The Medusa Stone

Valley of Dead Children

Answers to the dozens of questions swirling through Mercer’s mind had to wait until the column of Giancarlo Gianelli’s trucks ground back to the mine site. Mercer was in the back of one of the rigs with six heavily armed Sudanese while Selome rode in the back jump seat of another with Gianelli himself. He hoped that her proximity to the Italian was for her protection from the lewd intentions of the troopers and not for the magnate’s own carnal thoughts.

Mercer knew of Gianelli. The name had been synonymous with European finance for centuries, almost as famous as the house of Rothschild. He couldn’t recall how many of Europe’s wars the Gianelli family had funded, but much of their fortune had been soiled with the blood of countless thousands. He did remember that they were heavily involved with the Facist movement during the 1920s and ’30s and after World War Two had come under the protection of the United States because of their strong anti-Communism. Of the current head of the family dynasty, he knew little except that the ambition that had made them so powerful ran in Giancarlo’s veins.

It was mid-morning when the caravan entered the Valley of Dead Children. They drove past the open shaft bored by Gianelli’s ancestor and headed to the ancient mine. When they stopped, a guard in Mercer’s truck flipped up the soft canvas flap above the tailgate and jumped to the ground, covering Mercer with his rifle as he too leapt from the vehicle. Mercer had lost track of the number of days he’d been away from the mine, but was staggered by the amount of work that had taken place in his absence.

It took his ears a moment to adjust from the clamor of the truck to the sharper and significantly louder sounds of the work area. Apart from the large truck-mounted generators pounding away a short distance from the mine, Gianelli had two bulldozers, several Bobcat skiploaders, the Caterpillar excavator that Mercer had brought, and an Ingersoll-Rand rotary drill rig for pulling core samples. The equipment’s din echoed and reechoed off the bowl of mountains into a deafening racket that shook the dusty air. Amid this mechanical maelstrom, Mercer saw perhaps fifty Africans — the Eritrean refugees — toiling by hand with shovels, picks, and reed baskets.

He couldn’t believe the sheer volume of dirt they had managed to move. The mountain that he and Habte had dynamited had been clawed up by the machines and carted away by the African laborers one basket at a time. The mine that Brother Ephraim had spoken of had been exposed, a dark shaft driven into the side of the mountain. It was wide enough for the skiploader to charge into the earth and return again with its bucket loaded with overburden. The operator would dump it into a mound, and a stream of men attacked it with their hands, filling baskets which they hoisted to their heads and carried away.

Mercer thought about the heavy equipment that would be arriving soon, machinery he had either leased or bought on behalf of the Eritrean government. Alone, the 5130 hydraulic shovel could have moved the same amount of dirt in about an hour. Still, the Eritreans’ endeavor was miraculous.

A guard prodded him with an ungentle thrust of his assault rifle toward where Gianelli waited near the mine entrance. Mercer watched as one of the troopers, bothered by the slow pace of an Eritrean, knocked the worker to the ground, his heavy basket of dirt falling onto his chest as he lay defenseless in the dust. The rebel kicked the refugee several more times before turning to keep his eye on the rest of the laborers. None of the other workers had come to the aid of their countryman. They had all bowed themselves to the task of surviving.

Slavery was back.

“What do you think, Doctor? Impressive amount of work, wouldn’t you say?” Gianelli called. Selome was with him, and another white man stood with their little group, a hulking figure, big in the shoulders and gut.

“Yeah, and I’m sure union reps are having a hard time recruiting new members from your workers.”

Gianelli gave a genuine laugh. “I want you to meet Joppi Hofmyer, my supervisor. Joppi, this is Philip Mercer, the famous American mining engineer.”

Neither man made a move to shake hands, but Joppi’s expression betrayed the fact that he had heard of Mercer. There was respect behind his dim eyes.

“Before you tell me what you know about this mine,” Gianelli said breezily, “why don’t I give you a tour? I’m curious myself about the progress that’s been made while I’ve been gone.”

The mine opening was six feet tall and about the same width. The Bobcat’s roof scraped the rough stone ceiling as it emerged from the square aperture. Joppi spoke to the white skiploader driver for a second, and the man shut down the engine. Gianelli and Hofmyer each were handed lighted mining helmets by one of the Sudanese guarding the mine shaft. Neither Selome nor Mercer got one.

