The Medusa Stone

Valley of Dead Children

It was just before dusk when Habte, Selome, and Gibby arrived in the Valley of Dead Children on the half-loaded tractor trailer. Five minutes after the rig had crossed the secret bowl of land and trundled to the head gear, a bright yellow excavator tracked onto the plain, its hydraulic arm coiled to the boxy, rotatable cab. The operator had been forced to clear away part of the ancient landslide at the valley’s entrance to allow the truck access to the mine site. Rather than reload the cumbersome machine, he’d driven it to the former Italian installation.

Wind whipped the dust of their progress across the landscape, eddies and gyres forming and collapsing in their wake. At the camp, both vehicles were shut down, and silence rushed in on them. Habte quickly followed Selome out of the truck, and he dodged into the main bunkhouse. Returning outdoors, he shielded his eyes against the red sun nestled on the western rim of the bowl and scanned for Mercer. The Toyota Land Cruiser was gone and there was no sign of him.

“Gibby,” he called, and the boy scrambled off the trailer. “This is the right place. Where’s Mercer?”

“I don’t know,” Gibby admitted. “He said he was going to wait here for us. He was upset that the mine was empty and seemed eager to talk to us. I can’t guess where he went.”

Habte ignored a creeping sense of alarm when Selome and the two hired drivers joined them. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Mercer should have met us. But I don’t see him.” They walked over to the head gear, both peering into the inky depth of the abandoned mine.

“Could he have been that upset?” Selome put to words the fear both were thinking.

“No,” Habte replied sharply. “I just wanted to see down there for myself.” He turned away from the pit. “It’ll be dark soon. We should make camp.”

“Where’s the Toyota?”

“Mercer must have gone off exploring. He took the camping gear from the bunk house. I doubt we’ll see him tonight.”

“Will he be okay?” There was something deeper than friendly concern in Selome’s question.

Habte recognized it even if she did not. “He knows Africa. He’ll be fine.”

An hour passed while they removed their camping gear from the tractor trailer. Selome spent more time looking across the horizon for a telltale plume of dust than helping Habte and the others. They ate dinner in the old bunkhouse by the hissing light of hurricane lamps, but there was little conversation. The men fell sleep long before Selome. She lay awake, her ears straining for the first hint of an engine’s beat. But eventually she, too, dozed off.

Mercer swept into the cabin after midnight, waking everybody. His face and clothing were filthy, his hair matted with so much dust it looked like he wore a sand-colored skull cap. He was exhausted, his eyes closed to near slits, and he slumped gratefully to the ground near the camping stove. Lamps were quickly lit, and in their glow Mecer spooned the remains of their dinner onto the plate, avoiding the questioning looks they all gave him.

“Where have you been?” Selome finally asked, her voice full of emotion.

Mercer smiled at her. She was still a mystery, but he could feel her concern was genuine.

“If at first you don’t succeed…” He grinned, then turned to Habte. “Any problems getting the gear?”

“We had to use the excavator to build a temporary ford over the Adohba River. It was flooding and we won’t get the vehicles back across until it loses its swell. The good news is, we saw no signs of trouble in town. It is possible the Europeans have given up.”

“No. They just don’t know where we are.” Mercer sopped up the last of his food with a piece of injera bread. “Damn, I needed that. I haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

“Gibby tells me you went down into the mine.” Habte’s statement invited an explanation.

“Yeah, it’s a bust. They never hit the kimberlite, and Lord knows, they dug enough tunnels.” Mercer accepted a cup of thermos coffee from Selome.

“This is the mine everyone is interested in?” Habte asked. It was obvious to them all that Mercer wasn’t as upset as Gibby had led them to believe.

Mercer rested his back against the wall, struggling to keep his eyes open, an enigmatic smile on his face. “Oh, someone’s interested, all right. I just don’t know who.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are two groups after us, right? And considering what Habte saw in Asmara and what I saw in Rome, they don’t play well together. I think one group is after this mine, and the other wants something else entirely.”

“Like what?” Selome asked quickly.

“Like another mine,” he said, enjoying the astonished looks. He’d figured it out yesterday and had spent today testing his theory. “I’ll explain everything in the morning,” he sighed. “It’s been one hell of a day, and right now I need some sleep.” He was snoring softly before Habte could extinguish the lamps.

Mercer roused them at dawn and hustled them to get moving. He’d already made coffee and laid out bread and butter for breakfast. “We’ve got a full day ahead of us and sunshine is wasting.” He offered no explanation to his good mood.

The owner of the excavator was the first Eritrean out of the old camp building, and when he saw Mercer seated in the cab of his machine, he started yelling, windmilling his arms to get him back off the vehicle.

