The Lightning Stones

1

For the trapped miner the blackness was an absolute. It was his entire world. It filled every nook and cranny in the collapsed tunnel. It was a clammy presence on his skin, like he was pressed up against a corpse. The black had weight, like it was squeezing him as though he wore a too-tight diving suit. And that weight intensified every time he breathed, for the black invaded his lungs, crushing them, making him feel like he was taking in a warm liquid that he had to cough out. It coated the back of his throat like a noxious oil, slick and cloying. It filled his ears, jamming them so even when he screamed as loudly as possible, it sounded like a distant echo of a child’s whimper.

The black. It was his entire world, and if rescue didn’t come soon he was certain that it would begin to invade his mind as it had already subsumed his body.

Fifty yards and a world away, Hans Gruber, a taciturn German who was sick of the jokes people made about his name, picked his way past a jumble of crushed rock — detritus from the cave-in that littered the floor of the shaft some one thousand feet below the midwestern prairie. He wore heavy work clothes that were streaked and caked with dirt. An oxygen tank was strapped to his back although he and his team hadn’t detected any poisonous gases. The LED lamp on his helmet cast a bright blue cone in the otherwise stygian realm in which he worked.

Making the going even tougher were the four-foot-long steel bolts that had once held the collapsed ceiling together. There were hundreds of them sticking up in the rubble that blocked the tunnel, and each one seemed to snag at his clothes and tear at his skin like skeletal fingers. The dust was mostly settled since the cave-in, but motes still hung suspended. The air was perfectly still — a sure sign that the ventilation was not working in this section of the mine. Another in a long string of omens.

Behind him the rest of his crew was busy with the screw jacks. A steel forest had grown in their wake. His men had erected dozens of polelike jacks to help stabilize the hanging wall over their heads and hold back, at least until they could finish with the rescue, the millions of tons of rock above them.

Three hours earlier, on what was otherwise a normal Tuesday in the mines, a crew was shoring up the roof in this section of tunnel by drilling holes into the ceiling and then using a pneumatic tool to twist the screw bolt into the living rock, binding the otherwise unstable matrix until it was no longer a threat to those who had to work under it. This mine was known for poor rock conditions, but men had worked it successfully for years without a fatality from a cave-in. The techniques and safety protocols were perfected and the men followed them to the letter, and yet Mother Nature and gravity care not for proper preparations. Without so much as a groan, a fifty-foot-long section of ceiling at least six feet thick had crashed to the floor of the tunnel. Fortunately the men coming behind the “screw crew” to fill the holes with grout to prevent the metal from rusting in the hot humid air hadn’t yet reached the site of the collapse, so none of them were struck by the fall. But there were miners on the far side, and it was up to Gruber and his rescue team to reach them.

As the point man, it was Gruber who wielded the fifteen-pound steel bar and jabbed at the ceiling, prying at loose stones still hanging dangerously above them. The roof over their heads was a fractured mass of stone that could collapse at any second. With each poke and thrust, head-size chunks of stone fell to the scree-littered ground. Many times they would bounce toward Gruber, and he would need to jump aside.

It was hot, filthy work, and sweat cut runnels through the dust, smearing his face. He paused to check on the man directly behind him.

The second rescue worker gave him a nod of encouragement and a thumbs-up. “Yippee-ki-yay, Hans.”

For once Gruber didn’t mind the Die Hard reference. He got back to work, probing and jabbing and inexorably moving deeper and deeper into the collapsed section of the mine. There were three men waiting for him someplace ahead. Odds were they had been horribly crushed, their bodies nothing more than tissue stains, but there was always the chance one or more had been beyond the avalanche and unharmed. It was Gruber’s job today to defy the odds and pull them out alive. It was the hope of rescue that allowed men to overcome the twin primal fears of darkness and enclosed spaces, and venture into the hellish mazes of underground mines. Like soldiers behind enemy lines knowing their buddies were looking for them, miners too needed that promise of salvation in order to hold out until help arrived.

Gruber jabbed at yet another weak spot in the ceiling and caused a mini-avalanche of loose rock and at least one boulder to fall. Pebbles rained off his miner’s helmet, and for a few seconds the air filled with thick choking dust. He opened the tap on his air tank and took a few purifying breaths before stowing the mask. That air was for the men he was to rescue, he chided himself, not for his own comfort. He crawled on, climbing up and over a taller hillock of stones and debris, pressing himself nearly to the top of the tunnel, his heels scraping the hanging walls as he wriggled forward on his belly. The passage ahead appeared completely blocked.

