The Medusa Stone pm-3

by Jack Du Brul

  Dick Henna grabbed the phone the instant the President hung up. Dialing quickly, he looked at the President when the connection was being made. “I’ve got to warn Mercer. He’s got no idea he’s sitting in the middle of a three-thousand-year-old battle.”

  “Calm down, Dick,” the President said in a reassuring voice. “You know him better than I do, but Mercer has proven more than once that he can take care of himself.”

  “Yeah, but not when he’s facing an ambush from two different fronts by people who have a very old score to settle.” The phone was pressed tightly to his head, his knuckles whitening with the pressure.

  Valley of Dead Children

  Northern Eritrea

  Mercer fell asleep a few times during his vigil, jerking himself awake only seconds after nodding off. His eyes were red-rimmed and scratchy from the fine particles of dust that invaded the dilapidated camp building. At eleven, knowing that if he drifted off again he wouldn’t wake until dawn, he walked out onto the lonely plain, taking the sat-phone with him. The temperature dipped only slightly as night smothered Africa. The Milky Way was like a great smear across the sky. Wind moved silently across the landscape. The loudest noise he heard was the sound of his own footfalls on the cracked desert floor.

  With about ten minutes before his appointed contact time, he activated the satellite phone and it rang almost immediately. Startled and wondering why the contact had come early, he pressed the button for the receive mode. “Mercer.”

  “Dr. Mercer, it’s good to hear your voice again.” It was the man who’d spoken to him in Asmara. Mercer hoped he’d been killed in the Sudanese attack on the Ambasoira Hotel.

  “Can’t say the same,” he replied bitterly.

  The caller ignored Mercer’s quip. “I’ve tried calling several times, but your phone was deactivated. We have a great deal to discuss. Much has happened since our last conversation.”

  Maybe it was that he was standing near the mine’s entrance and had already done what was demanded of him or maybe it was because he’d been pushed too far, but Mercer couldn’t hold back his anger, couching it only slightly in sarcasm when he spoke. “Yeah, like you getting your ass kicked by a couple of amateurs trying to steal my underwear. They’d tried the night before. Fortunately, the maid scared them off with her mop. Looks like kidnapping defenseless old men is about the limit of your abilities. Maybe you ought to practice a bit more. Try taking candy from babies for a while — I hear it’s tougher than it sounds.”

  “Your humor is strained,” the voice said. “Perhaps this will dry it up entirely. Listen very carefully.”

  There was a short pause and Mercer heard a new voice. Harry! He sounded distant, as though he had been recorded and the tape played into the phone. Through the distortion, Mercer could still feel the terror in the old man’s voice. He sounded as if he’d been through hell.

  “Mercer, you’ve got to find that diamond mine. They’ve told me that if you don’t reach it in the next two weeks, they’re going to start cutting me.” Harry’s voice quavered. “They’re keeping me in a rat hole with some shit that’s worse than Boodles. I don’t know how much of this I can take.” Harry was cut off and the terrorist returned to the phone. “That should satisfy you that your friend is still alive. I’m maintaining our end of the bargain, how about you?”

  “What did Harry mean about two weeks? I thought I still had four.”

  “Not anymore. You will give us the mine’s location in two weeks or Harry White will be killed.”

  “I’m not even close yet,” Mercer lied, looking at the black silhouette of the mine’s head gear in the moon glow. Two weeks? That wasn’t enough time to come up with any sort of workable plan and he knew it. Shit.

  “That is your and Mr. White’s problem, not mine.”

  “I have a lead,” Mercer offered, adding a pleading note to his voice. “From a nomad family I met a couple of days ago, but I need more time. For Christ’s sake, this is a big country! You’ve been reasonable until now. Give me an additional week. In three weeks I’ll have the mine’s location, I swear.”

  “You have two.” There was a finality in the reply. “Now, there’s the problem of what happened in Asmara that we have to discuss.”

  “I didn’t kill your man.”

  “I know that, Dr. Mercer. As we both now realize, there is another party interested in our activities, and it may become necessary for me to protect you and your team. You will tell me where you are right now.”

