The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

through the side tunnel, through twenty feet of stone, into the parallel pioneer tunnel. It was narrow, cut rougher than the main bore, the ceiling dropping low here and there. They crouched and pressed ahead, deeper into the mountain, relighting their lamps once no one could see.

The old man limped more quickly now, playing his light on the side wall. Suddenly, he stopped and passed his hand over a jagged seam in the stone. The young man watched him and wondered, not for the first time, what kept him fighting for the cause when most men as crippled as he would spend their time in a rocking chair. But a man could get hurt asking too many questions in the hobo jungles, so he kept his wonderings to himself.

“Drill here.”

The old man revealed only enough to inspire the confidence of the volunteers he recruited. The farm boy carrying the hammer thought he was helping a shingle weaver down from Puget Sound, where the union had called a general strike that completely tied up the cedar-shingle industry until the bloodsucking manufacturers beat them with scab labor. Just the answer a budding anarchist longed to hear.

His previous recruit had believed he was from Idaho, on the run from the Coeur d‘Alene mine wars. To the next he would have fought the good fight organizing for the Wobblies in Chicago. How had he lost an eye? Same place he got the limp, slugging it out with strikebreakers in Colorado City, or bodyguarding for “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, or shot when the Governor called up the National Guard. Gilt-edged credentials to those who hungered to make a better world and had the guts to fight for it.

The big fellow produced a three-foot steel chisel and held it in place while the man with the eye patch tapped it until the point was firmly seated in the granite. Then he handed the hammer back.

“Here you go, Kevin. Quickly, now.”

“Are you certain smashing this tunnel won’t hurt the boys working the main bore?”

“I’d stake my life on it. There are twenty feet of solid granite between us.”

Kevin’s was a common story in the West. Born to be a farmer before his family lost their land to the bank, he had toiled in the silver mines, until he got fired for speaking up in favor of the union. Riding around the country on freight trains looking for work, he had been beaten by railway police. Rallying for higher wages, he’d been attacked by strikebreakers with ax handles. There were days his head hurt so bad he couldn’t think straight. Worst were the nights he despaired of ever finding a steady job, or even a regular place to sleep, much less meeting a girl and raising a family. On one of those nights, he had been seduced by the anarchists’ dream.

Dynamite, “the proletariat’s artillery,” would make a better world.

Kevin swung the heavy sledge with both hands. He pounded the chisel a foot in. He stopped to catch his breath and complained about the tool. “I can’t abide these steel hammers. They bounce too much. Give me old-fashioned cast iron.”

“Use the bounce.” Surprisingly lithe, the cripple with the eye patch took the hammer and swung it easily, using his powerful wrists to whip the steel up on the bounce, flick it back in a one fluid motion, and bring it hard down on the chisel again. “Make it work for you. Here, you finish ... Good. Very good.”

They chiseled a hole three feet into the stone.

“Dynamite,” said the old man, who had let Kevin carry everything incriminating in case the railway police searched them. Kevin removed three dull-red sticks from under his shirt. Printed on each in black ink was the manufacturer’s brand, VULCAN. The cripple stuffed them one after another into the hole.

“Detonator.”

“You absolutely certain it won’t hurt any workingmen?”

“Guaranteed.”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind blowing the bosses to hell, but those men in there, they’re on our side.”

“Even if they don’t know it yet,” the old cripple said cynically. He attached the detonator, which would explode forcefully enough to make the dynamite itself blow.

“Fuse.”

Kevin carefully uncoiled the slow fuse he had hidden in his hat. A yard of the hemp yarn impregnated with pulverized gunpowder would burn in ninety seconds—a foot in half a minute. To gain five minutes to retreat to a safe place, the old man laid eleven feet of fuse. The extra foot was to take into account variations in consistency and dampness.

“Would you like to fire the blast?” he asked casually.

Kevin’s eyes were burning like a little boy’s on Christmas morning. “Could I?”

“I’ll check the coast is clear. Just remember, you’ve only got five minutes to get out. Don’t dawdle. Light it and go—Wait! What’s that?” Pretending that he had heard someone coming, he whipped around and half drew a blade from his boot.

Kevin fell for the ruse. He cupped his hand to his ear. But all he heard was the distant rumble of the drills in the main bore and the whine of the blowers pulling foul air out of the pioneer tunnel and drawing in fresh. “What? What did you hear?”

“Run down there! See who’s coming.”

Kevin ran, shadows leaping as his light bounced on the rough walls.

The old man ripped the gunpowder fuse from the detonator and threw it into the darkness. He replaced it with an identical-looking string of hemp yarn soaked in melted trinitrotoluene, which was used to detonate multiple charges simultaneously because it burned so fast.

He was quick and dexterous. By the time he heard Kevin returning from his fool’s errand, the treachery was done. But when he looked up, he was stunned to see Kevin holding both hands in the air. Behind him was the railroad dick, the cop who had watched him enter the tunnel. Suspicion had transformed his whiskey-sodden face into a mask of cold vigilance. He was pointing a revolver in a rock-steady grip.

“Elevate!” he commanded. “Hands