The Medusa stone

by Jack Du Brul

  "Oh shit, we're going to lose it." Cullins heard the unperterbable General Kolwicki shout.

  "That's affirmative, General," Cullins said as he watched Medusa start falling toward earth.

  Two hundred and sixty miles below the Atlantis, General Reginald Kolwicki watched America's most expensive military accident unfold. In just three and a half minutes, Medusa went from crowning achievement to unrecoverable debacle. Telemetry from the positron gun platform confirmed that the satellite was in a degrading orbit and that it would not respond to ground commands to fire its maneuvering rockets. It was falling, and there was nothing the forty assembled men and women in the control room could do to prevent it.

  "Try the autonomous flight program," Kolwicki said to a computer technician who'd been typing furiously, trying to regain control of Medusa.

  "No response, sir. The central processor is off-line."

  "Are you getting anything from the damned thing?"

  "Positron gun is on stand-by, and all encryption routines are nominal."

  "Great. Medusa is about to burn up in the atmosphere, but it wants to still take pictures and keep the data a secret." Kolwicki growled at the irony. "How much longer?"

  "Medusa will enter the atmosphere in twenty-five seconds. Total loss in thirty seconds at the most."

  "Shit." A career military man who saw his career burning up in outer space, Kolwicki had no options. "What's the bird's position?"

  "Over North Africa, tracking southeast. It'll burn up above the Indian Ocean."

  "Might as well turn on the positron gun as she goes down. Maybe we'll gain something from this snafu." Kolwicki felt like a ship's captain knowing his command was going under and still ordering full steam ahead.

  "Sir?"

  "Just do it," he snapped.

  Fingers flying in a blur, the tech snapped off several commands. The plutonium reactor keyed up, beaming supercharged positrons back to earth in a swath that cut across northern Africa from Chad, across Sudan and Ethiopia and finally to Djibouti and Somalia. In all, it took "pictures" of two thousand square miles, but its data was incomplete. Several passes over the same area would be necessary teep but still radiated the heat like mirrors. Blisters of sweat appeared on the men's faces and exposed arms for the first time. They shuffled their feet in the flaky stones at the bottom of the wash, waiting for their leader to give them the order to dispatch the interloper.

  Jakob's chest rose and fell in a rapid cadence. His heart felt like it was breaking his ribs with each beat. Somewhere beyond his pelvis, in the sea of pain that had once been his legs, his shattered knee throbbed with an unholy pounding. Already the joint had swollen to twice its normal size. Each time his heart beat, the sharp bone fragments ground against each other, further mincing the tendons and ligaments. Through cracked and bleeding lips, he muttered long forgotten pieces of scripture, freely quoting the Talmud and the Old and New Testaments, mangling faiths in an attempt to supplicate a god, any god.

  "Lo, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." It sounded more like poetry than prayer.

  "Thou shall not kill," he screamed, but the sound was little more than a dry croak.

  "You are a spy for America," the young terrorist leader accused again, sliding closer to Jakob. "Only your death has worth to us."

  "It's not true," Jakob Steiner cried.

  "You were sent here to steal from us, and we were sent to stop you."

  "Oh, God, please, I only study the past. I don't care about--"

  The cadre leader, a man who called himself Mahdi, crashed the butt of his rifle against Steiner's head just at the hair line. The blow was not enough to kill, and Jakob screamed loudly, curling into a ball in a purely reflexive gesture.

  Mahdi stood and swung his weapon down again, missing Steiner's head but breaking his collarbone with the blow. Like jackals, the others sprang on him, raining blows on the defenseless scientist. Steiner screamed for only a few seconds before being beaten into unconsciousness. Soon Steiner was dead, but Mahdi allowed his men to continue for another minute before calling an end to the assault.

  "Enough," he said, and his men backed away from the bloody corpse. "Strip the body and then we'll return to his camp to erase all evidence of his presence."

  Mahdi tossed aside his old and worn boots and replaced them with Steiner's before joining his troops for the run back to the base camp. There were a number of items that would fetch good money on the black market in Sudan, and he wanted to make sure his undisciplined men did not ruin them in their frenzy of destruction.

