The Medusa Stone

The Mine

An hour before Gianelli broke through the first avalanche and encountered the drop mat, the working floor of the mine had been far different. Machinery thrummed and ratcheted, echoing off the arched roof and drowning the shouts and oaths of the Eritrean workers. The activity was frantic as they strove to reach Mercer’s nearly impossible deadline. They tore into the deep shaft like madmen, jack-hammering out chunks of stone that had to be muscled from the pit. They had bored a man-sized hole a further fifteen feet into the soft stone, deflected at an angle from the main shaft in strict accordance to Mercer’s instructions.

In the entry tunnel, the scene was less hectic but just as noisy, the crew continuing to drill ten-foot-deep holes into the hanging wall. Mercer had left the work in the pit and joined this crew, following behind them with bundles of explosives. He placed each charge carefully, not letting the pressure of time rush the delicate process. Selome worked with him, handing him the cylinders of plastique from a cart they had dragged into the tunnel. The drillers were far enough ahead so they could hold a shouted conversation.

“Are you finally going to explain what we’re doing?” she asked.

Mercer didn’t look up from the charge he was wiring. “Yeah. This drop mat is going to buy us a few more hours before Gianelli reaches us.”

“You already told me that,” Selome replied. “And you said you’re going to make us all disappear, but what do you mean?”

Mercer answered her question with one of his own. “Did you notice something incongruous between the mine that Brother Ephraim described and this tunnel here?” Selome shook her head. “He said that Solomon’s mine was excavated by children working in slave conditions, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then explain to me why the children needed to dig this tunnel so wide and so tall. Also, how could they have dug it straight to the kimberlite deposit? The odds against that are about one in a trillion.”

“I have no idea.” It was obvious that she hadn’t considered either of these points.

“This tunnel was built after the kimberlite had been discovered in order to make extracting the ore more efficient. It was sized for adults, not children, dug so that two men carrying baskets of ore in their hands could pass each other comfortably. The kimberlite had already been located through another set of tunnels that run beneath this one, and that’s the mine that The Shame of Kings describes.”

“Oh, my God,” Selome breathed. “It was staring in front of me all along and I never saw it.”

“Hey, I do this for a living,” Mercer said. “This one was dug when the mine’s high assay value made it economical to drive a tunnel directly to the ore body rather than haul it out through the smaller, children’s tunnels below us.”

“So the other team is digging where you think the two mines intersect? You found the location from the satellite photographs?”

“Yes.” Mercer finished with the charge he’d been wiring and inserted it into the hole over his head, tamping it gently to seat it properly. “Those Medusa pictures finally had some value after all. When I first saw them in Washington, I noticed that white lines covered some of them and assumed they were either distortions or veins of a dense mineral giving back a strong echo to the positron receiver. What I figured out since coming here is that they represent hollows in the earth, tunnels like this one.”

“And you found a way back to the surface?”

Mercer looked a little sheepish. “Well, not exactly. Remember, the resolution on those pictures was terrible. It’s not quite guesswork on my part, but damn close. Still, I think where those men are drilling will lead to the older tunnels, the ones Ephraim told us about.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but what if it doesn’t?”

“Then Gianelli’s going to break into this mine and gun down everyone he sees.” Mercer shrugged. “I’ve gotten us this far, haven’t I? Maybe our luck will hold.”

They blasted the drop mat as soon as Mercer had rigged the last charge, everyone having taken an impromptu vote to either surrender to Gianelli or try to find a way out on their own. Mercer felt he owed them that. He explained the pitfalls and the danger, but the vote was unanimous to seal off the mine again.

When the crew had finished blocking the tunnel, Mercer shifted them to the pit. They drilled for another hour, the men working with machine-like efficiency, Mercer in the thick of it. He was operating one of the drills when the bit struck a void in the rock and the entire rig sank up to its couplings. Not wanting to hope too much, but feeling a building excitement, he hauled the drill back up, aligned it a few inches away, and fired in another hole. A section of floor collapsed and he found himself standing above a black hollow that hadn’t seen light in three thousand years. His triumphant whoop alerted the other men, and they crowded around, recoiling at the fetid, decaying odor that belched from the depths.

Mercer shut down the drill and signaled to a man above to silence the generators. In moments the shaft was filled with excited voices as those workers not otherwise engaged clambered to look into the darkness.

“You did it,” Selome shrieked, and threw her arms around Mercer’s shoulders. Her passionate kiss brought a round of cheering from the workers and a delighted smile to Mercer.

“Little early for the champagne,” he warned. “There’s something I forgot, and it may already be too late. Cave disease.”

“Cave disease, what’s that?”

