The Medusa Stone

Valley of Dead Children Northern Eritrea

Mercer fell asleep a few times during his vigil, jerking himself awake only seconds after nodding off. His eyes were red-rimmed and scratchy from the fine particles of dust that invaded the dilapidated camp building. At eleven, knowing that if he drifted off again he wouldn’t wake until dawn, he walked out onto the lonely plain, taking the sat-phone with him. The temperature dipped only slightly as night smothered Africa. The Milky Way was like a great smear across the sky. Wind moved silently across the landscape. The loudest noise he heard was the sound of his own footfalls on the cracked desert floor.

With about ten minutes before his appointed contact time, he activated the satellite phone and it rang almost immediately. Startled and wondering why the contact had come early, he pressed the button for the receive mode. “Mercer.”

“Dr. Mercer, it’s good to hear your voice again.” It was the man who’d spoken to him in Asmara. Mercer hoped he’d been killed in the Sudanese attack on the Ambasoira Hotel.

“Can’t say the same,” he replied bitterly.

The caller ignored Mercer’s quip. “I’ve tried calling several times, but your phone was deactivated. We have a great deal to discuss. Much has happened since our last conversation.”

Maybe it was that he was standing near the mine’s entrance and had already done what was demanded of him or maybe it was because he’d been pushed too far, but Mercer couldn’t hold back his anger, couching it only slightly in sarcasm when he spoke. “Yeah, like you getting your ass kicked by a couple of amateurs trying to steal my underwear. They’d tried the night before. Fortunately, the maid scared them off with her mop. Looks like kidnapping defenseless old men is about the limit of your abilities. Maybe you ought to practice a bit more. Try taking candy from babies for a while — I hear it’s tougher than it sounds.”

“Your humor is strained,” the voice said. “Perhaps this will dry it up entirely. Listen very carefully.”

There was a short pause and Mercer heard a new voice. Harry! He sounded distant, as though he had been recorded and the tape played into the phone. Through the distortion, Mercer could still feel the terror in the old man’s voice. He sounded as if he’d been through hell.

“Mercer, you’ve got to find that diamond mine. They’ve told me that if you don’t reach it in the next two weeks, they’re going to start cutting me.” Harry’s voice quavered. “They’re keeping me in a rat hole with some shit that’s worse than Boodles. I don’t know how much of this I can take.” Harry was cut off and the terrorist returned to the phone. “That should satisfy you that your friend is still alive. I’m maintaining our end of the bargain, how about you?”

“What did Harry mean about two weeks? I thought I still had four.”

“Not anymore. You will give us the mine’s location in two weeks or Harry White will be killed.”

“I’m not even close yet,” Mercer lied, looking at the black silhouette of the mine’s head gear in the moon glow. Two weeks? That wasn’t enough time to come up with any sort of workable plan and he knew it. Shit.

“That is your and Mr. White’s problem, not mine.”

“I have a lead,” Mercer offered, adding a pleading note to his voice. “From a nomad family I met a couple of days ago, but I need more time. For Christ’s sake, this is a big country! You’ve been reasonable until now. Give me an additional week. In three weeks I’ll have the mine’s location, I swear.”

“You have two.” There was a finality in the reply. “Now, there’s the problem of what happened in Asmara that we have to discuss.”

“I didn’t kill your man.”

“I know that, Dr. Mercer. As we both now realize, there is another party interested in our activities, and it may become necessary for me to protect you and your team. You will tell me where you are right now.”

“Do you really think I am going to trust your sudden concern in our well-being?”

“Our interest in your welfare is well documented. Hence the two dead Africans I left in your hotel room,” the caller said placidly. “I consider you an employee and I want you to succeed. Tell me where you are.”

“No. You want that mine and I want Harry White. That’s our agreement, and you’re going to leave me alone until I find it.” Mercer’s voice hardened.

“And the Sudanese?”

“I’ll worry about them myself.”

“You know I can’t make you tell me,” the other man conceded. “But when we next speak, I will have another tape recording and you’ll hear Harry White losing his left hand.” The phone went dead.

