Short Fuse: Elite Operators, Book 2 (5 page)

Chapter Five

“You’re not claustrophobic, right? No panic attacks, anxiety disorders?”

Nicola had to smother her smirk as Warren met Roger’s patronizing tone with a cool smile.

“I disarm bombs for a living. I think I can manage an elevator into a tunnel.”

“We’ll see.” Roger snatched a spare folded boiler suit from the bin in the corner of the locker room and tossed it to Warren. “Not sure we have anything that’ll fit a stringy
oke
like you. This’ll have to do.”

He turned to her, rheumy eyes wandering southward. She held up her gym bag. “Don’t worry, I brought my own.”

Roger grunted his disappointment. “We only have the one changing room. Not enough female visitors to justify two. Of course, you’re welcome to use my office if you want privacy.”

She imagined hidden cameras with motion detectors. “I’m sure Warren will be gracious enough to turn his back while I change.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but the way Roger’s expression darkened and Warren’s ears flushed suggested she might have misjudged. The site manager huffed out of the room with a barked admonishment to meet him by the shaft entrance in ten minutes.

She and Warren stared at each other across the single bench.

“I can wait outside until you’re done,” he offered, those quicksilver eyes refusing to meet hers.

“It’s fine,” she insisted more breezily than she felt. “It’ll take two minutes, and then I can help you with your safety gear. Just, you know, don’t look.”

“I wouldn’t.” But he hesitated a second too long before turning, like a kid who suspects his sister will steal his Monopoly money while he leans down to find the dice.

As she raced to strip down to her underwear she was keenly aware of every sound from his side of the room, simultaneously worried he would turn around too soon and absurdly hopeful that he did. She heard his boots thud onto the floor, heard the bench creak under his weight. By now he had to be dressed, sitting down to put on the steel-toed rubber boots worn by every mine employee. She yanked up the zipper on her Garraway-branded coveralls and spun.

And blinked.

“Oh, sorry.” Warren hurried to drag on the boiler suit’s sleeves but not before she got an eyeful of his exquisite back and shoulders, smooth muscles creating perfectly curved topography on either side of his spine, a tattooed falcon swooping in the hollow just below his neck.

She cleared her throat and turned around, declaring with false brightness, “You’re fine. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll help you with the gear. I’m not sure how the Copley operations compare, but—”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You’ve never been down a mine?” She heard his oncoming footsteps and pivoted to face him.

He shook his head. “Neither has my father, at least not since he was a kid. My grandfather introduced all the technological innovations that made the company successful. My dad just reads maps and watches the news, looking for fledgling African governments he can exploit.”

“Governments who otherwise might have no capital with which to fund infrastructure like hospitals and roads, and who can create thousands of jobs with the stroke of a pen when they give Copley Ventures permission to mine.”

His expression hardened. “What did you say about gear? We should hurry up. Roger’s waiting.”

Guess we’ll conclude that debate another time.
“Twist your belt around so those hooks are on either side. This one’s for your safety pack, the other’s for your lamp battery.” She grabbed two of the aluminum cases from a locker, tossed one to him and affixed the other on her belt.

“What do I do with this?”

“It’s a self-rescue kit. If the air turns toxic you open the case, blow into the rubber bag inside to inflate it, then strap it on like those masks you see in airplane safety demonstrations. Supposedly it’ll keep you alive for thirty minutes.”

His nod bordered on indifferent. She had to smile.

“I’ll be honest with you, Warren, you’re denying me the sadistic pleasure of the terrified looks I usually get when I explain this stuff.”

He shrugged. “I can do a lot with thirty minutes.”

Prove it.
She bit her lip against several saucy double entendres and pointed to the rack of hard hats with lights mounted over the brims. “Grab one of those and attach the battery pack to the other belt clip. Make sure the lamp works and we’re good to go.”

“Shall I grab you one as well?” He stretched to reach the few remaining hats on the top shelf.

“I’ve got my own.” She reached into her gym bag and retrieved her customized miner’s hat, which was Garraway-blue with white, fluffy clouds all over. At the sight of it Warren cracked one of his fleeting smiles.

“Let me guess, that refers to Garraway’s outstanding record on air pollution?”

