by JE Gurley
“There’s a place to rest a little farther down the tunnel,” Eve said.
With their choices dwindling, they continued down the tunnel and entered a chamber created by widening the tunnel.
“What’s this?” Alan asked, shining his light about.
“It was a ready room,” Eve explained. “They used it to store drilling equipment, carts – things like that.” She pointed to some wooden benches along one wall. “Let’s rest awhile.”
Alan continued scanning the walls and discovered an opening. “Where does this go?”
Eve sat down and leaned against the wall with her shoulders slumped. “It is a dead end. They made a second attempt to reach Frederick from here, but it, too, failed.” She lowered her head and brushed a tear from her eye. When she looked up, she was more composed, but the anguish remained.
Alan noticed Tells breathing hard. The running had been rough on him. “You three rest,” he suggested. “I’ll look around.”
He continued down the tunnel leading to the second cave-in. The shaft ran straight for several hundred meters before beginning a series of sharp bends. At each curve, the miners had left a pillar of rock intact to help support the walls and roof. If the rock stratum had not been so brittle, it might have held. Piles of rock lay along the floor of the tunnel, shaken from the roof by small tremors since the cave-in. When he saw the main roof collapse, he knew why rescue had been impossible. Tons of rock and slabs of stone blocked the tunnel, some weighing over a ton. As he examined the collapse, something about its odd symmetry caught his attention. He stared at the rubble for several minutes before finally realizing what was wrong.
“The right-hand wall went first,” he said aloud. “Then the roof gave way. It doesn’t make sense.”
He poked through the rubble near the wall and spotted something protruding from beneath a rock. He picked it up and examined it, recognizing it as blasting wire, the wire that carried electrical current from a detonator to the blasting cap.
His chest tightened. “This was deliberate. Someone wanted to bring down the roof. That was why Verkhoen stopped any further attempts at rescue. He didn’t want anyone to find this.” He paused to let the implications sink in. “Eve’s husband was murdered.”
He stuck the wire in his pocket as evidence. If he managed to get out alive, he would see Verkhoen pay for his crime. As he started back to the others, he felt air brush his cheek. He scanned the roof but saw no airshaft. Shining his light along the floor, he spotted a two-meter-long crack several centimeters wide running along the floor. Pressing his cheek to the crack, he felt a rush of cool, moist air. He took off his belt and slipped it down into the fissure. It continued unimpeded until it reached the buckle. Shining his light down the fissure, he saw it widened the deeper it went. He knew it couldn’t be a natural fault. There was another tunnel below him. An earthquake sometime in the last few years had cracked the thin shell of rock separating the two tunnels. If he could widen the opening, it might provide an exit.
He went back to the others and informed them of his discovery.
Eve looked skeptical. “It must be the flooded tunnel.”
“It was flooded several years ago. It might have drained since then. It’s our only chance,” he said. He set down his pouch and began removing dynamite.
“Wait a minute,” Sandersohn cautioned when he saw the dynamite. “You don’t seriously intend to detonate that stuff. It might bring down the entire tunnel on our heads.”
“It’s a possibility,” he admitted, “but as I see it, the only other way out is the way we came, and it won’t take long for those insects to get through that rotten door.”
Sandersohn nodded. “I see your point.”
“Look, I’ve handled explosives before. The fissure widens deeper down. All I need do is crack open the surface with a small, controlled blast.”
He didn’t add that dynamite was not very good for controlled blasts. He would have to guess at how much to use and hope for the best. He tied two sticks together, what he thought would be enough, inserted a blasting cap in one, and began cutting a length of fuse with his knife.
“Is that long enough?” Eve asked, eying with apprehension the short fuse he had measured out.
He held up the fuse. “This is fast-burning Visco fuse. It burns at twenty-four seconds per foot. That’s thirty-point-five centimeters to you. I brought about ten feet of cord. That gives us a little less than four minutes of burn time. I want to keep some for later, just in case.” He didn’t mention his intention to seal the Cerberus shaft with his remaining dynamite. “Five feet gives me about two minutes. A few seconds one way or the other doesn’t matter much.”
