by Jack Du Brul
His breathing raged despite his efforts to slow it, drawing in rancid dust with each inhalation. He took a second to check the worst of his bloody injuries. Once he’d recovered, he cast the light toward the clogged shaft. The drift’s rectangular opening was completely blocked with an impassable wall of debris packed so tightly now that Mercer couldn’t get his arm more than a few inches into it. He gripped a steel I-beam and heaved at it until stars and pin-wheels flared behind his closed eyes. Yet the beam didn’t move more than a fraction of an inch. When it collapsed, the cables, hoists, cages, skips, and all the other equipment thrown into the shaft had keyed into itself, locking together like puzzle pieces, plugging his exit. It would take explosives to dislodge any of it.
Mercer was trapped.
“Well, this is an unexpected wrinkle,” he said aloud.
Mercer knew panic resulted from fear of the unfamiliar, and for better or worse, he had been trapped in mines before. He kept his fear firmly in check. As calmly as a man walking to his office, he turned and started down the dark passage. After only a couple of yards, he stopped short. Blood drained from his face, and his gorge rose acidly in his throat.
The long tunnel was a crypt with hundreds of bodies laid out like cordwood. Ranks of them lined both walls for as far as Mercer’s flashlight could penetrate. He first thought they had been trapped down here like himself, but he realized that their postures were too orderly. These men would have struggled until the last possible second to get themselves out of the chamber. They would have been clustered at the shaft, not resting in these peaceful poses. He inspected the man lying closest to him, and understood. In the parched skin of his forehead, a neat hole had been drilled through his skull. Judging by their clothes, these men were the miners who had excavated the tunnels. They had been shot when the Italians had fled, their bodies abandoned here, the secret of the mine kept by their eternal silence.
“Jesus.” Mercer was reminded of the slave labor gangs used by the Nazis to dig the clandestine underground factories for their rockets and jet fighters.
Walking by the grisly ranks, he judged there were more than four hundred bodies in the drift. Even as he fought his pity for them, he considered just what this meant and had no answer.
Delaying his search for a way out of the drift, Mercer took the time to walk all the way to its end. It ran for more than a mile, branching numerous times to both left and right. The hanging wall was just inches from the top of his miner’s helmet. This tunnel alone doubled again his estimates of the size of the mine and the time taken to create it. Like the first drift he’d explored, the working face had been abandoned shortly after a shot. A mechanical scraper hulked just before the face, and the cables that maneuvered the plow-shaped machine ran back to a four-cylinder donkey engine. The miners had even left their picks, shovels, and pry bars a little way off, the metal kept pristine by the dry air.
A number of questions were answered for Mercer as he studied the rock face itself and examined the ore that had broken away from the stope. He turned away sadly. “Oh, you poor bastards, you never had a chance, did you?”
There was a whole other set of questions Mercer needed to think through, but first he had to get back to the surface. Having spent much of his professional career in the subterranean realm, he had developed the ability to map these three-dimensional mazes as he walked, part of his brain counting distances and angles without really being conscious of it. It was a skill honed with years of practice and allowed him to move underground with relative ease. He back-tracked to the first raise he’d come across on this level. Peering up the black hole, he sensed that it wouldn’t lead to the level above but would branch off into a subdrift. He searched for a cross cut that led to another drift, shorter than the main one and angled downward. A short distance down this tunnel, he came to another raise and inspected the ladder that ran upward. The wood had grayed through the years and was so riddled with dry rot that it felt chalky to the touch. Mercer tested the bottom rung, and his foot snapped the strut with only a tiny amount of pressure.
“Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.”
Instinct told him that at the top of this vertical raise would be a tunnel to the main shaft above the pile of ruined machinery. And his rope to safety. There was enough loose stone on the floor for him to build a mounded pyramid below the aperture. He hummed to himself as he worked, often switching off the flashlight to conserve the batteries, working in a darkness more total than the deepest night. After twenty minutes, the pile was high enough. With a ceiling height of just over six feet, he’d needed a platform of stones three feet tall and had built one nearly four. He aimed the light up the raise, but its ray vanished in the gloom.
The rubble was loose under his boots as he climbed to the top of the pile, ducking into the opening so the rim brushed against his thighs. Just to be certain, he tested another section of the ladder, tugging it gently, but the wood splintered in his hand. Mercer took a deep breath and jammed one foot against the side of the three-foot square vertical shaft. He levered his shoulder against the rock, kicked upward, and swung his other foot against the stone, lifting himself off the pile of gravel and bits of rock. Standing in the chimney with his legs akimbo, he would need both hands to steady himself as he continued the ascent, so he tucked the Maglite into his belt, shifted his weight to his left foot, raised his right a few inches, and rammed it against the wall again.
It took him fifteen minutes to shimmy twenty feet up the shaft because he could take only six-inch steps safely and had to force his palms against the rock face to help distribute his weight. He thought the raise would have ended by now, landing him in another drift, but still it rose into the darkness. To his horror, Mercer realized the shaft was widening; his legs were now spread more than four feet and the strain on his groin muscles and upper thighs was becoming unbearable. For the first time since the collapse of the machinery in the sump, he was starting to have doubts about getting out. He shifted positions, pressing both feet against one wall and forcing his shoulders against the opposite so that his body spanned the void.
