Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  His next words came out a different shaft.

  "Right now, just about every human being with a badge in the whole state of West Virginia and Ohio — oh, and the state water patrol, too, maybe even the FBI — is out there beating the bushes looking for you — in the wrong place. When they don't find you there, they'll come here. I left a voicemail with directions." T.J. paused. "I'd estimate you have less than half an hour to get in your car, beat feet to the Triple C Airport, hop in that Learjet sitting on the runway gassed up and waiting, and disappear out of the lives of this county forever."

  "If the police know about us, why didn't they come here in the first—?

  "You want me to tell you the whole long story or do you want to haul ass out of here? Me, I got all the time in the world. You, on the other hand …"

  Suddenly, the motor on the piece of equipment that was sticking out the front of the shaft next to the far wall sprang to life. It rumbled like a freight train inside a kettle drum — stunningly, disorientingly loud for somebody not used to it.

  "Don't worry, the engine on this scoop won't set off an explosion, but this Bic lighter …"

  "You're bluffing!"

  "Think so? Fine. You got a flashlight in your hand, a dumb civilian flashlight that'd never be allowed in a mine. I'm standing here in the dark right in front of you. Turn that flashlight on and shoot me. Or don't. Just stand there, trying to decide what to do — while every second the cavalry is getting closer and closer."

  The pregnant silence settled around them again, broken only by the rumble of the scoop's engine, the sound echoing off the walls until it seemed to come from everywhere. That's why T.J. had started it, to dump noise into the silence, confuse and distract.

  Then he called out to Bailey.

  "Bailey, honey, I want you to know that seeing you painting that day on your front porch — seems like a lifetime ago, now — was one of the best things that ever happened to me. If these are the last few seconds I'm going to draw breath on this earth, I want you to know that I love you like a daughter."

  His voice actually cracked. Hadn't meant for it to, but it was good it did. When he spoke again, the steel was back in his words.

  "Now you, tough guy. Call. My. Bluff!"

  T.J. let the rumble of the motor fill the empty silence. After he let it drag out for what seemed like a minute, maybe two, but which was probably no more than thirty seconds, he spoke again. Ran bent over three shafts down so the words would issue from a different place.

  "You won't — because you're a coward and cowards are always afraid to die. Now put your weapons in a pile way over there in the back corner room and untie those girls. Move slow and careful. One spark of static electricity — that's all it'll take — and where you're standing will look like Hiroshima after first pass of the Enola Gay."

  "You know this isn't over." Jacko ground out the words, sounded like gravel in his throat. "I will find you. I will come for you and I will—"

  "Put a sock in it. You don't scare me. I'm a Marine, Special Forces. Wimps like you … snack food."

  "You are a dead man! Now, as you stand there. A dead man! You understand."

  "Tick. Tick. Tick."

  All the men looked at the Beast. T.J. had only once in his life seen such raging hatred on a human face, and that face hadn't been human at the time. The Beast looked at his watch, then met the gaze of his men.

  He said nothing, just turned and walked to the back corner of the hollowed-out space at the mine face and set his weapon down on the floor, nodded to the others and they did the same.

  "Now the other weapons you think I don't know about. Backups. You first, tough guy. The shoulder holster and the ankle." The Beast unloaded two more firearms onto the pile, the others made offerings as well, though T.J. was sure a couple of them were still holding out. "Open those coats, gentlemen. Pull up the pants legs." Three more firearms were added to the pile.

  The men went to the hostages, cut their bonds and roughly ripped the duct tape off their mouths. The girls cried out in pain. Then they all ran to Bailey — T.J. couldn't have said why — and huddled around her where she stood in front of the end of the conveyor belt. Jacko reached out and grabbed the girl whose punk-cut short hair was colored like a tropical fish.

  "Christina, you stay with me for a little while." He held her between him and the mine shafts, unwilling to stand unarmed and unprotected.

  Jeni, the blonde girl they'd found in the casino, was the last and she paused in front of Bailey, stood looking at her.

  "Delay?" she said.

