He turned the ignition and the vehicle’s 6.5L V8 turbocharged diesel engine roared into life. He dropped the park brake and put his foot down hard on the accelerator. For nearly six thousand pounds worth of light truck, the Humvee took off at a spritely pace.
Gallagher drove down the recently built construction road from the old base to the entrance to the first shaft of the boring tunnel. Blacktop had already started to break away from the new road base, where the unimaginably heavy boring machines were maneuvered through. Ten minutes later, he reached the entrance of the tunnel.
He gave his ID to the guard who approached his window. The man recognized him immediately and handed the card back to him and waved him through. Gallagher switched on his headlights and drove through.
Five minutes later, he came to a stop where several engineers and machine operators were standing around talking among themselves as though they didn’t have a care in the world. Perhaps they didn’t? It wasn’t their problem that over a hundred million dollars of boring equipment, including Big Bertha was sitting there doing nothing but costing the company a couple hundred thousand dollars a day. And while they were all enjoying a leisurely chat waiting for the machine operator at the head of the convoy to get a move on, he had to explain to the key stakeholders in the project that despite the already almost insurmountable cost overruns, they were still a long way off having to declare the Bering Strait Crossing a total boondoggle.
He switched off the ignition and climbed out of the Humvee. Each of his workers tensed, as though caught by the headmaster for truancy, as Gallagher approached. He shook his head. What did they think was going to happen? The forward machine operator had defiantly pulled the plug. He was bound to come down and get things moving again, today.
Gallagher looked at the group of engineers and machine operators. “All right, where is he?”
“Who?”
“The schmuck who decided today he’d found his balls and decided to cost the company a couple hundred thousand dollars in delays.”
“Bill’s sitting in his rig,” Mark, the tunnel manager for the day shift, said.
“What’s his problem, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He says the drilling head’s struck something.”
Gallagher shrugged. “The damned machine designed to slice right through granite for God’s sake. So, what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. You go talk to him.”
Gallagher, realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere talking to this bunch, walked toward the lead boring machine, past where the two smaller boring machines had stopped working and his assistant and the crews of both the rear borers followed. Gallagher approached the last of the gigantic tunneling machines.
He watched as the monstrous piece of heavy machinery lurched forward ahead of him. He heard the operator swear. It was immediately followed by a loud explosion, which shook the ground in the tunnel.
Gallagher ducked, instinctively expecting the roof to collapse. When it didn’t come down on him, he cautiously rose and looked toward the front of the tunnel, where the machine was toppling, almost in slow motion. The foreman couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing at first.
Then, with sudden understanding as the heavy machine disappeared into the newly created fracture in the tunnel wall, he yelled, “Run!”
Chapter Ten
Gallagher turned and ran with the rest of the crew toward the landward end of the tunnel. He expected the freezing sea to come pouring into the tunnel at any moment. Instead of icy saltwater, what followed him was a sustained blast of warm air, carrying dust and other debris. With the rest of his operators, he stumbled, choking, out of the mouth of the tunnel.
Dirt, filth and debris began raining down from above their heads, where the funnel of air spread out in the open and slowed down until it could no longer carry the weight of the dirt and debris it bore. The men stood in clumps, everyone with expressions of confusion.
What the hell just happened?
They waited a good thirty minutes for any signs of seawater running up to greet them. When it didn’t, Gallagher concluded that the collapse had not been from above, and they could reasonably expect to go and see without drowning.
He led the group back into the tunnel, running again with the hope of rescuing the crew of the forward machine and fighting the gale of hot air and debris every step. When they reached the spot where she’d last been seen, there was no sign of the borer. Only an abyss large enough to swallow her, and ahead, a wall of volcanic gabbro where the foreman would have expected sedimentary bedrock.
The workmen gathered around the perimeter of the hole, trying to peer down into the abyss. However, the still-flowing heated blast drove them back. From what they could tell in brief glimpses with safety goggles protecting their eyes but not the skin of their faces, the machine was not visible.
It appeared the borer had broken into a previously undetected underground cavern. There was no telling how deep it was without specialized equipment, and no chance to form a rescue party from here. The whole crew were presumed dead. The foreman’s day was now officially a disaster, but nothing like the poor men who’d gone down with the borer.
“Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing we can do,” he said, with a defeated sigh. The source of the hot air and the detritus it carried was above his pay grade. Let the bigwigs figure it out. He’d have all he could handle keeping his crew from mutinying.
Three hours later, a mine rescue team, two senior engineers, two geologists and one anthropologist arrived. They had been flown in from Anchorage to Wales by a fixed wing aircraft and then from Wales to Big Diomede Island by helicopter. Not a bad effort, Gallagher realized, to pull a group of experts to such a remote part of the world within such short notice.
The mine rescue team donned protective equipment, breathing apparatus, and made their way into the boring tunnel. At the same time the senior engineers, geologists and bigwigs began to try to figure out what happened, what was continuing to happen, and what to do next. Meanwhile, the entire construction camp was being buried under a layer of red sand, grit, and more. The foreman didn’t know what to make of the miscellaneous small animals, bush fragments, and oddest of all, bones from both large and small animals being brought up from the cavern by the howling wind. Neither did anyone else.
Gallagher sat in on the frequent meetings, but seldom had anything to contribute. It was his suggestion, though, that brought in a forensic anthropologist to identify the bones. Most were cattle and coyote, which meant they could have originated anywhere on the mainland. That in itself was odd enough. Another oddity — there were no reindeer bones. Reindeer were prevalent in both the Russian and Alaskan peninsulas. Even many of the surrounding islands, such as the Aleutian Islands, had had reindeer introduced and were still herded as a source of subsistence meat.
Oddest of all were the human bones. Not so much those that were of obvious prehistoric origin. The Diomede islands, after all, were thought to be one of the last exposed portions of the land bridge between Asia and North America that existed during the Pleistocene period. The anthropologist was stunned by the size of some of the bone fragments though. They suggested that the origins of those bones were much more modern.
Other than providing a little more information, it made no difference to the foreman’s dilemma. He needed to get his crews working again, but before he could do that, he needed more information about that cavern. Would moving the bore hole a few feet or yards to the side save the project? Or would it risk losing another crew and costly machinery? Until someone could tell him that, he was at a standstill.