The Boy Who Would Rule the World

by Brian Toal

  CHAPTER ONE

  ONE

  August, 1991

  “It ain’t natural. That’s what I was telling you on the radio.” Frank yelled above the roar of two bulldozers working behind them, diesel smoke and dust clogging his words. “I thought something was strange yesterday when we were clearing the trees and the overburden. But today when we began to dig down, I knew for sure. This isn’t a rock outcrop. It’s a wall.”

  Charlie Rutherford leaned back and looked up at the angled rock face that blocked one side of the excavation. It rose above him, fifteen feet of exposed rock and a hundred feet long. Flat grey stone. Unremarkable in Northern Canada where bedrock is often close to the surface, except it wasn’t supposed to be here. The engineers that had planned the project, and the geologists that had assisted the surveyors all had agreed - clay and gravel deposits only - and the red flagging attached to wooden stakes that marched along the hillside above, marked their decision.

  “When did you find out about this?”

  “Well, as I was saying, yesterday when we were clearing the overburden we came across the first of it. You can see up there by the stakes, where it goes on into the hill. Thought it might be a rock outcrop and we might need to blast’ er.”

  “There’s not supposed to be any rock outcrops here. That’s why we chose this spot to come through the hill.”

  “Yeah well...” Frank wiped his hands across the sheen of his coveralls. The flap covering the zipper pulled wide as every inch of the material struggled to contain the beer-broadened mass beneath. Charlie was the Operations Manager - Frank’s boss’s boss. “I kept the guys working, knowing you want this part of the rail-line finished by the end of the month. But the deeper we go, the wider it gets.”

  Charlie took a couple steps forward, looking along the offending rock face. It ran at an angle, almost to the middle of the excavation. A smooth rock face blending into the hillside above. Beyond that, the men had continued to work, cutting back behind it to resume their planned attack on the remainder of the hill.

  Frank spoke from behind him. “I figured we could blast it. Then I got looking...well actually me and the guys got looking and we figured that...well, we figured we should give you a call"

  “Uh-huh.” Charlie wasn’t really paying attention. Whatever this was, he knew it was going to slow the work on this section of the rail-line by three or four days. Three or four days NorthCan didn’t have. Or at least he didn’t have. NorthCan was a Canadian mining company wholly owned by an American conglomerate out of Detroit, that had hit it big with one of the largest gold deposits discovered in Canada in recent years. After years long fights with environmentalists, Ministries of the Canadian government, local indigenous populations and others that just didn't like mining in general, they had won. And now they had big plans of getting it out of the ground as soon as they could, before any other stop-work legal papers could be filed. Detroit had urgent plans for this place - where Charlie would be returning at the end of the month. Back to board meetings and planning sessions. Planning sessions where he had better be able to report progress.

  “Well see...me and the guys we figure that...” Frank stopped, his eyes focused over Charlie’s shoulder. “Are those your kids?”

  With a frown, Charlie turned to face two young boys running across the broken earth and rock left behind from the bulldozers. As he watched, the two of them paused, waiting for one of the yellow machines to push its way past them, then shot across its wake. One of them with red hair to match the color and shade of Charlie’s, his skin burnt by the summer’s sun into a sea of freckles, jumped across the last remaining boulders to land at Charlie’s side. “What are you looking at Dad?”

  “I thought I told you two to stay in the truck.”

  “But Dad it’s too hot in there. You still haven’t got the air-conditioning fixed.”

  “And Todd’s worms are dying.” The other boy, tanned and dark, blue eyes looking out from under a jet-black mane, held up a cardboard milk carton stuffed with dirt. “We want to put them in the shade.”

  “Not much shade around here.”

  “But Dad it’s too hot in the truck. They’ll die.” Todd took the box from the other boy and stirred the dirt with his finger.

  “Well, you can’t stay here. There’s too much machinery working around here.”

  “How long are you going to be?”

  “I don’t know Todd. A while.”

