Predator Island

by Douglas Cameron

  Then, not knowing anything else to do, he picked up Matías’s body and began walking back to Rochelle Town (the workers’ village.)

  A coffin was made and Matías was buried, wrapped in a plastic sheet inside the wooden coffin. He was buried in the sinkhole where he had died, and a headstone was ordered inscribed with all that they knew about him which was his name and when he had died. The headstone came on board the B.B. São Rochelle when she made her first trip to the island.

  Chapter 11

  When the first workmen reached São Rochelle, they were told that there should be horses and cows. The news of the cows excited them because that meant fresh milk and despite the helicopter biweekly food deliveries, they knew they would truly welcome fresh milk. So once they had settled into a work routine and had the time, they started looking. Being a small island, it didn’t take long to find two mangy scrawny cows with dry udders. Naturally they would not be good for meat, so they were left alone. They also found two horses also long in the tooth and definitely of the plow horse variety. All four of the beasts were naturally a little leery of humans not having seen any for several years. There was plenty of natural vegetation to eat but apparently not to their liking so with the first food delivery was seed for grass suitable for the animals and some hay to hold them over until the new grass grew. Also the men were told that the animals would be removed when the dock was completed and the ship to bring more equipment and later the predators was built. With free time and needing a little recreation, several of the men with some horse experience decided to try to ride the animals. So a request was made, and the next helicopter shipment of supplies included four lariats and two halters.

  Contest #1: Roping a horse. Actually this first turned into “Roping a Stake” driven in the ground and then “Roping a Barrel.” After the first contest, the best eight men were picked and after the barrel exercise just the best four were kept. So the best four – Jason Beane, Ignacio Suárez, Nicolás Morena, and Ines Cola (one of the cooks who was female) – went out looking for the horses. A crowd gathered on top of Colina da Rocha to watch. The four ropers had a pretty good idea where the horses were and so the four approached from different directions. It took two days before the first horse was roped by Ines Cola and led to near Rochelle Town and hobbled. Then the second horse was caught immediately on the second day by Jason Beane because the horse came to be with the first horse and was an easy catch.

  Contest #2: Riding a horse. The horses were basically plow horses (think of a Clydesdale) and not easy to ride bareback even if they were broken. These were – or had been – at least as far as harnesses for pulling plows but undoubtedly small children had been given rides. Before this contest even started, management in the guise of Walt Jeffries, Construction Supervisor, made the rules. “Get an injury requiring air flight to the mainland and it comes out of your wages – both ways. If you cannot work, you are not paid.” Of course this rule applied only to their off-duty hours and specifically to the horses. Fortunately, there were no injuries of that type. Face it, these were horses “long in the tooth,” which means they were old. Not familiar with the saying? Horses’ teeth continue to grow and, even though the teeth wear, age can be judged by the length and condition of their teeth. To make a long story short, they didn’t buck like rodeo horses and were quickly broken.

  Contest #3: Riding the circuit. Once the horses were rideable, the question became “Which one was faster?” So a circuit was set up: Starting at the bottom pool of Colina da Rocha Prometheus’s Aerie), going counterclockwise (west to begin with) around Colina da Rocha across the bridge across Rio da Fonte (River Styx) and back to the pool. By this time, there was a road completely around and that was used as the race track. The horses were not fast, at best getting up to a trot for part of the circuit, and one of them wouldn’t cross the bridge with a rider. So, to make things fair, a mark was set about one hundred feet short of the bridge and another one the same distance on the other side of the bridge. These were the dismount and mount marks and, because the riders were always the smallest men willing to ride the horses, they had a difficult time mounting and needed help. Amazingly, the same horse did not always win, and it wasn’t the rider who made the difference. It was obviously just the way the horse felt. Both quickly learned the routine and would “race” to the dismount pole and then take their time getting to the remount pole because they didn’t want to “race” again.

