Red Helmet (8 page)

There was a new steel mill in India that desperately needed an extremely pure metallurgical coal. Atlas headquarters had first signed a long-term contract to supply this coal, and then installed new equipment in the Highcoal processing plant to provide it. But, to date, the Highcoal mine had failed to meet the demand as specified in the contract. Cable could not figure out why. All the sections were nearly at peak production, and the seam they worked contained what was reputedly the finest metallurgical coal in the world. But when all the raw tonnage was separated into its different grades, he kept coming up short. He feared that the quality of the coal in the mine was decreasing, that they had already dug out most of the good stuff a long time ago. If so, the Indian steel mill would go elsewhere with their orders and Highcoal might be in danger of laying off miners, or even shutting down.

Cable's mind revolved around this concern for a while, but he was distracted by thoughts of Song, which didn't cheer him up. It wasn't just the gossip about her that worried him. After seeing so little of Highcoal, she wasn't happy, which was more than a little distressing. Highcoal was a beautiful town and the people were purely wonderful, not counting their propensity toward gossip. They gossiped in New York City too, right? He pondered what might make her happy and came up with not much, except he guessed he should spend more time with her while she was visiting. But when would that be, with all this bad coal being run?

Cable kept worrying about Song as the tracks clicked below the jeep. When no answer came, he went back to worrying over his mine. Both problems seemed to have unknowns he couldn't quite put his finger on. With his wife, she seemed to have a strange lens through which she observed Highcoal. With the mine, it simply made no sense that he couldn't meet the orders sent down from headquarters. The overall tonnage was good, but the special high-grade tonnage stayed low. Why? And was it a permanent situation? Was there really that much rock mixed in with the coal? Visually it seemed fine, but when it emerged from the preparation plant, it just didn't add up. He had gone over the numbers with the plant manager, Stan Stanvic. He'd grown up with Stan, was on the football team with him, and he trusted him. Stan also loved Highcoal and would never do anything to hurt it. No, it had to be something else, probably just some bad coal they were passing through. It happened sometimes. But if they didn't get through it soon, Atlas headquarters was going to go into some kind of spasm that wouldn't be good for anybody.

He passed phosphorescent safety placards that presented safety messages. Danger High Voltage. Caution Low Roof. Phone One Hundred Yards. He had installed a hard-wired pager system throughout the mine, each station with a telephone and monitor inside a hardened, blast-proof box. He'd also had carbon monoxide sensors installed up and down the main escapeway and air return. A coal mine was an inherently dangerous place. Cable's men worked in the dark beneath hundreds of feet of densely packed earth and rock, much of it unstable, all of it hideously heavy. Methane leaked out of the prehistoric seams, and if the gas was allowed to pool, it only took a single spark to set it off in a massive explosion. Carbon monoxide was the silent killer, the result of a fire, sometimes so low and smoldering no one noticed. The roof, the tight confines of the face, the heavy equipment on the move, all could combine to crush or maim a miner with only a second's inattention. Every day a miner faced injury or death in too many ways to count.

A little past the midpoint of the main line, Cable caught sight of two lights toward Three West, an old section that had produced consistently for over forty years. In fact, his father had been killed at its face. The lights were flashing around, then one of them seemed to drop. Cable turned into the entry, but stopped when one of the lights flashed in his eyes. He climbed out of the jeep and walked bent beneath the low roof. The light stayed in his eyes. “Look away. You're blinding me!” he yelled at the miscreant.

The light moved off him and he saw, with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, that it belonged to Bum Wilkes, who only yesterday had gleefully given him and Song the finger. He was crouched next to a power plant that fed electricity to the machines working the face. “What are you doing, Bum?” Cable asked.

Bum didn't answer, but then another helmet light came on. Cable saw it belonged to a miner sitting in the gob and recognized him—Pinky Wilson, a young man who'd recently completed his red cap training. Pinky had a bloody nose.

“What's going on here?” Cable demanded.

“Nothing, Cable,” Bum said. “Ain't that right, Pinky-winky?”

