Chapter 18
While the away team was busy exploring the canyons, searching for the mineral deposit and preparing the mining site for the long process, Dominic Shaw the Director of Field Operations spent the weeks overseeing the excavation operation in the Nevada desert. The digging had been going roughly with equipment breakdowns every time one of the massive excavators crossed into the middle of the hole and Dominic was stressed over his deadline and trying to come up with ideas to speed the process along.
“What if we just do our cut around the middle?” Frank, one of Dominic’s excavator mechanics suggested. “Don’t seem to have any problems outside of that center ring.”
“Really.” Dominic thought out loud. “Say we use a GPS locater to map the exact places where we have the breakdowns and avoid it, what then? We just make a donut shaped hole?”
“Well,” Frank considered the thought, “we could just leave it for a few rounds, ten feet at a time between clean ups like we been doing, then when it’s too tall maybe knock it over with the long-arm?”
“You don’t think that’d be dangerous for whomever is in that excavator?” Dominic asked.
“It’ll buck pretty hard for sure,” Frank said, “but I think the length of the arm will keep it from having enough leverage to tip backward. Might break something, but Halvorsen said he didn’t care about cost so maybe it’s a good idea to try.”
“Do it.” Dominic said as he pulled out his phone and tapped the screen.
“Halvorsen Global Holdings, Hannah speaking. How may I direct your call?” came the disembodies voice of Mark Sr’s personal assistant.
“Good evening Hannah, Dominic Shaw here.” Dominic announced into his phone, “Is Mr Halvorsen available? I need to clear something with him.”
“One moment please.” She said as the phone clicked.
“Hey Dom, what’s new?” Mark Sr’s voice was chipper with the success of the overseas property acquisition he had been working on.
“Good evening sir,” Dominic started, “I think we have a way around these equipment issues that have been slowing progress but it might be costly.”
“What’d you have in mind?” Mark asked.
“We’re thinking about mapping the breakdowns and digging around them, then using the long arm excavator to knock the pile down when it gets too tall.”
“Sounds logical, have you taken the bucking into consideration?” Mark answered.
“That’s the possibly expensive part,” Dom’s voice was laced with trepidation as he explained, “Frank thinks the long arm will keep it from having enough leverage to tip the machine, but I’m worried about breaking the arm. Might be a costly repair job.”
“Sounds like it might work to get you down faster.” Mark Sr considered the idea. “Make sure the operator is buckled in and wearing a helmet instead of a hard hat and go for it. Cost is not an issue, if the machine breaks have a new one brought out while you’re waiting on the repair, human safety is my only concern.”
“The long arm has a reinforced cabin cage, so falling debris wont be an issue.” Dominic said, “I’ll have Frank wear his ATV helmet while he’s knocking it down.”
“Perfect, thanks for the update Dom. Have a great day.”
The call ended as Dominic relayed the adjustments to Frank and the work crew were each given GPS tracker to start pinning coordinates with every malfunction. As the next few days progressed a clear patter started emerging, a perfect square in the center of the nearly one acre wide funnel shaped pit. The bulldozers started working around the square, cutting the earth away in a frenzy of uninterrupted progress. On the third day they reached the thirty feet danger zone for the square column they had created in the middle of the work site and it was time to test the theory. Dominic stood at the top of the excavation with his goggles zoomed in so he could see every detail of the work.
“Alright Frank,” Dominic announced into the walkie talkie, “lift your bucket as far over the top as you can right at the corner, I want to see how big of a chunk we can take down.”
“Ten-four” Frank barked into his walkie as he lifted the arm of the excavator.
The enormous excavator easily reached above the thirty foot wall in front of it as Frank positioned the bucket as close to the center of the top as he could.
“Right there!” Dominic called out into the walkie talkie.
“Got it boss!” Frank replied, “Gonna hit the bucket in three, two, one…”
Frank yanked the control stick backward, slamming the excavator bucket into the top of the monolith and sank its teeth deep into the earth above him. The expected malfunction was right on cue. The excavator arm convulsed, pulling it straight downward into the dirt and immediately opening a crack in the surface. Inside the cab Frank whipped wildly back and forth as the machine bucked under the force of the arm. The crack widened, the excavator convulsed and pulled the bucket down harder. The crack turned into a crease that clung to its foundation like an animal trying desperately not to fall, then with silent grace it began to topple.
The excavator lost its grip as a full quarter of the island rained down over the cab of the excavator. As the bucket swung free from the dirt the convulsions stopped and the excavators tracks slammed back to the earth so hard the crew felt the ground shake. The dust hung in the air unnaturally long, filling the low part of the excavation with a cloud so thick it was hard to tell if Frank and his machine survived. As it started settling a smile creased Dominic’s face.