  Bailey sucked in a breath.

  "Yes!" she cried, reached out and enveloped Jeni in a hug.

  Before T.J. could order Jacko to let the girl go, there was a noise — and it wasn't another piece of mining equipment he'd cranked up. It was the elevator descending from the cavern above. No one spoke. When the elevator reached the bottom, the door swung open. Dobbs! A white-haired man stood behind him and shoved. Dobbs stumbled and fell to the ground.

  T.J. saw the gun the same time Jacko saw it.

  "Vinny, put that thing away!" Jacko yelled.

  "He said he knew the ladies. I said they could watch him die."

  The man lifted the gun then and pointed it at Dobbs.

  "No," roared the Beast. "Don't—"

  Bailey cried out, "Dobbs!"

  A shot rang out, the roar of a cannon in the confined space.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  T.J. was maybe a minute away from pulling the noose on his trap!

  It took only seconds for the whole thing to fall apart.

  The man holding the gun on Dobbs looked up quizzically before he crumpled to the ground, blood squirting in arterial bursts from the hole in the front of his neck.

  T.J. had intended to take the weaponless kidnappers hostage as soon as he could pry that last girl out of Jacko's clutches. Or shoot the men where they stood if they tried to resist. He was fully prepared to do either.

  But in an instant, they scattered like roaches on a kitchen floor. He didn't dare fire at Jacko, even though he let the girl go when he raced toward the pile of guns. He did fire at the blonde man, who'd dropped to the ground, and missed. And at the black man and heard him cry out, wounded, not dead.

  Then T.J. called out to Bailey.

  "Boardwalk! Run!" praying she'd remember Dobbs's description of the layout of a coal mine.

  The instant his shot rang out, he saw Dobbs leap up and dodge into the Broadway shaft. After that, it was utter pandemonium. The world was alive with gunfire, rattling, ricocheting bullets flying everywhere. And with screaming — the girls either scared or hit, T.J. couldn't tell which. As soon as the gunmen reached their weapons, they began firing indiscriminately into the shafts.

  T.J. crouched behind the edge of the coal pillar as bullets knocked out hunks of coal all around him.

  "Kill them all," Jacko roared in rage. "Not one left alive."

  T.J.'d seen a continuous miner sitting behind the coal pillar in cross shaft #79, halfway between the belt line and Broadway. He ran to it, bent over like an old man with a walker, climbed into the seat, hit the beam of his headlamp just for an instant to light up the dashboard and cranked the machine to life. Its motor emitted a rumble twice as loud as the scoop that sat idling three shafts over. T.J. needed all the distractions he could get, so he shoved down the lever that turned on the revolving blades on the boom sticking out the front of the piece of equipment, vicious whirling knives — like the propeller on a boat — that cut through coal like butter and could turn a human body instantly into a Slurpee. Then he put the miner in gear and got out of the seat. The big machine with blades whirring out in front began to move ponderously down past the coal pillar and out into the Broadway shaft. Hopefully, it would provide cover for Dobbs, who knew how to avoid getting killed by it. Bullets pinged off the machine. As he'd hoped, the kidnappers assumed somebody had to be driving the thing and they were determined to take him out.

  T.J. tu
rned then and headed in the opposite direction. Spray-painted in white on the back side of every coal pillar in that cross shaft was the number 79. Which meant that the front of the coal mine — and their only way out of here now — was 78 cross shafts south.

  The plan T.J. was making on the fly was to gather up Bailey and the girls somewhere along the Boardwalk shaft. Bailey would go there, take with her as many of the girls as had survived the barrage of gunfire. Seven girls, seven kidnapped teenagers! He had figured three or four, never that many. He trusted that Bailey would remember the location of Boardwalk, that it was the shaft on the left of Main Street, the shaft with the conveyor belt. She'd laughed at the Monopoly names. She had to remember that!

