Old Earth (6 page)

“The last thing you need to do is worry about me.”

Dwyer was struck by the ominous tone.

They followed the gradual slope downward. At the tunnel’s highest, they barely had a few inches of headroom. But it quickly got lower, much lower, making them crouch. That’s when they cut far left into the passageway called Lloyd George. The farther they walked, the narrower it got, sometimes barely wide enough for wheelbarrows.

Formichelli had seen how tunnels branched off into networks of rooms where chronically coughing miners, as young as nine, dug, shoveled, and removed the coal by the light of dim electric bulbs, oil lamps, and brass Justrite carbide head lamps.

This was the process every day except on Sundays. The Lord’s day.

“Halfway,” Dwyer said after twelve minutes. “Need a break?”

“No.”

The breeze that had been at their backs from outside air pushing down the main shaft was now gone. The air was stale and full of coal dust. Formichelli wrapped a scarf around his nose and mouth. Dwyer didn’t.

After another grueling six minutes they stopped at the end of the electric wing. They lit hand- held lamps now. “The rest of the way we’re on our hands and knees. Follow me.”

The colliery’s chief led the way. Though miners hadn’t extracted any coal from the new vein yet, the air was still heavy with coal dust.

“No other ventilation?” Formichelli asked.

“No,” Dwyer said through a phlegm-filled cough. “You’ll feel some fresher air, though.”

They continued another two minutes through the claustrophobic space, at times on all fours then upright again.

“Here’s what you wanted to see,” Dwyer said with annoyance. He pointed to the far end of the excavation.

“Where?”

“There,” Dwyer said. He brought his lamp closer to the rock. But it wasn’t rock. It was a wall. But not a wall. A surface that was there, but wasn’t there. A black wall.

“Some sort of metal,” Dwyer said trying to sound smart for the company man. “At first, we thought it was silver; a black silver. Now I don’t know. Gotta get some work crews down here. Fact of the matter is if it’s not coal, and we’re in the business of coal, then it’s not my job to figure it out.”

But it did matter.

“How’d you say you heard about this?” Dwyer said, now curious.

“I didn’t.”

Formichelli turned in a slow circle, finally settling on the blacker-than-black surface, about eight feet wide and more than ten feet tall. He touched it. Not a spec of dirt.

“What do you think?” the miner asked. “Must have been buffed by millions of years of water, the way a waterfall polishes boulders,” Dwyer said.

The visitor continued to glide his fingers along the metal where it met the rock.

The mining manager had had enough. “Can we leave now?”

Formichelli ignored him.

“Like I said up above, no coal. Nothing.”

It wasn’t
nothing
to Formichelli. He smiled. “Okay, I’ve seen enough. I can leave now.”

The word
I
was different than
we.
Dwyer missed the distinction. He also missed seeing Formichelli remove a knife from his bag and raise it to neck level. Had Dwyer seen it, he wouldn’t have been able to defend himself.

Dwyer died without knowing why. That was Formichelli’s way.

Now the killer retraced his steps, stopping fifteen meters away. He set the first of the long fuses to the dynamite he’d carried into the tunnel. The length of the fuse would buy him fifteen minutes. On the way back to the lift he lit five more fuses at strategic points.

It wouldn’t be the first coal mine explosion in Wales. The newspaper would report that the mine’s general manager had died on a survey. The probable cause: an explosion due to a faulty lamp station. Eventually the accident was all but forgotten because of another Universal Colliery explosion barely six months later. That event became the worst in the history of the British Isles. Anthony Formichelli also witnessed that first-hand.

Eight

NEW HAVEN, CT
LATE MAY

“Insurance certificates are in the yellow file. State and park permits in the green. Your travel is in blue and emergency…”

“I know, I know,” McCauley said.

DeMeo grimaced. His boss still hadn’t made a final decision on the site, so the graduate teaching assistant had to clear two. That would be the next order of business. “Now please, doc, pay attention.”

“I am.”

It didn’t look like he was. The Yale paleontologist crisscrossed his office, throwing files of his own into a large Fed Ex box. “Keep going.”

