William Krueger - Vermilion Drift

Through the open window of the Rescue Room came the sound of the cage rattling up. They stepped outside, put on the hard hats Haddad had distributed, and stood next to the shaft. The cage arrived in a rush of cool air that smelled of deep, wet rock. Haddad threw back the gate. After they were in, Haddad reached to a button mounted on the framework and gave it three rings.

“Connects to the hoist operator in the engine house,” he explained. “We communicate everything with the rings.”

“What if we get stuck down there and the ringer fails?” Cork asked.

“The shaft has an antenna that runs from the lowest level all the way to the top. I just give a signal with this.” He tapped a pager that hung on his belt.

They began a rattling descend. There was a single lightbulb in a fixture at the top of the cage, and, as they dropped, Cork could see the hard face of the rock that had been cut for the shaft. The walls were streaked red, as if a great flow of blood had run there.

“You never answered Marsha’s question, Lou,” Cork said above the noise of the cage rattle. “What do you think about using Vermilion One to store nuclear waste?”

“A while back, Germany went with the idea of a waste isolation facility, which they created in a deep abandoned salt mine,” Haddad said. “They’ve discovered that it leaks. It’s been leaking for years.” He shook his head dismally. “The plan at the moment is to use the Yucca Mountain facility, but because of some of the potential difficulties there, other sites need to be considered. The question remains: What do we do with the nuclear waste we’ve created? Nobody in their right mind wants it in their backyard.”

It took a couple of minutes to reach the third level. When the cage stopped, Haddad threw back the gate and led Cork and Dross out. They were in a large excavation where two tunnels, each ten feet high and ten feet wide, led off to the left and to the right. The area around the cage station was lit with electric lights strung along the ceiling, but the tunnels were black. Up top the temperature was in the low seventies, but in the mine the air was twenty degrees cooler and Cork wished he’d brought a sweater. Dross was hugging herself for warmth.

“Over here,” Haddad said. He moved to a wall not far from the cage. Spray-painted in red across the old mining scars were the words “We die. U die.” The message had been carefully done so that it looked very much like the printed messages Haddad and the others had received. The words seemed to drip blood.

“When did you discover this?” Cork asked.

“I didn’t,” Haddad replied. “It was Genie Kufus, yesterday. She came down to inspect this level, and there it was.”

“She was alone?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time anyone was down here before that?”

“On this level specifically, a week ago. I sent a couple of men down to make sure the pumps were working. They checked every level except the last five.”

“Pumps?”

“Water. It leaks into the mine and has to be removed. The lowest levels are still flooded. It’ll be a while before we get those cleared for inspection.”

“They didn’t report anything?” Dross asked.

“No.”

“Could they have simply missed it?”

“Would you miss that?” Haddad replied.

Cork said, “So this was done sometime between last Sunday and yesterday. How would they have gotten access to this level?”

“Coming down the Number Six shaft is the only way.”

“There are seven other shafts, though, right?”

“All of them have been capped and sealed. I checked them myself yesterday after Genie reported what she’d found. None of them have been monkeyed with. Besides, none of the other shafts connect with the drifts that run off Number Six.”

“Was anyone else in the mine at all during that time, on any level?”

“Yes. Mike Chernokov and Freddie Brink. They’ve been working on the ventilation and the water pumps. And we had a small tour group in from the state legislature on Friday. They wanted to see for themselves what the DOE found so attractive about this site. I led it myself.”

“Did you visit Level Three?”

“No, I confined the tour to Level One, the Vermilion Drift.”

“Vermilion Drift?”

“In a mine, a vertical excavation is called a sink. An excavation that runs horizontally off a sink is called a drift.”

“So mine shafts are sinks and tunnels are drifts?” Cork said.

“That’s right. The Vermilion Drift was the first underground mining done in this location, and I thought it was appropriate for the group.”

“Your two guys and the legislature group, that’s it?”

“And Genie.”

“Did you talk to your guys?” Dross asked.

“Believe me, I talked.”

“What did they say?”

“That they went down, completed their work, came back up. They didn’t do anything, they didn’t see anything.”

“Do you trust them?” Cork asked.

“Listen, good-paying jobs on the Range aren’t that plentiful. Those guys are family men. They’d have to be stupid, which they’re not, or ideologically fanatic, which they also are not, to jeopardize their employment that way.”

“Okay,” Cork said. “I saw a ladder running down the framework on the side of the shaft. Is it possible somebody from your tour group slipped away and climbed down here?”

“There were only five in the group. All of them were in my sight the entire time.”

“What about Kufus?” Dross threw out.

Haddad looked surprised, then looked as if he was about to laugh. “Why would she do it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You said she was alone when she found this. When she reported it, how did she seem?”

“Disturbed. If you’re looking at storing nuclear waste in Vermilion One, the issue of security is going to be huge. She seemed genuinely surprised and upset.”

“Okay, let’s work on the premise that no one who was down here legitimately is responsible,” Cork said. “That would mean someone was here who wasn’t supposed to be.”

“No way someone who wasn’t authorized could get down here,” Haddad replied.

“If you accept my premise, that’s not true.”

“Which means what?” Haddad asked.

Dross eyed Cork and smiled with perfect understanding. “There’s got to be another way in.”

Up top, Haddad separated and went to his office, while Cork and Dross returned to the conference room. Cavanaugh and Kufus were deep in a conversation that stopped the moment Cork and the sheriff walked in. From the looks on their faces and the abruptness with which the conversation ended, Cork had the distinct impression that it wasn’t business they were discussing.

Haddad came in a few moments later and dropped a book in the middle of the table. The tome-nearly a foot wide, eighteen inches long, eight inches thick, and bound in heavy material that looked a lot like leather-hit with the thump of a fallen body.

He said, “These are the schematics for every level of the mine, all twenty-seven. Every shaft, every drift, every foot of the fifty-four miles of excavation. I’ve gone over them so many times they visit me in my nightmares. I’m telling you, aside from Number Six, which is the only shaft still open, there is no other way in. Why would there be?”

“I don’t know,” Cork said. “Enlighten me.”

“I just did. Another entrance would mean another sink, and, believe me, cutting a shaft into rock is no Sunday drive in the country. It requires equipment, explosives, time, money. We’d know if someone did that. For one thing, they’d make a hell of a racket.”

Cork opened the book. The pages were made of a thin, waxy material. The drawings on them reminded Cork of town plats, precise lines and corridors with lots of numbers indicating sizes and distances. All this was laid against a background that showed the county section lines for the ground above. In the lower right-hand corner was a legend that contained the scale and explained the markings on the map: stopes, raises, drifts, shafts, drill holes. Under the legend was a notation: “Prepared by Engineers Office, Granger, MN.” Beneath that was a date.