Turbee raced down the street, heading east along Pennsylvania Avenue. He ran for several blocks, until his underused lungs started to ache. His eyes lost their focus, and cars and buildings swirled around him. “Out, out, out. Fuck off. Pack. History. Out!” The comments of his First Grade class joined the chorus chiming in his brain. “Loon. Moron. Idiot. Retard.” He couldn’t control the sound in his head, which was starting to disintegrate like a Hendrix guitar note. “Stupid, stupid, STUPID!” His heart was racing and sweat was pouring out of his pores. His anxiety reached a fevered pitch, and the feeling was becoming as audible as a highly pitched warbling electronic yowl.
The voice of Kathy, his tutor from Fourth to Tenth Grade, gradually emerged from the confusion of images, sounds, and memories. Kathy, who had replaced the mother that he had lost to parties, alcohol, and strange men. “Don’t ever forget this, Hamilton,” Kathy had told him once. “If this ever happens again, breathe slowly and deeply. Stop moving. Close your eyes. Think back to this moment and remember my voice. Slow your breathing. Shut out the noise and the lights, and stay calm. Breathe, Hambee. Breathe slowly… breathe… breathe…”
He opened his eyes, and felt the howling concerto of Dan Alexanders begin to fade out. His panic dropped somewhat, and he started walking again. His brain switched to autopilot, and for awhile he distracted himself by mentally solving five-dimensional Fourier transform equations.
He wandered about in this fugue state for most of the day, stopping at the occasional corner store to purchase chocolate and root beer, two of his comfort foods. He was now completely lost, but didn’t care. When he became weary he simply sat down on a curb or nearby bench. The entire day slid past while Turbee wandered the city aimlessly.
The Haramosh Star rounded the northern tip of Sumatra silently, with Lhok Alurayeun to the north, and Banda Aceh to the south. It was three in the afternoon, and a hot tropical sun was beating down on the ship. The waters were calm. Vince had slowed the ship to a pace of ten knots, and was alertly watching both the radar and sonar screens. The Straight of Malacca was one of the most crowded marine traffic lanes on the planet. Any eastbound vessel from Africa, the Suez Canal, the Middle East, Pakistan, or India went through these waters. Furthermore, the great earthquake of 2004, and the tsunami that followed, had been severe enough to alter the course of the shallow channel. The old channel maps were no longer accurate, and in the year following the great earthquake many vessels had run aground in places where the maps showed that there should have been sufficient depth. Vince was determined to avoid this fate.
He watched as the reconstruction sites of Banda Aceh crawled by. With billions of dollars of aid from many governments, agencies, and organizations, the area was now witnessing one of the greatest building booms in history. Vince shuddered at the reason behind the rebuilding. Oceanographers and mathematicians had calculated that the tsunami that had swept over this peninsula and resulted in the need for rebuilding had been a towering, unbelievable 80 feet in height. The height of a six or seven-floor building. The poor bastards never had a chance, he thought, as his eyes followed the coastline, simultaneously tracking the screens in front of him. Not a prayer of a chance. He continued to look at the shoreline, and was deeply, deeply troubled. The explosives he had stowed away on his ship would be capable of much greater damage than what he was looking at. His sailor’s heart thanked God that he wouldn’t be there to see it.
Governments being what they are, notorious entanglements of inefficiency and tepid bureaucracy, it took Indy the better part of a day in downtown Victoria, BC to find the proper building. He was sent first to the Ministry of Mines executive offices, and from there to the MOM Operations Building, and from there to the MOM Annex, then to the MOM New Building, and finally to the BC Mining Archives building. Once in the building, it had still taken him an hour of deferential waiting to be shown, by a relatively young man who moved at a glacial pace, to the sub-basement stacks. It was another hour before he found the shelving units that contained the precious nuggets of information he was seeking.
The office closed for business by 4:30PM, which of course meant that almost everyone was gone by four. The lights dimmed, and Indy listened to the scurrying of feet and the locking of doors somewhere above him. Good. They had forgotten he was there, which meant he had the place to himself. He renewed his search, relieved that he wouldn’t be interrupted.
Eventually he found what he was looking for, and it turned out to be a priceless morsel of information. Lying on a bottom shelf, covered with dust and hoary with age, was a file folder bearing the name “Devil’s Anvil.” His hands trembling in anticipation, Indy found the application, the permit, the development plan, and the subsequent modifications and alterations of the disused mine. There were also some interesting old memos. Everything was there. There was even a series of maps enclosed with the application.
Indy compared the 1920 surveying maps to the modern map he’d brought with him. A grin started to play across his face. Sure enough, the Leon Lestage property was located precisely at the entrance to the Devil’s Anvil mine. Some of the shafts and tunnels appeared to be very close, if not touching, the 49th parallel (otherwise known as the US/Canada border in Montana). He looked more closely at one of the development plans on file. At the bottom of a large map of the mine itself was a signature. It was unmistakable — James Leon Hallett. No doubt one of the progenitors of what was to become the Hallett/ Lestage gang 60 or 70 years later.
Is this how they’re doing it? he wondered. Is this the route? Was this the border hole? More work was required. Dangerous work. He’d have to get into that mine. He needed to know what modifications the Lestages and Halletts had made. How they were doing this. It would be critical, and perilous, and would have to be done when Leon was away. He would definitely need Catherine’s help.
The phone at the Cranbrook detachment rang a few times. A receptionist picked it up and promptly put Corporal Catherine Gray on the line.
“Ready to do some spelunking, Cath?” Indy asked.
“Sure, but it had better not be dirty,” she answered.
“Spelunking. Exploring underground cave systems. In this case, underground mine systems. That’s what spelunking is. And sorry, but it can be dirty — especially if it’s a coal mine we’re exploring.”
“Where?”
“Leon’s trailer is positioned right at the entrance of an abandoned coal mine called Devil’s Anvil. Carved out of the stone in the 1920s by a mule-stubborn Scottish miner by the name of James Leon Hallett. The mine was pretty rich too, according to the assay reports.” Indy was talking so quickly that his Punjabi accent was starting to come through.
“Slow down, Indy. Where are you?” asked Catherine. “What have you found? And what’s with the Devil’s Anvil nonsense?”
“I’m at the BC Mining Archives, in Victoria, in the basement.”
“Where?”
Indy explained to her how an RCMP computer analyst had teased the name Devil’s Anvil out of one of the digital photographs he had taken on his recent trip to the Akamina-Kishinina. He told her that it had been a lucky guess that it was the name of an old mine. “At the time it must have looked like it would be a good commercial proposition, but the railway never extended that far south, and the American railways never went that far north,” he told her. “So James Hallett was stuck. He ranted and raved in Victoria, and apparently did the same in Ottawa. According to this file he was arrested for waving a gun around in the Nelson District Mining Office. Ultimately, it seems that he drank himself to death, probably unable to come to terms with the fact that he was sitting on one of the richest coal deposits in the Rockies, with no one who wanted to put in a railway. It’s kind of a sad story, actually.”