“Cryptococcus. It’s a fungus that lives in undisturbed areas like caves and abandoned mines. Once inhaled, it germinates in the lungs and can cause fatal meningitis if not treated quickly. The main tunnel was safe because Hofmyer vented it before sending in workers, but this other mine may be rife with the stuff.” Mercer paused, assessing the odds. “We’ve already breathed the air blowing out of the hole, and we don’t have a choice but to continue.”

“Is there a cure?”

“Yeah, um, amphotericin and flourocytosine, I think. But we don’t have time to worry about that now. Gianelli should be working on the blast mat, and we have to get everyone into the original mine and hide every trace that we were ever here.” Mercer then added with a fiendish grin, “And that includes the safe full of diamonds.”

Another twenty minutes and they were ready to abandon the chamber. Mercer had rigged a coffer dam above the pit that led to the old mine and loaded it with tons of rubble. He configured it so its contents could be dumped into the shaft after they had escaped through the hole in its bottom. He also ordered the destruction of the remaining mining equipment and scrawled a personal greeting to Gianelli and Hofmyer for their arrival. Dropping the safe into the hole widened it enough for the men to begin lowering themselves into the cramped tunnels below.

Mercer considered leaving du Toit and the Sudanese behind, but they would give away the escape route the instant Gianelli reached the chamber. He couldn’t bring himself to murder them. They were prisoners and deserved some sort of fair treatment. He made sure they were securely bound and well guarded before allowing them into the tunnel.

He was the last one to descend into the children’s mine, dragging the lanyard that would breach the coffer dam behind him. Once in the cramped tunnel, he moved away from the hole connecting the two mines. When he judged he was far enough, he yanked the line and held his breath as debris filled the pit above them. Unless Hofmyer possessed a photographic memory, he would never know the pit had been filled or how Mercer had taken his people out of the main chamber.

It was only after the last of the rubble settled that he took a moment to investigate their surroundings. In the beam of his flashlight, the tunnel was only three feet tall and maybe as wide, circular rather than squared. All the surfaces were rough, showing the marks where they had been worked by primitive stone tools. The air was just rich enough to breathe, but it was a struggle. In the few moments since the tunnel had been sealed, the air was starting to foul. Mercer realized he had to string out the forty men with him if he was to avoid depleting the oxygen in one section, yet he couldn’t have them too far apart for fear of losing someone.

From where he sat, he could see three branch tunnels meandering off, one to left, one to right, and one rising up and over this one. The claustrophobic tunnels reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the myriad branches in a human lung or the den of some burrowing rodent. A man could become hopelessly lost after only a few feet. He crawled over the supine men until he had reached the front of the group, passing the Sudanese guards, oblivious to their wrathful stares. Selome waited for him with her own flashlight. They had only two others, but these lights were powered by hand crank mechanisms that required no batteries so there wasn’t any danger of them dying. Still, the tunnel was so dim that it was impossible to see beyond just a couple of yards.

“What now, fearless leader?” Selome asked, her pride in Mercer evident in her eyes and smile.

Mercer’s kit bag bulged with items he thought he might need for the ordeal to come. He dug out one of the lighters. He sparked the wheel and watched the flame until the metal top was too hot to touch. The flame remained in a solid column, not flickering in the slightest. “No air movement, but that doesn’t mean we won’t find some. It just means we are too far back to feel it. What I want to do is find a place to leave everyone behind, a chamber like the children would have used as a dormitory. Chances are it will be situated near a natural air vent.”

“And then?”

“You and I find the way out of here. We’ll be able to move a lot faster if we don’t have to worry about stragglers and our prisoners.” Mercer glanced back into the darkness, listening to the coughing fits of the men. The air was rank. “Now you know why I didn’t want Habte with us. As much as he smokes, he wouldn’t last five minutes in here. By the time we get out, he should have reached Dick Henna and a couple hundred Marines will have landed, taking care of our former Italian slave master.”

“And then we come back for the rest of the miners?”

“You got it.”

They started out, Mercer in the lead with Selome right behind. They followed the erratic beam of his flashlight as he crawled through the serpentine tunnels on his hands and knees. After an hour, all of them were feeling the effects of the dust their motion kicked up, and the tunnel echoed like a tuberculosis ward. The Eritreans were drinking water at a prodigious rate to salve their burned throats. Mercer was becoming concerned. They needed to find a small chink in the earth’s armor that allowed a seep of air to reach the dark maze.

Another two hours of uninterrupted agony followed as the party oozed through the warren with wormlike slowness. Every few hundred yards, Mercer would test the air for movement, but each time the lighter’s flame held steady. He studied the Medusa pictures at many of the major junctures. Their resolution was so poor that the lines on the photos did not correspond with the three-dimensional map he was creating in his mind. After the fourth frustrating time, he angrily tucked them back in his bag. Their only hope lay with Mercer’s instincts and his intimate knowledge of mines and mining. He was the only one who could navigate this subterranean realm, ignoring large branches and side tunnels that might have tempted another and leading them through tiny crawl spaces that someone else would have ignored.