“Shit!” Mercer punched off and then dialed the satellite phone he’d given to Habte.

“Selam?” Habte answered immediately. As discussed before they separated, he’d been waiting for Mercer’s call.

“Habte, it’s me. I think I just screwed up with the kidnappers. They’re making some threats and I believe them.” Mercer was replaying the conversation in his head when he considered something odd Harry had said. Some shit worse than Boodles. What the hell was the old bastard talking about? “Listen, I’m not going to say too much, but I’m going to need that excavator sooner than planned. Can you start at first light?”

“Yes, the vehicle’s owner has been working here repairing roads, but he told the city’s council that he would have to leave at a moment’s notice.”

“Making a little money on the side?”

“I don’t see anything wrong with that. Nacfa is in disrepair and excavating equipment is rare in Eritrea.”

“As long as he’s got full tanks when you get here,” Mercer cautioned.

“He will. We also have the other equipment you had me pick up before you arrived in Eritrea.”

“Good. We’re going to need that generator and the portable floodlights.” While the sat-phones were not secure from eavesdropping, Mercer felt sure that no one was listening to this particular frequency at this particular time. However, he wasn’t going to take any unnecessary risks by broadcasting their location in clear. He gave Habte map coordinates roughly ten miles from the Valley of Dead Children, planning to send Gibby to guide them in the last few miles. “What’s your ETA?”

“It will take us at least a day. That’s rough country and the Adobha River may already be flooded. It would be best if Gibby met us at noon the day after tomorrow to be certain.”

“Understood,” Mercer said, still thinking about Harry White. Boodles was a brand name of gin. What was he doing with gin if his captors were Muslim and thus forbidden alcohol? Obviously, Harry was trying to tell him something, but Mercer was too tired to put it together.

Mercer woke Gibby as soon as it was light enough to see. He’d gotten just enough sleep to satisfy his body’s immediate needs, but he felt slow and lethargic in the mounting heat of the dawn. Gibby agreed that he could stay in the valley assisting Mercer until the following morning and still make the rendezvous with Habte, Selome, and the bulk of their equipment.

After a quick breakfast, Mercer inspected the head gear’s framework while Gibby unpacked all the rope they had brought with them. The rust on the steel struts was only surface accumulation; the metal underneath still appeared strong. There were only three fifty-foot lengths of rope in the Toyota, but if they attached them to the tow cable on the Land Cruiser, they would have enough to get Mercer to the bottom of the shaft.

He rigged a series of pulleys using the metal frame, wrapping the struts with wads of tape and smearing them with oil drained from the Toyota’s sump to prevent the sharp metal from fraying the rope. He showed Gibby how to belay the harness Mercer had fashioned and devised a quick series of verbal and tugging signals for communication.

“Remember, Gibby, you’re all that’s keeping me from a quick drop to hell,” Mercer warned, standing at the threshold of the old mine opening. Gibby had proved to be an able assistant, but Mercer still didn’t like the idea of trusting his life to the teenager. The black pit seemed to want to suck him into its depths.

Mercer took several breaths and stepped off the crumbling edge, hanging above the hundred-and-sixty-foot void. Gibby struggled for a moment, shifting his grip, so Mercer dropped a few quick inches. “You okay?” Mercer gasped, a sickly smile on his face.

“Yes, effendi,” Gibby grinned. “Your rope tangle makes you weigh just a little bit.”

The pulley system made it so Gibby was supporting only about fifty pounds of actual weight, but Mercer made sure the rope was still secured to the Land Cruiser’s winch. When the time came to haul him out, Gibby would need the power of the Toyota to pull him to safety.

“All right, lower away.”

Mercer dropped into a black world, the square of light over his head receding almost too fast. He switched on a six-cell flashlight and made certain his mining helmet was planted securely on his head. Bits of debris rained around him, pinging against the helmet and plunging down the vertical shaft. “Slower,” he yelled, bracing his feet against the irregular wall to give him just a little slack in the line. He gave two quick tugs to reinforce his verbal command, and his progress slowed dramatically.

