9~
"What are you going on about now, Blanchard?" Dennis asked.
"My people are telling me that something's happening on my end, Dennis," Blanchard explained. "My drillers are not working."
"Is that right?" Dennis sneered. "Are you sure it just isn't simple incompetence on your end of things?"
Blanchard bristled through his waning patience. "Are you sure it isn't some corporate espionage on yours?"
Blanchard and Dennis stared hard at one another in the dark conference room, in what amounted to a game of will across the miles and years between them, silently broadcasting the unmistakable dislike they had for each other.
What are you saying?" Dennis finally said back. "That one of us has sabotaged your equipment?"
"Can you fault me for thinking so?"
"Well, we didn't do it," Dennis dismissed him. "How could we? We're busy doing our part to save Gatorsburg. Instead of blaming us for your little mechanical breakdowns, maybe you should deal with the problem."
And with that, Dennis, thoroughly tired of telling Blanchard how to run a business, turned off his screen, making the room a little darker around a brooding Blanchard.
Blanchard dismissed his rival and made himself focus on the problem at hand. He would be damned if it was his company that didn't pull its weight and caused millions of dollars of flood damage to his hometown.
He reached over, tapped his com panel and asked into it, "Team Leader, apart from Mine Two's drillers, have any more been destroyed?"
"Afraid so, sir," the voice issued from the table's built-in speakers. "A driller from Mine One. The engineer operating the second unit managed to shut it down before it was too late. Whatever was attacking them, just stopped at that point."
"Has anyone gotten a better look at what it is?"
"Not really, sir. Other than the fact that is looks white, we don't have a clue what it is."
"And the fact that seems to be hopping from one mine to the next," Blanchard surmised.
Marcie, who, like everyone in the station, had been listening to the conversation over her headset. Then, suddenly, she stood up from her console's chair like a shot.
"No way!" she squeaked in startled epiphany. "How did he get in there?"
Everyone turned to the outburst, but it was Blanchard, who heard the shout, who asked, "Marcie? Was that you? Have you figured out what's attacking us?"
"I think so, sir," she said, her recent memories being stirred up to a high degree. "Have you ever heard of...Ol' Whitey?"
"Ol' Whitey?" a engineer working from Console Two scoffed with a chuckle. "That old miners' myth? What about it?"
"I'm afraid it's no myth, Mr. Blanchard," Marcie implored the CEO. "I actually ran into him, myself, after Pretre du Marais tried to feed me to him. He lives in the deeper caves of Mine Four, but I think I know how he's getting around to smashing our drillers."
"How?"
"He must be using some other underwater tunnel system that your people don't know about, that connects to all of your caves' lakes, to hunt. That, at least, explains why he hasn't starved to death in all those years. He's probably hunting and the sound and movement of the drillers is like prey to him."
Blanchard mulled that over. Alligators were animals, after all, and over the many years that he served the company, he long had to acknowledge the biological component of the business, even if he didn't understand it fully. What Marcie postulated could be possible.
He trusted her this far, he decided. No sense in stopping this late in the game. "If that's true, then how do we get this gator out of the way so we can finish our work?" he asked her.
He couldn't see the relieved look on the teen's face, but did hear her say with urgent confidence, "I'm working on that now, sir."
"All right," Blanchard said, pleased to see that things were fighting to get back on track. "Get on it, and let me know what you propose."
"Yes, sir."
Despite the danger of being floated away by the floodwaters that were being born from the rising lake's levels and earth that was now overtaxed in trying to soak up the deluge, McAfee and Wharton knew that staying inside the van was their safest course of action, even as the van twirled and banged into every tree that the current flowed past.
"We're really earning our hazard pay, now," Wharton quipped after a serious bang from a tree against his driver's side door.
"Question is, whether we'll live long enough to collect it," said McAfee, rattled by an impact from her side of the van. It felt like being the guest of honor in a demolition derby.
If anything else was to be said, it was cut off, brutally, by the screech of crunched metal that heralded their sudden halt with a wrenching force so violent that almost threw the two of them into the windshield.
Instead, heads hit dashboards, stunning them for several moments.
McAfee managed to rouse herself before Wharton did, and groggily picked up her cell phone.
"Wharton," she called to him. "Wharton, wake up. I think we hit something. We've stopped moving."
"Feels like we ran aground on something," Wharton guessed, while clearing the cobwebs from his head. He felt that his guess was confirmed when he noticed that the van felt elevated, as if it rested on an incline. "I'll open the door and check."