He jammed the fuse into the end of the blasting cap and crimped it with his teeth.
“Stay here and take cover. The bends in the shaft should dampen the blast. After the explosion, wait a minute or two to make sure there’s no aftershock, and join me.” He dropped the pouch beside Eve. “Keep this here, but bring it with you when you come.”
“What if this doesn’t work?”
“We’ll be dead and the bugs won’t matter.” He leaned closer to her and whispered, “If I don’t come back, try the airshaft. Don’t worry about the others.”
She surprised him by kissing him on the lips. “Please come back.”
It seemed more than a simple good luck kiss, and he enjoyed it. He smiled at her. “For more of that, I will.”
She looked at him with a pleading smile, reached out, and touched his hand for a moment. “Be careful, Alan.”
He nodded.
When he reached the fissure, he placed the bundle of dynamite just inside the fissure in what he judged as the weakest spot. He jammed it in place using a flat rock as a wedge. He ran the five feet of fuse as far as it would reach. To his eye, it looked pitifully short. He considered using the entire length of fuse, but he still wanted to seal the Cerberus shaft. He wondered how much distance he could cover in two minutes, dodging piles of rock and debris. He piled rocks on top of the fissure to contain as much of the blast as possible.
One detail he had omitted when describing his plan to the others – he had no way to determine if the tunnel contained a pocket of methane. If it did, the resulting explosion could sweep through the tunnel, killing them all.
“I’m ready to blast!” he yelled to the others. He ignited his Zippo lighter and lit the fuse. It burst into a furious flame that raced along its length at an alarming rate. He raced down the tunnel, counting backwards from one-twenty in his head.
At ten, he decided not to push his luck and looked for cover. As he knelt behind a pile of rocks he hoped suitable for the task, the floor of the tunnel heaved, slamming his head into the wall with enough force to draw blood. The sound of the blast roared down the tunnel, just ahead of a wave of hot air. A billowing cloud of dust and smoke followed, almost choking him. Rocks rained from the ceiling, bouncing off his head and landing all around him, but none big enough to cause more than a bruise hit him. He wished he had grabbed a hardhat from the emergency shelter. The roof and the walls groaned menacingly for thirty seconds but held.
He waited a full minute longer before leaving his shelter. The air was still thick with dust, making seeing difficult, but he hadn’t brought the entire roof down on the fissure. For that bit of luck, he was grateful. He examined his handiwork. The tiny fissure was now a fracture several meters long and a meter wide. The flashlight couldn’t penetrate the thick dust far enough to see the bottom, but cooler, moist, stale air rushed up to wash over his face. As he waited for the dust to clear, he heard the others approaching, coughing from the dust. Their hardhat lamps were three faint smudges in the darkness. By the time they arrived, the dust had cleared enough to see the floor of another tunnel less than three meters below. He saw no water.
He called to the others. “The tunnel is dry.”
Eve appeared from the darkness, wiping dust from her eyes with her clenched hands. She left a white ring around her haze
l eyes, giving her a raccoon appearance. He tried to hide his smile. Tells came next and stared down into the hole.
“I’ll never be able to climb down there,” he protested.
“I’ll go down first,” Alan said. “The others can help guide your feet to my shoulders, and I’ll lower you to the ground.”
Tells looked dubious. “If you say so.”
Alan dropped through the hole. Once on the ground, he helped the less nimble Tells down. The overweight scientist moved clumsily, poking him in the eye with his foot; then almost fell on top of him, but after a little effort, he got him safely on the ground. Eve followed, clinging to him longer than necessary, but he didn’t mind the close contact. Her breasts rubbed against him through her thin shirt, making it difficult to keep his mind on what he was doing. From her smile, he wondered if she had done it on purpose.
Sandersohn, nimbler than he looked, grabbed the edge of the fissure, dangled over the side for a moment, and dropped to the ground. “Which way?” he asked.
