Vermilion Drift co-10 Read online

To every blessing there was, Cork supposed, a dark side. The mine pits ate at the earth, ugly as cancers, and the tailings rose in red mountains that sullied the rivers and streams. And in the end, the demand for ore declined and the mines began to close one by one, leaving a population without recourse. The men were miners, bred from generations of miners, and the work they’d prepared for all their lives had vanished, with nothing at all promising on the horizon. A lot of people simply left, and life went out of the towns. Aurora had gone through this. When Cork was a teenager, after the Vermilion One closed, the town struggled to redefine itself. Iron Lake and the proximity of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness helped. The town began to court and to cater to the tourist trade and slowly reshaped itself around the heart of that new economy. Other towns didn’t fare as well and stood nearly deserted in the shadow of the great red mountains of ore tailings.

  Cork closed the book and stared out the window. He could see the rugged, forested hills of the North Country stretching away like a beautiful, turbulent sea. With all his heart, he loved that place, which had been his home for most of his life. Although he couldn’t see the protesters beyond the trees that walled off the Vermilion One complex, his heart was with them. He told himself that what he was doing wasn’t about helping the mine become a nuclear waste dump. It was about ensuring the safety of the people who worked there, people he knew, and so was a different issue. Still, a part of him felt like a traitor.

  He heard footfalls in the hallway, and Lou Haddad walked in, carrying a briefcase, which he set on the conference table and opened. He slid from it a single schematic, very old looking, drawn on material that had the feel of canvas.

  “What did you find?” Cork asked, joining him.

  Haddad said, “This is a map for Level One. This”-he put his finger on a tunnel outlined on the page-“is the Vermilion Drift, the first of the excavations dug when the mine went underground, in 1900. Everything looks normal until you get here.” His finger followed the lines of the tunnel drawing until it came to a place where the solid lines ended and were replaced with dotted lines.

  “Why the change in how the lines are drawn?”

  “Officially, the Vermilion Drift was closed back in the early part of the last century. A cave-in. The dotted lines show where the tunnel used to run.”

  “So the tunnel’s blocked?”

  “That’s what the map says, but I’ve been thinking about that. Some of the underground mines had real problems with cave-ins, but not Vermilion One. The rock here is simply too stable, one of the reasons for the DOE’s interest. And something else isn’t right, this drift beyond the cave-in. According to the schematic, it takes a sharp turn and heads east.”

  “So?”

  “The ore deposit runs the other way.”

  “So the drift goes away from the iron?”

  “That’s what the map shows.”

  “You don’t buy it?”

  “Not for a minute. Take a look at this, right here.” Haddad tapped the paper at a point a short distance beyond where the tunnel veered east. “That’s where the Iron Lake Reservation begins. The ore deposit runs directly under reservation land, I’d stake my reputation on it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think that, in those early years, they mined ore that didn’t belong to them.”

  “How could they get away with it?”

  “Probably just went about it quietly.”

  “And when they were finished, they sealed the tunnel to hide what they’d done, claimed there’d been a cave-in, and altered the maps?”

  “That’s my speculation.”

  “This extension doesn’t appear on any of the more recent schematics?”

  Haddad shook his head. “When the last survey was done, just before the mine shut down, the tunnel had been sealed for years.”

  “Sealed how?” Cork asked.

  “Timbered off. Which would explain why the newer maps simply show the tunnel ending. As far as anyone knew, it did.”

  “But maybe it doesn’t?”

  Haddad straightened up. “Let’s go see.”

  On his way to Vermilion One, Cork had stopped at his house and picked up a sweater to wear in the mine, a cardigan his kids had given him for Christmas six or seven years earlier. It was red, with a white reindeer embroidered on the left side. He put it on in the cage as they descended. When Haddad saw it, he laughed and said, “Ho, ho, ho.” He wore a fleece-lined windbreaker. They both wore hard hats, each with a light mounted in front. For backup, Cork had brought the Maglite he kept in his Land Rover. Plott, the security guard on duty in the Rescue Room next to the framehead, had given Haddad a Coleman electric lantern.

