The Lightning Stones

2

Instinct and experience told Mercer he was hearing machine pistols like an Uzi, but more likely the popular Heckler & Koch MP5s. The H&K was the preferred weapon of elite fighting forces like Delta or the SEALs. The weapons’ sound had been suppressed with very good silencers, not some jury-rigged contraptions, but precision milled tubes with the correct sequence of baffles and discharge holes.

The incongruity of hearing suppressed gunfire deep in an underground mine didn’t slow Mercer’s reflexes. He had launched himself over the transporter’s bed even before the machine pistols went silent. He snuggled up to the wheeled train as best he could, snapping off his miner’s lamp and peering into the darkness between the close-set tires. His body was awash in adrenaline and his heart rate was spiking, and yet he was able to keep his breathing calm and deliberate.

Thirty feet ahead was the entrance to the antechamber where Abe and the others would be working. Mercer could just discern a lessening of the mine’s absolute blackness. To call it light was being too generous, but there was a faint corona far beyond the opening and a few stray photons leaked out. Screams echoed from the entrance¸ followed by another burst from the machine pistols. Mercer saw the shadow of flickering light, the telltale muzzle flash of autofire.

This time when the weapons fell silent, there were no more screams. He had no idea what was happening and wished it was some elaborate joke, but he knew it wasn’t. Mercer remained motionless and silent, straining to see anything.

About one minute after the second burst and Mercer was beginning to move closer, when he saw a sudden shift in the darkness. The patch of less-black space — the entrance to the experiment chamber — blinked four times. It was the silhouettes of four men walking out of that room. They displayed no light whatsoever, but the speed with which they emerged and the precise interval between them told Mercer they were acting as though they could see.

They had to be using thermal imaging, or they were wearing light emitters in the ultraviolet band with goggles that could distinguish it. With such equipment, the tunnel would look illuminated while the men themselves remained in absolute darkness. The military used the system sparingly, because an enemy with the right goggles could easily see the UV light from the emitters.

Their shoes made barely a whisper as they jogged through the massive room and disappeared into the forest of support pillars. Mercer slithered from where he’d hidden, moving cautiously in the dark. He didn’t dare turn on his headlamp. He inched closer to where the gunmen had emerged, making certain each of his footsteps was firmly on solid ground before transferring his weight. When he reached the entrance he could better see the glow of distant light that had found its way around several walls. He went down a short corridor that twisted left, then right, and then left again. Around each bend he was rewarded with more light until he finally emerged into a circular chamber with three sets of yellow construction lights atop spindly tripods. One of them had been knocked over and only shone a weak beam that still managed to capture some of the horror. That lamp reflected off a smear of blood on the stone floor as bright as lipstick.

The other lights painted a sickening tableau. There had been six people down here. Four men and two women. One of the women was nearest the felled light, and it was blood from a wound in her neck that was caught in its beam. By the slashes and swirls it looked as though the woman had convulsed as her heart pumped her life out of her shredded carotid. The second woman had taken several bullets to the chest, her body tossed back onto a table loaded with computers and scientific gear so that her feet dangled above the floor.

The men had fared just as poorly. Two looked like they had been hit in the back, most likely during the opening pulse of lead when the gunmen had entered the chamber. Another appeared to have been running laterally across the room and took several shots into his thigh, hip, and torso before augering into a stack of gas cylinders like those used by welders.

The fourth man was Abe Jacobs. It looked to Mercer like he had tried to use his body to shield the woman who had bled out. His chest was a bloody mess, and his full beard — a source of pride that hung down past his neck — was stained like red steel wool. In the middle of the room was a heap of thick glass that had been shattered. Hoses ran from the pile to a central mixing control that looked like an oilfield manifold, which itself was fed from several of the gas cylinders. These were the remains of a cloud chamber they were using in their experiments. Nearby was a copper box with a hinged lid whose function he couldn’t guess.

Mercer took all of this in with a quick sweep. He rushed to Abe’s side, dropping to his knees and grabbing for the old man’s hand, but it was futile. Abe had probably been dead even before his body had hit the hard stone floor.

Mercer expected tears but none came. Instead he felt a hot anger building in the pit of his stomach. He stood and quickly checked the others. Had there been a chance to save any of them he would have remained to dress wounds and comfort the victims, but there was nothing he could do for any of these people. At least, not by sitting in this chamber.

