The Lightning Stones

13

The sun was not yet up when they left the compound. They drove in a large SUV that sloshed on its suspension whenever they went around a curve, telling Mercer the Suburban was heavily armored. Hamid was behind the wheel with Book in the passenger seat. The three other shooters, Mercer, and all their gear were jammed into the back.

“We would have picked you up from the airport in this beast,” Booker explained, “but another team was using it to ferry a couple of Silicon Valley types who are here trying to persuade people who’ve just stopped living in caves that they now need 4G Wi-Fi.”

“How’d they do?” Mercer asked as they raced through the predawn darkness, their headlamps the only light visible except for the setting moon.

“They’re still alive,” Book said. “That’s all I care about.”

It sounded like a flippant comment, but Sykes was speaking from the heart. The successful completion of the mission was all that interested him.

It was dark out, and cold — two factors that sapped the spirits and eroded will, and yet as they rocketed through the deserted streets, Mercer felt confidence surging through him. The truck smelled of the inevitable spices from their headquarters, and of gun oil from their assault rifles, but there was another scent in the vehicle. It was the musk or the pheromone that bonded parties of hunters since humanity’s days on the plains of ancient Africa. It was what gave them the courage to face enemies armed with tooth and claw and speed and stealth. Prey that was larger than them, better able to defend itself. Prey that was not prey at all, and yet those proto-humans with their sticks and rudimentary language not only eked out their existence on the grassy plains but thrived to eventually inhabit every corner of the globe.

At the most basic level the men in the truck were no different from the primitive hunters. Their weapons were better, their language more refined, but they were imbued with that same antediluvian courage that left them buoyed of spirit and eager to face whatever challenge may come.

The chopper was hangared at the far end of the international airport, well away from the commercial airliners and the meager aircraft of the fledgling Afghan Air Force that used the airport. The Mi-2 had been rolled free of the building and into the brightening sky. It was so utilitarian and boxy it reminded Mercer of a panel van with a tail stalk and rotor blades, and a huge forehead bulge that was its two turbine engines.

The pilot was already in the front seat busy with preflight checks, while another Afghan waited by the open cargo door to help the passengers load their gear. Booker’s men didn’t bother with hard cases for their weapons but carried them in the open. Mercer had no idea what bureaucratic nightmare had to be negotiated for this to happen, but there were a couple of soldiers nearby and Sykes approached them with a handful of the Marlboro cigarette packs Mercer had brought into the country. He suspected that this was just simple wheel greasing and not the true bribery that let Gen-D Systems operate as its own army. The soldiers immediately lit up their cigarettes, standing under a bright No Smoking sign written in Pashtu as well as English and in symbols so basic a child could understand them.

Sykes introduced Mercer to the pilot, Ahmad, and then the two talked about the latest weather report for their intended route. Rain was a possibility, which neither pilot nor team leader liked, but it would only hamper their operation, not force its cancellation. They discussed the fuel situation, and Ahmad reassured Book that he had a reserve supply waiting in the city of Khost.

“All right,” Sykes said and his voice boomed. “Let’s mount up.”

The men wore a patchwork of Western gear hidden under Afghan clothing that was surprisingly comfortable and warm. Mercer carried about thirty pounds of equipment. Some was for technical mountaineering: Mammut Duodess climbing ropes, rock bolts, and a sling of carabiners and belay clamps. The rest was extra ammunition magazines for the team’s M-4A1 assault rifles and some geology tools he had pilfered from Gen-D’s motor pool workshop. The claw part of the hammer would work as a pick, but he had doubts about the tensile strength of a two-foot pry bar he’d borrowed. The Beretta 92 9mm pistol Book had loaned him was strapped to his thigh in a low holster that made him feel a little like a gunslinger out of an old Western.

They settled into the chopper as the old turbines wailed into life, one after the other. The engines bogged down when Ahmad engaged the transmission to start the big rotors turning overhead. Yet in minutes the entire chopper was bucking and shaking like a washing machine about to tear itself apart. The sensation wasn’t unknown to Mercer. This was an older helicopter, after all, but it seemed to take forever before the blades were beating the air with sufficient speed to haul the ungainly machine into the air.