  Once he found the girls, T.J. would lead them in a zigzagging route south, dodging out of sight behind the plastic curtains that hung between the coal pillars to direct the flow of air when the fan was on. He hoped that when the gunmen running down the shafts got to the first cross shaft … and realized all the shafts were connected, a maze of them out there in the darkness, they'd give up and leave. But in truth, he had no faith they'd show good judgment. They'd seen he was bluffing, and now Jacko surely figured the whole thing had been a con — including the part about the approaching armada of police officers, the only part of the elaborate story that was true. They'd hang in, try to find and kill their prey, not daring to leave all these witnesses behind.

  Gunshots continued to ring out. The kidnappers had moved down into the shafts now, blasting with automatic weapons, lethal ricocheting bullets. The barrage of gunfire made it impossible for T.J. to return fire. They would kill anybody they found, any girl who fell behind … but the girls could move fast, like baby rabbits. They were small, wouldn't have as much trouble as the men were having with the low ceilings.

  And the mine was a big, long, dark place where T.J. felt at home and where the men following him were clueless. He'd win a game of cat and mouse here. There were eight shafts leading longways down the mine toward an exit they didn't even know was there. Only four kidnappers remained, one of them wounded. They couldn't cover all the shafts, and the way they were shooting, they'd soon run out of ammo. He'd bide his time, pick them off one by one.

  But first he had to find the girls!

  When he finally got to the Boardwalk shaft, one of the kidnappers with an automatic weapon was lumbering down it, spraying the air in front of him with a hail of bullets. Bailey might have brought the girls here but she couldn't have stayed.

  So where had they gone?

  T.J. couldn't protect them if he couldn't find them! He had a headlamp — light. The girls had nothing. The girls would be just as lost as their pursuers!

  … unless Bailey remembered Dobbs's description of a coal mine, recalled the grid of numbered cross shafts, used it to her advantage. If she did, they had a chance. If she didn't, they'd get hopelessly lost, double back, stumble into the line of fire and the gunmen would mow them down.

  There was only one way for T.J. to help them now. He had to do whatever he could to distract the gunmen, keep them busy, give Bailey a chance to lead the girls away.

  But the darkness itself would soon become the enemy. The light from the face would fade quickly the deeper they went into the mine. Soon, there would be nothing but darkness all around, a profound darkness hard for the human mind to countenance, the utter sightlessness of one born blind. Only someone who'd been inside a coal mine could understand the power of the horror that kind of darkness produced. Eventually, the girls would run deep enough into the mine to encounter it, a blackness where they would have to feel their way along.

  Their pursuers had flashlights. The psychological advantage of that was incalculable. With light in your hands, you could chase away the shadows. With light in your hands, the oppression of the darkness could be held at bay. With light in your hands, you were the master, you were in charge.

  But with no light at all, the darkness became a sea of ink, drowning you. Darkness that profound was disorienting. Even with your feet on the ground, or crawling on all fours, you could experience vertigo with no light reference points. He prayed Bailey wouldn’t panic, race off with the girls down the shafts in a madness of flight, deeper and deeper until the darkness overtook them.

  As long as they could see the light from the face, even if it was only a distant spark … they could orient themselves, know where they were going, where they'd come from, keep moving around the grid, stay hidden. And he'd turned on the lights in the front of the mine when he came in, so there would be light ahead. But LHOM #2 was so deep there was a space in between the front where he had come in and the face where they had come in that there was no light at all. Total, absolute blackness. If Bailey and the girls ran that far, with no light behind or in front, they'd become paralyzed, unable to go forward or back, huddled together, afraid to move. They would be like a deer in the headlights in the glow of a flashlight beam then, unable to run away.

  T.J. could only protect the girls now by becoming a target, goad the gunmen into firing until they'd emptied their automatic weapons. With only handguns left, he would pick them off, one by one. Sitting ducks, they were, with flashlights in their hands. T.J. would stalk them and kill them all.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  In the silence that followed the gunshot, Bailey froze, believing that Dobbs was dead. Then she saw the gunman collapse and heard T.J. call out "Boardwalk!" Grabbing Jeni's hand, she covered the few steps past the belt line, snatched up what was lying on it and headed for the shaft entrance on the left. She ducked into it and ran as fast as she could — bent at the waist — down it.