  “Awe, Dad! You said you were going to take us fishing.”

  “And I will.” Charlie took the cardboard box from his son, feeling the temperature of the moist dirt inside. The other boy, a head shorter, raised himself up on his toes as Charlie pulled the dirt back with his fingers.

  “Are they still alive, Uncle Charlie?”

  A few inches down in the moist earth Charlie found a mass of squirming worms. “Yeah, Chris, they are still alive. Look....” He handed the box back to his son. “Give me a while longer. Then we’ll head straight down to the lake.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know, just stay here beside me and watch out for the machinery.”

  “Taking your boys fishing were ya?” Frank asked, making conversation.

  “Only one’s mine. The other is my nephew. He’s up here on vacation for a couple weeks.”

  “Well, if they’re into fishing you can’t beat Northern Ontario for that. Tourists pay a fortune to fly in here. There’s a couple of fishing lodges less than ten miles from here. I figure they’ll be a mite miffed when they hear you got the right to dig a big hole in their woodlot.”

  “If it wasn’t us. It’d be somebody else.”

  “I suppose. Havin’ to build a railway line to get the camp and equipment in would have slowed down most of the competition. But somebody’s got to get to it sometime.”

  “That’s right. So, what can we do about this rock outcrop?” Charlie turned his attention back to the granite slab running beside them. “I’m on a deadline here. Have we still got a blasting crew in camp?”

  “Well that’s the problem, Mr. Rutherford. We could blast it, but me and the boys think somebody made this.”

  “What?” Charlie looked across at the overweight crew-chief.

  Frank’s face broke into lines of worry. “That’s what I was telling ya, Mr. Rutherford. This rock outcrop. It’s not natural.”

  Charlie laughed. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because it’s got joins in it.”

  “Joins?”

  “Yeah. Lines through the rock. Like where blocks join together.”

  Charlie looked along the smooth granite slab, tilted at a slight angle into the hillside above, then back to the crew-chief’s name embroidered onto his coveralls. “Frank, we are three hundred miles north of anything that has been civilized - ever. Underneath us is the Canadian Shield. Oldest rock on the planet. It’s been bent and twisted and contorted and cracked into a million pieces over five billion years.” Charlie shook his head in dismissal. “Nobody ever built anything up here.”

  “Well, I’m not sure about that, Mr. Rutherford. It’s difficult to see from here. But down there a little further...” Frank pointed down the length of smooth stone. “You can see where the blocks join together. And further on, right at the end, there’s a corner. And those stones are cut at a right angle that would earn a stone-mason his paycheck.”

  Charlie stared at the crew-chief, noticing as his son and nephew turned, looking for the first time at the rock slab that towered above them. “Show me.” He muttered, keeping his voice as level as possible.

  The crew-chief turned, his work-boots crunching through the broken clay drying in the sun.

  “Aw
esome!” He heard Chris say from behind him. “Maybe some natives built it. Maybe it is where they buried their chiefs and weapons and all kinds of cool stuff.”

  “I doubt it.” Charlie couldn’t help but reply. What Frank said could not be true. They were literally in the middle of nowhere. All their equipment - trucks, bulldozers, food, sleeping trailers, everything - was brought in by rail. For a thousand miles east and west there was forest. To the north there were trees again, hundreds of miles of them up to the tree-line, then barren windswept tundra with the Arctic Ocean on the far side. To the south, it was the same. Hundreds of miles of prime forest. Pine, birch and poplar. With a road and a couple towns cut out of the middle of it about three hundred miles south of them. No one had ever civilized this area. Natives had traveled through it. Fur trappers had followed them. But no one had actually lived here - and certainly no one had ever built anything.

  Frank stopped in front of him and then ran one finger down the rock face in front of him. “Well, as I was saying Mr. Rutherford, me and the boys don’t think this is a rock outcrop. We think somebody built this thing. Here’s the joins I was telling you about.”