Like a rickety elevator, the Mil struggled and wheezed and made all sorts of terrifying sounds as it climbed into the dawn. The sun was just beginning to paint the mountain peaks that dominate the skyline to the north and south of the capital city. The snowy crests flashed impossible shades of gold and red when struck by the pure light of such an unpolluted place, and for a moment Mercer could forget the poverty and dinginess of the city sprawled below them.

Only Ahmad and Sykes next to him had headphones, and the Mi-2 was too loud to hold anything short of screaming matches, so Mercer settled in for the two-hour flight toward the tribal regions spanning the Afghan-Pakistan border. In all of recorded history it was one of the few places in the world that could boast it had never been fully conquered.

As they cleared the city, he was reminded of Buzz Aldrin’s line about the moon being “magnificent desolation.” The same could be said of Afghanistan. There was little below them but rock and valley, hilltop and hardscrabble villages scraping by on the edge of fields that were more gravel lot than life-sustaining grove. It was too early in the spring for anything to be in bloom, so the landscape was a patchwork of earth tones that bled and ran into each other in a drab mosaic that stretched to the silvery mountains in the distance. As well traveled as he was, even Mercer had a hard time recalling such a harsh and unforgiving land.

They thundered on. Two of Sykes’s men slept, or at least had their eyes closed. Another scanned the ground to their right, while Booker in the left front seat watched for anything suspicious coming at them from that direction. They were safe enough at altitude and speed from an RPG, and not even the Taliban had any working Stinger missiles left over from the post — Soviet invasion days, but years of being immersed in combat zones made the men rightly cautious.

Mercer continued to push fluids into his body as they flew higher into the mountains. Altitude sickness was a real concern. He’d never really been struck by it in the past, but he would be pushing himself hard over the next twelve or so hours without giving his body the proper amount of time to acclimate. As a precaution, he popped a few Tylenol, knowing headache was usually the first symptom. Their overwatch sniper, Sleep, saw him do this and flashed a diver’s “okay” sign. Mercer responded in kind, and the shooter tucked his cap farther over his dark brow and nodded off again.

Ninety minutes later, Mercer felt Booker Sykes tapping him on the shoulder. He turned in his rear-facing jump seat and stretched his upper body into the cockpit. “What’s up?”

“We’re nearing your coordinates,” Book called over the beat of the rotor and scream of the turbines. “Thought you should see what we’re flying over to get a better picture than those satellite shots.”

Mercer nodded, preoccupied by worry. There was a danger to this mission he had considered from the moment Sherman Smithson rattled off the longitude and latitude coordinates for what Michael Dillman had claimed was the location where he had discovered Sample 681. The danger was that Dillman could have been dozens, or even hundreds of miles off target. Since the minerals were obviously collected long before modern navigation aids like GPS, Dillman was working with a sextant, a chronometer that might not have been calibrated in weeks or months, and making best-guess estimates of a slew of other factors in determining his location.

Dillman had dutifully written out the coordinates for the sample’s origin to a very precise degree, one that Mercer could pinpoint decades later on a satellite photograph as a tight valley that looked like it petered out into the side of a mountain. However, that didn’t mean the written coordinates marked the actual spot where the man had found Sample 681. Mercer had to hope Dillman was accurate enough to get them close, so that his own knowledge of geology and geography could lead them to where X really marked the spot.

The ground below the speeding chopper was a crosshatch of canyons and ridges that had no discernible pattern. It was all chaos but with monotony of color. Rather than brown, like around Kabul, here the world was shades of gray, from nearly black to almost white. It was ugly terrain, and one that he didn’t relish having to march across because the shortest distance in terrain such as this was never a straight line. It also didn’t help that the promising dawn they had left in Kabul was now a leaden sky that seemed to hover scant feet over their heads.

Booker split his attention between the panorama unfolding beneath them and a handheld GPS device that he’d programmed with their destination. Mercer had eyes only for the topography, while behind him in the cabin, Sleep, Grump, and Sneeze watched out for any movement that could betray a Taliban position. Occasionally, Mercer could see Sykes mouthing orders to Ahmad to correct their flight path.

A minute later, Book made an emphatic gesture pointing his thumb down, and Mercer could read his lips as he said to the pilot, “Hover here.”

