The Lightning Stones

by Jack Du Brul

  “Tell you what.” He peeled two hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “This is for the room and any damage. I doubt there’s much in this place worth more than one forty.”

  For some reason that made the girl giggle.

  “I just need a shower and a few hours rack time.”

  “I need your name for the register,” the girl said, flipping open a dog-eared registration book.

  Mercer placed the cash on the scarred counter, leaned past her, and pulled a red plastic fob and its attached key from a cubbyhole behind the desk. He’d taken a room close to the center of the building—and, he hoped, its hot water supply. “My ID is on the two bills. My name’s Ben Franklin.”

  She said nothing more as he turned and headed back out. He parked the truck two doors down from his own room and let himself in with the key. The lightbulbs had been replaced with low-watt fluorescents, so the room remained cloaked in shadow and murk. He couldn’t care less. He allowed himself a half hour under the hottest water he could stand, needed three of the threadbare towels to properly dry himself, and collapsed onto the sagging full-size with the tapioca-colored spread and mismatched pillows.

  No sooner had his head hit the low-thread-count cotton than he knew he’d been kidding himself. It was true he shouldn’t be driving, but there was no way he was going to sleep. His mind didn’t work that way. He’d tried to outrun his feelings by pouring on mile after mile, but the fact remained that his friend was dead along with six others and he’d been unable to stop any of the slaughter. Mercer wasn’t Catholic but he understood guilt better than most. It was his motivator and anchor at the same time. To assuage it he would go to any lengths even when, more often than not, the guilt was not his to shoulder. It was a burden he took up out of duty rather than true responsibility. This meant sometimes he could not forgive himself things for which he was wholly blameless. A shrink would have told him his feelings dated back to his parents’ death, and the fact that he’d been unable to prevent the tragedy. Now Mercer felt he should have stopped Abe’s vicious murder, so the guilt weighed especially heavy.

  That hadn’t been the case when a then twentysomething Philip Mercer had gone back to Penn State for his doctorate, following two years at the Colorado School of Mines.

  Over Christmas break that first year into his PhD studies, Abe had secured a research grant to take a few of his best students to West Africa for a ten-day trip to assist in a mineral prospecting expedition. The grad students would essentially be unpaid load bearers and Sherpas for the field team, but they had jumped at the opportunity.

  The first week of the trip had gone off without a hitch. The team of eight Westerners, including Abe and his three top students, plus four armed native Cameroonians, had scoured streambeds and exposed rock formations for interesting geological markers. They were investigating the belief that this particular region in the highlands contained coltan, a mineral necessary for the newly burgeoning cellular phone market. They hadn’t yet found any of the dull metallic ore, but that hadn’t dampened any spirits, especially among the grad students.

  Their final day dawned cool and misty. The camp stirred to life slowly, but soon cooking fires were lit and instant coffee was being passed around. A breakfast of powdered eggs was about to be served when dark shapes flitted through the surrounding mist, and a staccato solo of mechanized death rang out. There had been talk of rebels in this area, but they were supposed to be across the border in Nigeria, over forty miles away.

  One of their Cameroonian guards was hit in the opening barrage. He went down as if body-slammed, with blood and other matter oozing from a gaping hole in the back of his head. By all rights, Mercer should have been frozen where he sat, opposite Abe and another student from California named Lance. This was similar to the ambush that took his parents; all that was missing was the battered pickup his mother was driving with his injured father in the back when they were gunned down.

  But Mercer didn’t hesitate. In that first split second, Abe became the parents he hadn’t been able to save. Mercer didn’t think about himself, didn’t consider the danger at all. He had failed to prevent two parents being lost to the violence of this savage continent, he wasn’t going to lose a man he now considered a third. He just moved on adrenaline-fueled instinct to protect Abe Jacobs, or die trying.

