The Medusa Stone

Valley of Dead Children

Within a few minutes of leaving the camp, Habte Makkonen knew that he had been spotted and followed, yet he did not change his pace or direction. Doing so would alert the stalker. The man who shadowed him was good, an expert actually, and the storm made his job that much easier, but Habte hadn’t survived so many years in the front lines of the rebellion without becoming better still.

There were two other problems besides the fact he wasn’t armed and his pursuer most likely was. First, the mountains ringing the valley were steep and too treacherous to climb in the rain, and the valley floor offered little cover. As he moved away from the mine, he was terribly exposed. Second was that the pursuit had been taken up much too quickly for the stalker to be one of the Sudanese guards. The rebels hadn’t had the time to mount an organized search by the time Habte fled the camp. This left only the snipers who’d opened fire moments before the explosives had buried the mine. Habte was also certain his watcher had a pair of night-vision goggles and his rifle’s scope had similar capabilities.

The sniper, certainly an Israeli agent, was interested in the mine — according to what Mercer had said — but Habte could guess at the man’s interest in him now. He had made an earlier, unsuccessful call to Dick Henna on Mercer’s satellite phone. He’d spoken for a few seconds before realizing that the recorded voice he heard was telling him he had a bad connection and to try the call again. The Israeli must have overheard him responding to the unfamiliar device. Habte cursed his own stupidity for not calling farther from the mining site. If he was going to alert Henna quickly, Habte didn’t have much leeway to wait out the sniper. He had to get clear to make that call.

Skirting an ancient landslide, Habte saw something across the plain that gave him an idea, and he wondered if the sniper would allow him to do it. Walking across a thousand yards of open land with a sniper’s scope on his back was not the most brilliant tactical solution he’d ever devised, but he hoped that if he kept his gait even and unthreatening and waited for the sniper to close range every few minutes, he might just make it.

The old head gear sat forlornly on the open expanse, the buildings next to it darker shadows in the night. Lightning illuminated the eerie site every few seconds, outlining the skeletal structure that had once hauled workers and worthless ore out of the Italian-built mine. As casually as a man on a stroll, Habte veered from the hills and made for the old facility. He expected a bullet in the back, but when none came after the first forty yards, he paused to allow the sniper to move into a better shooting position. As long as the sniper felt he wasn’t trying to bolt, Habte prayed that he wouldn’t take the shot.

The mine was far enough from the other workings to ensure that if the sniper wanted, he could pin Habte with a few well-placed shots and close in for an interrogation. That was what Habte was betting his life on: that the sniper was more interested in his intentions than his death. He continued to walk slowly, his pace almost ambling as if the storm didn’t matter. Once he thought he heard the sniper moving along a hillside, the sliding hiss of loose stones betraying both his position and the fact that he was closing.

And then a sudden thought struck Habte and he took off at a full run, legs flying, arms pumping and his breath heaving against years of cigarette smoke. A silenced shot winged by, ricocheting against the ground well behind and to the right. The shot was made in desperation; it was an inaccurate estimation of Habte’s position because the sniper didn’t have him in his sights. Habte then realized that the sudden bursts of brilliant electricity that cut through the storm would blind him if viewed through any light-amplifying device. The sniper couldn’t use the starlite scope or the night-vision goggles! While the Israeli was still armed, the playing field had been leveled by a common atmospheric phenomenon.

Habte dove into the building they had used as a camp when they first arrived at the valley. He had only moments before the pursuer reached the dilapidated structure, and Habte needed all of them to put his plan into motion. He stripped out of his clothing, dumping the soaked garments on the floor and, nude, scrambled back out of the building. His black skin would be shiny in the rain, but for his purpose he was invisible.

The Israeli sniper might have received the finest military training in the world, but his experience was nowhere near Habte’s. As he loped silently toward the head gear, his bare feet silent in the mud, the Eritrean felt the odds were evening out. One of the things that had kept him alive all those years fighting the Ethiopians was an understanding of human nature. He could anticipate what others were going to do long before they knew themselves.