“The purple file has contacts for your students. Black is for emergencies. Brown has my trip info. I’ve emailed PDFs of everything so you should have it on your iPhone, iPad, and laptop.”

DeMeo mastered organization years ago, a lesson learned at the foot of his mother, a school teacher. She told the young Peter DeMeo that everything comes down to collating and stapling. It was true then. It was true now.

“Got it. Yellow, green, blue. You’re yellow, travel is blue, insurance permits green.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong. What about black?” DeMeo asked.

“Black is the color of my true love’s hair,” McCauley said, citing the traditional Appalachian folk song

“Wrong again. You have no true love. It’s emergency contacts. Actually, I’ll put it in a red folder. Just read the damn labels and you’ll be okay. And please, don’t call me.”

“I’ll try my best.”

“Thank you. Now, can we finally decide where the fuck you’re going given you’ve already lied to the department?”

DeMeo laid out information on the remaining two sites. McCauley read the tab on the top file.
Makoshika State Park History
. He perused DeMeo’s extracts, though he didn’t have to. He’d passed on the site before. He thought it might be too touristy. But this year?
Makoshika.
The name called out to him. “Makoshika.”

“Interesting translation,” DeMeo noted.

“Yes. In the language of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota peoples, it means
bad earth
or
pitiful earth
.” He paused for thought. “Bad earth. Yes, bad earth. Maybe this is the year for bad earth.”

He considered some of the bullet points in the packet.

• Largest of Montana’s state parks
  
• More than 11,000 acres
  
• Freshwater shale, sandstone; evidence of mineral rich groundwater
  
• Carbonized wood
  
• Interlaced coal
  
• Smooth agates and towering cap rocks
  
• Fossilized coral
  

The file contained eerie photographs that could have been shot on an alien landscape except for the identifiable home grown vegetation that survived the bad earth. In one direction, knolls rose above the landscape. Another revealed a layered landscape with sedimentary rocks.

The terrain changed with every view: north, south, east, west. Wind swept rock formations were punctuated by juniper trees and hearty pines. There were high cliffs and beyond them a rugged desert without all the color variants of other sites. Mostly gray.

The pictures told the story of how erosion shaped the Makoshika geography for three hundred million years.

McCauley saw evidence in the pictures of ancient humid jungles, former lakebeds, and violent seismic shifts that accelerated transformation of the region. But, there was one additional photograph in the file DeMeo had prepared. It made McCauley laugh.

“Oh, this isn’t fair.”

He held up the photograph of Cottonwood, the eighteen-hole golf course two miles from the center of Glendive, Montana.

“It’s considered one of the toughest in the region,” DeMeo offered. “Intimidating. Ready for someone who’s up to the challenge.”

“Makoshika.”

“Good, because I already charged a summer club membership on your card.”

“What if I’d chosen the other site?”

“You wouldn’t. The golf course was the clincher.”

“My man! Who’s the park director?”

“A guy named Jim Kaplan, Kaplan with a ‘K.’ I’ve checked him out. Forty-eight, married, with twin daughters. I think you’ll like him. Nothing major published, but he knows his park and he’s done his share of digs in the region. University of Kansas grad.”

“Does he golf?”

“Now that I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

“Anything else?”

“Yup. Are you ready for your radio interview tonight?”

“Christ, thank you! I forgot. What time?”

“One in the morning. Set your alarm, doc.”

Nine

THAT NIGHT
1:00 AM

The news ended. The theme music came up and the late night talk host welcomed listeners to the second hour of his Saturday night broadcast over Boston’s fifty thousand-watt powerhouse radio station, WBZ.

“We’re back and I have one of my favorite guests on the phone, Dr. Quinn McCauley. He’s a leading paleontologist, first from Harvard, now Yale. I’ll forgive him for leaving as long as he keeps visiting us. Dare I say, he digs the earth. He actually digs the earth for dinosaur fossils. Every year, he heads out west in search of new discoveries. So pleased you’re joining us tonight. How are you, Dr. McCauley?”

“Absolutely fine, thanks, Jordan. Great to be back. But please, it’s Quinn.”