  Charlie stood in the dirt. A vertical crack less than half an inch wide ran up the rock face. A few feet higher, it terminated at a horizontal seam. That horizontal seam ran an equal distance to either side until it met two other vertical cracks. They in turn met another horizontal seam. Charlie took a few steps back, bumping into the two boys behind him. Then shading his eyes from the sunlight, he could see it. The entire rock face was crisscrossed with ruler-straight fractures. Straight lines - and one thing Charlie knew from years of excavating projects and road building - nature abhorred straight lines.

  ONE – TWO

  “I don’t care what your Dad says, I think it’s some Native thing.” Chris ran one hand over the smooth stone, both of the boys standing well back from Todd’s father, who now had four men clustered around him. “Maybe it’s a burial place, with weapons and gold and all kinds of stuff in there.”

  “The natives in North America didn’t build this sort of thing.” Todd had his head tilted back, studying the rock wall where it disappeared into the hillside above him.

  “Well somebody did, that Frank guy says these are stone blocks - and look you can see them.” Chris raised his arm, tracing the five-by-five squares of stone in the air with his finger.

  “Well, there may be another explanation. In Scotland there’s a long roadway that runs out under the sea made up of perfect octagonal blocks. Everybody thought some long-dead race had made them. But it turned out they were formed by a volcano when the molten rock hit the cold water.”

  “Yeah...but this isn’t a roadway. This is a....” Chris moved forward running his finger down one of the vertical cracks. “This is a building - and I bet it’s where the natives from a long, long time ago buried their chiefs.”

  Todd’s face was serious as he stepped forward beside his cousin, his mind working as he tried to recall what he had learned in school and from the books he had read on Native history. “I don’t think so. The natives in this part of North America didn’t build anything, because they were mostly nomadic. Besides we’re really far up North, I don’t think any native tribes actually lived here.”

  “Yeah right. How would you know?”

  “I do!” Todd looked down at his younger cousin. At thirteen Todd was a head taller than Chris and one grade ahead. Up until June, they had both attended the same school in Detroit, Michigan, but in two weeks, when both of them returned home, Todd would be moving on to Junior High. A challenge he was looking forward to immensely as, unlike most of his friends, his younger cousin included, he actually liked school. Enjoyed the reading assignments and math exercises, geography studies and history lessons - of which he was doing his best to recall now. “Natives built things out of wood. You know long-houses, totem poles and tepees, stuff like that - they didn’t build big stone walls.”

  “Well, who did then?”

  “Got me. I don’t know.”

  Behind them a bulldozer ground to a halt and the engine died. Moments later, two empty dump trucks pulled up beside the bulldozer and the drivers also shut down. Further away the track-hoe working at the far end of the wide trench stopped as well, the big bucket on the end of a long, cantilevered arm resting on the ground between the two wide treads.

  “What are they doing?”

  Todd watched as the men from the dump trucks and the bulldozer operator gathered together and then, with their lunch boxes under their arms, they walked across the broken ground towards his father. “It’s lunch time. I guess they’re going to have lunch with my Dad.”

  “That’s no good! Now we’ll never get to go fishing.”

  Todd shrugged. “Maybe after lunch. We can still get a few hours in before dinner.

  “If your Dad doesn’t need to stay here, until they blow this thing up...” Chris looked up at Todd, his blue eyes wide. “Todd you think they’ll have to blow it up? They need to make everything straight for the railway your Dad is building - right?” Chris slapped the rock wall beside him. “We should stay here! That would be coolest. If your dad’s going to blow it up, then we could see what’s inside.”

  Todd looked down and met his younger cousin’s excited gaze. Chris’ eyes were bright with excitement, his deep tan and jet-black hair exaggerating the blue within. Todd’s mom called them his ‘lady killers’ and said Chris would never lack for partners at the dance clubs. Although he and Chris had only been to two school dances and neither of them had danced with any girls. Not that it seemed to have mattered as the majority of the boys had just hung out by the pop stand, watching the known couples dance and waiting for the more aggressive girls to yank them onto the dance floor. He expected dances at Junior High would be different, but he couldn’t quite predict how. “Chris...” He said calmly, leaving the dance-floor behind “...if they decide to blow this up it’ll take them days to drill the holes and set the charges.”

