The Deep Dark (41 page)

Lights flooded the station. It was empty, but for one man. He was slumped by the phone, still clutching the receiver in his hand. His face had inflated into a monster's. Damp T-shirts still covering their mouths and noses, Flory and Wilkinson exchanged horrified looks and kept away from the man. Wilkinson went for the cord and belled for the cage, using the emergency nine-bell signal. They craned their necks and looked up the shaft and hollered into the darkness.

“Hey! We're down here!”

But it was quiet.

Flory fastened his eyes on the man with the phone. The closer he got to the dead man, the sicker he became. The man's skin had split, and coagulated body fluids were oozing out. Flory grabbed the cord and pulled on it to extricate the receiver from the dead man's grip. A gooey film covered the receiver. In his hunger, it reminded Flory of tapioca pudding.

He took the T-shirt from his face. “Hey!” he called out again. “We're down on forty-eight!”

The line was dead and without static. Flory balled up his fist and banged on the box. Neither man knew about the cave-in that had crippled the communications link to their level.

They were captives, and the futility of their situation was making Flory crazy.

“I'm going to climb up the shaft,” he said. “I'm gonna get the hell out of here.”

It was Wilkinson's turn to cool down his partner.

“You are
not,”
he said, his words a command. “You'll never make it. You're going to stay here. We're going to get out of this.”

Though mentally foggy from hunger and full of fear, Flory immediately retreated from the irrational idea of a thousand-foot climb through darkness.

“It's been too long since we had a good meal,” he said. “We'd never make it. It would be a long climb without a good meal. I think the Lord wants us to stay right here and wait until somebody comes.”

Ron Flory was sure he and his buddy were close to the end. Certainly they had the will to survive and the drive to make it out of the goddamn mine, but they had no food, water was in short supply, and the hours were piling seamlessly into days. Flory promised God he'd go to church every Sunday if he ever got a second chance.

3:00
A.M.,
M
AY
9

Sunshine Borehole

A
ROUND 3:00 A.M. ON
T
UESDAY, A FOUR-MAN
USBM
CREW RODE
the capsule to 4800, laying phone lines as they descended into the dark. They traveled in pairs, but one man had to remain in the capsule, talking to the hoistman on 3700 so he'd be able to navigate through the rough channel. The first man out of the capsule pointed out footprints in the muck. There was no way of telling when they had been made, but their proximity to the telephone was either curious or coincidental. When the four had assembled at the borehole, they worked their way west into the dead-end drift. The air was 92 degrees and breathable without apparatuses. Methodically moving toward the face of the drift, some three hundred feet away, the crew saw evidence that men had been working there on May 2. A pair of jackleg drills rested in the muck. The diffuse beams of their cap lamps sprayed light over the rock face, revealing fuses draped from drilled holes. No miner would ever leave live charges if he had thought for one minute he wouldn't be back. No one abandons explosives for some other guy to find with the end of his drill. The crew went east, looking for any signs of life. But fifteen hundred feet down the drift, their lights began to fade.

“Hello,
hello
. . . anybody there?”

They stopped to listen, but there was only silence. Sunshine men were dead at the station or bulkheaded in someplace where nothing could be heard. Disappointed, the rescue team returned to the surface. Another crew would take over.

Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson had been a thousand feet from rescue, but nobody knew it.

D
AWN,
M
AY
9
Bunker Hill Warehouse, Smelterville

L
AMP NUMBERS FIRST, THEN CLOTHING, SCARS, AND TATTOOS
WERE
the first indicators of who was who as the identification crew sifted through the bodies in the Smelterville warehouse. Most miners wore the same jeans, hats, shirts—or no shirt at all—every day of the workweek. They'd hose the muck off at the station, go upstairs, and strip down and hang everything in the dry until the next shift. Most brought diggers home once a week for washing, but some never did. The men scanning the remains worked with a rhythm that, once going, fueled them into the long hours of the night. Victims who had been sealed in body bags for a longer period had looser skin. It was as though they'd been in a crockpot all day, and the heat of the mine and the fluids of their bodies had softened tissue to fall-from-the-bone goo, making it easier for examiners to slide off fingertips for inking and printing. The bodies that had remained in the mine the longest, those at the deeper levels, however, were more difficult. Their skin had hardened; patches seemed plasticlike, or leathery. In those cases it was impossible to pull off fingertips. FBI men used a pair of steel cutters and snipped through the bone, then the digits were daubed in ink and pressed on paper.

