The Medusa Stone

Northern Eritrea January of this year

Jakob Steiner was beyond caring that he was about to die.

Death would be a welcome release from the torture of the past hour. His body was so racked with pain and the effects of dehydration that his will to live had evaporated as quickly as the sweat that had once poured freely from his skin. He had stopped sweating soon after his tormentors took up the chase, pushing him hard across the arid landscape. His khaki bush shirt and pants had once been wet with perspiration but now showed only white circles of dried salt under his arms and at his groin. At first he’d thought he was outpacing the Shifta bandits as they dogged him across the rocky desert, but quickly he realized that his initial burst of speed could not compete with the machine-like endurance of the terrorists. They’d managed to catch him easily and now lagged only a few paces behind. He could hear their boots on the loose soil, smell their unwashed bodies over his own stench.

They were toying with him. They could have killed him earlier with a shot from the AK-47s all four carried. Yet like a pack of hunting dogs, they chased him, hounding him with occasional shouts, pushing him beyond his own level of endurance so he ran on pure instinct, fight or flight. An hour had passed, an hour of unrelenting fear, and Steiner was reaching the point where he could not continue, when fight became a better option than flight.

Steiner hadn’t had a drink of water since just before returning to his camp following another unsuccessful foray into one of the hundreds of box canyons in this part of the country. Zarai, his native guide, had remained in the Spartan camp as ordered whenever the scientist went exploring. Steiner gave no reason to the Eritrean, and custom demanded that Zarai not ask.

This morning marked the eighth day the two men had spent in the desolate region, a barren section of Eritrea’s lowlands consisting of jagged ridges and mountains too steep and dry to be inhabited. Because there was nothing in these formidable canyons and plateaus to attract the agrarian Eritreans, the duo were almost certain to be the first explorers in the region since the Italian occupation prior to the Second World War.

Steiner had come into the camp shortly before eleven. A shrieking wind had picked up, throwing grit in his eyes and clogging his nose and mouth so he’d walked the last few miles with a bandanna tied around his face and his expedition hat pulled low. He could hear the nylon of his and Zarai’s two tents snapping like the sails of a racing yacht.

For the first time since Jakob had begun his explorations, Zarai was not waiting for him in his usual position, hunkered over the low smokeless fire he used to brew endless cups of tea. In fact, the fire had been kicked out. The circle of stones ringing the pit was scattered across the space between the two tents, and Zarai’s treasured teakettle lay haphazardly on the smooth sand. Steiner was too tired to sense any danger until he was pulling off his boots on the camp stool in front of his tent.

It was the smell that drew his attention first. The fine hairs on the back of his hands rose. He could feel the premonition of danger like a thousand centipedes marching up his arms to his chest. Jakob stood, his filthy, sweat-smeared socks whispering on the sand as he spun in place, sensing that he was being watched.

Without warning, Zarai came flying through Jakob’s tent, propelled by some unseen force. Steiner staggered back, tripping over his own feet so that he fell heavily, his eyes unable to tear away from the sight of his guide dying just a pace away.

Zarai’s face was covered with blood that had leaked from the sockets where his eyes had been. Fat black flies buzzed quickly back to their sanguinous meal, blanketing his head only seconds after his body came to rest. Zarai moaned weakly, brushing his curled hand along the sand in an effort to reach his mutilated face.

Jakob screamed, a high-pitched keen not unlike a young girl’s, his stomach turning to oil. He crabbed across the ground in an effort to distance himself from his companion’s pitiable figure.

Zarai clawed weakly at the ground again and went still, his last gasp no more than a whisper in the wind.

Then four greyhound-thin men came into the camp. They were dressed in stained and dusty uniforms, the camouflage pattern all but washed out, the cuffs, collars, and countless pockets showing frayed edges. While the clothing they wore was tattered, all four were in the prime of their lives, which for this part of Africa meant early twenties. Their matching Soviet assault rifles looked well cared for and greased.

The young men stood arrogantly, flat dark eyes regarding the cowering Steiner with contempt. Unlike Zarai, who had lighter skin and Arab features, a reminder of Eritrea’s long association with the Middle East, these men were so black their skin had almost a blue tinge. Their features were classical negroid: high foreheads, thickened lips, and wide, handsome noses. While Steiner’s field of expertise was archaeology, he recognized that these men were from Sudan, born in the ancient lands of Kush. Steiner knew enough of modern politics to know his life could not be measured in minutes.

A civil war had been raging in Sudan for decades, fought between the northern majority of Muslims against the Christians from the south. Sudan’s small but appreciable animist population was caught in the middle. Relief agencies had been granted only sporadic entrance into the country to minister aid, so estimates of those killed were unreliable, but they ranged into the millions. In the past few years, driven by disease and malnutrition, many of those fighting in the south had turned to more mercenary activities — raiding aid shipments, plundering the camps of the quarter-million Eritrean refugees living in the country, and staging cross-border sorties for food or medicine and, more commonly now, to kidnap victims to be held for ransom.

Jakob Steiner lay on the ground, his socks stained the same dun color as his khaki clothes. His eyes were wide and fearful as he looked at the four men towering over him, four men who doubtlessly had perpetrated some of the despicable things Zarai had spoken of during their nights in the camp.

“What do you want from me?” he asked in German, his voice made raw by thirst and fear.

