by Jack Du Brul
“Before you tell me what you know about this mine,” Gianelli said breezily, “why don’t I give you a tour? I’m curious myself about the progress that’s been made while I’ve been gone.”
The mine opening was six feet tall and about the same width. The Bobcat’s roof scraped the rough stone ceiling as it emerged from the square aperture. Joppi spoke to the white skiploader driver for a second, and the man shut down the engine. Gianelli and Hofmyer each were handed lighted mining helmets by one of the Sudanese guarding the mine shaft. Neither Selome nor Mercer got one.
“We’ve managed to remove another seventy feet of overburden from the tunnel,” Hofmyer told Gianelli. “But the deeper into the mountain we go, the more packed the material seems to be. It’s as if whoever sealed the mine wanted to make sure it was never opened again. Pretty soon we may even have to blast away some of the stones and impacted dirt.”
“Any deviation on the direction or slope? Have you found any branches or chambers?”
“It’s still as straight as a string and sloping downward at fifteen degrees. I think I should wait and let you see the rest for yourself.”
Twenty feet into the shaft, Hofmyer and Gianelli switched on their headlamps. The light cut into the gloom, yet the tunnel was oppressively dark and the air was heavy and fouled by the skiploader’s exhaust. The hanging wall, or ceiling, was low enough to force Mercer to bend slightly as he and Selome lagged behind the Italian and the South African miner. Two Sudanese took up the rear, both carrying pistols.
They continued for over fifteen minutes, Mercer estimating that the tunnel was at least a mile and a half long. While Hofmyer and Gianelli marched with a single-minded purpose, Mercer studied the rock walls and ceiling under the bouncing light from his guards’ lanterns, pausing when a particular feature caught his eye. He picked up his pace only when prodded by one of the two guerrillas.
“What are you looking for?” Selome whispered.
“An escape route,” he responded cryptically.
Selome looked behind them, but all she saw was an endless tube of featureless rock.
The tunnel ended on a ledge that overlooked the floor of a chamber, a huge vaulted space that had been created eons ago by the natural process of the kimberlite pipe’s formation. Molten magma, driven by the engine of the earth, had risen to this level during an eruption before cooling and solidifying. The diamond-bearing material injected into the three-hundred-foot-wide dome had settled over time, lowering the floor of the chamber until the ceiling lofted fifty or more feet over their heads. This was the working area of the ancient mine, and the floor was scarred by man’s rapacious appetite for diamonds.
A generator hummed near where the tunnel entered the chamber, tripod-mounted halogen lights running off its power and illuminating nearly every square foot of the cavern. The early miners had divided the cave’s floor into square grids, probably to better track the progress of the slaves who had worked here. While much of the floor was uniform, some areas had been mined deeper than others, so the floor resembled a three-dimensional chessboard. Some of the deeper areas were lost in the penumbra below where the party stood at the lip of the subterranean pit. Mercer had no way to guess how many tons of ore had been pulled from the chamber. For all he knew, the entire space had once been solid rock. But he began to believe that Brother Ephraim’s claim that the mine had been active for four hundred years was conservative.
“My God! It’s the blue ground!” Giancarlo gasped, looking to Hofmyer for confirmation. The big South African nodded.
The entire blue-tinted floor of the chamber was composed of the tough ultramific lodestone for diamond. There was no way of knowing the assay value — the ratio between kimberlite ore and diamond — until samples were taken and analyzed, but it was safe to say that they were all standing on a fortune. Mercer thought about the crushed samples of kimberlite he had discovered shortly before leaving for the monastery and how thoroughly it had been worked to extract every possible carat. That was pretty good proof of the value of the ore. Yes, he thought. A fortune. One that belonged to the people of Eritrea. Apart from everything else, Mercer knew that if he didn’t act, it would end up in Gianelli’s hands. He kept his anger behind a stony mask, but the effort cost him.