So far they hadn’t had to shift a lot of material, but it seemed now they would have to laboriously clear the tunnel one stone at a time.

Gruber reached and stretched and pressed hard against the wall of junk rock and felt the pile blocking the top couple of feet of the passageway shift. He dug his feet into the debris and pushed even harder, his gloved fists like the blade of a bulldozer as he used his tremendous strength to push the obstruction back and finally down the far side of the hillock.

Even as the rocks skittered and jumbled down deeper into the mine he heard a weak voice cry for help.

With a flash of excitement, Gruber realized he had reached the end of the cave-in.

“I think we have one!” the German shouted. He crawled faster, thrusting his head through the debris as though the earth itself was birthing him.

His light revealed that the tunnel beyond was all but unobstructed. Twenty feet farther in he saw the hulking pneumatic drill machine the miners had been using to bolt the ceiling. And between him and it lay one of the men. The miner’s helmet was lying a few feet away, and it looked like one of his legs was pinned.

Gruber wiggled and fought until the rock finally released him, and he slid down the pile of shattered stone and crawled over to the trapped miner. Overhead, the ceiling appeared to be solid and undamaged.

“It’s okay,” he told the man.

The miner looked to be in shock. He’d been in darkness so long that Gruber’s light seemed to blind him.

“Thank God,” the man finally said. Gruber held a canteen to the miner’s lips and let the man drink thirstily. So much so that he started to choke, and half the fluid he took down came back up again.

“Let’s look at your leg. How does it feel?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” the miner replied with a cough. “It’s just pinned.”

“We’ll have you out and in a bar before you know it.”

“Can you find my helmet and turn on the light? It’s been so dark…” The miner’s voice trailed off.

“Sure thing, my friend. What’s your name?”

Gruber stretched out to grab the man’s helmet.

“I’m Tom Rogers.”

Hans flipped the switch to turn on the lamp.

“Boom!” The voice was so loud it echoed.

“Vas?” Gruber gasped, and looked about.

“I said boom,” the second rescuer repeated; it was the man who had given Gruber encouragement just moments before. “You just killed yourself, Tom there, and most importantly you killed me.”

“Nein,” Gruber protested. “Das ist bullshit.”

“Das ist nicht bullsheet,” the man replied, mimicking Gruber’s excited German accent. The second rescuer finished climbing through the tiny aperture and slid down to the tunnel floor on his butt, planting his feet firmly when he landed. When he spoke again any teasing in his voice had evaporated. “Check your gas detector.”

Sheepishly, Gruber peeled back the cloth cover of the device hanging in a bag over his shoulder. The detector wasn’t switched on for this training exercise, but pieces of paper like a tear-off pad had been affixed over the digital display. As they had progressed through the rescue, Gruber had checked the meter at various way points by tearing off the topmost sheet. The page below had always said “clear.” This time he tore off the penultimate piece of paper. Below it was written “Methane at explosive concentrations.”

“But I didn’t cause any sparks,” Gruber protested. “I left the pry bar up on top of the debris, and there is no metal on me that could cause a spark. The methane could not explode.”

By now the “trapped” miner, Tom Rogers, had regained his feet and was dusting off his coveralls. Like Hans Gruber, Rogers was another trainee, and he leaned in eagerly to see what had gone wrong. Other than Hans giving him water too fast, which he’d spit back out to indicate the gaffe to his classmate, he thought Gruber had performed a textbook rescue.

“Look at Tom’s headlamp,” the rescue instructor said.

“The electronics are vacuum sealed,” Gruber said. “The lamp cannot cause an explosion.”

Philip Mercer pulled off his goggles and headgear, and fixed his gray eyes on Gruber in a serious stare. “That’s why I said to look at it,” he said with just a trace of irritation.

This was the twentieth time Mercer had led the miners on this, their final test, with each person taking point to show off what they had learned after two weeks of classroom instruction and field training. Mercer was justifiably tired.

Gruber examined the lamp under the white aura of his own. “Scheisse,” he cursed when he saw his mistake.

“That’s right,” Mercer said, pointing to the lamp. “The lens is cracked. That allowed methane to seep into the light, and when you flipped the switch the initial arc of electricity ignited, turning us into so much roast schnitzel.” He patted Gruber on the back. “Let’s go back to the others.”

Mercer let the two students precede him out of the seemingly isolated chamber and then clambered out himself. He was grateful that Hans had been the last of the nineteen men and one woman he’d agreed to train as he himself had once learned mine rescue techniques from South Africa’s fabled Proto Teams.