“It was a gift from my boss. Apparently I’m a blue-sky thinker. Plus it looks great in the press releases.”

“Are you princesses almost ready?” Roger bellowed through the door. “It’s a gold mine, not a fashion show.”

“On our way,” Nicola called back, and Warren trailed her outside.

They followed Roger to the entrance of the head frame, the cement tower that stood over the mineshaft.

“That’s the hoist house,” she pointed out to Warren, indicating the smaller structure beside the head frame. “There’s a huge wheel in there that winds up the cables taking the elevator up and down. The ore comes out on the conveyer belt at the back, but the humans go up and down in what we call the cage.”

Roger squinted at Warren over his shoulder. “Didn’t you read up on gold mining before you came out here?”

Warren’s eyes narrowed, but before he could speak Nicola interjected, “Every operation is different. I want to make sure he’s familiar with this one.”

Roger said nothing more as he motioned them into the metal grate-walled cage, already packed with boiler-suited mineworkers, and pulled the door shut with a
clank
. As he signaled to the cable operator that they were ready to descend, she leaned in to speak to Warren.

“This elevator travels at more than thirty miles per hour. The mine is a little under two miles deep. The gold seam itself is barely two feet wide, but wait ’til you see how much equipment and personnel it takes to get that to the surface.”

“How many employees are there onsite?”

“Around two thousand.”

The elevator began to descend, slowly at first, then rushing toward the bottom with a speed that still made her feel like her stomach was back at the surface. Exposed rock walls seemed to fly past them with blurry speed, and the heat and humidity in the cage grew with each passing second. She took deep breaths, swallowing the flash of claustrophobia that always accompanied these five-minute elevator rides. This cage seemed tighter and hotter than most, and as she craned her neck to see around Roger’s bulk at her side, she realized why.

“There are too many people in here,” she murmured, her mental headcount climbing over forty.

“What?” Roger called over the din.

“Forty-two, forty-three… There are—”

The elevator shuddered to a rough halt at the bottom, and before she could say another word the miners swarmed toward the door, shoving it open and stampeding out into the tunnel. One miner stomped on her foot, another’s elbow whizzed past her ear, and if Warren hadn’t grabbed a fistful of her boiler suit and tugged her backward she would’ve been trampled by a man so busy adjusting his battery that he wasn’t watching where he went.

He kept his hand on her back as he leaned down to ask if she was all right. She nodded, chiding herself for the tingling thrill that emanated from that tiny point of contact. She’d been in worse mines than this one—she didn’t need a man to reassure her.

Although needing and liking weren’t necessarily the same thing.

“They’re all in a hurry to punch in so they don’t miss a second’s wage.” Roger rolled his eyes as he motioned for her to precede him out of the emptied elevator. “Those are Latadians for you—their manners are even worse than their work ethic.”

“Are you aware there were forty-three people in that elevator? Its maximum capacity is thirty-five.”

Roger shrugged as he led the way through the cavernous entrance to one of the many tunnels twisting out from its walls. They passed one in which the miners from the elevator were shoving onto an underground train, turning into a tunnel meant for pedestrians where Roger evidently stored a golf cart for his own use.

“You know what these guys are like,” he explained, wedging himself behind the wheel and gesturing for them to join him. “They show up late, miss the elevator, squeeze onto the next one.”

“Then you need to have someone monitoring the passenger load so there’s no overcrowding. Seven people is a lot of extra weight, and if they had to be evacuated—”

“I’ll look into it,” Roger grumbled, but Nicola was already squinting up at the electric bulbs strung along the ceiling.

“Is there a problem with your power supply? Several of these lights are out. In a pedestrian tunnel also in use by golf carts you need to ensure the illumination is adequate.”

Roger didn’t reply, but he did press harder on the accelerator. A rustle from the backseat told her Warren had crossed his arms, and for the second time that morning she was glad he was there.

They drove in tense silence, the electric whirr of the golf cart’s battery-powered engine echoing off the rock walls, which were lined with a tightly strung net to support the structure and reduce the impact of cave-ins. The air was heavy and cloying, thick with the industrial smells of diesel, sulfur and rock dust. In some stretches the lighting was so dim that the miners they passed didn’t seem to appear until they were almost at her side, blue boiler suits surging out of the darkness, faces shadowed to inhuman blurs beneath the brims of their hard hats.

