The Voyage of the Iron Dragon Read online

  Unfortunately, the pneumatic wheels proved to be of limited use on the extremely uneven ground of the mine itself. They were better than the wooden wheels, but not by much. In the narrow confines of the mine, the cart had to be pulled by a single mule, so whenever a wheel hit a large bump, the cart would come to a halt while two or three men grunted and heaved to get it moving again. Finally, they worked out a compromise system: the carts would run on rails until where they got to the staging area, where the larger pneumatic wheels would be installed. The cart would be pulled on the rubber wheels to the dock, where it would be emptied into a waiting ship. The mule, guided by a miner, would then turn around, and head back into the mine. The pneumatic wheels would be removed, and the process would start over again. The process of installing and removing the wheels took a few minutes, but it was still vastly more efficient than stopping a dozen or more times to heave the cart over a bump.

  O’Brien walked passed the platform where the wheels were installed and removed and then followed the rails down into the mine, the dim lamp on his helmet illuminating the walls of the passage front of him. The grade here was steep, and his quadriceps soon burned from the effort. He was descending nearly a foot for every ten feet he moved forward. It was about two hundred feet to main cut of the mine, meaning that he’d be descending about twenty feet underground. Denser and higher quality strata of coal could be found lower, but the water table here was only about twenty-five feet below the level of the gate. Digging deeper would require a constant effort to pump water out of the mine.

  Soon he heard voices, and he knew immediately that something was wrong. When things were going smoothly in the mine, all you would hear was the steady clinking of picks, scraping of shovels, and the low, rhythmic murmur of mining songs—mostly repurposed Viking sea chanties, since most of the miners were Norsemen. Men talking meant something had gone wrong.

  Resisting the urge to run, O’Brien picked his way down the drift as the voices grew steadily louder. The echoes off the tunnel walls made it difficult to understand what they were saying, but he caught fragments as he neared them. They were speaking Norse, a language in which O’Brien had become fluent.

  “—air is in there—”

  “—matter. It will be days, maybe weeks—”

  “—already stopped for almost a week—”

  O’Brien had come to the first of a dozen cuts that extended perpendicularly from the main cut. The perpendicular cuts were about forty feet apart; the first several had been exhausted through what was called “room and pillar mining”: the coal was dug away from the cuts to the left and right, leaving hourglass-shaped pillars every twelve feet or so. Eventually the pillars—comprised mostly of coal themselves, would be dug out as well, while the room was braced with temporary supports, and cuts would be left to collapse.

  “—want to do? There’s no way to get to them without—”

  “—cave in, and then we’re all dead.”

  O’Brien continued following the sound of the voices until he reached the cut where the men were. He turned right and walked down the cut. A flicker of dim light was visible ahead, coming from a chamber on the right. As the light from his own headlamp illuminated the passage, the voices suddenly stopped. A man stepped out of the chamber, and for a moment O’Brien was blinded by the glare of his lamp. Putting up his hand, O’Brien saw that this was Ivar, the foreman.

  “What is going on, Ivar?” O’Brien asked. Ivar, a stocky man with a great yellow beard, held out his hand as O’Brien approached, and the two men clasped hands.

  “Cave-in,” Ivar said.

  “How bad?”

  Ivar’s grimace was answer enough. They’d had cave-ins in the past, but thanks to safety precautions largely unheard-of in tenth century Europe, had only had two deaths in the history of the mine.

  “How many dead?”

  “Don’t know. Seventeen men are unaccounted for.” Three pillars gave out, one after another. We don’t know how much actually collapsed, but we think there’s probably several rooms intact on the other side.

  “How long ago?”

  “Three days.”

  O’Brien’s gut tightened. Seventeen men sealed in a tomb for three days. Some of them were probably injured; others were undoubtedly already dead. He silently cursed himself for taking his time on the way to the mine, but he couldn’t have known. There’d been no sign from the surface, and the miners were completely out of contact with Höfn. Despite their technological advances over the past twenty years, Reyes’s engineers were a long way from developing a transmitter that could send a message 800 miles.