Pinky ran his arm across his nose, leaving a scarlet trail on his shirt sleeve. “That's right, Mr. Jordan,” he said in a shaky voice. “Nothing going on here, no, sir.”

Cable knew the answer already, but he had to ask it. “Did Bum hit you?”

“No, sir. I tripped.”

Cable turned back to Bum. “I asked you what you're doing.”

Bum held up a screwdriver. “Foreman said for us to check the power plant. Circuit breaker keeps tripping. I'm fixing it.”

Cable inspected the substation. “You've disconnected the ground.”

Bum grinned his gap-toothed grin. “Sure did. That circuit breaker ain't gonna trip no more.”

“Are you crazy, Bum? You could electrocute somebody with a stunt like that!”

Bum's grin vanished. “It's been done before, ain't nobody got hurt. You pushing everybody around here to load coal, what do you expect us to do?”

“I told him it was wrong, Mr. Jordan,” Pinky said. He had his hand over his nose. “That's why he hit me.”

“You shut your mouth or you gonna swallow some teeth,” Bum growled.

Cable turned to Bum. “Bum, I'm fining you one hundred dollars for this stunt. Pinky, you're fined fifty for not going after the foreman. As for your foreman, you tell him to come see me.
Move!
”

Pinky instantly started walking toward the section, but Bum stayed put and put his light in Cable's eyes. “Aw, Cable. I'm your old teammate, ain't I?” he said. “We got to stick together, right?”

“We were teammates awhile ago, Bum. Now I have a job to do. And get your light out of my eyes.”

Bum looked away. “It ain't right, you fining me,” he rumbled. “It ain't right at all.”

“Just get back to work, Bum. I'll think about the fine, but this brawling has got to stop. I've been fielding complaints on you ever since I took over. You're either fighting or sleeping on the job. I've taken up for you a lot more than I should.”

“Yeah, right,” Bum said. “Big man now, ain'tcha? How'd you get up so high, anyway?”

“I got an education, Bum. You could have too.”

“And how was that going to happen, with my daddy all busted up and my ma so sick all the time? I had to go to work.”

Cable didn't bother to remind Bum that his own father had been killed in the mine, and his mom also had to struggle until she married her plumber in Florida. Bum knew all that. He was just baiting him.

“Go back to work, Bum,” he said. “And stay out of trouble. That's all I'm asking.”

Bum's light flashed insolently into his eyes again, then the big miner turned and stomped off, passing the foreman, Harry “Poker” Williams, who was actually running bent beneath the low roof.

“Sorry, Cable,” he panted as he arrived. “I was up to my neck in alligators. The coal's getting mighty low and the roof 's working something fierce.”

Cable was not impressed with the excuse. “Poker, you sent Bum with an inexperienced man to look at a power plant. What were you thinking? You should have called an electrician.”

Poker's mouth opened to answer, then closed as he took another moment to think. “You're right, Cable,” he concluded. “It was stupid.”

“I know you're undermanned and I'm pushing you to mine coal, but you've got to use some common sense. Now, go call that electrician.”

“You going to fine me?”

“I'm not going to fine anybody if you do your job for a change.”

Poker hastily withdrew, heading toward one of the hardened telephones to make the call for an outside electrician. Disgusted, Cable aimed his jeep back down the track to the bottom and the manlift, which would carry him back to where the sky wasn't made of stone.

On the surface, Mole Phillips, his clerk and dispatcher, was waiting for him. Mole looked worried, and for good reason. “Einstein's in your office, Cable,” he announced even before Cable stepped off the lift.

“Einstein” was Ian Stein, the meticulous and ruthless MSHA inspector who apparently thought the Highcoal mine was his personal project. When you talked to Einstein, about the only words he wanted to hear out of your mouth were, “Yes, sir!” That was mostly what he got.

“What's he doing?” Cable demanded.

“Studying your mine map.”

“Trouble on top of trouble,” Cable groaned, and headed for his office.