“Success!” he shouted into his radio.
“Good news boss!” Frank’s reply crackled back. “And it doesn’t look like we hurt anything. Moving to the next corner.”
Frank repositioned the excavator and repeated the process, each time carving away another massive chunk of the fifty by fifty foot square central column. Within two hours they had removed the entire pedestal and were cleaning up the debris by scraping far enough away from the middle to allow the loaders and rock trucks room haul it away.
“That was a successful day.” Dominic announced as the crew gathered for the end of day meeting. “Tomorrow we repeat the process, hopefully we will grab another thirty feet a day from here.”
“’Till we hit bedrock anyway.” Bob laughed.
Bob was one of the heavy equipment operators on the job site, but as the certified explosives expert, he was also in charge of the drilling unit and explosives they would use to blast through any unyielding challenges.
“Yeah,” Dominic laughed, “that’ll slow us down, but according to Sophia’s scans we won’t hit any real rock until just before we reach depth.”
By the end of the second day they managed to reach a depth of eighty feet and were scraping the floor clean as Dominic stood in his usual spot watching from the rim. Dominic was focused on the dust and debris that was being kicked up and watching slowly settle. The dust was hanging in the air longer and longer the deeper they went and it was a puzzle that felt like a hole in the pit in Dominic’s stomach.
“Hey Frank,” Dominic called his foreman on the radio, “Park and come up here for a minute, something strange is going on down there.”
“On my way sir.” It only took him a few minutes to reach the top of the ridge where Dominic was watching from. As he climbed off his ATV he asked, “What’s up?”
“Put on your goggles and look down there.” Dominic pointed to one of the loaders as it dumped into a rock truck. “Watch the rocks as they roll off the top of the truck. I’ve been timing it and it’s taking longer and longer for them to hit the ground the deeper we go.”
“What?” Frank exclaimed. “What the hell does that even mean?”
“I sent a message to Sophia,” Dominic explained, “still waiting to hear her thoughts, but I think its got something to do with this thing we’re digging up. The board has been talking a lot about gravitational anomalies, maybe that’s what it means. Anything feel different down there?”
“It would explain the bucket sensors over filling the loaders.” Frank thought out loud.
“What do you mean?” Dominic asked.
“I been having the guys manually control the bucket loads,” Frank explained, “watching it the old fashioned way cause the equipment keeps registering too light unless the buckets are overflowing. I thought it was just another oddity in this twilight zone of a job site, but maybe gravity down there is somehow less?”
“I’ll have Julian send over a sensor tonight,” Dominic decided as he tapped on his phone screen, “we need some data.”
The sensor kept a steady data stream through the night and when they gathered for the morning meeting to review it they were all stunned by the data.
“So,” Julian Mercer, the project’s data analysis team leader announced, “right now gravity is normal, no detectable anomalies. “We’re getting a standard nine-point-eight meters per second squared acceleration. Completely normal. But the telemetry I pulled off that sensor overnight? It looks like a calibration error, except all three redundant axis sensors confirmed it.
“Yesterday afternoon,” he continued, “something in that pit began generating a localized anti-gravitational gradient—essentially an upward-directed counter-force. It isn't just that things are lighter; the net downward acceleration at eighty feet was actively being reduced by a localized vertical field offset. As you cleared material away during the day, the upward vector increased, counterbalancing the ambient gravitational pull. But here's the real headache: between midnight and dawn, the field dampening collapsed back to zero. It’s like the ambient mass offset is resetting itself on a diurnal cycle.”
“Uh…” Tom, one of the excavator operators laughed shyly, “You want to put that in English there professor?”
The room erupted in laughter as Julian realized his slip. “Er… Sorry about that. Basically it looks like something down there is pushing upward and somehow it’s pushing harder after we clean up our depth target in the evening than it is when we come back in the morning. We’re not sure what, why or even how yet, but I have a full team analyzing the data from last night and they will keep watching it through today.”
“So business as normal?” Frank asked.
“Business as normal.” Julian confirmed. “I expect we will reach the critical lithic threshold by tonight, the point where the overburden and remaining crust between the pit floor and the cavern ceiling becomes too thin to operate on safely with the heavy rigs, so be extra careful this afternoon and tomorrow we may adjust our methodology depending on the overnight scans. Have a safe day everyone.”
With the meeting dismissed the crew went back to work in the excavation, aiming to reach the final target of one hundred ten feet by quitting time. As the day progressed and they started pulling down the center column Dominic was watching and scratching his head in confusion. The long arm excavator reached over the top of the pillar and jolted downward to pull it away, Frank strapped in and ready for the violent experience he had been having each time he did it.
