But he didn’t have a choice. Mercer took a moment to work his muscles, limbering himself for the challenge. He dropped to his knees, peering down into the shadowed jumble, picking his first moves with his eyes before committing his body. Like a contortionist, he twisted through the equipment, torquing and shifting constantly, lowering himself across the scaly steel, cutting his hands on the sharp edges, smearing skin off his legs and back. His clothes were reduced to rags. It was like moving through a huge knot of barbed wire. If he found a passage to the drift, it would be easy to retrace the trail of blood back to the top of the debris.
Eight feet into the pile, he maneuvered himself into a head-down position, flashing the light under the elevator cage where it had wedged against the wall of the shaft. The beam was swallowed by the darkness of another drift, the last one. His position put him at the inky tunnel’s ceiling. Wriggling like a landed fish, he worked his body under the cage, holding his breath when a section of ruined equipment settled, grinding like a huge pair of steel jaws. He felt the pile was ready to collapse. Ignoring the pain as a piece of metal ripped across his back, he forced himself those last feet, tumbling into the drift as the junk gave out. The tons of machinery, precariously balanced for half a century, collapsed deeper into the mine’s sump with an echoing crash, kicking up a choking cloud of dust. Had Mercer been a second slower, his body would have been cut in two as the cage sheared across the entrance to the drift like the blade of a guillotine.
His breathing raged despite his efforts to slow it, drawing in rancid dust with each inhalation. He took a second to check the worst of his bloody injuries. Once he’d recovered, he cast the light toward the clogged shaft. The drift’s rectangular opening was completely blocked with an impassable wall of debris packed so tightly now that Mercer couldn’t get his arm more than a few inches into it. He gripped a steel I-beam and heaved at it until stars and pin-wheels flared behind his closed eyes. Yet the beam didn’t move more than a fraction of an inch. When it collapsed, the cables, hoists, cages, skips, and all the other equipment thrown into the shaft had keyed into itself, locking together like puzzle pieces, plugging his exit. It would take explosives to dislodge any of it.
Mercer was trapped.
“Well, this is an unexpected wrinkle,” he said aloud.
Mercer knew panic resulted from fear of the unfamiliar, and for better or worse, he had been trapped in mines before. He kept his fear firmly in check. As calmly as a man walking to his office, he turned and started down the dark passage. After only a couple of yards, he stopped short. Blood drained from his face, and his gorge rose acidly in his throat.
The long tunnel was a crypt with hundreds of bodies laid out like cordwood. Ranks of them lined both walls for as far as Mercer’s flashlight could penetrate. He first thought they had been trapped down here like himself, but he realized that their postures were too orderly. These men would have struggled until the last possible second to get themselves out of the chamber. They would have been clustered at the shaft, not resting in these peaceful poses. He inspected the man lying closest to him, and understood. In the parched skin of his forehead, a neat hole had been drilled through his skull. Judging by their clothes, these men were the miners who had excavated the tunnels. They had been shot when the Italians had fled, their bodies abandoned here, the secret of the mine kept by their eternal silence.
“Jesus.” Mercer was reminded of the slave labor gangs used by the Nazis to dig the clandestine underground factories for their rockets and jet fighters.
Walking by the grisly ranks, he judged there were more than four hundred bodies in the drift. Even as he fought his pity for them, he considered just what this meant and had no answer.
Delaying his search for a way out of the drift, Mercer took the time to walk all the way to its end. It ran for more than a mile, branching numerous times to both left and right. The hanging wall was just inches from the top of his miner’s helmet. This tunnel alone doubled again his estimates of the size of the mine and the time taken to create it. Like the first drift he’d explored, the working face had been abandoned shortly after a shot. A mechanical scraper hulked just before the face, and the cables that maneuvered the plow-shaped machine ran back to a four-cylinder donkey engine. The miners had even left their picks, shovels, and pry bars a little way off, the metal kept pristine by the dry air.
A number of questions were answered for Mercer as he studied the rock face itself and examined the ore that had broken away from the stope. He turned away sadly. “Oh, you poor bastards, you never had a chance, did you?”
There was a whole other set of questions Mercer needed to think through, but first he had to get back to the surface. Having spent much of his professional career in the subterranean realm, he had developed the ability to map these three-dimensional mazes as he walked, part of his brain counting distances and angles without really being conscious of it. It was a skill honed with years of practice and allowed him to move underground with relative ease. He back-tracked to the first raise he’d come across on this level. Peering up the black hole, he sensed that it wouldn’t lead to the level above but would branch off into a subdrift. He searched for a cross cut that led to another drift, shorter than the main one and angled downward. A short distance down this tunnel, he came to another raise and inspected the ladder that ran upward. The wood had grayed through the years and was so riddled with dry rot that it felt chalky to the touch. Mercer tested the bottom rung, and his foot snapped the strut with only a tiny amount of pressure.
“Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.”
Instinct told him that at the top of this vertical raise would be a tunnel to the main shaft above the pile of ruined machinery. And his rope to safety. There was enough loose stone on the floor for him to build a mounded pyramid below the aperture. He hummed to himself as he worked, often switching off the flashlight to conserve the batteries, working in a darkness more total than the deepest night. After twenty minutes, the pile was high enough. With a ceiling height of just over six feet, he’d needed a platform of stones three feet tall and had built one nearly four. He aimed the light up the raise, but its ray vanished in the gloom.
The rubble was loose under his boots as he climbed to the top of the pile, ducking into the opening so the rim brushed against his thighs. Just to be certain, he tested another section of the ladder, tugging it gently, but the wood splintered in his hand. Mercer took a deep breath and jammed one foot against the side of the three-foot square vertical shaft. He levered his shoulder against the rock, kicked upward, and swung his other foot against the stone, lifting himself off the pile of gravel and bits of rock. Standing in the chimney with his legs akimbo, he would need both hands to steady himself as he continued the ascent, so he tucked the Maglite into his belt, shifted his weight to his left foot, raised his right a few inches, and rammed it against the wall again.
It took him fifteen minutes to shimmy twenty feet up the shaft because he could take only six-inch steps safely and had to force his palms against the rock face to help distribute his weight. He thought the raise would have ended by now, landing him in another drift, but still it rose into the darkness. To his horror, Mercer realized the shaft was widening; his legs were now spread more than four feet and the strain on his groin muscles and upper thighs was becoming unbearable. For the first time since the collapse of the machinery in the sump, he was starting to have doubts about getting out. He shifted positions, pressing both feet against one wall and forcing his shoulders against the opposite so that his body spanned the void.