With hands made sticky by blood, Mercer ran out of the room and back into the main chamber. His miner’s lamp couldn’t penetrate more than a couple of feet, so the darkness beyond the beam was an unknown world of inky shadow where one of the gunmen could be lurking in wait for any sign of pursuit. Mercer glanced above his head and saw that the science team had strung lights from the main shaft to their science chamber. These people weren’t miners accustomed to the black. They would want as much light down here as possible.

The assault team had smashed the bulbs as they approached, which told Mercer they were likely retracing their steps using thermal imagers tracking the still-hot filaments. Mercer wore thick coveralls that trapped a massive amount of heat, and his body was only about fifteen degrees cooler than the mine’s musty air. The commandos wouldn’t be able to see him until he was practically on top of them.

He leapt aboard the Segway and leaned as far forward as he dared, the gawky wheeled platform taking off, if not like a shot, then a lot faster than Mercer could run for the mile he needed to cover to reach the main lift. The wind across his face told him he was moving at a good clip.

Now it was calculations of relative speeds and distances. How quickly would the gunmen want to make their escape without making noise? Full tilt, would be Mercer’s guess. Meaning they would be running flat out, hampered only by the need to wear the thermal imaging goggles. Call it a seven-minute mile. They had a two-minute head start even before Mercer went to check on Abe and the others. Another minute lost.

The math was irrefutable. He couldn’t catch up to them. His only hope was they were somehow delayed in getting into the three-story-tall main lift cage.

Mercer finally saw lights up ahead. At this level, the area around the lift station had been carved into a massive cavern, with roads leading off into the rock strata as well as ramps and chutes to feed the multiple levels of the personnel lift or the tall ore skip. The support structure around the elevator looked like a quarry’s loading platform, with three stories’ worth of steel and tangles of piping and ore processors. There were simply too many lightbulbs for the commandos to smash, so they left the chamber alone.

Mercer slowed to a stop just before he burst into the cavern and jumped from the Segway. He hadn’t thought through what he would do if he succeeded in catching the murderers. He was completely unarmed. The best he could hope to accomplish was to warn the top-side lift crew to trap the shooters in the elevator until the police could be called.

He edged out of the blackened tunnel and took up a position behind a small tracked excavator that had been abandoned decades ago. The machine had been stripped for spare parts so it resembled an insect’s husk after being devoured by ants.

He spotted the gunmen right away. They were climbing the scissor stairs on the side of the loading platform, heading for the top tier of the three-story elevator car. There were four of them dressed in black tactical gear. Each had high-tech goggles pushed up on his forehead, and they carried silenced machine pistols. These weren’t MP5s as he’d surmised but something newer and even more sinister, weapons designed to do one thing and one thing only — kill humans. One of the men also had a large pack over his shoulders, and judging by his posture it appeared its contents were heavy.

The elevator car was already in position. The men need only to step into it, close the grate, and send the signal to the operator up on the surface. Once they were up the shaft a few hundred feet, Mercer planned to break cover and reach the intercom mounted just outside the lift doors.

His plan changed a moment later when the lead gunman mounted the loading platform and nonchalantly shot out the intercom. Even as the muted echoes of the silenced shots faded, Mercer could see the panel sparking and sputtering.

He didn’t think. He acted.

Mercer rushed from his hiding place and ran as fast as he could, while above him the men were stepping into the elevator cage. He ignored the ground-level loading platform and instead threw himself down a set of stairs that gave access to the bottom level.

A gunman slammed the gate closed on the top compartment, and a second later a bell toned. Mercer reached the last step. The gate was closed in front of him, and he could just see the bottom of the thirty-foot-tall elevator begin to rise.

With this lift, unlike a commercial one, Mercer could open the gate to gain direct access to the elevator shaft itself. Miners were well trained in elevator safety and could be trusted not to kill themselves by doing anything deliberately stupid. Like Mercer was doing now.

The elevator was a functional three-chambered steel cage attached to a hoist on the surface. Simple signals told the operator at which level to stop the lift. They were at the lowest level, and Mercer knew this elevator was going straight for the surface.

A cable dangled in a loop from under the car. It was a standard armored metal electrical wire that had worked itself loose from a couple of brackets. Below it, the shaft dropped another twelve feet into a sump to collect rainwater seepage. A nearby pump kept the water at manageable levels.