  “Do you really think I am going to trust your sudden concern in our well-being?”

  “Our interest in your welfare is well documented. Hence the two dead Africans I left in your hotel room,” the caller said placidly. “I consider you an employee and I want you to succeed. Tell me where you are.”

  “No. You want that mine and I want Harry White. That’s our agreement, and you’re going to leave me alone until I find it.” Mercer’s voice hardened.

  “And the Sudanese?”

  “I’ll worry about them myself.”

  “You know I can’t make you tell me,” the other man conceded. “But when we next speak, I will have another tape recording and you’ll hear Harry White losing his left hand.” The phone went dead.

  “Shit!” Mercer punched off and then dialed the satellite phone he’d given to Habte.

  “Selam?” Habte answered immediately. As discussed before they separated, he’d been waiting for Mercer’s call.

  “Habte, it’s me. I think I just screwed up with the kidnappers. They’re making some threats and I believe them.” Mercer was replaying the conversation in his head when he considered something odd Harry had said. Some shit worse than Boodles. What the hell was the old bastard talking about? “Listen, I’m not going to say too much, but I’m going to need that excavator sooner than planned. Can you start at first light?”

  “Yes, the vehicle’s owner has been working here repairing roads, but he told the city’s council that he would have to leave at a moment’s notice.”

  “Making a little money on the side?”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with that. Nacfa is in disrepair and excavating equipment is rare in Eritrea.”

  “As long as he’s got full tanks when you get here,” Mercer cautioned.

  “He will. We also have the other equipment you had me pick up before you arrived in Eritrea.”

  “Good. We’re going to need that generator and the portable floodlights.” While the sat-phones were not secure from eavesdropping, Mercer felt sure that no one was listening to this particular frequency at this particular time. However, he wasn’t going to take any unnecessary risks by broadcasting their location in clear. He gave Habte map coordinates roughly ten miles from the Valley of Dead Children, planning to send Gibby to guide them in the last few miles. “What’s your ETA?”

  “It will take us at least a day. That’s rough country and the Adobha River may already be flooded. It would be best if Gibby met us at noon the day after tomorrow to be certain.”

  “Understood,” Mercer said, still thinking about Harry White. Boodles was a brand name of gin. What was he doing with gin if his captors were Muslim and thus forbidden alcohol? Obviously, Harry was trying to tell him something, but Mercer was too tired to put it together.

  * * *

  Mercer woke Gibby as soon as it was light enough to see. He’d gotten just enough sleep to satisfy his body’s immediate needs, but he felt slow and lethargic in the mounting heat of the dawn. Gibby agreed that he could stay in the valley assisting Mercer until the following morning and still make the rendezvous with Habte, Selome, and the bulk of their equipment.

  After a quick breakfast, Mercer inspected the head gear’s framework while Gibby unpacked all the rope they had brought with them. The rust on the steel struts was only surface accumulation; the metal underneath still appeared strong. There were only three fifty-foot lengths of rope in the Toyota, but if they attached them to the tow cable on the Land Cruiser, they would
have enough to get Mercer to the bottom of the shaft.

  He rigged a series of pulleys using the metal frame, wrapping the struts with wads of tape and smearing them with oil drained from the Toyota’s sump to prevent the sharp metal from fraying the rope. He showed Gibby how to belay the harness Mercer had fashioned and devised a quick series of verbal and tugging signals for communication.

  “Remember, Gibby, you’re all that’s keeping me from a quick drop to hell,” Mercer warned, standing at the threshold of the old mine opening. Gibby had proved to be an able assistant, but Mercer still didn’t like the idea of trusting his life to the teenager. The black pit seemed to want to suck him into its depths.

  Mercer took several breaths and stepped off the crumbling edge, hanging above the hundred-and-sixty-foot void. Gibby struggled for a moment, shifting his grip, so Mercer dropped a few quick inches. “You okay?” Mercer gasped, a sickly smile on his face.