Mercer studied the ground for anything that looked familiar. At first all the arêtes and gorges and talus slopes looked the same, and then the landscape resolved itself to the images he’d studied earlier. This was where Dillman claimed he’d found the mysterious mineral he’d called a lightning stone, which Herbert Hoover later classified numerically for his collection. As with the satellite pictures, nothing about this location struck Mercer as being geologically significant. It looked like every other godforsaken part of this country, bleak, desolate, totally uninviting and uninhabitable.

Prospects didn’t improve when Sykes handed him a pair of military-grade binoculars. Ahmad kept the Mil in constant motion so they didn’t become an easy target, but Mercer had no trouble studying the ground and for five minutes he peered intently at everything but saw nothing.

“Give me a five-mile perimeter,” he yelled at Book. Sykes nodded and relayed his order to the Afghan pilot. As had been discussed earlier, they only had fifteen minutes’ flying time before Ahmad would need to off-load their extra weight in order to make it to Khost and refuel.

They spiraled out away from the exact coordinates Michael Dillman had provided. Mercer had known not to expect a big glaring sign that advertised an excavation of some sort, but the farther they flew from Dillman’s purported spot, the fewer were their chances of actually finding anything. In searches, one either looked at one locale precisely or combed a massive area; there really wasn’t much by way of middle ground.

He kept the binocs snug to his eyes as the chopper circled the rugged massif, intent on catching every detail he could in the few minutes remaining. Each ridge and hillside looked identical. There were no individual reference points, nothing distinctive to help orient the search. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly, so he wouldn’t know it if he actually saw it. There was little of interest at all, and yet that in itself might be what he sought. It was maddening, and he started to think this whole trip had been a colossal waste of time.

He decided they should head back to the coordinates, land, and hope for the best. He was reaching to tap Book on the shoulder to tell him, when he saw something that caught his attention. It was a crease in the side of a mountain at the head of a narrow canyon. The only way it was recognizable would be by standing at its base or high above as they were now.

He pointed it out to Sykes. “See the top of that one mountain covered in snow that looks like an octopus’s tentacles? Look below that and to the right. That narrow valley. What does it look like to you where those two rounded parts of the mountain meet?”

Sykes used the verbal waypoints to spot the anomaly. He grinned wolfishly. “Looks like a butt crack.”

“Remember what I told you Dillman wrote? The sample came from the anus of the world. Bet you a case of whiskey there’s a cave where those two lobes of the hill come together.”

Booker nodded. “As long as all you geologist types have childish senses of humor.”

“We do. That’s our spot.”

Sykes told Ahmad, and the pilot scouted the ground for a suitable place to let them off. They got lucky in that there was a flatland on top of a mountain not four miles from the site Mercer selected. He flew them there after Booker programmed their new destination into the GPS.

Ahmad approached the LZ like he was going to buzz right past it and only flared the chopper at the last second, reining it back like a horse so that it was almost standing on its tail rotor before leveling it out a foot off the ground and at zero indicated airspeed. It was a masterful tactical maneuver, and the men didn’t waste it by congratulating him. Mercer felt like he was being borne by a massive crowd as the men poured from the back of the Mil in a rush to get clear. Seconds later, the lightened chopper sped off again, emerging from a filthy cloud of rotor wash and climbing hard.

When the dust cleared, the four operators were prone on the ground, ringing the LZ and watching the valleys and nearby peaks for any sign their landing had drawn attention. Mercer also stayed put and waited for Sykes to give him the all clear. The whop whop of the receding helicopter faded to silence before the former Delta commando was satisfied they were alone.

Though confident they were secure, the men never stood to outline themselves against the sky as they moved off the flatland and down the crumbly side of the hill. These mountains were among the most seismically active in the world, so that nothing on the surface appeared to have been exposed enough to weather much. All the stones were hard-edged and flinty, like natural knives that would shred unprotected skin without mercy. Apart from all the other gear Booker Sykes had loaned him, Mercer was thankful for the Kevlar combat gloves. He kept his sidearm holstered, but Sykes and the others swept the terrain with the barrels of their weapons in constant arcs that seemingly missed nothing. Sykes took the lead with the others strung out behind him at fifteen-yard intervals. They would bunch up or spread out as the terrain demanded.

For the first part of the trip off the mountain, their descent was a barely controlled slide. The loose rock shifted under their boots, releasing miniature avalanches with every step. It was only when they hit against a larger rock buried in the scree that they could gain some sense of influence over their movement.