  It took no time at all to reach Level One. They stepped into the cage station area, which was only dimly lit. Haddad indicated the dark tunnel directly ahead. “The Vermilion Drift,” he said.

  Bright sun, blue sky, green trees, sweet air, abundant life-all this was only a hundred feet above his head-but the solidness of the chill rock around him made Cork feel completely cut off from the world he knew. As he stood facing the dark throat of the Vermilion Drift, everything human in him cried out to back away, to return to the light, and for a moment he couldn’t make himself go forward.

  “Claustrophobic?” Haddad asked with real concern.

  “No,” Cork said. “It’s not that.”

  “Alien, isn’t it?”

  “Like I’m on another planet.”

  “Imagine spending your whole life in a place like this, Cork. A lot of men did, my old man among them.”

  In that moment, Cork felt a greater respect for Lou’s father and the men like him than he ever had before.

  “You okay going on?” Haddad asked.

  “Yeah. I’m right behind you.”

  They walked slowly into a dark that, if their lights failed, would swallow them completely. The floor was flat, the tunnel itself a ten-by-ten-foot bore whose walls showed every scar of its creation. Cork had expected the rock to be red here, but it was dull gray-green.

  “Ely greenstone,” Haddad explained. “Waste rock. They had to get through this to reach the ore. That’s what this drift is for. And see that?” Haddad pointed toward a short tunnel that cut off to their right. “A crosscut. The ore deposits didn’t flow in neat fingers. Sometimes there were offshoots, and crosscuts were used to get to them. Here, let me show you something.”

  Haddad turned off the Vermilion Drift into the crosscut tunnel. Near the end of the crosscut, which was only a dozen yards long, he stopped and shined a light toward the ceiling, illuminating a wide hole there.

  “This is a raise,” he told Cork. “In the mining here, they used a technique called undercutting. They tunneled beneath the deposits and blasted raises, these short upward accesses into the ore itself. They’d mine the ore, creating rooms called stopes, and send the ore down the raises into cars waiting on the rails below here in the drift. The cars would take the ore back to the main shaft, where it was lifted up to the framehead and dumped for crushing.”

  Cork looked down at the bare rock under his feet. “What happened to the rails?”

  “Recycled,” Haddad said. “Whenever they finished mining a drift, they pulled up the rails and used them somewhere else.” He stared upward into the raise above his head, and, when he spoke, his voice was full of admiration. “The men in charge of a crew, they were called captains. These were guys who’d spent their lives in mines in Wales and Slovakia and Germany. They were tough cusses, proud men. They knew rock and how to mine it.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He started out as a mucker, worked his way up until he had his own crew. Damn near broke his heart when they closed the mine.”

  Cork knew that afterward Haddad’s father had gone to work in the family grocery store, but his heart was never in it.

  “I don’t know,” Lou said. “Maybe it was a good thing, having to leave the mine. A lot of miners at the end were suffering. Art
hritis, lung problems. Hell, in the old days, because of the ungodly noise in the stopes, most of the miners were hard of hearing.”

  Cork remembered something his own father used to tell him: You always knew when you were passing the house of a guy who’d worked the Vermilion One. You could hear his radio or television blasting all the way out to the street.

  They returned to the main drift and kept going.

  A few minutes later, their headlamps illuminated a sudden wall ahead, the official end of the tunnel, a construct of dark timbers that completely blocked the passage.

  “Do all tunnels end this way?” Cork asked.

  “Normally they just end in rock. This is unusual.”

  “Has Genie Kufus finished her survey of Level One?”

  “Yes.”

  “She say anything about this to you?”

  “She hasn’t shared any of her thoughts yet. She probably won’t until she’s completed the survey of the entire mine.”

  They stood before the wall, which had been constructed of six-by-six timbers laid horizontally, one atop the other. They’d been secured to the wall of the tunnel with bolted metal L plates. The wood had fared well in the dry cool of the mine. Then Cork noticed something.