He got no reaction from the four terrorists, but noticed that one was carrying a large machete that hung from a hook on his belt. Zarai’s blood was a red-black stain on the weapon’s blade. He repeated the question in English. Again, the men looked at him blankly, ignoring the flies that had descended on the camp like a plague. Two jagged-wing vultures circled high above, gliding on the thermal updrafts produced by the sun hammering the desert.

“I have nothing,” Jakob stammered. Even if the men didn’t understand the words, they could certainly hear the pleading tone in his voice. “Just a little food, enough for another day or two, and just a small amount of money. I have more money in the capital, Asmara. I could send it to you, but you must let me go.”

Silence, save the wind blowing across the camp.

“I am a scientist. I study ancient bones. I have no powerful friends. I am worth nothing to you as a hostage. Please let me go.” Jakob was crying now, tears running into the dust caked on his face. “Please, take anything you want, but let me go. Do not hurt me!”

The four Sudanese did not react as his voice rose to a shrill whine. Then the terrorist with the machete, who was a little older than the others, kicked Steiner’s boots across the few feet of open ground separating them from the Austrian scientist.

“You are a spy from America here to enslave our people,” the cadre leader said in English as if he had memorized the words.

“No,” Jakob shouted, hopeful for the first time because one of the men understood him. “I am not from America, I am Austrian. I come from Europe. I am not a spy. I study old bones, the bones of our ancient ancestors. I am not here to steal from you.”

“You are from America. You are going to die. Put on your boots and go. We will give you a quarter of the clock dial to run, and then we will hunt you down.” The young Sudanese showed off a cheap watch slung loosely around his wrist. Steiner had fifteen minutes to get into his boots and run.

“But I’m not from—”

“Run!”

Steiner didn’t even bother lacing his boots. He merely slipped them on, ignoring the small piles of sand that had already accumulated in the toes, and began sprinting.

It took the terrorists only a half hour to catch their quarry, but they did not move in for the kill. They ran behind Steiner, taunting him, goading him. It went on like this for another hour, an hour of Steiner hearing his own painful breathing tearing through his chest and his sore and swollen feet tripping over the jagged ground. Jakob hadn’t run like this in his entire life. His legs were rubbery beneath him, his feet slapping ineffectually against the hardpan. His pudgy arms were pumping slower and slower, like a machine grinding down for want of fuel.

The Sudanese slowed to a walking pace behind the shambling Austrian. Their breath came slow and even, and only a little sweat gleaned against their skin. Sensing that the chase was at an end, the leader came forward and smashed down on the scientist’s knee with the butt of his AK-47. The joint crumbled and Jakob fell to the ground, rolling in a thin cloud of chalky dust.

Settled comfortably on their haunches, the Sudanese ringed Steiner, their assault rifles held between their knees. The leader lit a Turkish cigarette and passed it to his men, each taking a long draw before giving it to the next. The cigarette made three complete circles before the leader took one last drag, pinched off the burning tip to shred the remaining leaf, and tucked the filter in the pocket of his uniform blouse.

The hunt had ended in another of the countless dry river-beds that snaked through the lowlands. The banks were not steep but still radiated the heat like mirrors. Blisters of sweat appeared on the men’s faces and exposed arms for the first time. They shuffled their feet in the flaky stones at the bottom of the wash, waiting for their leader to give them the order to dispatch the interloper.

Jakob’s chest rose and fell in a rapid cadence. His heart felt like it was breaking his ribs with each beat. Somewhere beyond his pelvis, in the sea of pain that had once been his legs, his shattered knee throbbed with an unholy pounding. Already the joint had swollen to twice its normal size. Each time his heart beat, the sharp bone fragments ground against each other, further mincing the tendons and ligaments. Through cracked and bleeding lips, he muttered long forgotten pieces of scripture, freely quoting the Talmud and the Old and New Testaments, mangling faiths in an attempt to supplicate a god, any god.

“Lo, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” It sounded more like poetry than prayer.

“Thou shall not kill,” he screamed, but the sound was little more than a dry croak.

“You are a spy for America,” the young terrorist leader accused again, sliding closer to Jakob. “Only your death has worth to us.”

“It’s not true,” Jakob Steiner cried.

“You were sent here to steal from us, and we were sent to stop you.”

“Oh, God, please, I only study the past. I don’t care about—”

The cadre leader, a man who called himself Mahdi, crashed the butt of his rifle against Steiner’s head just at the hair line. The blow was not enough to kill, and Jakob screamed loudly, curling into a ball in a purely reflexive gesture.

Mahdi stood and swung his weapon down again, missing Steiner’s head but breaking his collarbone with the blow. Like jackals, the others sprang on him, raining blows on the defenseless scientist. Steiner screamed for only a few seconds before being beaten into unconsciousness. Soon Steiner was dead, but Mahdi allowed his men to continue for another minute before calling an end to the assault.

“Enough,” he said, and his men backed away from the bloody corpse. “Strip the body and then we’ll return to his camp to erase all evidence of his presence.”

Mahdi tossed aside his old and worn boots and replaced them with Steiner’s before joining his troops for the run back to the base camp. There were a number of items that would fetch good money on the black market in Sudan, and he wanted to make sure his undisciplined men did not ruin them in their frenzy of destruction.