He gripped the door handle and lifted. The door stayed closed. He worked the handle again and again, and the door remained shut, tightly so.
"Open your door, McAfee," Wharton told her, hoping that his door was simply jammed from too much earlier abuse.
She grabbed her handle and lifted. Her door stayed shut.
"What's happened to the doors?" she asked, her anxiety rising as fast as, she knew, the waters outside were getting.
She rolled down her window and was greeted by a disquieting sight. A tree trunk filled her view, as it was pressed tight against her door and its window frame.
"Uh-oh!" she grumbled, as Wharton followed suit and saw, to his deep dismay, a similar tree wedged against his door, as well.
At the moment, if anyone had been outside, that person would have seen the white van effectively pinned between two wide, stout trees, its front end lifted high, as it was forced into the bosky vice by the force of the steadily rising torrent.
Wharton brightened with a thought. "We'll get out through the back doors. C'mon."
Freeing himself from his seatbelt, he turned in his seat to get ready to ease into the rear, when he saw something that halted him in mid-motion.
The squeezing action of being wedged between the trees caused the chassis to deform inwardly along the van's sides, popping the rear doors open. That wouldn't have alarmed the man, however, the fact that floodwater was now rushing in, and more distressingly, was filing the interior fast, confirmed how much water was raging outside and how swiftly it was moving out of the wetlands.
A fact that certainly impressed upon McAfee to make a panicked phone call to Blanchard to warn him of the situation, before it was too late.
"Mr. Blanchard," McAfee said into the phone, trying to keep the fear from rising in time with the water level, "we've got some bad news."
An engineer from the console that monitored Mine Three, yelped, "Whatever it is, it just knocked out my driller!"
"Understood," Marcie said, moving her driller away from the established tunnel network on her screen. "I'm using my driller to try and look for any unmarked tunnels Ol' Whitey's might use to hit this lake, next."
With experimental pulls of her joystick, her driller headed further into the deeper, darker zones of the lake, looking for a clue, for confirmation to her hunch while the mammoth gator was busy elsewhere. Even with the driller's spotlights on full beam in the murk, it was frustrating work.
Then the sweeping driller's spotlights moved across a patch of darkness against a far bank, a patch that had a tantalizing sense of depth in it. Marcie held the driller on that area.
"Hey! There!" she alerted everyone. "Is that a new tunnel down there?" Then, she brought the image up to the main monitor.
Another engineer, studying the image, confirmed her acquisition. "I guess we did miss that one. It's down there pretty deep."
Before anyone else could share any more insight on it, everyone's headset rang with the grim and urgent voice of the company's CEO.
"I've just gotten a call from those two government workers, McAfee and Wharton," Blanchard reported. "The flash flooding has started and they couldn't get out of the swamps in time. The other companies have reported that they've cleared their tunnels, but they must not be draining the floodwater into the caves fast enough. We're the only one that hasn't finished yet. Get that gator, or whatever it is, out of our way and finish clearing the tunnels, right now!"
The impact of the news about the flood hit them as hard as Blanchard's hardening, commanding voice. Everyone responded accordingly.
"Yes, sir!" Marcie and the other engineers called out, as if soldiers receiving their orders.
The team leader walked over towards Marcie's console and addressed her, directly. "You heard the man. What do we do?"
"We have to lure Ol' Whitey down that tunnel and keep him there," Marcie said.
An engineer, overhearing, chimed in with a incredulous question. "And just how is anyone gonna do that without becoming gator chow?"
With that question, Marcie had to slow down for a minute. Thinking fast was a virtue worth cultivating, she knew, but too fast, and she could miss something, things could run out of control. As she was fearing it was happening now.
She scowled at her monitor screen in thought. Superimposed in a low corner, was a small menu of commands for her drillers. The unfamiliarity of one command caught her attention.
"What's that?" Marcie asked the team leader, thoughtfully, pointing to the word.
He looked over her shoulder to the command text. "AutoMode? We set the drillers to that when we find a new tunnel. It'll normally explore the length of the tunnel, automatically, to see where it ends up. But we don't have time for that."
Marcie's mind latched onto the word automatically, and suddenly brightened at the hope that this unknown function presented.
"Yes, we do!" she cried out, jumping to her feet again. "It's perfect!"
Marcie left her post, turned for the doorway and spoke to the team leader from over her shoulder. "Set aside one of those drillers in Mine Three. I'll be there in a few minutes. I have an idea!"
