Time is of the essence. Digger and the Colonel must work until noon the next day, before they leave. The flying time plus the time difference will put them at the foot of another mountain at the next sunrise.
The closest ten thousand foot runway is the Air National Guard base in Great Falls, Montana, 207 miles away. This becomes a 70-minute flight in Colonel Jeter’s Blackhawk Helicopter.
The ferry range of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress flying without ordnance is 10,145 miles. After removing the bombardier, electronic weapons officer, and flight surgeon, that leaves seats for Jeter, Digger, and Padric Dempsey.
The flying time to Aviano Air Base is ten hours, including the stop for Dempsey at the NORAD Interceptor Base in Rome, New York. All six seats are ejection seats, but at the takeoff in New York, the wise cracking copilot informs Padric and Digger that their seats are the two that eject downward. He is a little sore, feeling the crew has been demoted to bus drivers. He knows nothing about Yellowstone.
Their destination is one of Subterranean Technology’s jobsites, located only a final 80 miles west of Aviano, where another Blackhawk waits to take them into the Alps on their final leg. Eventually, even the thrill of riding in a nuclear bomber wears off. Sometime after leaving behind the coast of Labrador, they loosen up and start to talk.
Dempsey turns to Jeter. “Are you still working with that dish you brought to the meeting?”
Jeter nods, smiling. “Best looking scenery in Yellowstone.”
“What’s a dish?” Digger asks from the back where he sits alone.
The Colonel laughs and points backward with his thumb. “He’s too young to know.”
Dempsey turns around. “You get it, Junior, don’t you? The cheese-cake, the cuddle-bunny, the looker, the doll, your dream girl.”
“Oh, you mean Claire! Yeah, she’s still doing seismic studies with the Professor.”
The co-pilot now turns around from in front. “If you gentlemen have decided to fall in love back there, I suggest you switch your headsets to channel-two.”
One month has passed since Claire discovered the lava burning the meadow near Craig’s Pass. Colonel Jeter must finally see a TBM in action for himself. His preliminary designs are complete. Steel is not yet rising. Drilling has not begun. Only the site work and the utilities are in progress at Madison Valley. His forces, still arriving, are all bivouacked in tents. This trip will be his only chance.
The mountains of the Italian Alps squeeze the little town between them. The mountain ridges running north to south make twilight longer here. The days are briefer. The sun transits a shorter path between mountain ridges. Colonel Jeter, Digger, and Padric Dempsey crouch beneath the still swirling blades, as they begin their walk across the jobsite. Mezzolombardo, Italy has built right to the foot of Paganella Mountain. It has blocked the way for thousands of years.
They stand 100 feet from the tunnel entrance. The rock face goes straight up. It reminds Jeter of the rock of Gibraltar, except far from the ocean.
Digger gestures to the mountain. “Spormaggiore is located on the other side of this?”
Dempsey nods. “Five miles from here, but existing mountain roads turn that trip into fifty miles. The tunnel will change all that.”
Dempsey fills in the picture. “And complicating this, we’re boring upward on a four-percent grade. Mezzolombardo is 800 feet above sea level and Spormaggiore is at 1,800 feet. This tunnel will also link up with the town of Fai della Paganella.”
Digger asks, “Where in the world is that at?”
“Straight up. Nine-hundred people live up there a half-mile overhead—almost directly above us on this side. It is only another thousand feet to the top of the mountain. You can only reach Fai della Paganella on a road that runs around the mountain from out of Spormaggiore. These level places in the alps have been inhabited for six thousand years.”
Digger persists, “What is the attraction with that, apart from breathtaking scenery?”
Colonel Jeter provides a soldier’s insight, “Defensible positions, Digger. It is hard to get an army in here, and when you do, there is no place upon which to mass the whole of it. These towns are interlocking. While besieging the one to your front, you have the citizens of three more at your back.”