But they did not head straight to the valley floor; that was tactical suicide in Afghanistan. They found an old game trail midway down the hill and started moving parallel to the crest and now heading toward their destination. The air remained cold and damp, almost thick enough to be considered a drizzling mist but not quite. It wasn’t even enough to dampen clothes yet, but it didn’t bode well for what might come.

The one trail petered out, forcing them to move along loose rock again, exposed to the opposite side of the valley and anyone with a sniper rifle. The terrain across the valley looked as forlorn and barren as where they were walking. However, Mercer knew a good sniper could dig into almost any background and remain hidden for days. Mercer asked himself if he felt eyes on him, and honestly he wasn’t sure. He walked a little quicker and stooped a little lower.

It took a careful hour to move to within a mile of their target. Sykes called a break and ordered their sniper, Sleep, up to higher ground to get a better look. Mercer scarfed down some more painkillers and water. He was panting hard in the thin air but didn’t feel himself succumbing to altitude sickness. His vision was acute, his head felt fine, and he had no nausea. He felt better, in fact, than on a Saturday morning following a night out at Tiny’s with Harry.

The sniper returned fifteen minutes later. The men hunkered down in the protection of a small grove of stunted pines that clung to the rocks at the very terminus of the timberline.

“The target valley is still a ways off,” Sleep said, the butt of his long gun resting on his thigh. “But we might have a problem. I heard bells.”

Grump cursed.

“What’s that mean?” Mercer asked, though he had a good idea.

“Goats,” Sleep said. “Locals put all kinds of shit on their goats, including bells.”

“And lipstick,” Sneeze joked, “don’t forget lipstick.”

“Direct approach is out,” Sykes decided, guessing the goats, and their human minders, would stay down in the valleys where there was more vegetation. “We’ll keep to the hills and circle around to the head of the valley. That’s our target anyway.”

It took another long hour, moving slowly, always scouting ahead and straining their senses to perceive anything out of the ordinary in the gathering storm. They heard nothing resembling goat bells and collectively decided that the danger was passed. A new problem was approaching; the clouds that were rolling in were black and heavy with rain. If they let loose before the mission was over, Ahmad might not make it back until the storm dissipated, and no one relished the idea of a night spent out in the open.

Mercer pulled his headscarf tighter to keep out the dribbling rain. He had started a slight cough in the past twenty minutes, nothing more than a deep tickle that he could mostly suppress, but the first time one escaped his lips Sykes had looked at him sharply. They both knew what that single inexorable exhalation portended. He also had to admit that the Tylenol was doing little for the pressure building in his head and behind his sinuses.

He was breathing far harder than the others, a fast pant like a dog in the summer heat.

“Slow it, man,” Grumpy said. “Force yourself to take slow, even breaths. That’s it. Nice and deep. Give your lungs time to absorb the oxygen you’ve already taken in rather than suck in O₂ that ain’t there.”

A few seconds later, Mercer felt the pressure under his diaphragm ease and the rope tightening around his skull unknot. “Thanks,” he said, feeling a bit more human.

“It ain’t nothing, bro.”

They continued on. Their target valley started wide and then narrowed and steepened, so that sheer cliffs lined its two-hundred-yard width. From what Mercer had seen from the chopper, it would widen out into a circular bowl near where he saw the cleft that looked like human buttocks. If he were to guess, he would assume local shepherds used the protective bowl when the weather turned foul to shelter themselves and their animals. So far there had been no ringing of bells or scent of a watch fire in the misty air, but Mercer had to admit that the strain of being constantly alert for such signs was exhausting. The fighters protecting him could go for days on extended combat patrols, but he was nearly spent after a couple of hours. He had always admired Sykes and men like him, but this experience was boosting his admiration to a new level.

The darkest of the clouds rolled past without shedding their store of rain. Mercer’s woolen outer smock, though heavy with accumulated dew, had kept him warm and dry as such garments had done for hundreds of years in these rugged mountains. They reached the head of the canyon. From here the cliffs were sheer and virtually featureless. Only occasional tufts of grass found a crag in which to root, and there were but a few spots where birds had nested and permanently streaked the stone with their droppings.