  Arlington, Virginia Four Months Later

  Philip Mercer was in the habit of waking just before dawn so he could watch the pearly light seep through the skylight above his bed. These early-morning minutes were an important time for him. It was when he did his best thinking, oftentimes coalescing thoughts that had come to him in his sleep.

  The night before, he'd helped his friend, Harry White, celebrate his eightieth birthday. The octogenarian was sleeping off the night's excesses on a downstairs couch. Mercer hadn't indulged nearly as much as Harry, so his head felt reasonably clear, but this morning his mind was troubled. He wanted to stay relaxed, but the muscles in his legs and back began to tning blois profession. Within the hard-rock mining industry, his capabilities were almost legendary. A recent article in a trade publication credited him with saving more than four hundred lives following mining disasters and in the next paragraph detailed the more than three billion dollars in mineral finds he'd made for various mining concerns all over the globe. His fees had made him a wealthy man, and maybe that was part of his problem. He'd become too comfortable.

  The thrill of making a new find or the adrenaline rush of delving into the earth to pull out trapped men had begun to pale. Since his struggle against Ivan Kerikov and his ecoterrorist allies in Alaska last October, Mercer was having a hard time returning to his normal life. He felt a hollowness that just wouldn't go away. He wanted to believe he hadn't become addicted to that kind of mortal danger, but it was difficult to convince himself. Pitting his reputation against the normal hazards of his career didn't seem to be enough anymore.

  His street was lined with identical three-story town-houses, close enough to the city center to be convenient but far enough away to remain quiet. Unlike the others, Mercer lived in his alone and had done extensive remodeling to turn it into his home. The lion's share of his income went into its mortgage. The front quarter of the building was open from floor to roof with his bedroom overlooking the atrium. An antique spiral staircase connected the levels. He dressed quickly and spun down to retrieve the morning paper from the front step.

  The second floor had two small guest rooms and a balconied library with a view of the tiled mezzanine. It also contained what had become Mercer's living room, a reproduction of an English gentleman's club that he and his friends affectionately called The Bar. It had two sectional leather couches, several matching chairs, a television, and a large ornate mahogany bar fronted by six dark cane stools. The lump under a blanket on one of the couches was Harry. Behind the bar was a circa 1950s lock-lever refrigerator and shelving for enough liquor to shame most commercial drinking establishments. The automatic coffee maker on the back bar had already brewed a barely potable sludge.

  Seated with his coffee and paper, Mercer tried to read through the day's fare. The Post led with another story about the fatal bombing at Jerusalem's Western Wall six weeks ago. Defense Minister Chaim Levine, a hard-line candidate for the upcoming elections, said that if he were leading the country, such attacks would never happen, and if they did, the investigation would take days, not weeks. He was calling for a draconian crackdown on all Palestinians and a suspension of the latest peace talks. Mercer read that another victim had died in the hospital, bringing the death toll to one hundred and sixty-seven. The destabilized Middle East held his attention for only a couple of paragraphs, and he slid the rest of the paper out of reach.

  Harry still snored from t
he couch. His rattling breathing sounded like the explosive grunts of some large animal. He gave a startled snort, and then he was awake, yawning broadly.

  Mercer smiled. "Good morning. How do you feel on the first day of the rest of your life?"

  "Jesus Christ," Harry rasped "What time is it?"

  Mercer looked at his watch. "Six-thirty."

  "I liked it better when you and Aggie were together. You never came downstairs until after nine." Harry immediately recognized his gaffe. "Oh, shit, I'm sorry. That was a rotten thing to say."

  Aggie Johnston had been ged b but Aggie reminded you of the actual price you've been paying. You haven't been yourself since you two split."

  Mercer considered Harry's words. "I've been thinking it has to do with the danger we went through. It was the excitement I was missing."

  "I'm sure that's part of it. I never felt more alive than during the waar. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but there was a tingle at the base of his neck and he didn't know why. He swung back and followed the retreating maitre d' into the dining room.

