The Medusa Stone

The Eritrea-Sudan Border

There were two rugged gravel roads that crossed the lonely border, both of them traversing a deep gorge bridged with rickety wooden structures that dated back decades. Near both crossings, roughly forty kilometers apart, refugee camps had grown out of the scrub plain, tens of thousands of miserable people huddling together in tents that offered little protection from the wind or the brutal sun. The tent cities housed Eritreans who could not return to their homeland. Since the intensification of Sudan’s civil war, Sudanese natives too were seeking shelter here, hoping for the chance of a better life in Eritrea. Such was their desperation, they saw their impoverished neighbor as a promised land.

Situated close to the border and thus easier to reach, these camps were in much better condition than the reservations in Sudan’s interior. The people here received regular visits from United Nations and EC trucks carrying food, medicine, and clothing transshipped through Eritrea.

At the bottom of the gorge, a thin trickle of water passed the camps, and each camp had a continuous chain of girls making the trip down and back, heavy pots of water balanced on their heads. Washing and latrines were situated a short way from where they took their drinking water, but by the time the stream reached the downstream camp, it was fouled by its neighbor. Diseases such as dysentery and other bacterial infections raged.

A farther ten miles south from the second camp was a third, one occupied by soldiers rather than refugees. A compound had been carved out of a rare grove of camel thorn trees, tents erected in their meager shade. A generator hummed a short distance from the camp, and a pump drew water from the gorge through a two-inch hose. A team of three men tended the fires for boiling the water, purifying it with heat before it was further chemically treated.

Despite the efforts to maintain a sanitary encampment, the fetid smell from the refugee camp wafted on the breeze, carrying with it the stink of sewage. That and the constant buzzing of metallic green flies were the two biggest drawbacks to the soldiers’ camp, in Giancarlo Gianelli’s opinion. He found everything else to his liking. His tent was large and air-conditioned, and the cooking was surprisingly good. One of Mahdi’s rebel troopers had been a chef in Khartoum before taking up arms, and he delighted in the equipment Gianelli had brought into the bush. If he could ignore the armed troopers bivouacked around him, with their continuous arms practice and parade formations, Gianelli would have likened this to one of the elegant “Hemingway” camps run by the big safari companies in Kenya or South Africa.

Gianelli sat in the shade of his tent’s awning, his view of the world beyond made indistinct by gauzy mosquito netting. His desk was mahogany, but cleverly constructed so it could be folded flat and easily moved. The matching chair was covered with zebra hide. A glass of sparkling water, blistered with condensation, rested in easy reach next to a laptop computer, allowing him to keep in contact with the many branches of Gianelli SpA through a satellite link.

Had the country been more interesting, filled with game, for example, he would have resented the intrusions of his business life here, but the desert was dry, featureless, and empty of all life save the stinking humanity farther north. So Gianelli filled his days of waiting with the tasks of running his multinational corporation.

As promised, Mahdi had secured enough soldiers for the mission. When the Sudanese Liberation Army’s Revolutionary Council learned that the request had come from their biggest European supporter, they dispatched fifty men to the Eritrean border under Mahdi’s command, but Gianelli’s control. The men were the best of the SLA, combat-toughened veterans who all had at least ten years of experience in the bloody bush war. With Gianelli’s help, they were equipped with the latest NATO field gear, though they refused to use the new assault rifles, preferring to keep their venerable AK-47s.

“Mr. Gianelli, sir?” One of his white miners was standing outside the tent fly.

“Yes, Joppi? Come in, come in.” The miners Gianelli had hired were expatriate South Africans who’d fled their country after the ANC took power in 1994. He had found them in Australia like so many other countrymen who feared living in the new black-run nation. Gianelli imagined many of them might return to their native country when his plan so destabilized South Africa’s economy that the people would scream for the relative prosperity they’d had under the white regime.

The rangy Boer ducked through the mosquito netting and took a camp chair opposite Gianelli. “We’ve finished going over the mining gear you brought. Damn impressive stuff.”

Gianelli had secured the services of five white mine supervisors, all of them master explosives experts and former shift bosses. They were to lead the hundred-strong gang of laborers Mahdi had promised. He had also brought five large diesel trucks loaded with mining equipment, big pneumatic drills called drifters, explosives, and several small utility trucks specifically designed to work in underground conditions. The equipment had been shipped to Africa over many months and stored at a Gianelli SpA facility in Khartoum, waiting until Giancarlo found the location of the mine his uncle had started so long ago.

Joppi Hofmyer lit a cigarette, leaving it between his lips so it jumped and danced as he talked, smoke coiling around his head, slitting his heavy-browed eyes. “Those fookin’ kaffirs keep wanting to get to the stores of plastique, and I’ve had to crack a few skulls to teach them a lesson.”

Gianelli smiled. “Nothing too rough, I trust. Those soldiers may save your life one day.”

“Your typical kaffir has a skull like a boulder. A little beating may chip it some, but don’t hurt it at all,” Hofmyer grunted. “On the Rand, management never understood that a good whipping will get more work out of a black than extra meat rations or a fookin’ dental program.”