Down he went, the makeshift bosun’s chair digging painfully into the back of his legs, the flashlight casting a white spot before his eyes. He trained it below his swaying perch, but the light could penetrate only a few feet. There should have been a steel guide rail bolted into the rock face to stabilize the skips and cages but there wasn’t, and Mercer could see no evidence that one had ever been installed. It made him wonder just how far the earlier attempt at digging out the diamonds had progressed.

There had been no evidence of a crushing mill or separation facilities at the surface camp. Since they hadn’t even installed a proper hoist system, it was possible the mine hadn’t been worked for very long. Yet a shaft this deep would have taken a year or more to dig, considering its age and the quality of equipment available a half century ago.

He came to the first drift roughly eighty feet down. This was a horizontal working passageway the miners had dug off the central shaft in order to tunnel into the mineral-laden ore. From this depth, the shaft’s surface opening appeared to be no larger than a storm drain. Mercer twisted himself across the open shaft until his boots landed firmly on the shelf that led off into the living rock. Whoever had opened the mine knew enough not to bore the main shaft straight into the volcanic vent, but rather sink a hole next to it and from there tunnel into the kimberlite ore. Mercer gave the signal for Gibby to hold the line where it was and unhooked himself from his sling, tying it to a wooden support beam so it wouldn’t dangle back over the void.

The flashlight cut into the gloom, revealing a long tunnel that was roughly twelve feet wide, six high, and God alone knew how long. Mercer played the light along the ceiling, surprised not to see any bats. In fact, he hadn’t noticed the guano smell so typical to abandoned mines. Like the Valley of Dead Children, the mine too was devoid of life. A chill ran up his spine that had nothing to do with the coolness of the subterranean passage.

He walked fifty yards down the drift before coming to the first cross cut, a right-angle passage roughly the same height as the drift by only half the width. For a moment Mercer considered taking this branch, but thought it better to keep to the main drive. Another cross cut appeared on his left after only a few more yards and then a third shortly after that. As he kept exploring, he again played the beam of the flashlight on the hanging wall — the ceiling, in mining parlance — and saw that bolts hadn’t been driven into it to help its stability. The rock was mostly rhyolite and probably didn’t need the bolts, but it deepened his concern. There was something very wrong about this mine.

He discovered a winze after two hundred yards, an open hole in the floor that dropped directly to the next level down. Such small vertical shafts connected two mining levels and frequently dumped into a haulage, a passage used for the removal of mined material. The wooden railing around the winze was dry and broken, and a descending ladder bolted to one side looked so weak it wouldn’t support a mouse, let alone a man. He continued on. By the time he reached the working face of the drift, fifteen hundred feet from the main shaft, he’d passed a total of eight cross cuts, two winzes, and a raise, an aperture in the hanging wall over his head that meant there was another level above him, one not directly joined to the principal shaft.

His original estimate of the size of the workings was way off the mark. Without exploring the cross cuts, he could only guess that they at least doubled the amount of mined tunnels from just this one drift. There was still a further hundred-foot drop to the bottom of the shaft, and there was no telling how many more drifts there were. Depending on the stability of the rock and the way in which the drifts were driven, there could be several more miles of tunnels shooting off the original bore.

Mercer spent fifteen minutes at the working face minutely examining the rocks. The ore from the last explosive shot hadn’t been cleared when the miners were pulled from the stopes, evidence that they had left in a hurry. Miners never, ever, left unprocessed ore in a mine. He sifted through the debris on the foot wall — the term for the floor — using brute strength to lever aside some of the larger chunks so he could scrutinize the rock face. No matter how he held his light, he could see no evidence of the opaque blue ground, the kimberlite, that would yield the diamonds. He figured about a year had been wasted here with nothing to show for it. This drift had been a bust, worthless.

Back at the main shaft, he tugged on the bosun’s chair, signaling Gibby, and slipped into the harness, cinching it tight around his legs and across his waist. He jerked twice more and stepped out into the void, spinning like a dervish as the rope took up the strain and unkinked itself. His descent was dizzying, but Mercer had done this before and felt no ill effects as Gibby lowered him farther into the earth.