McCauley had never actually met Jordan Rich, the venerable late night host. These were call-in interviews. Promotion in pajamas. Though it didn’t count toward McCauley’s scholarly publishing, the exposure on WBZ reached listeners in thirty-three states. The bragging rights were enormous. But so was the enthusiasm of the overnight audiences, who McCauley had no problem holding in awe for hours.

“So, where are you off to this year?”

“Eastern Montana, a dynamic region in the heart of dinosaur country. My team comes from some of the great universities across the country. Harvard, Michigan, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Penn State, and one from Spain. I think it’s fair to say we’ll have a field day. Or more accurately, if everyone makes it, eight great weeks.”

“Do people ever drop out?” Rich asked.

“Rarely. Too much fun. Oh, sometimes, family issues unavoidably come up, but invariably they return before the summer’s through. And occasionally there are some who realize the field is not for them. I see it as a real litmus test and a great way to measure dedication and patience. And believe me, our work requires patience. There’s nothing quick about what we do. Oh, and it takes good knees.”

Jordan Rich laughed.

“And what will you find?”

“What will we find or what do I hope we’ll find?” McCauley responded.

“Both. Either,” the host replied.

“I expect we’ll find a go-to favorite. Tyrannosaurus rex fossils. Always a crowd pleaser. In fact, one of the greatest species was uncovered right where we’ll be. But what do I hope for?”

He paused for only a fraction of a second to rev up.

“For me, the best discovery of all is that one or more of the students will become superstars and carry on the work with true desire in a world of slash and burn budgets. That’ll help ensure we don’t turn into fossils ourselves.”

It was a point well worth making; a pitch for new minds to come to the old world.

Rich asked, “In terms of actual scientific discoveries, what’s still out there? Are there things we don’t yet know?”

“Can a teenager today imagine a life without smartphones, tablets, the cloud? What’s around the corner? What devices will we be utilizing tomorrow? They’re almost unimaginable. Well, same thing for looking backwards. Say about two hundred, three hundred, four hundred or five hundred million years ago. So, yes, there’s a lot out there. I always hope that we’ll pitch our shovel in the right spot and come up with something really cool. Then we have to figure out how to put the darned thing together.”

McCauley and Rich bantered for another twelve minutes on the character of dinosaurs, what scientists have discerned about their familial relationships, how much they ate, and conversely, how much they likely stank depending upon whether they were meat eaters or vegetarians.

“British scientists have estimated that the sauropods, the dinosaur group which includes the Brontosaurus, produced about five hundred twenty million tons of methane per year. That’s enough farting…can I say farting on the air?”

“You have twice, I think you’re okay,” the host laughed.

“Well, a bit more delicately, they expelled enough methane to warm the climate about eighteen degrees Fahrenheit more than it is today. Let’s just say that it’s a good thing cave dwellers and the discovery of fire came much later given all the gas in the air. Kaboom!”

With that, Jordan Rich laughed, then led to a commercial break.

Ironically, the first spot was for a local New England Ford dealership selling the all-terrain F-150 SVT
Raptor
.

Two minutes later, they were back into the show. “We’ll open up to your calls in a few minutes.” Jordan Rich gave the toll-free phone number. “But first, another science lesson. I suppose on the historic timeline, we’re the newbies, but the earth itself and other life-forms are another matter. Without getting into the religious debate, give us what you scientists see about the history of planet Earth.”

“Perfectly positioned, Jordan. I’m not one to disrespect alternate points of view. However I’ll tell you what I read.”

“What’s that?”

“I read the rocks. They have a very old story to tell.”

McCauley launched into it.

“The Earth’s outer crust, a rocky crust, solidified billions of years ago. But the crust isn’t a solid shell. It’s broken. I mean it’s really broken. Broken into huge chunks, thick rock plates typically 50-to-250 miles thick that constantly drift over the more viscous upper mantle. It can take eons to see the change or seconds to feel it. These plates move sideways and up and down. They bump into one another, exerting dramatic changes in continental shapes and positions. That’s why the earth is always changing. Has always changed. Will always change.

“The movement is called plate tectonics. In its most violent motion it creates earthquakes and volcanoes, mountain ranges and deep ocean trenches.”