Vermilion Drift (4 page)

Cavanaugh said, “Mine was inside my morning paper.”

“And mine had been slipped under the door of my hotel room,” Kufus said.

“No fingerprints on them or on the envelopes,” Dross told him. “We’ve checked.”

“When did you get them?” Cork asked.

“Two days ago,” Lou said.

Cork looked at the woman from the DOE. “You’re here to survey the mine, is that right, Ms. Kufus?”

“It’s Genie, and yes. I’m heading up the team that’s been sent to assess the geologic integrity of the Vermilion One site.”

“Geologic integrity?”

“Its suitability for long-term storage of nuclear waste.”

“Ah.” Cork studied the sheets. “Ink-jet printed.” He held one of them to the light, checking for a watermark. There was none. He shook his head at the bloody-looking print. “I don’t think I have this particular font on my computer.”

“It’s called ‘From Hell.’ Free download off the Internet,” Dross said. “Big around Halloween, I understand.”

“Have any of you received any other threats?”

“No,” Haddad said, then looked to the others for confirmation. No one contradicted him.

“Has anyone else received one of these?”

“Not that we know of,” Haddad replied. “Just us lucky three.”

“Did anyone see the envelopes being delivered?”

Dross shook her head. “My guys canvassed the areas, came up with nothing.”

“Is there any reason to believe that it’s not just part of the general anger that the DOE’s proposal has generated, that it’s not some crackpot letting off steam?”

“Do you want to take that chance?” Dross asked.

Cavanaugh said, “Cork, if you wouldn’t mind accompanying Lou, there’s something else you need to see.”

It was raining harder now, coming down in warm, gray sheets. Haddad, Dross, and Cork huddled in the old Mine Rescue Room next to the headframe. There was a guard on duty in the Rescue Room, a big guy who wasn’t familiar to Cork. The name tag on his company uniform read “Plott.” He sat in front of a bank of monitors, each showing a view of a different area of the property: the front gate, the mine office, the engine house, the other mine shaft openings. He had an FM radio going, but he’d turned it low when they came in so that it was barely audible. He watched the screens with a dedication that Cork was pretty certain was mostly show for those who’d intruded on his territory.

“What do you know about Vermilion One?” Haddad asked his companions.

“Among the oldest and deepest of the underground mines on the Iron Range,” Cork replied. “Closed when we were both kids. What, thirteen?”

“Thirteen,” Haddad confirmed with a nod. “Summer of nineteen sixty-four. My father was laid off. Sad day for a lot of folks. Do either of you understand Vermilion One, geologically?”

“I’m not from the North Country, Lou,” Dross replied. “All I know is that there’s iron in them thar hills.”

“That’s okay. Most people who aren’t Rangers don’t know much beyond that.” He pronounced the word “Ranger” as “Rain-cher,” which was how the old-timers on the Iron Range often referred to themselves.

While they waited for the cage to be lifted to the surface, Haddad explained a few things. The area in northern Minnesota known generally as the Iron Range was actually composed of three distinct ranges: the Vermilion, the Mesabi, and the Cuyuna. Because the Vermilion Range contained hematite, iron in nearly perfect concentration, it was
the first area to be mined. The Vermilion One had begun as a pit mine—several pit mines, actually—then had gone to underground excavation. The first shaft had been sunk in 1900. By the time the mine was abandoned, it had reached a depth of nearly half a mile.

“Why abandoned?” Dross asked.

“New methods of mining and processing made taconite—that’s the low-grade form of iron ore that runs like a great river through the range—more profitable, and digging enormous pits became the way. The Hull Rust Mine outside Hibbing is the largest open-pit iron mine in the world.”

“Grand Canyon of the North,” Cork said.

“That’s what they call it,” Haddad confirmed.

“The depth of Vermilion One, is that the reason the DOE is interested in storing nuclear waste here?” Dross asked.