Nothing.
The excavator pulled the slab of earth down from the dirt spire without malfunction, operating with the smooth grace that spoke of Franks decades of experience operating heavy equipment, but the dirt just hung in the air as though suspended by a string.
“What the…” Dominic hissed as he looked at the sensor readouts and grabbed his radio. “Frank, that looked too easy. What’s going on?”
“No clue boss!” Frank shouted into his radio. “Seems like whatever was killin’ the machines has stopped but the anomaly is the worst today it’s been.”
“Well,” Dominic considered his options, “let’s not look a gift-horse in the mouth and miss the chance to get ahead.”
“Ten-four boss.” Frank called out.
The crew rallied for the big end of day push to clear the last of the debris before stopping for dinner, scraping the expansive floor of the excavation to a clean smooth finish. Tom tipped his last bucket load into the rock truck and started backing away from it to park, but as he looked back at the truck the load was still hanging there in the air a few feet above the truck, it hadn’t even begun to fall.
“Uh, boss?” he said into his radio. “You seein’ this?”
Tom parked his loader and tipped the bucket forward to set the cutting edge on the ground for the night, the same as he did every day. The bucket dropped the last ten inches as he cut the engine off, slamming into the ground with a thud.
POP!
The sound echoed up through the funnel with such ferocity it forced Dominic to take a step backward as it reached his ears.
There’s a moment right before an explosion, when the kinetic energy builds to just before it’s breaking point. As Dominic heard the cracking sounds that followed his stomach dropped, he knew what was about to happen. Dominic mashed the button on his radio and started to shout a warning, but it was too late.
The earth in the bottom of the pit exploded throwing the long arm excavator, three rock truck and two massive loaders skyward as though they were a child’s toys. Dominic’s breath caught in his throat, dread filling every cell in his body as he watched his men in a sudden fight for their very lives. Dirt, rocks and equipment all flew about fifty feet upward, riding the shock-wave skyward before a momentary hang at the apex for what felt like hours before a blinding flash of light erupted from beneath it all and they started to fall. Dominic watched helplessly from the rim of the pit, panic streaking confusion through his mind as he raced to come up with the fastest way to rescue his men.
“Sit-rep!” he shouted into his radio, “All hands, sit-rep!”
He knew it was too soon for any of the men to respond, rock and dirt were still raining down over the top of whole scene.
Dominic furiously tapped away on his phone before mashing it against his ear, “Natalie!”
“What’s wrong Dom?” Natalie could hear the panic in his voice and as chief of safety she knew by his tone that her day was about to get hectic.
“I…” Dominic momentarily stammered, “I don’t know what happened.” He struggled to describe the scene through his shaky voice. “We were finishing for the day. Tom’s bucket must have cracked the critical threshold or something, but…” he trailed off for a second before adding, “it exploded! I was watching for a cave in, but this was an explosion. It’s a mess down there, I’m on my way in now to try to find the crew.”
“Dom…” a thready voice crackled over the radio, “Frank here, I’m upright and not hurt, but I think I’m berried down here boss. It’s pitch black in my cab.”
“I’m on my way Frank,” Dominic shouted into his radio, “hold tight. Anyone else with a sit-rep?”
“What do you need Dom?” Natalie shot into her phone.
“Medics…” Dominic began, “maybe a medivac lift, I don’t know. I need some people to dig, it’s a mess down there.”
Dominic climbed onto his ATV and started racing down the sloped road they had built around the walls of the funnel shaped excavation for moving equipment and debris in and out of the hole.
“Bob here,” Another voice crackled from his radio speaker, “I’m pinned boss. Truck hit face first, my feet went through the windshield and my legs are pinned under the truck.” He paused, his silence building a palpable tension in the air before he added, “God, the pain boss, hurry.”
“Definitely send the medivac!” Dom shouted as he stuffed his phone into his shirt pocket and started the engine.
Dominic raced to the bottom as he searched the scene below for some indication of what to do when he finally reached his team. He had a shovel, nothing else.
“Sit-rep!” he shouted into his radio one last time before he raced over to a lump of earth with the distinct shape of a rock trucks dump body and slammed his shovel into the dirt.
Thud!
His shovel hit metal as the dull thud sounded through the loose dirt. Dominic frantically scraped the dirt away from the top of the truck cab and started working his way down to the side window. A tension filled half hour passed as he scooped loose dirt and sand then desperately tried to keep the hole from filling back in before he could toss the scoop aside. Finally he saw his friends face appear in the din of the berried truck cab. After clearing enough dirt to get the window rolled down Frank climbed out and onto the surface.