He ignored the next three drifts, knowing he could explore them if necessary on his way back to the surface. As he expected, at the bottom of the shaft lay a twisted pile of machinery and hundreds of feet of braided steel cable. When the mine had been abandoned, the men working it had dumped their equipment into the hole rather than allow it to be taken by their enemies, probably the advancing English army. Mercer landed on a coil of hoist cable, the strands rusted together by Eritrea’s seasonal rains into a solid mass of metal that looked like a modern sculpture. Below it, his flashlight revealed the top of the cage used to haul men out of the mine, and farther into the tangled gear, he saw a large ore skip. He played the light across the debris and saw that the equipment had not actually fallen all the way to the bottom of the shaft; it had jammed together about fifteen feet from the ground. Shining the light around the perimeter walls of the mine’s sump, he jumped back dangerously when the beam flashed across a twisted corpse. It took several seconds for his heart to slow.

He picked his way across the pile of junk to get a closer look, the metal scraping against itself as his weight shifted its precarious balance. The body was in a similar state of decomposition as the Eritrean soldier he and Gibby had buried the day before, and his uniform looked about the same too. Mercer guessed that a curious soldier had stepped too close to the open pit, lost his footing, and plummeted to a quick death. Unhooking himself from the rope again, he signaled Gibby to hold his position — not that the lad would have much of a choice. With Mercer this deep, the line was at full stretch.

There were gaps between some of the equipment, a tangled warren of openings that Mercer could possibly edge his way through, gaining access to the mine’s deepest drift, whose entrance was buried by the abandoned mining gear. Yet even in the best circumstances, making the attempt was dangerous. The scrap could shift, crushing him or trapping him without any hope of rescue. If he became stuck, there wouldn’t be any way to signal Gibby, and even if he could, there wasn’t anything one person could do to set him free.

But he didn’t have a choice. Mercer took a moment to work his muscles, limbering himself for the challenge. He dropped to his knees, peering down into the shadowed jumble, picking his first moves with his eyes before committing his body. Like a contortionist, he twisted through the equipment, torquing and shifting constantly, lowering himself across the scaly steel, cutting his hands on the sharp edges, smearing skin off his legs and back. His clothes were reduced to rags. It was like moving through a huge knot of barbed wire. If he found a passage to the drift, it would be easy to retrace the trail of blood back to the top of the debris.

Eight feet into the pile, he maneuvered himself into a head-down position, flashing the light under the elevator cage where it had wedged against the wall of the shaft. The beam was swallowed by the darkness of another drift, the last one. His position put him at the inky tunnel’s ceiling. Wriggling like a landed fish, he worked his body under the cage, holding his breath when a section of ruined equipment settled, grinding like a huge pair of steel jaws. He felt the pile was ready to collapse. Ignoring the pain as a piece of metal ripped across his back, he forced himself those last feet, tumbling into the drift as the junk gave out. The tons of machinery, precariously balanced for half a century, collapsed deeper into the mine’s sump with an echoing crash, kicking up a choking cloud of dust. Had Mercer been a second slower, his body would have been cut in two as the cage sheared across the entrance to the drift like the blade of a guillotine.

His breathing raged despite his efforts to slow it, drawing in rancid dust with each inhalation. He took a second to check the worst of his bloody injuries. Once he’d recovered, he cast the light toward the clogged shaft. The drift’s rectangular opening was completely blocked with an impassable wall of debris packed so tightly now that Mercer couldn’t get his arm more than a few inches into it. He gripped a steel I-beam and heaved at it until stars and pin-wheels flared behind his closed eyes. Yet the beam didn’t move more than a fraction of an inch. When it collapsed, the cables, hoists, cages, skips, and all the other equipment thrown into the shaft had keyed into itself, locking together like puzzle pieces, plugging his exit. It would take explosives to dislodge any of it.

Mercer was trapped.

“Well, this is an unexpected wrinkle,” he said aloud.

Mercer knew panic resulted from fear of the unfamiliar, and for better or worse, he had been trapped in mines before. He kept his fear firmly in check. As calmly as a man walking to his office, he turned and started down the dark passage. After only a couple of yards, he stopped short. Blood drained from his face, and his gorge rose acidly in his throat.

