. I had no call to say anything about your wife.”
    Cable made no reply, lest his anger make him say something he didn’t really mean. He depended on Bossman, and he knew the man was sorry for telling the story of how Song had gotten upset about her blamed mussed-up blouse. Bossman probably only told his wife, but women talked and so did men in Highcoal, and it didn’t take long before everybody knew everybody else’s business.
    Cable turned his attention to the face. The spinning teeth of the continuous miner ground into an ebony layer, violently ripping the coal from where it had peacefully lain undisturbed for over three hundred million years. It was similar to the machine that Cable’s father had operated but bigger and more powerful. Shuttle cars trundled in behind the monster digger to receive a load of the ancient treasure, then raced to dump it on a conveyor belt to be carried out of the mine. When the continuous miner backed out, the roof bolt crew moved in to brace the newly exposed roof, using a powerful hydraulic drill to pierce the roof in several strategic places, then inserting slender anchors with retaining plates called roof bolts. Working with the camaraderie and skill of a NASCAR pit crew, they backed out as the continuous miner roared into the seam to rip and tear it anew. It was the choreography of the working face, and Cable thought it as beautiful a thing as there was on the earth.
    Cable raised his voice over the machinery. “It’s a good section, Bossman. Real good. Give Vietnam my compliments.”
    Charles “Vietnam” Petroski was the foreman of the section. A miner for over thirty years, he’d passed his foreman’s exam only a few months previously and was now proudly wearing his new white helmet, the mark of a mine supervisor. Almost as if he sensed Cable’s comment, Vietnam looked up from where he’d been helping to hang a ventilation curtain and flashed his light across to the two watching bosses. They flashed their lights back.
    â€œVietnam’s a good foreman, Cable, and he’s got good men. But if one of them gets sick, his section’s pretty much out of business. I got nobody to fill in.”
    â€œI know that,” Cable replied. “I’m working on it.”
    â€œI’m just telling you.” Bossman shrugged.
    Cable was working on it, but without much success. He couldn’t find any miners to hire. Coal was suddenly in demand across the world because of rising oil prices coupled with the rapid multiplication of steel mills in China and India. Orders for fuel coal and metallurgical coal had poured in, quickly exceeding the capacity of the coal industry in the United States. The coal from southern West Virginia was especially suitable for making steel, resulting in hot competition between the local coal companies to hire the few veteran miners around. Hiring and training new miners was the answer, but there weren’t enough applicants. It didn’t matter that the starting salary averaged over fifty thousand dollars. Today’s miner’s kids and grandkids, raised on iPods and computer games, just weren’t interested. For the few who were, the drop-out rate was high because of unexpected claustrophobia or an aversion to what they quickly realized was hard and dangerous work. The small number who stuck it out were, as the Marines put it, the few and the proud. But mostly the few.
    Cable withdrew a gas monitor from the holster on his belt and held it near the roof. The digital readout told him that the explosive methane gas seeping out of the coal was at a safe level, the oxygen content was normal, and carbon monoxide, the stealthy