Ignoring the hundred-foot hole beneath the head gear’s lattice of struts, Habte leaped onto one of the supports, scampering up ten feet without pause, ignoring the slashes in his skin made by the scaly surfaces. He nestled the satellite phone into the crotch of two beams and clung tightly, his silhouette hidden in the tangle of metal. He doubted the Israeli had seen this mine before and was certain the sniper would not be able to resist the urge to peer into the stygian mine shaft.

The sniper had shouldered his long rifle and moved slowly, an Uzi rucked hard against his flank, the bulbous night-vision gear resting on the top of his head. His body was shrouded in a ghillie suit, a camouflage garment made of hundreds of sewn-together rags that from a distance of a few feet looked like an innocuous shrub. With the amount of rain that had soaked the suit, Habte estimated the soldier was carrying an additional thirty pounds, and his movements would be slowed by the encumbrance.

A bolt of lightning cast a sizzling light across the sky, and the Israeli rolled to the ground, coming up against the camp building, covering his exposed right side with the machine pistol. Habte’s suspicions were confirmed; the man’s movements appeared lethargic. At this range, there was enough ambient light for Habte to watch the Israeli clip the goggles over his eyes for a moment to peer around the camp and into the building before slipping them off again. He’d studied the head gear for an instant but didn’t notice Habte.

As predicted, the sniper seemed more interested in the mine shaft as the only other logical place for his quarry to hide and began crawling over for a better look. Habte estimated he had only a few seconds to wait before springing on the soldier.

The sound was sharp enough to carry over the storm’s fury and so incongruous that Habte waited until it sounded again before reacting. The sat-phone was about to ring for a third time when Habte snatched at it, clumsily dislodging it from its resting place and knocking it from his perch. The Israeli was equally startled, but there was nothing clumsy about his movements. He rolled on his back, bringing his Uzi to his shoulder, and when the phone rang again, he adjusted his aim. His reactions were instinctive. He fired off a quarter of the magazine, a long tongue of fire leaping from the compact weapon as bullets pinged off the steel scaffold.

His aim, however, was directed at the falling phone and not at the dark figure poised in the murk above. Habte leaped from the tower, propelling himself out into the night, landing yards short of where the Israeli lay on the muddy ground. The sniper scrambled to trigger the Uzi at the apparition rolling toward him. He took just a second too long, and while Habte’s lunge lacked force, it was enough to foul the weapon’s aim. A harmless spray of 9mm rounds streaked into the sky.

The phone had survived the drop and hadn’t been hit by the opening fusillade so it rang again.

With the Uzi clamped between the two struggling figures, Habte had the advantage. The Israeli grappled with him, but Habte’s wet skin gave him no handhold. The Eritrean grabbed a hank of the ghillie suit and started to shake the sniper vigorously, slamming his head into the mud. Even when the sniper tried to hook an ankle around Habte’s and roll them to gain the upper hand, his feet just slid up Habte’s bare leg. Yet Habte couldn’t get enough of a grip to force the writhing agent’s face into the ooze to drown him, so they continued in a macabre parody of lovemaking, both moving against each other, arms and legs entwined.

The advantage shifted when the Israeli grasped the dangling bunch of Habte’s genitals and squeezed them with all of his strength. Habte howled, arching his body in an effort to break the grip, but the sniper held on with the tenacity of a remora. Managing to free one hand, Habte wrapped his fingers around the Israeli’s throat and angled the sniper for a vicious head butt that shattered teeth and forced blood to pool in the soldier’s mouth. Choking on his own blood and with his wind pipe almost crushed, the sniper started to die, his grip on Habte’s balls loosening.

Habte maintained the pressure long after the sniper stopped struggling and only stood when he felt that all the life had been crushed from the body. He studied the face and recognized him as the driver of the car parked outside the Ambasoira Hotel when the Sudanese and the Israelis had clashed in Mercer’s room. Habte wished it was the Israeli team’s leader lying here covered in mud and soaked with his own blood, but that would have to wait.

The phone’s ring shocked Habte, and he lifted himself painfully from the ground and found the small device half buried in the mud. It had landed about an inch from the lip of the mine shaft.

