Authors: David Vinjamuri
Sergeant Quigley didn’t waste any time when we got out of the elevator. He motioned to Walters—the second bomb squad guy—who leaned down and talked to Cody before giving him a pat. The dog set off around the elevator at a brisk trot with Walters and Quigley close behind. Jones motioned to us to wait and hurried after them with a worried look on his face. Nichols and I looked around to get our bearings.
The ceiling was set low, a few inches shorter than me, and it was irregular. There were steel posts driven into the roof, supporting plates I assumed kept the whole thing from falling in on us. Given the near absence of light, I would have put numerous gashes in my skull without the helmet. Nichols could just stand but I had to hunch over. Nichols and I were staring at a large, low-slung vehicle with big wheels when we heard the dog bark. In a moment, Jones appeared and motioned to us. “They found something.”
We followed him through a side tunnel past the large coal elevator. The car was sitting idle at the bottom of the shaft. Quigley, Walters and Cody were behind the elevator.
“Take a look.” Quigley motioned to us. I peered over Walters’s shoulder. The dog was sniffing at one of the enormous steel girders anchoring the elevator. An orange box sprouting yellow wires connected to four bricks of high explosive.
“Can you deactivate that?” Nichols asked.
“It’s already done,” Quigley said. “This is a commercial rig. They’ve just attached a timing device to a Lorica Electronic blasting system. They set the charges to amplify the damage to the elevator rail systems and collapse the shaft.”
“This is very visible.” I turned to Jones. “Shouldn’t you have spotted it?”
“Nobody would be back here unless we were doing work on the elevator.” Jones was staring at the blasting setup with a look of incomprehension.
“What are you going to do?” I asked Quigley as Walters withdrew a hard plastic Pelikan case from his gear bag and handed it to him.
“We’ll leave the high explosive here for now. It’s stable on its own. The guys who come after us will have disposal containers with them. But I’m removing the blasting caps. We don’t want them anywhere near the Semtex.” Quigley gingerly removed the caps from each block of high explosive, unwired them from the blasting system, wrapped them up in non-conductive insulator and put them into the hard case.
“The timer,” I asked Quigley after he’d finished securing the blasting caps, “when was it set to go?”
“In two and a half hours.” Silence. Nichols gave me a significant look and I was pretty sure we were having the same thought. We’d guessed wrong. Right about the mine but wrong about the day.
“You better tell the people up top not to send anyone else down after us,” Nichols said to Jones. When she said it, any thoughts of cutting bait and hauling ass out of the mine dissipated. Jones looked shaken but he just nodded and walked over to the call box wired up at the bottom of the elevator.
* * *
“That dog handled himself pretty well on the helicopter,” I said to Quigley as we rumbled through the mineshaft, sprawled in the uncomfortable, low-slung electric vehicle called a mantrip. If the elevator ride down to the bottom of the mine was quick, the journey to the Kitaniny seam was not—it would take nearly forty minutes in the subterranean people mover. Cody, having received a treat for sniffing out a bomb, was sitting happily next to Quigley, his tongue hanging out and his nose poked cautiously from the side of the vehicle.
“He’s a veteran,” Quigley said.
“Literally?”
“You bet. Iraq—two tours. He was a combat dog. Walters was his handler. He adopted Cody when he retired and trained him to be a sniffer. Cody is happiest when he’s working,” he said, scratching the dog under his chin.
“You served there, too?” I asked. Quigley handled himself like he’d seen a few things before.
“Yes. Three tours. We’ve met before, you know.”
I squinted harder through the gloom. “I’m sorry—I’m pretty good with faces but I don’t remember you.” I’m told I have an eidetic memory. I don’t know if that’s true, but when I see something it usually sticks.
“I was wearing a blast suit at the time. In Fallujah.”
“I was there more than once.”
