by Jack Du Brul
Three other things caught his attention as he swept the flashlight beam around the room. One was the odd jagged stripes radiating from the hole in the ceiling and etching their way down the walls and across the floor. It looked as though the gray stone had been painted with snaggy black lines. The second thing was the grotto at the far end of the room. It was a natural formation, about four feet high and two wide, and it seemed most of the black scorch lines terminated at its entrance. The final thing, and the one that held his interest, was the body.
The corpse was obviously ancient. It was little more than black parchment skin drawn over a skeleton that had shrunk and shriveled over time. The dead figure was sitting in the meditative lotus position, with wrists resting on its knees and feet crossed over onto the opposite thigh. The only incongruity was that while the corpse maintained this most Eastern of poses, it was actually resting on its side, so one bony knee stuck up in the air and the head had detached from the neck after it no longer had support. Mercer immediately understood that the body had once sat guarding the entrance to the grotto and someone, Dillman most likely, had moved it out of the way by simply setting it aside without any thought to repositioning it.
Looking more carefully, he saw that ragged holes had been punched through the body at random places and that the skin had discolored around these spots in zigging streaks of darker char. He looked again at the pattern of lines on the walls and the spokes of darker coloration coming from the hole in the ceiling and shooting for the grotto, and he finally understood what was taking place, or at least had taken place here.
He trained the light into the grotto to verify that with a storm still expected topside he was safe, and saw the hollow behind the grotto was empty. The grotto was, in fact, a large geode, and someone—Mercer had to assume Michael Dillman—had removed the crystals that had once lined its interior. Left behind like empty honeycombs were the sockets in which the crystals had formed, and judging by their size the crystals themselves would have been the size of bananas or larger. He flashed back to the wax-paper wrapping recovered from Abe’s trash can. It had spent decades encasing something tubular about the size of a carrot. One of these crystals, he was certain.
As to the rest of the mystery, whatever molecular composition and atomic structure had gone into the crystals’ formation, they had interfered enough with the surrounding natural geomagnetic forces to turn the geode into a big fat lightning rod. The cave had been hit so many times over the past millions of years that the shock had cracked the ceiling, and the natural bolts of searing electricity had scarred the stone and eventually punched holes through the body of a Buddhist or Jain mystic who had decided to crawl in here to die, at what must have been considered a sacred place.
Dillman’s moniker for the stones now made sense.
This all came with another, troubling realization. Mike Dillman had plundered the cavern completely. Mercer scanned every inch of the phone-booth-size geode with his light, contorting his body and craning his neck to see each square inch of its otherworldly interior. There wasn’t a trace of Sample 681 left anywhere.
The locals who settled this area would have experienced the lightning striking this particular piece of mountain. Maybe they had explored the cave, but seeing the corpse had persuaded them to leave the site alone. But Dillman came along, a field geologist who, if he was anything like Mercer, would take local lore and custom into account when prospecting. He figured there was something underground attracting an inordinate amount of lightning, and he came in to investigate. Mercer didn’t know if Dillman had cleared it all out in one trip, or taken a few samples and only returned later when it was found the crystals had real value. Either way, Mercer thought as he slashed his light back and forth one last time, Dillman had been very thorough in cleaning out the cache of crystal gems. The bastard. Mercer had quickly developed a distinct dislike for the old prospector. Mercer was decades if not a century or more too late.
His light rested on the macabre remains of the long-dead mystic. The cave was too tight for someone to have dragged the body down here and set it in its current tableau, so the swami had come down to accept death willingly. Mercer wasn’t too sure of the rites of Buddhists or Jains, but he didn’t think suicide like this was strictly forbidden like it was in Islam or Christianity. He considered the spiritual and physical path this man must have taken to reach this point. He would have seen the mountain take strike after strike every time the sky opened up with bolts of blue fire. That had to have had some higher meaning to him, so the shaman came here to learn why this happened and decided this was such a sacred spot, a womb within the living rock, that he wanted it for his sepulcher. He had to recognize that it was the crystals that attracted the sky fire, so they were the real power here.
So what would he do? Just sit down and wait? Come here hoping to be struck by lightning?
“You wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, didn’t you?” Mercer said to the capsized corpse. “And to make sure that happened, I am willing to bet…”
He let his voice trail off and examined the claw-like hands, fully expecting to see the spindly fingers curled around one of the crystals, but they were empty. He swore, sure that he’d been right, and then another thought struck him. Fighting both revulsion and the returning nausea brought on by the altitude, he pried open the disarticulated skull’s locked jaw. Bits of desiccated flesh and skin sloughed off in disgusting flakes. The teeth were loose and a couple dropped out as Mercer prodded, but his fingers found purchase on something that would have been held trapped under the tongue, which was now nothing more than a scaly sac that crumbled to powder.
Mercer’s hand returned from its repulsive quest, and into the yellow beam of his flashlight came a nub of crystal the size of an acorn that was the same color, and had the same lifeless dinginess, as a ball of mud. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment. For no other reason than that treasures are always supposed to dazzle the eye, he’d expected something magical and exquisite, something with the fire of a diamond, or the mystery of a ruby or the spellbinding depth of an emerald. This stone made even the dimmest smoke quartz look luminous.
