The Medusa Stone

Northern Eritrea South of the Hajer Plateau

For ten long days and equally long nights they slowly roamed across the desert with nothing to show for their efforts except a dangerously low fuel gauge. The attitude of the team was going sour with frustration and tedium. They were feeling the effects of the Land Cruiser’s bone-jarring suspension, the molten air that beat down with the intensity of a blast furnace, and the swarms of stinging insects that found them the moment they stopped. Habte and Selome rarely spoke to each other, and since Gibby idolized his older cousin, he too had gone quiet around her. The silences in the stifling truck were draining.

Only Mercer seemed not to notice any of this. He was in his element and had managed to put everything out of his mind except the geology and geography of the area. Using the Medusa photographs, Habte’s recollections, and his own sense of the earth, he guided them almost randomly, never losing his good spirits.

Even after ten days of fruitless searching, his dedication hadn’t faltered. In fact, he seemed to move with ever greater assurance as the days passed. But the task was still daunting. He felt like a grizzled Forty-niner who had opened California’s gold rush with little more than a pick and high hopes. Used to being part of a well-financed expedition, he had only his years of experience and his innate intuition to rely on.

At least twenty times a day since reaching the Barka Province, Mercer ordered Habte to stop the truck so he could race across the hardpan, a pointed geologist’s hammer in his fist. He would scramble up some nameless hill, chip away at the stone, examine it for up to half an hour, using his tongue to moisten some samples to change their reflective properties. Sometimes he asked Gibby to join him with two shovels, and for an hour or more, they dug trenches in the scaly soil. Wordlessly, they returned to the Land-Cruiser. Mercer would point in a new direction, and off they would go again.

They established primitive camps at night. Habte had managed to pack only two tents before their flight from Asmara. He and Gibby shared one, Mercer had the other to himself, and Selome slept on the Toyota’s rear bench seat. Their meals were equally crude: millet cakes, turnips or potatoes, and canned meat. The highlight of every day was the seemingly endless bottles of brandy Mercer produced from his luggage, some brought from the United States and a couple purchased for him by Gibby at the Keren Hotel. The three Eritreans usually fell into a death-like sleep soon after their meal, but Mercer worked deep into the night. A hurricane lantern hissed in his tent as he scribbled in a thick notebook, the satellite pictures spread on his knees.

Mercer had intended to use the truck for about a week of exploratory sorties and then return to Asmara to charter a plane and study the terrain from the air, cross-referencing the aerial view with his ground observations and the Medusa pictures. That was now, of course, impossible. It would be suicide for any of them to return to the capital. He was limited to what he could see from the ground and forced to match it to the surface topography from the photos.

At dawn on the eleventh day, the sun was diffused by banks of clouds. Far to the east, the rains had come. The sunrise cast a rose hue on the desert, rouging the sand and casting bizarre shadows on the western mountains. Mercer emerged from his tent before the others awoke, enjoying the solitude of the early morning. They were camped on the bank of one of the rare streams. For the first time in days, water was readily available. Mercer took a few minutes to strip and wash the sweat and grit from his body, dressing again in the same clothes but changing into a fresh pair of socks and boxer shorts. His skin cooled quickly in the dawn chill, and goose flesh rose along his arms and chest. The sensation was wonderful.

Habte emerged from his shared tent with a cigarette already smoldering between his thin lips. He kicked life back into the embers of their fire and heated a pot of water for coffee.

Mercer accepted a mug gratefully, cupping his hands around the warm container. They drank in contented silence. Gibby and Selome awoke a short time later, she going off to perform her morning ablutions and Gibby and Habte falling into a conversation in Tigrinyan, leaving Mercer to watch the grotesque shapes of distant outcrops materialize from the gloom.

“We must return to Badn today,” Habte said when Gibby went off into the desert to relieve himself.

They had negotiated with a group of nomads staying around the village of Badn to travel to Nacfa and purchase gasoline. Their camel caravan would have returned by now, and even with extended tanks, the Toyota would just make it to town.

“I know,” Mercer replied absently, watching Selome’s sinuous return to the camp. Despite the harsh conditions, each morning she managed to look fresh and beautiful. She wore ballooning jodhpurs and a man’s large overshirt. Her hair formed a dense halo from under the wide brim of a straw hat, its fuchsia band adding a touch of feminine color to the ensemble. Her lightweight clothes were better suited to the desert than the jeans she had started out wearing.