Rolling his shoulders alternately and walking up the far wall, Mercer resumed his climb, blood soaking his shirt and running into his khaki pants. The shaft continued to widen as he climbed, making it necessary to exert more pressure against the walls to maintain his perch. If it opened much farther, Mercer knew he wouldn’t have the leverage to bridge the opening and still be able to climb. He shut his mind to that possibility, but he was becoming desperate, his body aching in areas he didn’t know existed. He was running out of strength, his muscles cramping, and knew he would never be able to control his descent if it became necessary. A fall from even thirty feet against the stone floor below would break bones. And in his position, he knew the most likely were his neck and back. Mercer climbed doggedly.
He realized he’d made it to the top of the raise when he could no longer hear stone scratching against his metal miner’s helmet. Levering himself upward another six inches, he was able to kick with both legs and torque his body to the side, rolling himself onto the floor of the upper drift. He lay there panting, his cheek pressed to the cold stone, blood dripping from the cuts in his back and from the scrapes on his hands.
Five minutes ticked by before he could move again. He stood shakily, brushed himself off, and flipped on the flashlight. Ignoring the passage to his left, he moved off to the right, knowing he was in a main artery because of its size. After two hundred yards he could see shadows in the darkness cast from light spilling down from the surface. He looked at the luminous dots on his watch. It was not yet noon, but he felt as if he’d been in the mine for a day or more.
The rope was dangling just out of his reach at the drift entrance, and he had to use his belt to snag it and draw it to him. In the gloom below he could see the abandoned machinery that had nearly trapped him forever. He gave the rope a sharp tug. Immediately, Gibby started hauling. When the bosun’s chair reached this level, Mercer jerked the
line again to signal Gibby to stop. It was only when he had stepped into the harness and secured himself that he pulled a flare from his pocket and sparked the igniter off the stone wall. This was Gibby’s signal to start the Toyota and back the vehicle away from the head gear. The chair rose like a silent elevator.
The sun was a blessed relief after so many hours of darkness, and had Mercer’s eyes not possessed a feline quickness to adjust, the brightness would have left him blinded. He shucked the harness and was leaning against the head gear’s struts when Gibby drove back. Mercer felt an exhaustion that had nothing to do with his morning’s work. Gibby had the foresight to retrieve Mercer’s last beer and hand it over. Mercer downed the warm, gassy brew with several heavy swallows, belching so loudly it brought a startled guffaw from the Eritrean.
“Well, effendi?” The boy couldn’t contain his excitement. “Show me more of the stones that will make our nation rich.”
Mercer looked up at him, squinting against the blazing sun. Gibby looked like the image of a black Jesus Christ, a halo of sacred light cast around his head. Mercer dug something out of his breast pocket, a small misshapen lump. He tossed it to the eager teen, bowing his head.
Gibby stared at the bit of metal for a long time, his expression that of total confusion.
“It ain’t riches, kid. It’s lead from a bullet fired into the head of a man at the bottom of the mine, just like the four hundred other men who’d worked with him,” Mercer said.
He’d discovered the body slumped over the controls of the scraper at the end of the lowest drift. He’d been murdered like all the others, executed not only to preserve the mine’s secret location, but also to hide the fact that the entire project had been a failure. They had never hit the fabled blue ground, the kimberlite that held the diamonds. They had tunneled for years with their blood and their sweat, yet turned up nothing. And their reward? Their reward had been a summary shot to the head.
There were diamonds here, someplace, Mercer was sure. And with a couple of years, a few thousand men, and a couple hundred million dollars, he would be able to find them and bring them up. None of which he had, none of which would save Harry. The men holding him had said they wanted Mercer to find a mine, which he had, but he knew they would never accept this bust-out. They wanted diamonds, not a big hole in the ground, and they could set deadlines from now until doomsday and there was nothing Mercer could do to satisfy them.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, dammed-up tears of frustration and grief and pain finally spilling onto his cheeks.
The Eritrea-Sudan Border
There were two rugged gravel roads that crossed the lonely border, both of them traversing a deep gorge bridged with rickety wooden structures that dated back decades. Near both crossings, roughly forty kilometers apart, refugee camps had grown out of the scrub plain, tens of thousands of miserable people huddling together in tents that offered little protection from the wind or the brutal sun. The tent cities housed Eritreans who could not return to their homeland. Since the intensification of Sudan’s civil war, Sudanese natives too were seeking shelter here, hoping for the chance of a better life in Eritrea. Such was their desperation, they saw their impoverished neighbor as a promised land.
Situated close to the border and thus easier to reach, these camps were in much better condition than the reservations in Sudan’s interior. The people here received regular visits from United Nations and EC trucks carrying food, medicine, and clothing transshipped through Eritrea.
At the bottom of the gorge, a thin trickle of water passed the camps, and each camp had a continuous chain of girls making the trip down and back, heavy pots of water balanced on their heads. Washing and latrines were situated a short way from where they took their drinking water, but by the time the stream reached the downstream camp, it was fouled by its neighbor. Diseases such as dysentery and other bacterial infections raged.