“What’s he saying?” Mercer asked Habte, who had come outside, drawn by the angry shouts.

“He says you are not qualified to operate his excavator. He must work it at all times.” Habte was fumbling with a pack of wooden matches to light his first cigarette.

“Ask him if I can give him a demonstration of my qualifications,” Mercer laughed.

The driver agreed to the request, and Mercer remounted the tracked excavator. The engine gauge showed the machine had been worked for several thousand hours and he doubted it had seen much maintenance in its long life, but it fired at the first turn of the key. He dismounted as the engine warmed, and he took the matches from Habte.

“I’ll give them right back,” he promised. He secured one of the wooden matches to the longest steel tooth on the excavator’s bucket with some tape he’d found in the cab. He eyed the ground for a second before asking Habte to move a few feet closer to the excavator.

Back in the cab, Mercer tested the vehicle’s hydraulics, rotating the entire body, extending the arm, flexing its three joints, and tilting the bucket through its ten degrees of play. Satisfied he could gauge the lag between his wrist movements on the joysticks and the machine’s response, he glanced at his audience, a devilish grin on his face. Damn, it feels good to be on some iron again, he thought.

Selome, Gibby, and the two drivers watched, guessing at Mercer’s intentions but none of them believing he could actually do it. The owner of the rig had a particular smirk on his face when Mercer accidentally overrevved the engine.

“Trust me, Habte, and don’t move,” Mercer warned.

He lowered the bucket to the ground, the sulfurous tip of the match almost, but not quite, touching the hard soil. His hands were feather light on the joysticks. He lowered the bucket that fraction of an inch more, twisting the cab on its gimble. The match flared against a rough stone, and as it burned, he rotated the cab, extending the boom so it swung dangerously through the air, the match nearly flaring out by the movement. Habte closed his eyes as the huge bucket swept at his head.

Mercer’s feet and hands danced over the controls. He had judged perfectly. An instant before the wind extinguished the match, he touched it to the tip of the cigarette in Habte’s mouth. The Eritrean took a nervous drag and laughed delightedly, a jet of smoke blowing from his mouth and nose. Mercer gave a mock salute to the applause from the others.

“How did you do that?” Selome’s question was filled with awe.

He grinned like a boy. “I grew up on machines like this. My grandfather taught me when I was ten or twelve. Habte, ask the driver if I’m qualified to use his machine, then let’s get the excavator reloaded. We’re going for a little drive.”

At the far end of the bowl, under the looming rock face of the northern ridge, Mercer slowed the Land Cruiser. He drove hunched to the windshield so he could study the cliff over their heads, using its irregularities for reference. Finally he stopped and the tractor trailer pulled up behind them. Mercer was on the ground in a minute, running up a long talus slope in the mountain. “Come on,” he called down.

At fifty feet above the plain, he paused to allow Selome, Habte, and the others to reach a wide sandstone plateau. “What do you see?” Mercer invited, pointing out over the bowl.

“Nothing,” Selome breathed.

“I thought the same thing when I first got up here yesterday.” Mercer lowered himself onto his haunches.

“Okay, explanation time. After exploring the mine — which was dug during the Italian occupation, by the way — I had a hard time believing that there could be two different groups of people looking for the same defunct property. They didn’t seem know about each other until the gun fight in Rome, and yet they are playing for the same high stakes. The chances that they were after the same thing without knowing about the other seemed pretty remote. So I started thinking that maybe both groups are after a diamond mine, but not necessarily the same one.”

“What are you suggesting?” As Mercer suspected, there was something besides curiosity in Selome’s tone.

“That there are two mines here, one dug before World War II and one worked a lot longer ago. I’m guessing those Europeans in Asmara must be representatives of the Italian company which built that head gear out there and sank the shaft. The Sudanese are coming at us from a different angle. They must know of the older, earlier mine in this valley but aren’t sure of its precise location.” Selome appeared to accept his explanation, but he noticed a discomfort that hadn’t been there a second ago. In his scenario, however, he had no idea where Harry’s kidnappers fit in. He considered that if Harry’s captors had given him gin and might not be from an Arab terror group, he couldn’t begin to guess at her and the Mossad’s interested in this whole thing.

“Go on,” Habte prompted.

“The older mine must have been lost long before the Italians came here or they would have discovered it themselves when they surveyed the valley. They sank their shaft a couple miles off the mark.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They dug three miles from the kimberlite vent. It was an understandable mistake. Their geologist must have assumed the vent was in the center of this circular depression and drove the shaft accordingly. He didn’t realize that erosion by wind and rain had shifted the surface topography in the past billion years, distorting the rim of mountains so they no longer surrounded the vent, but sat atop it instead. Now, assuming the vent had been mined by someone else before the Italians came, all I had to do was find the ancient workings.”

