8.4

by Peter Hernon

  “JEFF, great to see you.”

  Booker had hurried over to a helicopter as it landed on the mine’s gravel parking lot. It took off quickly as soon as Jeff Burke was on the ground and his equipment unloaded. Booker pumped his friend’s hand.

  Burke had arrived straight from the ORNL. He came bearing gifts. “I’ve got Neutron,” he said. “Everything you asked for.”

  The small robot was covered in plastic sheeting. So were the two boxes of explosive charges that had also been shipped from Oak Ridge. Booker planned to use them to seal up the mine before the bomb was detonated.

  Booker couldn’t help smiling. Burke had fitted Neutron with an oversized football helmet. It was bright orange, the color of his favorite college team, the University of Tennessee. His alma mater. It even had a big UT logo on the side.

  “I couldn’t find a miner’s helmet big enough to go over the actuator housing,” Burke said. “I wanted to protect it. This was the best I could come up with.”

  “And so you just happened to find that helmet,” Booker said.

  “What can I say. It fit,” Burke said, grinning.

  Booker introduced Atkins and Elizabeth Holleran to his old friend. The president and Steve Draper came over to join them.

  Using the robot’s control panel, Booker put Neutron through several maneuvers, which included manipulating the robot’s powerful hydraulic “human extender” arms to lift the MK/B-61. The demonstration impressed Doc Murray. Neutron easily carried the four-foot-long, cylindrically shaped weapon.

  “Not bad,” Murray said. “I can see why you want that little guy to come along with us.”

  Booker then turned to a discussion of the arming-and-firing procedure he planned to follow with the MK/B-61.

  It was Elizabeth’s first good look at the weapon and its gleaming, stainless-steel housing. Like Atkins, she was struck by its small size. She’d expected something much larger for a one-megaton nuclear bomb. Atkins was right. He’d compared it to an elongated trash can.

  Ross was among those who listened, hanging on Booker’s every word. They were shielded from the flanking hillsides by a double row of military trucks. Several more squads of troops had moved into the woods that sloped up from the mine. There’d been a few shots earlier, but for the time being all firing had ceased.

  Booker used sheets ripped from a yellow legal pad to sketch out the bomb’s firing system.

  Atkins took notes as he tried to keep warm. The sun had broken through the gloom, but it wasn’t enough to take the chill out of the air. He tried to concentrate and stay awake. After the trip from Texas and now this, he needed sleep, craved it. Even half an hour would have been a blessing. When this was over, he was going to lock himself up in a hotel room with Elizabeth and not come out for days.

  Booker’s plan was to use a time-delay fuse, which he’d set once they were in position in the mine. There was less risk of error or mechanical breakdown that way, he explained. The firing signal from the timer would release an electrical charge stored in the capacitors, which would set off the detonators. That blast, in turn, would ignite the high explosives that encased the nuclear pit.

  The mechanics of the time-delay fuse were fairly simple: the electrical charge from the capacitors would open two normally closed contact circuits and close two other circuits that were normally open. The process would send an electrical pulse across a bridge wire, triggering the detonators.

  “How much time are you giving yourself to get out?” Ross asked.

  “Four hours,” Booker said.

  “Is that enough?”

  Atkins wondered the same thing. Based on what Doc Murray had seen in the mine, the sooner they got out of there, the better. Four hours didn’t give them much leeway in case something went wrong.

  “It better be,” Booker said. “Once the timer is set, you can’t turn it off without going back. I don’t think we’ll want to do that. For that matter, I don’t think we’ll get the chance.”

  During their descent, Booker would set explosives at key points in the mine. They’d be timed to go off exactly one minute before the blast. The plastic charges were designed to seal off all four shafts to prevent any radioactive material from venting into the atmosphere.

  “I’ll use gelatin dynamite, a mixture of nitroglycerin and sodium nitrate,” Booker said. “It’s incredibly dense, highly stable, and water resistant. It makes a hell of an explosion.”

  “How do you plan to detonate it?” Atkins asked.