  “Show me,” O’Brien said.

  Ivar nodded and went back into the chamber. They passed through three rooms before reaching the cave-in. The rest of the miners—all thirty of them—were standing around a mountain of coal and gravel that was piled up against the far wall. They were filthy and looked exhausted; most of them were leaning on picks or shovels.

  “Why aren’t you digging?” O’Brien asked, without thinking. Several of the men turned to glare at him, and three of them began talking over each other, their anger all directed at O’Brien.

  “We’ve been digging for three days,” Ivar said, holding up his hand to silence the men. “We just stopped to see if we could hear anything.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So we don’t know if there’s even anyone alive back there.”

  “No, but we have to assume there is.” He pointed his chin at O’Brien as he said this, challenging O’Brien to defy him.

  “Agreed,” O’Brien said. “What about the digger?”

  The digger was what they called the steam shovel that was rusting outside in one of the shacks. They’d used it early on to dig the topsoil out of the bell pits, but it was of little use now that they’d moved underground. All the digging down here was done by hand.

  Ivar seemed uncomfortable at the question. “I thought…” he began. “That is, I told the men….”

  “You told the men what?” O’Brien asked, puzzled at Ivar’s agitation.

  “I told them you’d forbidden us to use it.”

  O’Brien opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. The men were staring at him, cold-eyed, as if waiting for a decree from a cruel, vengeful god. Was this really how they thought of him? How they thought of the strangers from the stars, with their mysterious plans and demands for secrecy? Did they think he would sacrifice seventeen men just to avoid the possibility of detection? The only thing that bothered him more than Ivar’s assessment was the possibility that it was true.

  “Who’s your best mechanic?” O’Brien asked.

  “Einar or Stigr.”

  “I want them both working on that steam engine. Get a couple more men up there in case they need help. Everybody else, get back to digging. And send someone to the karve to fetch the crew. We need all the men we can get.”

  The miners, still looking to Ivar for instructions, didn’t move.

  “We can’t get the digger down here,” Ivar said.

  “Not through the drift,” O’Brien said. “But we can go straight down.”

  “It will ruin the mine,” Ivar said. “The first hard rain, it will flood.”

  “We’ll dig another one,” O’Brien said. “Plenty of coal around here.”

  “But… that will take months!”

  “Then it will take months,” O’Brien snapped, starting to lose his temper. “Move!”

  Ivar nodded. “Einar, Stigr, Sturi and Dag, start working on that engine. Everybody else, dig!”

  Chapter Three

  It took until nearly noon the next day to get the digger running. Several of the joints on the digging arm had rusted solid, the caterpillar tracks the machine rolled on had to be pulled off, repaired and reinstalled, and the engine itself had to be disassembled, purged of dirt and hydrocarbon gunk, and reassembled. They filled the boiler was filled with water and loaded the hopper with coal. Every joint was lubr
icated until it moved smoothly. Once it was running reliably, O’Brien climbed into the driver’s seat. He had insisted on operating the machine himself: he and Reyes had built the digger, based on specs downloaded to their cuffs, and he had logged more hours on it than anyone. Besides, if something went wrong and men died, he wanted to be the one responsible. Dag, a giant of a man with a wispy blond beard, was selected to be the fireman. He rode on the back of the digger, strapped into a harness so that he could shovel coal into the furnace without falling off.

  The digger was the largest machine that had yet been fabricated at Höfn. Weighing twenty tons unloaded, it had to be shipped to Camp Yeager in pieces and assembled on site. It was essentially a rectangular wooden building, eight feet wide and twelve feet long—resting on a rotating platform affixed to the tread assembly. Most of the shed was taken up by the coal hopper, boiler and steam engine. A big iron smokestack and a smaller outlet for escaping steam protruded from the roof toward the rear of the building, and affixed to the front of it was a steel arm assembly with a reach of nearly twenty feet. At the end of the arm, suspended from a cantilevered elbow joint, was a bucket that could hold twenty cubic feet of earth or coal. This wasn’t much by the standards of later, diesel-powered models, but it was the equivalent of about a hundred shovelfuls. It moved more slowly than a human miner, but it could run all day and night with no rest, so its net output was the equivalent of at least fifty men.

