The Deep Dark (37 page)

In addition to handling the main office phones, Red Cross worker Oradell Triplett, thirty-five, was given another responsibility at night. One of the Sunshine managers informed her that a handful of prostitutes had come over from Spokane to work the crowd. Triplett could scarcely believe her ears.

“Watch out for these women,” he said. “Let us know when you see one.”

“What will they look like?” she asked, finding her nerve.

“You can tell more by their actions than anything,” he said. He also said some of the women were wearing Red Cross armbands.

Later on, Triplett notified security. A redhead out in the mine yard seemed a little too friendly consoling some men. With attack speed, a couple of guys from Company A escorted the woman across the creek bridge.

A person can't be that money-hungry,
Triplett thought.

D
AWN,
M
AY
6

3100 Level

W
HEN
THE
GRAVEYARD-SHIFT
RESCUE
CREW
ARRIVED
AT
THE
3100
hoist room, the air was strange, a kind of translucent, smoky fog that hung like moving drapes. The scene reminded Lucky Friday's Art Brown of the old movie
Phantom of the Opera.
All around was a surreal and frozen scene of the horrific moment when everything stopped at once. Lifeless faces looked up into the beams of light from the cap lamps of each member of Brown's rescue team.

“He doesn't look real,” said a miner, looking closer at one of the dead.

“He looks like he's made of plastic,” Brown agreed, wishing it were so.

Some of the crewmen jerked their lights away whenever they met the gaze of a dead man. Flesh had puffed up and lips had split. Ears seemed to have melted. Brown radioed topside what they'd found. Somehow, despite what he was feeling, his words were matter-of-fact. He was all business.

A few yards from the station, it appeared that one man had used the air compressor to live a bit longer. How much time the man had bought, or what terrifying things he'd witnessed, no one could guess. Art Brown knew even a minute was too long. He bent down and picked up a muck-dusted dinner bucket. It had been packed four days before by some woman who now was wondering if her man would ever come home. Inside, he found a wallet. It held a few dollars and pictures of the miner's family. Those faces were the other side of the tragedy. Although Brown could have taken the wallet topside and told the woman her husband was gone, Marvin Chase insisted all names be kept confidential. He wanted the women to know the rescue effort was the primary focus, and no one was wasting precious time allocating correct names to dead men. Their air supply halfway depleted, the crew returned to the surface. No one was disappointed to leave. They brought with them the news of more dead, more unbelievably disfigured men. Men who no longer looked as they had in life. It was a problem no one could have imagined.

Putting names to bodies fell on those who had the most contact with the crew. Marvin Chase and Al Walkup, bosses at the top, didn't know everyone working underground. Launhardt knew many, but he was caught up assisting the USBM with the continuing ventilation problems. The initial identification team included accountant George Gieser, union man George Gipson, hiring agent Bill Steele, and the dry man, Dick Terrill. A three-man FBI identification team was on its way from Washington, D.C.

The group assembled in the back of a Kellogg funeral home and was briefed by the Shoshone County coroner, another town doctor, and a pair of volunteer morticians. It was grisly and startling. Steele expected stiff bodies, but rigor mortis had come and gone.

“They'll smell bad,” a mortician said. Though the bodies had been zipped inside bags, there was some seepage of the acrid odor of death. No one used a mask or air freshener to allay the putrid odor.

The coroner offered another word of warning, telling the others that the bodies should be considered
remains,
not the men themselves.

“Think of it as just a body and we need to put a name to it.”

Steele could barely bring himself to pull the zipper on the first corpse. One of the morticians stepped in and peeled back the black pupa-like casing that had molded like a vacuum seal to the corpse. An appalling stench burst forth and flowed across the room. The smell was as acrid as a mix of battery acid and roadkill, multiplied a million times. The room constricted and everyone breathed in shallowly. Steele peered at the body. It was blackened and featureless. The shirt looked as if it had been soaked in the darkest wine. He couldn't make out a face, and said so.

“He's on his stomach,” the coroner said.

