Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2

by Various Authors

  Ken sped up, wanting to catch sight of the scumbag, but then he saw the sign for his turnoff.

  ‘World’s biggest and deepest open cut mine!’ the sign screamed, as if it were a tourist attraction. Then, ‘Entry prohibited.’ Typical. Hart Ridge Corp were notoriously hungry for publicity, but hid themselves behind a few slogans and the blustering reputation of their CEO.

  It wasn’t a dirt road, either, but two lanes of blacktop with wide verges —in better condition than the highway that led past it across the desert; but the dead lizards continued, just the same, through the nature reserve and all the way until the artificial range of Hart mine tailings began.

  Suddenly Ken didn’t like Hart Ridge Corp at all.

  An hour and a half later he was being ushered into the office of the site’s security chief. “NFR’s science advisor here to see you, sir.”

  Now the wrangling would start. Were these jokers going to let him do his job? Was he going to be escorted around the site by the security chief, not a foreman or mining engineer? So much for being allowed to do a site inspection and a risk assessment for any emergency services that might have to respond. It wasn’t the first time Ken had been on the receiving end of such an attitude. Yet Hart Ridge Corp would be the first to complain if shit happened and they needed help. He would much rather be at home in Canberra, Ken decided, but then he chuckled, curious. From everything he had heard, this particular hole in the ground was huge.

  “So tell me, Mr Greenfield,” the security chief glared at him, “just who the fuck are NFR, and what makes you think you can walk in here and tell us our job?”

  Ken answered the question with another question. “Why does the Minister want this now? That hole in the ground has been there for sixty years. Think of it as rhetorical. I like these things in the open,” said Ken.

  The glare was his only response.

  “Now, down to business. You reckon with that hole outside you’ll reach China? Or do you get to go through Hell first?”

  No reaction to that either. This was going to be a long day.

  Ten weeks ago

  Ken had been in the boardroom twice before. Once after the Mount Isa job when NFR had helped Queensland Fire & Rescue pull thirty miners out of a collapsed mineshaft, and once to deliver a briefing about the impact of climate change on the frequency and severity of severe weather events and the added costs of insurance and building new houses to the required standards.

  The walls were covered in dark green velvet wallpaper; the ceiling was light green with subtle lighting. It had all the necessary screens, projectors and workstations for a corporate boardroom, and even an old fashioned whiteboard for those who liked to stand and lecture, but it was the huge, solid jarrah boardroom table that Ken liked the best. It was the old-fashioned, dependable honesty of the wood that Ken liked; back home, entire pubs were built of wood like this, maybe not as hard as this jarrah, but just as dark and dependable. Even at a time ruled by corporate frugality, some things remained unchanged, and this table had been unchanged for fifty years. Take the high-tech corporate communications machinery away, and the room reminded him of the country pubs back in South Yorkshire. Just add beer-drenched carpet, the aroma of centuries of ingrained cigarette smoke, real ale and roast meat, and he would feel right at home.

  He looked around the table. Some folk he recognised, others he didn’t know at all. Not all wore NFR uniform. Then Deputy Commissioner Livings walked in and the meeting began. The Hart Ridge Corp mine was the first item on the agenda.

  “Ken, I’ve got your report here. Thanks for going to so much trouble,” said Livings. “Can you brief us on the main points? What are your feelings about the place?”

  Ken leaned forwards on the table and looked down at his notes for a moment. He looked up. “The main points are size, isolation, and ego.”

  “Please explain that.”

  “You’ve heard that the thing is big. I’ve got some photos here, but they don’t do it justice.”

  Ken flicked through the photos projected from his laptop to the screen at the head of the room. “This truck,” he said, pointing to a speck on a track on the far side of the pit wall, “is twenty metres long, six metres wide and six high. Google Maps probably gives the best idea of the scale of the place.”

  Ken shifted to the satellite imagery and zoomed in. “Note the poor resolution within the Hart Ridge property. Out here in the Nullarbor Reserve, we can distinguish individual salt bush plants, but here —near the edge of the pit —the vegetation is just a blur, with a resolution of about ten metres.”

