Binder - 02 (23 page)

“There are almost eight hundred men working at Gilroy mine, most of them underground. They’re evacuating the mine right now and local police are sealing off the three entry portals.”

“Have you figured out how they could disable the mine? If we don’t have a good idea...” I trailed off. The mine was small on the surface but enormous underground—the mirror opposite of Hobart.

“Coal mining releases pockets of methane gas and a great deal of coal dust. Both are highly flammable,” said the analyst who’d spoken earlier. “Even a modestly-sized explosive device set off anywhere in an underground coal mine would be catastrophic. The worst mine accident in history happened in Monongah, West Virginia in 1907. Workers mishandled a small amount of dynamite and 500 miners died. So really, any explosive charge set off inside the mine near the coal seams could be devastating. If you wanted to be sure to maximize the damage, however, you’d want to set it up near a seam where methane gas is being released.”

“You said they’re evacuating the mine?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Do they have anyone checking the miners? We need to know if there are any outsiders there—replacement workers, inspectors, journalists, anyone.”

“We asked the foreman not to let anyone leave. The county sheriff is at the mine with four deputies. They’re holding the miners on the site for now. The State Police should be arriving about an hour after you. They’ll process the miners.”

“How deep is this mine?” Nichols asked.

“Nearly three thousand feet.”

“Is there any way we can get down to the active coal seams without using the elevator?” I asked.

“No. This is a shaft mine with a central elevator, so even after you drive in, there’s only one way to get down and back up.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s just great.”

32

“You folks aren’t planning on carrying firearms into the mine, are ya?” Earl Jones, the mine superintendent, asked the moment he stepped into his office. He eyed the .45 caliber automatic I was strapping to my leg as he spoke. Jones was a small, wiry man with thick, wavy gray hair and a voice like crushed gravel.

Nichols, the two bomb squad agents, Cody the Malinois and I had been gearing up in Jones’s office as we waited for him to arrive from one of the mine portals. The four of us exchanged a look.

He pulled a map down in front of the white board behind his desk. “You pull the trigger once down there and you could collapse the whole mine without help from any damn terrorists.”

“We won’t use weapons underground. We understand the risks,” I assured Mr. Jones.

“So why carry ’em?” he asked bluntly. He saw he wasn’t getting anywhere and moved on. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but we’re doing a headcount as our workers surface. We initiated an emergency recall for all of our underground personnel when we got word of the terrorist threat, but it takes some of our miners two hours to get topside.” He glanced at the four of us. “I have to say, I was expecting a few more people. Four of you won’t be able to cover much territory down below.”

“In two hours you’ll have more help than you know what to do with,” I said. “But we can’t wait that long. We have a credible threat of sabotage against your mine. We believe the attack is planned for tomorrow, but we have no idea when. If the terrorists are using explosives, they may have already placed them.”

Jones looked skeptical but didn’t argue. I judged him as a man with a good deal of common sense. A brunette in a blue suit with her hair in a tight bun stepped into the room and handed Jones a folder.

“You wanted to know who’s been in the mine in the last few days? Other than employees?”

“We should also look at employees you hired in the past six months as well as any who used to work for Transnational Coal. But the visitor log is a good start.”

“We’ve only had three outside groups visit in the past two weeks. Some inspectors, a class from WV State and a PBS film crew.”

“Did you know any of the visitors personally?”

“No, but the inspectors were from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. That’s a federal agency and it was a scheduled inspection.”

“What about the other groups. When were they here?”

“The students were here on Wednesday. The film crew was here on Friday.”

“Where did they go?”

“The students went through the Epply portal. I don’t know where they went from there but the man who guided them is topside now so I can ask him. The film crew...let me see...they used the Foley Portal because they wanted to see a longwall setup with robotic equipment. And their guide—oh, that’s odd.” Four heads jerked up.

“They were taken down by a relatively new supervisor. Jeb McFarland. He called in sick today.”