“The main tunnel is this way,” Eve replied, pointing down the tunnel.
Alan examined the tunnel. He picked up a piece of rock and studied it by the light of the flashlight. “I thought you said this level had been flooded.”
Eve looked at him queerly. “Yes, it was.”
Alan tossed the rock aside. “I don’t see any evidence of flooding here.”
“Maybe it flooded farther down the tunnel.”
“The floor is level. It wouldn’t pool.”
“Why would Verkhoen …?”
“Can we discuss this later?” Sandersohn asked. “Let’s get out of here.”
Alan led the way, treading carefully over and around piles of loose rock that had fallen from the roof, some of it loosened by his blast. He searched the tunnel walls as they went, looking for some watermark or other indication the tunnel had been underwater, but it looked like the rest of the tunnel – dry. His light fell on an object ahead of them. He stopped.
“Wait here a minute while I check this out,” he advised them.
As he neared the object, he had a sinking suspicion he knew what it was – a skeleton. Shining his light along the tunnel, he found four more, all dismembered, some with bones missing. He knelt beside one of the skeletons covered only with the tattered remnants of a jumpsuit. A dust-covered hardhat lay a few feet away. The skeleton was missing a leg and one hand. Like the other skeletons, the bones showed signs of gnawing. If not for their present situation, he might have written off the marks as post-mortem rat teeth marks. Now, he wasn’t sure.
On the ground beside the body lay a small box that had fallen out through a hole in the decaying jumpsuit. He picked it up, looked inside, and found a tarnished gold ring, not something an ordinary miner would carry. He picked up the hardhat and wiped off a layer of dried mud concealing a metal nameplate – Frederick Means, Eve’s husband.
“What is it?” Eve called out.
“I believe I’ve found your husband’s remains,” he said.
She was silent a long moment before answering. “No, that can’t be. My husband died trapped in the tunnel above. Verkhoen assured me. This tunnel was flooded. That was why they couldn’t use it to rescue him from below.”
Alan was now beginning to have doubts about Verkhoen’s honesty. First, the lava tube, and now a dry tunnel that should have been flooded. It sounded as if Eve was also suspicious. He held out the ring and saw the faint trace of an inscription etched inside the band covered by the oxidization.
“I found this.”
Eve stared at the ring for a long moment before accepting it. She turned it over in her hand, squinting to read the writing. She scratched away some of the corrosion with her fingernail, read, “Were I your Adam and you my Eve,” and gasped sharply. Fighting back a tear, she said, “Frederick said that to me once.” She walked over to his body, looked down at the bones, and asked them, “Oh, Frederick! What happened?”
Frederick could not answer her question, so Alan tried. “I think they were trapped above and came down here just as we did through another crack, or perhaps they dug through trying to escape, but the insects found them.”
Eve stared at him incredulous, “But, but that was four years ago.”
“The miners must have punched through into the lava tube when they opened this shaft six years ago, just as Cerberus did.” He made a rapid mental calculation. “Given the lava tube’s twelve-degree slope, it should intersect this tunnel about two kilometers from where the Cerberus punched through. The miners lost six years ago probably suffered the same fate as your husband.”
Eve groaned. Alan kicked himself mentally for suggesting insects had devoured her husband, though the condition of the skeleton made it likely.
“Yet Verkhoen tried again two years later, this time using my husband.” She looked at Alan with equal parts of sorrow and rage on her face. “This tunnel wasn’t flooded, was it?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so. Verkhoen discovered the two miners’ bodies six years ago but couldn’t explain the condition of their bodies. He probably refused to let anyone examine them before burying them. Then, he deliberately concocted the phony flooding story and sealed the tunnel to keep anyone from finding out what had really happened.”
“Why would Verkhoen lie? We could have reached my husband through this tunnel.”
“He knew the discovery that the tunnel wasn’t flooded would start an investigation into the previous deaths that would halt further digging in the area.” He pulled out the piece of wire he had found. “I think someone deliberately collapsed the tunnel above using explosives. Someone wanted your husband trapped or dead and didn’t want them rescued.”