Although their faces were gone, there were clues to pinpoint identity. In the most gruesome task on a hideous list, dentures were pulled from disfigured mouths. Some men had personalized their hardhats with automotive or powder supplier stickers. One had stenciled green racing stripes on his hat. Most smoked, so a brand of cigarettes—a pack tucked into an inner-tube hatband—was also a clue. One miner carried his eyeglasses to and from the station that way. Tool belts also held potential. Some guys had special wrenches or expensive Snap-On tools.

When a bag holding one of the larger dead men was unzipped, a flare of yellow contrasted sharply against the black morass of decomposing remains. A closer look revealed that coils of yellow blasting wire had been used to fasten the victim's overall shoulder straps.

Seeing that, Bill Steele knew instantly who it was.

“This is Custer Keough,” he said. “He's worn his overalls like that for years. No doubt. It's him.”

An FBI agent stripped the skin from the fifty-nine-year-old miner's fingers. Steele didn't think it was necessary. Only Keough had that yellow wire. Once a name was paired with a body, it was turned over to the FBI for fingerprint confirmation. Fingerprint records, thankfully, were not hard to come by. Many of the dead had been printed in the military; other comparisons came courtesy of arrest records from the Shoshone County Sheriff.

Identifying Joe Armijo was also relatively easy. He was a tall man, just under six feet, with a lean build and shiny black hair. In addition to the Navy tattoos on his chest and both biceps, Armijo had a heavy scar that spilled down his right shoulder, the remnant of an accident at Bunker Hill. A BM-1447 self-rescuer had been tucked inside his body bag. Armijo was one of the thirty-one who made it to the 10-Shaft station on 3100, only to die.

When identity still remained in doubt, bodies were weighed and measured and set aside as John Does. Five men were designated as such—one of whom would be later identified by a wedding band.

Something else registered as peculiar. Four of the five John Does came from the same pocket. All the men there had removed their lamp belts. Why had those particular men taken them off? The FBI didn't know, but Steele did. Belts were heavy, loaded with battery packs and ten-inch pipe wrenches. Whenever a man ate lunch or waited at the station, he routinely dropped his belt. The men on that level had been waiting for the cage.

Throughout the night, fluorescent tubes buzzed like a chorus of wasps and cast a shadowless light. When it came time for a break, Bill Steele found a place to eat a TV dinner, though after a moment it dawned on him that he was sitting on a stack of body-bagged remains. Others were doing the same thing. If someone had told Steele he could ever get so used to the unthinkable that he'd do something like that, he'd have said they were crazy. Somewhere between working on the handful of bodies at the funeral home in Kellogg, and the ever-growing heap in Smelterville, Steele became immune to the horror.

5:50
P.M.,
M
AY
9

4800 Level

T
OM, DAMN,
I
JUST SAW A LIGHT OUT THERE,
”
RON
F
LORY SAID
, looking in the direction of the borehole.

Wilkinson thought the worst.
Now Ron's lost it for sure.
It made absolutely no sense that anything or anyone would come from
that
direction. Everything came from 10-Shaft.

Wilkinson remained calm. “You're seeing things. There's no light.”

“Yeah, there is.”

“No, there isn't.”

The two argued a little, and Flory put on his boots and turned off the motor light. A black shadow descended over everything.

And a wash of light spread over the drift.

Wilkinson sat up. There
was
a light reflecting over the water line.