  Mercer leapt through the flames of the cooking fires and tackled both his fellow student and Abe as fresh bursts of automatic fire ripped through the camp. He pressed the two into the loamy ground with his body weight as strings of bullets crisscrossed over their heads. Off to one side, it sounded as though another one of their guards had fled into the jungle.

  One summer years earlier, Mercer’s best friend, Mike, had been given a .22-caliber rifle by his father. The two fourteen-year-olds had spent the summer working every odd job they could think of in order to feed that little rifle’s insatiable appetite for ammunition. No sooner had the boys been paid than they were at a local gun shop buying boxes of rounds, much like some teens hung out at convenience stores hoping someone would buy beer for them. Then it was off to an old gravel pit where they took turns shooting the gun as though they were movie action heroes. When school and then winter finally ended their shooting trips, they had both pumped thousands of rounds through the .22, damaging its barrel so it no longer shot true, and yet both had become superior marksmen from every shooting position they had studied in an old World War II–era army training booklet they’d found at the gun store.

  Mercer pushed down on the two Americans for good measure and rolled through the short grass for the dead guard. The mist was lifting, and he could see the muzzle flashes of at least five shooters moving in on the camp. The two remaining guards were pinned behind a craggy bit of rock that jutted from the jungle floor. Their cover would vanish in another thirty seconds as the shooters advanced.

  He reached the dead guard and pulled the AK-47 from his lifeless grip and two spare magazines from a pouch on the man’s chest. His name was Paul. He had taken to Mercer because he had a son named Philippe.

  Although Mercer had never fired an automatic weapon, muscle memory from those teenaged shooting trips left him feeling comfortable with the Kalashnikov in his hands, and he used it as though it were an extension of his own body. From an awkward prone position he loosened a short burst that caught one of the shooters just as he stepped into the clearing where the prospectors had made their camp. Mercer could tell the man was dead even before he fell, so he switched his aim toward the muzzle flash of another attacker who was still hiding among the trees and semitropical shrubs that surrounded them.

  The unseen gunman screamed when his body was raked by the burst, then fell into a silence so profound that it could only mean he was dead.

  The two hired guards, sensing a shift in the battle’s momentum, popped up from their cover position and added their combined fire to the hail of lead exploding all around the camp.

  Mercer’s eyes never rested on one spot for more than a few seconds while he scanned for additional targets. He also checked that the AK’s bolt was closed, meaning there was a round in the chamber, and he quickly changed out the magazine. His fingers were a little less sure than they’d been on the old Ruger, but he got it done.

  Another of the attackers went down when targeted by the two guards. He screamed even louder than the man Mercer had taken, and it seemed his high keening cry for help was enough to unman the remaining attackers. Their guns fell silent as they retreated into the forest. Mercer sprang from where he’d been crouching and started after them. He felt certain that whoever led the guerrillas would reorganize them quickly and they’d be back. He raced into the jungle, the AK held low on the hip, his finger ready to squeeze the trigger. One of the many things he’d never anticipated about a firefight, despite what he’d seen on television, was the unimaginable level of noise. The multiple discharging guns had left him deafened, his ears ringing as though he were standing next to some enormous electrical generator.

/>   Mercer reached another small clearing two hundred yards from where they’d camped. He spotted four men across the way, maybe thirty yards out. Three were armed natives dressed in street clothes and battered tennis shoes. The other two wore paramilitary camouflage with matching packs and slouch hats on their heads. They didn’t carry Africa’s ubiquitous weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov. They were fitted out with black assault rifles, mounting scopes, and boxy twenty-round mags. These were Western guns, expensive and recognizable as the tools of professional mercenaries. In the murky light of dawn it was hard to be sure, but Mercer felt the two dressed as soldiers were white men, not black.

  He skidded to a stop. The other men saw him and their guns all came up, but Mercer was already set to fire and even with the AK down low, he sent a scything barrage across the clearing. The two Africans died immediately, and one of the white mercenaries took a round that spun him in place and he dropped from view. The other got his gun to his shoulder and opened fire. Mercer had no cover, so he dove back into the jungle, his finger still on the trigger, the AK’s bolt slamming back and forth like an industrial loom stitching out bullets.

