PROLOGUE – Remote Alaskan Wilderness on the Alagnak Wild River
“Are the charges ready?” Brian Donovan, the mine site manager, was sitting at his desk inside the operations trailer. He was a no-nonsense man, close-cropped hair peppered throughout with gray. He’d been a desk jockey some ten years now, but, even at fifty-four, his physique did much to belie that; his arms were corded with muscles and his stomach was as flat and tight as his college football playing days.
“They are.” Pepper Johnson stood in front of Brian’s desk; he had his Baltimore Orioles hat in his hands, twisting it around in tight, sweaty fists.
Brian looked up from the paperwork he was busy signing. “Something else?”
“Boss...”
“You know I hate it when you call me that. I’m not some plantation owner.”
Pepper couldn’t help it. A large swath of his youth had been spent in the Georgia penal system, and, subsequently, he had done his share of road maintenance in chain gangs (without the chains, though the name had endured). It was expected that the guards be called "boss," and he reverted to that whenever he was nervous, which he was, extremely so. “We’ve been shut down. I shouldn’t be laying charges.”
Donovan had saved Pepper from a life of petty crime and compounding jail time. He'd taught the man a trade; now he earned more money working a job he loved than he could ever have stolen. He had loyalty for Donovan that ran deep, and, because of that fealty, he’d done quite a few things over the years that he hadn’t completely agreed with. Not for the first time, Pepper stood there wondering if that had been exactly the reason Donovan had saved him all those years ago, he’d been grooming a yes man. Someone that would do as he was asked, perhaps not without question, but certainly not with many of them.
“We’re close to hitting that vein, I can feel it in my bones.”
Pepper didn’t doubt it. The man never failed to find a lode. “I’m not doubting you, Boss.” Brian’s eyes crinkled in irritation. “It’s the EPA, b...err, Mr. Donovan. They said our study of the environmental impact was incomplete, and they need to shut us down to have more tests done.”
Brian stood up. “I’m well aware of what they said. What’s your point?”
Pepper swallowed hard. “That maybe we shouldn’t be mining.”
“Do you know how much the parent company has spent to set this operation up and get us running? Would you like to hear the numbers? I’ll tell you. 3.6 million. Want to know how much viable ore we’ve pulled out of this hellhole to pay that back? Zero, nothing, not a single fucking nugget. Not once, Pepper, not once in my career have I not had a mine turn a profit. Some bigger than others, maybe, but I have always made sure that my men, myself, and the company were very well compensated.”
“I know this.”
“Well? If you know that, what makes you think I’m going to let it all go now? United Mining is in trouble, Pepper. And that stays in this office. The company you and I have both worked at for over twenty years is on the verge of going under. That nimrod CEO has been canned, but because of years of shitty investments, he’s led them right down the toilet. This mine here, right here, this is it. We either right the ship, or she sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and us with her. It could be a year or more before they get their damned study completed and get the stamp of approval from the feds. UM doesn’t have that kind of time. I’m not supposed to say anything, but the support staff back home, they’re not drawing checks. Those people and their families, they’re counting on us, on me and you, Pep. So excuse me if I don’t give a flying fuck about some damned fish and squirrels. Now are you going to set the charges, or do I need to find someone else to do it?”
“We could be looking at jail time.”
“We find what I know is there, and none of us will be going to jail. Hell, they’ll be giving us medals. I expect to have my world rocked in the next fifteen minutes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we've both got work to do.” Donovan sat down and went back to his paperwork.
Pepper, as he walked out of the trailer, looked over to his truck. For the briefest of moments, he contemplated getting in the cab and driving off. Regrets over that missed opportunity would be his last thoughts, just a few days later, as he lay dying.
“Fire in the hole!” Pepper shouted over the radio and PA system. A blaring horn commenced the countdown. Ten seconds later, the ground under his feet shook as the largest string of explosives he had ever set was detonated. “Hope it’s worth it,” he said as clouds of dirt and rock dust blew from the mouth of the cavern. They might have been far from the beaten path, but the sound would not go unnoticed. Locals would investigate and a call would go out to the EPA by the end of the day. How long it would take for them to respond was the question, and whether Donovan could get out enough ore to make it all worthwhile. How much of his life did he owe?
The foreman had been ordered to get the heavy equipment back into the shaft much quicker than safety guidelines allowed. He wasn’t happy about it and voiced his opinion; Donovan had threatened to fire him on the spot until he acquiesced.