Seven

W
hen Song awoke, she lay in bed for a while to think about the situation. She'd come all this way, taken a week out of her busy schedule to be with her husband, and now he was somewhere else. She contemplated his empty pillow, then reached over and tossed it off the bed.

“Thanks, Cable,” she muttered.

She was angry and hurt, and she was also not used to being ignored. “Reality has sharp teeth,” her father always told her. “If you turn away from it, it'll bite you in the butt.” Crudely put, but it reminded Song that her father was, after all, famous for his ruthlessness in business, and devoted to his only child. She knew he liked Cable, but she also knew he'd bury the man if she wanted him to. But Song didn't want to bury Cable. She loved him, even if she wasn't absolutely sure, based on his performance yesterday, if he loved her anymore.

Song needed to talk to her father. She tried her cell, receiving the same message she'd gotten the day before: “No service.” Shaking her head, she went into the bathroom, only to remember she had no makeup, except what she had carried in her purse, which wasn't much. She did a few things, some light powder, some lipstick, then put on jeans, a chambray shirt, and running shoes. She headed downstairs to try the kitchen telephone. When she dialed her father's number, the recording told her the circuits were still down. The squirrels were apparently still in charge at the local telephone company.

After looking in various cabinets for something she could eat, she discovered some cereal in the pantry. With the milk in the refrigerator—unhappily not low-fat—breakfast was solved. She also made a pot of strong coffee. Carrying a cup outside, she walked to the edge of the yard, which ended abruptly at a cliff that had a vertical drop of about a hundred feet. With all the trees lower than the yard, the result was an unimpeded view of the town and the mine. From that elevation, she could see every house. They were almost all uniformly gray in color, which made the white church stand out all the more. Its steeple seemed to reach for the sunlit sky. Its bell began to toll, and Song wondered what it was announcing on a Tuesday morning.

She recalled Rhonda's advice, that the church was the place to “meet and greet,” but Song knew she'd never go there. As far as she was concerned, religion and superstition were one and the same. There had to be other ways to meet people, not that she was particularly interested. Cable was the only person in Highcoal she cared anything about. Well, maybe Young Henry. He seemed like a nice kid.

She turned her attention to the ugly black scar of the mine. She studied its layout and tried to figure out what its various structures were for. The wheels atop the black tower were turning. She recalled there were cables attached to it, so perhaps it was lifting or lowering something. Maybe, she divined, the tower was just an elevator. But what did it lift and lower? Miners? Coal? Equipment? Her intellect was stirred.

She saw a big truck crawling along until it reached three silolike structures on stilts. When it stopped at one of the silos, the acoustics of the valley were such that she clearly heard what sounded like a rumble of rocks down a metal chute. She suspected the truck was probably receiving a load of coal from the silo. But why were there three of them? Did they hold different kinds of coal?
Were
there different kinds of coal? The mine complex was mysterious, but she was confident it would all make perfect sense if she studied it long enough. As the property and acquisitions manager for her father, she was required to understand what companies did, sometimes even better than their own employees. Now she wondered what it would take to learn about coal mining, even to know as much as Cable knew. This made her smile, though it was somewhat grim. That would surprise him, wouldn't it?

But she didn't want to learn about coal mining. What she wanted to do, what she
had
to do, was to get Cable out of Highcoal. It was not possible for her to live in the grimy little town. She had already seen enough to convince her of that.

Song sat in one of the rockers on the porch and wondered what she was going to do with herself for the rest of the day. She looked at Cable's roadster parked outside the garage. Presuming she could drive it, where would she go? To visit Cable at the mine? He hadn't invited her there. She could cruise through town, but she'd already done that coming in, and what good would that do? Somebody might spit chewing tobacco at her and she couldn't take any more of that! Horseback riding appealed to her. She could saddle Trixie and take a turn around the pasture. It would pass a little time, at least. She was thinking about that when a battered brown pickup truck rattled up the driveway. Every truck Song had seen so far in Highcoal had been beat-up. She wondered if they came that way.

A woman in blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and a wide-brimmed canvas hat, not to mention a confident air, stepped out of the truck.