He decided right there that Dillman had taken just a small amount of this unlikely gem with him and only returned when told it had value, most likely by Herbert Hoover, and probably on his orders.
Studying the uninteresting lump, Mercer also deduced that Sample 681, the piece Abe had died for, was probably from that first foray into these mountains, but then wondered what happened to the lion’s share of the crystals after Dillman came back and wrested them from the geode.
“Shit,” he muttered in the empty echo of the chamber. He’d come here to solve one mystery and ended up with another, and one that might well not have a solution because the trail had gone as cold and as dead as the shaman staring at him from his ridiculous stiffened position. Mercer quickly righted the mummified mystic so that he could face eternity without his butt half in the air and then plucked a waterproof digital camera from his bag. He used crisp dollar bills as a reference by placing one on the floor of the geode and sticking another to a wall with a bit of chewing gum and snapped the better part of two hundred pictures. There was a photo interpretation business he knew outside of Washington that did a lot of work with the National Reconnaissance Office and would be able to stitch the pics together to form a three-dimensional composite of the chamber and extrapolate its exact volume. In this way he would know how many pounds of crystal Dillman had removed.
For now, though, his goal was to run a battery of tests on the sample he did have. He slipped the lump of cloudy crystal into a plastic baggie. Sealed it. Slipped that into another, sealed that one, and then finally slipped it into a third before stuffing it into a zippered pocket.
He exited the way he had entered, crawling like a commando on his elbows and the outsides of his boots, slithering inch by inch but mindful of the dust. The initial burst of adrenaline had long since worn off. His head pounded and his mout
h felt stuffed with cotton. Using just the flashlight Mercer couldn’t tell how much his vision was diminished, but the pressure behind his eyes told him it was fading fast. And he was bone-achingly exhausted. He knew that if he paused for a second while lying on the cave floor he’d be asleep before he could stop himself.
Contemplating the slog out of the mountains drained him even further.
When the cave opened up enough for him to stand, he clicked off his light. Outside, the sky remained murky as more storm clouds moved through the valleys. Mercer heard the distant rumble of thunder, and he purposely touched the crystal nestled in his pocket. He wondered how attractive to lightning it really was.
He clicked his climbing harness onto the rope and gave the line a tug to warn the others he was coming back. He got a quick tug in reply. By the gray-faced TAG Heuer he’d worn for twenty years, he saw he’d been inside the cave for forty minutes. Sykes would be anxious.
He started climbing back across the cliff, certain that the security team would be shortening the line every few minutes to keep him properly belayed.
Another crump of thunder sounded, an odd echoing clap that hit concussively. Suddenly Mercer heard Booker Sykes shout, “Incoming!”
It wasn’t thunder, but the hollow whomp of a mortar round being fired from somewhere out in the valley.
Mercer turned to look and saw a puff of smoke being shredded by the wind several hundred yards away. That momentary reflex—to find the source of the danger—cost him his perch on the slick rock. With an irreversible drop, Mercer fell and his body pendulumed at the end of the safety line, arcing across the stone so quickly it was all he could do to keep his legs pedaling and stop himself from getting smeared against the cliff. Above him came the ferocious response to the mortar shot from Sykes and his team. They poured a massive amount of lead down the valley even before the mortar finished its parabola and exploded to the right and below the team.
Mercer came to the end of his Tarzan-like swing along the cliff and twisted quickly before he started arcing back. Rather than let gravity do the work, this time he pushed himself hard, knowing he was as inviting a target as a metal duck at a shooting gallery. From below came another blast from the mortar, followed by the mechanical crash of Kalashnikovs joining the fray. Hooded fighters emerged from cover and started firing. Each long pull on the AKs’ triggers blew a jet of flame that looked like rocket exhaust in the dishwater-gray pre-storm light.
The protective detail ducked as the second mortar round came arrowing in, landing much closer as the crew zeroed on their target. The next round would land right where the men defended the ridge and Mercer’s anchor point.
With adrenaline once again beating back the symptoms of altitude sickness, Mercer raced across the front of the cliff with the buzz of bullets swarming around him. Bits of rock exploded off the wall when struck by the copper-jacketed rounds, and stung like wasp strikes. He could feel the momentum running out of his arc as he neared its apogee, and he pushed harder, pounding his feet into the rock to gain precious inches, his hand outstretched, and his fingers touching but not finding purchase on the lip of stone ringing the cave.
Like a cat, Mercer reversed himself. As bullets peppered the cliff he ran flat out across its face once again, punishing the safety rope as it chafed against the stone where it was anchored. Sykes and the others tried to provide cover fire as best they could, but twenty native fighters were shooting up from the valley below; no matter how accurate the team was, the Afghanis continued to advance.
The mortar popped again, and this time the Americans had no choice but to abandon their position. The round would likely be coming in for a direct hit.
Mercer was forced to swing back again when the line came up hard against his climbing harness, and for a second attempt he ran across the cliff face at the cave entrance, shouting incoherently, his entire focus on making it to its relative safety. He was almost there when the mortar round impacted with a deafening blast, directly where Sykes had tied him off to a slab of rock. Stone chips and smoke boiled into the air.