Roger stopped the golf cart outside a room dug into the tunnel wall, one of many designed to double as administrative spaces and refuges in a collapse. As they climbed out of the golf cart she squinted up into one of the ventilation shafts in the ceiling.

“Where are the evacuation ladders?”

Roger exhaled peevishly. “They kept rusting so we took them out. It’s not like they’d be much use in a mine this deep anyway. That part of the safety code is more relevant for old sites, not new ones like Hambani.”

Nicola gritted her teeth. She was getting very close to fed up with Roger’s slipshod safety management and bad attitude. “You shouldn’t be operating without ladders. Even if someone couldn’t make it all the way to the surface, they could survive a rockslide or a blast in that shaft, then climb down to a refuge. I need those ladders installed today. And I want to see your personnel logs. If you have extra people in the elevator, you may have extra people on shift.”

Roger’s narrowed eyes let her know exactly how he felt about her demands, but he stalked off to a filing cabinet at the other end of the room.

“There are way too many code violations here, especially for such a new operation,” she fretted aloud, turning to Warren.

“And there was no security check on anyone boarding that elevator,” he agreed. “All they do at the gate is glance at the ID, but it would be easy for someone to stow away in one of the bunkhouses or pass someone their ID through the fence.”

“Roger boasted to me this morning that they do end-of-shift strip searches to make sure none of them are stealing gold. I know theft is a big problem in this industry, but you can’t treat your employees like criminals. They have to be kept safe, too.”

They shared a second or two of considered silence, watching Roger rifle through a drawer. Then Warren pivoted to survey the rest of the room, plucking at the front of his boiler suit.

“Is it always this hot?”

“Believe it or not, it’s air conditioned down here.” Nicola lifted her ponytail off the back of her neck and fanned the exposed skin. “Slurry ice is pumped through the tunnels to keep it cool, otherwise it would be about a hundred and ten degrees, Fahrenheit. And you might notice the higher pressure at this depth. Most people feel sluggish and heavy, like you’re walking underwater. It also means you bleed faster, so be careful.”

“How much gold do you get from the rock?” he asked, running his fingertips across the rough surface of the tunnel wall.

“Very little. A ton of rock usually only produces about an ounce of gold. That’s why we have to keep developing the technology to go deeper.”

“Or trade a different, renewable resource.”

She opened her mouth, primed for an argument, then reconsidered. She’d learned to love this industry the long way around—so would he.

“Three billion years ago this was a lake. The land we were walking across this morning was underneath the water.” She leaned down and picked up a pebble from the floor, and then reached for his hand and held it open, palm up. His hand seemed big and strong beside hers as she placed the stone in the center of his palm, electric pulses of yearning shooting along her nerves with every feather-light brush of their flesh.

“This stone is ancient.” She pushed his fingers closed around it. “It’s billions of years old, and it’s totally untouched by the sun’s rays. And now it’s yours.”

His smile was reluctant, but unmistakable. “I guess that’s pretty cool.”

Actually, no it’s not.
Thrusting herself against his chest and pressing her lips to his might be pretty cool. Letting him shove her against the wall, rip open her boiler suit and lick the space between her breasts would definitely be pretty cool. The little rock? Not cool at all.

Not that it was likely to happen. She shouldn’t even be thinking like that. Except now that she had, it was as if the imagined contours of Warren’s bare body had overtaken every other thought she’d ever had, would ever have, until her brain was empty of everything but his shoulders, his back, the indentation of his spine…

“Here it is.” Beads of sweat stood out on Roger’s forehead as he hurried back to where they stood, proffering a manila folder.

Warren wandered off as she opened it and leafed through the pages inside. She was used to a low standard of paperwork—many of the people filling it in often had little education or poor fluency—but for a mine with an English-speaking South African at its helm the quality of what she read was appalling. The rotas had incomplete employee information, missing ID numbers and shift times, and as she turned pages she discovered entire days were absent from the records. She shut the folder, gearing up to launch a scathing inquisition when Warren called to them from the back of the room.