Before the team leader could ask what it was, she had already run off.
Coming out of the rain and standing by the bank of Mine Four's lake, with a small can in her hand, a slightly damp Marcie wondered if it was due to some weird form of providence that she always found herself there. The fact that she was beginning to remember details of the defunct mine by sheer dint of being there so many times, slightly depressed her.
She stared impatiently at the dark water, expecting movement, but the surface was still.
"Where's the driller?" Marcie asked into her headset.
The voice of the team leader came through. "It's coming."
A trail of bubbles and disturbance caught her attention, and Marcie could finally see the driller quietly break the surface and rolled up to the bank, where it stopped by her feet.
Blanchard's voice came in next. "What's this all about?" he asked her. "What are you going to do?"
Marcie knelt before the driller, and with the edge of a screwdriver, opened the can. Then, she opened the small storage compartment in the back of the driller and proceeded to pour the fluid into it.
"Give Ol' Whitey something else to chase," Marcie answered, closing the compartment. "I just poured a whole can of gator lure into the driller. Okay, Team Leader, this driller's now called Decoy One. Send it to the new tunnel and switch it to AutoMode. Ol' Whitey should follow it."
"All right," the leader said. "Sending the driller down, now."
Like a remote-controlled toy, the driller turned and trundled back into the lake. Soon after, its built-in ballast tanks filled with water and it descended, trailing a chemical slick down into the depths.
"Okay, get back to the station, so we can finish clearing the rest of the tunnels," the team leader ordered her.
"Got it," Marcie said, happy to leave and get back into the warm administration building, and into the business of saving lives, hopefully starting with McAfee and Wharton's.
The team leader regarded Marcie once he saw her rush back into the TMS. "Marcie, you're back. Good news. Decoy One's rear camera just caught sight of that white alligator following it as it entered the new tunnel. I think it's working."
"Thank goodness," she sighed. "How's the drilling going, now?"
"We've got technicians putting replacement drillers in the lakes that Ol' Whitey hit. We're getting back on track."
An geologist spoke up from his station. "The other mines are clear of obstruction except Mine Four. Crap!"
"What's wrong?" the team leader asked, but one look from the scientist's face gave him a strong clue.
"Landslide! It must have been from all the vibrations from all our drilling! It covered the mouths of all of Mine Four's tunnels."
Now his face matched the geologist's. "No! We were so close! If we had more time, we could dig those tunnels clear, but now...it's hopeless."
Helpless silence reigned in the room for long moments, and then Marcie stiffened in thought and exclaimed, "Wait! There may be one shot."
"What do you mean?" the team leader asked. So far, the teen wasn't wasting his time with her presence, but these unwelcome, last-minute surprises were beginning to fray the edges of his sense of professionalism.
"We're gonna take a page from the Pretre du Marais Book of Underwater Sabotage," she said as she prepared to bolt from her station, yet again. "Tell your techs to gather all of the drillers from the other mines and grab some of that EXP-9, then meet me back at Mine Four's lake. If we work together on this, we can still clear the way."
McAfee hoped, as the water level inside the van rose to touch the back of the front seats and threatened to creep past and flood the front of the vehicle, that their open windows might mitigate some of the deadly water by causing it to flow out.
Unfortunately, the trees that kept the doors pinned closed were also wide enough that they effectively blocked the window openings and looked like they were equally good at keep most of the water in.
Wharton was forced to stay in his seat, but was still determined to get his partner and himself free by ineffectually kicking at the windshield, an action made harder by the awkward positioning in the driver's seat he had to endure.
With the window refusing to break, McAfee quipped glumly, "Built to last, huh?"
Wharton, seeing the momentary futility of his enterprise, took a break and slumped back in his now wet seat.
"I'm closer to breaking my ankle on this thing," he told her. "Sorry."
She glanced at her partner and could see the fear and frustration through his weary face. He was a good man, a fine scientist and a dear friend, more for his trying to save them, than his success at it.
"It's all right," she comforted him. Then, with a reflexive jump, she frowned, as cold lake water began to wet her hips. The water level was now entering the front, and there was nothing to be done about it.
"This is risky, Marcie, even under good conditions," the team leader grumbled. "This could cause another landslide even bigger that this one."
"I can't argue with that, but if I'm right, this could clear it all in one go. That's why we're gonna let the geologists make the placements themselves. They're the best people for the job."