Dempsey adds another view. He is a businessman at heart. This is how SUB-T endures. “Any time you reduce transportation costs, local economies pick up. Not only is freight cheaper, but efficiencies emerge, as the lead-time between plan and execution diminishes. Workforces become more productive. Opportunities are better exploited.”
“How far into the mountain is your machine, Padric?” Digger asks.
“Our machine is still only one-mile inside.”
“When do you punch through the other side?” Colonel Jeter asks.
“Four more months, Colonel.”
Digger exclaims. “That’s a mile a month, Padric!”
Jeter sees an opportunity. He is always alert for ways to advance the project. “Then why won’t we be able to obtain that kind of speed?”
“Perhaps you will, Colonel. That remains to be seen. But we do know one thing without turning the first shovelful of earth—your project is more difficult. Tell us about the rock here, Digger.”
“The rock in this part of the Alps is called Dolomite. It has a MOHS hardness of only three and a half. By comparison, the rock we have at Yellowstone will be a hardness of eight in the Basalt of Madison Valley and then it drops to seven, which is still high, as we encounter the granitic rock near the Yellowstone caldera. When our TBM’s encounter Rhyolite—that’s in the granite family—that will tell us that we’re getting close.”
Padric interrupted, “The probe drill will do that for you, when you reach that point. Both of your TBM’s will be fitted with one.”
Digger finishes, “Anyway, our rock back home is twice as hard as this.”
Dempsey continues. “Colonel, at Yellowstone, we will cut less deeply with every rotation. The cutterwheels on the Yellowstone machines will break more often. Our hydraulics and controls systems will be attacked by the heat of the Earth and by the condensation from your cooling system. Men will work short shifts. Fresh crews will replace spent crews almost continuously. Meticulous planning will be required to obtain any kind of efficiency.”
The Colonel silently agreed, yet he did not like hearing it. The only advantage that the Yellowstone project had given him was the fact that the vertical shafts could be blasted from the bottom up. That was a big advantage, but it was the only one they had.
Their electric cart enters the mountain. It whines along a roadway cast level into the bottoms of the concrete segments that line the tunnel. Daylight, barely begun, recedes quickly. Dempsey drives.
A four-foot diameter air duct runs above them, fastened to the top of the tunnel, next to the conveyor. Conduits for electric power string along beside. Lower, a smaller conduit spotted with light fixtures parallels beneath it all. The trip in takes four-minutes. This will become a highway with two lanes of twelve-feet each, and with a breakdown lane in the middle.
The alpine tunnel is forty feet in diameter. Islands of light glow every fifty-feet. The upward pitch of the gradient is noticeable. For every twenty-six feet of travel, they gain one-foot of altitude. At a speed of fifteen miles per hour, this trip uphill makes their heads feel oddly heavy. By instinct, as they ride, they each lean forward into the incline.
The tunnel has a strangely finished appearance, unexpected for the inside of a mountain. The walls are lined with concrete segments, which the TBM carries with it and installs as it bores. Overhead, a conveyor system carries the stream of rock bits, called muck, toward the entrance, where dump trucks shuttle in and out.
Swiftly, the shiny white dot ahead enlarges into the massive stern of the tunnel-boring machine. It is bigger around than a modern attack submarine, and almost as long. The conveying system is interrupted to allow an overlap so that the machine can creep forward.
Jeter is impressed. “So, this baby is the same size as ours?”
“Right, same diameter, but yours will be a little shorter because you won’t have the tunnel lining segment in yours.”
As they park the cart, the TBM begins its move, ahead six feet. Somewhere up the tunnel, two convex hydraulic shoes push against the tunnel wall. The machine moves like a man pulling himself along by his elbows, while dragging his feet.
The closer they walk, the more astounding the machine becomes. They wait behind the TBM until it has finished its advance. Then they climb a short flight of hollow-sounding steel treads, and step aboard on a landing of steel gratings surrounded by railings. Digger thinks that this is like a back porch behind a building, except it cantilevers two-feet above the tunnel floor.
