Again and again he and Tim would make an adjustment and then crank the engine. After more than an hour of this, their troubles worsened. When Tim went to turn the engine on, it wouldn’t even click. Nothing. All that cranking had drained the Humvee’s battery, and now it was dead. On top of everything else.
In that moment of exasperation, Billy’s instincts kicked in. He headed over to the white Humvee pickup, the one they had driven out in, and popped the hood. He removed the battery from that vehicle and used it to replace the dead one in the Humvee wagon. That worked. But they still had to get the engine running.
More tinkering, more frustration. Finally they tried holding the override switch on the oxygen injector for an unusually long time. Whether it was that, or something else they did, or just sheer luck, the engine burped and, for the first time, didn’t conk out. It was 7:23 p.m. The guys rushed to collect their tools that were scattered all around, then climbed into their seats in either the Hummer wagon or the towed pickup, and Tim threw the wagon into drive.
Hoss had spent much of the day sitting beside Harald topside in his trailer, so he’d heard all the calls about the air problems and the Humvee not starting and the battery dying. He was still in pain because of the problems from Monday’s shift, but Tuesday had turned out to be just as bad. He had felt himself getting more and more upset as the day wore on. T is buUshit, he told himself. By ten o’clock that night, when the divers had ridden the man cage up the shaft and were shuffling over to Harald’s trailer, Hoss was fuming. And so were the rest of the guys.
They confronted Harald about the recurring problems, which seemed only to be getting worse. Harald acknowledged there were still a few kinks that needed to be worked out, but he assured them things would go better tomorrow. To Hoss, though, the problems had escalated to the point where they felt less like kinks than like fundamental flaws that were now compromising the divers’ safety. And he had no interest in hearing the same explanations and excuses.
Tap had been sitting in his black trailer with the door open, so he’d heard enough of the divers’ complaints to detect their seriousness. After the divers cleared out and boarded their school bus, Tap walked over to Harald’s white trailer and asked, “What’s going on?”
Harald talked about how they had to adjust a few of the valves to improve the flow rates, and then everything should be fine.
“Okay,” Tap said, tentatively. But as he walked back to his trailer, he felt his stomach tightening. He knew the guys were upset, and he wondered if he should raise a ruckus with the people above Harald. But he didn’t feel that he had enough concrete information to take to the managers at Kiewit or the MWRA and ask for a halt to the operation. If Harald gave them the same reassuring assessment he’d just delivered to Tap, they’d probably defer to the distinguished Canadian engineer over him. I’m dealing with these big, big companies that can squash me, Tap told himself. I need to know what’s going on before I go to the powers that be. Still, he promised himself that if things didn’t improve tomorrow, he’d step up his complaints.
As Hoss and the other guys rode the school bus off the island and back to the racetrack parking lot, the tense meeting that had begun in Harald’s trailer erupted into an all-out bitch session. The consensus was that the breathing system was lousy and the equipment unreliable. Even a normally easygoing guy like Tim, whose wife had made him promise during their phone call Sunday night not to go back into the tunnel if he felt it wasn’t safe, had grown more concerned.
“This is fucked,” Hoss told his wife when he called her from his HoJo’s motel room. Heather was used to her husband being gung-ho about his work and relatively close-mouthed about any problems he encountered on site. So when he opened up to her about how badly the tunnel job was going, she was alarmed.
“Come home,” she told him. “Just get out of there!”
Hoss said he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t abandon the other guys, who after all were in the same predicament as he was. He also worried about the impact that walking off the job would have on his career at Norwesco, the only real employer he’d ever known as a diver. Roger had flown him out to Boston twice, counting the factfinding mission from a year earlier, and had spent money on his training and lodging. The owner was counting on him to help Norwesco finish this big job. Hoss figured that if he walked now, it would be a surefire way to extinguish his rising-star reputation. After he hung up with his wife, he called his parents. They had the same reaction, encouraging him to come home. He told them what he had told Heather: he couldn’t let his team down. But he also assured them that if any more problems arose, he would keep himself out of the tunnel and work as part of the standby team.
As pissed off as Hoss was, a part of him still wondered if he might be overreacting. He’d been on plenty of jobs before that saw setbacks and tension, and somehow things had always worked out in the end. Maybe that was all this was. But he sure didn’t think so.
As they fanned out for the night, the other divers were feeling similar pangs of doubt. When Riggs talked with his wife about some of his concerns, Karen too grew worried, especially since he was usually so circumspect. But past experience told her that nothing she could say was going to influence his decision. So she tried to offer a few comforting words.
When Billy arrived at his buddy’s house late that night and prepared to crash, there was a message from Michelle. He knew how uneasy she was with the job already, so he had no interest in adding to her agitation by detailing all the day’s disturbing developments. He didn’t have the energy for another lecture. Surprisingly, though, in her message Michelle didn’t mention any of her qualms about the job. Instead, she told Billy she had an important question for him about what kind of homeowner’s insurance they needed to line up in preparation for the closing on their house, which would take place in two weeks.
After years of scrimping, Billy and Michelle were finally going to get the beautiful old farmhouse they’d been longing for. Sitting on eleven acres, it had a gracious porch and a garage out back where Billy could keep his tools and do his tinkering. They hoped eventually to open a small business together, so in preparation Michelle planned to return to college to study accounting. Because neither of them had ever bought property before, Billy had been soliciting advice from his mother, Olga, who worked as an assistant to a real estate attorney in Florida. Olga had even delayed a planned summer visit to see Billy until after he and Michelle had moved into their new place. In several house-related phone calls, Billy had shared all the major details with his mother except one. He hadn’t told her where his biggest source of funds for the house had come from. It had been the cash Tap paid him when he bought out Billy’s partnership in Black Dog. Billy worried that his parents, especially his father, would be disappointed in him for giving up on being a small-business owner. He remembered how much his dad had beamed with pride when he’d come to New Hampshire to see Billy and Tap’s Black Dog operation. So Billy had mentioned nothing of the sale to his family and had made Michelle promise to keep her lips sealed as well.
Billy didn’t know the answer to Michelle’s insurance question, but he knew his mother would. Still, knowing Olga was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person, there was no way he was going to call her as the clock approached midnight. He decided to wait until morning to phone her, then call Michelle after that, once he had the information.
Meanwhile, before DJ made his way home to Waltham, he stopped off to see his girlfriend. Dana had been out for drinks with her sister, so DJ had to wait for a while outside her house before she showed up. Like the other guys, DJ was rattled by what he had experienced in the tunnel, especially given the steady accretion of problems on the job. Also like the other guys, he was looking to talk honestly with the woman he loved about what was on his mind, but without signaling so much concern that she became overly worried and he created a new headache for himself. When Dana finally showed up and he began offering a few details from the day, she didn’t seem particularly concerned. Either that, or she failed to grasp the gravity of what he was trying to say. Frustrated, he told her he had to get going on account of his early start the next morning.