“How long has McFarland been with you?”

“Three, maybe four months. I’ll pull his file.”

“Is it normal for a new miner to give a tour?”

“It’s not. It’s usually my deputy or me. I’ll have to find out what happened.”

“It makes the film crew a good candidate for us. Would anyone else here have seen them before they went down?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your fax number and I’ll have some photos faxed over. If we can match anyone we’ll have a better idea where to look.” Earl gave me the number and walked out of the office to tell his secretary to bring in the fax. I stepped outside and pulled out the satphone to call the operations center for the Activity to have the photos sent over. I would have had them e-mailed but Earl’s computer didn’t look like it was capable of displaying a photograph. Earl was back in five minutes. He handed me one of the faxed pages.

“Your boys sent over six shots. I haven’t talked to my deputy yet but the Foley Creek foreman rode down on the lift with the film people and he thinks he remembers this one—one of the cameramen. Hard to be sure, though.” The photo was grainy, and it was a surveillance photo, not a mug shot. But the man in the picture had a sickle shaped scar under his right eye that would be hard to miss. A marking in the corner of the photo told me that it was one of the men the Activity had identified in South Africa. I realized I should have asked for the photos earlier.

“I recognize him,” I said. I’d seen the man the previous afternoon in the National Front’s employee parking lot. He’d been shooting at me. He was a good shot, and I killed him while I was escaping.

Nichols grabbed the photo from Jones and turned to me. “Can your boss connect this man to an act of terrorism?”

“For the FISA court?”

“Yes.”

“I think so.”

“Mr. Jones, I’m going to need to take a statement from your foreman right now. Then I need a phone and a fax.” Walters motioned to his assistant, who was perched in the doorway, and asked her to help Nichols; the two women disappeared. If Nichols could get an eyewitness statement confirming that a known terrorist was inside the Gilroy mine, she might be able to get a FISA warrant to give the FBI legal access to the e-mails from the National Front that the Activity had already accessed with PRISM. That in turn could give us enough evidence to get a warrant to search the National Front compound. I was ready to go back there and knock down every door until I found Heather Hernandez.

“I asked my deputy why McFarland gave the tour. Apparently they asked for him by name. They said he’d taken them around at Stony Creek, the last mine he worked. Plus he had ten years as a foreman there before he was laid off, so he was qualified.”

“Who owns the Stony Creek mine?”

“Transnational.”

“Do you have security cameras here?”

“Yessir.”

“Would you have footage of this film crew?”

“There’s a camera on each elevator. I think we keep about a week’s worth of video on a DVR in the security office.”

“Let’s take a look.”

* * *

Six of us jammed into the security trailer around a thirteen-inch black and white screen as the guard zipped through hours of footage of miners coming and going down the platform of the mine shaft elevator. The tension was palpable and I had the strong sense of time slipping away from us. But given the size of the mine, we had no choice. We could wander around for days underground without finding anything unless we were sure about where we were heading.

The security guy finally found what we were looking for. The PBS film crew was made up of six men, mostly big guys. I recognized the one from the National Front parking lot. I turned to Tim Quigley, the sergeant from the West Virginia State Police bomb squad.

“What do you think?” I asked as we watched the video. We watched the men enter and exit the elevator, after skipping through most of the footage of them standing in place in between.

“They’re avoiding the camera,” he observed—and he was right. The men had their heads down, turned away from the camera.

“Look at their gear. Can you guess how many devices they might be carrying with them?”

Quigley shrugged and ran a hand over his close-shaved head. “Hard to say. Looks like they have two camera bags plus the cameras. They could be hiding something in the cameras. If not, and depending on the explosives they’re using and the design of the devices, they could easily have three or four complete devices. Less if they had to conceal the devices within the bags.”

We both looked over to Jones. “We always check bags to see what visitors are bringing down into the mine. Can’t tell you how many lighters we’ve confiscated.”