  “With fuse tubing and a blaster,” Booker said. “I wouldn’t risk running wire for the weapon, but I don’t see any other alternative for the explosive charges. They’ve got to be connected to a fusing network.” He explained how he’d use a special nonelectrical or “non-1” fuse that consisted of plastic tubing filled with explosives. About the size of the clear tubing used in aquarium tanks, non-1 didn’t emit sparks that could ignite dangerous gases. It had long been a popular detonation device in mines.

  “We’ll use a PAL arming system for the bomb,” the physicist went on. The letters, he explained, stood for Permissive Action Link, which consisted of a code that had to be set by punching in the right sequence of numbers before an electromagnetic lock would open, arming the weapon.

  “We’ve come a long way with PALs,” said Booker. “The coding can be transmitted automatically once a missile has been launched. On this shot, we’re going to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  Booker programmed the weapon with an eight-digit number randomly selected from a coding device a presidential aide carried in the “black box,” actually a battered, black leather briefcase. When they were ready to “arm enable” the weapon underground, Booker would punch in the same sequence of numbers.

  For safety redundancy, they also used a fail-safe color coding system. Booker turned a red arming switch on the side of the bomb’s hard case. Later, in the mine, he’d flip a corresponding green switch, which would arm the weapon.

  An array of monitoring devices would be set up near ground zero. Electrical cables would be run from the equipment four miles to the red shack, an Army trailer, where Guy Thompson and other seismologists would track the explosion and its seismic effects. Thompson was already there, setting up.

  Everyone would be withdrawn from the area two hours before the bomb was detonated. Two helicopters would be kept on standby with their engines running, ready to fly the party to safety as soon as they emerged from the mine.

  “I’ll be waiting for you when you get out of there,” Ross promised.

  “I beg to differ, Mister President,” said his Secret Service chief, Belleau. “You can’t be anywhere near here once they arm that weapon.”

  “I’m afraid I outrank you on this one, Phil,” the president said in a soft, firm voice. He turned to the team that was going to make the descent. He shook hands with each of them, first Elizabeth, then Atkins, and the others.

  “I’ll be praying for you all,” he said. He looked right at Belleau. “And when you come out of that mine, I’ll be here.”

  DOC Murray laid the equipment out on the ground. Elizabeth, Atkins, and the others had gathered around him. There was time for only one safety session. So Atkins and the others listened to Murray as they’d never listened to anyone in their lives.

  Murray picked up an apparatus that looked like a small oxygen tank. It was equipped with a mask.

  “We call this a Drag-B,” he said, demonstrating how the tank was strapped over the shoulders. The face piece slipped over the head like a scuba mask. “The full name is a Drager BG-174 Long Duration Closed Circuit Breathing Apparatus. It’s the most important piece of equipment you’re going to carry. The canister holds forty pounds of air, enough for four hours. It’s got a scrubber that takes out the carbon monoxide. If I tell you to put the mask on, get it over your face as fast as you can. Your life will depend on it. You’ve got to know how to do this in the dark. We’ll run a little practice drill once we get down into the mine.”

&nbs
p; Murray may have looked country, tall and rawboned with a mountain twang to his voice, but Atkins had found out from Draper that he had a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla School of Mines.

  Murray spent several minutes with each of them, demonstrating how to get the face mask on. Atkins had to try twice before he did it properly. Elizabeth got it right the first time.

  “The main thing is to put it on as soon as I tell you,” Murray said. “You don’t want to wait for smoke. Carbon monoxide could already be present in the air. You won’t see it or smell it.”

  Murray got them outfitted with hard hats and lamps. The five-pound battery for the lamp hung from a web belt. The lamp itself was attached to the helmet. Murray and Atkins would carry state-of-the-art dry foam sprayers in case they had to fight fires. The forty-pound canisters strapped to their backs. Each also would carry a hundred-foot coil of rope.

  “Remember that the air shafts and skip shaft are your primary escape routes,” Murray said. “Once we go below ground, you’ll see they’re all marked with green reflectors.”

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen down there?” Weston asked.

  Murray didn’t hesitate.