Mercer paid no attention to the distraction, and stretched himself like an outfielder going for a pop-up. He had built up so much momentum in his headlong plunge that he was able to hook one forearm into the cave, followed by the other. Mercer fought until he pulled his lower body onto the outer lip of the cavern floor. When he glanced up the cliff face, he beheld a terrifying sight. The thousand-pound anchor boulder was now tumbling from its perch, starting to bounce down the cliff, his nylon line still knotted around its bulk. Mercer only had seconds. His hands were stiff from the cold and hurting from the climb, and yet they flew toward the steel carabiner on his belt. The boulder streaking past the cave opening would tear him from his perch, tossing him bodily down to the valley floor below. With a click the D link opened and was torn from his hands so violently by the plummeting stone that it ripped off his right glove.
Mercer rolled backward, into deeper cover. With his lungs pumping and his heart pounding in his chest, he was on such an adrenaline high that for a giddy moment he actually laughed at the fluke of his escape. Just one quarter second more and he would have been hurled down the mountain.
Bullets from the phalanx of Kalashnikovs continued to buzz and zip all around him, some pinging off the stone and vanishing farther down the cave. He slid back until they were no longer a threat. Several mortar rounds exploded near the entrance and filled the cavern with dust.
Mercer was safe for the moment, but he also knew he was trapped. Equally disturbing, the presence of the mortar told him these men had lain in ambush and waited until Mercer emerged from the cave in order to catch them all off guard. It was only Sykes’s quick counterfire that bought Mercer the time to find cover, and his bodyguards a chance to escape. Mercer figured his team would seek high ground and a more defensible position, but the large number of attackers meant eventually they would have to withdraw.
And that left him on his own. The Afghanis knew where he was. These were mountain people who could wait out an enemy for years if necessary. Mercer knew his odds of climbing down undetected were virtually zero, so if he didn’t find a way out of this mess quickly, he was going to die in this desolate corner of the globe. The world’s anus, indeed.
He really hated Michael Dillman now.
Mercer stayed low and moved deeper into the mountain, abandoning his pack but keeping his camera’s memory card and the sample when the cavern walls tightened. The ping and whine of ricochets died off to silence, and the mortar, too, had gone quiet. The Taliban or smugglers or whoever they were didn’t have any targets for the moment. He dropped to his knees and began crawling, and then down to his belly to slither when the tunnel constricted further. He passed the spot where Dillman had hit his head. His stomach was knotting up again and his headache was back. His eyesight was narrowing so that a gray halo ringed everything in view, and the halo was growing darker and thicker with each passing minute. On this second trip through the tunnel, however, Mercer noticed evidence that lightning had streaked through the passage, for the walls showed blackened char lines that ran up toward the geode chamber.
He needed a fraction of the time to reach the cave’s terminus this trip, and he didn’t waste precious moments looking at anything other than the collapsed part of the ceiling that had given way after aeons of being struck by lightning. Mercer felt the air blowing down the shaft from the surface. The going would be tight, but for the first ten or so feet he could see he had enough room to maneuver his body. He hoisted himself onto the heap of loose stone, some slabs as large as automobiles, and reached up and found a handhold just above the ceiling level. Mercer pulled himself up, kicking his feet into the rock to find traction. He pressed his back to the side of the chimney and reached up for another handhold, which broke off in his fingers. He dropped it and groped for another. He pried away several more weak stones before finding one he could use to haul himself up another couple of feet.
At times, the path sh
aped by the unimaginable force of lightning was so tortured and twisted he had to bend like a contortionist to keep climbing. At others, the chimney tightened so it felt like he had to dislocate a shoulder to work it through. If there was any saving grace, the air was fresher the higher he went, and while it didn’t contain much additional oxygen, even an extra little bit gave him strength.
Mercer could discern the pain of his body being pushed too far. Below him, dislodged pieces of stone rattled and pinged as he forged a path up the chimney. When he finally spotted daylight, Mercer could hardly believe his eyes. He was sure the climb would take much longer, and yet the evidence was right above him. The sky was the color of old pewter, but it had never looked better. He fought and clawed those last feet, straining to pull himself from the ground’s cloying embrace.
A moment later, all his enthusiasm vanished. It was as if fate had played the cruelest trick. Above him, the very top of the chimney reduced to a hole smaller than his head. A raccoon might have been able to squeeze through it, or maybe a young child, but there was no way a man his size would ever climb free.
Mercer wanted to scream with frustration, and he felt himself sag in the narrow space. With no energy remaining, he wondered if he would become lodged in this tight passageway, unable to free himself.
Mercer took a deep breath, and when he looked up he saw a crack along one edge of the hole. He reached up and worked one finger into it, and then a second. Mercer heaved at the crack, and a small piece crumbled like a rotten tooth. Erosion had weakened the rock, so it had become friable like sandstone. He clawed until more chunks of stone fell away below him, and he was able to wriggle one arm and part of his shoulder out of the hole.