Mercer had designed the curriculum himself, and with the help of the mine’s owner had built several subterranean obstacle courses to challenge his students. He’d built this one by loading a particularly tall shaft with overburden brought down from the slag heaps on the surface. Another course he had rigged with smoke machines to simulate fire, while a third could be flooded using seep water pumped up from a lower level. In all, Mercer had shown them the basics of what they would find in a real-world mine rescue. He’d been in on enough actual rescues to know you can’t plan for everything, and the ability to think on one’s feet was as crucial as being well practiced.

Mercer still received cards from many of Los 33, the Chilean miners he’d help rescue back in 2010, and expected he would for many years to come. It had been his gut call, in coordination with a local engineer, as to where to drill the escape shaft 2,300 feet into the bedrock in order to save the thirty-three men who’d been trapped for a record-setting sixty-nine days. In a life and career filled with proud moments, Philip Mercer had to concede that that was one of the best.

The rest of his students were waiting in a panic shelter carved into the side of a main tunnel about a hundred yards from where he’d constructed the “cave-in.” The shelter had once been provisioned to last forty men a week in case of an emergency, but this former copper mine had been abandoned in the late eighties when it became too expensive to work profitably. An adjacent rock quarry was still going strong, but the Leister Deep Mine was played out.

The room was just barren stone walls and a smoothed-out rock floor. Power was supplied by a jury-rigged system using wires Mercer had run off a generator that he’d jacked into an old ventilation conduit. He wasn’t sure if the exhaust actually made it to the surface a thousand feet above them, but carbon monoxide levels hadn’t risen, so he figured he’d done something right.

These people had come from all over the world to study rescue techniques from him, and for the most part he’d been pleased with their progress. All of them were type A’s, especially Kara Hawkins, the sole woman. She was a shift foreperson at a newly reopened Nevada silver mine who had arrived here on a Harley Softail Heritage Classic wearing full black leathers over her six-foot frame and dispelled any question of her sexual preference by sharing a bed with José Cabrillo, a mine engineer from Bolivia who looked and sounded like a young Ricardo Montalban.

“Well?” Gerhard Werner asked when Hans appeared with Tom and then Mercer. The two Germans were longtime friends who worked at the same mine back home.

Hans slashed a finger across his throat. “Kaput.”

“Gather round,” Mercer called, wiping sweat from his face with a towel and then swigging from a water bottle someone had handed him. The water was cold thanks to the fridge they’d lugged down. And like a sports team they all took a knee to listen to their coach. “Half the class made the same mistake.”

Gerhard interrupted, saying, “Hans turned on the lamp too.”

“He did,” Mercer said, “but that wasn’t his main mistake. No, the mistake many of you made was listening to the victim. Think of this like saving someone who is drowning. Have any of you gotten lifeguard certification?”

He looked at the blank, sooty faces. Most of the miners were from rural coal country in whichever nation they called home. They were rednecks and hayseeds, and he didn’t think fishin’ holes and cricks had much in the way of swimmer safety. Still, he could tell they wanted to please him.

“Okay,” he went on after a beat. “First thing they teach you is to always approach a drowning person from behind. Anyone want to guess why?”

A hand went up.

“José.”

“If he see you he gonna try to drown you.”

“Basically that’s it,” Mercer agreed. “The swimmer won’t mean to drown you, but the human panic reflex when drowning is to grab anything nearby and climb on top of it, and that especially includes would-be rescuers.”

“And you’re saying that a trapped miner is like that drowning swimmer,” another of the men said.

“I am. Now, why?” This time a few hands went up. “Jimmy.”

The drawl was pure Kentucky. “ ’Cause he’s gonna be all panic like and we’re the calm ones. We know what’s best for him ’cause we been trained.”

“You do your holler proud, Jimmy,” Mercer said with a smile. “For our foreign guests I will translate that answer into English.”

A few of the other West Virginian and fellow Kentucky miners poked Jimmy Carson in the ribs. The students responded well to Mercer’s style, a combination of patient indulgence with mistakes, vast knowledge of the subject, and an easy sense of humor. They had a good time but they were learning skills that might one day save lives.

“The miner you come across,” Mercer went on, “has been alone and in the dark. He’s hungry, thirsty, hurt, scared, and begging for his momma. It doesn’t matter if he’s been down there six hours or six weeks, since time is meaningless when you’re facing the black. He wants out — and he may well see you as an impediment to his salvation rather than its harbinger. All of you have to remember to stay in command at all times, the way a cop or fireman would. Like them, we know the rules. The victims don’t.

“Tom wanted his light turned on, but providing a victim additional light is not a priority. It might make him feel more secure, but that’s not a necessity to save his life. Assessing the situation, the rock stability, gas levels, the victim’s medical condition. These are the things you focus on first.