  Races were held on Sunday afternoons because Sunday was the only off day. The hardy souls who wanted to see the entire race would climb to the top of Colina da Rocha and watch from there. Those uninterested in the racing might swim in the bottom pool or jump from the middle pool following the example of Ignacio Suárez.

  Certainly money was exchanged but usually the bets were modest because few people had much money since there was nothing to spend it on and the majority had almost all their money sent home. Of course, racing came to a stop two years into the project when the B.B. São Rochelle arrived and took the animals to the mainland.

  Chapter 12

  The B.B. São Rochelle was launched two years after work started on the island. Modeled after the LST (Landing Ship Tank) of World War II, she was two-thirds the size so as to minimize the draft in order to get into the port which was constructed on the island. She was fifty feet in the beam (widest part), three hundred eighty feet long and could carry 3200 tons with a draft of ten feet in the stern and three feet forward. That could put her into the dock on São Rochelle with a foot to spare at low tide. She had a double hinged eighty-foot-long ramp which gave her plenty of space, just in case. She was much more seaworthy than her WWII prototypes and made twenty knots loaded in making port in São Rochelle. She was painted sea blue camouflage like the U. S. warships at the request of Ramiro Esteves and, since he paid for it, no one questioned why or really cared. After all she was a working ship. Her christening was a sight to behold as each of the members of the Billionaire Bundle had an expensive bottle of his or her favorite champagne attached to a nylon cord which on cue, they cast against the front of the ship and it was properly fortuitous that all of them broke on first impact.

  It was an ancient Babylonian tradition that eventually led to the use of champagne bottles to christen a ship. In ancient Babylonia, liquid was poured over the hull of a new ship prior to its launching. And it wasn’t for good luck but a check for holes in the hull that could cause the ship to sink. Over the years, this tradition became a ceremony, and it wasn’t until the end of the 1900’s that champagne became the liquid of choice.

  And some time in the course of events, the failure of a bottle of champagne to break was taken as a sign of bad luck. As recently as 2007, the champagne bottle failed to break when the Duchess of Cornwall attempted to christen a cruise ship. Passengers on some of the first cruises of that ship contracted a viral illness whose symptoms included vomiting. Even more prophetic, reportedly the champagne bottle failed to break when the Costa Concordia was launched. Although in this case, the ship was built in 2004 and tragedy did not occur until January 2012 when the Concordia struck a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea ripping a 160-foot gash in the port side of her hull and resulting in the death of thirty-two people.

  There are lots of ways that are used to ensure that champagne bottles break: cheap champagne is used because it has more bubbles in it and that increases the pressure inside the bottle and hence the odds that the bottle will break; the bottle is thrown against the strongest part of the hull; and the outside of the bottle is scored to weaken the glass which breaks easier. What was done with the bottles in the case of the B.B. São Rochelle no one has ever said but having seven bottles break must certainly be some kind of record.

  On her maiden voyage and unladen, the B.B. São Rochelle had made port on the island in the midst of a mild storm without difficulty and achieved a cruising speed of twenty-five knots. She had been greeted by all the workers who had been given the day off in celebration. Naturally tours of the ship were given
. The next morning, her first cargo was loaded: Two cows (considerably fatter and more content) and two “thoroughbred racing” horses.

  She made port in São Rochelle at noon two months later with her first inbound load, and for the billionaires it was the most important, at least to that point. Issaack, Siegfried and Waldo were on board for this occasion because of her cargo. It took almost most twenty-four hours to get things arranged since the cargo left little room in the hold of the B.B. São Rochelle (who was called B.B. Queen by her crew, a play on the name of the jazz great B.B. King but, of course, being a ship, the B.B. São Rochelle was a woman.) Again the workers were present although not with full liberty since this was a working day. Because of the necessary preparations and tests that needed to be performed to be certain that the cargo was running properly, it was 10:17 a.m. when the assembled workers heard the engine roar to life and 4 minutes, 37 seconds after that when the bow doors of the B.B. São Rochelle opened, and the ramp let down onto the pier which had been constructed so that this would happen because of the weight it had to carry on this voyage. The crowd filed in single file to inspect the machine. Dubbed Ant Man by his new crew, he probably looked like something out of a science fiction film because his 30-foot-6-inch-round face was covered with spinning shiny drills.