A couple of men reached under the slippery corpse and rolled it over.

Even right side up, this doesn't look human.
The face had flattened to fit the level plane of the floor on which it had settled. A closer look revealed elements of a human face, but it sure didn't look as though it could ever have been a real man.

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered.

The stink was so overpowering that with the first unzipped cadaver, it became obvious that the gruesome task couldn't continue at that funeral home. The stench would kill the mortician's business. After that, bodies were dispatched to the Shoshone Inn Nursing Home in Kellogg. The not-yet-opened nursing home would serve as a temporary morgue, but a more discreet location would be needed.

An examiner wrote: “We knew most of these men for many years, yet some unexplained mechanism seemed to dull over our emotions and we were able to function almost normally.”

M
ORNING,
M
AY
6
Shifter's Shack

A
TWO-WAY RADIO CRACKLED UNDERGROUND, AND THE REPORTER
with the Red Cross armband, Jerry McGinn, overheard descriptions of tragic tableaux discovered by the helmet crew: a fallen father with his arm wrapped around his son's shoulder; a man holding a sandwich, frozen in the moment. From each pocket of the dead, a story emerged of men trying to get out, or dying before they knew what hit them. McGinn also heard the names of the dead. One was the husband of a woman he'd been talking with while delivering blankets and coffee. After that, whenever she asked him if he knew something, he said they were still sifting through the mine. He didn't give her any hope. He avoided a direct answer.

As McGinn hunkered in the shifter's shack Saturday morning, word circulated in the yard that there was a reporter hiding out as a rescue worker or Red Cross volunteer. The man was using a disguise to infiltrate the inner circle of the rescue effort and to cozy up to families waiting at the portal.

They're talking about me,
McGinn thought, his pockets full of toilet tissue scrawled with notes. He wished himself invisible. No one in the shack said a word to him.

Correspondents from other media outlets had wised up. They started asking about the UPI reporter who kept pushing a higher body count. The
Wallace Miner
published an article about the unidentified undercover reporter, and someone from the AP pinned the tearsheet on a wall where the press congregated. On the top of the paper, someone had scrawled, “We want to meet this fella.”

Topside, as the temperature dropped, the waiting families were weary, damp, and cold. Some of the Army reservists pitched a huge tent to shield people from a pinprick rain that stopped and started in a rolling rhythm. That day, the waiting families found some comfort in their government representatives. Idaho senator Frank Church once more urged Nixon to ease the district's burden with financial assistance. With Sunshine shut down, unemployment rolls were expected to double in Shoshone County. The Steelworkers demanded a congressional probe. None of its members trusted the USBM or the Department of the Interior to do the job without trying to cover their own asses.

In addition to the USBM's high-sensitivity geophone listening system—a microphone and walkie-talkies—a crew prepared to lower a video camera into the borehole. The camera was state of the art, similar to what had been used to record the famous images of the Apollo spacecraft on the moon in July 1969. The camera was an eye that could see in the dark. The reconnaissance of the borehole to 4800 was important to determine whether or not it could accommodate one of the AEC capsules. It was slow going down the 1,100-foot drop.

It was a common misconception that a shaft or a borehole was a perfectly constructed rock tube. It was straight to the extent that the passageway was vertical, but there were bumps and bulges, and nicks of a size sufficient to hold a truck camper. The crew needed to “bar down” part of the passage. Hammers and heavy steel rods splintered off any fractured and loose rock, letting it fall to the bottom, rather than onto the cage or a man's head. By the end of the day, the capsule had only reached 4400. Provided the anomalies associated with the rough stone channel were not insurmountable—the clearance for the capsule was about five inches on each side—a two-man team would ride the capsule to 4800 and work its way back to 10-Shaft, looking for survivors. The video feed was viewed on a monitor on 3700.

The two capsules from Nevada, courtesy of an AEC subcontractor, Reynolds Electric and Engineering Company, were scheduled to be in Spokane by 8:00 a.m. the next day.

