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Bustos knew next to nothing about mining when he entered the San José copper mine on the fateful morning of August 5. Bustos was a man at home on the water, working on boats, repairing, welding and fixing water systems at the Chilean Navy shipyards. He worked there for years until a Sunday morning in February 2010, when he lost not only his job but his entire workplace, which was dragged out to sea by a thirty-foot-high wall of water, a deadly tsunami. The 8.8 earthquake that spawned the tsunami left few factories standing in the coastal city of Talcahuano, so Bustos migrated 800 miles north to the San José mine.
    Bustos, forty years old, knew the mine’s dangerous reputation but was not worried. His job often kept him in a garage with a zinc-roofed shed, on a treeless hillside repairing vehicles. Sunstroke and homesickness seemed to be his biggest dangers. Every other week, he rode the bus half the length of the nation to see his wife, Carolina. Bustos never complained about the twenty-hour ride or let his wife know his new workplace was so precarious. When a vehicle was reported to have a flat tire and mechanical problems deep inside the mine on the morning of August 5, Bustos stepped inside a pickup and was driven four miles down into the mine, deep into the earth.
    The mine was a maze of more than four miles of tunnels. As more than a century of miners had chased the rich veins of gold and copper, the tunnel was not excavated in an orderly fashion, but was a chaotic scene. Loose cables hung from the ceiling. Thick wire mesh was hung from the roof to catch falling rock. Small altars along the narrow main tunnel marked the spots where workers had been killed. In general, the men worked in groups of three or four. Some worked alone. Nearly all of them had ear protection, making it difficult to speak or hear anything but the loud noises of the working mine.
    At 1:30 pm on August 5 the miners stopped for lunch, some of them heading down to the refuge where there were benches and they could grab a boost of oxygen. Five minutes sucking oxygen was usually enough to get the men back to work or at least back to the lunch table where they shared a rare communal moment in their solitary world. While they ate, the men fired up “ la talla ”—a distinctly Chilean practice of spontaneous humor that feels like a brilliant combination of stand-up comedy and impromptu rapping. Meanwhile, an entire mountain was sagging above them.
    Franklin Lobos was the last man to enter the mine that day—probably the last one ever. As official chauffeur for the mine, Lobos ran an efficient and hilarious shuttle service—entertaining his passengers with wild stories of women and fame as he drove them into the depths of a world that looked like a set from Lord of the Rings with its sagging roof, piles of debris, and walls that looked as if they had been carved out by hand a century earlier.
    As a former soccer star in Chile, Lobos was a legend. It was like having David Byrne drive you to Heathrow or Mike Tyson as your cabdriver to JFK. Lobos, fifty-three, was now bald, round-faced and low-key. His youthful adventures made him a magical storyteller and he regaled his passengers with the glory days of his career for the soccer club Cobresal. Many of the miners were devout fans, men who grew up watching Lobos score goal after goal as he cemented his reputation on the soccerfield.
    During his 1981 to 1995 career, Lobos rose to the elite in northern Chile—a demigod who turned free kicks into a one-man show. Even before Lobos touched the ball, the entire stadium was rapt, imagining the impossible trajectory that Lobos would unleash, celebrating his abuse of physics. Lobos’s goals were so precise and unbelievable that the Chilean press dubbed him “The Magic Mortar Man,” a player capable of half-field bombs that arched exactly to their target. Even Beckham would have applauded. But soccer stars in Chile have an