  The steam engine’s deployment to Camp Yeager had always been intended to be temporary; it was too risky to keep using it at the mining operation long-term, and the machine was too valuable to be left idle. It remained in Scotland due to what Reyes euphemistically referred to as “sub-optimal management of dependencies,” which was project management-speak for poor planning. As badly as Höfn needed the digger, they needed coal even more, and they had a limited number of ships to transport cargo. The Iron Dragon project was a constant exercise in juggling priorities.

  As the machine rumbled out of the shed and up the hillside, Ivar emerged from the mine opening. O’Brien put the digger in neutral, pulled the hand brake and jumped down. Leaving Dag to his shoveling, he met Ivar halfway down the hill. They had to shout to hear each other over the chugging of the steam engine.

  “We’ve made contact,” Ivar shouted.

  “How many are alive?”

  “Eleven. Three seriously injured.”

  That meant three dead already. “Can you get to them?”

  Ivar shook his head. “It will take another day at least. By then…”

  O’Brien nodded, understanding. By then, more men would have died—if not from untreated wounds, then from dehydration. The men were thought to have some water with them, but not enough to last five days. And he could only imagine how exhausted the men doing the digging were. They’d gotten some relief from the crew of the karve, but many of them had been working eighteen-hour-shifts for four days.

  “The good news is, they’ve got enough air for a few days,” said Ivar. “We’re trying to get a pipe through to get them some water, but it may take a few hours.”

  O’Brien shook his head. “Get everybody out of there,” he shouted. “Set up the chain.”

  Ivar hesitated a moment, but then nodded. He turned to go back to the mine. While working on the digger, they’d come up with a plan for communicating the status of the men below via a daisy chain of men from the site of the cave-in to the surface. O’Brien had long wanted to install a primitive telephone system in the mine, but other projects had taken priority, so the daisy chain would have to do. O’Brien would have liked to give Ivar time to get a water pipe through, but it was too dangerous to have men working below while he was using the digger, and he didn’t dare wait any longer.

  Ivar was a good man, well-respected by the miners and trusted implicitly by O’Brien and the other higher-ups in the Iron Dragon project. He was one of only a handful of the miners who even knew about the Höfn settlement, and the only one on-site who had an inkling of the ultimate purpose of the mine. The rest knew—at most—that they were digging coal in service of the ambitions of some distant political regime. They were paid fairly and treated well, and they trusted Ivar—and in the end, that was all that mattered.

  O’Brien turned and made his way back to the digger. Once in the driver’s seat, he disengaged the brake and shoved it into gear. The machine lurched and continued to lumber slowly up the hill. Soon he had reached the area Ivar had marked out with wooden stakes. Strips of rags had been tied to the stakes so O’Brien could see them. He maneuvered the bucket to the center of the four stakes and began to dig.

  The idea was essentially to dig a bell pit directly on top of the cave-in, removing the rubble that blocked access to the chamber in which the miners were trapped. As Ivar had pointed out, digging a gaping hole in the ceiling of the mine would render it unusable, essentially cutting off the energy lifeline that kept the Höfn settlement going, but O’Brien had made his peace with that. His only concern at present was getting the men out.

  Using the digger to get them out, however, presented its own risks. There was a chance that the movements of the steam shovel would cause another cave-in, crushing the men or putting more rubble between them and the rest of the mine. Ivar had measured and marked the location of the cut as best he could, but if he was off by more than a foot or two, the mine might collapse underneath it, dooming their efforts. By the time they got the digger free and cleared the rubble, the men would be dead.