  “Awe...really?”

  “Yes. First, they got to find out where the fracture points are. Then they got to drill down to just the right depth so the explosives break the rock up into manageable pieces. If they don’t, sometimes the explosives will just...” Todd stopped as Chris moved away, his hand idly tracing the rock wall.

  Todd looked back over his shoulder to where his father stood with a sizable group of men surrounding him, his red beard and red hair visible through the clump of shoulders. “Hold on Chris. I got to talk to my Dad.”

  A wall of coveralls enclosing the wide rear ends of dump-truck drivers, bulldozer operators and other equipment handlers blocked their way as the two of them turned back to speak with Todd’s father. The whole crew had shut down their machinery and the vast majority were grouped around Todd’s father, lunch boxes between their feet, as they voiced their opinions to NorthCan management or just each other. Chris and Todd paused just outside the circle, the wide backs of the drivers and their legs-apart stance, momentarily stopping their advance.

  “Damn thing has to be ten thousand years old.” One of the drivers was saying, “look at the amount of over-burden and soil that have accumulated above where we scraped it clean.”

  “NorthCan will need to get permission, before I’ll touch it.” A bulldozer operator spoke up. “I was working for a company down south and we tore into an old Indian graveyard. The foreman and the company got a fine, but the government boys were thinking of charging us too.”

  “Doubt if it is native. It’s pretty big.”

  Todd could see his father standing beside Frank on the far side of the circle, and he moved around behind the men, hoping to push his way through closer to where his father stood.

  “That blasting crew is pretty good.” Another man was saying as he and Chris squeezed between the group of men and the rock face. “Bet they could drill a couple holes right at the corners of one of those blocks and pop one out with no trouble.”

  “Round the sid
e, it looks like you might be able to get in without blasting. There’s a good-sized crack between a couple of the blocks - maybe from settling or something. Somebody small might be able to squeeze their way in...”

  Todd felt Chris’ hand pull on his arm.

  “...I can’t do no fancy work, cause I got the big bucket on. But I gave the blocks on either side a nudge and managed to move them apart a bit. Looks like it goes in a fair ways.”

  “We should get Henry back there with the back-hoe. Maybe he’d be able to pull them apart.”

  Chris pulled again at Todd’s arm and Todd nodded, indicating he had heard. “Just a sec,” he whispered. “I got to talk to my Dad.”

  He squeezed by a couple more men, then circled around behind the others to stand just behind Frank.

  “No, I don’t want to shut the project down.” His father was saying. “Keep the men working on the rest of the cut. We need the gravel for the rail-bed anyway...”

  “Excuse me.” Todd said politely, reaching up to tap on Frank’s shoulder. Frank looked back at him and then stepped aside.

  “...I’ll be in touch with NorthCan in Detroit and we’ll get this thing sorted out. The problem is, today is Friday. I won’t get any decisions made until Monday and I want to keep at least the gravel coming...”

  “Dad?”

  His father stopped speaking and looked in his direction.

  “Chris and I are going to take a look around and find some shade for these.” Todd held up the box of worms.

  Charlie looked down at his watch. “Okay. I’ll probably be here for another hour, then we’ll try and go fishing - okay buddy?” He gave Todd a smile. A smile Todd had seen many times before. It was the sorry-buddy smile. Sorry-buddy, I couldn’t make it to your baseball game. Sorry-buddy, I couldn’t make it to your school play. Sorry-buddy, but I got to work a thousand miles away from Detroit all summer - want to come? Which Todd and his mother had done and it had been an okay summer too - not as good as hanging out with his friends back in Detroit perhaps - but, it had been different and something he would be able to tell them about when he got back. However, he knew he and Chris would not be going fishing this afternoon - and maybe that was okay too.