“One of the reasons. The other is the geologic stability. We’re standing on an extension of the Canadian Shield, the oldest exposed rock formation in the Northern Hemisphere and one of the most stable. The chance of seismic activity here is next to nothing. Compared with the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage site, which experiences several hundred seismic events every year, this place is about as dull as a nun’s sex life. When you’re thinking long-term safety of the nuclear waste we’ve generated, this is an attractive site. Plus the fact that there’s fifty miles of tunnel already excavated, so the storage areas have pretty much already been created. A significant cost reduction.”

“But if it does leak, it could contaminate the headwaters of a couple of the largest river systems in North America,” Cork pointed out.

Haddad said, “There’s that.”

“What do you think of all this, Lou?” Dross asked.

Haddad glanced toward the security guard, whose eyes were glued to the monitors, and didn’t reply.

Through the open window of the Rescue Room came the sound of the cage rattling up. They stepped outside, put on the hard hats Haddad had distributed, and stood next to the shaft. The cage arrived in a rush of cool air that smelled of deep, wet rock. Haddad threw back the gate. After they were in, Haddad reached to a button mounted on the framework and gave it three rings.

“Connects to the hoist operator in the engine house,” he explained. “We communicate everything with the rings.”

“What if we get stuck down there and the ringer fails?” Cork asked.

“The shaft has an antenna that runs from the lowest level all the way to the top. I just give a signal with this.” He tapped a pager that hung on his belt.

They began a rattling descend. There was a single lightbulb in a fixture at the top of the cage, and, as they dropped, Cork could see the hard face of the rock that had been cut for the shaft. The walls were streaked red, as if a great flow of blood had run there.

“You never answered Marsha’s question, Lou,” Cork said above the noise of the cage rattle. “What do you think about using Vermilion One to store nuclear waste?”

“A while back, Germany went with the idea of a waste isolation facility, which they created in a deep abandoned salt mine,” Haddad said. “They’ve discovered that it leaks. It’s been leaking for years.” He shook his head dismally. “The plan at the moment is to use the Yucca Mountain facility, but because of some of the potential difficulties there, other sites need to be considered. The question remains: What do we do with the nuclear waste we’ve created? Nobody in their right mind wants it in their backyard.”

It took a couple of minutes to reach the third level. When the cage stopped, Haddad threw back the gate and led Cork and Dross out. They were in a large excavation where two tunnels, each ten feet high and ten feet wide, led off to the left and to the right. The area around the cage station was lit with electric lights strung along the ceiling, but the tunnels were black. Up top the temperature was in the low seventies, but in the mine the air was twenty degrees cooler and Cork wished he’d brought a sweater. Dross was hugging herself for warmth.

“Over here,” Haddad said. He moved to a wall not far from the cage. Spray-painted in red across the old mining scars were the words “We die. U die.” The message had been carefully done so that it looked very much like the printed messages Haddad and the others had received. The words seemed to drip blood.

“When did you discover this?” Cork asked.

“I didn’t,” Haddad replied. “It was Genie Kufus, yesterday. She came down to inspect this level, and there it was.”

“She was alone?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time anyone was down here before that?”

“On this level specifically, a week ago. I sent a couple of men down to make sure the pumps were working. They checked every level except the last five.”

“Pumps?”

“Water. It leaks into the mine and has to be removed. The lowest levels are still flooded. It’ll be a while before we get those cleared for inspection.”

“They didn’t report anything?” Dross asked.

“No.”

“Could they have simply missed it?”

“Would you miss that?” Haddad replied.

Cork said, “So this was done sometime between last Sunday and yesterday. How would they have gotten access to this level?”

“Coming down the Number Six shaft is the only way.”

“There are seven other shafts, though, right?”

“All of them have been capped and sealed. I checked them myself yesterday after Genie reported what she’d found. None of them have been monkeyed with. Besides, none of the other shafts connect with the drifts that run off Number Six.”

“Was anyone else in the mine at all during that time, on any level?”

“Yes. Mike Chernokov and Freddie Brink. They’ve been working on the ventilation and the water pumps. And we had a small tour group in from the state legislature on Friday. They wanted to see for themselves what the DOE found so attractive about this site. I led it myself.”

“Did you visit Level Three?”

“No, I confined the tour to Level One, the Vermilion Drift.”

“Vermilion Drift?”