She curled into a cross-legged position on the ground across the fire from Mercer. There was a trace of blush on her cheeks. She’d been aware of his gaze.

“We’re heading back to Badn this morning,” Mercer announced, and he could see relief in her eyes. The pace he had set for the past days had been brutal, and they all anticipated at least a small break in the tiny hamlet. “I want to hire those nomads again to return to Nacfa and have them guide the excavator here.”

Both Habte and Selome gaped at him. It was Selome who found her voice first. “You found the mine?”

Mercer looked at her sharply, then dashed her hopes with a quick shake of his head. “No, not yet, but the rains are coming soon, and if we don’t get the excavator across the Adohba River now, we may never be able to. There aren’t any bridges across it strong enough to take the weight of the tractor trailer and crawler.” Disappointment made her face collapse. “However, I do have good news.”

He went to his tent and returned with his notebook and the now dog-eared photographs. He spread the material on the ground, anchoring the corners of a rolled-up map with fist-size rocks. Habte and Selome clustered over his shoulder while Gibby made himself busy breaking down their camp. “Since my Global Positioning Satellite receiver was left in Asmara, all the reference marks on the map are just estimates. They could be off as much as a mile or two, and a margin of error that big doesn’t help our cause.”

He pointed at a spot twenty miles north of Badn. “We’re roughly here now. The asterisks on the map represent sites where I’ve taken samples.” There were dozens of such notations. Despite the seemingly random route Mercer had taken, the marks were laid out in perfect symmetry, each about half a mile from its neighbor in every direction. Habte and Selome were impressed by his orienteering skills. “The marks in red show where I discovered traces of garnet and ilmenites that may or may not mean the presence of diamonds. The problem is their quantity. There doesn’t seem to be enough for me to believe the kimberlite pipe ever reached the surface to be eroded down and its contents spread by these ancient water courses.” He pointed at several twisting lines he’d drawn on the map, certain the others hadn’t been aware that they’d traveled in any streambeds, such were the changes wrought in the millions of years since they’d been carved. “If the pipe’s still buried under the surface, we may never find it.”

“So what is our next move?” Habte asked.

Mercer thumbed through his notebook until he came to a pencil sketch of a buttress of rock bisected by a deep valley. Through the valley’s sheer aperture, an open plain beyond was revealed in detail. The drawing was harsh in its economy of line, but there was a depth of skill and just a bit of evocative emotion in its composition. “This is the best I can deduce from the surface details revealed by the Medusa pictures. They weren’t calibrated when the shots were taken, and the above-ground features suffered the most from this. But this is what the area around the kimberlite pipe should look like from ground level. I wanted to have this drawing finished a while ago, but it wasn’t until last night that I was finally satisfied with the results. If the pipe exists, it’s going to be behind these ramparts in the valley. Habte, do you recognize any features like this?”

Habte would have easily remembered because the drawing’s detail made it very recognizable. But he had never seen the sheer mountain wall with such a narrow ax-stroke cut in its face. “No, but we can show it to the nomads in Badn; they may know of it. I’m guessing this is farther north, near the Hajer Plateau.”

“Do you know the region?”

“Bad country up there. Shifta control much of the area. The government doesn’t even bother to patrol that far north. During the war the whole area was heavily mined by the Ethiopians to prevent us from using Sudan as a safe haven. It is not safe to leave the road that passes through Itaro to the east. The nomads and shepherds avoid the area, but still a few are killed or maimed by mines every year.”

Mercer cursed because of the added danger. Military planners called them “perfect soldiers.” Once planted, landmines sat silently, effective for decades, waiting long after the wars were over. It took only a few pounds of pressure to set one off, detonating a measure of high explosive that caught its victim unaware. Children usually found and triggered the devices as they played far from their villages.

“Is there anything else up there?”

“There’s a monastery. It was abandoned during the war, but I think the monks have come back.”

The mines would never be deactivated, Mercer knew, for the cost was astronomical. Northern Eritrea would be contaminated for decades, as lifeless and unsafe as the environs around Chernobyl. “We don’t have a choice. If any of you want to abandon the search, I’ll understand, but I am going on.”

“We’re with you,” Selome said quickly, and Habte and Gibby nodded.