  “Yes, effendi,” Gibby grinned. “Your rope tangle makes you weigh just a little bit.”

  The pulley system made it so Gibby was supporting only about fifty pounds of actual weight, but Mercer made sure the rope was still secured to the Land Cruiser’s winch. When the time came to haul him out, Gibby would need the power of the Toyota to pull him to safety.

  “All right, lower away.”

  Mercer dropped into a black world, the square of light over his head receding almost too fast. He switched on a six-cell flashlight and made certain his mining helmet was planted securely on his head. Bits of debris rained around him, pinging against the helmet and plunging down the vertical shaft. “Slower,” he yelled, bracing his feet against the irregular wall to give him just a little slack in the line. He gave two quick tugs to reinforce his verbal command, and his progress slowed dramatically.

  Down he went, the makeshift bosun’s chair digging painfully into the back of his legs, the flashlight casting a white spot before his eyes. He trained it below his swaying perch, but the light could penetrate only a few feet. There should have been a steel guide rail bolted into the rock face to stabilize the skips and cages but there wasn’t, and Mercer could see no evidence that one had ever been installed. It made him wonder just how far the earlier attempt at digging out the diamonds had progressed.

  There had been no evidence of a crushing mill or separation facilities at the surface camp. Since they hadn’t even installed a proper hoist system, it was possible the mine hadn’t been worked for very long. Yet a shaft this deep would have taken a year or more to dig, considering its age and the quality of equipment available a half century ago.

  He came to the first drift roughly eighty feet down. This was a horizontal working passageway the miners had dug off the central shaft in order to tunnel into the mineral-laden ore. From this depth, the shaft’s surface opening appeared to be no larger than a storm drain. Mercer twisted himself across the open shaft until his boots landed firmly on the shelf that led off into the living rock. Whoever had opened the mine knew enough not to bore the main shaft straight into the volcanic vent, but rather sink a hole next to it and from there tunnel into the kimberlite ore. Mercer gave the signal for Gibby to hold the line where it was and unhooked himself from his sling, tying it to a wooden support beam so it wouldn’t dangle back over the void.

  The flashlight cut into the gloom, revealing a long tunnel that was roughly twelve feet wide, six high, and God alone knew how long. Mercer played the light along the ceiling, surprised not to see any bats. In fact, he hadn’t noticed the guano smell so typical to abandoned mines. Like the Valley of Dead Children, the mine too was devoid of life. A chill ran up his spine that had nothing to do with the coolness of the subterranean passage.

  He walked fifty yards down the drift before coming to the first cross cut, a right-angle passage roughly the same height as the drift by only half the width. For a moment Mercer considered taking this branch, but thought it better to keep to the main drive. Another cross cut appeared on his left after only a few more yards and then a third shortly after that. As he kept exploring, he again played the beam of the flashlight on the hanging wall — the ceiling, in mining parlance — and saw that bolts hadn’t been driven into it to help its stability. The rock was mostly rhyolite and probably didn’t need the bolts, but it deepened his concern. There was something very wrong about this mine.

  He discovered a winze after two hundred yards, an open hole in the floor that dropped directly to the next level down. Such small vertical shafts connected two mining levels and frequently dumped into a haulage, a passage used for the removal of mined material. The wooden railing around the winze was dry and broken, and a descending ladder bolted to one side looked so weak it wouldn’t support a mouse, let alone a man. He continued on. By the time he reached the working face of the drift, fifteen hundred feet from the main shaft, he’d passed a total of eight cross cuts, two winzes, and a raise, an aperture in the hanging wall over his head that meant there was another level above him, one not directly joined to the principal shaft.

  His original estimate of the size of the workings was way off the mark. Without exploring the cross cuts, he could only guess that they at least doubled the amount of mined tunnels from just this one drift. There was still a further hundred-foot drop to the bottom of the shaft, and there was no telling how many more drifts there were. Depending on the stability of the rock and the way in which the drifts were driven, there could be several more miles of tunnels shooting off the original bore.