“Verkhoen,” she hissed. “My husband warned me he was reporting Verkhoen’s dangerous efforts to dig into the friable rock to the Board of Directors. Verkhoen is too vain to allow my husband to jeopardize his career.”
“If it wasn’t him, he had it done.”
“Duchamps.” She spat out the name as if it tasted foul. “Nothing happens in this mine that Mr. Lion Tamer Duchamps isn’t aware of.”
That had been Alan’s thoughts as well when he first met the security chief. Eve’s nickname for Duchamps intrigued him. “Where did that come from?”
“He likes to tell everyone his scar is from a lion attack, but the rumor is that a fellow officer in the SADF cut him in a knife fight. That’s why they kicked him out.”
“So the security chief is a disgraced former South African Defense Force officer. That might explain his bitterness.”
“He’s a right bastard, but it’s Verkhoen I want to see in jail,” she replied.
“I’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to turn the spotlight on him, but we need Duchamps’ testimony to turn the key on his cell door.”
She nodded, still staring at her husband’s bones. To the others, he said, “Help me cover these remains, please.”
Eve noticed her husband’s iPad lying next to his body. She picked it up and brushed it off. The screen was cracked and the battery case punctured. A memory stick jutted from the USB port. “Frederick always used a backup,” she said. She removed the memory stick and shoved it in her pocket.
When they finished with the makeshift graves, they stood silently over five small piles of rocks that barely resembled true graves. Eve spoke a few words. As she did, she unconsciously rubbed the ring that Alan had found between her thumb and index finger, but she didn’t put it on. Alan wondered if having broken her ties with her dead husband years ago, she was afraid placing the ring on her finger would re-commit her to his memory.
Alan’s mind was on Verkhoen. The Van Gotts CEO had been aware of the existence of the insects or at least the existence of something dangerous inhabiting the mine for six years; and yet, he had offered no warning. In fact, he had made a second failed attempt to reach the gold-bearing stratum from a new shaft. Had he murdered Frederick Means to assure his silence? He had no doubts that Duchamps was c
apable of such a reprehensible act. He had murdered Bill Bakkerman in cold blood after first forcing him to unplug the lava tube by moving Cerberus. Dozens would likely die before they could evacuate the mine.
So much death over a few diamonds.
After a few minutes, Sandersohn spoke up. “I don’t mean to seem uncaring, but if Frederick Means and the other miners were killed by these creatures, another opening into the lava tube must exist. I suggest we leave before more of the creatures find us.”
Alan nodded. “You’re right. We should go.” He looked at Eve. She brushed a tear away, placed the ring on her finger, and smiled.
“Yes, we should go now. I’ve had four years to grieve. It is good to see him finally at rest. Thank you for that.”
They walked a kilometer down the tunnel. Alan hoped they were near the entrance. He didn’t feel well. He looked down at his throbbing left hand. Blood and a cream-colored liquid oozed through the bandage. He peeled it back to examine the wound. The gash was red and puffy around the edges, and the flesh was very tender to the touch. He hoped he was not succumbing to some quarter-million-year old bacteria. He brushed his forehead with the back of his hand and found it was warm.
Abruptly, things got worse. A rock fall had sealed the tunnel. Piles of rock and debris blocked their way. He tapped on the rocks experimentally.
“It sounds solid. I don’t think we can dig through.”
“The door is only a few meters away,” Eve moaned.
He felt her anguish. They were so close, but they were trapped. He didn’t think it would be long before the insects found them. Doctor Tells leaned against the wall. His face was ashen, and he was breathing hard. Alan was concerned about him. He was an old man. The climbing and walking were taking a toll on him.
“What are our options?” Eve asked.
Alan could think of only one. “We have to go the other direction and hope this tunnel still opens to the lava tube. From there, we can make our way back to the Cerberus and out.”
Sandersohn was aghast. “Go in there with these monsters? I thought we were trying to escape them.”