“Thank you.” The two men were risking their lives for him, and Mercer was deeply touched by their dedication. They barely knew him, yet were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Selome, on the other hand, was on her own mission, and her willingness to continue gave him a glimpse of her commitment. “I’m going to take a chance and ignore the desert between us and the Hajer Plateau. To get the excavator up here, we can use the main road as far north as Itaro, and the nomads can guide it to this point here.” He used his pencil to circle the village of Ila Babu on the Adobha River. “Now, let’s get going.”

The Toyota was sputtering when they entered Badn, its body so dusty it looked as if it had been painted with a desert camouflage pattern. There were only a couple of permanent structures in the village. The rest of Badn was mostly mounded tents of coarse fabric stretched over wooden frames. On the open plain, they resembled loaves of bread with the sun setting behind them. The town’s natu rally fed well was its only raison d’être. Nomads from all over the Barka Province used the waters for their camels and goats.

Habte recognized the tent of the family he had hired to fetch gasoline from Nacfa and steered the Land Cruiser to the rude compound. Bundles of firewood stood a little way off from the central tent, and in the shimmering distance a caravan of camels was returning from a foray with more. From this range, their misshapen bodies appeared to float in the chimera of rising heat. Several of the bawling beasts were pegged near the camp, their soft eyes regarding the truck with ill-disguised contempt. Behind the faggots of desiccated wood sat a pile of plastic jerry cans filled with their gasoline.

Their return was seen as an opportunity for the nomad headman to throw a party. He was in his sixties with a booming voice and a backslapping greeting that, had Mercer not been prepared, would have driven him to the ground. “Fuck, fuck,” he smiled, demonstrating his command of English. “Fuck.”

“And fuck to you too.” Mercer grinned.

The chieftain turned to Habte and spoke in rapid fire, motioning for a translation for Mercer’s benefit. “He says you are welcome back to his humble home and hopes that our travels have been profitable. He also hopes you have brought him his money to cement his friendship.”

Mercer reached into one of his vest pockets for a sheath of ten-dollar bills and handed the entire roll across. The money represented more cash than the family saw in a year. The nomad smiled again, slapping Mercer soundly on the shoulder. The few teeth remaining in his smile were jagged yellow stumps that had been filed to points so their sharpness made up for their diminished numbers. “Fuck.”

“Fuck, fuck,” Mercer rejoined.

Habte translated when the headman spoke. “We must spend the night as his guests. He says he will not allow us to leave until he has shown us his hospitality.”

“Tell him we would be honored. If it’s permitted, I have a bottle of brandy to bring to his table.”

The old headman’s eyes lit up with delight. “Fuck, yes.”

Two hours later, having bathed, Mercer ducked into the headman’s tent with Habte, Selome, and Gibby in tow. He was stopped by the rank odor of the tent and the smoke coiling up through the chimney slit from the small fire. Oil lamps lit the center of the tent, revealing an expanse of beautifully woven rugs on the bare floor. The headman sat amid a circular ring of men, a space opened at his right for Mercer and his party. Inside the circle was a huge hammered brass plate with several matching pots surrounding it. Next to each man was a platter of injera, the unleavened bread that was the staple of most Eritreans’ diets. There were at least fifteen children in the tent, laughing and squealing with some noisy game, their play adding to the din of the twenty adults. Incongruously, a Michael Jackson tape played on a portable radio. The King of Pop sounded like a baritone because the tape deck’s batteries were nearly dead. Selome took Mercer’s hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Looks like you’re going to get that traditional meal after all.” From around the cooking fire the heady aroma of their meal wafted across the room, and even at this distance the spiciness made Mercer’s eyes swim.

The headman indicated that Mercer was to sit beside him, and Selome slid into a place on Mercer’s other side. The Eritrean thrust a brass cup into Mercer’s hand and toasted him with a drink of his own. Mercer recognized the smell of tej, a delightful honey wine made only in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and he drank down the tumbler in one quick toss. Unlike the polished, sweet wine he’d enjoyed in Washington’s Ethiopian restaurants, this fiery brew was as smooth as sandpaper, with the subtlety of a stick of dynamite and twice the kick. It took all of his will not to cry out as the liquor exploded in his stomach. He finally caught his breath. “Oh, fuck.”

It took four more shots of tej for Mercer to get into the spirit of the party. He took the bottle of brandy Gibby had been holding for him and handed it ceremoniously to the chieftain. The nomad prince opened it gleefully and tossed the cap over his shoulder, where it landed unerringly in one of the cooking pots. Disdaining his cup in his desire to drink such a delicacy, he tilted the bottle to his lips, his throat pumping. He handed the bottle to Mercer. Hoping the brandy would kill whatever swam in the Eritrean’s mouth, he, too, took a long gulp. “Oh, fuck,” he muttered again. It was going to be a long night.