“This was in April 2004. I was an EOD specialist with the Second Infantry, Second Battalion. We were sent to help an A-team raiding a small munitions factory. The hadjis booby-trapped the entire place, bricked up the overhead entrances and blew a bunch of our guys to hell. We were trying to disarm some of the devices on a side door to give another assault team a way through when we came under heavy fire and got pinned down. It was just two of us in blast suits with six dead soldiers piled up around us. We called in and our Lieutenant said they were sending help. We sat there for nearly two hours, into the night, with these guys plinking at us every few minutes like we were squirrels in the vegetable patch. Without the blast suits, we both would have been dead.
“Eventually the shooting stopped—but not all at once. It got lighter and lighter for a while and then we noticed that nobody was shooting at us anymore. We had just started to work on the door we’d been trying to get through again when it swung open. A guy in black walked through and said, ‘It’s clear.’ Then he took off his helmet and ran his hand through his hair. It was the same color as the uniform. I won’t ever forget that face, even with the black paint. It was yours. You didn’t say anything else; you just walked off.
“When we went into the building we found some tricky shit they’d left for us—all disabled. And about a dozen insurgents, all dead, some of them without a bullet hole in them or a drop of blood spilled anywhere. I remember asking the Lieutenant if he’d seen the rest of your team. I figured you were Special Forces or something. He just shook his head. ‘That was a recon guy from one of the ghost JSOC units,’ he said. ‘They sent him in alone. As far as you’re concerned, he was never there.’ They gave us bronze stars for that action, but we didn’t do a goddamn thing to earn them.”
I didn’t say anything and I don’t think he expected me to. We both had particular skills, and he’d found a good way to use his after he left the service.
“So Mr. Herne, if you want to know why me and Walters are willing to take a trip into hell with a civilian to find explosives that may detonate before we reach them when nobody’s life is at risk, it isn’t because some politician told us to. It’s because I know your character, I owe you and that’s all that matters.”
Quigley’s words should have made me feel good, but I was distracted by a stronger sensation. I had a tingle in the middle of my spine, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. It was the same feeling of being yanked around that I’d had since I first stepped in West Virginia. Like someone smarter than me was pulling the strings and I was one step behind.
34
“We’ve got another one.” Walters’s voice came from the darkness.
Nichols and I rounded a corner to find Quigley and Walters crouched over another orange box with three yellow leads snaking out of it. Jones was shining a battery-powered lamp on it while nervously checking methane levels on a handheld detector.
It had been slow going after the rush of finding the initial device so close to the bottom of the elevator shaft. If you’ve never been in a mine, you have no idea what darkness really is. The night sky is full of light, even when it’s overcast. Even night vision goggles don’t work in a mine because there is no light to amplify, only inky darkness. The narrow cone of a headlamp defines your world underground, and you’re reminded of its limitations every time you stumble on uneven floor or bump your head against the irregular, low ceiling. We had to stay within earshot of one another because communications devices work poorly underground.
I had briefly entertained the idea of bringing goggles down in the mine anyway, for the infrared, but they wouldn’t have helped. Infrared might have helped me see Nichols, Quigley and the others, but it would have done no good at all with the regularly spaced steel pillars holding the unnatural roof of the mine aloft.
We scouted a half-dozen different junctions of the ventilation system as we made our way to the idled mining machine on the Kitaniny seam. As we walked, Jones explained the basics of how the mine functioned. Long wall mining has been around since the late 17
th
century. The idea is simple: you cut coal out of the earth and let the roof collapse in on itself. The trick is to make sure that the seam doesn’t collapse on you, by placing roof supports where you’re mining. Now everything is automated, including the removal of the coal. On the new systems, the ceiling is held up by hydraulic lifts that are part of the automated face conveyer system mining the coal.
The Kitaniny seam was a big one—three hundred meters wide and nearly four miles long. The AFC was about a third of the way through it, so we had to travel along an access tunnel that had been cut alongside the seam. The vent for the gas and dust ran along the entire length of the tunnel, at moments intersecting with other vents running up or down to other seams. We stopped at each of these to let Cody sniff for explosives. It was painstaking work.
All of us were nervous because we were past our fail-safe time—the point when we’d need to turn back if we wanted to get topside before the first device would have detonated.