Vanessa Blanders was the first in. At thirty-eight, she had traded places with her husband of eighteen years. Four years previously, he’d been injured working in a mine, his body violently pinned between a cavern wall and an underground mining truck. Vanessa had moved up the ranks from the oldest greenie to an underground tractor operator. She now worked the squat rock hauler, which looked a lot like a frontend loader that had been soundly pressed flat. She was good at her job, earning more than her husband ever had as a laborer, and he’d taken to caring for their three kids like a duck to water, something Vanessa had always felt out of her depth doing. She constantly thought about how weird, and yet how completely timely, his injury had been. She’d loved her job—right up until this project. Nothing had seemed to go their way, right from the very beginning, starting with the young surveyor crushed by an isolated landslide. The tragedy had only added to her, and most everyone else on the crew’s, trepidation.
Mining safety called for a twenty-four-hour period after a blasting to ensure there weren’t any unexpected cave-ins. The dust had barely settled when she’d been called to excavate. If Christmas hadn’t been approaching, she would have told her boss to kick rocks. A line of her fellow miners watched as she entered the opening. She knew they would do all they could to help her should she be trapped, but that did little to ease her fear. She was feeling better about it all after her fourth haul out and nothing untoward had happened. She’d just gone in for her fifth when a small shake made a crack in the wall to her left. She had her foot on the reverse pedal, ready to leave as quickly as she could, when a ray of golden sunshine poured through. She pushed a pile of rocks ahead so she could get a better look. She was curious about where the light was coming from, but that couldn’t hold a candle to what was illuminated before her.
“Pepper, this is Blanders.”
“Got you, four by four. Everything all right, Van?”
“You’re going to want to get Donovan in a truck; you two should come down here pronto.”
“On our way,” Donovan said, monitoring the line.
Fifteen minutes later, Pepper was standing at the edge of the newly formed crevice. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He ran his hands over the wall. The vein of gold was some fifteen feet tall on one side and sloped up even higher on the other. “If we mine this out too fast, we’re going to crash the price of gold.”
“Can’t sit on it,” Donovan said, his eyes glinting. “We’ve got a week, maybe less, before the feds get here. Might even seize the whole operation.”
“Seize this because of an EPA violation?” Pepper asked incredulously.
“No, because there's a chance it could destabilize the economy of the world. We need to get as much out as we can, as fast as we can.” Donovan turned on his heel and got back into his truck. Pepper and Vanessa spent a moment looking at each other before Pepper headed out as well.
“Is no one going to say anything about the weird sunlight?” she asked as the truck backed out. By the time she got her next load out, word had spread throughout the entire camp. The crew and their equipment were waiting impatiently for her to finish the clean-out so that they could get started. An hour later, Pepper confirmed the area was clear enough for mining to resume.
“Something’s not right in there.” Van shook her head. She had tried to get Pepper to talk with her, but she could see the gold fever in his eyes. She could no sooner reason with him about proceeding with caution than she could tell a child not to eat all of their candy from their Halloween haul.
For three days straight they’d worked the mine, splitting the crew in two, twelve on, twelve off. Even during their off-time, a lot of the men continued to work, knowing their fortunes were tied to how quickly they could excavate the ore. On the morning of the fourth day, Peter Fontaine went missing. No one thought too much about it. First-year greenies often walked off the job; the stress of the work, the underground claustrophobia that could hit at any time, the breakdown of the body from the physical labor, they were all contributing factors. It didn’t make much sense for someone to leave with that type of bonus dangling over their head, but stranger things had happened. Twelve hours later, when David Keller, a ten-year vet of the mines, failed to show up in the logs as having checked out of the mine, management took notice.
“Everyone out,” Pepper ordered over the radio. Donovan nearly overrode the directive, but allowed commonsense to dictate. Two hours later, a thorough search had yielded no results. By now, the crew was convinced that the mine was cursed. The surveyor's death, the insane motherlode, the strange illumination in the shaft; with their proclivity toward superstition, the missing miners were the final proof they needed. Four walked off the job. Even the promise of being rich beyond their wildest dreams was not worth the risk of losing their lives.
The next day would be the last day of Vanessa's life. Her final thoughts were wishing she had stayed on the phone with her husband and kids a little while longer. She’d cut them short, knowing she had to get back to work. She'd promised them she’d catch up the next day, but she never got the chance. None of the crew, besides Donovan, escaped. What came out of that opening was something none of them would have been able to explain, and none would have ever believed.