Free Red Helmet by Homer Hickam

preparation plant, it just didn’t add up. He had gone over the numbers with the plant manager, Stan Stanvic. He’d grown up with Stan, was on the football team with him, and he trusted him. Stan also loved Highcoal and would never do anything to hurt it. No, it had to be something else, probably just some bad coal they were passing through. It happened sometimes. But if they didn’t get through it soon, Atlas headquarters was going to go into some kind of spasm that wouldn’t be good for anybody.
    He passed phosphorescent safety placards that presented safety messages. Danger High Voltage. Caution Low Roof. Phone One Hundred Yards. He had installed a hard-wired pager system throughout the mine, each station with a telephone and monitor inside a hardened, blast-proof box. He’d also had carbon monoxide sensors installed up and down the main escapeway and air return. A coal mine was an inherently dangerous place. Cable’s men worked in the dark beneath hundreds of feet of densely packed earth and rock, much of it unstable, all of it hideously heavy. Methane leaked out of the prehistoric seams, and if the gas was allowed to pool, it only took a single spark to set it off in a massive explosion. Carbon monoxide was the silent killer, the result of a fire, sometimes so low and smoldering no one noticed. The roof, the tight confines of the face, the heavy equipment on the move, all could combine to crush or maim a miner with only a second’s inattention. Every day a miner faced injury or death in too many ways to count.
    A little past the midpoint of the main line, Cable caught sight of two lights toward Three West, an old section that had produced consistently for over forty years. In fact, his father had been killed at its face. The lights were flashing around, then one of them seemed to drop. Cable turned into the entry, but stopped when one of the lights flashed in his eyes. He climbed out of the jeep and walked bent beneath the low roof. The light stayed in his eyes. “Look away. You’re blinding me!” he yelled at the miscreant.
    The light moved off him and he saw, with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, that it belonged to Bum Wilkes, who only yesterday had gleefully given him and Song the finger. He was crouched next to a power plant that fed electricity to the machines working the face. “What are you doing, Bum?” Cable asked.
    Bum didn’t answer, but then another helmet light came on. Cable saw it belonged to a miner sitting in the gob and recognized him—Pinky Wilson, a young man who’d recently completed his red cap training. Pinky had a bloody nose.
    â€œWhat’s going on here?” Cable demanded.
    â€œNothing, Cable,” Bum said. “Ain’t that right, Pinky-winky?”
    Pinky ran his arm across his nose, leaving a scarlet trail on his shirt sleeve. “That’s right, Mr. Jordan,” he said in a shaky voice. “Nothing going on here, no, sir.”
    Cable knew the answer already, but he had to ask it. “Did Bum hit you?”
    â€œNo, sir. I tripped.”
    Cable turned back to Bum. “I asked you what you’re doing.”
    Bum held up a screwdriver. “Foreman said for us to check the power plant. Circuit breaker keeps tripping. I’m fixing it.”
    Cable inspected the substation. “You’ve disconnected the ground.”
    Bum grinned his gap-toothed grin. “Sure did. That circuit breaker ain’t gonna trip no more.”
    â€œAre you crazy, Bum? You could electrocute somebody with a stunt like that!”
    Bum’s grin vanished. “It’s been done before, ain’t nobody got hurt. You pushing everybody around here to load coal, what do you expect us to do?”
    â€œI told him it was wrong, Mr. Jordan,” Pinky said. He had his hand over his nose. “That’s why he hit me.”
    â€œYou shut your mouth or you gonna swallow some teeth,” Bum