By the stony bank of the lake, technicians were kneeling before recovered drillers, opening storage compartments and carefully placing small charges of EXP-9 explosive and radio detonators into them.
Once hatches were closed and secured, a technician stood and said to the team leader, "The drillers are ready to go."
"Thank you, everyone," he said to them, then gestured to his headset. "Drill team, you all know what you have to do. The geologists will insert the drillers into the best places needed to clear the most debris. When they're done with placement, the engineers will activate the charges. Hopefully, this will remove the landslide and clear the tunnels at the same time. Understood?"
He heard affirmatives on his end, then switched off.
"I hope this works," he grumbled under his breath as he and Marcie left the mine.
"You and me, both," she agreed.
When the two returned to the TMS, they could see on the main monitor a humbling sight. An x, far larger than any they had seen had been blinking and marked the location of the landslide. Individual console monitors had been switched to driller camera feeds to give the geologists working, the best view for placement.
Standing by a wall control panel, the team leader, pressed a button, and the view of the main monitor switched to a live camera feed, as well.
From there, he and Marcie could see the drillers head for the landslide's base, where the weighty concentration of rocks acted as a foundation, holding up the rest of the debris against the aquatic cliff wall and the tunnel mouths.
Without fanfare, the geologists drove the drillers head-first into the base, watching as their drill bits ate their way deep into the foundation, and then, eventually, stop.
"Drillers are now at optimum depth and placement," said one of the geologists to the team leader.
The leader nodded. "Good. All right, engineers, when you're ready."
On the engineers' side of the console sat a small box with a single red button in its center. All of the engineers opened the clear lid of the devices and hovered their collective fingers over the button, ready for a synchronized press.
"Blow it!" the team leader commanded.
With a unified press, the drillers within the base exploded, breaking up and scattering the foundation with a cloudy, violent detonation.
As the base disintegrated and became the start of a new layer of sediment, its strength was lost and the avalanche it held up began to loosely cascade down the length of the cliff face.
With the debris now sliding away, the building water pressure deep within the tunnels, suddenly blasted the new obstructions free from their mouths. Gallons upon gallons of Bellow Lake water began surging in a bubbling torrent, helping to clear away the remains of the landslide, and slowly, but surely, raise the level of the mine's lake.
As one, the entire TMS room gave a mighty and heartfelt cheer. Success, truly, was theirs this day.
Indeed, the remaining three mine's lakes were experiencing similar rises in water level, as the caves began to reenact the flash flooding being suffered by the Source Swamps, and the mining staff couldn't have been happier.
Inside the van, the flood had risen to the dashboard and a watery death lapped at Wharton's neck and McAfee's jaw line.
As she feared, the trees were wide enough to keep enough of the water inside to kill them, as McAfee, being the shorter of the two, fought to keep her head above the water.
"A flash flood," she groused, coughing up a mouthful of lake water. "We're gonna buy it in a flash flood."
"What? Was there any other way that you'd like to check out?" Wharton asked, wondering why she would be worried about the hows of her death. Dead was dead, regardless of reason.
Then, he saw her once stricken face soften somewhat as she seemed to look for some inner courage to say what was truly concerning her.
"I thought...that if things were different, we could..." she managed to say without half-drowning. With Wharton understanding and placing his hand comfortingly on her wet cheek, McAfee knew she needn't say anymore.
By the lake, however, something was happening.
Along the sides of the lake, water began to churn, and then suddenly, great plumes of white, frothy water began to fountain high in pressure-relieved blasts. Like hundreds of drains being unclogged at once, this was the glorious signal that, at last, the tunnels were cleared.
McAfee's heart pounded in grim anticipation to her demise, as the water reached her lips. And then, after a minute, it didn't rise any further.
The level started to descend to her chin, then to her collarbone, her midsection, and, surprisingly, to her hips, again.
She looked at Wharton, who was also sporting wet clothes, yet was now only sitting on top of the receding water level, and yelled ecstatically, "They did it!"
"They sure did," he breathed relievedly. "I was beginning to think-"
Before he could finish his comment, he felt McAfee snake her arms around his neck and shoulder, before she leaned across the driver's seat and gave him a passionate kiss.
Life and love, he thought, two of the most beautiful words in the English language, as he return the passion of the kiss back to her.
As the waters gradually emptied from the rear of the van and began to fall back to the depths of Bellow Lake, Wharton added two more to his list of beautiful words in the English language.
Hillary McAfee.