Mercer and Sykes hid behind a slab of stone that had sheared off a cliff aeons ago while the men covered them, both studying the ground below for any sign of a cave that Michael Dillman had dubbed the anus of the world. The molded contours of the mountain at the valley’s head and the long vertical crease that ran down it looked even more like a butt now that they were closer. It was flattened somewhat, and a little shaggy with grasses, so Mercer thought of it as a guy’s ass rather than the shapely curve of a woman’s. And just where it would be anatomically on a human, there was a darkened cave entrance where the two lobes of stone met and doubtless inspired Michael Dillman’s anatomical reference.

“I’ll be damned,” Sykes said when he spotted the six-foot-wide cave entrance. He whispered to Mercer, “What now, we put you in a big body glove and lube you up?”

“You are no longer allowed to comment on my sense of humor.”

Because of the cave’s height, thirty feet above the valley floor, and the way the cliffs curved, Mercer would not be able to free climb up to it. Also he had to admit that in the thin air he probably didn’t have the strength. There was a flat plateau about fifty feet above and to the right of the cave entrance, and it looked like an easy march up a goat trail to reach it. From there he could rappel down and spider crawl to the cave mouth while the others provided cover. He told Sykes his plan, and after a few minutes studying the terrain through binoculars the former Delta officer agreed.

The trail was just wide enough for them to place one foot in front of the other and walk with their shoulders torqued around, but the grade was manageable and soon the men were eighty feet up the two-hundred-foot cliff face and on the shelf Mercer had seen from the ground. A chunk of stone the size of an automobile engine had broken off the cliff and made a perfect belay point for the safety rope Mercer would pay out as he climbed across to the cavern.

Sykes and Sleep helped with the line while Grump surveyed the entire scene through his sniper scope, and Sneeze did the same over his M-4A1’s optics. There was some passable cover behind other chunks of rock that had dislodged and settled on the shelf over the years, but this was still an exposed position and countersniper procedures were necessary.

While Booker tied off the line, Mercer shucked his pack and quickly hauled out the extra ammo, spare canteen, MREs, and other gear so all he would carry in it for the climb were the rock hammer, the short pry bar, sample bags, and a flashlight.

“I don’t like it here,” Sykes said, giving the rope a final, brutal pull. “Get over there, do your thing, and get your ass back. We are way too exposed for my taste. Got it?”

“What is it you guys say? Hooah,” Mercer replied.

“Hooah,” Sykes called back softly, and Mercer climbed over the makeshift barricade and started down the rock face.

The strain on his arms and legs immediately made him want to cough, but he suppressed the urge and concentrated on his tenuous grip on the stone. It was ice cold and greasy from the rain turning a coating of dust into something as viscous as pond slime. The climb also put added pressure on his abdominal muscles, which were toned into hard bands, but when they tightened on his stomach, it brought the first wave of altitude-induced nausea. The men above kept the rope from getting in his way as he crawled down, and also across the right cheek of the buttocks-shaped formation. The mountain was very young in geologic terms and erosion hadn’t yet smoothed out the face, which provided plenty of hand- and footholds, but still he was racing his own body’s negative reaction to being this high up in the oxygen-depleted air.

As part of his mine rescue work, Mercer was an accomplished climber, even if he never saw it as a thrill sport. He moved surely and steadily, his technique flawless in execution and adherence to safety protocols. His fingers were cold but not yet cramping, and only once did the toe of his boot slip from a knuckle-size projection when he asked it to take his weight. Because of the rock face’s outward curve, he could not see the ground directly below him, which wasn’t a problem, but when the wind picked up, whipping around the horseshoe-shaped valley head, Mercer felt a small stab of concern. It came around so fast that it got between him and the stone and tried to peel him off the mountain with surprising force. He had to tighten his hands into claws and curl his toes to keep a precarious grip on the rock, attempting to press his body back against the face while Mother Nature tried to send him tumbling into the void.

Fighting for every millimeter, Mercer was able to mash himself to the rock in a lover’s embrace. He suddenly gave in to his body’s need, and he coughed so deeply it almost felt like he’d torn tissue. He spat some watery saliva, but it wasn’t stained with blood. That would likely come later.