“And did you?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Mercer replied. “One of the keys to mining is ventilation, moving air into the underground workings to blow out the dust and provide oxygen to the miners. In the big mines in South Africa, they pump about sixteen tons of air into the shafts for every ton of ore they remove. Now, the problems of ventilation for an older mine, say one dug before modern machinery, are even tougher. I jury-rigged an anometer yesterday out of a metal can and a shovel handle after Gibby went to get you, then drove around the bowl, testing wind speed and direction until I found this spot. The wind whips over the northern wall of the depression, curls back on itself in a vortex that can gust to about twenty miles an hour.” Mercer used his finger to draw a crude sketch in the soil. The drawing showed the side of the mountain with a V-shaped symbol pointing at its flank.

“The tricky part comes when you need to channel the air into the shaft, concentrating the flow exactly where you want it. Now, look again on the desert floor right below us.”

It was Gibby, with his younger, sharper eyes who saw it first. “There,” he pointed. “I see what you drew.”

There were two faint lines in the dirt, just a shade darker than the rest of the desert. They were two hundred feet long, angling toward each other so they nearly met below where the party stood. They were too geometrical for nature to be their creator. They were the work of man.

“What are they?”

“All that remains of the foundations of two huge walls. Judging by their width, I’d guess they were at least seventy feet tall, more than enough to catch the wind blowing off the mountains and channel it into a mine entrance. I’m sure there are some vents driven into the mountain to allow an escape outlet for the wind, but I’m not too concerned with those quite yet.”

“You mean, we are standing on top of another mine?”

“That’s right.” Mercer tempered his excitement with difficulty. “A horizontal drift tunneled into the mountain.”

“When was this excavated?” asked Habte.

“I don’t know. We can check the foundations to get an idea, but it’s not really important.”

“The question I want answered is, who dug this in the first place?” Selome said.

Mercer glanced at her, feeling she already knew the answer. “We’ll find that when we open her up.”

An hour later, the excavator was ripping into the side of the hill, clearing away the dirt that had piled against the stone face. Mercer stood next to where the bucket clawed into the ground, using hand gestures to guide the operator. He kept a shovel with him, and every ten minutes or so would descend into the trench dug by the machine. The temperature was again hovering around a hundred degrees, and Mercer worked stripped to the waist. Every trip into the trench was more dangerous than the last. It was already fifteen feet deep and twice as long, its sides loose and crumbling. He used the hand shovel to dig a bit farther into the soil, exposing earth that hadn’t seen daylight in who knew how many years. Carrying samples out of the trench, he examined each minutely before motioning for the excavator to continue.

“What are you looking for?” Selome asked when he emerged after the sixth time. Habte, Gibby, and the truck driver were busy unbundling the pallets of equipment secured to the tractor trailer.

“Overburden, the mine’s waste rock.” Mercer wiped the sweat from his forehead with a saturated bandanna. “When it was first excavated, they would have piled the worthless material at the entrance. It should be easy to detect it from the accumulated surface material.”

“But if the mine’s at the point of the two walls, why don’t we dig into the mountain there?”

“Because I want to know what’s in there before we reopen the shaft. It’s a question of safety,” Mercer explained. “And I’m hoping to discover the mine tailings, the kimberlite that has already been broken down and picked through.”

“Why? We know the diamonds are here.”

Mercer just grunted and watched her walk off. She knew there was something here, he was sure, but he wasn’t banking on her interest being diamonds. He decided that when they found the mine’s entrance, he would have his talk with her.

By noon there was a fifty-foot scar in the hillside. The side of the mountain had tumbled in small avalanches as its support was torn away, and the laborious process of digging had to be repeated. Mercer was at the controls of the excavator, and the Eritrean operator, named Abebe, was standing in the pit when the teeth of the machine bit into the first of the kimberlite tailings.

Mercer shut down the engine, bounding from his perch. Abebe was already on his hands and knees examining the pulverized bluish stones in the bucket. The kimberlite had been crushed into a fine aggregate, the biggest piece no larger than the first joint of Mercer’s thumb. The men who had originally worked the mine had been very thorough in the processing of the ore, nearly powdering it to find even the smallest diamonds. To warrant this kind of extra work, Mercer knew, meant the mine’s assay value was high. It also told him that this had been a massive operation, with hundreds or perhaps thousands of workers. Kimberlite was notoriously tough, and it would take days to hand-crush even a small amount to this consistency.