They were well into their fourth hour when Mercer sparked his lighter again. The small flames swayed away from him, its movement so slight that had he not been staring, he never would have noticed it. Selome saw the expression on his face and grinned.

“I think we’re going to be okay,” he said.

The chamber they found fifteen minutes later was about twenty feet square, and while the quarters were cramped, everyone fit. Mercer noted that the cavity was a natural formation, one that the child miners had discovered and exploited for themselves. It was like a warm womb deep underground, a sanctuary from the agonizing labor they endured until their young lives ended in the darkness. The ceiling of the cave was about six feet tall and was scarred with hundreds of cracks. Through one of these fissures and through a labyrinthine twist in the living rock, a trickle of air descended into the earth, freshening the atmosphere. After the foul odor of the tunnels, the air in the chamber was sweet and joyously refreshing.

Selome settled against Mercer’s chest as he lay against one wall, taking a much needed break. The men were tangled around them like a litter of exhausted puppies, too tired to sort themselves out. Many minutes would pass before the last coughing spell ended with a wet expectoration of blood.

“It’s all downhill from here,” Mercer said.

“You mean it gets easier?”

“No.” Mercer shook his head. “We’ve been climbing toward the surface for the past hour so these tunnels will have to slope downward again if we’re going to find an exit we can use.”

“Okay, mister.” Selome looked at him with mock severity. “You’ve been giving cryptic answers and telling only half the story since we entered the mine, and every time you pull some trick out of your hat. So what’s your trick this time?”

Mercer laughed. “Found me out, did you? Yes, I have another trick. Remember when we first entered the mine after Gianelli caught us at the monastery? I said I was looking for an escape route.” Selome nodded. “I noticed a section of wall a hundred feet from the surface that looked as if it had been rebuilt. The stone was a shade lighter than the blocks used to line the rest of the tunnel. I’m betting our lives that there’s another tunnel behind it that had been covered over, hidden.”

“You think these old mine shafts lead to it.”

He nodded. “But if they don’t, we are seriously screwed.” They rested for another half hour before Mercer decided that if he delayed any longer, he’d be too stiff to continue. He roused Selome and spoke with the gang leaders, again asking her to translate. He laid out his plan and the Eritreans agreed. Their faith in his abilities was an inspiration for Mercer, but also a burden. First it was Harry’s life which depended on what he did, then Selome’s and Habte’s, and now he’d added forty more people, plus the others still in the slave compounds. He cleared his mind of creeping defeatism. It was much too late to doubt his decisions, even if he led them into a possible, and quite literal, dead end.

“Are you ready?” Mercer asked.

“Have I ever said no?”

“That’s my girl.”

They started out of the chamber, exiting through one of the larger tunnels. In only a few seconds, they could no longer see the glow from the two flashlights they’d left with the Eritreans. The beam of their own single light seemed puny in the mounting blackness of the unnatural maze. And as Mercer crawled ahead of Selome, the single AK-47 he’d taken with him seemed just as ineffective if they managed to reach the surface and had to face Gianelli again.

Mahdi had bided his time. He was not a patient man and the quiet waiting had been frustrating, but now it was all about to pay off. He lay with the three other Sudanese soldiers, men who had been under his command for years, men who would kill or die for him. Just having him with them had given his troops the necessary discipline to wait out the American and his Eritrean whore. Lying amid the stinking pile of humanity, Mahdi congratulated himself for getting this far.

Of course, it was pure chance he’d been in the mine talking with his troops when Mercer appeared. He was the soldier to drop his weapon first, sensing that even with superior firepower, Mercer had taken the tactical advantage by holding the white miner. When he saw the whore appear a moment later, her own weapon leveled, Mahdi knew he’d made the correct choice.

Another element of chance at work tonight was the large bandage that swathed the upper half of his face and dressed his right cheek. He’d been practicing fighting moves against one of his lieutenants with unsheathed knives, as was their habit, when the soldier slipped and the blade slashed Mahdi’s face. The wound would heal nicely, adding a new scar to the older wounds marring his body. The bandage his medic had applied hid enough of his features to prevent anyone from recognizing him, and since neither Mercer nor the Eritreans had looked too closely, they hadn’t realized their prisoner was the commander of the Sudanese guard detail.

Mahdi had allowed himself to be taken, cowed like the rest of his men and shepherded along with this suicide mission for no other reason than to see Mercer choke to death on his tongue when there was the chance to cut it out and feed it to him. Maybe he’d have a piece of the whore before he killed her too. He smiled in the dark chamber, a tightening of his facial muscles that on a normal person would look like a grimace. He wondered if he could work it so Mercer was still alive when he stuck it to the Eritrean slut, but he doubted it. Better to just kill the American and then have his fun.