  “He’s done a deal with Google, like the military of some countries.” The speaker was a nondescript man of average height sitting with the Minister’s department head. He hadn’t been introduced.

  “Possibly. That’s partly what I meant by ego. You remember the old song, Blue Sky Mine? This is a bit like that. Hart Ridge Corp’s idea seems to be that if they dig deep enough and wide enough they’ll find something worth extracting. They might not know up front what that something is, but there will be something. They started digging for gold sixty-two years ago. It was Jon Hart’s grandfather, Erasmus, back then. Now, the pit is twenty kilometres wide, and two and a half deep. The temperature at the bottom is close to twenty degrees Celsius higher than it is on the surface. All the machinery in the pit is climate controlled. Right now, late autumn, it isn’t too bad, a bit warm at the bottom, but that’s all. But in summer, nobody can work outside in the pit. They pump out groundwater, treat it until it’s crystal clear, pipe it fifty kilometres away and pump it back into an aquifer. The pipeline is underground—”

  “Did they tell you about the pipeline?” asked the unnamed man.

  “No. I saw the treatment plant and asked. They gave me the run around, so I researched it when I got back. It was built some decades ago, I don’t know exactly when, probably the late seventies. I couldn’t find any government approvals or environmental impact statements.”

  “1977, and there aren’t any,” the man said.

  Ken continued. “Everything about this place is like that. Huge. Secretive. Getting information is like pulling teeth. They’ve dug out coal. The original gold is long gone, but they found more later. They’ve got big silver, lead and zinc deposits that they’re currently working on two kilometres down along one of the pit walls. They’ve pulled out copper. The alluvial gravel they’ve pulled out covers half the dirt roads in South Australia. Parts of the place are radioactive; I had a dosimeter in my pocket when I went in, but most of what they pull out is dirt and rock, and that goes here.” Ken indicated the range of mine tailings.

  The unnamed man spoke again, “You mentioned ego. Do you think ego really explains this?”

  Ken thought for a moment. “Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps the pit is just a giant toy, and they’re playing, like toddlers building sand castles at a beach.”

  “Grown men—” Livings began.

  “And women. Remember, Hart’s aunt ran Hart Ridge Corp for a decade.” It was the Minister’s department head who interrupted, one of the few who could interrupt the deputy commissioner.

  “Of course. Playing like toddlers at a beach? With tens of billions of the shareholders’ money?” asked Livings.

  “But there are no shareholders,” said Ken. “There isn’t that level of accountability. This mine is the property of Jon Hart’s family, they’re funding it from their other mining enterprises, and we don’t know his purpose. That’s why it’s so difficult to assess the risk the mine presents to the public.”

  “Could his purpose be something darker, more malevolent, do you think?” the unnamed man asked.

  “Malevolent? Well, they’re destroying the environment, but then they seem to be building a new environment. Who knows, his purpose could be anything.”

  The unnamed man was obviously fishing for something, but Ken didn’t know what. The Minister’s department head paid close attention to every word.

  Two nights before />
  The railway line from Port Augusta to Perth passed forty kilometres south of the mine. The Indian Pacific passenger train, travelling from Sydney to Perth, reached the point of closest approach in the early hours of the morning.

  At 2.31am, the driver saw a cloud of mist obscuring the tracks. That was rare on the Nullarbor, but it happened sometimes. She slowed the train and radioed ahead to Cook and back to Ooldea. The track was clear in both directions. The driver slowly accelerated the train into the mist. Instantly the stench of rotten eggs permeated the cabin. The driver remembered her high-school chemistry —hydrogen sulphide. She turned on the PA immediately. “Sorry to wake you up, everybody! I need you all to close your windows if they’re open, and turn off your air-conditioning. Roll up towels and put them under the doors. Crew, go to your chemical spill kits and put on your charcoal P2 masks.” She made up the advice, but it was common-sense. She braked and prepared to reverse, but by the time the train had stopped, the mist was clearing ahead. She accelerated, and the train nosed out of the bank of gas.