He took the shovel from Abebe and dug into the exposed vein of kimberlite waste. The digging was slow, for the rock had been cemented together by the weight of the mountain above it and the countless rains that had percolated through it. The shovel hit a particularly tough spot and Mercer tossed it aside, dropping to his belly to peer into the hole he’d created. He thrust both arms into the earth, wrestling something out of the ground. It was another type of stone, white and badly chipped, roughly the size of his fist. Mercer held it to the light with reverence.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch.” As he studied it, his estimate of the mine’s age was pushed back several thousand years.

Abebe didn’t understand Mercer’s fascination with the lump of worked stone and ignored him when Mercer retrieved his leather kit bag from the excavator and placed the rock inside.

Selome and the others joined them a short while later. Gibby had made lunch, and Habte had found beer in the village of Ila Babu. They ate and drank in companionable silence. Selome sat close to Mercer, her knee almost touching his.

Habte translated a question from the truck driver. “Do you want us to work through the day? It is going to get hotter.”

“ ’Fraid so,” Mercer replied. “I don’t know how long our presence here will remain a secret. The mountains contain most of the noise from the excavator’s engine, but people on the other side will be able to hear us.”

The driver nodded at the response, but it was apparent he wasn’t too happy about it.

“We’re just about ready to open the mine entrance,” Mercer said to lighten their mood. “We hit the kimberlite tailings just before lunch, and I’m satisfied that we can open the mine without any danger.”

“What do you think we’ll find?”

“I have a theory,” Mercer said, then looked at the youngest member of their party. “Gibby, Habte mentioned there’s an old monastery near here. Do you know where it is?”

“I can show you,” Habte replied. “It’s about sixty miles away.”

“No, I need you here to start opening the mine, but I want to go up there and talk to the priests. Gibby, do you know it?”

“Yes. I think I can find it from here, but it is far.” The teenager didn’t sound sure.

“Talk to Habte about it. We won’t be leaving for a day or two anyway.”

“Why do you want to talk to the priests?”

“That monastery has been here for a thousand years. And I’m willing to bet they already know about this mine and the people who opened it.”

“But what do you wish to learn?” Selome pressed.

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to talk to them, now would I?” Mercer stood and brushed off the back of his pants. He was sure that Selome had detected a change in his attitude toward her. She’d been playing him for a fool, and it pissed him off. She knew what this was all about, had known since the beginning, but still was asking questions she knew the answers to. Mercer had some questions of his own, and it was getting time for the answers.

They worked for three straight days, each of them settling into a routine that left them wasted when the sun finally set. Habte and the truck driver rigged a plow on the front of the ten-wheeled rig to use it as a bulldozer. They worked in unison with the excavator, pushing aside the piles of debris that the big Caterpillar stripped from the side of the mountain. Mercer and Abebe took turns running the excavator while Gibby stood in the excavated sections, guiding the bucket to maximize the bite it took with every scoop. Only Selome, who didn’t have a specific task related to the digging, balked at the traditional female role of housekeeper and chef.

Late afternoon on the third day, there was still no sign of the mine entrance. The team was gathered at the excavation. The ground had been compressed by the movement of the excavator until it felt like concrete. They had opened up a chasm nearly sixty feet wide and over twice that deep. The mountain towered above them. It hung precariously. From the bottom of the chasm, the sky was just a narrow blue band between the two sides. Habte and Abebe were smoking cigarettes while Mercer pulled from a bottle of beer. They were all frustrated by the amount of work and the lack of results.

Mercer broke the tired silence. “I’m going to have to blast the mountain. We’ve dug so deep, I’m afraid that lot over our heads is going to come down pretty soon. We have to cause our own avalanche, and that’ll mean at least another full day to clear the debris before we can continue to dig for the mine entrance.”

“No other way,” Habte agreed. “We did the same thing when I worked in the quarries.”

“Did you get the fertilizer I requested?” Mercer asked as he finished the last of the beer.

“Ammonium nitrite, two hundred pounds’ worth. And I got five thousand feet of detonator cord.” The explosives Mercer had requested when still in Washington had been abandoned in Asmara so he was forced to improvise.

“Good. We’ll use the diesel from the truck’s auxiliary tank. We won’t need that much punch — the mountain will collapse with just a good swift kick.” He looked at the hill, gauging where he would place the amfo. “After I make the shot, Selome, Gibby, and I are going to the monastery and have a chat with the good fathers.”

“Why do you need me?” Selome didn’t sound like she minded the trip, but she was curious.

“No offense to Gibby, but his English isn’t much better than my Tigrinyan. Congratulations, you’ve been promoted from scullery wench to interpreter.”

Selome smiled. “Give me another week and I’ll be running this operation.”

“That’s the spirit.” Mercer matched her smile for the first time in days. They’d have a chance to talk on the ride to the monastery.