“We found it the day before yesterday. I’ve had the men busting some ass to clear it of dirt before you arrived.” Hofmyer’s voice shattered the wonder and astonishment Gianelli was obviously feeling as he looked at the mine for the first time. “Whoever worked this place first did a pretty good job of filling it back up too. It’s at the far side of this chamber that we may have to blast away some of the kak dumped back in here.”
“How deep are those vertical shafts from the working floor of the pit?” Mercer asked.
“I had a couple of kaffirs dig into one, and they hadn’t hit bottom after pulling up thirty feet of overburden.”
“Paystreak in the kimberlite?”
“My thought too,” Hofmyer agreed. “Way back when, they must have hit one particularly rich diamond-bearing section and dug into it like dogs.”
“This is better than anything I could have possibly hoped for,” Gianelli breathed. He turned to Mercer. “Now, tell me about this mine.”
Mercer could feel Selome stiffen next to him. He, too, was reluctant to tell the Italian anything, but knew he had to if he wanted to keep them alive.
“The mine was opened about three thousand years ago.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hofmyer exploded. “Look at this place. Only machinery could have tunneled this deeply. This chamber can’t be more than a hundred years old.”
“I assure you this is an ancient working.” Mercer kept a smirk off his face as he studied Hofmyer. Just keep showing your ignorance, you stupid bastard. “I found a stone hammer before leaving for the monastery. It was badly chipped and looked as though it had been discarded with the tailings. You’ll find it in a leather bag in my tent. I doubt miners with access to machinery would use Stone-Age tools. What’s more, look at the tunnel itself. It was bored using a technique that dates back millennia.
“Judging by the texture of the walls and ceiling, the mining of the tunnel must have been hellish work. If you look closely, you can still see the cracks created when the original miners used fires to heat the rock, then flash-quenched them with water and vinegar acid. The thermal shock would shatter the stone and allow them to cart out the debris. I wouldn’t be surprised if every foot of that shaft represented a day or more of work. I’d guess about twenty-five years just to drive that one tunnel.”
“Is it possible?” Giancarlo asked his mine engineer.
“Ja, maybe,” Hofmyer muttered.
“Possible, my ass. Haven’t you ever read Pliny’s account of the gold mines in Asturias, Spain?” Mercer doubted Hofmyer had even heard of the Roman historian. “He called it the ‘Destruction of a Mountain.’ Starting around 25 B.C., the Romans forced tens of thousand of slaves to tunnel into the Las Medulas Mountains using the technique I just described. On the tops of the mountains, huge reservoirs and canals and aqueducts were constructed, then filled with water. When enough interconnecting tunnels were dug — and I’m talking miles and miles of them — a torrent could be released into the galleries. The water’s hydrostatic pressure literally blew the mountains apart, and gold-laden earth was washed down into a plain where it could be easily retrieved. The Romans worked those mountains for two hundred years, forever changing the landscape, and recovering an estimated twelve billion dollars’ worth of bullion. Believe me, this mine was worked in a similar fashion and a lot longer ago.”
Mercer shot a deadly look at Gianelli. “This leads me to my final piece of evidence. The monk you shot last night told me he knew of this mine from one of their ancient texts, a book lost long ago, but its oral tradition had been maintained.” Mercer hoped he was spinning enough fact with the fiction to satisfy Gianelli. “He said that this mine was worked for centuries until there was an invasion. The people
who operated it sealed it entirely rather than see it captured.”
“My God, it sounds like King Solomon’s Mine,” Gianelli gasped.
“Maybe, I don’t know.” The Italian had gotten too close to the truth, and Mercer had to derail him. “It could be that this was the basis for the legend, but as I’m sure Yappy here can tell you, there are countless spots all over Africa that also claim that distinction.”
Joppi Hofmyer growled at the bastardization of his name.
“Fascinating,” Gianelli said. It was evident that he was more impressed with his prisoner than with the man he had hired to excavate the mine.
Mercer saw this and started to make it work to his advantage. “If I may make a suggestion. You mentioned bringing explosives into this chamber. I wouldn’t. The dome may look solid, but unless you have blast mats to deflect the shock of a detonation down the tunnel, you may find yourself proving the hard way that it’s not.”