A farther ten miles south from the second camp was a third, one occupied by soldiers rather than refugees. A compound had been carved out of a rare grove of camel thorn trees, tents erected in their meager shade. A generator hummed a short distance from the camp, and a pump drew water from the gorge through a two-inch hose. A team of three men tended the fires for boiling the water, purifying it with heat before it was further chemically treated.
Despite the efforts to maintain a sanitary encampment, the fetid smell from the refugee camp wafted on the breeze, carrying with it the stink of sewage. That and the constant buzzing of metallic green flies were the two biggest drawbacks to the soldiers’ camp, in Giancarlo Gianelli’s opinion. He found everything else to his liking. His tent was large and air-conditioned, and the cooking was surprisingly good. One of Mahdi’s rebel troopers had been a chef in Khartoum before taking up arms, and he delighted in the equipment Gianelli had brought into the bush. If he could ignore the armed troopers bivouacked around him, with their continuous arms practice and parade formations, Gianelli would have likened this to one of the elegant “Hemingway” camps run by the big safari companies in Kenya or South Africa.
Gianelli sat in the shade of his tent’s awning, his view of the world beyond made indistinct by gauzy mosquito netting. His desk was mahogany, but cleverly constructed so it could be folded flat and easily moved. The matching chair was covered with zebra hide. A glass of sparkling water, blistered with condensation, rested in easy reach next to a laptop computer, allowing him to keep in contact with the many branches of Gianelli SpA through a satellite link.
Had the country been more interesting, filled with game, for example, he would have resented the intrusions of his business life here, but the desert was dry, featureless, and empty of all life save the stinking humanity farther north. So Gianelli filled his days of waiting with the tasks of running his multinational corporation.
As promised, Mahdi had secured enough soldiers for the mission. When the Sudanese Liberation Army’s Revolutionary Council learned that the request had come from their biggest European supporter, they dispatched fifty men to the Eritrean border under Mahdi’s command, but Gianelli’s control. The men were the best of the SLA, combat-toughened veterans who all had at least ten years of experience in the bloody bush war. With Gianelli’s help, they were equipped with the latest NATO field gear, though they refused to use the new assault rifles, preferring to keep their venerable AK-47s.
“Mr. Gianelli, sir?” One of his white miners was standing outside the tent fly.
“Yes, Joppi? Come in, come in.” The miners Gianelli had hired were expatriate South Africans who’d fled their country after the ANC took power in 1994. He had found them in Australia like so many other countrymen who feared living in the new black-run nation. Gianelli imagined many of them might return to their native country when his plan so destabilized South Africa’s economy that the people would scream for the relative prosperity they’d had under the white regime.
The rangy Boer ducked through the mosquito netting and took a camp chair opposite Gianelli. “We’ve finished going over the mining gear you brought. Damn impressive stuff.”
Gianelli had secured the services of five white mine supervisors, all of them master explosives experts and former shift bosses. They were to lead the hundred-strong gang of laborers Mahdi had promised. He had also brought five large diesel trucks loaded with mining equipment, big pneumatic drills called drifters, explosives, and several small utility trucks specifically designed to work in underground conditions. The equipment had been shipped to Africa over many months and stored at a Gianelli SpA facility in Khartoum, waiting until Giancarlo found the location of the mine his uncle had started so long ago.
Joppi Hofmyer lit a cigarette, leaving it between his lips so it jumped and danced as he talked, smoke coiling around his head, slitting his heavy-browed eyes. “Those fookin’ kaffirs keep wanting to get to the stores of plastique, and I’ve had to crack a few skulls to teach them a lesson.”
Gianelli smiled. “Nothing too rough, I trust. Those soldiers may save
your life one day.”
“Your typical kaffir has a skull like a boulder. A little beating may chip it some, but don’t hurt it at all,” Hofmyer grunted. “On the Rand, management never understood that a good whipping will get more work out of a black than extra meat rations or a fookin’ dental program.”
“Joppi, those men aren’t going to work for you,” Gianelli said irritably. “They are guards in my employ.”
“Ja, and you expect us to work with the dregs from the camps? Mahdi’s been bringing us a couple dozen at a time to check ’em out, you know? Gott, if we can use one out of fifty, we’re doing well. Mining’s tough work, and half those kaffirs can’t even stand. And they’re about as stupid as sheep.”
Giancarlo logged off his computer to concentrate on his conversation with the South African. If they were going to reopen the mine, they were going to need labor. Mahdi had suggested, and Gianelli agreed, that recruiting able-bodied men from the camps was their best option. These men were desperate for work. They would do anything asked of them, grateful for the first job many of them had ever had. Most of them were second- or third-generation refugees. “How many have you gotten so far?”
“Forty.” Hofmyer didn’t catch the edge of anxiety in his superior’s voice. “Once we get to work, I bet half of them will either take off when they get a taste of real work or die in the mine. The northern, fuzzier, kaffir is a delicate creature and can die on you without any warning.”