“If you take anything away from this training seminar it is these two things.” Mercer’s voice carried a serious tone that seemed to seep into the stone walls. “First thing is to thank the stars you’re not a Chinese miner.” This got a few dark chuckles as they had spent part of a classroom session going over the horrors of the Chinese mining industry. “But seriously, know that if you are ever called upon to use the skills we’ve worked on together, then some fellow miner is having the worst day of his life — and his life is in your hands. Don’t make the situation worse by forgetting your training.”

Mercer let them think about that for a few seconds before smacking his hands together to break the hypnotic mood. “Okay children, I have taught you at least the basics, and despite a few gaffes that were not bullsheet, Hans…you’ve all passed the course.” A round of spontaneous applause broke out in the room. “And,” Mercer continued, “that means dinner tonight is on me.”

The miners roared their approbation, even if the local eatery was a kitschy overdecorated chain restaurant. It had thirty kinds of beer on tap, and all of them were cold.

They started moving off in a raucous gang, like schoolkids anticipating summer vacation. Mercer stood, watching them go.

Teaching mine rescue techniques wasn’t his primary job. Mercer was a prospecting geologist and mine engineer. He was the hired gun called in when big mining companies needed a second opinion before committing hundreds of millions of dollars to open a new pit or shaft, or when they needed guidance to maximize claims they were already working. Mercer was credited with finding billions of dollars’ worth of extractable ore, be it something as ordinary as bauxite deposits for aluminum smelting, or as exotic as the sapphires from a mine in India that was producing some of the finest gemstones ever discovered. His career had taken him to almost every corner of the planet and had made him a wealthy man, but one who did not forget the roots of his success. Mercer felt a responsibility to his profession to give back a little of his hard-won experience. In fact, his pay for the weeks here in Minnesota was less than a tenth of what he earned consulting. But some things in life weren’t about money.

“Dr. Mercer.”

“Just Mercer, Tom,” he said to the one student who’d hung back. “The doctor title is only used getting dinner reservations.”

“I just wanted to thank you for everything. It’s been real interesting.”

“Well, let me say this with all sincerity, I hope to God you never need to use what you’ve learned.”

It took a second for the young miner to catch Mercer’s meaning. “I hope the same thing. Thank you.” They shook hands. Tom Rogers turned for the long walk to the mine head, where the lifts to the surface were located. Mercer didn’t move. “You coming?”

“No,” Mercer said. “I want to check out the science team that’s leased out another part of the mine. I’ll see you at the restaurant.”

Mercer moved into a side chamber and killed the generator he’d rigged to run the lights and mini-fridge. The silence and darkness were profound. It was complete sensory deprivation — such an alien experience that most people couldn’t stand it for more than a few minutes. Many panicked in seconds. Mercer could have stood there for eternity. He flicked on his helmet light and moved off down the tunnel, away from where his men had vanished around a corner. They were headed to the main lifting station. Mercer made for the auxiliary elevator shaft, his step light even in steel-toed boots.

The science team wasn’t actually his primary interest. They were here at the Leister Deep Mine doing some research on climate change and cosmic rays. They needed to be underground and at this particular mine because the copper vein was situated below a thousand-foot-thick slab of iron ore. Though not commercially viable to mine, the ore acted as a shield to certain galactic rays while admitting others. It was, embarrassingly, a bit out of his field.

The problem with modern science, he mused, was that it had become so specialized that a geologist like him hadn’t the foggiest idea what was happening in a related field such as climatology. Both were earth sciences, but so widely divergent that the men and women down here could be doing voodoo incantations as part of their research for all he knew.

No, Mercer’s real interest was not in this particular research, but in Abraham Jacobs. Jacobs was one of the faculty advisers on the team, an éminence grise of Penn State University and later Carnegie Mellon, and was now retired but still consulted at a small private college in eastern Ohio. Far more than an adviser, Jacobs had been Mercer’s mentor during his time at Penn State while he had earned his doctorate in geology.

When asked about his background, Mercer liked to quip he was African American. People looked at his white skin and storm-gray eyes and usually cocked a questioning eyebrow, until Mercer would explain that he was born in Africa, to an American father and a Belgian mother. His parents were killed in a forgotten uprising in a forgotten part of what was then Zaire, and he was raised by his paternal grandparents. They were wonderful people who tended to all his childhood needs, but it was Abe Jacobs who really became Mercer’s role model and surrogate father.