He needed to get after them first. While it would be easy to track them in the dusty tunnels, he didn’t want them getting too far ahead. Waiting for more of the slave laborers to fall asleep, Mahdi used subtle hand signals to communicate with the other guards, a secret code of gestures that they’d used countless times during the civil war in Sudan. Mahdi ordered one of his men to sacrifice himself in a blatant escape attempt that would give him the opportunity to make a break for it. He’d considered trying to overpower their captors but the Eritreans were armed with the guards’ AK-47s. A silent retreat would work the best, and even if Mahdi got out without one of the Kalishnikovs, he still carried a throwing knife in his boot.

Waiting for the right moment, he glanced at the boots and remembered the fat bald man who had once owned them. That had been a boring hunt but a very satisfying kill, he recalled. Hadn’t his victim said he was an archeologist? Clever cover, but Mahdi had already been warned by Gianelli that the man was searching for the lost mine. Mahdi knew now that the man need not have died; he had been searching fifty miles from the mine. But Mahdi liked the boots.

When three quarters of the Eritreans were asleep, including one of the armed ones, he decided that it was time. Mahdi showed his comrade the old cavalryman’s signal of a closed fist and the waiting soldier gave a sharp nod. Charge.

The trooper didn’t hesitate. He leaped to his feet, kicking sleeping miners as he rushed toward a side tunnel away from where Mercer and Selome had disappeared, screaming unintelligible curses as he went. Mahdi too was in motion, using the other Sudanese as shields as he twisted away from the group, blending himself into the darkness beyond the feeble glow of the single lit flashlight.

The Eritreans came awake, one of them taking aim in the gloom and gave the trigger a quick tap. Three red explosions appeared on the diversionary guerrilla’s back, and he pitched forward, his body collapsing against the wall next to the exit. In the confusion, Mahdi rolled away from the group, the rope binding his hands making it difficult to move, but still he managed to grasp the spare light on his way out of the cavern.

He regained his feet and stumbled on. The tunnel was so dark he walked with his eyes closed, keeping his arms stretched to one side so he could brush along the wall. After passing several side branches, he ducked into another one and snapped on the light. It took him only a moment to pluck the knife from his boot and cut through the hemp securing his wrists. His men would destroy the other flashlight left with the Eritreans in the melee following his escape, so he was now immune from pursuit. He, and he alone, was the hunter in this hellish world, and Mercer would never know what was coming.

If Mercer thought the early part of their trek was torturous, it was nothing compared to the past couple of hours. It seemed he could do no wrong leading the miners to the fresh air chamber, but since then he’d led Selome up two long blind alleys and had been forced to wriggle through areas that even the children who’d dug these galleries would have trouble negotiating. It was as though they were trapped in the body of some enormous creature not willing to give up its latest meal. As they corkscrewed through the twisting intersections and aimless shafts, Mercer was beginning to think he would get them hopelessly lost. So far their motion had created a trail in the dust, but if they passed a spot that was clean, it would be impossible to backtrack to where the Eritreans waited.

Finally they entered another tall cavern, one that lacked fresh air but had been mined extensively. The flashlight’s beam revealed a sight that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Unlike the bodies he’d discovered in the Italian mine, these were not neatly laid out. It appeared they had been left where they had died. Their poses were agonizing. There were maybe a dozen of them, desiccated mummies with skin stretched tightly over screams of pain. The corpses were all of children, the oldest not more than ten or twelve. Even in death, their suffering transcended the millennia.

“Oh, God.” Selome gagged.

Mercer said nothing. He looked at the pitiable remains of the slave children, trying to keep emotions from clouding his judgment. By the ore piled around a couple of them, he could see that work had continued without pause next to the bodies. No attempts had been made to give the children any kind of burial. They had been abandoned, worked to death, and left to rot where they’d died. Selome began praying.

Still in shock, Mercer forced himself to make a closer examination of one of the bodies, wanting to know the exact cause of death. He didn’t dare disturb the fragile corpse, but from the areas he could study, he saw no signs of injury; no broken bones or blunt trauma. The only bizarre feature was the unnatural curling of its hands, arms, and feet. They were coiled so tightly they looked as if they had no bones in them at all. Mercer noted that the other bodies were all in similar positions.

What the hell could have done this? he thought. He noted the child still had its teeth, so he discounted scurvy, but rickets was a possible candidate. Then the clinical side of his brain shut down and he felt pity wash over him in tidal surges. What did it matter how they died? They were gone, murdered by a nameless slave master long ago who’d probably been rewarded for his efficiency. Mercer had to force himself to breathe. He said a silent prayer for the children, and when he raised his eyes and took note of the vein of ore they’d been working, a sickening realization came to him.

