Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

But this slightly comforting situation did not last long. The leader of the oil field drilling crew found Liu Xin at the foot of the enormous rig.

“Dr. Liu, no more drilling can be done at two-thirds of the well positions!” he shouted over the roar of the drills and pumps.

“Are you joking? We’ve got to add more water-injection holes to the fire.”

“No. Well pressure at those positions is growing too quickly. Any more drilling and there’ll be a blowout!”

“Bullshit. This isn’t an oil field. There’s no high-pressure gas reservoir. What’s going to blow?”

“You know nothing! I’m shutting down the drills and pulling out.”

Enraged, Liu Xin grabbed his collar. “You will not. I order you to continue drilling. There will not be a blowout. You hear me? There won’t!”

Even before he finished speaking, they heard a loud crash from the direction of the rig, and they turned in time to witness the well’s heavy seal fly off in two pieces as a yellowish-black mud spurted into the air together with pieces of broken drill pipe. Bystanders shouted in alarm, and the mud gradually lightened in color as its particulate content reduced. Then it turned snow-white, and they realized that the ground fire had heated the injected water into pressurized steam. High up on the rig they saw the body of the drill driver, suspended and twisting slowly in the roiling steam. There was no trace of the other three engineers who had been on the platform.

What happened next was even more terrifying. The head of the white dragon broke free from the ground and gradually took flight, until finally the white steam had risen above the rig like a white-haired demon in the sky. There was nothing in the space between the demon and the mouth of the well apart from the wreckage of the rig. Nothing but that terrifying hiss. A few young engineers, under the impression that the blowout had stopped, took hesitant steps forward, but Liu Xin grabbed two of them and shouted, “That’s suicide! It’s superheated steam!”

They watched in terror as the damp headframe was blasted dry in the steam’s heat, and the thick rubber pipes strung from it liquefied like wax. The infernal steam assaulted the frame with a hair-curling thunder….

Further water injection was impossible, and even if it weren’t, it would act more to combust than to quench the fire.

All emergency command center personnel assembled at the third mine, by Shaft No. 4, the nearest to the fire line.

“The fire is nearing the mine’s extraction zone,” Aygul said. “If it gets there, then the mine passages will supply it with oxygen and multiply its strength considerably…. That’s the present situation.” He broke off, and glanced at the bureau director and the heads of the five mines uncomfortably, unwilling to violate the greatest taboo in mining.

“And conditions in the shafts?” the director asked without emotion.

“Excavation and extraction are proceeding as normal in eight shafts, primarily for stability’s sake,” the head of one mine said.

“Shut down production altogether. Evacuate all staff in the shafts. Then…” The director paused and remained silent for a few seconds.

Those few seconds felt immeasurably long.

“Seal the shafts,” the director said at last, uttering the heartbreaking words.

“No! You can’t!” The cry burst from Li Minsheng before he could stop himself. “What I mean is…” He grasped for counterlogic to present the director. “Sealing the shafts… sealing the shafts… will throw everything into chaos. And…”

“Enough,” the director said with a gentle wave of his hand. His expression said everything: I know how you feel. I feel the same way. We all do.

Li Minsheng crouched on the ground, head in hands, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. The mining leadership and engineers stood silently before the shaft. The cavernous entrance stared back at them like a giant eye, just as Shaft No. 2 had stared at Liu Xin two decades before.

They shared a moment of silence for the century-old mine.

After a while, the bureau’s chief engineer broke the silence with a low voice: “Let’s take up as much equipment as we can from down below.”

“Then,” the mine chief said, “we ought to get together demolition squads.”

The director nodded. “Time is of the essence. You get to work. I’ll file a request with the ministry.”

The bureau party secretary said, “Can’t we use military engineers? If we use miners for the demolition squad, and anything happens…”

“I’ve considered it,” said the director. “But we only have one detachment of military engineers at the moment, far too few even for one shaft. Besides, they’re not familiar with subterranean demolitions.”

Shaft No. 4, closest to the fire, was the first to shut down. When the tramloads of miners reached the entrance, they found a hundred-strong demolition squad waiting around a pile of drills. They inquired, but the demolition squad members didn’t know what they were expected to do; their orders were only to assemble beside the drilling equipment. Suddenly, their attention was seized by a convoy heading toward the entrance. The first truck bristled with armed police, who jumped down to secure a perimeter around a parking area for the vehicles that followed. When the eleven trucks stopped, the canvas was pulled back to reveal neat stacks of yellow wooden crates. The miners were stunned. They knew what was in these crates.

Each crate held twenty-four kilos of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, fifty tons of it altogether in the ten trucks. The final, somewhat smaller truck carried a few bundles of bamboo strips for lashing the explosives together, and a pile of black plastic bags, which the miners knew held electronic detonators.

Liu Xin and Li Minsheng hopped down from the cab of one of the trucks and saw the newly appointed captain of the demolition squad, a muscular, bearded man, coming their way with a roll of charts.

“What are you making us do, Engineer Li?” the captain asked as he unrolled the paper.

Li Minsheng pointed to a spot on the chart, his finger trembling slightly. “Three blast lines, each thirty-five meters long. Detailed positions are on the chart underneath. One-hundred-fifty-millimeter and seventy-five-millimeter boreholes, filled with twenty-eight kilos and fourteen kilos of explosives, respectively, at a density of…”

“I’m asking, what are you trying to make us do?”

Li Minsheng went silent and bowed his head under the captain’s fiery stare.

The captain turned toward the crowd. “Brothers, they want us to blow up the tunnels!” he shouted. There was a moment of commotion among the miners, but a wall of armed police came forward in a semicircle to block the crowd from reaching the trucks. But the police line distorted under the pressure of the surging black human sea, until it was at the breaking point. All of this took place in a heavy silence, with the scuffle of footsteps and clack of gun bolts the only sounds. At the last moment, the crowd ceased its tumult as the director and mine head stepped up onto the bed of one of the trucks.

“I started work in this mine when I was fifteen. Are you just going to destroy it?” shouted one old miner. The wrinkles carved into his face were visible even beneath the thick cover of coal dust.

“What are we going to live on after it’s closed?”

“Why are you blowing it up?”

“Life in the mine was difficult enough without you all messing around.”

The crowd exploded, waves of anger surging ever fiercer over the sea of coal-blackened faces flashing white teeth. The director waited silently until the crowd’s anger turned to restless movement, then, when it was just about to get out of control, he spoke.