Dempsey opens the rear hatch and they enter the tunnel-boring machine—allowing the scene inside the mountain to revert once more into a shadow-filled still life.
Dempsey leads them more than 300 feet to the front, to the dangerous end of the TBM. A disagreeable and continuous noise becomes louder as they clomp along, ringing the catwalks and the steep ships-ladders. In the control room, Dempsey hands out earplugs. The noise level has reached 80 decibels. That kind of noise makes Digger edgy. He will say little.
Padric gives orders to the crew in the control room to throw the disconnect switch and to lock it out. He does not want a boring sequence to begin while they are inside the cutterhead, or infinitely worse, outside at the rock face. There may be violent deaths more gruesome, but he cannot think of any off-hand.
Padric relates what they are seeing to the Yellowstone design. “The cutterhead is through that access door. According to the basic design of TBM’s it must be exposed to the temperature of the tunnel. That means that on your machines, the wall between the cutterhead and the control room must have twelve-inches of thermal insulation, and your access door must be redesigned as an airlock with hatches on either end.
“The hatches of the airlock will be electrically interlocked. When moving from hot to cool, there will be a timer and a cool-down sequence. When moving from cool to hot, there won’t be. However, it will always happen that opening one door disables the other door. By that I mean, when one door is opened on one side, the door on the other side is automatically locked out. There must always be a separation between environments.
“Let’s talk about your fire entry suits. I know that this is work by others, but I have some ideas. They need to be redesigned for use here at the cutterhead.
“I’d like to provide you with seven cubic feet of human air per minute through two high-temp silicone hoses for an envisioned maximum of three workers doing cutterhead interventions.. One at the hip for cooling and one at the back into your regulator and mouthpiece. You can’t work inside the cutterhead with a tank on your back under your suit and you sure can’t get through the port in the cutterface with a tank on your back. Your air will have to come from the TBM. And it will be a lot hotter up here than back in the tunnel at the stern due to radiant heat—especially at the rock face.”
Jeter is impressed. “Good idea, Padric. I’ll put you in touch with my suit manufacturer to coordinate fittings.”
As they step toward this much simpler access door, Dempsey turns. “Gentlemen, please. Don’t touch the cutterhead. Don’t touch the mountain. And stay away from the drive shaft and the main bearing! If the machine starts to move forward while we’re inside, grab on to something. In front of the cutterhead is a good place to die. Inside the cutterhead chamber, is a good place to lose an arm.”
Jeter is confused. “But Padric, I just saw you disable the drive. What can go wrong while the disconnect switch is thrown?”
“Colonel, pardon my bluntness, but I have survived three hundred projects because I realize that there are only two states of mind: suspicion and complacency.”
The Colonel and Digger glance knowingly at each other. They are getting to like Padric more and more.
“And if I have to get in front of the machine in the six-feet of space at the rock face, I lock out the drive system and put the only key in my pocket.”
As the access door opens, the sound swamps them, increasing by one-half. The light drops from eighty foot-candles to twenty. The cutterhead is twenty-feet deep. Fourteen feet of that is a fixed cylinder fastened to the TBM. The final six-feet is a rotating cylinder—and the cutterface.
There is a gap, and through that gap, they can see the mountain. On the other side of the gap, the cutterface contains fifty back-loading cutter wheels. It rotates clockwise. When boring cycle re-starts, the hydraulics will push the cutterface six-feet to the rock and then as it rotates, it will continue to push the cutterhead face forward to maintain tight contact with the rock.
The cutterface is like the side of a building except the front of it rotates on a gleaming eighteen-inch diameter shaft. It scribes a circle once every eight seconds. Flakes of rock shower continuously from the tunnel face. Eight scooped openings around the side bring the cut rock inside. They rotate around to the apex where the rock flakes shower onto the conveyor for the trip overhead, back to the entrance. A tall auger bit raises most of the muck which has fallen to the bottom up to the conveyor. Hand shoveling is required for the rest of the fallen spoil and doing this is only one part of what they call interventions.