Mercer didn’t break stride or think through what he was doing. As the monstrous elevator car began its ascent, he jumped for the cable just before it rose out of reach. Mercer barely got his fingertips around the steel before his momentum slammed him against the roughhewn shaft wall and nearly wrenched his shoulder from its socket. He scrambled to get a better grip as he pendulumed beneath the fast-rising elevator. He finally got his second hand onto the wire and chanced looking down. The light from the loading station appeared as distant as the glow of a celestial constellation. And even as he watched, the elevator rose high enough for the light to fade completely. Darkness sucked at his dangling boots.

Mercer wriggled an arm through the cable loop to take the strain off his hands, and another of the riveted brackets securing the cable to the car snapped. The pop couldn’t be heard over the mechanical grind of the car, but Mercer’s sudden gasp as he fell a few inches sounded to him like a thunderous scream. Not twenty feet above him were four heavily armed men who showed no compunction over committing murder. With a good flashlight, they could easily see Mercer through the car’s floor and ceiling grates.

He readjusted his position, gaining a better grip on the cable, which for now seemed to be holding. He looked up. Two of the shooters held lit flashlights, but neither was directed downward. They were already five hundred feet up from the bottom of the shaft, with another thousand to go. Had there been sufficient light, Mercer probably would have started panicking. As it was he forced himself not to think of the widening chasm between his bicycling legs and the ground far below.

The elevator continued to rocket upward, rattling and scraping in a trip that never seemed to end. They shot past the level where Mercer had been teaching mine rescue. There were no lights to mark the opening, but he felt the brief change in air pressure as they soared beyond it.

Mercer’s arms were beginning to tire as lactic acid built up in muscles that were already sore after a day spent crawling through simulated cave-ins. He swung his body just enough to throw a leg over the loop, and he hung there like a lemur, alternating hands to give each a rest.

He had no idea how he was going to get out of the shaft once he reached the top, but for now all that mattered was keeping close to the shooters. It struck him that the killers had probably shot their way into the mine in the first place, and the operator above was likely at gunpoint.

With a loud pop Mercer’s weight caused another bracket to let go, and the downward jerk on the cable snapped two more in rapid succession. His snug little perch, where he could use a hand to steady himself against the elevator’s underside, now became a wild swinging ride that saw each arc grow in amplitude and frequency. Mercer’s heart raged in his chest as he desperately clutched the cable. The jerkiness made him lose his leg grip, so once again he was hanging over the void with only his hands — which burned with fatigue and felt as though the tendons were going to erupt through the skin.

Thirty agonizing seconds later, the elevator began to slow. It wasn’t the staid deceleration of a skyscraper’s ergonomically designed lift, which felt as gentle as a jetliner’s final approach. This was the brutal jarring slowdown of a military transport dropping into Bagram when the Afghans were launching SAMs at every inbound flight.

Momentum nearly slammed Mercer into the underside of the lift.

The car came to a stop a moment later. The top of the Leister Deep’s main shaft was housed in a huge warehouselike building, surrounded by a massive concrete pad. There was just enough light for Mercer to see that below him was a yawning porthole to the abyss, and a drop of more than fifteen hundred feet.

His hands were shaking.

He had to get himself clear as soon as possible. The exit gate was above him. There was only one way to reach it, and that was free climbing in the cramped space between the elevator car itself and the side of the shaft.

Mercer positioned himself so he could contort his body and begin to sway back and forth, building up speed with each turn. He timed it at the height of one of his looping swings and reached out one hand to grab the edge of the car, his fingers fitting into the metal grate. He let go his other hand and quickly threaded it into the grate too so he’d only taken the strain on one hand for a second.

The shooters were talking quietly as they shuffled off the elevator. Had Mercer led the team, he would have sent the elevator back into the depths and disabled it, as well as the smaller secondary lift, so that the murders wouldn’t have been discovered for the days it would take to repair them.

He got lucky that the gunmen weren’t so thorough.

He heaved and struggled to raise himself in the narrow gap between the shaft wall and the lift. There was barely enough room for his head, and he had to deflate his lungs to get his chest to fit. Blood flowed from where the steel had cut into his fingers. Mercer ignored it all. The killers were already out of the elevator and headed, he supposed, to a getaway vehicle. He had to move fast or he was going to lose them.

He slithered his way to the lowest of the personnel platforms and unlatched the accordion gate. He slid it open just enough to squeeze through. He could hear voices above him. He slowly climbed out and up to ground level. Across from him and up in a control booth was the lift operator’s station. It had a large plate-glass window that overlooked the loading platform. The window was spattered with blood, and the body of the operator was slumped in his chair. The blood was still running and oozing down the glass. The local mine worker had done his job by operating the lift, as ordered, and was summarily executed.