“Maybe two or three devices, then. But don’t hold me to that.”

* * *

Back in his office, Jones turned to the map he’d rolled down from the wall. It was a cutaway view of the mine, showing different layers of activity.

“Here are the three portals—Epply, Foley and Glassy. Between Epply and Glassy is nearly four miles. In total, the mine spans across surface territory that’s twenty miles long in some places. We’ve been working this mine for going on sixty years and there are over two hundred miles of tunnels in total here, not counting those that have been filled in. So the first thing to realize is the scale of what you’re looking at. This isn’t like visiting a paper plant and inspecting a couple of big buildings. This mine is more like the New York City subway system.”

I looked at Nichols and saw anticipation warring with futility.

“The film crew went through the Foley Creek Portal. They were planning to see the Kitaniny Seam. That’s our most productive seam at the moment—a forty-foot seam that we found two years ago 2600 feet down—a half-mile under the surface of the Earth.”

Earl looked at the four of us seriously. “How many of you have visited a working mine before?” Not one of us twitched. Earl shook his head in disgust.

“I know the picture you have in your mind. A bunch of men with pickaxes on their shoulders riding in a little car down a roller-coaster chute, right? That’s not hardly the situation here, boys.” Nichols cleared her throat. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he corrected himself.

“The Kitaniny seam is a longwall operation. We’re using a piece of highly automated equipment that extracts and transports coal on its own without any assistance. We also have a few older continuous mining machines in operation on that line, but they’re nearly a thousand feet shallower.”

“If you were going to place a device to do the maximum damage to the mine, where would you put it?” I asked.

“Well, I can tell you where mines have had the worst damage from accidents. When mines lose elevator shafts, it limits our access to the rest of the damage. The Foley Creek portal has a passenger elevator and a coal elevator sharing the same shaft. The second area we worry about is the ventilation system. We set up ventilation lines along all of the working seams and in the main tunnels to evacuate methane from the mining environment. There are four conduits with aboveground motors that power the fans. We have to be extra careful around the ventilation because that’s where the greatest concentration of flammable gases build up. Finally, there’s the seam itself. We’ve had some issues recently with larger pockets of methane being released there. We had a fatal accident not eight months ago because of that.”

“Is that something that other mines would know about?”

“Yes, it’s all public. You can find a copy of the report on the Internet.”

“Okay,I guess that gives us some places to start,” I said.

“We’ll need a guide,” Nichols interjected. It was a statement, not a question.

“I’m responsible for safety in this mine. If someone put something in there, it’s my fault.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jones. We can use your help.”

“I’ll take you to the locker room now. We’ll give each of you a suit to put on over your uniforms. You’ll be glad when you see how much dust you pick up. You’re going to get hardhats with headlamps, a methane detector and a self-rescue breathing unit. You’ll also have a locator and a token for emergencies.”

“You should activate all of the locators before we go under so the state police know where we are in the mine,” Quigley suggested.

“That’s a good idea. I’ll explain how to use the breathing and safety equipment and some of the precautions that you need to take. Please listen carefully. You can’t afford to make mistakes underground.”

33

I’m not prone to claustrophobia. I can spend an hour inside a submerged wreck sucking on a re-breather without getting jitters or a whole day buried under mud, sticks and leaves in a gilly suit in the jungle. But when the elevator began to descend down the mineshaft, I felt the weight of the entire mountain pressing down on me. There’s something fundamentally wrong with descending straight down beneath the earth’s surface. On a primal level, you know that you’re trapped, at the mercy of immense geologic forces held at bay by imperfect human technology. The explosives we were looking for might have been part of it, too.

The elevator ride was shorter than I expected, just a few minutes. In that time, we’d traveled down a distance that was twice the length of the Empire State Building. The car was quite large—big enough to hold twenty or thirty miners with ease. When we got out, though, it was all blackness save the faint glow of low-wattage lighting.