“In a mine, a vertical excavation is called a sink. An excavation that runs horizontally off a sink is called a drift.”

“So mine shafts are sinks and tunnels are drifts?” Cork said.

“That’s right. The Vermilion Drift was the first underground mining done in this location, and I thought it was appropriate for the group.”

“Your two guys and the legislature group, that’s it?”

“And Genie.”

“Did you talk to your guys?” Dross asked.

“Believe me, I talked.”

“What did they say?”

“That they went down, completed their work, came back up. They didn’t do anything, they didn’t see anything.”

“Do you trust them?” Cork asked.

“Listen, good-paying jobs on the Range aren’t that plentiful. Those guys are family men. They’d have to be stupid, which they’re not, or ideologically fanatic, which they also are not, to jeopardize their employment that way.”

“Okay,” Cork said. “I saw a ladder running down the framework on the side of the shaft. Is it possible somebody from your tour group slipped away and climbed down here?”

“There were only five in the group. All of them were in my sight the entire time.”

“What about Kufus?” Dross threw out.

Haddad looked surprised, then looked as if he was about to laugh. “Why would she do it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You said she was alone when she found this. When she reported it, how did she seem?”

“Disturbed. If you’re looking at storing nuclear waste in Vermilion One, the issue of security is going to be huge. She seemed genuinely surprised and upset.”

“Okay, let’s work on the premise that no one who was down here legitimately is responsible,” Cork said. “That would mean someone was here who wasn’t supposed to be.”

“No way someone who wasn’t authorized could get down here,” Haddad replied.

“If you accept my premise, that’s not true.”

“Which means what?” Haddad asked.

Dross eyed Cork and smiled with perfect understanding. “There’s got to be another way in.”

U
p top, Haddad separated and went to his office, while Cork and Dross returned to the conference room. Cavanaugh and Kufus were deep in a conversation that stopped the moment Cork and the sheriff walked in. From the looks on their faces and the abruptness with which the conversation ended, Cork had the distinct impression that it wasn’t business they were discussing.

Haddad came in a few moments later and dropped a book in the middle of the table. The tome—nearly a foot wide, eighteen inches long, eight inches thick, and bound in heavy material that looked a lot like leather—hit with the thump of a fallen body.

He said, “These are the schematics for every level of the mine, all twenty-seven. Every shaft, every drift, every foot of the fifty-four miles of excavation. I’ve gone over them so many times they visit me in my nightmares. I’m telling you, aside from Number Six, which is the only shaft still open, there is no other way in. Why would there be?”

“I don’t know,” Cork said. “Enlighten me.”

“I just did. Another entrance would mean another sink, and, believe me, cutting a shaft into rock is no Sunday drive in the country. It requires equipment, explosives, time, money. We’d know if someone did that. For one thing, they’d make a hell of a racket.”

Cork opened the book. The pages were made of a thin, waxy material. The drawings on them reminded Cork of town plats, precise lines and corridors with lots of numbers indicating sizes and distances. All this was laid against a background that showed the county section lines for the ground above. In the lower right-hand corner was a legend that contained the scale and explained the markings on the map:
stopes, raises, drifts, shafts, drill holes. Under the legend was a notation: “Prepared by Engineers Office, Granger, MN.” Beneath that was a date.

“These are recent,” he said.

“I requested them as soon as I knew about the DOE inspection,” Cavanaugh said. He nodded toward Kufus. “I wanted Genie and her people to have the most accurate information possible.”

“How were they prepared?”

Haddad said, “I took the last full set of schematics—they’re in pretty bad shape—and had them redone.”

“When was the last set created?”

“Just before the mine closed in the sixties.”

“Any chance something was missed in the update?”

Haddad shook his head. “I checked the old schematics against the new set myself. They’re identical.”

Cork thought a moment. “Do you have anything before the sixties?”

“Yes. Archived at the Ladyslipper Mine. When Vermilion One closed, everything was moved there for storage.”

“Were they the basis for the schematics done when the mine closed?”

“No. A complete and independent survey was carried out at that time. They wanted an accurate blueprint of the mine as it existed then.”