He wanted to escape this macabre cave, but the scientist in him had to be sure, even if he knew the results could be a death sentence for him and Selome. She continued to pray as he crushed down a small sample of the ore left on the footwall. He unclipped the protective steel casing off the boxy flashlight and poured a measure of the ore into it. He ignored the coils of fuse in the bag and withdrew a stick of dynamite. He worked the explosive until he could pour the powder onto the ground beneath the container. Only when he was finished did she notice his efforts and join him.

“What are you doing?”

“An experiment,” he replied, and Selome recognized the fear in his voice.

He laid their full canteen onto the metal case so it acted as a lid. “Do you remember what Brother Ephraim said about the children who worked the mine being killed by sin?”

Without a tight constraint, the explosive burst into flame when he touched it off with his lighter, illuminating the cavern in harsh white light. When the fire burned out, he tapped the canteen several times and stuck it back into his bag. The reddish ore in his makeshift apparatus had darkened considerably. He dumped it onto a jagged rock and waited. It took just a few seconds for silvery beads to ooze out of the ore and pool on the ground next to him.

“He wasn’t warning us about sin with a S, but sin with a C, as in cinnabar, also called red mercuric sulfide. It’s the principal ore stone for raw mercury.” They both stared at the shimmering pool of liquid metal.

“But isn’t mercury—”

“One of the most toxic substances on the planet. It can cripple, paralyze, or kill just by breathing its fumes.”

“That’s what killed the children?”

“That’s what going to kill us, too, if we don’t get out of here. It’s so deadly that miners who dig this stuff today only work eight days a month. Every second we delay can have permanent effects.” He was already leading Selome down another tunnel.

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Yeah, sweat a lot. Believe it or not, perspiration can cleanse the body of mercury if it’s not allowed to bond to the cell proteins. After every shift, miners spend time in a room called ‘the beach’ to sweat out the toxins under powerful heat lamps.”

The mine was stuffy and hot already, so there wasn’t a problem keeping their pores open, but they only had that single canteen of water, and when that ran out, their bodies would no longer waste fluids on temperature control. The mercury would then begin its absorption process, and the consequences after that might be irreversible.

They encountered several more horror chambers as they wound through the mine, one of them containing at least a hundred mummified victims. Mercer could see that many of the children had been exposed to mercury through their mothers when they were in the womb. The poison had done terrible damage to their chromosomes, and they suffered horrifying malformations. Some were barely recognizable as human.

“Somehow the kimberlite vent came up through a vein of mercuric sulfide. I’ve never heard of a geologic feature like this but I can understand why they thought the Ark of the Covenant may have helped the children,” Mercer said.

“How?”

“Even at the time the Ark was brought to Africa, metallurgists knew that mercury bonded with gold. I think they were hoping it would absorb the mercury vapor and stop its debilitating effects. Remember, apart from any mythical properties it may have had, the Ark was covered with gold.”

“But this much mercury?”

“I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

They continued through more endless passages for another hour until Selome had a disturbing thought. “Mercer, the tunnel leading to the working pit was about a mile and a half long, and even at a slow crawl, we must have covered five times that distance on our way back.” Her voice was muffled by the tight passage as the walls soaked up the sound.

“You noticed that, too?” he replied. “I’m beginning to get a little concerned myself. These tunnels were constructed through softer material to make the mining easier, but it doesn’t seem possible that they’d meander as badly as this. I’m starting to think we may be in another dead end.”

“We’re lost?” She started to panic.

Mercer stopped, twisted around so he could see her with the flashlight. Her face was tiger-striped by beads of sweat cutting runnels through the dust caked to her skin. He could see she was starting to lose confidence. Mercer cupped her chin in his palm. “There are two inevitabilities in life, death and taxes. You have my word that come next April, you’ll be cutting a big check.”

She forced bravery into her voice. “Americans pay taxes in April. I’m Eritrean.”

The next chamber they found was high enough for them to stand, and unlike the others, it was enormous. Their flashlight could penetrate only a fraction of the way across, but by gauging the echoes, Mercer estimated the cavity was nearly the size of a football field. He immediately recognized the mining technique used to excavate the space. Room and pillar mining called for huge spaces to be gouged into the ore while leaving support columns of undisturbed rock to hold up the hanging wall. It was a common technique in coal mining, but not very efficient in a diamond mine, and he was surprised it had been used to work this kimberlite vein. The pillars were so numerous, it felt as if they were walking among the trunks of a dense petrified forest or in the eerie catacombs under an ancient cathedral. He was stunned that the mine overseers had conceived and engineered the system as he led Selome across the expanse. Over their heads, the hanging wall was in terrible shape, cracked and scored by the enormous pressure of the earth bearing down on it. He guessed that in another hundred years or so, the pillars would succumb to the strain and the entire room would collapse.