The women finished preparing the meal and tipped the cooking pots directly into the three brass bowls around the giant platter. The assembled tribesmen went at the food like a pack of wild dogs. They tore off slabs of injera, dunking them into the bowls so their hands came away smeared to the wrist with stew, clots of meat, and vegetables dripping onto the huge plate as they bent forward to cram the mass down their throats. Habte and Gibby ate with equal gusto, though Selome showed a bit more decorum with the size of the bites she took. The wat in the bowl closest to Mercer was made of lentils, chickpeas, and oily mutton. The bread helped absorb some of the grease, but he could feel his arteries hardening with every bite. The only thing that cut through the food’s spicy edge was the tej that the women encouragingly refilled every time his cup was only half emptied.

Unbelievably, the huge amount of food was eaten in just a few minutes, and no sooner had the last of the three bowls been emptied than the women approached and poured fresh wat for the men and replenished their stacks of injera.

“How are you doing?” Selome asked, wiping her hands on her pant leg. Her eyes were bright and glassy with wine, and the food had brought a flush to her perfect skin.

Mercer could see she was enjoying herself as much as he. He wondered what this was like for her, to sit with her people after so many years of isolation and enjoy the simple pleasure of a communal meal. “A few more cups of tej and I’ll forget that my stomach lining has been burned away.”

Selome suddenly leaned across and kissed him full on the mouth, catching Mercer by surprise. He could feel the spicy heat from the wat on her lips and felt a deeper warmth that had nothing to do with the food. The uncharacteristic intimacy shocked her as much as it did him, and she turned away, flustered.

Again the three huge bowls were emptied and again they were refilled, fresh steam rising up in dangerous tendrils that burned like acid. The headman dipped a piece of injera into the fresh stew and palmed a chunk of meat the size of his fist. He handed it to Mercer with another grin. “Fuck?”

“Oh, no problem.” Mercer emptied his tej and jammed the fatty hunk into his mouth with the relish of a native.

Four more times the pots were emptied and recharged. The communal eating platter was mounded with the food the men hadn’t been quick enough to get to their mouths before it dropped. The few die-hards still eating were making a significant dent in these leavings. The Eritreans were doused with grease from their mouths to the tips of their ubiquitous beards and from their fingernails to their forearms. The meal was finally winding down, and Mercer thought it a good time to ask his host a favor. He had kept his notebook with him, sitting on it during the banquet to keep it from either being ruined by grease or accidentally eaten by one of the clansmen. He opened the book to his sketch of the valley and mountain around the kimberlite pipe and asked Selome to translate.

“Do you recognize this place?”

“Yes, of course.” The headman tried to draw himself straight, but the prodigious amount of alcohol made his spine rebel and he slumped against his neighbor. “My father’s mother was born near that place. It is on the western flank of Hajer. We call it the Valley of Dead Children.”

“Why is that?”

“Because that is its name,” the old man pointed out logically.

“But why that name?” Mercer persisted.

“Who knows? That’s what it’s been called since long before time was recorded.” He was starting to fade away from the conversation, his eyes rolling back into his skull and his lips going rubbery around the last few words. “Even before the war, no one went to this place. Evil spirits live in the hills. My father told me that even animals refuse to enter the valley. They could feel the ghosts. Now the area around the Valley of Dead Children is full of mines. A cousin lost his eldest son there two rains ago when the boy went looking for a young goat that wandered away from his herd.”

“Have you been to this valley?”

“No.” And the headman started to snore.

Years of friendship with Harry White should have prepared Mercer for the next morning’s hangover, but his previous experiences couldn’t have possibly readied him for the pounding in his skull or the maelstrom that churned his gut. Everyone was still in the tent, most snoring loudly where they’d passed out the night before. One clansmen lying in the platter was dangerously close to drowning in the grease pooled at its bottom. Mercer came awake in slow, painful stages, dimly aware that it was still dark outside and the tent was lit with only a single guttering oil lamp.

Selome was curled up in the crook of his arm, her head resting lightly on the pads of muscle. Her face was toward him, her mouth parted and her lips shining in the murky light. Mercer recalled the surprising kiss she had given him the night before and passed it off as alcohol-induced affection. He kissed her forehead and carefully disentangled her limbs from his.