The long tunnel was a crypt with hundreds of bodies laid out like cordwood. Ranks of them lined both walls for as far as Mercer’s flashlight could penetrate. He first thought they had been trapped down here like himself, but he realized that their postures were too orderly. These men would have struggled until the last possible second to get themselves out of the chamber. They would have been clustered at the shaft, not resting in these peaceful poses. He inspected the man lying closest to him, and understood. In the parched skin of his forehead, a neat hole had been drilled through his skull. Judging by their clothes, these men were the miners who had excavated the tunnels. They had been shot when the Italians had fled, their bodies abandoned here, the secret of the mine kept by their eternal silence.

“Jesus.” Mercer was reminded of the slave labor gangs used by the Nazis to dig the clandestine underground factories for their rockets and jet fighters.

Walking by the grisly ranks, he judged there were more than four hundred bodies in the drift. Even as he fought his pity for them, he considered just what this meant and had no answer.

Delaying his search for a way out of the drift, Mercer took the time to walk all the way to its end. It ran for more than a mile, branching numerous times to both left and right. The hanging wall was just inches from the top of his miner’s helmet. This tunnel alone doubled again his estimates of the size of the mine and the time taken to create it. Like the first drift he’d explored, the working face had been abandoned shortly after a shot. A mechanical scraper hulked just before the face, and the cables that maneuvered the plow-shaped machine ran back to a four-cylinder donkey engine. The miners had even left their picks, shovels, and pry bars a little way off, the metal kept pristine by the dry air.

A number of questions were answered for Mercer as he studied the rock face itself and examined the ore that had broken away from the stope. He turned away sadly. “Oh, you poor bastards, you never had a chance, did you?”

There was a whole other set of questions Mercer needed to think through, but first he had to get back to the surface. Having spent much of his professional career in the subterranean realm, he had developed the ability to map these three-dimensional mazes as he walked, part of his brain counting distances and angles without really being conscious of it. It was a skill honed with years of practice and allowed him to move underground with relative ease. He back-tracked to the first raise he’d come across on this level. Peering up the black hole, he sensed that it wouldn’t lead to the level above but would branch off into a subdrift. He searched for a cross cut that led to another drift, shorter than the main one and angled downward. A short distance down this tunnel, he came to another raise and inspected the ladder that ran upward. The wood had grayed through the years and was so riddled with dry rot that it felt chalky to the touch. Mercer tested the bottom rung, and his foot snapped the strut with only a tiny amount of pressure.

“Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.”

Instinct told him that at the top of this vertical raise would be a tunnel to the main shaft above the pile of ruined machinery. And his rope to safety. There was enough loose stone on the floor for him to build a mounded pyramid below the aperture. He hummed to himself as he worked, often switching off the flashlight to conserve the batteries, working in a darkness more total than the deepest night. After twenty minutes, the pile was high enough. With a ceiling height of just over six feet, he’d needed a platform of stones three feet tall and had built one nearly four. He aimed the light up the raise, but its ray vanished in the gloom.

The rubble was loose under his boots as he climbed to the top of the pile, ducking into the opening so the rim brushed against his thighs. Just to be certain, he tested another section of the ladder, tugging it gently, but the wood splintered in his hand. Mercer took a deep breath and jammed one foot against the side of the three-foot square vertical shaft. He levered his shoulder against the rock, kicked upward, and swung his other foot against the stone, lifting himself off the pile of gravel and bits of rock. Standing in the chimney with his legs akimbo, he would need both hands to steady himself as he continued the ascent, so he tucked the Maglite into his belt, shifted his weight to his left foot, raised his right a few inches, and rammed it against the wall again.

It took him fifteen minutes to shimmy twenty feet up the shaft because he could take only six-inch steps safely and had to force his palms against the rock face to help distribute his weight. He thought the raise would have ended by now, landing him in another drift, but still it rose into the darkness. To his horror, Mercer realized the shaft was widening; his legs were now spread more than four feet and the strain on his groin muscles and upper thighs was becoming unbearable. For the first time since the collapse of the machinery in the sump, he was starting to have doubts about getting out. He shifted positions, pressing both feet against one wall and forcing his shoulders against the opposite so that his body spanned the void.

