The Deep Dark (26 page)

Years later, Susan set aside some of her anger; she even forgave her dad, but she couldn't sweep his drinking-related abuse under the rug. She confronted him once, and Goos denied that he'd ever laid a hand on anyone. There was no telling him how she'd prayed every night that God would intervene and save her mother from his balled-up fist. There was nothing to be gained in pushing the point, because the blameless look on his rugged face was so utterly convincing.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
2
Hayden Lake, North of Coeur D'Alene

I
T WAS AN INCOMPLETE JUMBLE OF BAD INFORMATION WHEN THE
news reached Delmar and Donna Kitchen's dream house, with its two bathrooms and two-car garage, in Hayden Lake. Someone said that it was Delmar who was ensnared in the drifts of the burning mine, and his brother and dad had escaped. Donna's mother came right over, and the two agreed that they'd focus on getting over to Sunshine, and not so much on what they'd find when they arrived. Donna, however, turned her worries to her sister-in-law, Margie, and how she would be able to cope if the situation at the mine was deadly.

“It would be better,” Donna Kitchen said, “if Delmar died than Dewellyn.”

Her mother was incredulous, and Donna tried to explain her remark. It wasn't that she wanted to trade her husband's life for her brother-in-law's; it was that she felt that if the worst happened, she'd be able to get by. Dewellyn's wife was more dependent on her man than Donna was. He'd made all the decisions. He had been her
life.
Donna felt she could draw on her own strengths and survive whatever God handed her.

Delmar was standing on the bridge when they found him in the crowded mine yard. His pale skin was whiter than paper. Donna ran for her husband, joyous at the sight of him, but also confused.

“Delmar,” she said, “what are you doing out? They said you were trapped! They said your dad and brother went in after you.”

Another man came running. It was an old classmate from Pine Creek. In a flash, he grabbed Kitchen and hugged him.

“I thought you was dead!” The man's eyes were floating in tears. “They told me you was dead.”

“I'm okay,” Kitchen said, before amending his words: “I'm alive.”

But his dad and his brother and dozens of others hadn't been seen for hours.

T
IME UNKNOWN,
M
AY
2
4800 Level

B
REATHE AND REMAIN CALM.
FLORY AND
W
ILKINSON HUDDLED IN THE
crosscut on the western end of 4800. The image of the dead men back down the drift was at once vivid and hazy. The swirling, rolling smoke made the drift otherworldly. Broad swipes of black against the dull sheen of blasted walls and the crisp, blue-gray ribbons of tetrahedrite would in themselves have been an awesome sight if that had been all they'd seen. But it was the unexpected and horrific spectacle of bodies splayed out over the tracks that they tried to comprehend. Men had simply slumped over—quietly, and, it appeared, suddenly. Maybe they hadn't even had time to fight whatever was killing them. Maybe they didn't know what had happened to the guy behind each of them and they fell like dominoes, one after another.

Flory had been the last to see the others alive. He'd had no idea if he'd make it, but he knew that the last moments of a man's life, his final words, were sometimes precious to survivors.
What can I say to their wives and children?
He didn't even know who half of them were. Neither did Wilkinson. They knew three of them as Gordy, Pat, and Dick. They might have shared a smoke with one or another of the men topside, but they didn't hang out at the Happy Landing, nor did they actually work together. They were familiar faces and nothing more. The newest of the bunch was a tall kid, Darrell Stephens, nineteen, just a year out of Wallace High. Flory wondered if it had been the boy's first day in the mine.

“I don't remember seeing him before,” he said.

The men were unnerved, yet their fear remained unspoken. Wilkinson pinched a fat bunch of Copenhagen, and Flory pulled out a cigarette and lit up. Half the world was above them, ton upon ton of rock, water, and earth held up by God's will or the force of nature. They sat and speculated about what had happened above. Both were sure 4800 had suffered the greatest calamity.

“They'll be coming down here for us,” Wilkinson said.

The toxic cloud tiptoed past seven dead men—Richard Allison, Richard Bewley, Davy Mullin, Hubert “Pat” Patrick, Darrell Stephens, and Gordy Whatcott. Each had a story. A child with a heart problem. A wife who had once been beaten by her husband's hand. A parolee looking for a second chance. Each had a future before that day, and some had a past for which they could no longer make amends.

