Exile Hunter (37 page)

“Is that so?”
Linder answered doubtfully. “What kind of a break?”

“I found Scotty,”
Burt answered with an excited glow in his eyes. “He’s got a job
as a loader on the trucks that shuttle supplies between here and the
main camp. And he says he might be able to recover our stash of
supplies and send them to us if we tell him where to find them.”

“That’s a tall
order,” Browning added. “But if he can, it just might put us back
in business. “Now, all we have to do is find a way out of this
damned place.”

* * *

By the following
week, the ever-resourceful Scotty had collected most of the
provisions that he, Linder, Burt, and Browning had put aside for
their escape and delivered them to the mining site, where new hiding
places had been found. By now, however, the men were so weakened that
it took all their resolve not to raid the extra rations on the spot.

In another stroke of
good fortune, Yost had been promoted to foreman on the strength of
his prior work record and managed to have Linder and the other
escapists assigned to his team. Yost used his authority to rotate his
co-conspirators through every shaft and room in the mine so that they
had first-hand reconnaissance of the entire underground facility to
match Scotty’s mapping of MacTung’s aboveground layout.

After many nights of
study and deliberation, the team was able to work out a detailed
escape plan similar to the one they had devised at the logging site,
featuring an evacuation route toward the east, over the Mackenzie
Range, rather than westward toward Alaska and the sea, the route
favored by conventional wisdom among both prisoners and captors. This
had been Scotty’s proposal, not only because their pursuers could
be expected to search more actively along the South Canol Road to the
west, but also because, unlike the white man, he knew how to live off
the land and could enlist the help of any native peoples they might
come across.

The only problem was
that, unlike Camp N-320, where they had worked at a remote logging
site surrounded by only a basic security fence, their work at MacTung
was underground. More than that, the mine lay within an impenetrable
security perimeter featuring electrified fences, floodlights, remote
sensors, canine patrols, and guard towers manned by snipers with
orders to shoot to kill. Despite their best efforts, they had not yet
discovered a way to breach that perimeter.

As the winter wore on
and one storm after another descended on the mine, each one promising
to erase all traces of an escape, the men met more and more
frequently to find a way out before spring. Each week they considered
new theories and took on individual assignments to explore possible
lapses in the site’s security, even at the risk of drawing unwanted
attention to their efforts. What each of them felt but none wanted to
admit was that time was running out for a winter escape and they
might not survive long enough to try another.

It was on the eve of
yet another Arctic storm that Linder drilled his borehole, packed it
with explosives, and stood by while the technician set the primer and
secured the area for the next blast in one of the new exploratory
shafts at the western edge of the mine. Since it was the end of the
three-to-eleven shift on a Friday night, the civilian technician
planned to leave for the weekend directly after detonating the
charge. Perhaps he had been careless in measuring the charge, or
perhaps the rock was of a different quality in this part of the mine,
but the blast had an outsized effect and caused the ceiling to cave
in, both ahead of and behind where Linder took shelter.

When the last rock
fragment came to rest and the worst of the dust had cleared, Linder’s
relief at having escaped serious injury was soon overtaken by a
growing panic that he might suffocate. By the light of his headlamp,
he groped along the walls for any openings in the direction of the
main shaft but found none. Nonetheless, he continued exploring and,
to his great surprise, found a gap between the mine’s ceiling and a
tall pile of debris. Climbing to the top of the pile, he saw that the
opening led to a smaller shaft that he had not known to exist.

Linder cleared away the
rock and crawled through. The passage ahead was straight and narrow,
just under head height and sloping gradually upward. Relieved to have
found the air clear of smoke and dust and fresher than where he had
been, he moved further away from the cave-in, examining the shaft’s
walls and floor more closely as he went. It looked crude and
unfinished, as he imagined an exploratory shaft or an airway might
be, except that this shaft had not appeared in any blueprint of the
mine that he had been allowed to view.