“We’ve managed to remove another seventy feet of overburden from the tunnel,” Hofmyer told Gianelli. “But the deeper into the mountain we go, the more packed the material seems to be. It’s as if whoever sealed the mine wanted to make sure it was never opened again. Pretty soon we may even have to blast away some of the stones and impacted dirt.”

“Any deviation on the direction or slope? Have you found any branches or chambers?”

“It’s still as straight as a string and sloping downward at fifteen degrees. I think I should wait and let you see the rest for yourself.”

Twenty feet into the shaft, Hofmyer and Gianelli switched on their headlamps. The light cut into the gloom, yet the tunnel was oppressively dark and the air was heavy and fouled by the skiploader’s exhaust. The hanging wall, or ceiling, was low enough to force Mercer to bend slightly as he and Selome lagged behind the Italian and the South African miner. Two Sudanese took up the rear, both carrying pistols.

They continued for over fifteen minutes, Mercer estimating that the tunnel was at least a mile and a half long. While Hofmyer and Gianelli marched with a single-minded purpose, Mercer studied the rock walls and ceiling under the bouncing light from his guards’ lanterns, pausing when a particular feature caught his eye. He picked up his pace only when prodded by one of the two guerrillas.

“What are you looking for?” Selome whispered.

“An escape route,” he responded cryptically.

Selome looked behind them, but all she saw was an endless tube of featureless rock.

The tunnel ended on a ledge that overlooked the floor of a chamber, a huge vaulted space that had been created eons ago by the natural process of the kimberlite pipe’s formation. Molten magma, driven by the engine of the earth, had risen to this level during an eruption before cooling and solidifying. The diamond-bearing material injected into the three-hundred-foot-wide dome had settled over time, lowering the floor of the chamber until the ceiling lofted fifty or more feet over their heads. This was the working area of the ancient mine, and the floor was scarred by man’s rapacious appetite for diamonds.

A generator hummed near where the tunnel entered the chamber, tripod-mounted halogen lights running off its power and illuminating nearly every square foot of the cavern. The early miners had divided the cave’s floor into square grids, probably to better track the progress of the slaves who had worked here. While much of the floor was uniform, some areas had been mined deeper than others, so the floor resembled a three-dimensional chessboard. Some of the deeper areas were lost in the penumbra below where the party stood at the lip of the subterranean pit. Mercer had no way to guess how many tons of ore had been pulled from the chamber. For all he knew, the entire space had once been solid rock. But he began to believe that Brother Ephraim’s claim that the mine had been active for four hundred years was conservative.

“My God! It’s the blue ground!” Giancarlo gasped, looking to Hofmyer for confirmation. The big South African nodded.

The entire blue-tinted floor of the chamber was composed of the tough ultramific lodestone for diamond. There was no way of knowing the assay value — the ratio between kimberlite ore and diamond — until samples were taken and analyzed, but it was safe to say that they were all standing on a fortune. Mercer thought about the crushed samples of kimberlite he had discovered shortly before leaving for the monastery and how thoroughly it had been worked to extract every possible carat. That was pretty good proof of the value of the ore. Yes, he thought. A fortune. One that belonged to the people of Eritrea. Apart from everything else, Mercer knew that if he didn’t act, it would end up in Gianelli’s hands. He kept his anger behind a stony mask, but the effort cost him.

“We found it the day before yesterday. I’ve had the men busting some ass to clear it of dirt before you arrived.” Hofmyer’s voice shattered the wonder and astonishment Gianelli was obviously feeling as he looked at the mine for the first time. “Whoever worked this place first did a pretty good job of filling it back up too. It’s at the far side of this chamber that we may have to blast away some of the kak dumped back in here.”

“How deep are those vertical shafts from the working floor of the pit?” Mercer asked.

“I had a couple of kaffirs dig into one, and they hadn’t hit bottom after pulling up thirty feet of overburden.”

“Paystreak in the kimberlite?”

“My thought too,” Hofmyer agreed. “Way back when, they must have hit one particularly rich diamond-bearing section and dug into it like dogs.”

“This is better than anything I could have possibly hoped for,” Gianelli breathed. He turned to Mercer. “Now, tell me about this mine.”

Mercer could feel Selome stiffen next to him. He, too, was reluctant to tell the Italian anything, but knew he had to if he wanted to keep them alive.

“The mine was opened about three thousand years ago.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hofmyer exploded. “Look at this place. Only machinery could have tunneled this deeply. This chamber can’t be more than a hundred years old.”