Just as there are access doors into the cutterhead, there are also access ports through the cutterface. On the Yellowstone machines, the diameters of these hatches will be twice as large to accommodate men working in fire entry suits.
In front at the rock face is the most dangerous place to work. If a man were to be left out there when the machine restarted, there would be no evidence of it, not even a red stain. He would re-enter the cutterhead as splinters and globs breaded with rock dust. He would come in through the side scoops and make his way back outside on the muck conveyor. He would simply disappear until the head-count was taken, and until forensics examined the muck pile for bone chips. Of course, in the Madison Valley Abyss, the muck pile falls to the bottom of the Abyss, eight miles below the entrance to the tunnel. This is no place to work if the people have a grudge against you.
Colonel Jeter raises his voice. “What turns the cutterhead and what’s the horsepower?”
Dempsey raises his voice in return. “The inside surface of the cutterface cylinder is lined with gear teeth. It is one huge annular gear. Mounted within the fixed cylinder of the cutterhead are 500 horsepower motors, each fitted with a pinion gear. There are ten motors. The cutterhead pinion gears mesh with the annular gear of the cutterface.”
“Will that be enough horsepower?” Jeter asks.
“Colonel, horsepower is misleading. People use it all the time without understanding it. Horsepower is a measure of rate not of power. It is better to use foot-pounds of torque on systems using a turning shaft, which, obviously, these do.
“This TBM uses six pole motors. There is a big difference in torque between 500 horsepower of six-pole and 500 horsepower of four-pole. The magnetic field is stronger.
“The bottom line is that at eight revolutions per minute, ten of these motors provides us with three million seven hundred thousand watts. And Colonel, watts is work. If you work the conversion, that is nominally almost forty million Newton-meters of torque. If one still insists on using horsepower, that is five thousand. The cutterheads on your machines are both this same forty-foot diameter. Are my Yellowstone machines are getting that much power from your steam turbine drives?”
“For once I am ahead of you, Padric. Yes, that much or more, depending upon what electric boat discovers our operational temperature limits to be. Like with all nuclear reactors, we increase power by removing control rods. To save space, the cooling will be done with Helium instead of the usual heavy water.”
“Just exactly how many watts am I getting?
“Up to twelve million. Precisely how much will actually depend on how many control rods we can pull out of the nuclear reactor core while not exceeding temperature limits.”
Padric is relieved. Still he bores in. “How long between re-fueling?”
“One year.”
“Good. That means never. We will be done before a year is out. Radiation levels?”
“The same as we now have dock-side at an attack submarine in port.”
Dempsey appears to be staring at something miles away as he lapses into a private reverie. He returns to the design vision that has been assembling inside his mind for the last month. He sees the future machine in cross-section. It is this particular talent from this single mind that drives Sub-T past all competitors. You must see the future to make it happen, or else the future is something that happens to you.
“What are our chances, Padric?”
Dempsey snaps out of it, looking insulted. “You don’t have to worry about me. Within enough money, I can do anything. Seen enough at this end?” They both nod. “Good, this noise is driving me nuts. Let’s get out of here.”
Dempsey leads them out.
As they re-enter the relative quiet of the control room, the cutterface restarts. There follows a sharp crack as, somewhere on the face, one of the cutter wheels breaks in half. The massive cutterhead crumples it and brushes it aside.
The Colonel looks like he has just taken a big bite of a lemon. He frowns and points.
Padric responds, “A cutter wheel slipped out of its Kerf.”
The control room crew now listens carefully to the sound of the remaining forty-nine cutter wheels. They do not wish to stop and to lose efficiency. The broken cutter parts may either break other cutterwheels or may make them inefficient. Or the broken parts may be small and may be drawn inside with the muck. A trained ear is better at this than a television camera.