Habte snapped it open and pressed the button to accept the call. His voice was a painful wheeze. “Hello, you have reached the phone of Philip Mercer. He’s been buried alive. May I help you? My name is Habte Makkonen.”

The men working to clear the mine entrance heard and felt another explosion deep within the earth, a jolt that shook the ground. In the pause that followed, Gianelli asked Joppi Hofmyer if he knew the origin of the subterranean detonation. The South African had no answer, and rather than speculate, as Gianelli seemed to want, Hofmyer put the crews back to work. It took another forty minutes to clear the entrance enough for a man to slip inside.

Hofmyer went first, a powerful flashlight supplementing the lamp on his miner’s helmet. Gianelli scrambled after him, and the two started down the near-black tunnel. Hofmyer kept his eyes on the walls and ceiling, looking for new cracks in the rock. Every few feet he would tap the stone with a hammer, listening for a dull thud that would indicate a rotten place. In contrast, Gianelli stared into the gloom ahead of them, his mind focused on recovering his diamonds.

“They must have tried to blow open the safe. That’s what we heard,” he told an uninterested Hofmyer. “Mercer warned about using explosives under the dome without blast mats, so it couldn’t be anything else.”

The lights cut just a few feet into the choking veil of dust that mingled with the chemical stench of explosives. So far the path into the mountain was clear. Nothing seemed out of place amid the dressed stones that lined the walls and ceiling.

Hofmyer was the first to see a new plug in the tunnel, when he estimated they were only about two hundred feet from the pit. Rubble blocked the drive from floor to ceiling, but this avalanche wasn’t as tightly packed as the first one. The rock was loose and shifted with just a tap of his foot, and when he levered a few pieces out of the pile, nothing new fell from above.

“What’s this all about?” Gianelli asked.

“No idea, but if Mercer thinks this’ll stop us for long, he’s out of his bloody head,” Hofmyer sneered. “It’ll take nothing to move this out of the way and get to the pit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, the ceiling seems stable, but just to be safe, we’ll shore this lot up as we clear the muck outa the way.” Hofmyer finished his examination of the pile of debris and turned to his employer. Gianelli had promised him a bonus commensurate with the speed in which the diamonds were recovered, so he had a newfound desire to get into the mine. “I told ya I heard of this Mercer before from some of the trade magazines and from mates back in South Africa, and I expected a hell of a lot more from him. Blocking the tunnel like this is child’s play. I don’t know what he’s playing at, but this is starting to piss me off.”

“When we get our hands on him, he’ll wish he had died in the avalanche.”

Once the entrance to the main tunnel was completely cleared, Hofmyer ordered the Eritreans to remove the debris from Mercer’s drop mat. The explosives had rendered the waste into easily maneuvered chunks, and a human chain was quickly established to transfer the debris outside. It still took nearly two hours because of the distance to the surface and because Hofmyer used specially designed screw jacks to prop up the hanging wall.

Gianelli was standing next to the South African when they broke through to the pit. Hofmyer poked his head into the chamber, a pistol held in his fist, just in case. He was silent for a long moment.

“Well?” Gianelli panted.

Hofmyer didn’t answer. He directed a couple of workers to clear away the last of the rubble and crawled into the domed chamber. Emboldened by Hofmyer’s actions, Gianelli dogged his heels. They found themselves standing on the ledge above the ancient mine floor. Lights still blazed brightly, running on internal battery power because the generators were silent. In fact, they had been destroyed, their mechanical guts spread around them in pools of oil. The drills were lined up next to the generators, and they, too, had been wrecked, the couplings for the air hoses smashed beyond repair.

Apart from the equipment, the chamber was empty.

“Gone,” Gianelli said, not believing his eyes. “They are all gone.”

Hofmyer stood next to him, slack-jawed incredulity on his face. There was no sign of Mercer or the Eritrean miners or the Sudanese guards. Mercer had made the entire group vanish.

On the far wall of the pit, written with neon yellow paint in letters five feet tall was a simple six-word message composed, no doubt, by Philip Mercer. It sent a deep chill through Hofmyer and especially Gianelli. They both felt that somehow it was true.

I’M WAITING FOR YOU IN HELL