Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(112)

That’s how he feels now, at the Tuonela Mine, where the air smells like sulfur and the lung-blackening exhaust of a tractor-trailer. He feels like he has been here before. He feels like he must have worn the same clothes yesterday. He feels like he keeps saying, “Great, great,” but can’t stop himself from repeating it no matter what anyone tells him.

The tour guide, Mason, is a squat-bodied American with the black wiry hair of a nostril who speaks with expansive hand gestures and who wears a gray shirt wrinkled like foil along his broad back.

Mason leads them first through the business center, a hive of narrow hallways and square concrete offices without doors in which sallow-faced black-tied men hammer keyboards and square stacks of paper and drink from disposable cups of tea. He walks backward when he can, occasionally jarring a shoulder into a doorframe, while talking to them about uranium mining and refinement, telling them how the ore is generally low concentration so that the extraction has to be high volume. He tells them, with his fist smacking his open palm, that 20 percent of the world’s uranium presently comes from the Lupine Republic. “Twenty percent,” he says. “Ten thousand tons. Quite a bit of which was drawn from the ground beneath your feet. That’s a whole lot.”

He talks about how the ore is processed by milling it into particles and he talks about how it is then treated by chemical leaching to extract the uranium and he talks about how the yellowcake is the result of this, a dry powder sold on the market as U3O8. “And that’s what you see blasting out of here on train after train after train.”

Chase knows most of this—he’s been briefed extensively on the mines and forced to memorize all the talking points that make nuclear energy the key to powering the States through the next century—and he pays more attention to whether he is slouching, whether his gut is sucked in, as the reporters snap so many photos of him that he sees the bright burst of a flash even when his eyes are shut.

The tiled hallway is wet and Mason tells them to be careful and they skate around a corner, where they surprise a black-haired janitor with a tumor like a cauliflower growing out of his neck. He wears gray coveralls and he hunches over his mop and he says, “Oh!” when he sees them and retreats against the wall and says how terribly sorry he is, his eyes flitting between Mason and Chase, how terribly sorry.

They step outside, into sunlight so bright it makes them shield their eyes, onto an observation deck with the snow recently scraped from it, to take in the view of the open pit mines, one of them half-full of yellow ice, and the other, carved out layer by layer, the walls sloping gradually inward, so that it appears a pyramid was drawn upside down from it. Dynamite claps like thunder. Loaders and diggers rattle and beep, their drivers in iron-sleeve suits and enclosed cabins with the very best filtration systems, which protect them—“Mostly,” Mason says—from radiation and airborne dust.

Inside, they stomp the cold out of their feet and put on safety goggles and yellow plastic helmets before heading into the refinement facility, where they clamp along ironwork planks and up and down stairwells and pass by milling machinery stained with rivers of orange rust wherever there is a scratch or a rivet or a screw. Geiger counters and radon detectors seem to hang from every wall like a clock collection clicking its way to doomsday.

They take a juddering elevator with graffiti notched on its walls and gum stuck to its floor to some dim lower level full of access shafts from which cool, musty air gusts like the breath of a buried beast. There are grated fans everywhere, sucking out the radon-poisoned air and blasting in filtered air from outside, and Mason has to yell over the top of them to be heard. He tells them about sunken shafts and ore veins and crosscuts. He talks about tunnels known as raises and as winzes meant for extraction.

A miner with a headlamp walks past their group and smiles, his teeth flecked black, and says something to Chase in Russian. He holds out his hand and Chase takes it and pumps it even as the security force closes in around them. He knows that everyone who works for the mine must succumb to a monthly blood test, that any who do not test positive for Volpexx are immediately terminated. “Don’t worry,” Chase tells them and adjusts his body to face a flashing camera. “You worry too much.”

When they climb into the elevator again, Mason leans in to Chase and snickers and says, “Hey, is it true you once threw a ball of hamburger at a vegan protester after touring a meatpacking plant?”

“That’s not true. She was a vegetarian.”

He tries to laugh along with Mason, but the laughter feels stale in his mouth and the memory of packing and hurling the handful of ground beef feels like somebody else’s memory, and he can’t help but think, and not for the first time, that he is a fool. Then the elevator doors open and the grated walkway they cross looks down upon another grated walkway, and another and another still, and when Chase drops his head he feels a momentary uncertainty as to where he stands.

At one point Neal hands him a phone and he retreats to a quiet corner and hears Buffalo on the other end, already talking, telling him about Jeremy Saber: 60 Minutes was pushing for a death-row interview—and the media want access to the execution. “We don’t want him to have a camera. We don’t want him to have a microphone. We don’t want him to do any more damage than he has already done, and damage is what will come if they allow the media to film the execution. Cameras make martyrs. Cameras stir up the crazies. The LA riots would not have happened if not for the Rodney King footage.”