A fifth gunman clad in black tacticals was waiting for the others next to a tall rolling door and an idling four-door Ford F-350 pickup. Mercer noted the rear license plate had been removed. He assumed the truck was stolen.

The four men who’d gone down into the mine linked up with their surface support guy. He made a big deal of the backpack, and then they loaded themselves into the dually pickup. In seconds they had pulled out of the building and vanished around a corner.

Mercer launched himself from the stairwell and raced after the truck. He pulled up short when he got outside. It was late afternoon and a cold rain was falling. It was mid-April, but the bitter air held March’s chill. The truck was already being swallowed by the gloom. Its taillights flashed as it slowed to let a bucket loader from the nearby gravel quarry pass. And then the truck started to pull away.

The access road to the mine complex was only a mile long, but it went through several tight hairpins as it descended down to a valley where it tied in with a local two-laner. Mercer ran for the bucket loader. It was as large as a semitrailer, with tires that stood as tall as he did, but the excavator moved slowly enough for him to catch up and then vault onto a ladder leading up to the operator’s cab.

The driver was shocked when Mercer suddenly appeared and opened the door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked angrily. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“No reception up here…I don’t bother. Who are you?”

“I don’t have time to explain. That truck that just went past you. The men in it killed six people down in the Leister Deep as well as the hoist operator. Get to a phone and call the police. It’s a Ford F-350 dual rear-wheeled pickup with five men in it wearing black tactical uniforms. There’s no rear license plate.”

The driver took one look into Mercer’s slate-gray eyes, recognized the determination behind them, and chose to believe the bizarre story. He cranked the bucket loader’s joystick control and added on some more power.

Mercer reached across and chopped the throttle controls back to idle. “I don’t think you understand, pal. I’m going after the truck. Get out and run.”

“No way, man. I can’t let—”

That’s as far as Mercer let the operator get. He threw a right fist into a spot below the miner’s left ear. His head snapped around and his eyes went glassy. Mercer popped the quick release for the safety belts and hauled the driver out of his chair as the bucket loader continued to slow.

The man was groggy but not out. Mercer frog-marched him down the rear deck to the stairs mounted over the back tires. The driver was starting to come to his senses. Mercer could feel him becoming more resistant. Rather than hitting him again, Mercer collapsed the driver’s knee so that he fell back into Mercer’s waiting arms. He lowered the operator to the deck and unceremoniously pushed him down the stairs. He rolled like a log and then fell into the mud in a dazed heap.

“Call the police! Have them stop that truck!”

Not knowing what the driver would do, Mercer raced back to the cab and threw himself into the operator’s seat. He was in a Caterpillar 990. Not their largest front-end loader, but not too far off the mark, either. He was very familiar with how to drive it, and nearly every other piece of iron that came out of Cat’s Peoria, Illinois, plant.

He cranked up the throttle and marveled at the throaty boom of the 625-horsepower diesel. The machine lurched forward. Mercer had no intention of trying to catch the fleeing pickup. He had a quarter of their top speed. What he had, though, was a real off-road capability they could only dream about.

Rather than steer down the broad dirt access road, Mercer directed the 990 over the edge of the plateau where the mine and quarry were located, avoiding the S-shaped switchbacks altogether. The grade was steep, better than forty-five degrees, but there were enough small trees and undergrowth to keep the eighty-ton monster from plunging out of control. Mercer worked the joystick control like a fighter pilot, juking the loader around the larger trees that it couldn’t simply bowl over. Saplings as thick around as baseball bats vanished under the massive tires, and branches whipped at the cab, one shattering the side glass.

The loader emerged onto the haul road once again, halving its distance from the speeding pickup that had yet to notice it was being stalked. Like a rampaging elephant, Mercer drove the loader across the road and down another embankment. This time there wasn’t anywhere near the same amount of vegetation, and the big machine began to slide on the loose rock and dirt. Mercer fought the instinct to apply the brake and instead hit the gas to straighten out. The back end tucked in behind the front, and he continued to steer down the slope. He hit the next section of flat haul road and was nearly tossed through the windshield by the impact, and for a moment he feared the blow had been enough to dislodge the front axle. But the machine ran on, a snarling testament to American design and construction.

The pickup had just passed by. Mercer could clearly see the marks on the ground from its doubled-up rear tires. The loader sped across the road, and when Mercer put its nose over the next slope, he could see the truck steadily accelerating out of the last hairpin turn. And a sharp-eyed gunman must have seen him too.