Halfway to the other side of the room a shadow caught Mercer’s eye, and when he turned to investigate, Selome gave a startled scream and was thrown to the floor. Mercer was flattened by a rushing apparition that materialized out of the darkness. His head cracked against the ground, his mind spinning. It was impossible that anything alive could be down here with them; the mine had been sealed for thousands of years. A vicious kick to his stomach pulled him back to reality. It didn’t matter who or what was with them, they were about to be killed. A knife glinted sharply in the beam of the flashlight that had flown from his stunned hands. The AK-47 lay out of reach beyond the penumbra.

The thing jumped on Mercer as he lay stunned. He managed to raise a hand and deflect the blade plunging at his chest. He twisted his assailant enough for him to counter with a crushing punch, the blow snapping a couple of short ribs. Rather than being slowed by the shot, the attacker went wild, striking Mercer across the jaw with his elbow, and the darkness of the cavern rushed into Mercer’s brain. He would have lost the fight right then had Selome not leaped on the assailant’s back, drawing him off Mercer for a moment.

For her effort, Mercer saw her catch a savage punch in the face that sent her reeling, her body falling like a deflated balloon. He scrambled to find his assault rifle and the attacker was on him again, this time sinking the knife into the fleshy part of Mercer’s thigh. Screaming with the needle-hot pain, Mercer torqued and back-handed the creature across the cheek. To his horror, he felt his hand sink into its putrid face and saw a chunk of flesh fly off. The wound did nothing to deter the assault and Mercer realized he really was fighting some demon who roamed the labyrinth.

He scrambled out of the monster’s reach, dodging around a pillar and into total darkness. From his vantage point he could see the creature shuffling to the abandoned light. The beam caught the apparition in the face, and Mercer recognized Gianelli’s principal henchman, the leader of the rebels, Mahdi. He remembered one of the guards he’d taken prisoner had worn a bandage — that was what he’d wiped off Mahdi’s face.

Mercer had no time to consider how he had escaped the Eritreans or managed to track them. He knew Mahdi would go for the AK next, and he had to get to the gun first. He concentrated on his exact position when Mahdi had first hit him and the most logical direction the gun would have sailed. A glint in the distance caught Mercer’s attention, but it was too far away to be the gun. He struck out boldly, his hands in front of him to avoid slamming into one of the stone columns. In the darkness, Selome was still screaming as if she believed that some specter stalked these galleries.

Both men spotted the weapon when it caught the light’s beam. Mahdi had a shorter distance to run to reach it, but Mercer’s reactions were quicker and they both dove and got a hand on it at the same time.

Mercer had a better grip on the AK and used it to twist the weapon away from the soldier. Mahdi kneed him viciously in the inside of his forearm and Mercer’s entire hand went numb. Suddenly the gun was in Mahdi’s control. Struggling under the man’s weight and only able to use his bad arm to deflect the gloating Sudanese, Mercer reached into the kit bag still slung around his shoulder.

He’d planned to use the high-speed fuse in conjunction with the dynamite he carried if they’d needed to blast any obstacles that got in their way, but now it had a more urgent purpose. Mahdi either didn’t notice or didn’t care as Mercer dropped the two-hundred-foot coil of fuse over his head. The rebel was laughing, knowing he had the advantage, but when he spied a tiny flame shooting from the Zippo in Mercer’s fingers, his eyes went wide with terror. In those last seconds he understood what Mercer had looped over him.

The fuse burned at twenty-two thousand feet per second, so the entire coil cooked off faster than the eye could see. Even under its protective coating, the temperature of the burning chemicals skyrocketed. The smell was almost as bad as the screech when the veins in Mahdi’s throat burst under the pressure of his blood turning to steam. His flesh roasted like a joint of meat.

Mahdi’s finger tightened on the AK’s trigger even as his eyes rolled back into his skull. A full clip arrowed into the ceiling, ricocheting and filling the chamber with deadly lead. The crashing shots and the echoes weakened a section of the scaly hanging wall, and a fifty-ton slab of stone crashed to the floor a short distance away, followed seconds later by several more.

The whole ceiling was giving way! Mercer rolled out from under the struggling terrorist, grabbed up the assault rifle by its hot barrel, and grasped the flashlight in his other hand. More stones let go, huge chunks whose impact loosened even more of the ceiling in a domino effect. It was as if the earth had come alive and they were caught in its jaws. With the weight shifting its balance, one of the pillars exploded like a bomb, crushed beyond its structural tolerance, hurtling rock like grapeshot.

Mercer heaved Selome off the floor as if she was no more than a child. As more debris rained around them, they ducked into a side tunnel. He took just a second to look back and watched a slab of rock larger than an automobile land squarely on Mahdi as he writhed with the pain of his burned neck. The weight of the stone forced the contents of his torso toward his head, but they could not erupt through the cranium. Mercer saw Mahdi’s throat expand like that of a bull frog’s until the entire bulbous mass exploded in a red mist and the body lay still.

