GOLIATH squatted upon the near end of the Neck, occupying almost the entire width of that slender land bridge between plateau and island mesa. Except for the strobe and the red warning lights far above their heads, he was dark, silent, idle, apparently vacant of human life. No man sat in the operator’s chair of the high, fore-projecting control cab. No one moved upon the decks and gangways of the engine house, the fan vent room, the catwalks of the lowered boom or the towering masts and A-frames.
“They shut her down,” Smith whispered. “I thought they never shut that thing down.”
Hayduke screwed night-vision lenses into the eyepieces of his big 7x50 Green Beret binoculars and looked beyond the dragline machine to the bonfire and mob of laughing humans at the far west end of the Neck. “Boys are having a party,” he said. “About a dozen hardhats. Whole damn S and R Team’s there too. That BLM rangerette what’s-her-name.”
“Dick. Ginny Dick. A nice woman. I like her.”
“Dick. No kidding. Ranger Dick. Couple of those fucking gun-happy assholes from Ace. And by God there’s ol’ Bishop Love himself, in person, all meat, the great Horse’s Ass in the flesh, wearing his Ralph Lauren cowperson costume, he’s got one hand on the ranger’s ass and a Pepsi in the … Pepsi? Pepsi hell, by God, Seldom, the Bishop is drinking a beer. A beer, I tell you.”
“Coors Lite?”
“Let’s see. Hard to tell. Old fart’s got a big hand. But yeah, there’s a case of that angel piss on the ground by the fire. They’re grilling steaks. Sons of bitches are having a picnic while we work. Celebrating.”
“I’m hungry, George.”
“Yeah.” Hayduke studied the tableau a bit longer, especially the G.E.M., grinning his savage grin, muttering his harmless mantras. “Fuckin’ motherfucker … cocksuckin’ son of a motherfuckin’ cocksucker …”
“Hungry, George.”
Hayduke snapped shut the binocs, rammed them in the case, case into pack. “Work, m’fug. To work. First we work. Then we eat.” He pulled on leather gloves. “Come on.”
They half rose and slipped ahead through the shadows, down the gentle slope of bare stone and sand toward the monster, stopping every few seconds to look hard and listen harder.
“Should of brought satchel charges, George. Satchel charges. One hell of a lot easier.” Now Smith drew on his gloves. “Wouldn’t it, George?”
Kneeling in the moonshade of a juniper, Hayduke peered up at the steel shoes, engine house deck, control cab. “No glory in it that way. Too easy. And too hard — we’d need a ton of H.E. to demolish this fucker. Look at that thing — bigger’n the goddamn fuckin’ state capitol …”
Hearing and seeing no sign of life, they padded to the ladder on the side of the near shoe, climbed from there up a steep gangway to the main deck and entered the dark interior of the powerhouse, sixty feet above the level of the ground. Hayduke paused, listening in the dark, then switched on a Mini-Mag-light, its intense little beam filtered through a blue lens for purposes of moonlight mischief.
“So?” he says, “how do we get to the control room?”
“Hain’t sure, George.” Smith opened a bulkhead door, flicked on his own Mini-Mag and played the light over a vast and complex warehouse-like interior, where dynamos and turbines under molded housings of battleship steel waited for the black button of excitation. “Not that way, I don’t reckon.”
“Thought you knew these machines.”
“George, I said I worked in that little one up near Craig, Colorado, about only half the size this here GOLIATH. And I was only the oiler: number-two nigger.”
“Maybe we follow that outside catwalk.”
“Yeah but there’s gotta be a inside way through here to the cab too. Anyhow first we got to find the master switch to turn on power to the engine room.”
“Master switch?”
“Safety, George. In case control cab gets knocked off or something.” Smith moved down the corridor between engine room and lockers, looking for the wall-high circuit breaker closet. “Should be down here … yep …” He opened the box, checked a deep array of switches, each about the size of a handbrake lever on a truck. He closed the switch labeled MAIN, then the HOIST, DRAG, PROPEL, SWING, DUMP, P.A., LIGHTS, HEAT, A.C., CABLE and UTILITY switches.
“So …”mused Hayduke. “Somebody gets in here they can stop us. How we gonna watch this and outside too?”
