The Medusa Stone

Valley of Dead Children

Yosef couldn’t believe his eyes when the mountain beneath his sniper’s position suddenly began sliding downward in an unstoppable rush. He was a quarter mile away, higher in the hills that surrounded the valley, and he watched the whole thing through night-vision glasses. Even in the greenish distortion of the second-generation optics, the sight was unbelievable.

One moment, he saw his man work his rifle, the long silencer fitted to the American-made Remington, eliminating all telltale signs of his location while cutting just a fraction off the deadly weapon’s accuracy. And then the hill heaved upward in multiple gouts of earth. The sniper was caught unaware, vanishing into the maelstrom of debris so quickly that Yosef couldn’t track his position as he was swallowed by the avalanche. Nor could he tell if Selome Nagast and Philip Mercer had made it into the tunnel. It was possible they’d been crushed by the tons of rock and dirt.

He radioed his other team, thinking that the mine was under attack. The two-man team reported that nothing was happening at their sector.

If it wasn’t an attack, then Yosef had no idea what had happened. He’d watched Mercer’s escape from the barbed-wire enclosure and tracked him as he moved stealthily around the mining camp, first to a cluster of tents and later to free Selome. Their dash for the mine in the small digging machine was dismaying. Yosef couldn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to escape the valley. And then came the avalanche. He considered that perhaps the explosions were the result of a trip-wire booby trap designed to prevent unauthorized entry into the mine. There could be no other explanation.

Then came the full realization. The ancient mine had been sealed by the landslide! He gaped at the mounds of rock and earth that blocked the entrance and was struck dumb. All the work that had gone into the opening of the mine was lost, and it could only be the fault of Philip Mercer. Yosef prayed that the American had been smeared into a wet stain. Mercer had destroyed Yosef’s chance for ever recovering the Tabernacle of the Lord, the sacred Ark in which Moses had carried the Word of God into Israel.

The Israeli team had kept the mine under observation since the column of equipment had arrived from the west, followed shortly by hundreds of refugees. They had found the valley from the plane they’d rented in Asmara, using the map supplied by Rabbi Yadid. They’d landed twenty miles away, and Yosef and the others had taken only a day to march to the mine and establish observation posts that they’d manned around the clock for the past weeks.

In all that time, none of them had seen anything remotely resembling the Ark of the Covenant removed from the mine, and Yosef assumed that the artifact was still buried inside. The miners would have a better chance than the commandos at finding it, so he had hoped to make his assault when it was discovered and removed from the tunnel. The superior training of his small team would ensure they’d have little trouble stealing the Ark once it was on the surface.

But things back home had changed all that.

During his last contact with Levine, the Defense Minister had told him that his agents in Israel had failed to find Harry White. It was crucial that Yosef find the Ark before White’s debriefing, or the operation would fail. So far no alarms had been sounded within the intelligence community, but both men knew that once the old man told his story, it was only a matter of time before an investigation implicated the minister. Levine ordered Yosef and his men to make a direct approach by taking over the mine and finding the Ark themselves. Yosef noted the strong odor of desperation in Levine’s plan.

At first Levine had wanted the Ark to secure his election to the prime minister’s office, but now the discovery might be needed to protect him from prosecution. He’d promised Yosef that he could still count on close air support from the CH-53 Super Stallion standing by. Levine needed just four hours’ notice to get the chopper and an in-flight tanker into the air and en route.

Choking down his own emotions, Yosef continued to watch the camp below him. He saw the two white leaders of the expedition take charge of the pandemonium. He assumed one of them was Giancarlo Gianelli and the larger man with him was a mining engineer. Yosef couldn’t hear their voices, but the gestures and the speed in which the orders were carried out demonstrated total control. Within minutes, additional lamps had been brought to the landslide and the large crawler excavator was up and running, its twin lights piercing the rain. The mechanical arm began tearing into the loose rubble, ripping out long trenches of debris.

Yosef saw some of the armed Sudanese lope off into the night and assumed they were chasing the few Eritreans who had escaped the stockades after Mercer and Selome. Only twenty minutes after the disaster, nearly a quarter of the detritus had been cleared. The Israeli was amazed at the efficiency with which the white men worked the crews.

Perhaps, Yosef thought, hope remained. They looked as though they would get the shaft cleared in just a few hours. This meant Yosef and his people could still sneak in later to search for their prize. Even as he watched, more Eritreans were put to the task, crawling over the mounds of rubble with shovels and picks, adding their labor to the machine’s.

Yosef lay cradled in a hollow between several boulders. Rain pounded mercilessly, turning the top layer of soil into a slipping mass that oozed downhill. He hated that the Ark was going to become just another political tool, its very symbolism tarnished by the manner of its recovery. Yet as long as it went to the people of Israel, he felt justified. With Levine now backed into a corner, recovering the artifact could mean the difference between prison and freedom for all of them.

A noise pulled his attention from the workers clearing the mine. Someone was on the mountain with him, moving laterally to get away from the encampment. He thought it was one of the fleeing Eritrean refugees. He hunkered a little deeper into his burrow. If either an Eritrean or one of the armed guards stumbled onto his position, he would kill without hesitation. If he remained undiscovered, he would leave them to their nocturnal fumbling.

He put the noise out of his mind and redirected his attention to the mine when a voice disturbed him again. He thought maybe two Eritreans had linked up in the dark and was about to turn back to his vigil when he realized he could hear only one voice. A man was speaking on a phone.

And he was speaking in English.