“Thank you boss.” He sighed as he shook Dominic’s extended hand. “When that thing went I thought I was a goner for sure.”
“You’re OK?” Dominic quickly looked Frank over from his head to his feet for injuries.
“I’m fine boss, any idea where Bob’s at?” Concern etched Frank’s face.
“Bob, you still with us?” Dominic called into his radio.
“Still here boss, but it hurts.” Bob’s voice was weak.
“Do you have any idea where you landed?” Dominic asked.
“I was on the north edge, almost on the road out when it happened.” Bob said, “That’s all I know.”
There was long pause as the silence once again brought tension with it.
“Wait.” Bob’s voice was strained as he spoke, “I have one of Sophia’s trail marker pigs in my pocket…” he paused again, “if I can only get my hand in there…”
Silence.
“Got it!” Bob shouted into the radio. “Now the stake is in my back pock…” another pause then he added, “nope! The damn thing is in my but cheek!”
“What?” Dominic shouted.
“Must’ve stabbed me when the truck hit.” Bob said grimly, “I think I can… OUCH!”
More silence filled the air.
“Alright the post is attached, I am activating the pog now…” for the first time Bob sounded hopeful. “It’s green boss, and… There! It’s in the dirt, can you see me?”
“I don’t have a transponder!” Dominic growled as he pulled out his phone again.
“Go for Nat!” Natalie shouted toward her speaker phone.
“On Sophia’s desk in the office,” Dominic instructed, “her computer is connected to the SPS still. Bob activated a trail marker pog, I need you to send me a screen grab with his location ASAP please.”
“On it.” She shouted as she crossed to Sophia’s desk. “And… Sending. Expect a search and rescue team within ten minutes.”
“Thank you Natalie.” Dominic’s tone eased just a little as realization dawned that help was on the way.
The floor of the excavation was littered with debris, piles of dirt and loose rocks that were strewn around the perimeter while a perfect square cut into the center dropped another eighty feet to the cavern floor where the majority of the mess landed. And where Bob’s marker signal was coming from. Dominic scouted the edge of the drop off for a way down, nothing. The square hole was wrapped with sheer walls so smooth they looked as though they had been polished, but no way down.
“We’re gonna have to repel down there,” Dominic grunted as he hauled a coil of rope out of the bag attached to his ATV. “I’ve got rope but no harnesses, do you know how to tie a Swiss seat?”
“No.” Frank frowned.
“No worries, I got you.” Dominic slung a short bit of rope around Frank’s middle and then lashed it between his legs, securely fastening it in the front before clipping a set of D-rings onto it to control the rope movement.
Dominic tied his own quickly, secured the loose end of the rope to the berried truck that he had pulled Frank from and tossed it over the edge.
“What about repelling,” Dominic asked, “ever done that?”
“Sorry boss,” Frank said softly, “never.”
“Hm.” Dominic huffed as his mind wrestled with the options. “Ok…” he looped the repelling rope through Frank’s harness, “One hand on the rope above you for stability, the other on the trail rope to control descent. Got it?” he paused for confirmation, “You want to go faster, move the control hand further from your body, to stop just touch your backside with it and it’ll bind the rope and stop you.” Dominic paused again as he slid the rope through his own harness. “I’m going down first, once I am on the bottom you come down. I will be monitoring your rope, if I think your coming too fast I can stop you from down there. Good?”
“No,” Frank sighed, “but my men are down there, so it has to be.”
As Dominic slid over the edge and into the yawning mouth of the lower pit he saw rescue crews begin pouring over the edge and onto the access road. He breathed his relief as he disappeared over the edge. The moment Frank was on the ground the two men ran to the place where Bob’s marker was at and started digging, with six feet of loose dirt to get through it took the better part of an hour before the first yellow paint of the twisted steel of the loader was seen.
“Got him!” Frank’s shovel slammed into the metal cage around the machine’s cab.
Another fifteen minutes and the two men had dug far enough to see inside and scene was stomach churning macabre. Bob was half inside and half out of the cab of the loader, his seatbelt hanging in tattered shreds from the force of the impact. Dominic could see his upper body and down to his mid thigh, but below that Bob completely disappeared into the blood soaked dirt that had fallen between the loaders scoop and cab as the ground they had been digging fell over the top of his machine.
“It looks bad boss.” Frank whispered, turning to face Dominic with his back to Bob. “I don’t see him getting out of this with his legs unless we completely dig this thing out, and that’ll take so long the blood loss alone might kill him. What do we do?”