Crews tackled the smoke from the top of the Jewell, removing two sections of the three-piece ventilation stack so a 240-horsepower Buffalo Forge fan could be mounted there to draw out carbon monoxide and smoke from the mine's interior.

Air leaks and excessive heat at 3100 station once again delayed complete recovery and use of the hoist room. Operating any equipment in the heat was dubious; a fan was ordered down to 3100. It would take another twelve hours to get it to the point where the hoist could be used. Curiously, the men in the command center had let go of some of the frustration and tension that had colored every moment. It wasn't that they were giving up, but more that they had become accustomed to a rescue effort that met obstacles at every turn. The hard way, it seemed, became the
only
way. The bureau tried to procure more breathing units, but neither manufacturer of the government-sanctioned breathing units—McCaa nor Draeger—had any surplus. All other mines that had any spares had already sent them. The bureau turned to a London manufacturer of mine-safety equipment. Instead of the high-pressure oxygen cylinder of the Draeger and McCaa, the Aerlox employed an evaporator filled with liquid oxygen. They were also lighter and cooler. An Aerlox face mask supplied oxygen at 65 degrees Fahrenheit—the others could get as hot as 120 degrees. For the beleaguered helmet crew toiling in the depths of hell, it was as though they'd been breathing through a hair dryer. Within a couple of hours of the request, thirty-five British Aerlox units were packed on an Air Force jet headed for Spokane.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
6
Osburn

A
CROSS THE DISTRICT IN
O
SBURN, THE
S
EVENTH-
D
AY
A
DVENTIST
church,
with its high-
peaked A-frame façade, had never seen a funeral like Don Beehner's. So many people came that the blue upholstered pews could only accommodate half the mourners. A loudspeaker piped the service to the overflow crowd outside. A fragrant spray of roses and feathery ferns was mounted on a tripod facing the mourners. A pink satin ribbon was pinned across the arrangement with the words
To Daddy
written in glittery cursive script. Wava and her children sat in the front row, her youngest daughter, Nora, in a pretty red dress her mother had borrowed. The pastor told the mourners how Beehner had taken his kids hunting with only a single bullet because he never wanted to kill anything. He had been a gentle guy, one who had worked hard to provide for his wife and children. Don Beehner, a man who grew up with a boozing father and without two nickels to rub together, had done all right with the thirty-eight years God had given him. The service lasted twenty minutes. Don had always said not to make a fuss, and a good funeral was a short one.

After Don Beehner was laid to rest at Nine Mile Cemetery, the little green house on Burke Road was jammed with more people than on any single day in the dozen years the family had lived there. Matthew Beehner counted nineteen cars parked outside. He stood in the kitchen watching various family members embrace each other, balance teetering plates of food on their knees, or just mill around. He looked up at their faces, all red and tear-stained. It seemed like a sad little party.

T
IME UNKNOWN,
M
AY
6
4800 Level

T
HE SURVIVORS IN THE
S
AFETY
Z
ONE HAD WAITED FOR HELP FOR
more than four days, more than one hundred hours, and with each hour the idea that they might not ever get out became more vivid, more frequent in their discussions. It was startling how quickly and completely the implausible had become possible. They knew that eventually the rescue team would find them. They were, after all, on a level that was prime silver country.

“They aren't going to seal off the mine and forget about us,” Wilkinson said.

“Yeah, but what's going to happen to us?”

Flory slumped on his bedboard, looking small and defeated.

“Are they gonna get to us before we starve to death?”

Wilkinson saw Flory sinking into depression.

“We're gonna get out of this,” he said.

To put the focus on anything other than their situation, Flory taught Wilkinson how to square-braid yellow blasting wire, and for hours in the shadows they said nothing as they spun out chains of yellow. At one point Flory made a checkerboard of lagging, and the two men played checkers until they could no longer stand it. And they talked about fishing trips they'd taken and ones they would take if and when they got out. Wilkinson said that the guys on the surface were just biding their time playing pinochle and waiting for the smoke to clear out of the mine.