Zero Hour

THIRTY

Deep beneath the surface of the ice-covered island, Patrick Devlin found his ears ringing. The bone-shaking sound of a huge rock drill grinding away had all but deafened him over the past hour. When it suddenly stopped, the silence was almost painful.

“That’s deep enough,” a burly foreman shouted.

Devlin backed away from the wall. The heavy drill was mounted on an ore cart of sorts. Padi’s job was to keep pressure on it and drill a series of boreholes in the wall. Covered in dust and grime, he stepped back as another man placed a series of charges in the holes and began attaching wires to the caps.

A sharp whistle sounded. “Everyone to the tunnel,” a foreman demanded.

Spread about the large cavern, a dozen other workers busy crushing rocks and scooping the rubble onto a conveyor belt stopped what they were doing and began trudging toward a small tunnel entrance on one side of the room.

They fit themselves inside, taking shelter under the steel-reinforced arch, weary souls glad to put down their tools for a moment. Devlin noticed their faces were drawn but their bodies fit.

With the armed foreman and his assistant checking the explosives, he took a chance. “What’s your name?” he asked a black man who stood beside him.

“My name is Masinga,” the man replied in a distinct South African accent.

Devlin nodded. “I’m Patrick,” he said. “Sometimes, people call me Padi. What is this place?”

“Don’t you know?”

Devlin shook his head.

“Diamond mine,” Masinga said.

Devlin studied the crumbled rock sitting on the motionless conveyor belt. “I don’t see any diamonds.”

“They’re in the rock,” Masinga explained. “Not much of a miner if you don’t know that.”

“I’m not a miner,” Devlin said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I was bloody well shanghaied,” Devlin swore under his breath. “Weren’t you?”

“No,” Masinga said. “I signed a contract. We all did. Paid us twice the rate De Beers was offering. Only when it came time to leave, we were kept on against our will.”

“Have you tried to escape?”

The man laughed. “Do we look like fish? We’re on an island in the middle of the ocean. Where would we escape to?”

“But your families,” Padi said. “Surely, they can protest.”

“They’ve been told we died in an accident,” another man said. He sounded like he might be from South America. “And they never knew where we were in the first place. None of us did until we got here.”

It sounded like madness to Devlin, but then little had made sense since he’d spotted the Voyager in the harbor off the coast of Jakarta.

“What about you?” Masinga asked. “Maybe someone will come looking.”

“Not likely,” Padi said, remembering that Keane was unconscious when he found the Voyager. “If I had to guess, the whole world probably thinks I’m dead too.”

“You are, then,” Masinga said. “We all are.”

“Tartarus,” Devlin mumbled, prison of the underworld. Now it made sense to him.

“Fire in the hole!” the foreman called out.

The burly man pressed a switch. A dozen small charges went off in rapid succession. The wall bulged out, holding its shape for an instant and then crumbling in a great clamor and cloud of dust.

Fans designed to draw the dust and heat out of the room kicked on, and the cloud was evacuated up a large vertical shaft that led to the surface. It swirled past them, sticking to their sweat-covered bodies. By the time it cleared, Padi’s face was as dark as Masinga’s. In fact, all of them were the same gray color no matter the shade of their skin.

The foreman looked over, the shotgun resting on his shoulder. “Break’s over,” he shouted. “Back to work.”

Masinga and the others rose up and wearily began moving into position. Against his will, Devlin followed.