Then the smoke stalled and rolled backward. It was both quiet and monstrous. Neither Ron Flory nor Tom Wilkinson could imagine what was causing it. And there was no way to find out. They were so far away from the outside world, the sky, the fresh air, and the men trying to reach them and the others. On 4800, Wilkinson and Flory were at a depth greater than the height of four of the country's tallest buildings—New York's Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid, and the soon-to-be-completed Sears Tower in Chicago
—
combined.

H
ARRY
C
OUGHER
'
S CREW ADVANCED FARTHER TOWARD 10-
S
HAFT,
all holding hope that Sunshine miners were safely ensconced on the levels below, just waiting to get out. As they moved down 3100, it occurred to Cougher that the men might have barricaded themselves in the hoist room.

God,
he thought,
what if there's a whole bunch of men back there and they try to steal my apparatus?

On the station, the smoke parted a little, revealing an underground killing field. Their lights sweeping the muck, Cougher and his men just stood still for a moment. A couple of guys felt sick. Everywhere around them were bodies, faces staring upward. One man had hit the concrete floor and the steel of the train track with such force that blood leaked from his ears. Cougher wondered if he'd fallen hard enough to fracture his skull. But most men had just slumped and keeled over. They looked as though they had just gone to sleep, peacefully and without fear. One guy sat off alone in the corner of the station, pressed up tight against the timbers. He reminded Cougher of how they'd found Charlie Casteel.

Some men had died while drinking coffee; others had kicked back to drag on a cigarette in the middle of the smoke storm.
These guys weren't in a hurry to get out,
Ray Rudd thought. They might have made it if they'd taken the threat seriously. Rudd knew why the scene had been so serene, why there hadn't been panic. The men were mostly gyppos. Since they hadn't finished blasting for the day, they'd planted themselves on the station to wait it out. They had thought they'd go back to blow up some rock.

Cougher's eyes caught Rudd's. Next was the hoist room.

In the world of hardrock mining, a smart man would argue that there is no job more important to operations than running the hoist. Without a hoistman, nothing moved from level to level—not men, not supplies, and of course, not ore. Hot mines like Sunshine built air-conditioned compartments around the control area, making it the most comfortable place underground. Cougher's crew entered the hoist room. The last minutes played in each man's mind. It was almost as if they could hear what had happened. The coughing. The yelling. The promises that they'd be able to get out alive. The deadly smoke had entered through the ventilation system, and the men had fought with their lives to save the others below. Over by the console were fallen dominoes, the bodies of several men who had tried to take over the controls. As each had succumbed, another had shoved him out of the operator's chair. The last one to die was a heavyset fellow, stripped to the waist, wearing only his diggers and boots. His beefy chest was bright cherry red.

God,
Cougher thought,
that poor kid had a heat rash before he died.

Their air supply half-exhausted, the helmet crew returned toward daylight, heavy, life-giving oxygen packs loading their backs. Marvin Chase met them at the collar and warned them that reporters with TV cameras were facing the portal.

“Don't stop and talk to any of them,” he said. His voice was a near whisper. “Go directly to the office in the maintenance shop. We'll talk there.”

They gathered around a table, and Al Walkup set out a pad for notes.

“Well,” Chase said, “what did you see? Did you recognize anyone?”

“No,” Rudd said emphatically.

The response nearly knocked Harry Cougher out of his chair.

“Jesus Christ, Rudd, you
did.
You called out the names of those guys.”

Rudd looked completely bewildered. He said he didn't know anybody who was down there.

Cougher mentioned Duwain Crow and Wayne Allen as two men Rudd had identified—names that meant nothing to Cougher because he'd never met them. Cougher was bewildered. He wondered if Ray Rudd was in shock.