The wind dropped a minute later and he kept going, ever downward and moving to his left, approaching the cave entrance with each step. Because it was so high off the valley floor it wouldn’t be home to any predators; snow leopards, though rare, still haunted these forsaken mountains, and they were high enough in elevation that bats wouldn’t likely call it home, but there were some large bird species that hunted the Hindu Kush, and Mercer wasn’t keen on encountering one bursting out of the cave as he tried to enter.

He was still five feet above and ten feet to the right of the cave when he paused, pulled a handful of pebbles he’d collected just prior to the climb, and threw them at the shadowy cave entrance. Several pattered down the face of the cliff, but enough found their mark that had a vulture or eagle or other raptor been roosting inside, it would have burst out in a riot of feathers and angered cries.

Mercer finished his descent and soon found himself standing at the cave entrance. The floor was littered with the bones of tiny creatures — mice and voles and other ground mammals that were the favored meal of the indigenous birds of prey. Powdered guano also blanketed the floor while more recent streaks splattered the walls. The cavern remained wide and tall for only a short distance into the mountain before the ceiling dropped and the walls narrowed. Mercer unhooked himself from the line, tying it off around a chunk of stone almost as large as the upper anchor point.

Only ten feet in, and he was down to his hands and knees and needing the flashlight to peer into the stygian blackness ahead of him. There was nothing remarkable about the geology; the mountain was granite of poor quality judging by the numerous cracks and fissures. It wasn’t handling the shock load of so much seismic activity, and if he were to guess he’d have to say the cave would most likely collapse in another couple thousand years.

A further twenty feet in, and he was forced to remove his backpack and push it ahead of him and commando crawl. He saw no evidence that anyone other than the raptors had been here before him. The sandy cave floor showed occasional animal tracks, but no telltale human spoor. This didn’t bode well and Mercer started feeling the first pangs of doubt. He had just been guessing that this cave was what Dillman referenced. They could be miles from the actual target. He moved on, forced even flatter by the constricting rock walls and lowering ceiling. No matter how carefully he crawled, he still kicked up a cloud of fine dust particles that made their way deep into his airways and triggered another coughing fit, only this time the surrounding stone seemed to squeeze in on each spasm and redouble the pain in the delicate oxygen-deprived tissues of his lungs. Each cough was like a full body blow, and no matter what he tried he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Mercer worried that in seconds his hind brain would overwhelm his logic center and blind panic would ensue. He fought to control himself, to calm down and take easy shallow sips of air, to forget the tons of rock pressing in on him, and the tickle at the back of his throat or the coppery taste of blood in his mouth.

Booker and his team were hanging exposed on the side of a mountain in the middle of Taliban country, and they were relying on him to get the mission done as quickly as possible. He took as deep a breath as possible and forced himself to hold it, forced the muscles around his diaphragm to relax. He held on to that breath until his vision pixelated and dimmed so it looked as if his flashlight was dying and he was being left in the pitch darkness of that Afghan cave. He kept at it until he was moments from passing out, and maybe he even did for a second, but then he let it go, nice and easy, no need to panic. When his lungs were empty he took another, normal breath and this time there were no spasms. The air was still filled with dust, and it irritated his nose and throat but it wasn’t getting so deep as to convulse his entire body.

He was sixty feet into the mountain, and the tunnel remained snug but not impassable. He saw no signs that animals ventured this deep. In fact he saw nothing at all except the futility of what he was attempting. Rather than mourn the loss of Abraham Jacobs as a proper friend should, and attend his funeral and swap stories about a great man with others who had loved him, Mercer had turned Abe’s death into a quest, a personal obligation to find those responsible. Here he was, in the bowels of a desolate mountain in the middle of one of the most dangerous places on Earth, putting his life and the lives of the others in jeopardy because he couldn’t face Abe’s death head-on. As he had so often in the past, Mercer had taken a tangent when faced with one of life’s roadblocks, and this time it had gone too far afield even to try to justify. Mercer realized the tightness in his throat and the burning behind his eyes had nothing to do with the dust.

Feeling as distraught as when he saw Abe’s crumpled body in the Leister Deep Mine, Mercer shifted so he could start sliding back out of the hole. His light swept across the rough wall and something caught his eye — a smudge on the wall at the very limit of its glow. Unsure about anything, he slithered forward and saw what looked like letters painted onto the wall, as crudely as if they were drawn by a child. It was the black crustiness of the medium that made him realize they had been drawn with human blood.

They read: MD.