“What’s the timer set for?” I asked.
“Same as the other one. Under an hour from now.”
“Now we’re committed.”
Quigley didn’t answer. He and Walters worked quickly to disarm the device and secure the blasting caps. As with the other charge it wasn’t hidden, just set up where miners making their way to the active seam wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it. We were moving again in ten minutes, and Jones stopped the mantrip after another ten minutes of travel.
“The AFC is about a hundred yards from here.” He pointed.
“How far has it moved since that camera crew was here on Friday?” I asked.
“That’s why I stopped. The AFC would have been right around here on Friday when the film crew visited. There were two shifts, but we discovered a binder in the seam during the second shift. Some kind of clay or shale and it’s the devil to get out. We had to stop work to let the geologist evaluate it.”
Nichols grabbed me as Quigley and Walters followed Cody toward the mining machine.
“Doesn’t this strike you as a little too easy? Two devices almost in plain sight, set up so that a six-year-old could disarm them?”
“They weren’t expecting anybody to be looking.”
“I don’t buy that. These guys are professionals. There have been at least two shift changes in this mine since they left. You think the elevators don’t get inspected regularly when they’re three thousand feet underground?”
“You think they’re decoys? How would that make sense? They’d search this place high and low for anything else once they found them.”
“I’m saying that it was too easy finding and disarming them if the men who did this are as experienced as we think.”
It was a disturbing thought, but it made sense.
* * *
“Got you, you bastard!” Quigley said as he shone a handheld light at a third explosive device, looking much like the other two.
“That’s the beam stage loader,” Jones explained. “This is the end of the cutting line. The shearer there,” he pointed to an enormous piece of equipment over ten feet in diameter that looked like twin pizza cutting wheels with spikes protruding from the edges every foot or so, “moves along the AFC, shearing coal from the wall. The coal drops onto the conveyer and gets pulled down to the end of the line where it hits the beam stage loader. It turns the coal 90 degrees and drops it onto the main conveyer. The conveyer takes the coal all the way back to the coal elevator, where it’s compacted and taken to the surface.”
“Why would they put a device here rather than on the AFC itself?” I asked.
“I don’t know too much about explosives, but the shearer makes a lot of noise and vibrations. And there are always at least two miners supervising it.”
“Wouldn’t they see something going on here, too?”
“Maybe. That would depend on how long it took to set up the bomb. The shearer takes a little while to get from one end of the seam to the other. They wouldn’t see that back there unless they were servicing the machine, I think.” I could tell that Jones was wondering if there was another man on his crew he couldn’t trust.
“We’ve only got twenty minutes left on this one,” Walters said as he reached for one of the blasting caps protruding from a block of plastic explosive. Something in my mind tripped, like tumblers lining up on a bank safe.
I dove at Walters, tackling him before his hand inched past the bright orange control box. Cody snarled and pulled me down by the arm. There was an awkward moment with the three of us piled up, both Walters and I trying to avoid tumbling into the device itself and the dog’s growl echoing through the silent tunnels. Then Walters called Cody off and Nichols pulled me off of Walters. I felt bruises developing on my arm where the dog took hold of me, but he hadn’t broken the skin.
Quigley had figured it out by the time Walters and I disengaged. He leaned in toward the device and pulled a light from his belt. “Turn off your headlamps,” he said. When the rest of us complied, he clicked on the small light. Its four red led bulbs illuminated a narrow section of the commercial detonator. As he slowly moved them across the face, there was a stray gleam, an unexpected reflection of the light. He stopped and inspected closer then swore softly. “Son of a bitch.” Turning the light slightly, he pointed to a monofilament strand the width of a mosquito’s wing. “How did you know?” he asked me.
“I didn’t. She did.” I inclined my head to Nichols. “She figured out that the first two were decoys.”
35
“There’s a second device behind this one. They’ve got it rigged to go if the timer attached to the commercial explosive is disabled. What’s our time?” Quigley asked. Quigley was on his knees on an antistatic pad he’d laid in front of the device. Walters was on the other side, flat on his back, looking up.