  Ten minutes later, in clear air well away from the bank of gas, she stopped the train in a siding. A number of passengers and crew were ill, but alive. The crew conducted a roll call.

  Six passengers were missing.

  A day later, the right leg of one of the missing passengers—identified by the boot it still wore —was found ten kilometres north of the train tracks. Another part was found twelve kilometres from the tracks. Of the remaining missing passengers, there was no trace.

  Satellite imagery showed the gas plume had come from the Hart Ridge Corp open cut mine, sucked up by a north-westerly gale blowing across the pit.

  Now

  The helicopter approached along the length of the artificial range from the south, with the wind behind it. The range of mine tailings was three hundred and five metres taller than the surrounding plain, tall enough to be called a mountain by all accepted definitions of the word —even in jurisdictions that measured these things in feet. It was nearly fifty kilometres in length, and was one-and-a-half wide. For most of its length, it ran due north-south. Where it reached the railway line in the south, it turned due east. Hart Ridge Corp had even built their own railway along the crest to bring the fresh tailings out to the end.

  Someone had gone to a lot of effort to build this.

  “Look at it. More money than sense,” said Inspector Sophie Harding.

  “What do you expect? That’s Hart Ridge. Built by the Hart Ridge Corporation,” said Ken. The range would be here long after its builders were dead. Not as long as the ancient features of the flat desert landscape it nestled on, but still long enough to be able to pretend. “They’re doing it because they can.”

  Harding changed the subject. “When we get there, are you going in?”

  “I always go in, Sarah. It’s the reason I’m in the job.”

  “You’re too important. I’m not sure we should risk it.”

  “Then I’ll have to find another job.”

  Harding snorted, and turned again to stare out the window.

  The final three members of the crew, Jack, Ahmed and Tina, sat behind them. Tina stared out the window, amazed but not impressed, Jack played with a Rubik’s cube, Ahmed read a Wisden’s Almanac.

  As they got closer, the pilot lifted the helicopter up above the ridge. Ahead, the ridge turned west, at right angles, and then curved gently for another twenty kilometres. Nestled in the curve was the pit the tailings had come from. The helicopter slowed and dipped.

  Ken spoke to the pilot. “Land near those logistics sheds there, at the head of the access road.”

  The pilot just grunted, and Ken realised that’s just what he was doing. “Sorry. Bad habit.”

  The helicopter came to a soft landing beside two police 4WDs. The NFR crew jumped out of the helicopter, ducked under the spinning blades, and crossed over to the waiting SA Police Incident Management Team. Instead of joining them, Ken walked to the edge. The far side of the pit was visible in the haze, twenty kilometres away, just like the last time Ken had been here, except now the bottom of the pit was invisible, hidden below a roiling sea of fog.

  Before, the floor of the pit had been visible two and a half kilometres below, the giant mining dump trucks crawling like ants on the tracks corkscrewing along the sides of the pit. There were two tracks for the trucks going down empty, another two for the full trucks coming back out. Then, the haze in the air had been dust from the massive rotary cutters searching through the rock to find the next vein of ore. Now, it was gas.

  He heard boots crunching on the gravel and turned. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “Hello Ken.” It was the nameless man from when he had given his briefing. The suit had gone, to be replaced by tan work clothes, boots, and a sun hat which completely covered his pale brown hair. Ken congratulated himself on remembering what colour it was; the guy was almost as invisible, almost as nondescript, now, standing under the desert sun, as he had been in the NFR corporate boardroom.

  The man held his hand out. “Ray.”

  Harding wouldn’t be happy.

  Ken shook his hand. “Ray, what do you know about this place?”

  Ray turned and looked out over the pit.

  “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

  “What detectors are we taking in?” Jack asked.

  “Four-head—”

  “Fucking thing’ll never shut up!”

  “So, acknowledge the alarm.” Sometimes Ken thought he was talking to children. The truth was, these technicians would make sound decisions on their own. They only wanted him to confirm their thinking —or perhaps they only wanted to give him something to do so he could feel useful.