  The watcher was not certain if she had been seen; but her orders were clear. While Mercer's glance had passed right by her as she sat unassumingly in a corner thumbing a Washington guide book, she felt it wasn't worth the chance.

  She reached into the pocket of her skirt, making sure her motions were masked by the folds of her sweater and double-clicked the micro-burst transmitter all of the team carried. Seconds later, another member of their detail walked in, alerted by a similar transmission from their cell leader. The woman did not acknowledge her teammate. She simply finished what little remained of her diet soda and signaled the waitress for her bill.

  While no surveillance is immune from detection, usually no more than ten people are needed to maintain a twenty-four-hour watch on even the most paranoid target. Such was their interest in Mercer that all twelve operatives stationed in Maryland were assigned to shadow him and report on his every movement. As the woman walked out of the hotel to catch a taxi, she realized she hadn't been told who Philip Mercer was or what the interest in him could be.

  "Dr. Mercer, I presume?" Prescott Hyde laughed at his tired joke as he proffered a hand.

  Hyde was in his early fifties, almost completely bald, with a fleshiness that showed self-indulgence. His face was dominated by a large chiseled nose that on someone else would have been distinctive but on him simply looked big. His chin was soft and his cheeks were rounded, giving him an open, comforting quality. But as Mercer shook his hand, he noticed that Hyde's eyes were hard behind gold-rimmed glasses.

  "A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Undersecretary."

  "I thought we dispensed with that yesterday. Please, it's Bill. My middle name is William, thank God. I can't imagine going through life being called Prescott." Hyde flashed another smile. His teeth were perfect. Capped.

  Until they ordered, the conversation was dominated by Hyde, who turned out to be a gracious host, talking about the latest scandals within the halls of power with an insider's knowledge and a gossip's love of speculation. Mercer ordered another gimlet while they waited for their food. Hyde drank sparkling water.

  "I wanted to make this a leisurely get-together," Hyde said as their drinks were brought. "A sort of familiarization session because I have a feeling we will be working with each other for a while. However, I have a pressing appointment a little later on, so I am afraid our time is short."

  Hyde seemed to talk as if his words were thought out in advance, written down and practiced.

  "I understand. I'm afraid my afternoon is rather full too." Paul Gordon, the former jockey who owned Tiny's, ran a horseracing book in Arlington. With the Kentucky Derby only two weeks away, he and Mercer had some serious strategizing to do.

  "All the better, then." Hyde leaned back in his chair. "Tell me what you know about Africa."

  Mercer chuckled. "To begin with, I was born there, in the Congo. My father was a mine manager and my mother was a Belgian national. I've been back probably twenty-five times, and while I don't speak any native languages other than a bit of Swahili, my French is good enough to getconomic outlook, we're going to be here for a while."

  "I wasn't aware that you were born there, but Sam Becker told me that you're somewhat of an expert."

  "Not really. I'm a miner, and Africa happens to be where most of the action is." Mercer didn't tell Hyde that he loved the continent. Despite all the cruelty, pain, and suffering he'd witnessed there and had experienced himself, he truly loved the land and its people. His parents had been killed by Africans in one of the many rampages, but he never once blamed the people for what happened. He smiled remembering the Tutsi woman who had hidden him in her village for nearly six months after her parents' murder. When he recalled how she'd died during the ethnic cleansings in Rwanda in the mid-nineties, his smile faded.

  "What do you know about Eritrea?" Hyde asked.

  The question surprised him. Eritrea was a backwater even by African standards, and Mercer couldn't guess Hyde's interest.

  "Located just north of the Horn of Africa on the Red Sea coast, bordered by Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. They've been independent from Ethiopia since 1993. Their struggle was a Cold War battleground between the U.S. and the Soviets in terms of arms and aid. Currently, Eritrea has nothing in terms of raw materials, industries, or hope. I've heard the people live on little more than the pride of being independent for the first time in modern history."