  “Fire,” he said. “I’ve been in three fires in coal mines. I don’t want to go through another one. I’m all out of luck.”

  NEAR KALER, KENTUCKY

  JANUARY 20

  9:15 A.M.

  LAUREN MITCHELL WAS SHOCKED TO SEE HIM. AT first she wasn’t sure it was the same man. He’d aged, but he looked and moved with the easy, fluid grace of someone much younger. The face was creased and heavily lined, but the real difference, the detail that focused her attention, were the eyes. She remembered how his blue, clear eyes had blazed out from his coal-blackened face when he came up out of the mine on that day so many years ago. His eyes were different. They’d lost some of their sparkle.

  Lauren approached Murray as he lit an unfiltered Camel.

  “You won’t remember me, but I was here twenty-three years ago,” she said. “You helped bring up my husband’s body.”

  Murray, who’d been staring at the ground, quickly looked up. He hadn’t mentioned the disaster to the scientists, figuring they probably already knew about it, and if they didn’t, why give them another reason to lose their nerve.

  “His name was Bob Mitchell,” Lauren said.

  “One of the best foremen in the business,” Murray said, taking off his helmet. “I met Bob once or twice. He was a fine man.”

  He didn’t know what else to say to the woman, who stood there smiling at him with her thick hair blowing in the wind. It had been the worst mine disaster he’d ever seen. More than forty men trapped a thousand feet below ground by a methane explosion, sealed off in a tunnel and slowly suffocating as their air gave out. He’d led a rescue team, one of the lucky ones. Three men from another squad had been killed in a cave-in.

  “I never thanked you for bringing him out,” Lauren said. “It’s a little late, but I want you to know I’ve never forgotten and never stopped praying for you.”

  Murray took her hand and held it. “I wouldn’t mind a few more of those prayers.”

  Lauren said, “This is going to be bad, isn’t it?”

  Murray hesitated before he said, “These people have no idea what it’s like down there.”

  When it was almost time, Lauren watched as Murray helped them slip into their fire-resistant bunker gear—thick leather overcoats, pants, steel-toed boots and gloves, hard hats. They strapped on their air tanks. Each of them also lugged a twenty-pound tank of dry foam for fighting fires. A coil of rope was attached to their web belts.

  Booker carried the bomb’s fusing components, capacitors, and timer in a canvas backpack. The remote control for Neutron—about the size of a laptop—was strapped around his neck. He punched a few buttons and worked the joysticks. The robot easily picked up the bomb, cradling it in its special alloy mechanical arms. It rolled onto the steel elevator cage that would take them down the man shaft to the eight-hundred-foot level. A large spool of non-1 fuse was attached to its back.

  “I’m gonna have to get me one of those,” Murray said, smiling. “How much does that machine cost?”

  “About $10 million,” Booker said. “If you get us through this, I’ll see if I can get you a deal.”

  THE elevator cage had just reached the four-hundred-foot level when the ground moved—a sharp horizontal tremor that made the cage sway on its steel cable. A sprinkling of dust fell on them. They all had their hard hat lanterns turned on.

  “Better get used to it,” Murray said, gripping the side of the cage for balance. “We’re probably going to have some more of those.”

  Atkins knew he was right. Shortly before they’d made their descent, he’d spoken with Guy Thompson by radio. The most recent seismic data showed the fault was averaging ten or eleven mild shocks an hour and that they were building in intensity.

  Murray carried a multigas detector. The size of a pocket calculator, the device was calibrated to detect such gases as methane, carbon monoxide, and oxygen. It emitted a beep and flashed a red light when it registered dangerous levels.

  Murray checked the readings. “It’s showing about 3.6 percent. That’s up a little since the last time I went down. We’re all right as long as it doesn’t hit 5 percent.”

  Atkins was fairly sure the repeated tremors were responsible for the methane. The powerful shaking had probably opened up a pocket of the gas trapped in the ground. As soon as they’d started down the elevator shaft, he’d noticed another gas, hydrogen sulfide. He remembered the smell, the faint odor of rotten eggs, from the last time he’d gone into the Golden Orient.