A rear window in the dark truck’s cab slid down, and the stubby barrel of one of the machine pistols appeared. They must have figured the big Caterpillar machine was chasing after them, and they were taking no chances. The range was extreme for such a weapon, but that didn’t stop the shooter from unloading a thirty-round magazine of 9mm Parabellums.

A few shots might have hit the loader. Mercer couldn’t hear any strike over the engine’s roar, but for good measure he raised the bucket and tilted it outward so that the cab was protected. He urged the machine over the precipice. This time there were bushes and trees, but they were thicker than upslope and Mercer was forced to use the loader’s massive weight as well as its powerful engine to bull his way down the mountain. He was forced to lower the bucket and use its lip like a blunt ax to scythe through the scrub and topple trees that rose forty feet or more. His speed was cut in half, and he felt frustration mounting. There was only one more switchback before the haul road met the local byway. Within a quarter mile of the entrance to the mine, there were any number of turnoffs. Even if the loader’s driver had called the police, once the shooters reached the public roads they’d vanish inside of a couple of minutes.

If Mercer couldn’t stop them, he had to find a way to delay them.

He had the engine roaring like a rhinoceros defending its territory, and the dense copse of trees, saplings, and brush disappeared under the loader’s tall rubber tires, but the Ford pickup was also under full power. The driver knew what he was doing, because he power-slid into the last hairpin, letting momentum and centripetal force slew the big truck around onto the final leg of its escape.

They were now charging for the spot where Mercer would emerge back onto the road from his crazy dash down the treacherous slope. If Mercer was late and they made it past, it was over. They would be gone.

The Ford’s engine was racing, and Mercer knew it was going to be close. In the last few seconds before he hit the road, the vegetation gave way to knee-high grass and the Cat picked up just enough speed. But then came the hail of bullets. Four guns opened fire simultaneously. One of the shooters had crawled into the pickup’s open bed and was firing over the cab. Other rounds came from the passenger window and from the two guys in the backseat.

The onslaught of lead was overpowering, and their aim grew more accurate as the gap between the two vehicles narrowed. Mercer didn’t have the protection of the big steel bucket as these shots were coming from his right-hand side.

The windshield and remaining side glass disintegrated, showering him with diamond-like shards. Bullets pinged off metal and ricocheted past his head.

Mercer had no choice.

He levered a booted foot onto the operator’s seat and threw himself out the left window. He rolled as he landed on the decking from which he had tossed the driver moments earlier, and used his momentum to leap bodily off the earthmover.

Mercer landed in the grass and tucked his head as tight to his shoulder as he could. He rolled and tumbled a half dozen times, shedding speed with each jarring impact with the frost-hardened ground. The loader thundered past him, its tires churning just feet from where he had somersaulted. Bullets continued to pummel its thick steel hide.

And then the machine hit the flat of the road just in front of the pickup. Had Mercer remained at the controls things would have worked out differently. The impact with level ground wasn’t evenly distributed between the two front tires. The left hit first, which caused the machine to veer sharply to that side. The bucket swung crazily at the same time the pickup’s driver laid on the brakes and threw the truck into a sliding skid, before kicking it around in the opposite direction like a matador torqueing away from the enraged bull. The earthmover’s bucket clipped the F-350’s rear quarter panel with enough force to put the truck up on its outside wheels. The driver cranked the steering to the opposite lock, and as quickly as the vehicle almost flipped onto its roof it was back down on all six wheels and accelerating away.

Mercer lay in the wet grass while the loader crabbed across the road and fell down into the final ditch at the bottom of the access route. The engine kept power going to all four tires, but the bucket had buried itself into the swampy ground. The wheel spin managed to kick up an impressive amount of semifrozen mud, but the loader wasn’t going anywhere.

He heard the Ford hit the public road and begin a long, smooth acceleration away from the mine. They had gotten away with murdering seven people. Mercer had no idea what they’d stolen in the backpack — some part of the experiment, no doubt. He couldn’t begin to speculate what would be worth the cold-blooded murder of so many innocents.

All Mercer could do was lie on his back in the rain, knowing he’d failed to bring justice for his mentor. He ached everywhere.

Mercer was still there, six minutes later, when he finally heard sirens approaching the mine. By then, he had already decided what he had to do. It would have nothing to do with justice. It was too personal now. What came next was revenge.