At the next maintenance shift, a man will go through the hatch, outside, between the cutterface and the rock face to bring the fallen parts back in, as other men, inside the cutterhead, replace the failed cutter wheel.
The worst scenario, and the one the crew and Padric now alertly listen for, is called a wipeout. A broken cutter wheel breaks the next and the effect multiplies across the cutterface. The crew must stop boring at once and send men forward to intervene.
Dempsey replies, “You’d better get used to that happening, Colonel.”
Digger loosens up a little bit. “Padric what are all of the reasons that men have to go into the cutterhead or out in front of it?”
“Okay, Digger. We call those interventions. There are many reasons to intervene inside the cutterhead or to intervene at the rock face. First, here is the inside list: replacing cutter wheels, re-welding the cutterhead, shoveling muck, unclogging the de-dusting system, and replacing the lubrication packs of the main bearing. The outside list includes: picking up broken cutter wheels, re-welding the cutterface, breaking up dislodged rock with a sledgehammer, and injecting cement grout into an uneven rock face so that the cutterface does not tear itself up rotating over it.
“The cutter wheels must stay in their groove with every rotation of the cutterface. We put more than a million pounds of force against the rock face, but a cutter wheel can still skip out of the track, which we call the Kerf. This is only part of what we call cutterhead stabilization.”
“Man, this cutter is a full time job.”
“Digger, TBM’s are still five times faster than drill and blast methods. Normally, on a round the clock schedule, a TBM bores only half the day. The other half is spent fixing things that break, or in preventative maintenance. Colonel Jeter has asked for sixty percent utilization.”
Now the Colonel is curious. “Padric, what about the hydraulic fluids? How are you overcoming our operating temperatures?
“You guys really put me through my paces. Okay. On your job, the hydraulic fluid packs contain a material which does not even become liquid until five hundred degrees. Sub-T is testing it as we speak.”
After factory acceptance testing in Albany, Dempsey will personally crane the TBM modules onto barges for the trip down the Hudson into New York Harbor. Dempsey accounts himself the company’s best rigger and crane operator. No one can be as careful as actual risk-taker. Dempsey risks everything that he and his family have ever worked for, and that provides a focus like no other.
At a dock along Manhattan’s east side, other forces working under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers will crane the modules aboard a ship for the trip around to New Orleans, where, once again, they would be loaded onto barges for the trip up the Mississippi to a new dock at Davenport, Iowa, near the Rock Island Arsenal, where Colonel Jeter’s permanent office is located. This is an office that he has seen little of in recent years, but it sits there waiting for him.
From that point, the trip is overland in a convoy of flatbed trailers, flanked by Army Humvees mounting machine guns and myriads of whip-like antennae. The trip west with wide loads will close the westbound lanes of Interstate 80 for several days. Several other connecting highways will be closed in both directions when a few towns lose their overpasses. They will be quickly rebuilt.
As the rumors about Yellowstone spread, the complaints along the way will stoically mute into the stony silence of those who must endure.
They gather at the landing where they entered. They listen to the cutterhead turning from the length of a football field away. They watch the rock flakes motoring past them on the muck conveyor, heading toward the entrance and the dump trucks. They feel a jolt. They wobble on their feet. They grab for the railing. The machine is moving again.
Digger is clearly enjoying himself. “What keeps the dust down in there, Padric?”
“We have air intakes behind the cutterhead. The air is sent through two stages of filtration—a high efficiency cyclone and then a dust collector that cleans itself with pulses of compressed air. The captured particulate joins the muck conveyor. The filtered air is then returned to the atmosphere at the cutterhead face. In this way, we fluidize the fines and intercept them near the source.”
Digger was not competing with the Colonel. He was simply too excited to stop. “How often does this machine move, Padric?”
“On average, once every twenty-five minutes.”