  The main problem, though, was simply the vast amount of earth that would need to be moved to get to the men. To get to the rubble blocking trapping the men, they would have to dig down about thirty feet straight down, but the digger could only dig down about ten feet. That meant they would have to dig at least two tiers, like an inverted ziggurat, so the steam shovel would have a level place to rest while digging farther down. The digger would dig down ten feet, clearing a level surface big enough for it to set on, drive into the depression, and then repeat the process. The third level would be a bowl shape, with the bottom of the bow intersecting the pile of rubble that was trapping the men. By O’Brien’s estimates, they were going to have to move at least 80,000 cubic feet of earth. At twenty cubic feet per bucket, that was 4,000 bucketsful. At six bucketsful per minute, that was about eleven hours of digging, if all went smoothly and the digger didn’t break down.

  O’Brien worked for six hours straight, stopping only briefly for water: both for himself and for the steam shovel’s boiler. Operating the digger was more exhausting than he remembered, although of course he’d never had to operate it under such dangerous and unforgiving circumstances. The slight air movement in the valley did little to carry the thick, black smoke from the chimney away, so his eyes burned constantly, and his throat became raw. Finally he had to admit that he couldn’t do it alone. He put the digger in neutral, engaged the brake, and climbed down. If Einar hadn’t been there to catch him, he’d have collapsed.

  When O’Brien was able to stand on his own, Einar shot him a questioning look, tapping on his own chest. O’Brien nodded weakly, and Einar grinned. He turned and shouted to Sturi, who was climbing down a ladder into the depression O’Brien had dug. He’d finished the first tier about an hour earlier and driven the digger down the shallow slope he’d left on the east side. For the past hour, he’d been working on the second tier.

  Turning, O’Brien saw that Dag, looking even more exhausted than O’Brien, had climbed down from the digger as well. He’d been shoveling coal for six hours, after helping with the repairs on the digger for most of the previous day, and assisting in the rescue efforts before that. He probably hadn’t had a wink of sleep in forty-eight hours, and he couldn’t hide his relief that Sturi would be taking his place at the furnace. If O’Brien had the emotional energy to spare, he might have been embarrassed at his own exhaustion.

  As Einar and Sturi took their places in the machine, O’Brien and Dag made their way to the ladder. To their left, a mule was
pulling an empty coal cart back up the slope. It had already delivered ten loads, which would probably be enough to power the digger through the night.

  O’Brien climbed to the top of the depression and made his way dumbly down the hillside, his ears ringing and his throat on fire. His entire body was covered in a sticky glaze of sweat, dust and soot. His eyes were so dry that it hurt to blink and his hands stung from a thousand tiny cuts and scrapes.

  He’d intended to clean up when he got back to camp but found himself to exhausted to go through with it. He located a vacant cot, managed to set the alarm on his cuff for four hours, lay down and fell asleep.

  He was awoken what seemed like three seconds later by an insistent chiming from his cuff. After an instant of panic followed by a good minute of sitting in the dark wondering where he was and why his entire body hurt, he got to his feet and made his way to the latrine. He washed the worst of the gunk off his face and hands, splashed some water on his neck, back and armpits, and then put his clothes back on and went outside, blindly following the distant sound of the steam shovel. The stars were out and a crescent moon was visible above the horizon, giving him just enough light to avoid stumbling. He walked briskly to warm himself against the cold air.

  As he got to the edge of the pit, he saw that Einar and Sturi had made good progress: the second tier had been dug, and they were now working on the final, bowl-shaped impression. Dozens of torches on poles had been set up around the perimeter of the pit, and spotters holding the few battery-powered work lights the camp possessed were standing at the edge of the bowl, doing their best to illuminate the work area. The digger rested on solid ground and there was no sign of any collapse. If they’d measured correctly—give or take a couple of feet—they’d soon be able to start removing the bulk of the earth trapping the miners inside. He could only hope most of them were still alive.