This is the account of the 2010 San Jose mine rescue in Chile, after one of the longest human entrapments in history. With his coveted "rescue pass," the author was permitted access far past the police perimeter. It would be seventeen long days before the miners were discovered alive and the world press descended. It would be another fifty-two days before the miners were all successfully rescued. For eight weeks, the author conducted interviews with families, rescue workers, the mine psychologist, drill operators, scientists, and the architects of the rescue operation. He reported from an improvised office on the mountainside that was the nerve center of the rescue operation, in a makeshift container. Far below, families and loved ones lived in a cluster of tents known as Camp Hope. While the men were still underground, the author interviewed them via a crude telephone; he helped send vital supplies to them via the "paloma" (pigeon). And when the first miners were rescued on October 13, he had the first media contact with the recently freed men in a series of interviews from inside the field hospital. The book togglesbetween the dramatic chaos belowground as the men realized that their escape routes were blocked and that their shelter held only enough rations for ten men to survive seventy-two hours; and the desperate rescue efforts aboveground, the massive campaign from the top level of the Chilean government to enlist and unite brilliant minds from around the world in the San Jose rescue effort.