Bad blood

12

“I’ll wait up here if we all won’t fit in,” I said.

Three wooden crates were near my feet, each stamped on the side with the words explosives-30 LBS. In front of me was an eight-foot-tall metal cage that looked like the kind in which divers are lowered into the ocean to photograph sharks. Its open grid-work was painted red, and it dangled over the top of the hole from a giant winch. The sign on its door read: DANGER: AMPUTATION-KEEP HANDS AWAY FROM DOOR.

George Golden smiled at me. “Step in, Alex. It can hold us.”

Mike nudged me in the back and I reluctantly entered the Alimak-the tiny elevator that would carry the four of us to the floor of the deep shaft below. We were all wearing the obligatory yellow slickers, plastic hard hats in a variety of primary colors, and steel-tipped rubber boots that George had appropriated from the shack. Mine were way too big, and I shuffled forward to avoid stumbling out of the borrowed footwear.

The fifth man was at the controls of the machine, which ran up and down along the inside of the gaping, thirty-foot-wide mouth. He was dressed as we were and had large plugs protruding from his ears. “Do we need those?” Mercer asked.

“Only according to the law,” George said. “The guys never use them inside the tunnel, even though they’re supposed to. In the long run, they’ll have permanent hearing damage anyway-the blasts can split your eardrums. But it’s even more dangerous to take a chance that they can’t hear what’s going on down there.”

I clasped the honeycombed grid with one hand, bracing my back against the rear of the cage. The metal box rattled and shook when Mercer and Mike added their weight to it, and then again as the chief geologist entered last.

“You look nervous,” George said to me. “There’s nothing to worry about, really. You’ve got to keep your fingers in though.”

He reminded me of the DANGER sign and I dropped my hands to my sides. Mercer took one of mine in his own and squeezed it tightly.

Mike saw the gesture and laughed. “Coop’s tribe? Let’s just say it wasn’t the Stoics.”

The operator of the Alimak flipped the switch and the machine lurched into its descent.

Golden ran a finger down the length of his nose, watching my reaction as the noisy cage picked up speed. I didn’t want his attention centered on me, so I leaned my head back, concentrating on the circle of daylight over my head.

“You can always tell when someone isn’t going to like it in the hole,” he said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“If you got room down there for a wet bar, a mirror, and a tube of lipstick, then Coop is good to go,” Mike said.

By the time we had descended a hundred feet, the opening above had narrowed considerably and I felt constricted by the thick, dark wall surrounding us. I closed my eyes and lowered my head. Pinpoints of light-probably the naked bulbs at the bottom-were all I could see through the metal grating.

“You don’t want to look down, Alex,” George said, his voice echoing off the surface of the rock, which glistened with water.

“Are there guys who have trouble working here?” Mercer asked.

“Plenty of them. It’s gotta be in the blood. There are men who come down once, realize that this creaky elevator that might squeeze eight of us in at best is the only way out from that hellhole, and that the tunnels stretch for miles in both directions, full of sandhogs. Some would crawl up the walls if they could. And then there’s the dripping. Constant sound of dripping water. That’s what gets the rest of ’em.”

The Alimak operator called out, “Two hundred feet.”

I craned my neck upward but could no longer see anything above.

“Is the dripping from cracks in the old pipes overhead?” Mercer asked.

Another fear I hadn’t considered. I could hear the pinging sound but wondered what could possibly be leaking this far below the surface.

“There are leaks all right. But the water you see here is a natural phenomenon. It’s all in the landscape above us, pouring down through the earth and rocks, from riverbeds and underground streams. Another two minutes you’ll be five hundred feet below the Hudson River.”

I shivered at the thought of the weight of an entire city pressing down upon me. There was nowhere for me to look but straight ahead, at the point of Golden’s nose.

“You’re not cold, are you?” he asked.

“Just a bit.”

“People always think it’s gonna be freezing. The odd thing is that it’s mild the entire year all this way down. Fifty-five degrees.”

“Three hundred feet,” the man at the controls said, and I knew we were halfway through the four-minute ride to the bottom, the Alimak creaking as we seemed to hurtle on our descent into the darkness.

“So what do the guys do for fresh air?” Mike asked.

“Fresh isn’t exactly the operative word. But air is pumped in all the time by fans, and then the stale air is pumped out through ventilation pipes. Got to be tested constantly for toxic gases and stuff like that.”

Gases. Check. Something else to add to the short list of ways I hadn’t thought about to die in this water tunnel.

“The ones that can’t take it,” Golden went on, “they just blanch before they’re out of this cage. Turn green, some of them, on the ride. Like a kid on his first crack at the giant roller coaster. Get all queasy inside.”

Queasy would have been a good feeling. I was nauseous at this point, clinging to Mercer’s hand as the cage seemed to bounce against the wall and vibrate.

“Four hundred feet.”

“Think about it,” George said. “You go up to see that fabulous view from the Rainbow Room, over at Rockefeller Center. You can look up the Hudson and practically touch Canada from there. Another minute and you’ll be farther in the ground than that skyscraper reaches into the sky.”

Smoke and dust, the residue from last night’s explosion, were still heavy in the air. I covered my mouth and coughed, hoping not to be sick in the crowded elevator.

Golden reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out several small plastic bags-the kind used to store sandwiches or food-with something folded inside each. “You might want a mask,” he said to us, holding out his arm. “The fire will make it tougher to breathe today.”

In another bag he had a package of cough drops, which he offered to me. “Everything has to come down here in plastic-the guys’ lunch, their cigarettes, their identification. The constant dripping gets to everything-and everybody.”

“Five hundred feet.”

The droplets had turned into running rivulets of water, streaming through the wire of the cage from the reinforced-concrete walls of the hole.

I was willing myself to stay on my feet, thinking of the beautiful June day that was awaiting me on my return to the surface. As we neared the end of the descent, the artificial light source below us cast an eerie glow against the scarlet mesh of the Alimak.

The operator cranked back the lever to bring us to a stop, blowing a shrill whistle to clear the landing platform and announce our arrival to the men in the tunnel. The cage shuddered on the enormous chain that tethered it to the winch.

Golden reached back and unlatched the door, stepping out onto the top of a wooden staircase that led down to the floor of the shaft, six hundred feet below midtown Manhattan.

“Welcome to the center of the earth,” he said, as Mike followed him out and started down the steps. Golden ran his hand across the wet surface of the wall as he walked. “Nobody but the sandhogs-and you investigators-will ever see this-this bedrock, this tunnel that will keep everyone in New York alive for generations to come.”

Mercer kept hold of my hand and led me out behind him. I stopped to look up toward the top of the hole-the great void to the side of the Alimak-trying to discern the source of a terrible clanging noise over my head.

“You okay?” he asked me, trying to disengage from my grasp. “C’mon, Alex. Let’s keep up. I promise to get you back up there in one piece.”

I grabbed the banister, reluctant to take the first step off the wooden platform, struggling to keep from walking out of my borrowed boots.

Golden was pointing out the tunnel structure to Mike, who was behind him, and to Mercer, who had started to descend the staircase after them as I stood frozen in place. The Alimak jerked upward from the base and started its noisy climb while the other dreadful banging in the hole seemed to get even louder.

“Hurry up,” Mercer said, coming back up toward me and stretching out an arm to coax me down.

Then I saw the expression on his face as he screamed at me to duck.

I leaned over, my hard hat crashing down the steps, falling into the mudpile at the bottom. Behind me, a lethal metal spear-a tire iron that had fallen, or been dropped, from street level at the mouth of the hole-landed inches from my back and impaled itself into the wooden floorboard.