“This’ll help.” Smith pulled a set of Master Padlocks from his pack, selected one and locked the circuit breaker door.
They stepped out on the deck again, checking the party at the fading then flaring bonfire. Sounds of music: somebody was playing a battery-powered boombox. A few couples in black silhouette jerked and jiggled, like spastic puppets, before the flames. Shrieks, shouts and a bray of laughter rang through the night. Clash of breaking bottles. Seldom Seen Smith gaped wistfully at the festive throng.
“There’s wimmin there, George. We’re missin’ out on a good party.” Smith the wilderness lover always loved a party. Like most solitary outdoorsmen he was a highly gregarious and incurably social animal. “Wimmin, George,” he repeated.
“Fuck ‘em, m’fug, we got work to do.”
“I love wimmin, George.”
“Love women, do you? Female women? Smith, these days that makes you some kind of queer. Come on.”
“Well reckon that’s the kind of queer I am. That queer kind of queer.”
“Anyhow you don’t love women you just love women’s bodies.” Hayduke tugged at Smith’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”
“Hain’t never seen a woman’s body yet didn’t have a woman inside of it. Maybe you ain’t noticed, George, but them female people come in neat integrated little packages. I hain’t complainin’, you understand, but it’s a true fact. Might be handier if they didn’t but they do.”
“ ‘Woman’s ass and the whisky glass / Made a loser out of you.’ Seldom, you going to help me or do I have to do everything myself?”
“Ready.”
“So which way?”
“We can get there from the outside but somebody might see us. Let’s try the long way.” Smith re-entered the engine house, padlocked the door on the inside, took the corridor past lockers and circuit breakers to another high-pitched gangway aft. This brought them to an inner catwalk with rails high inside the cavernous engine room. Ducts, cables, steel rope, and a network of pipes hung suspended in huge brackets from the overhead deck. Watching each step, following his pencil-beam of bluish light, Smith proceeded forward to another bulkhead opening. Hayduke followed hard on his heels, sweating with excitement, fear, joy, the lust for action. For heroic and noble action. The urge to destroy that which is evil, said the anarchist Prince Bakunin, is a creative urge. How true. How bloody awful true.
They passed through the bulkhead gangway and found themselves in the rear of the control cabin, cantilevered high above the ground. This part of the cab was like a small kitchen and bunkroom, with refrigerator, microwave oven, water cooler, coffee maker, workbench, cabinets and table. One bunk with foam pad and blankets was folded against the wall. The walls were lined in genuine Formica pine paneling, the floor covered with authentic virgin linoleum tile.
“Hey,” whispered Smith, “like a brakeman’s caboose. Nice, Just like home.” He opened a cabinet door and helped himself to a fistful of mixed nuts from an open can.
“What do you know about cabooses? Don’t tell me you worked on the fucking trains too.”
“Yes sir, one time on the Union Pacific out of Thompson Springs. About six months. Good job; I should’ve kept it, I’d be retired and drawing a fat ol’ railroader’s pension now.”
“You’d be a fat old pile of retired shit. Get out of those peanuts. Where’s the steering wheel on this fucker? Show me the starter, the gas pedal, the goddamn choke.”
“This way.” Smith turned off his flashlight; Hayduke did the same. The forward half of the cab was walled by sliding glass doors. Moonlight, starlight, night light provided suffi
cient illumination. In the soft gray gloom of the interior the men approached the operator’s wide chair upholstered in leatherette. Jostling his friend not too gently aside, Hayduke enthroned himself in the seat of power. He placed his hands on the knobbed levers at either side of the operating console, put his feet on a pair of big pedals on the floor. Grinning with delight.
“Start up the mother, Seldom. I’ll drive.” He found himself facing eastward, the way they had come. “How do we turn it?”
“Hold your horses, George. Think. First we got to start up the motors. Big noise. When we do that Love and his team’ll come charging across that there Neck like a herd of mustangs.”
Hayduke drew his revolver and set it on the little steel table, with its dials and gauges, before him.
“Nope, that won’t work. They got us outgunned about ten to one. And these glass walls won’t stop bullets. Think, George, you’re the sabotage expert.”
Hayduke thought, recalling their plans. “Okay. Right. They’re all bunched up now by that fire. So we turn on the spotlights first, keep ‘em under strict surveillance. Then we pick up the hostages, let the fuckers know the terms. Where’s the radio?”