“That’s over twelve feet per hour! That’s hauling ass, Padric!” Digger instantly considers that the Colonel will return to a discussion of cutting speed. He turns to mollify Jeter, “The easy way to understand the difference between the Italian project and ours is that this Dolomite comes from the ancient sediments of bacteria, whereas our rock at Yellowstone comes directly out of the mantle of the planet.”
The Colonel worries. “Padric, on that first day, I asked you for 60% utilization. Here, in this soft rock, you only have fifty percent utilization. Half the time this machine is just sitting, being worked on, being maintained. Have I been too optimistic?”
“Remember Colonel, I’ve told you that I can do anything with money. This job at Mezzolombardo, Italy was publicly bid. I had competition from all over the world. In such an environment, if you plug in enough money to cover the cost of the best product, you’ll wind up sitting on the sidelines watching someone else do the job.
“Colonel, your project is different. You are throwing money at the problem. That’s the right approach for a quality product. Normally the project authorities are consumed with worry that I might make a decent profit. That attitude degrades quality to varying extents on every job. Those costs return just the same to show up in ways they do not understand. In other words, one way or another, costs find you. The trick is to plug the money into the right spot at the front end. This promotes efficiency. The Yellowstone project does not suffer from such defects because it proceeds from the right attitude.
“For instance, knowing that your shifts are short and that working in fire entry suits is awkward, I’m giving you better access and more working room at every point you need.
“Moreover, supplying your own nuclear power train also takes away my motor burnout problem. Just be sure you give me that rear spindle so I can run my muck conveyor off your turbine. Then, the only induction motors I will have will be pump motors for the fluid power, like the hydraulics that push the cutterface forward to maintain tight contact with the tunnel face, and the hydraulics that push the entire TBM forward. Those motors are located where you can replace them easily and they are small enough so that you don’t need a crane to move them. We will hard-plumb the fluids. No flexible hoses on your job except at the cutterhead.
“If your steam turbines can do the job, Colonel, I’ll give you more than a half-mile a month. I might even give you a mile. When am I going down into your tunnels?”
“You’re not, Padric.”
“Colonel, I’ve been on jobs like this all over the world for thirty-five years.”
“That’s precisely the reason, Padric. We cannot afford to lose you. Once my plans and specs are finished, they can afford to lose me, but not you.”
On the way back out, Digger asks, “Padric, in English what does Fai della Paganella translate to?”
“It means ‘Do the Paganella.”
“Well, I guess you’re doing it.”
“Like no one’s ever done it before, son.”
“Padric, I have an idea. I should not speak for Colonel Jeter, but I wonder if we should not be sending you some of our team for you to pre-qualify on this project in order to get them up to speed. I am not sure we should attempt anything this complex four miles underground in 750-degree heat without as more experience. What do you think, Colonel?
“I wish I’d thought of that, Digger. Many of the job applicants for the tunnel teams have some prior experience, but not all of them. Digger is right, Padric. The Madison Valley Abyss is no place for on the job training. Can we do this, Padric?”
“Colonel, if you’ll keep those people on your payroll and pay their travel and living expenses, we’ll put them to work right alongside our own forces.”
“I’d like to be the first to volunteer, Colonel.”
“So that’s where you’re going with this! A free summer in Italy! Boy, I walked right into that one. Dr. O’Dell, you are going to stick with me like glue.”
“I would sure like to get up there on the mountain and visit that town sometime. Must be quite a view from up there.”
They left the tunnel feeling lighthearted and much relieved. This experience has validated what determined men already know—that all such things are possible if you are able to believe that, always, it is only your thinking that makes it so.
Dempsey’s tunnel in the Alps has two things that Colonel Jeter’s tunnels in Wyoming will lack: a beginning and an end. In the Alps, Mezzolombardo stands at one end. Spormaggiore stands at the other. Each has been well known since the time of the Caesars.
The Colonel’s starting point begins only in his imagination, and his ending point exists only among his unsettled dreams.