Flory hit the water line with his wrench, hammering out as much noise as he could. Wilkinson went for the motor and flashed the light. Flory kept pounding, a steady hammering that said,
We're alive back here.
Wilkinson yelled for help.

Then a beam moved in their direction.

“Stay right where you are,” a man's voice called out. “We're coming.”

It was more than a week after they'd been trapped. Outside at the portal, news swept through the crowd and hope poured over everyone like rain.

Ron Flory, twenty-eight, and Tom Wilkinson, twenty-nine, had been found. It was not delirium, but reality. They had dreamed about it and discussed it over and over since the smoke stalked their crew and left them alone. The two survivors of 4800 had no idea how many others had died. In their time underground, they assumed their level had been the one in trouble. They'd seen the other cages whiz past the station on May 2.

“How many of you?”

“Two. Just two.”

Becker and Kanack came into the Safety Zone, where they met a pair of miners as grungy and bewhiskered as men could be. Although their features were hollowed by weight loss, they were in surprisingly good physical condition. Their mood was even more striking. Never in all their lives had the rescuers seen such unabashed joy. Even Wilkinson, who kept his emotions more private, couldn't help but let it show.
They'd been saved.
Flory's eyes flooded. They were going home.

Wilkinson asked for a smoke. A second later, when he took a drag, he nearly fell to the floor.
Man, that was strong.
Flory had a cigarette in his mouth, too. Their promises about quitting after they got out of the mine had been abandoned in two seconds. They'd pledged to go to church, and to be better husbands and fathers. Only time would tell on those promises.

Both wanted to know how severe the fire had been, and why rescue had taken so long. Becker indicated the death toll had been substantial, but there were no definitive numbers.

“You're the only two we've found so far,” he said, adding that they were hopeful that the guys on the lowest levels would be all right. They just hadn't made it down there yet.

Flory's head spun, and adrenaline pumped. Wilkinson also felt the surge of energy and emotion. They picked up their dinner buckets and some of the braided blasting wire and walked toward the borehole where the capsule would take them to the surface. Flory would go first, then Wilkinson. They were told the borehole was dangerously narrow and their ascent would be slow. The capsule would take them to 3700, to the spot where Kenny Wilbur had removed the lagging cover that allowed fresh airflow to 4800 and created the Safety Zone.

On the surface, the public address system that until then had only brought news of food and cigarette distribution gave hope that lifted hearts to the sky:
“We have found two men alive and in good health on the 4800 level.”

7:45
P.M.,
M
AY
9
Sunshine Bridge

M
YRNA
F
LORY WALKED FROM
R
ON
'
S DARK BLUE
C
HARGER TO
THE
bridge over Big Creek. Her bell-bottoms were loose at the waist, her hands numb from gripping things so tightly. She was tired, sick, and afraid that God might actually renege and let her down. She wondered if she'd have to raise Tiger on her own, after all. She heard other women were planning funerals and futures. A group of network TV people loped across the yard, light stands and cameras with power cords dragging like maypole ribbons.
They're after another story.
The memory of the reporter who had told her that her husband was dead was still fresh. But they didn't come for her. They backed off.

A preacher touched her shoulder. It was 7:40 p.m.

“Mrs. Flory, your husband's alive. Come with me.”

Is this a dream?
Myrna felt the emotion of the week close in on her, and started to cry. She had a bad cold and a throat raw from coughing. She was sicker than she'd been in a long time, but she was overjoyed. A few more men were around her, and before she really knew what was happening, she was in a small room adjacent to the payroll office.

Frances Wilkinson was already there, having stayed most of the week in her sister's camper, crumpled on a metal folding chair. She, too, had been crying.

“They found Tom, too,” she said. “They're both alive.” She and Myrna held each other and sobbed.

Mine officials backed off to leave the women alone in the most joyous moment since the fire broke out.

Outside, the pack moved closer to the Jewell, compressed by their excitement and the need to be at the front of the group. And they were shivering. The early-evening air brought a bite from the mountainside.