Rolling his shoulders alternately and walking up the far wall, Mercer resumed his climb, blood soaking his shirt and running into his khaki pants. The shaft continued to widen as he climbed, making it necessary to exert more pressure against the walls to maintain his perch. If it opened much farther, Mercer knew he wouldn’t have the leverage to bridge the opening and still be able to climb. He shut his mind to that possibility, but he was becoming desperate, his body aching in areas he didn’t know existed. He was running out of strength, his muscles cramping, and knew he would never be able to control his descent if it became necessary. A fall from even thirty feet against the stone floor below would break bones. And in his position, he knew the most likely were his neck and back. Mercer climbed doggedly.

He realized he’d made it to the top of the raise when he could no longer hear stone scratching against his metal miner’s helmet. Levering himself upward another six inches, he was able to kick with both legs and torque his body to the side, rolling himself onto the floor of the upper drift. He lay there panting, his cheek pressed to the cold stone, blood dripping from the cuts in his back and from the scrapes on his hands.

Five minutes ticked by before he could move again. He stood shakily, brushed himself off, and flipped on the flashlight. Ignoring the passage to his left, he moved off to the right, knowing he was in a main artery because of its size. After two hundred yards he could see shadows in the darkness cast from light spilling down from the surface. He looked at the luminous dots on his watch. It was not yet noon, but he felt as if he’d been in the mine for a day or more.

The rope was dangling just out of his reach at the drift entrance, and he had to use his belt to snag it and draw it to him. In the gloom below he could see the abandoned machinery that had nearly trapped him forever. He gave the rope a sharp tug. Immediately, Gibby started hauling. When the bosun’s chair reached this level, Mercer jerked the line again to signal Gibby to stop. It was only when he had stepped into the harness and secured himself that he pulled a flare from his pocket and sparked the igniter off the stone wall. This was Gibby’s signal to start the Toyota and back the vehicle away from the head gear. The chair rose like a silent elevator.

The sun was a blessed relief after so many hours of darkness, and had Mercer’s eyes not possessed a feline quickness to adjust, the brightness would have left him blinded. He shucked the harness and was leaning against the head gear’s struts when Gibby drove back. Mercer felt an exhaustion that had nothing to do with his morning’s work. Gibby had the foresight to retrieve Mercer’s last beer and hand it over. Mercer downed the warm, gassy brew with several heavy swallows, belching so loudly it brought a startled guffaw from the Eritrean.

“Well, effendi?” The boy couldn’t contain his excitement. “Show me more of the stones that will make our nation rich.”

Mercer looked up at him, squinting against the blazing sun. Gibby looked like the image of a black Jesus Christ, a halo of sacred light cast around his head. Mercer dug something out of his breast pocket, a small misshapen lump. He tossed it to the eager teen, bowing his head.

Gibby stared at the bit of metal for a long time, his expression that of total confusion.

“It ain’t riches, kid. It’s lead from a bullet fired into the head of a man at the bottom of the mine, just like the four hundred other men who’d worked with him,” Mercer said.

He’d discovered the body slumped over the controls of the scraper at the end of the lowest drift. He’d been murdered like all the others, executed not only to preserve the mine’s secret location, but also to hide the fact that the entire project had been a failure. They had never hit the fabled blue ground, the kimberlite that held the diamonds. They had tunneled for years with their blood and their sweat, yet turned up nothing. And their reward? Their reward had been a summary shot to the head.

There were diamonds here, someplace, Mercer was sure. And with a couple of years, a few thousand men, and a couple hundred million dollars, he would be able to find them and bring them up. None of which he had, none of which would save Harry. The men holding him had said they wanted Mercer to find a mine, which he had, but he knew they would never accept this bust-out. They wanted diamonds, not a big hole in the ground, and they could set deadlines from now until doomsday and there was nothing Mercer could do to satisfy them.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, dammed-up tears of frustration and grief and pain finally spilling onto his cheeks.