After another ten or
fifteen meters, the passage opened into a high chamber. Linder looked
up and, in the weak light of his headlamp, saw what looked like an
iron grate above his head. Here the air was cold and fresh. He
switched off his headlamp, and when he saw a speck of pale moonlit
sky, his heart leapt. With energy he did not know he possessed, he
climbed up the steep rock wall and pushed with all his strength
against the grate. It moved aside and he found himself wedged within
a rocky crevice that looked out over the mine’s frozen runoff pond,
the distant peaks of the McKenzie range and no trace of a perimeter
fence in between.

* * *

Linder crawled back
through the opening from the exploratory shaft into the main mine and
filled the gap at the ceiling with loose rock before settling down to
wait for someone to rescue him. He turned off his headlamp to
conserve the battery and drifted off to sleep. He had no idea how
long he had slept when the sounds of a front-end loader clearing away
the rocky debris jarred him awake. Yost was the first man to crawl
through the hole to meet him. He nearly bowled Linder over with his
bear hug.

“You are one lucky
son-of-a-bitch, Linder,” Yost greeted him. “Nobody thought you
had a ghost of a chance in there. I had to threaten the supervisor
with a pickaxe before he’d let us back in to search for you. He was
going to wait till the engineers came back to work on Monday.”

“I wasn’t worried,”
Linder answered. “I figured you’d be back soon enough. Can’t
let a little cave-in get in the way of hitting the quota, eh?”

“Screw the quota,”
Yost replied. “Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”

“No, I’ll be okay.
I wouldn’t turn down a physical and a night in the infirmary, mind
you, but I doubt they’ll give me more than that. Tell me, though,
when do you suppose they’ll send us back in to clean up this mess?”

Yost shook his head and
looked puzzled.

“Now, why would any
man in his right mind ask a question like that after nearly being
buried alive?”

“I’ll tell you
later, Charlie,” Linder answered, looking around to make sure no
one could overhear. “But if that storm is still headed our way
tomorrow night, we might want to be down here when it hits.”

* * *

Linder accepted the
shift supervisor’s offer of a night in the infirmary to recover
from his close call in the mineshaft and made a show of coughing up
plenty of gray dust. But the next morning he rose early and, after a
hearty breakfast of flapjacks, scrapple, and high-octane coffee,
dishes available only in the infirmary and the officers’ mess, he
returned to the sleeping hut in the dark and roused Browning and Burt
from sleep.

“It’s on,” he
whispered to Burt as he sat beside him on his bunk in the overheated
room. In a few minutes the lights would come on and the morning alarm
chime would sound, but for the moment the only noise was of Burt’s
heavy breathing and a prodigious snorer two bunks away.

Burt opened his eyes
into an instant state of alertness but could not grasp at first what
Linder was telling him.

“What the devil are
you talking about?” he asked in a low voice. “What’s on?”

“I’ve found a way
out of the mine. But we have to move fast or we’ll miss our
chance,” Linder answered. “A snowstorm will roll in during the
night to cover our tracks. It’s now or never, amigo.”

“Have you talked to
the others?”

“I’ll talk to
Browning in a minute,” Linder replied. “Yost will come on later.
Do you think you can get a message to Scotty somehow before our shift
starts at three?”

“I’ll do my best.
What do I tell him?”

“He said once that he
might be able to steal a truck. If he can, tell him to meet us on the
access road headed outbound just east of the ford beyond the runoff
pond,” Linder said. “A pickup with a snowplow in front would be
best, if there’s a choice. But above all, he’s got to get there
without being noticed. We’ll need all the head start we can get.”

“That’s a mighty
tall order,” Burt answered doubtfully. “Scotty’s just a
prisoner. He doesn’t exactly have carte blanche to come and go from
the motor pool whenever he feels like it.”

“Okay, so it won’t
be easy,” Linder agreed. “He only has to do it once. Tell him to
find a way. Or he can meet us at the access road on foot.”

And without waiting for
a response, Linder moved across the room to wake Browning.

* * *

By the time their
shift started at 3:00 P.M., Linder, Burt, Browning, and Yost had
divided up their cached supplies and secreted as much as they could
conceal under their baggy jumpsuits. They milled around the mine’s
entrance with the rest of the men on their shift and waited under dim
fluorescent lights amid swirls of powdery snow until the elevator
doors rolled open.