  “Look here.” He knelt and ran his hand along a seam cut into several of the timbers a couple of feet from the right side of the wall. There was another seam cut two feet nearer the center. “These are fresh.”

  “Yeah,” Haddad agreed. He knelt beside Cork and gave the top cut section a push. It yielded and fell back into the dark on the other side of the timbers. He reached in and pulled the next section toward him, and, when it was out, Cork saw that an eyebolt had been screwed into the backside, which would allow it to be removed easily from the other side of the wall. One by one, Haddad cleared the next four sections of cut timber, which created an opening two feet high and two feet wide, large enough for a man to crawl through.

  Cork shot the beam of his Maglite into the dark on the other side, revealing a continuation of the Vermilion Drift. He saw no indication of a cave-in. He looked at Haddad. “You were right. Somebody lied in that official report a long time ago.”

  “Somebody who didn’t want it known that ore belonging to the Ojibwe had been taken.”

  “You game?”

  “Are you kidding?” Haddad crawled ahead through the gap.

  Cork followed and almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The air on the other side reeked of animal decay. He stood up and shot his light into the darkness ahead. “Something died in here, Lou. And not long ago.”

  “Probably some animal came in and couldn’t find its way out. Which means you’re right. There’s another entrance. And do you feel that?”

  “What?” Cork said.

  “The temperature. It’s much warmer here than on the other side of that timbered wall. There’s air coming in from somewhere up ahead.”

  Haddad went forward with the Coleman lantern. They had to walk carefully because on this side of the wall the tunnel floor was littered with blocks of stone big as an ice chest.

  Cork glanced uneasily at the ceiling above him. “Any chance of a cave-in?”

  “I wouldn’t worry.”

  “What about all these rocks on the floor?”

  Haddad shook his head. “Should have been cleared during the mining. Poor workmanship.”

  They seemed to have walked forever in the dark, and Cork was uncomfortably aware how far behind them was the way out. He’d never been claustrophobic before, but now he felt as if the walls were closing in on him. Maybe it was just the utter black around them and the fact that he didn’t really know where they were headed. The foulness of the air he breathed might also have had something to do with it.

  Haddad stopped suddenly, and Cork nearly ran into him. Haddad turned off his Coleman. “Kill your light,” he said.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Turn it off, Cork. And your headlamp, too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just do it.”

  Cork didn’t like the idea. But when the lights were off, he understood what Haddad was getting at. It was pitch dark around them but not absolute, as it should have been. Far ahead, the dark was broken by a diffuse paleness.

  Haddad switched his lantern on again, and for a moment the light was a knife in Cork’s eyes. “Come on,” Haddad said and started ahead, this time walking much faster despite the great stones littering the way.

  Before Cork could follow, he heard something scurry to his right. He swung the beam of his Maglite in that direction, but whatever critter had been there had vanished. It gave him the creeps knowing that there were living things that could see him but that he could not see.

  The tunnel ahead grew brighter, though still dark enough that artificial light was needed to navigate. At last they came to a jumble of what looked to Cork to be dynamite-blasted rock. There was a ragged passage into the tumble of debris where light came through. Haddad put down the lantern, knelt, and crawled into the opening.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “What is this?”

  “My guess would be a bit of wildcat mining. It happened in the early days on the Range, when no one was paying enough attention to property and mineral rights. The problem with open pits in this particular area was that the loose glacial deposits on the surface kept collapsing into the pit. That’s one of the reasons mining went underground on this part of the Range. I’d bet whoever blasted this sink finally said to hell with it. But I’d also bet that the guys in charge of the Vermilion One back then knew exactly where the ore was that the wildcatters were trying to get at and ran the Vermilion Drift all the way to the pit. Then maybe they had another landslide, or maybe they even blasted the side of the pit themselves to try to hide what they’d done. But they didn’t quite succeed. Come on, let’s see what’s up top.”