He trained the light to the far end of the gallery where he had seen the distant glint. Just before his view was obliterated by the crumbling chamber, he watched an eerie blue light radiate from the gloom, burning brighter and brighter until a chunk of stone crashed right in front of him, sealing the room forever.

The side tunnel’s roof was lower than most of the others they’d encountered, and Mercer had to ease Selome to the ground and coax her to follow as more of the chamber behind them collapsed. Huge clouds of dust blew into the tunnel, enveloping them, choking them until they could no longer open their eyes and every breath was torture. And still more of the room fell, a roaring sound that filled their world and threatened to tear away their sanity. They scrambled from it, ripping skin from their hands and knees as this tunnel began to fill with debris.

They covered fifty yards before the cave-in ended. The sudden silence left their ears ringing. Looking back the way they’d come, Mercer saw that they were cut off from the others by untold billions of tons of earth. Even if they had wanted to, there was no way they would ever be able to return.

What the hell was that glow? The blue light had to be a static discharge, he thought. When rock is crushed, it can give off a small amount of electricity. Given the amount of moving stone, the phenomenon could easily explain what he’d seen. Or maybe it was a pocket of methane catching fire after being ignited by a spark. He had several other naturally occurring explanations, but deep in the back of his mind, he knew there was also an unnatural one. No, it couldn’t be.

“What happened in there?”

“Mahdi suffered a crushing defeat,” Mercer rasped, waiting for Selome to take a drink from their canteen. He wanted to give her time to recover before telling her that this tunnel went in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go. There was no way he was going to tell her what else he’d seen.

“You have no idea what I was thinking in there when he attacked us,” Selome replied, wiping her lips against the delicate bones on the back of her hand.

“Can’t be any weirder than what was going through my mind,” Mercer agreed. “Are you okay?”

“My jaw hurts and I’m sure it’ll be black and blue in a few hours, but I’m fine. You?”

Mercer removed his pants and began working on the knife wound in his leg. He didn’t waste any of their precious water cleaning the gash but slapped a fragment of his shirt over the incision and secured it with a strips of silvery duct tape from his bag. “Dr. Mercer’s antiseptic surgery, secondary infections are our specialty.”

“Is it bad?”

“Nothing major was hit,” Mercer said, then added with dark humor, “and it’ll stiffen long before we get to see your black and blues.”

The dust was still too thick to rest this close to the cave-in, so Mercer donned his pants and they started out of the area. Particles lay heavily in the air, and the powerful light could cut only a feeble swath through it. After a further hundred yards, the tunnel had shrunk in diameter so that their backs scraped the ceiling as they crawled. Still they were dogged by chocking clouds of grit.

“This may take a while to settle.” Mercer gagged each time he opened his mouth and his nose felt scored by acid.

They were forced to lower themselves even more as the tunnel continued to shrink. In moments the shoulders of Mercer’s shirt were ripped through and the abraded skin began to bleed. Without choice or option, they continued, using their elbows and toes to propel themselves forward.

“Mercer, what’s happening?” Selome cried.

“I don’t know.”

The tunnel was no larger than a coffin, just wide enough for them to squirm on their bellies, and in the murky light Mercer could see its diameter constricting even further. For the first time he considered that this tunnel might pinch out into solid rock. As if reading his thoughts, Selome called his name again, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria.

“I know, I know.” It was becoming tougher for him to move. He’d taken off his kit bag a while back and pushed it and the AK-47 ahead of him. He had to twist and struggle to gain every inch.

For a while, the tunnel remained the same size, neither growing or shrinking, but their progress was cut to a snail’s pace. Rock encircled Mercer completely; not one section of his body was out of contact with its jagged embrace. The tunnel walls were pure, blood-red mercury ore. In a few places, raw mercury had worked itself from the ceiling and dripped into little hollows and troughs on the floor.

“How long did you say we could stay in here?”

“I’m not sure.” The light revealed a stretch of tunnel glittering with hundreds of tiny pools of quicksilver. “Remember, mercury can be absorbed through the skin, so don’t let it touch any open wounds you might have.”

“My entire body is an open wound.”

They made it through the severely contaminated section and started down a gentle slope. Mercer could see where the mercury had cut canals in the floor as it flowed downhill.

His coughing fits were becoming less frequent, but their severity was punishing. Unlike Selome, who had a little room between her body and the tunnel walls, Mercer was so constricted that every cough seemed stillborn in his chest, exploding within his body without finding a proper outlet. He had to prepare himself for the pain when he felt one coming. Already he could taste the coppery salt of blood in his mouth from ruptured lung tissue.

Mercer jammed.