“Keep your shirt on. Let’s wire up the hand levers first so we can stay away from all this Plexiglas.”
Hayduke nodded, becoming slightly more humble, opened his pack and pulled out a coil of wire and a fencing tool. Working quickly but pausing often to look and listen, they attached separate lengths of wire to each essential operating lever, including the horizontally moving foot pedals, and ran the wires back through the cab and onto the catwalk inside the engine room, shielded from outside gunfire by the bulkhead wall, plates of American-made A-36 carbon steel two and a half inches thick.
“Now what?”
“Escape route, George. Got your climbing ropes?”
They opened the cab’s sliding door and checked out the catwalk that led to the great boom, 310 feet long from foot to head. When the dragline reached tipover point, they’d be far out on the boom (they hoped), beginning a couple of free rappels that should break all known world speed records. They doubled two carefully inspected 150-foot Perlon ropes around the steel webwork, leaving the running ends neatly coiled on the catwalk of the boom. They cinched up rappel slings, snapped on the braking carabiners, and returned to the operator’s command post.
“We ready?”
“Reckon we are, George. Now let’s see what we got here. …” Smith flicked on his tiny light, shielding it with one hand, and studied the switches on the control console. “Spotlights, searchlight, numbers one, two and three. Control handles on the ceiling there, George, right above the chair. Get set. Radio and mike on your left.” He flicked on the radio switch. “Now you can talk to our ol’ friends out there at the picnic. It’ll sound like the voice of God Hisself. Scare the britches off ever’ one of them. You about ready?”
“Ready.” Hayduke plucked the radio microphone from its hook on the left control panel, depressed the button, cleared his throat. They heard, from the public address speakers high outside on the masts, a rumbling sound that rather resembled an avalanche of empty oil drums cascading down a steep pitch of broken cinderblock.
“Okay …”
“Do it, Seldom. Do it!”
Smith flicked on the searchlights. Hayduke swiveled the control handle on Number One, nailed Love & Co. with its blinding shaft of blue-white revelation. Smith turned on the black “Excitation” switch. Thirteen thousand eight hundred volts of electronic energy stirred the engines into life. Through the powerhouse walls came a rising vibrant roar equivalent, perhaps, to that of a hundred 747s revving up their turbo-jets. Hayduke, flushed red with triumphant exultation, spoke into the microphone, commencing his imperial monologue. “Now hear this,” he said, firmly, clearly, but not shouting, “now hear this …” From somewhere above and outside, through the walls of steel and glass, came the grotesque mimicry of Hayduke’s words amplified ten-thousandfold, reverberating across the desert wastes of northern Arizona. …
Standing at the main control console a little behind and to the right of the operator’s throne, Smith flipped the SWING switch from “Set” to “Release.” “Okay, George,” he shouted above the general uproar, “swing that there bucket around, pick up them bulldozers.”
But Hayduke, happily focusing his searchlight on Love and crew with one hand while bellowing god-like threats at the same time, did not or could not hear Seldom’s instructions. Realizing this, Smith stooped and tugged at one of the wires they’d linked to the foot pedals. At once but slowly, ponderously, GOLIATH began to revolve upon his massive base, swinging to the right, that is, toward the south and east, the great boom nearly horizontal with the ground and the giant bucket, on slack cables, dragging and banging over the sandstone, smashing a little ten-ton Schramm self-propelled drill rig, crushing a Chewy shit-green government pickup truck, and shoving a heavy-duty Caterpillar road-grading machine to the edge of the rim and over, out of sight out of mind. Smith released the HOIST brake, pulled the black knobbed lever on Hayduke’s left, and elevated the bucket about fifty feet above the surface.
Hayduke kept on talking, adjusting the searchlight control as the machine came around 180 degrees, the operator’s cab now projecting itself toward the abandoned bonfire, the defenseless Mitsubishi, the crowd of Searchers, Rescuers, construction workers and lovers scampering in a panicked herd into the sagebrush and junipers at the far west end of the Neck.