“Do we have blast mats?” Giancarlo demanded of Joppi.
“No, sir, but it would only take a few days to get them from Khartoum.” Hofmyer seethed at being so easily undercut.
“And while you’re at it,” Mercer continued, taking an almost casual command of the conversation, “I saw outside that you’re about to resift the original tailings for diamonds that might have been missed by the original workers. Don’t bother. The tailings I checked had been crushed down so fine that unless you brought a portable fluoroscope with you, it’ll be a complete waste of time and manpower that I doubt you can spare.”
Hofmyer shot Mercer such a scathing look that it appeared he would physically attack him. Sorting through the tailings had been his idea.
“Sounds logical,” Giancarlo said, enjoying the frustration on his overseer’s face. “If I had gone through the difficult task of mining the ore, I imagine that I would also make certain not a single stone had been overlooked.” He smiled. “Fetching you back here was a good idea. I think it would be another good idea if I kept you around for a while longer. For the time being, you will be my chief among slaves.”
For a fraction of a second, Mercer’s thoughts played openly across his face, but fortunately Gianelli had looked away. Mercer didn’t want the Italian to see the hatred or the resolve that flashed in his eyes. Those he was keeping to himself, knowing that they would help him when the time came. Slave, he’d been called. And slave he would be. Right up to the moment he would slip his hands around Gianelli’s throat and squeeze until the son of a bitch was dead.
The Mine
Two weeks passed. Two weeks in which Mercer saw a man beaten to death. Two weeks in which he saw others drop dead from exhaustion. Two weeks in which men and machine toiled endlessly to yank the kimberlite from the womb of the earth, tearing it free with picks and pneumatic drills and bare hands. Two weeks in which his own body was pushed mercilessly.
Gianelli and Joppi Hofmyer worked the male refugees, including Mercer and Habte, in twelve-hour shifts, allowing just ten minutes every two hours for a little food and a meager water ration. The pace wasn’t enough to kill a healthy adult, but many of the refugees had arrived at the mine on the verge of starvation and the labor pushed several of the older ones over the edge. Because of his expertise, Mercer was named an underground manager for his shift, watched over by one of Hofmyer’s South Africans, a man named du Toit. At least ten armed Sudanese also guarded the work. The pit echoed with the machine-gun rattle of compressed air drills and jackhammers, a deafening roar of man’s fight against earth’s strength. It was impossible to look across the workings. The air was thick with dust and fumes, and the miners were covered with so much grit that it was difficult to tell white from black. A flexible ventilator tube with high-speed fans had been rigged along the tunnel leading to the work, but it did little to alleviate the dust or the incredible heat in the chamber.
Taking a lesson from the British prisoners of war who had built the Kwai River bridge, Mercer dedicated himself to mining the kimberlite to the best of his ability. He selected those refugees with the strength and stamina to work the drills and jackhammers, teaching them the basics and a few tricks to make their task easier. Others he employed as pick men and priers, and still others to haul the ore back to the surface, where more people hammered it apart to search for the elusive diamonds.
But the stones weren’t that elusive. The kimberlite here was the richest Mercer had ever seen. While he was not allowed in the secure area near the mine’s entrance where the ore was crushed and the diamonds were stored in a safe, he learned enough to guess that the mine was paying out better than twelve carats a ton, an astronomically high value. He did have the opportunity to see a few stones that were found right in the mine. At first the Eritreans were dumbfounded at the value placed on the small symmetrical lumps of crystal when Mercer pointed them out, because there is little of a diamond’s hidden fire to be seen before the stone is cut and polished. The biggest stone Mercer saw for himself was a nice twenty carats, but he’d heard rumors about a monster stone, some said the size of a man’s fist, that had been found by one of the women sorting the ore.
It was in the pit that one of the guards beat an Eritrean to death. It wasn’t known if the refugee had broken one of Hofmyer’s numerous rules or if the young Sudanese had just done it for the thrill. The reason didn’t matter to the victim, nor did it really matter to those who witnessed the Sudanese using the butt of his AK-47 to split open the man’s head.