  Ant Man had been purchased from the Robbins Company in Solon, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The parts were shipped to Miami, Florida where they were loaded aboard the B.B. Queen where he was partially reassembled. When fully connected, he was approximately two hundred seventy-five feet long and made of seven sections with a total weight of fifteen hundred tons. The main and heaviest section was the actual Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) which was basically a tin can with an approximately10 meter (30.38 feet) diameter, 13 meter (approximately 42.5 feet) length, and weighed 1,000 tons. Not only would it dig the hole and send the muck back to the rest of its body, but it also would put the concrete sections of the tunnel in place so that the rest of the machine could ride inside the tunnel. The rest of the machine was called the Back-up Train. The first section of the Back-up Train was called the Bridge and was sixty-five (65) feet long with front wheels made of polyurethane because they rode on the concrete tunnel sections. The rear wheels rode on the rails which were installed whenever there was a thirty-foot gap between the section that the front wheels were in and the section containing already placed track. The rest of the Back-up Train was five thirty-foot-long railroad cars called Gantry 1 through Gantry 5 that contained the power units which drive the Tunnel Boring Machine such as hydraulic power units, electrical power units, and lubrication power units. It also housed the TBM Operators cab, ventilation system, rescue chamber, water systems, air systems and lunch and toilet facilities. It is easiest to understand if you think of a Tunnel Boring Machine as a factory which moves because everything you find in a factory will be located in the Tunnel Boring Machine system and advances as the machine bores forward. The TBM operating units are located on the top and sides of the back-up gantries. The lower inside section of the back-up is dedicated to the material transport system, this is where the muck dug by the TBM is carried by conveyer belts to the back of the train where it is emptied into small gondola type railroad cars and the supply train enters and exits the system bringing in manpower, concrete segments, rails, and other utilities to keep the system working.

  Ant Man wasn’t fast when he was working which was drilling an approximately thirty-one-foot hole in the ground ahead of him which in this case would be the side of the volcano on the island. Then he could move anywhere from a few feet to thirty feet per day depending on the composition of the earth he was chewing up. To help explain his rate of speed when drilling, every five feet he stopped and did what a newspaper reporter for The Akron Beacon Journal, writing about the city of Akron, Ohio’s sewer tunnel digger Rosie, explained as “an underground dance. Heavy concrete slabs are pulled from her belly and assembled around her in a ring. Seven of the 14-inch thick segments and a locking piece called a key are positioned and grouted (or cemented) in place to make the sewer tunnels (sic) walls.”

  The concrete segments would be made on the island using equipment brought in the B.B. Queen and yet to be assembled. For that reason, there was no real hurry for Ant Man to make tracks up the road to his starting place because it would take a couple of weeks to assemble the small plant that would fabricate the concrete pieces. It took most of the rest of that day to get track laid on the ramp to connect with the track already laid on the dock and in the hold of the B.B. Queen. In fact, her first trip to the island was to measure everything so that the track on the ramp would match the track on the shore. One of the last rail sections to be put down would be half on the ramp and half on the shore ensuring a smooth transition.

  Ant Man

  Tunnel Boring Machine and Bridge

  Gantries 1-4

  Gantry 5 and the Supply Train

  Chapter 13

  The next morning the crowds gathered again – at least those who could and – truth be told – except for the team involved in moving the sections, for most of them their work was done until the Ant Man started working. But before that could happen, his seven sections had to be taken up to the plateau and connected. In that respect, there was a problem that had to be faced long before his arrival: how to transport the Tunnel Boring Machine from the harbor to the plateau on the side of Vulcan’s Forge where the tunnel was going to be dug. The roads on São Rochelle were not paved so moving by truck was out of the question and its weight made that improbable. The only answer was by rail. The Back-up Train cars ran on a track with the rails thirty-six inches apart rather than four foot eight and a half inches which was the U.S. Standard. So all the railroad cars to carry supplies to the train and dirt from the tunnel and the engines that pulled or pushed them had to be of the smaller gauge and that meant specially built.