Smith released the right foot pedal, stopping the swing. He released the left HOIST lever, dropping the bucket to the stone on the farther side of the two bulldozers. Now what? Looking out through the front window, with its five-foot wiper dangling, he could see but not hear the huddled, gesticulating mob of celebrants staring up, their faces white under the glare, their little fists trembling above their little hardhat heads. Oh Jesus, he thought, they’re a-gonna be mad. I mean real pissed. Sure glad they can’t see us.
“Watch for guns,” he shouted at Hayduke. “Get ready to duck.” But Hayduke, enjoying the most glorious moments in his life since blowing up the Black Mesa coal train or rolling a boulder down on Bishop Love’s truck or maybe — maybe — since that first night in the Shady Rest Motel with Bonnie Abbzug, Hayduke didn’t seem to hear him. At any rate made no reply. Studying the console with his Mini-Mag Smith continued mechanical operations on his own.
He unlocked the drag brake, pulled the wire on the right-hand control lever, and draglined the mighty bucket toward the first Mitsubishi, cradled the tractor like a toy in the bucket’s outlandish jaws, pulled the HOIST lever and raised the bulldozer aloft for all to see and contemplate. Hayduke thundered on, speaking proudly into the mike which he held, as customary, close to his lips. Smith lowered the bucket again and scooped up the second bulldozer, elevated both and swung them over the abyss. The boom reached well beyond the north rim of the Neck. One short yank on the DUMP lever and both would fall.
Oh hey, he thought, you know this really is kind of fun. But scary too. Watching Love and friends, Smith saw two men try to sneak forward, then stop transfixed by the beam of Hayduke’s second searchlight. Any minute now they’re gonna start shootin’, Smith thought. Maybe rush us from behind too. He looked into the big rearview mirror on the right-hand side of the cab but could see only stars and moonlight in their rear. And then realized that the mirror faced south, that he was looking over the rimrock into the gulf of space. The void.
That way, he thought. The way we got to go. Bass ackwards over the edge, into the ditch two thousand five hundred feet below. Sure hope there ain’t none of my horses down there. Be a hell of a note to drop this slab of iron onto my own livestock.
He released the PROPEL brake, placed SWING and HOIST and DRAG and DUMP into “Set” or locked position. Do it? Are we really gonna do it? Thirty-seven-million-dollar little ol’ steam shovel we got here. Some folks won’t be happy about this. Some folks won’t understand. Won’t even try to understand. Well — can’
t please everybody. He grasped the wire hitched to the PROPEL lever, looped it around the hard gloved and powerful middle fingers of his right hand. With his left hand he reached up and twisted the control handle of the third searchlight, performing a quick scan of the rocks, trees and shrubs on the eastward approach to the Neck. Nobody coming from that direction — yet. But above, in the sky, not far, he saw the twinkling wing lights of an oncoming airplane. Coming in low and slowly like a firefly, preparing to land on the Super-G.E.M.’s broad track. Of course. Sheriff’s Dept.
“George!” Smith yelled. “George!” he yelled again, loud as he could. Hayduke finally looked around. Smith jerked his chin over his shoulder. “Get ready,” he shouted. “We’re goin’ over.”
Hayduke nodded. Smith had explained the necessary procedure beforehand. The G.E.M. could walk in any direction but only in a forward-facing, reverse-advancing attitude. Why? GOLIATH moved like a threatened crab, rearward only, because the cambered drive wheels of the two walking shoes rotated in one direction only, that is, away from the control cabin. The G.E.M. was a drag line excavator, after all, designed not for cross-country travel but for digging open pits, pits the size, if desired, of Lake Erie. Of Lake Titicaca. The Lake of Hell. Dis, where Satan lived, froze in ice to his bellybutton.
Smith pulled the PROPEL lever. Keeping the wire taut, he followed it through the cab through the bulkhead into the deafening clamor of the engine room. Quickly, efficiently, more by feel than sight, he dallied the line around a strut of the catwalk railing, secured it with a half hitch, and returned to Hayduke in the cabin. They listened to the thunderous grumble of the four hydraulic lifting cylinders, saw the shoes tilt, wobble, rise, reach apogee, and begin the backstroke under impulsion of the four hydraulic push cylinders, each cylinder driven by three 600-horsepower motors. Normal operating pressure: 2,500 pounds per square inch. Enough oil pressure to make a mere diesel locomotive engine explode like a fragmentation grenade.