Mercer had been on break when it happened, and he sprang to his feet at the first blow. Habte was next to him. He recognized the danger Mercer was about to put himself in, and Habte wrapped his arm around Mercer’s leg, tumbling him back to the ground.
“Don’t, Mercer, just don’t. That man is already dead and you are still alive,” Habte whispered. “I learned during the war that no man’s life is worth a defiant gesture.”
The beating lasted at least a minute, and when it was over, du Toit ordered the crew back to work. The corpse lay where it had fallen until the end of the shift, the workers ducking their eyes reverently as they passed by.
For two weeks the mining went on, a continuous chain of men burdened with baskets of kimberlite wending their way along the tunnel to the surface and returning to the workings for more. By the end of the second week, Mercer realized that Gianelli intended to work everyone to death, not only to ensure their silence, but to make certain that every possible diamond could be found in the time he’d allowed himself.
Late at night, when Mercer and Habte were lying on the ground in the barbed-wire stockade that acted as their quarters, they would discuss theories behind Gianelli’s rushed schedule. Habte maintained that the Italian was afraid the location would be discovered by someone else and reported to the government in Asmara, but Mercer suspected that there was another purpose behind the killer pace.
“Habte, be reasonable,” Mercer said. “We never saw another person when we were first searching for this place, and the nomad in Badn said this region is avoided because of some superstition. And don’t forget, the landmines act as one hell of a deterrent. Shit, I haven’t even seen a plane fly over.”
“All this is true,” Habte murmured tiredly, rolling so he could pluck a sharp stone from under his back. “But why is Gianelli pushing so hard?”
“I don’t know,” Mercer admitted, too tired to think through the problem.
It had been plaguing him from the start of the mining operation, but at night it took all of his concentration just to eat the weak stew served by the wives of the refugees.
The other thought dogging him was Selome’s safety. They hadn’t been able to speak to each other. She was in a separate compound with the other women, forced to cook for the workers, a slave as surely as he. Whenever Mercer saw her as he was getting his stew, he tried to smile and put up a brave front, but knew that concern darkened his eyes. He could see that she had been hit a couple of times, for purple bruises showed on her arms and face. Each night Mercer and the others co
uld hear guards drag a few of the women off for their own pleasure. He didn’t know if Selome had been similarly treated, and his inability to help her, or the others, ate at him like cancer.
On the morning that started his fifteenth day of captivity, the sky was dark with storm clouds. The veiled sun didn’t even cast shadows. The men waiting in line for their breakfast shivered miserably in the damp chill.
“It will rain before the sun sets again,” Habte said to Mercer, clutching a tin plate for more of the ungodly stew.
“If we’re going to make a break for it,” Mercer replied, first making sure that none of the guards were close enough to overhear, “it’ll have to be soon. I doubt they’ll give us tents, and the refugees won’t last more than a day or two in the rain.”
“Neither will we,” Habte grunted. “Do you have a plan?”
Mercer paid no attention to his friend. He looked at the women tending the cooking fires, watching for Selome to turn from her task so he could offer a smile. When she looked at him, he noticed that exhaustion had bent her once erect carriage and dulled her expression. He studied her for second and saw the old defiance flash from behind her eyes. As gently as he could, he nodded her over to him.
She looked about cautiously before hoisting a platter of injera to her head and moving to the long trestle table that served as the buffet. Mercer saw that her willowy body was so thin he could see the bony projections of her hips though the fabric of her pants. She did not meet Mercer’s eyes as she placed the platter on the table.
“We are getting out of here tonight,” Mercer whispered fiercely, his anger making his quick decision easy. “Be ready two hours after my shift ends.”
“We’ll never make it. The guards will be on us the moment we start running from the camp. Wouldn’t it be wiser if you got out alone and went for help from some village?”
“It would take me a week to reach a town, and the workers here won’t last another two days. Besides, we won’t be leaving the camp. Trust me, I have an idea. It’s nuts, incredibly dangerous, but we have to try.”