By the luminous dial of his watch, dawn was half an hour away. The moon hung near the horizon in its own bright corona. Mercer shuffled unsteadily to the Toyota. He retrieved a bundle from under the truck and returned to the low stools placed just outside the tent’s entrance. Mercer recalled that the headman’s name was Negga, and he was already sitting, his head hanging limply between his hands. Mercer tapped him on the shoulder and offered one of the Milotti beers he had left overnight in a sodden towel. The beer was refreshingly cold.

“Little hair of the hyena for you.” If Mercer was going to make it through the day, he’d need a beer to push back the effects of the tej. Harry called it the “deferred hangover plan. Party now and pay later.”

Habte and Gibby joined them after Mercer had passed a second beer to Negga.

“Habte, ask our host if he would give us a man to guide us to the Valley of Dead Children.”

“I am taking my family farther east to catch the rains,” Habte translated for the nomad leader. “My herds and flocks have been months without good pasturage. I want to help you, but I can’t delay. But heed my words. You don’t want to go up there. Not only do you have to worry about the mines, but I’ve heard there’s an army stationed on the Sudan side of the border. They arrived about six days ago.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know. They’re not regular soldiers, and it was said that there are at least fifty of them, all well armed. A force that size is too big for one of the shifta gangs.” The chieftain shrugged his shoulders. “Their presence is a mystery.”

Mercer retrieved his topographical map of Eritrea and spread it on the ground in front of Negga. “Can you at least show me where on the Hajer Plateau the valley lies?”

Negga stared at the map with incomprehension. Like most nomads, he relied on the accumulated knowledge of generations of wanderers to know his territory. Even after Mercer pointed to the Adobha River as a reference, Negga still couldn’t understand how the compressed lines on the flat projection represented the rugged northern mountains. “I don’t know what this paper means. The valley is on the west flank of the plateau, a long day’s ride on a swift camel from Ila Babu. That is all I can tell you.”

“Would you at least guide my people to Nacfa so they can get another truck I have waiting and then take them to Ila Babu?” There were no roads connecting the two towns.

“We have drunk from the same bottle. Of course, I will do this thing for you. But I will not permit my people to go beyond Ila Babu. I won’t lose any of my family for your search.”

“Fair enough.”

Negga’s expression brightened. “It will cost you only two hundred American dollars.”

In their debilitated state, it took Habte and Gibby a half hour to transfer the fuel from the jerry cans into the Toyota, lashing the spares onto the cargo rack under the stores already there. Mercer went to talk to Negga’s son, who spoke passable English, shook hands when they came to an agreement, and passed over some money.

“It sounds like we are not going with you,” Habte said when Mercer returned to the truck.

“You’re not. I don’t want Selome with us if I run into any trouble, and I can’t trust her alone with Negga’s guides.” Mercer paused. “There’s something else. Yesterday when we were talking about returning here, Selome asked if I thought I had discovered the mine’s location. Do you remember?”

Habte nodded slowly.

“As far as I know, she thinks we’re only looking for a kimberlite pipe, not a mine. It’s the same thing the kidnappers said. Unless she has outside knowledge, she shouldn’t know anything about the mine. I haven’t told her.”

Habte accepted this without a change of expression. “I’ll keep my eye on her, see if she tries to contact anyone in Nacfa.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“What about Gibby?”

“He stays with me.” Mercer secured the last corner of a cargo net. “I can use the help, and I’ll send him to meet you in Ila Babu to direct you to the mine site if I find it.”

“What were you talking to Negga’s son about?” Habte asked.

“Contingency plan B,” Mercer said and handed over his spare sat-phone with instructions on how and when to use it.

At last they were ready. Negga assured Mercer that two of his sons would take Selome and Habte to Nacfa the following morning. Selome was still asleep, and while Mercer felt a twinge of guilt leaving her without an explanation, he didn’t let it show. He swallowed three ibuprofin tablets, drank a full liter of purified water, then mounted the truck. Gibby was already strapped into the passenger seat, his head lolling as if its weight was too great a burden for his neck.

“Selome won’t be happy that you are leaving her behind,” Habte teased.

Mercer ignored the jibe. “I’ll call you after my next contact from the kidnappers. If I haven’t located the mine by then, plan on coming to meet us anyway and we can continue the search together.” When he saw Selome again, Mercer promised himself that they would have a long talk about what she already knew. The men holding Harry White were playing for keeps, and it was time for Mercer to do likewise.