  Behind her, the kidnappers were scrambling to get their weapons. She and the girls had to make it all the way to a cross shaft where they could duck out of sight before the shooting started. Shorter and smaller, it was easier for them to run crouched over than it was for the men chasing them. A flashlight beam shot out of the darkness behind them and a bullet flew by Bailey's face so close she could feel the air rearrange itself around it. She dropped to the ground, crawling, crying out in an urgent whisper, "Come on, this way."

  The girls behind her stumbled, fell, too, and crawled frantically.

  Bailey reached the cross shaft and dived behind the coal pillar. A flashlight beam swung back and forth in the shaft behind her. Searching. When it swung away from where she crouched, she leaped out and grabbed the girls still crawling and scrambling and yanked and shoved them behind the pillar.

  An automatic weapon of some kind spewed gunfire down the shaft along with the light, sweeping back and forth with it. One girl was lagging behind. The girl with the brown braid got her feet tangled up in the long skirt of her evening gown and tripped. When she staggered to her feet, a bullet tore into her. She flew forward, blood spewing out her mouth, and collapsed into the dirt.

  "Rayna!" one of the other girls cried out.

  Bailey turned away instantly, grabbed Jeni's hand. "Follow me. Hurry."

  She ran in a duckwalking crouch down the cross shaft to a piece of plastic sheeting stretched all the way across — iridescent orange, not lettuce green— shoved it aside, herded the girls through the opening, then shoved it back in place and led them down the cross shaft to the next large shaft, knowing the gunman would be right behind them. Peeking out around the pillar of coal, she saw no flashlight beam in this shaft so she dashed across it, ran down the cross shaft to the next curtain and leapt behind it.

  They had to find T.J.! And he had directed her to Boardwalk. She knew where it was — the shaft on the left of the belt line shaft called Main Street. But that's where the gunman was. They couldn't go that way. She had to lead the girls in the opposite direction, off into the maze of shafts. Maybe they'd be able to double back and find T.J.

  As soon as the last girl crawled through the opening, Bailey replaced the curtain and ran to the next shaft, saw no flashlight, but instead of racing down the cross shaft, she turned right and ran down the main shaft, past one cross shaft, tw
o, three, four, then she dived behind a coal pillar, yanking the girls around it, too, and sat where she was, panting, listening to their whimpering and labored breathing.

  "Shhhh," she commanded, and the whimpering ceased.

  Somewhere in the darkness, she heard an engine rumble, the sound echoing and pounding, directionless. T.J. had started some piece of equipment. Then she heard the grinding, whirring of the spinning head and knew he had cranked the continuous miner.

  What should they do now?

  Continue to run?

  Hide here?

  Try to double back and find T.J. on Boardwalk?

  She ached to find T.J.! He'd protect them. He was a coal miner!

  But no matter how much she yearned to be "protected," it didn't make sense to chance running into the gunman on the way to the Boardwalk shaft, and by now, the gunmen had likely forced T.J. away from it, too.

  It was always possible they would stumble upon Dobbs — she refused to believe that any of the bursts of gunfire she'd heard had cut him or T.J. down. That was happy talk, though. Reality still in the husk, as T.J. would put it, was that they were on their own. But they had their own ace. The Sugar Cube Coal Mine, which she could vividly picture in her mind — with its lengthwise shafts and crossways breaks and lettuce leaf curtains. She could picture where she was going, would know how to zigzag — the cross shafts were numbered so she could double back. The gunmen were big, hulking men trying to run bent over and shoot at the same time. If she was careful, she and the girls could stay one step ahead.

  They had to keep moving — which was good because it allowed her to give in to the terror bursting in her chest and obey the accompanying command to run!

  "Hold hands and stay with me."

  And so they ran. There was no destination, no to. Only the urgent from that sent them scrambling off into the darkness. Bailey had no intention of trying to lead the girls all the way out the front of the mine. That awful forever-darkness lay between them and where T.J. had come in. So she stayed where she could see light.