  He never took his eyes off the target, so he saw in the flash from the other man’s gun that the shooter was white, not much older than Mercer himself, and had a port-wine birthmark covering part of his left cheek. He stood up to the wild blast Mercer had fired at him because he was used to dealing with poorly trained boys who thought the sound of a machine gun was as deadly as its aim. But in an instant one of Mercer’s bullets struck him in the center of that purplish mark, and blood formed a halo around his head as he was knocked flat by the kinetic shock.

  Mercer reached to reload his empty weapon only to realize the second spare magazine had dropped from his back pocket somewhere on the trail from camp. He looked back at where the men had been. The first white mercenary he’d tagged was getting to his feet, and one of the native gunmen was also stirring.

  Wounded game was especially deadly, and injured men were no exception. Mercer moved back into the jungle and retraced his steps until he’d returned to the camp. Abe was tending to an injured prospector, while one of the remaining guards gathered equipment. The other man watched over the camp warily, his rifle at the ready. There was no sign of the guard who’d run away. Someone had already draped a tarp over Paul’s corpse.

  “Mercer,” Abe cried. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Mercer said, panting and a little shaky. “I caught up with them about two hundred yards out. I got a few of them, but two are injured and they might regroup and come back—we should get going.”

  Mercer grabbed a spare banana mag and rammed it into his AK, racking the slide to chamber a round as if he’d done it a million times.

  He looked at Abe working on the prospecting geologist, but all he saw was his own parents dying while he ran away with his nanny. Abe looked up with a smile, relieved that the injured man would be okay, and that his star student had saved their lives. Mercer hadn’t failed this time, and he vowed that to the best of his abilities he would never do so again.

  They made it to their predetermined rendezvous without incident and met the truck that was waiting to take them out of the wilderness. The guard who had run away at the outset of the attack was never seen again, and the company that had hired the guards made certain Paul’s widow and orphan child would be provided for. They never learned for certain what was behind the deadly attack, but rumor was a local warlord was trying to exert control over the territory for its mineral wealth and had hired white soldiers of fortune.

  It was this incident that a few short months later would make Abe recommend his best pupil for a mission into Iraq when the CIA needed a geologist to help an insertion team assess whether or not Saddam Hussein had enough domestic uranium ore to start an enrichment project. That mission was the pivot point for Mercer’s career to veer as much into countering terrorism as finding Earth’s natural resources. So much of what Mercer was proud of, and also that for which he was most deeply ashamed, had its genesis in that one incident when he had saved Abe’s life. Losing him now didn’t change his past, but it did make him regret not thanking his old mentor one last time.

  As a scattering of cars hissed by the road outside the Bell Tower Motor Court, and dawn started creeping past the sheer drapes, Mercer replayed the mine attack in his head again and again and again. He recalled, too, the incident in the jungle. One battle a victory, the other a defeat. Bookends to a friendship that ended too soon.

  By six thirty, Mercer knew everything he could about his new enemy. He’d watched their assault in his head a hundred times. Three of the shooters were harder to discern in his mind, but not the fourth, the leader. Mercer would always know that man by the way he held his head and moved. All four commandos were pros, but the leader—he was a warrior by nature more than training. Mercer had paid with a sleepless night, but in reward his target had crystallized in his mind. When their paths next crossed, Mercer planned on putting him down without so much as a warning. He was responsible for Abe’s death, not Mercer, but until Mercer killed him, he would carry that weight like a stone in his heart.

  4

  Marcel Roland d’Avejan’s hand tightened on the smartphone until his knuckles went white and an unconscious part of his brain realized he might crush the device.

  “You did what?” he demanded in a rising shout, his normally accent-free English showing its rural French roots.