  "Very true, very true." Hyde nodded at Mercer's assessment. "There's a chance you can change all of that if you're interested."

  A waiter took their lunch orders before Hyde continued. "While most Eritreans are agrarian, cattle mostly, there is one major urban center, Asmara, the capital. It was the only city left standing after the war. The country's in shambles. Per capita income hovers around one hundred and forty dollars a year. Still, the land can support the three million people living there, so starvation has yet to become a problem. But there are a quarter of a million Eritreans living in the Sudan, refugees deliberately not allowed to return because the influx of that many people would shatter the struggling economy. It's a sore spot for the government because they want to bring the displaced home. However, they refuse aid, not wanting to become a debtor nation, and unless some miracle economic boom takes place, those people are going to rot in some of the worst refugee camps on the continent."

  From his briefcase, Hyde withdrew a thick manila file folder bound with rubber bands. "You have to understand that what I am about to tell you is strictly confidential. In fact, some of this information has only recently been declassified from 'Top Secret' down to 'Eyes Only.' " Hyde slid some photographs from the folder across the table, pulling his hand back quickly as if the images could somehow contaminate him.

  Mercer had been to Africa, knew the people, and was not immune to their suffering. He had seen some of the worst hellholes on earth while in Rwanda during their civil war. He could still feel the bony limbs of children he'd carried to aide stations where the struggle for food and medicine was a losing battle. He had seen the ravages of disease--cholera, malaria, and AIDS. He had watched human skeletons shuffle in miles-long lines escaping one war and walking into the teeth of another.

  While these images haunted the darkest nightmares his sleep could generate, they could not prepare him for the six photographs before him. One showed an old man lying against a rusted drum, his legs looking like gnarled twigs. A fefferent from the other Medusa pictures.

  "One of the scientists who built the satellite was a geology buff. A rock hound is what he called himself. Anyway, while modeling for the system, he was tasked with developing computer simulations of what Medusa's potential would be. Because so much of South Africa's underground makeup, its geology, has been studied by mining companies, it's one of the best-catalogued regions for what lies under the earth's surface. What you are seeing there is what they believed the area around Kimberley, South Africa, would look like if Medusa were to use its
positron camera on it."

  Mercer understood and then he saw it.

  First known as Colesberg Kopje because of the small hillock on the African veldt that was nothing more than a blister on the open savanna, Kimberley had grown into a boom town before the turn of the twentieth century when diamonds were discovered there. Within a few years, a city had grown up on the plain and germinated the fortunes of such notables as Cecil Rhodes and the DeBeers Corporation. The diamonds had long since run out at Kimberley, but in their wake, the miners had left a mile-wide, mile-deep hole in the earth. It was the mouth of what was known as a kimberlite pipe.

  Kimberlite was the name given to a diamond mine's lodestone. In fact, Mercer had a large chunk of it in his home office that acted as his good luck piece. The two minerals went hand in hand, much like gold and quartz. The kimberlite pipes are channels to the earth's heart, openings where molten material, including diamonds, are thrust up toward the surface under tremendous pressure. Born in the planet's liquid interior, diamonds are nothing more than elemental carbon, no different from coal or the graphite found in pencils, except that nature spent a little more time cooking the atoms and compressing them into perfect crystals. From their first discovery on the Indian subcontinent, Mercer knew, diamonds have had the power to captivate men and drive nations to war. Their dazzling beauty is the mirror reflection of our own greed, and their purity is the foil to humanity's ugliness.

  Placing the Kimberley computer projection next to one of the actual Medusa pictures, Mercer quickly traced nearly a dozen similar features between the two. Rather than let his imagination run wild, he studied them more closely. But the truth was right there. His heart raced, and his fingers and palms began to sweat as excitement tore into him. Such a discovery was made once in a lifetime, and Hyde was setting it right in front of him. Buried in the wasteland of northern Eritrea was a kimberlite pipe very much like the one discovered accidentally a century and a half ago in South Africa. He looked up at Hyde, his amazed expression verifying Hyde's suspicion.