“I assure you this is an ancient working.” Mercer kept a smirk off his face as he studied Hofmyer. Just keep showing your ignorance, you stupid bastard. “I found a stone hammer before leaving for the monastery. It was badly chipped and looked as though it had been discarded with the tailings. You’ll find it in a leather bag in my tent. I doubt miners with access to machinery would use Stone-Age tools. What’s more, look at the tunnel itself. It was bored using a technique that dates back millennia.

“Judging by the texture of the walls and ceiling, the mining of the tunnel must have been hellish work. If you look closely, you can still see the cracks created when the original miners used fires to heat the rock, then flash-quenched them with water and vinegar acid. The thermal shock would shatter the stone and allow them to cart out the debris. I wouldn’t be surprised if every foot of that shaft represented a day or more of work. I’d guess about twenty-five years just to drive that one tunnel.”

“Is it possible?” Giancarlo asked his mine engineer.

“Ja, maybe,” Hofmyer muttered.

“Possible, my ass. Haven’t you ever read Pliny’s account of the gold mines in Asturias, Spain?” Mercer doubted Hofmyer had even heard of the Roman historian. “He called it the ‘Destruction of a Mountain.’ Starting around 25 B.C., the Romans forced tens of thousand of slaves to tunnel into the Las Medulas Mountains using the technique I just described. On the tops of the mountains, huge reservoirs and canals and aqueducts were constructed, then filled with water. When enough interconnecting tunnels were dug — and I’m talking miles and miles of them — a torrent could be released into the galleries. The water’s hydrostatic pressure literally blew the mountains apart, and gold-laden earth was washed down into a plain where it could be easily retrieved. The Romans worked those mountains for two hundred years, forever changing the landscape, and recovering an estimated twelve billion dollars’ worth of bullion. Believe me, this mine was worked in a similar fashion and a lot longer ago.”

Mercer shot a deadly look at Gianelli. “This leads me to my final piece of evidence. The monk you shot last night told me he knew of this mine from one of their ancient texts, a book lost long ago, but its oral tradition had been maintained.” Mercer hoped he was spinning enough fact with the fiction to satisfy Gianelli. “He said that this mine was worked for centuries until there was an invasion. The people who operated it sealed it entirely rather than see it captured.”

“My God, it sounds like King Solomon’s Mine,” Gianelli gasped.

“Maybe, I don’t know.” The Italian had gotten too close to the truth, and Mercer had to derail him. “It could be that this was the basis for the legend, but as I’m sure Yappy here can tell you, there are countless spots all over Africa that also claim that distinction.”

Joppi Hofmyer growled at the bastardization of his name.

“Fascinating,” Gianelli said. It was evident that he was more impressed with his prisoner than with the man he had hired to excavate the mine.

Mercer saw this and started to make it work to his advantage. “If I may make a suggestion. You mentioned bringing explosives into this chamber. I wouldn’t. The dome may look solid, but unless you have blast mats to deflect the shock of a detonation down the tunnel, you may find yourself proving the hard way that it’s not.”

“Do we have blast mats?” Giancarlo demanded of Joppi.

“No, sir, but it would only take a few days to get them from Khartoum.” Hofmyer seethed at being so easily undercut.

“And while you’re at it,” Mercer continued, taking an almost casual command of the conversation, “I saw outside that you’re about to resift the original tailings for diamonds that might have been missed by the original workers. Don’t bother. The tailings I checked had been crushed down so fine that unless you brought a portable fluoroscope with you, it’ll be a complete waste of time and manpower that I doubt you can spare.”

Hofmyer shot Mercer such a scathing look that it appeared he would physically attack him. Sorting through the tailings had been his idea.

“Sounds logical,” Giancarlo said, enjoying the frustration on his overseer’s face. “If I had gone through the difficult task of mining the ore, I imagine that I would also make certain not a single stone had been overlooked.” He smiled. “Fetching you back here was a good idea. I think it would be another good idea if I kept you around for a while longer. For the time being, you will be my chief among slaves.”

For a fraction of a second, Mercer’s thoughts played openly across his face, but fortunately Gianelli had looked away. Mercer didn’t want the Italian to see the hatred or the resolve that flashed in his eyes. Those he was keeping to himself, knowing that they would help him when the time came. Slave, he’d been called. And slave he would be. Right up to the moment he would slip his hands around Gianelli’s throat and squeeze until the son of a bitch was dead.