  Mercer spent fifteen minutes at the working face minutely examining the rocks. The ore from the last explosive shot hadn’t been cleared when the miners were pulled from the stopes, evidence that they had left in a hurry. Miners never, ever, left unprocessed ore in a mine. He sifted through the debris on the foot wall — the term for the floor — using brute strength to lever aside some of the larger chunks so he could scrutinize the rock face. No matter how he held his light, he could see no evidence of the opaque blue ground, the kimberlite, that would yield the diamonds. He figured about a year had been wasted here with nothing to show for it. This drift had been a bust, worthless.

  Back at the main shaft, he tugged on the bosun’s chair, signaling Gibby, and slipped into the harness, cinching it tight around his legs and across his waist. He jerked twice more and stepped out into the void, spinning like a dervish as the rope took up the strain and unkinked itself. His descent was dizzying, but Mercer had done this before and felt no ill effects as Gibby lowered him farther into the earth.

  He ignored the next three drifts, knowing he could explore them if necessary on his way back to the surface. As he expected, at the bottom of the shaft lay a twisted pile of machinery and hundreds of feet of braided steel cable. When the mine had been abandoned, the men working it had dumped their equipment into the hole rather than allow it to be taken by their enemies, probably the advancing English army. Mercer landed on a coil of hoist cable, the strands rusted together by Eritrea’s seasonal rains into a solid mass of metal that looked like a modern sculpture. Below it, his flashlight revealed the top of the cage used to haul men out of the mine, and farther into the tangled gear, he saw a large ore skip. He played the light across the debris and saw that the equipment had not actually fallen all the way to the bottom of the shaft; it had jammed together about fifteen feet from the ground. Shining the light around the perimeter walls of the mine’s sump, he jumped back dangerously when the beam flashed across a twisted corpse. It took several seconds for his heart to slow.

  He picked his way across the pile of junk to get a closer look, the metal scraping against itself as his weight shifted its precarious balance. The body was in a similar state of decomposition as the Eritrean soldier he and Gibby had buried the day before, and his uniform looked about the same too. Mercer guessed that a curious soldier had stepped too close to the open pit, lost his footing, and plummeted to a quick death. Unhooking himself from the rope again, he signaled Gibby to hold his position — not that the lad would have much of a choice. With
Mercer this deep, the line was at full stretch.

  There were gaps between some of the equipment, a tangled warren of openings that Mercer could possibly edge his way through, gaining access to the mine’s deepest drift, whose entrance was buried by the abandoned mining gear. Yet even in the best circumstances, making the attempt was dangerous. The scrap could shift, crushing him or trapping him without any hope of rescue. If he became stuck, there wouldn’t be any way to signal Gibby, and even if he could, there wasn’t anything one person could do to set him free.

  But he didn’t have a choice. Mercer took a moment to work his muscles, limbering himself for the challenge. He dropped to his knees, peering down into the shadowed jumble, picking his first moves with his eyes before committing his body. Like a contortionist, he twisted through the equipment, torquing and shifting constantly, lowering himself across the scaly steel, cutting his hands on the sharp edges, smearing skin off his legs and back. His clothes were reduced to rags. It was like moving through a huge knot of barbed wire. If he found a passage to the drift, it would be easy to retrace the trail of blood back to the top of the debris.

  Eight feet into the pile, he maneuvered himself into a head-down position, flashing the light under the elevator cage where it had wedged against the wall of the shaft. The beam was swallowed by the darkness of another drift, the last one. His position put him at the inky tunnel’s ceiling. Wriggling like a landed fish, he worked his body under the cage, holding his breath when a section of ruined equipment settled, grinding like a huge pair of steel jaws. He felt the pile was ready to collapse. Ignoring the pain as a piece of metal ripped across his back, he forced himself those last feet, tumbling into the drift as the junk gave out. The tons of machinery, precariously balanced for half a century, collapsed deeper into the mine’s sump with an echoing crash, kicking up a choking cloud of dust. Had Mercer been a second slower, his body would have been cut in two as the cage sheared across the entrance to the drift like the blade of a guillotine.