Page 44 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)
44.
Gerard Redding surveyed the sandbagging around the fence and decided it was as good as it was going to get.
Five of the six feet height were protected. And any flooding this far from the Never Summer—about a mile—would probably rise no more than a meter or so.
He was standing in the circular yard of the front of the company. He had always thought of this portion of his business as Cerberus, mythical three-headed dog guarding the entrance to the underworld.
This entryway was the body.
The three shafts—Hell, Hades and Inferno—were the necks.
The rock faces, a half mile down, the snarling heads.
It was a labored metaphor but he liked it.
He called to his workers. “Okay. That’s good! You can go home now.” He repeated the message in Spanish. He held up envelopes, each containing a hundred dollars in cash.
The half dozen men and women walked up to the fence and took the bonuses gratefully. They then hurried to their idling cars and made their escapes.
Hugh Davies, the operations manager, walked out of the office, looking over the barricade as well. “It’s good, don’t you think?”
Davies, a foot shorter than Redding, had a dapper, distinguished air about him. Even today—a day of alarm and extremes—he wore a white shirt and tie.
Redding nodded.
The manager continued, “She’ll get the flooding worse than us.” Eyes cutting across the highway, which separated the mine from Annie Coyne’s farm.
“Bitch,” Redding muttered.
At least, he had the satisfaction of knowing her frustration and anger every time she saw the north four hundred—the huge plot of farmland her father had lost to Redding’s sire in that fateful poker game. Redding was a miner, not a farmer, so he’d let the property go to seed. All he cared about was the mineral rights and that particular parcel had exceeded the old man’s expectations. He could have leased agrarian rights to her. But hell no.
“Everything secure?” he asked Davies.
Referring to moving the computers and paperwork to a safe location.
“As long as it doesn’t turn into Niagara Falls.”
It wouldn’t. Redding’s calculations had confirmed this.
“You want to leave?” Redding asked. “We can move the barricade.”
“If you’re not, think I’ll stick around too. In case your ass needs bailing out.”
“Ha.”
He believed that Davies had a crush of sorts on him. But it was as nebulous and unformed as it would forever be.
They gazed around. “Odd, the place looks funny with nobody around, no trucks, no sounds of machinery.”
“Like we had a snow day.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know?”
The manager shook his head.
Redding explained about schools up north closing because there was too much snow on the roads. He’d lived in Rochester getting his master’s in engineering at RIT, and the woman he lived with, briefly, had children.
Davies said, “Hm. Think it would teach the kids to toughen up.”
“Might get hurt. Parents would sue.”
Every person involved in mining was aware of one thing above all else: liability. It was far too easy to be hurt or killed in the profession.
Davies nodded. “Learn something new every day.” He walked off toward the office on the north side of the mythical dog’s body.
Redding glanced at Annie Coyne’s farm once more, then continued on to the workshop. He unlocked the door with a keypad and stepped inside. The place had no windows, of course. The building was visible from the highway and he knew competitors in the copper-mining world would love to cruise by and take a dozen digital high-definition pictures of what Redding was up to, from the research and development perspective.
Paranoid?
Maybe a little.
But he had many reasons to be cautious.
He now looked at one in particular.
It was a device he himself had invented and was as yet unpatented, resembling a moon lander—four legs under a gray metal box. Its height was about three feet, its width two.
On the right side was the drill, which would dig a hole in the earth beneath it, where a blank rifle bullet would be placed. On the other side was an armature that ended in a round metal plate resting on the ground.
The robot would then fire the bullet and the shock waves would drive down into the earth and then return to the sensor. This was typical of many devices in the industry, but what was revolutionary about his was that the software could differentiate between the types of ores the shock waves discovered and the quality of the vein.
He’d recently tried it and had spectacular results.
Redding wanted to make sure the device was safe from floodwater, on the off chance the sandbagging didn’t work. The machine was too heavy to lift. He would dismantle it into the component parts and store them high on the metal shelves in the back of the workshop.
First, the brain.
Using a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver, he removed the plate on the top of the robot. He set this and the four screws on a plastic examination tray a few feet away. He played a flashlight inside, nodding to himself with approval at the cleanliness of the design. And then he unplugged the green motherboard that measured three inches by six. This went into a Ziplock bag.
For the rest of the machine—motors and gears mostly—he didn’t need to be so delicate and so he would use a large cordless drill fitted with a screwdriver head. He opened the desk draw where he kept the Black they had been rendered useless by the force of the blast. So instead of the room filling with the gentle fire-extinguishing rain from the ceiling pipes, what appeared instantly was a thick haze.
Which was notable in that while the fumes from plastic explosives are generally gray-white, this particular mist was red, a hue that matched the shade of still-damp human blood perfectly.