Sam grinned, like a kid in a candy shop. “Nice piece of gear you’ve got here.”
“You’d better believe it. Some of the best dredgers in the world are up here. It’s because of the glacial silt.”
“Really? What about it?”
“As the name suggests, the silt is formed by fine particles of rock ground by the movement of glaciers. The particles become fine and powdery, but microscopically more accurately resemble razor sharp gravel.”
“So, it’s damaging to machinery?” Sam asked, thankful that Tom had made the decision to back the Sea Witch II away from the cloud of glacial silt from the crest of the mound and protect the props from real harm.
Miller nodded. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
Sam ran his eyes over the rest of the display instruments. To the right were a series of computer screens that monitored the dredging equipment in relation to bathymetric images of the seafloor in a series of depth isobaths. The monitoring software then used Real Time Kinematic satellite navigation to accurately record where the machine had been operating and to what depth.
Sam watched clearly, as the auger head was positioned at the side of the conical tower of sand. The captain adjusted the position with the adept movements of a single hand on a joystick. The device moved forward and began devouring the sand.
Thirty minutes later the auger head was positioned in the middle of the empty pile of sand. Sam stared at the monitoring equipment. It was obvious the sand tower was nothing more than that. He asked, “Would you feel some sort of resistance if the device struck the metal of a ship?”
“Sure we would. There’d be vibrations following up the line that would try and tear my ship apart.”
“So, it’s just sand?”
Captain Smith crossed his arms. “I don’t know what to tell you Mr. Reilly. Really, I don’t. The sand’s soft. No doubt about it. The ground below has been recently stirred up. That’s for sure. But I couldn’t even hazard a guess about who or what did it.”
“Can you dredge any deeper?”
“To a point. We’re already forty feet below the seabed. More sand and debris will keep coming in the farther we go.”
“The recently turned over sand continues as deep as forty feet?”
“Yeah. Much deeper.” The captain nodded. “It’s as though an old gigantic sandworm just bored its way through the surface and swallowed the sea whole.”
“Would a submarine earthquake cause anything like that?”
“No. It would stir up the sand. That’s for sure. But that’s where the similarities end. This is almost a perfectly circular tunnel of weakened sand with the diameter of a quarter of a mile. More like a sinkhole than a shift in the tectonic plates.”
“You think it’s big enough to have swallowed a moderate sized cargo ship?”
The captain thought about it for a moment. “It would need to drag it down vertically — like stern or bow first, but, yeah… I think it’s possible. I’ve never seen or even heard of such a thing happening before, but it’s possible.”
Sam nodded. “Any idea what could have possibly caused such an event?”
The captain shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Chapter Nine
The senior foreman stared at the large chart pinned up on the wall opposite his desk. He drew a quick breath and shook his head in frustration. It depicted an overly simplistic vision of the various stages of the Transcontinental World Link. An idea which had been bandied about by politicians, engineers, and wealthy merchants since 1890, when the first Governor of the Colorado Territory, William Gilpin, first proposed the idea of a vast cosmopolitan railway linking the US with Europe in a series of railways. More than a century later, Russia, Canada and the US had finally agreed on putting that plan into practice.
It all appeared easy enough on paper. The Bering Strait crossing included a bridge and a tunnel spanning the relatively narrow and shallow waters between the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia and the Seward Peninsula in the U.S. state of Alaska. With the two Diomede Islands between the peninsulas, the Bering Strait could be spanned by a bridge and a tunnel. There would be one long bridge connecting Alaska and the Diomede Islands, and a tunnel connecting the Diomede Islands and Russia. The earth bored from the tunnel could be used as landfill to connect the two islands. So far, the project had faced repeated political, engineering, and financial setbacks. The original feasibility study overlooked the most complex unknown in the construction industry — people.
That’s where the problems occurred. It had already been a frustrating day for Michael Gallagher, the foreman of the Canadian-led heavy construction crew. He ran the palm of his hand through what remained of his rapidly thinning, gray hair. He had as much respect as anyone for the First Peoples, but those on this god-forsaken rock of an island were driving him crazy.
Although the Russian-owned Big Diomede Island had been uninhabited by the native Yupik people since they were expelled during World War II, the tribal people who lived on its neighboring island of Little Diomede complained that the tunnel boring would disturb the soil, possibly releasing evil spirits into their world. They pointed to claims by distant relatives of the damage done by the US Northeast Cape Air Force Station on St. Lawrence Island in the Aleutian Islands during the Cold War causing cancer in the native population. The statistics eventually showed that their rates of illness were no higher than other people living in Alaska. Even so, the base was eventually removed and millions of dollars were spent on the cleanup.
The 110 permanent indigenous residents of Little Diomede challenged the Transcontinental World Link project. First, they’d delayed construction of the runway on the old site of the Russian military base. Even though the project had won the court battle, protesters often deliberately got in the way of the dangerous equipment, causing further delays. The foreman had dealt with clearing the runway of trespassing protesters today already, so the plane carrying parts for his Big Bertha class tunnel boring machine could be landed.
Now he was on his way to quell a rumor among his men that the Yupik workers he’d employed to placate the local First Peoples were secretly sabotaging the big machines. There was no need for them to do that, he thought savagely. The borers were temperamental enough on their own. And the near-vertical portion of the tunnel they were working on wasn’t easy on them. Nevertheless, they had to get deep enough to establish a secure base for the long horizontal bore toward the Russian mainland.
“Which operator is making the most noise?” he asked his assistant.
“The one in the forward machine,” came the answer.
“Figures.” He’d have to stop all work in the monster machines following their leader to safely approach the forward borer. Another delay.
Gallagher stepped out of his demountable office, put his hard hat on and climbed into one of the company’s mine shuttle cars — a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, more commonly referred to as a Humvee. Unlike its lighter civilian equivalent, called a Hummer H1, this was originally military hardware and one of four the company had purchased cheap from one of the bases that had closed down in the early 2000s. With its four-wheel drive, it was an effective shuttle car to move engineers and miners from the surface to the main boring machines far below. This one had a utility tray at the back, sort of like a pick-up truck, that had never been used.
The thing was enormous, but that didn’t matter. The tunnels were going to be big enough to accommodate a three-lane highway and the Humvee was only going to be used to ferry people from topside to the lead boring machine. The one nicknamed Big Bertha after Seattle’s first female mayor, where the machine was first commissioned.