  He asked Murray if he’d ever encountered anything like that before.

  “Not down in a mine,” he said. “It sure as hell stinks, but I don’t think it’s gonna kill us.”

  Atkins figured the foul-smelling gas was escaping from deep underground pockets, much like the methane.

  There were seven of them. Murray, Walt Jacobs, Elizabeth, Atkins, Weston, Wren, and Booker, who walked behind Neutron. The robot had glided along to the mine entrance, the wheels adjusting automatically to the changes in grade. It moved easily even weighed down with the bomb and the heavy roll of fuse.

  The party carried two radios to stay in touch with the people on the surface.

  “I feel like I’m going on one of my digs,” Elizabeth said, shifting the weight of the two heavy canisters on her back. “I could use a couple grad students to help carry this stuff.”

  It was a feeble joke meant to cheer up Walt Jacobs. The man had looked feverish ever since they’d arrived at the mine. His face was pale. He glanced back and smiled at her, and she sensed he was putting on a brave front. They’d just started, and she was already worried he wouldn’t make it.

  So was Atkins. Jacobs looked physically weak, unsteady on his feet. He’d also been concerned about Elizabeth, but after watching how easily she carried her packs, he realized she was in better shape than any of them.

  At the eight-hundred-foot level, they left the elevator cage. It was the place where the shaft had collapsed. It was totally blocked by fallen rock. They got their first look at the deep room-and-pillar cuts that tank-sized machines known as continuous miners had carved out of the rock face. They were on Level 8.

  Atkins found the layout just as Doc Murray had described it. Each level was comprised of a gridwork of three or four parallel tunnels with crossovers that connected them at right angles. As many as twenty-five “rooms” opened onto each side of the thousand-foot-long tunnels. Only the central or main tunnel connected to the air shaft and skip shaft. The air shaft was at one end. The skip shaft, which had once carried the coal to the top, was at the other.

  The tunnel’s roof and walls were covered with a thick layer of white powder. Atkins had remembered that detail from his first visit.

  “That’s rock dust,” Murray explained. “They mix it with water and spray it on
the walls to keep down the coal dust. It reduces the risk of explosions. Dust can be volatile.”

  Booker placed his first explosive charges near the elevator cage, chipping out holes in the shaft for five sticks of plastic explosive. He attached the non-1 fusing, crimping it onto the explosives with a special tool, and began to unreel the fuse from the spool attached to Neutron’s back.

  They advanced down a tunnel single file. Murray led the way, playing a spotlight on the walls and roof, checking for any sign of fresh cracks.

  “Stay as close to the center of the tunnel as you can,” he said. “The roof supports are better in the middle.” The supports consisted of hundreds of steel bolts drilled up into the ceiling, each of them four feet long.

  Looking behind a few minutes later to check on everyone’s progress, Murray noticed that Weston and Wren had drifted over toward the side of the tunnel. In the disorienting, absolute darkness, it was easy to get out of line, even with a headlamp.

  “Hold it,” Murray told them. He’d noticed a thin crack in the ceiling. “Get back here behind me.”

  When the two men were safely out of the way, he jabbed at the crack with the sharp end of an eight-foot-long crowbar he carried. A sheet of rock about five feet wide and an inch thick crashed down, throwing up a cloud of white dust.

  “Hope you got the idea,” Murray said. “Stay… in… the… middle of the tunnel. The shoring along the ribs over on the side wall is pretty poor. I’m noticing a lot of cracks.”

  With the stop it took them fifteen minutes to advance about five hundred feet to the end of the tunnel. Murray led them into the air shaft. Thick, heavy sheets of plastic covered the opening to the shaft.

  “That’s a fire curtain,” Murray said.” A fire breaks out, that’ll give you a little protection. Maybe a couple minutes. They’re mainly used to channel fresh air or to help seal off a tunnel from poisonous gas.” He grinned. “Like I said, it’ll buy you a couple minutes.”

  The air shaft sloped down at a steep incline. It was possible to walk on the grade, which had been designed to serve the double purpose of providing an intake for fresh air and an escape route in an emergency.