  He took another look over the edge. Well, his superiors wanted him here, no question, and the Minister wanted his report, again for whatever that would be worth.

  Ma’am, it’s a big hole in the ground, he could imagine saying. He chuckled.

  “Share it.”

  “Just thinking what I’m going to write in my report.”

  “You could start with it being a fucking big hole in the ground,” Jack smirked.

  “You read my mind.”

  Maybe they could achieve something, even if they only recovered bodies. Somewhere down there were two police officers and six miners, and nobody had yet found the missing tourists from the train.

  “We know there’s sulphur so bring the flame spectrophotometer. I’ll bring the photo-ionisation detector so we can cross-reference and maybe identify something.”

  “Here’s the plan,” said Harding. She was the senior NFR officer at the incident. The senior cop, an inspector from Ceduna, had already given up trying to patronise her. “Just get going, or I’ll send in another team.”

  “And SafeWork SA will put you in jail. It might be your incident, but it’s my Hot Zone.”

  “That’s a bloody big hole you’ve got in your Hot Zone.”

  “You’ve got nothing that can deal with it, buddy.”

  Ken chuckled at that memory as well.

  “Share it.”

  “Can it!” said Harding. “Okay. Jack, you and Ray are one team. Tina, you and the dude are the other. Ahmed, you’re with me. Jack and Tina, you’re in charge down there, do you understand that?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m getting to that,” said Harding. “Ken, this goes for you too, so listen up. Ray, think of it like the Navy. You might have the authority, but Jack and Tina are the helmsmen. You can tell them where you want them to go, but they’ll tell you how you’re going to get there, and even if you can get there at all. Understand? You’re in two teams of two. Jack leads one, Tina leads the other. Stick together. Jack leads the crew. Ray, they will help you in every way they can, but they are in charge, and if you don’t agree to that, I’ll ask the good Inspector here from Ceduna to restrain you.”

  “I have no problem.” Ray’s voice was mild, as if he was truly unconcerned.

  “Wh
o are you, anyway? What training have you got?” Jack asked.

  Ken knew that Ray and Sarah must have already spoken and worked things out as well as they could. Ray had obviously not given Sarah a choice about what he wanted to happen but had just as obviously not gotten his own way on everything. Harding had imposed limits.

  “Military. I’ve had breathing apparatus and hazmat training with the Navy. I’ve shown your boss…” he indicated Harding, “… my credentials.”

  “Next question, what are we going to call you?”

  “Ray.”

  “You don’t get it. Ken here is the Science Dude. Who are you?”

  “He’s the Invisible Man,” said Ken.

  “Nuh. He’s The Suit,” said Tina, facing him. “I can just imagine you wearing one in downtown Sydney, blending in with all the other suits walking up and down the footpath, going nowhere but around corners, totally invisible.”

  Ken laughed and, for the first time, Ray looked disconcerted.

  “But Tina, I am going somewhere.”

  “Not that we can tell.” And the name stuck.

  “Here’s the plan,” said Harding. “We drive down the exit road until we start detecting the gas, or as best we can guess it. Ahmed and I will back up a couple of hundred metres and set up in clean air. Ahmed will do BA Control. He and I will suit up and be ready to come in as a backup. I want lower explosive limit readings every couple of minutes, understand? If we have to come and get you, we need to know if it’s safe to drive in that shit, and we won’t drive into it if there’s an LEL reading. Take long duration tanks. You go down for one third of your air, and then turn around. You’ll use more air coming up that hill than going down.

  “Remember, this is a reconnaissance, a size-up. It might become a body recovery mission. We observe what we can, try to find the missing police crew and the miners who tried to get out.

  “Communications. There’s obviously no GRN out here. We’ll use VHF channel 50. Hart Ridge has their own network. We will not use that. We’ll make no attempt to monitor that. Understood?

  “Now, take a moment. Look at the size of that hole. We’re not going to finish this today.”