Since it was a
Saturday, the mine was operating at reduced output, with most
supervisory and technical staff off duty. Though a normal guard
complement covered the facility’s perimeter and key access points
to the mine and the mill, prisoners laboring underground were
supervised only by their foremen and a shift boss stationed
aboveground at the entrance to the main shaft.

As Linder had
predicted, their work orders for the three-to-eleven shift centered
on clearing the obstructed shaft from the cave-in that had occurred
the night before so the engineers could recertify it for operation on
Monday morning. This was not luck, but the foreseeable result of a
relentless demand to maximize output. Accordingly, it was not
difficult for Yost to arrange for his team to tackle the cleanup.

At the start of the
shift, Linder and Yost retreated to a corner of the spacious freight
elevator and spoke into each other’s ears over the whirring of the
electric hoist and the clanging of the metal cage.

“What if Scotty
doesn’t show up with a truck?” Yost asked as soon as the
contraption made its initial downward lurch.

“We walk,” Linder
replied. “But our chances of getting away clean depend on how far
we travel before they discover we’re missing. First, they’ll
search along the perimeter fence. Next, they’ll sweep the roads,
all of which lead south or east except one. But if we head north to
the Canol Road and make it through the MacMillan Pass before they
know we’re missing, the snow will cover our tracks and most
everyone will assume we’ve bolted for the coast. In that case, it
could be days before they look for us across the Mackenzie Range.”

“Because nobody could
be so stupid as to go there,” Yost ventured. “Except maybe a
native...”

“Assuming ours shows
up,” Linder added uneasily.

When the elevator
reached their level, the men split up into work teams and headed off
to their respective tunnels and chambers to start work. Yost, Linder,
Burt, and Browning formed one team, with Yost operating the front-end
loader, Browning operating the shuttle car, and Linder and Burt
shoveling out the corners and edges. By the late-afternoon break,
they had cleared nearly a third of the rubble but had not yet reached
the spot where Linder had found an opening to the hidden exploratory
shaft.

During the break, Yost
reported to the shift supervisor that they were making good progress
and would soon begin checking the tunnel walls beyond the cave-in for
signs of structural weakness. As a safety measure, he posted his
team’s tunnel as off-limits to unauthorized personnel. When Yost
returned, the other team members withdrew the shuttle car and loader
to a safe distance from the cave-in and deposited their tools by the
car as if stopping for an early dinner break. With Yost acting as
lookout, Linder enlisted Burt’s and Browning’s help in clearing
away enough broken rock to reopen the gap between the mine’s
ceiling and the pile of fallen rock that led to the hidden
exploratory shaft. Moments later, Yost followed them through to the
other side and they refilled the gap in a way that would not be
easily detectable from the other side.

The passage through the
newly discovered tunnel was as straight and narrow as Linder
remembered it, a few inches below head height and sloping gradually
upward. As before, the air was clear and grew fresher the further
they moved from the cave-in. After a dozen meters, the passage opened
into a high chamber and all four headlamp beams converged on the iron
grate above their heads. Linder switched off his headlamp and led the
way up, pushing the grate aside and emerging into the snow-filled
cleft.

Tiny snowflakes whirled
in an eddy around Linder and fell so thickly that he could see no
further than the edge of the mine’s frozen runoff pond. But that
was enough for him to take his bearings and plot a course toward the
spot where the mine’s access road intersected a dry creek bed. One
by one, the other men followed him through the grate and into the
rocky cleft.

“We’re beyond the
perimeter fence now,” Linder began. “When your eyes adjust, look
out at two o’clock until you spot the edge of the runoff pond.
We’re going to head single file toward the pond’s western shore
until we’re within a hundred meters of the access road, then we’ll
hike due west along the straightaway. If Scotty’s there with a
truck, we’ll ride. If he isn’t, we’ll keep skirting the access
road till we hit the Canol Road and then follow the river north
through the Macmillan Pass.”