  “It got out of hand,” the man in America replied. “What can I say? They’re all dead.” It sounded like he was sucking on a piece of hard candy. His speech was garbled and wet.

  “You can say,” d’Avejan ranted with little-suppressed fury, “that you are a complete moron who can’t follow instructions. You were supposed to steal some goddamn rocks from a bunch of academics, not gun them down.”

  The caller was a professional and knew that part of his job was calming clients when things didn’t go their way. A great deal of that process was just letting them vent. Corporate types like d’Avejan were the worst. They thought they ran in a hard and cruel world, but when the true levels of human depravity were opened up to them, they whined like frightened children. His opinion wasn’t swayed either way by the fact he’d been in d’Avejan’s exclusive employ for the better part of two years as special facilitator for his company’s global security arm.

  “I will not say it was strictly necessary,” the ex-soldier replied. “However, their deaths will slow the investigation.”

  “You can’t be serious,” the Frenchman scoffed.

  “They are looking into a mass murder, not a theft. Totally different type of investigation. Trust me. For the first week the FBI will be turning over every rock in Minnesota looking for Al Qaeda operatives. Part of my team has already crossed into Canada with the sample and will be airborne in less than two hours. We will finish up here in the States and be out of the country no later than tomorrow at noon. The feds from D.C. won’t even have landed in St. Paul by the time we’re clear.”

  Several long seconds passed. The security contractor knew exactly what was going through Roland d’Avejan’s mind. It was the same thing that had gone through his when the newest member of his team had opened fire hours earlier, without orders. The young security contractor thought one of the students had been reaching for a weapon. Of course there was no weapon. These were college kids and a couple of doddering professors. No matter the mistake, he realized even before the last victim bled out that he had no choice but to accept the circumstances and make the best of them. Accept, adapt, and overcome. It was a motto learned long ago.

  He could almost feel his employer’s anger moderating as he came to understand there were some circumstances beyond his control. The quicker he recognized this, the quicker he could move on to the next phase of their operation.

  “Are you sure no one followed you?” d’Avejan asked. He was once more in control. He was over the initial shock of being an accessory to a num
ber of murders even if he hadn’t been directly complicit.

  “Someone on a loader tried to ram us, meneer,” the mercenary admitted. “He missed and we left him in a ditch. We abandoned the truck two miles from the target site as planned and took to our secondary escape vehicles. No one saw them and we were well clear by the time the police were called in.”

  “I don’t like the idea that a workman tried to stop you,” d’Avejan said.

  “I wasn’t too keen either,” the man in America admitted. “I don’t know how he knew to come after us, but he was hell-bent to keep us from leaving.”

  “Could he have seen what happened down in the mine?”

  “No way.” On this point the security specialist was adamant. “Most likely he was responding to the shooting of the hoist operator and believed for a minute that he was Rambo. In the end his efforts were inconsequential. This was nothing to worry yourself about, meneer.”

  Marcel Roland d’Avejan finally relaxed his grip on the smartphone. Not that it mattered if he crushed it. He treated the four-hundred-euro phones as burners, the way drug dealers used prepaids from a corner tabac. One and done. As in one call and toss the phone and its associated number.

  “Call when your task is complete.” D’Avejan killed the connection and forcibly smashed the phone open to remove the battery before feeding the pieces into an industrial-style shredder behind his desk. The machine made an awful sound for just a few seconds and yet rendered the electronic marvel into so much ruined solder, copper, and plastic. The battery went into a recycling basket next to the shredder. Just because he trashed a few of these phones a week didn’t mean he wanted to trash the environment.

  After all, saving the planet was what this whole mission was about.

  He took a few breaths. His hands were shaky, and his stomach suddenly felt like it was filled with coiling snakes. Men were dead because of a decision he had made—not as the result of a horrible accident at one of the many industrial facilities d’Avejan controlled, but because they had been murdered. Gunned down in cold blood, for the simple fact they were witnesses and it was easier to kill them than deal with them.