They had drifted apart as Mercer’s career skyrocketed, only to reconnect in recent years. The two men, master instructor and star student, had tried to see each other now at least once a year. It had been eighteen months since their last visit — and Mercer was further burdened by guilt because monthly phone calls had degenerated to occasional texts — so he walked with an eager step down the lightless tunnel.

Mercer had accepted this offer to teach mine rescue in the Leister Deep because he knew Abe would be here helping on the research project. According to their last communication, Abe would be arriving today, while the principal investigator and her postdocs and undergrads had been here setting up the experiment over the course of the past week.

Mercer came to a lighted nexus point where several tunnels came together. The secondary lift was a utilitarian cage behind a steel accordion door and was only in working condition because the bulk of the abandoned mine’s upper levels had been turned into a climate-controlled storage facility totaling some eight million square feet. Down where Mercer had taught his course, and deeper still where the scientists worked, the air was too humid for storage, but since part of the facility was occupied, all of its safety and operations gear had to work properly no matter where it was located.

He stepped onto the open mesh floor of the lift cage and closed the door behind him. Below his feet was a profound blackness that seemed to want to suck him into its embrace. He depressed the control handle, and the elevator slid out from the glow of the subterranean crossroads and plunged downward. Had he wanted, Mercer could have brushed the rock of the shaft as the car dropped deeper into the earth. The stone was roughhewn, and it always amazed him that whoever had excavated this shaft had been the first creature ever to have laid eyes on this particular rock.

That concept gave him pause while he was in the field searching for the next mother lode, splitting open stones with a rock hammer and knowing that what he was looking at had never once seen the light of day. More than most, Mercer understood that humanity was a blip on the geologic timeline.

He descended another five hundred feet. From the dim light filtering up from below, Mercer could see that he was nearing the mine’s deepest complex of tunnels. He eased off the controls to slow the elevator and flicked it off when the car matched the depth of another accordion door. Beyond was a well-lit chamber much like the one above. Unlike a commercial elevator with automatic safety clamps, this one bobbed for several seconds, a sensation first-timers found very disconcerting. Mercer paused so the tension in the fifteen-hundred-foot cable could equalize before sliding open the door and stepping out into the tunnel.

He had been given two gifts by genetic luck. One was a near-photographic memory, and the other was a spatial sense that allowed him to understand the three-dimensional mazes that were hard-rock mines, and the ability to move about them without fear of getting lost.

Unlike the level where he’d been teaching, there was a lot of equipment stacked about even though this was the secondary lift. The big main elevator was a quarter mile away and could easily transport the massive ore buckets that had once been pulled from this depth as well as the heavy equipment that had been lowered down to mine it. Human nature being what it was, it appeared the scientists preferred using this man-scaled lift to get to work versus the barn-size primary hoist that had transported much of their gear.

Mercer saw they had even brought down electric golf carts and a couple of Segway people movers with fat off-road tires to handle the rough floor. They were plugged into a charging station that ran off the mine’s mains.

There’s a first time for everything, he thought, as he looked around furtively. Mercer unplugged and then stepped onto one of the two-wheelers, thumbing the “start” button and almost killing himself because he was leaning back slightly and the Segway tried to lurch out from under him. He centered his weight better, and the gyroscopes stabilized the platform. He took a firmer grip on the handlebars, leaned forward, and was amazed at how smoothly the awkward machine moved. In seconds he was weaving it from side to side down the tunnel like a veteran rider.

This section of the mine had been carved using the “room and pillar” technique. Mercer thought it an odd choice, since usually coal was taken from the earth in that way. The rooms were vast, tens of thousands of square feet, and they were supported at regular intervals by pillars of unmined ore that formed columns to hold up the roof. Mercer zipped silently through several such yawning caverns, until he approached the side chamber where he knew the scientists had set up their experiment. Outside the chamber were a half dozen golf carts and Segways as well as mechanical transporters fashioned for use in low-ceilinged spaces. These were real mining machines, designed so the operator sat in a cage off to the side of the vehicle rather than a cab atop it. They were old and dented, with fading paint, relics of a time when the mine was in operation. Lord knew how the team of eggheads had gotten them running, but the flatbeds had been used to haul the bulk of their scientific apparatus from the main lift.

Mercer left his Segway next to the others and stepped over to look at one of the transporters. It had a forward cab with a diesel engine behind it, and an articulated bed that had to have been fifty feet long. There were multiple sets of small solid rubber wheels, which filled Mercer’s mind with an image of a rudimentary mechanical centipede.

The thought was interrupted by a sudden sound — one Mercer had first heard on the day his parents had been mowed down by African rebels. He had heard it many times since. It was the staccato ratchet of automatic weapons fire.