  If a regular train rail track was run up the side of Vulcan’s Forge, it would take several hairpin turns because a train can efficiently only handle a five-degree slope. That was deemed unacceptable because of the space needed. In consultation with specialists, the decision was made to use two unlinked four axle wheel trucks, one at each end of the TBM and the parts of the trucks in contact with the section would swivel to permit sharper turns. Thus the decision to keep the track as straight as possible and also to keep the engines small because of the necessary turns.

  Coming off the B.B. Queen, a section would be pulled by one engine and pushed by a second. The engines themselves were unique and were in part designed by Waldo. They were loosely based on the electric mules that move ships through the locks of the Panama Canal with adaptations to either pull or push and to have a special gear on the bottom because the movement up the slope to the plateau would be a cog railway. They were powered by a third rail much like subways in many big cities. In their construction, simplicity was used, and they ended up looking a little like an ice rink Zamboni with the driver sitting high at the back. And to have the necessary power, they were twice as long as a Zamboni. Because of their construction, they did not move fast and even slower moving the train sections. It would take several days to move the TBM from the B.B. Queen to its position on the trestle.

  This morning the first section that came out of the B.B. Queen was Gantry 5 with the rear end first because the nature of the design required that the last or caboose section of Ant Man was the first to be taken up the hill. The TBM itself would be the last section to go up and it would be the slowest.

  Walt Jefferies (construction supervisor), Issaack, Siegfried, and Waldo were waiting on the dock to follow the first piece up the mountain.

  “Hey, Andy,” Walt Jefferies called to a short man standing near the first engine that would pull the section up the mountain. “When you get a chance come over here.”

  The man waved and finished talking to the man who was with him and started over to where the four were standing. Andrew (Andy) Russell was small enough to be a jockey if he had wanted to, but
until he was eighteen, he had never seen a horse in real life. All he wanted to do was to be an engineer – the kind of engineer who drives trains. That wasn’t going to happen he quickly realized so he became a Civil Engineer with a specialization in railroads. It was he who designed the tracks and the four axle trucks used to carry the sections. When he got to the group Walt Jefferies introduced him.

  “So tell us how this is going to work,” Issaack said.

  “Well, we need…”

  There was the blast of horn from the interior of the B.B. Queen and all turned to look. The first of the engines made its appearance moving at a speed of one mile an hour.

  “As I was saying,” Andy continued. “It’s going to take two engines to get each section of the Back-up Train up to the plateau and in place. That one is the Front Pull Engine 1. It is pulling the rear of Gantry 5. There is another engine pushing the other end and that is Rear Push Engine 1. When they reach the bottom of the mountain they will take the first switch and head straight up what we call the Rear Mountain Track. The name will be made clearer when I tell you how the TBM will be taken. The other track is the Front Mountain Track for a similar reason.”

  While he had been talking, Front Pull Engine 1 was all the way out of the B.B. Queen’s hold as was Gantry 5. At this point there was another horn blast from within the B.B. Queen’s hold and a second engine made its appearance.

  “That’s the Rear Push Engine 1,” Andy explained. “When they get the section all the way to the top and ready to take the section onto the trestle, Front Pull Engine 1 will disconnect and pull onto the Plateau siding. Rear Push Engine 1 will put the section in place. Then it will start back down the mountain followed by Front Push Engine 1. They will come down on the Front Mountain Track because a second section will be up on the Rear Mountain Track pulled by Front Pull Engine 2 and Rear Push Engine 2. Then the process will be repeated with the two engines picking up another section and heading up while the other two engines are heading down.”