4:00
P.M.,
M
AY
2
Coeur D'Alene Mining District

T
HE CALL FOR HELP FROM
K
ELLOGG,
I
DAHO, WAS HEARD ALL OVER
the Northwest. Miners with helmet or rescue training and gear were en route from Kimberly, British Columbia, and Butte, Montana. The Butte bunch, a dozen strong, came from the Anaconda Mining Company. Though rivals, they were also brothers. So quickly did they get to Big Creek that some wives didn't even know their husbands had left Montana until after they called home. One Butte miner spoke with a Spokane reporter.

“You can quote me,” he said, “as saying I think they're working damn well together. These guys from all over—who've never seen each other before—down there working right together, trying to get at those poor men.”

But for all that was going on, the office at the end of the maintenance shop was noticeably quiet, as if no one knew what to say. Johnny Austin, the fiftyish bulldog manager from Bunker Hill, cleared his throat and turned to Walkup and Chase.

“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.

Hecla's Gordon Miner saw a crack in the door and pushed right through it.

“By God, it's about time!” he said. “I'm interested in anybody who's got a suggestion!” The forty-three-year-old with the steely blue eyes and no-bullshit attitude wedged himself between would-be power brokers at the head of the table. At six foot two, Miner's appearance was as imposing as his manner. Whenever Hecla's top man spoke, it was with complete self-confidence; he was clearly a man who put action first and apologized later. For that very reason, some learned to follow Miner's lead because they knew that there was no stopping him—with reason
or
force. Al Walkup knew Miner's reputation, but he'd never felt the brunt of his indomitable personality until May 2. He backed off.

Miner saw Sunshine's Walkup and Chase as indecisive. It didn't seem they could stick to any plan and, not surprisingly, they were easily pushed around. Miner, in particular, was quite aggressive.
That figures,
Art Brown thought.
Gordon Miner will run roughshod over anyone who's weak enough to let him.
Around the Hecla office, his autocratic ways had earned him the nickname “the Alone Arranger.” Certainly he wasn't perfect, but Hecla's executive vice president was never short of ideas, and once he started moving forward, he never looked back.

Miner, in fact, had been through a potash mine fire in Utah. When they first realized fire was choking the life out of the mine there, some of the underground crew ran and some barricaded themselves in. The men who stayed put were the ones who survived. The Hecla chief hoped the trapped Sunshine miners were doing the same thing and were waiting for someone to get them out.

One thing troubled Gordon Miner above everything else, and he just couldn't shake it: the apparent delay in evacuating Sunshine.
You don't wait for a green light from the corporate types when they don't know anything anyway about that particular situation,
he thought.

Back in the command center, men unfurled schematics of the ventilation system and drift maps, circling the possible locations where they might find survivors. The room wasn't particularly large, about the size of an average dining room, with floor-to-ceiling drapes that made it seem more residential than professional. But it was packed. Advancing the fresh-air base through either 3100 or 3700 was proving slow going, with workers discovering that Sunshine's drifts were anything but airtight. Launhardt focused on Sunshine's connecting mine, the Silver Summit. From Sunshine's 3100, an eighty-five-foot ladderway joined the Silver Summit at its 3,000-foot level. The obscure route was Sunshine's designated emergency escapeway in the event the Jewell could not be used.

Coming from opposite directions, with the Sunshine effort west of 10-Shaft and the Silver Summit helmet crews to the east of the shaft, the rescue effort was a race in every way, with stakes no less than life and death. And above the constant discussion by men from all over—Sunshine, other district mines, the U.S. Bureau of Mines, the miners' union—was the ceaseless ringing of a bank of telephones. A big oak table was covered with so many underground maps that no wood showed. Some maps showed the suspected location of the fire; red markings indicated the belief that the fire had started in the abandoned stopes between 3400 and 3550, near the mined-out 09 crosscut or vein. The speed and fury of the smoke through the ventilation system pointed toward the failure of the bulkhead on 3400. The sixty-foot-long timber and polyurethane-foam-sealed bulkhead shuttered the 910 raise, which connected gob-filled workings to the 09 vein, a vein that hadn't seen a miner's jackleg since the mid-1940s. Harvey Dionne had seen the smoke boiling behind the eight-year-old bulkhead, just after all hell broke loose. Others reported that they had heard an explosion, which had been followed by billowing smoke darker than night.