  He didn’t wait for Cork to weigh in on the plan’s advisability but quickly disappeared into the mouth of the passage, which angled upward and was easily wide enough for his body to squeeze into. Cork didn’t follow right away, thinking it prudent to wait a bit to be sure they both didn’t get stuck somewhere they couldn’t get out of.

  As he waited, he heard something move behind him. He spun and searched the darkness, sensing a watcher he couldn’t see. He stabbed the flashlight beam into the black throat of the tunnel. Deep inside the Vermilion Drift, two yellow eyes glowed back at him.

  “You coming?” Haddad shouted down.

  “Just a minute!”

  Cork crept toward the eyes, which didn’t move. He reached down and picked up a rock from the tunnel floor. As he approached, a hiss came from the darkness, then an angry snort. Cork kept moving, the rock firmly in his grip. When he was fifteen feet away, the creature turned to flee and, in turning, showed its fat, furry body and bushy tail. A raccoon. Cork figured the tunnel would be a pretty good place to make a den for the winter months, and probably the coon had young somewhere. He was just about to return to the rock mess at the bottom of the test pit when the Maglite beam swept across a broken area in the wall that he’d overlooked as he’d passed through earlier. It appeared as if rocks had been loosely piled to close off a crosscut tunnel. He stepped around the rubble on the floor and worked one of the stones away from the makeshift wall. Behind was a well of darkness, and from that well flowed the stench that fouled the air in the tunnel. He shined his Maglite inside.

  Cork had always thought that as a cop he’d seen the worst of everything. When his flashlight revealed what the stone wall had hidden, he realized how wrong he’d been.

  SEVEN

  The sink, which Haddad had identified as most probably a wildcat operation, was in the middle of a small clearing a quarter mile north of the headframe for the Number Six shaft of the Vermilion One Mine. The sheriff’s people had been able to reach it by driving carefully among the pines that lay between the sink and the mine buildings.

  It was nearing seven in the ev
ening, and Cork stood with Sheriff Marsha Dross and Captain Ed Larson near the edge of the sink. Dross had put in a call to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office in Bemidji, and they were waiting for the agents to arrive. The drive would have taken a good three hours, and enough time had already passed that Cork and the others were watching their watches. Alf Murray, the chief of the Aurora Volunteer Fire Department, stood with Cork and the others, using a walkie-talkie to communicate with his men below. The firemen had brought out mobile lights and a generator, and a power cable snaked out of sight down the passage that led eventually to the Vermilion Drift. They’d set up the lights in the tunnel, but only as far as the gruesome discovery Cork had made. Ed Larson, who was in charge of major crimes for the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department, had overseen the dismantling of the makeshift stone wall. Some of Dross’s people had done a flashlight search of the tunnel from that point to the timber construction where Haddad and Cork had crawled through. Dross had put others to work doing a quadrant search of the area surrounding the surface opening of the sink for anything that might prove to be evidence. She’d hoped for maybe a footprint or tire track, but the ground had yielded nothing.

  Someone had gone to Lucy’s in Gresham and brought back a big container of coffee, and Cork stood sipping from a white foam cup as he waited. The sun had shifted to the far west, and the shadows of the pines had begun to creep across the clearing.

  “Ever deal with anything like this when you were sheriff?” Dross asked.

  “Nope,” Cork replied. “I can’t imagine many sheriffs do.”

  “Jesus, I hope not.”

  Cork heard the sound of a vehicle engine approaching gradually through the pines. The sun was in his eyes, and it was hard to see into the deep shade among the evergreens. A minute later, a white Suburban entered the clearing and rolled slowly toward them. It stopped beside the sheriff’s pickup truck, and the two occupants got out. One of them Cork knew well: Simon Rutledge, with whom he’d worked in the past, both when he was sheriff of Tamarack County and in the time since. Cork liked him immensely and had great respect for his ability. Rutledge’s companion was a stranger. She was of medium height, early fifties, hair the color of a cirrus cloud and with the same wispy appeal.