“Joppi, those men aren’t going to work for you,” Gianelli said irritably. “They are guards in my employ.”

“Ja, and you expect us to work with the dregs from the camps? Mahdi’s been bringing us a couple dozen at a time to check ’em out, you know? Gott, if we can use one out of fifty, we’re doing well. Mining’s tough work, and half those kaffirs can’t even stand. And they’re about as stupid as sheep.”

Giancarlo logged off his computer to concentrate on his conversation with the South African. If they were going to reopen the mine, they were going to need labor. Mahdi had suggested, and Gianelli agreed, that recruiting able-bodied men from the camps was their best option. These men were desperate for work. They would do anything asked of them, grateful for the first job many of them had ever had. Most of them were second- or third-generation refugees. “How many have you gotten so far?”

“Forty.” Hofmyer didn’t catch the edge of anxiety in his superior’s voice. “Once we get to work, I bet half of them will either take off when they get a taste of real work or die in the mine. The northern, fuzzier, kaffir is a delicate creature and can die on you without any warning.”

“You’ve worked with Sudanese and Eritreans before?”

“Ja, in the Zambia copper mines when the country was still Northern Rhodesia. A few hundred of ’em came down to work the pits, but in five months they were gone again, half of ’em dead and the others willing to starve to death in the big famines up here.”

“I hadn’t realized,” Gianelli remarked, sensing a serious problem.

“Don’t worry about it. When it’s time to go into Eritrea, we’ll have enough of the bastards to take up the slack of those that drop or take off. Any word on when we’re heading in?”

“Nothing yet.” No sooner had he said this than Mahdi appeared at the tent. He was layered with sweat, and his chest heaved in the hot air. “Yes, what is it?”

“Sir,” Mahdi panted, “I was just at the refugee camp. About fifty men and their families crossed the border last night with a nomad who came here to recruit them. The rumor is that a great mine has been opened in Eritrea and men are needed to work it. Many other families are packing now to join them. I’ve learned that the nomad was sent here by a white man.”

“That’s it!” Gianelli bolted to his feet. “Mercer has found it!”

“Yes, sir, they are talking about a white overseer who knows how to talk to rock.”

Emotion filled Gianelli in waves. The Medusa pictures had shown that Enrico had been right all along, and Mercer had used them to find the mine. There was a kimberlite pipe in northern Eritrea, one of the rarest geological features on the planet, and Enrico had found it decades ago without any modern aids. Enrico’s Folly was now within Giancarlo’s grasp.

Of course, Giancarlo had never known his great-uncle, but a large part of him admired the elder Gianelli for the independent streak that had driven him. Giancarlo had it too, that ceaseless desire to prove the impossible, to follow a belief to its only conclusion. He thought about his plan that followed the diamonds’ recovery and smiled wickedly. While restoring Enrico’s name was a noble goal, Gianelli had also made provisions to profit handsomely from this adventure. He debated making the call to London now, then decided it was better to wait and see just how many diamonds they could find before the Central Selling System’s next meeting. His target was five thousand carats and, getting a sense of Joppi Hofmyer’s brutality, he had little doubt they’d reach that goal.

“Mahdi, alert your men. We must move out quickly.”

Gianelli’s emotions raised his voice to a shout. “The refugees have a head start on us that we’ll make up in the trucks, but I don’t want them getting too far ahead. Joppi, I think our friend Mercer has gotten the rest of the men you needed to work the mine. Those Eritreans will supplement the men you’ve already recruited. Is everything packed on the trucks?”

“Ja.” The Africaaner grinned. He was plainly relieved to escape the boredom of the camp. “We repacked them after checking each load.”

“Mahdi, how fast can that refugee caravan walk through the desert?”

“If they left their women and children behind, twenty or more miles a day, but they are bringing their families. That would cut their progress in half.”

“Good.” The refugees moving so slowly tempered Gianelli’s haste and changed his plans slightly. “Send out scouts to track them. It shouldn’t be too difficult. We’ll remain in camp until they get a few days ahead of us. That way we won’t trip over them when we leave. That also gives us more time to get another fuel truck from Khartoum.”

“Mr. Gianelli, if there are that many people at the mine, we’re going to need more water too,” Joppi remarked.

Giancarlo opened his laptop again and began a list. “Water, fuel, what else?”

The three of them worked for an hour, refining the list. By the time they had finished, they had the provisions to sustain the camp for several weeks without resupply. After that, they would start to bring stores from Sudan, which wasn’t a problem given Gianelli’s influence. In addition to his support to the rebels, he also maintained contacts with the government in Khartoum, working both sides of the civil war.

Gianelli concluded their meeting. “Mahdi, send out those scouts now, have them take a hand radio to report their progress. I’m going to order the rest of the equipment and supplies from Khartoum and make the necessary security arrangements. Joppi, you just make damned sure your men are ready to go.”

“Yes, sir,” both men said in unison. In the bizarre twist of Joppi Hofmyer’s racism that made him hate the group but not the individuals, he held the tent fly open for Mahdi as they left the screened enclosure.