Fighting panic, he rolled his shoulders and tried to work them forward, but the more he struggled, the more it seemed the walls tightened around him like the remorseless coils of a python. The tunnel floor was compacted dirt, and he tried to tear into it with his hands, but it was as hard as cement and left his fingers bleeding.

Selome saw his frantic movements and slid back to avoid his flailing feet. “What’s happening?”

“I’m afraid I’m stuck.”

“What do you mean stuck?”

“I mean I can’t move. I can’t go back and I can’t go forward.”

“Well, try!” In the confines of the tunnel, her voice was muted, dead, like she was speaking from the other side of a wall.

“And you think I’ve been lying here taking a nap,” Mercer snapped, but he couldn’t draw a deep enough breath to give force to his words. He felt like he was drowning.

“I’m sorry,” Selome said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Grab my feet and pull as hard as you can.” He needed to breathe. He wanted to scream. The rock wouldn’t let him.

It took five minutes to pull him back enough for him to gain some working room. Mercer calmed again, but he could feel panic clawing at the back of his thoughts. His shoulders and back were flecked with blood. “Now we go back again.”

“But that way is blocked by the cave-in.”

“Not that far back. We need to find a place where you can crawl over me and take the lead. I think you will be able to squeeze through.”

“What about you?”

“We’ll burn that bridge after we cross it.”

It took two hours of slithering backward for them to find an area with enough ceiling height for Selome to crawl over him. When she was lying on his back, she rested her head against his neck for a moment, her breath in his ear.

“God, be careful,” Mercer cried. “I don’t have the room in here to get an erection.”

With Selome leading the way, they slowly returned to the area where Mercer had gotten stuck. “What happens now?”

“You keep going. Take the light and the gun, and try to find a way out of here.” Mercer sounded emotionless when he spoke but was glad that she couldn’t see his face.

Panic was a reaction to the unfamiliar, he told himself. But this time he had no experience to give him the confidence to keep from losing his grip with the rational.

“I can’t.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Even as he knew he might not escape alive, he thought about the others. “There are forty trapped miners waiting to be rescued, and if we both die right here, they die too.”

“I don’t care about them, dammit, I care about you.” She was sobbing.

Mercer reached out and stroked her ankle, pulling down her sock so he could touch her smooth skin. “And I care about you, too. But unless you get moving and find some help, I’ll never be able to take you on a sex-filled vacation in some exotic place.”

“Is that a promise?”

“I haven’t let you down yet.” Mercer felt another racking cough coming. The last words came out in a painful gasp.

“I can’t leave you.”

Her cry made him wince. He didn’t want to die alone, but he hardened himself, pushing aside his own needs. He struggled to regain his breath and purged his mouth of more blood. “Just go. You have to find a way out of here. I can’t have your death as the last thing on my conscience. You can’t do that to me.”

She sniffed back tears. “What about the canteen and the flashlight?”

“Take them.”

“Philip, I think that… I…” He could hear her struggling with the words and her own feelings, and before she committed herself, she changed her mind. “I think that we should go to Egypt, maybe a Nile cruise. I’ve always wanted to see the ancient monuments.”

“I’ll call my travel agent when you’re gone.”

Selome slithered away, vanishing from sight after a couple of yards. Mercer could see that a few impossible feet in front of him, the tunnel tantalizingly widened. The rock held him tighter than a straitjacket, and he struggled between panic and frustration. He’d never suffered claustrophobia, but he felt its icy tentacles reaching for him, grabbing him around every inch of his body and squeezing until his lungs convulsed. He drew shallow gulps of air so fouled with dust that he retched.

He was alone, shrouded in a darkness worse than death. He tried to wriggle forward but became more tightly trapped, the tunnel pressing him from all sides, holding him in a grip it would never relinquish. The blackness was so complete he could taste it as it filled his mouth and smell it as it invaded his lungs. His skin crawled with the silence of his tomb. His mind screamed for release from this prison, to move just a fraction of an inch. He could barely swivel his head, and when he did, crumbly mercury ore scraped off the ceiling, more poisonous dust for him to draw into his body.

“Okay, well, this is interesting, isn’t it?” It would only take a few days before his words became the ravings of a madman as he fought against the darkness and the silence and the isolation of his death.

Another spasm of coughing took him. His chest was unable to expand properly and the internal pressure threatened to shatter his ribs like glass. He wondered if pneumonia would develop and kill him before the mercury he was breathing destroyed his motor control and rotted his brain. He remembered that the beginning stage of mercury poisoning was a tremor in the extremities, and he couldn’t tell if the quiver in his legs was real or imagined.

Rather than dwell on the inevitable, he let his mind drift to the blue glow. What if he hadn’t seen a static discharge or a methane explosion? What if it really was the Ark, now crushed beyond recovery? “I’ve got the rest of my life to figure it out.”