The Medusa stone

by Jack Du Brul

  "Drop your weapons!" she shouted in Tigrinyan, and when one of the Sudanese who understood the language did so, the others followed suit. Eritreans near the guards scrambled to retrieve the assault rifles.

  Many of them had been freedom fighters just a few years earlier, and they handled the weapons with easy familiarity, forcing the Sudanese to their knees and asking Selome if they could kill them.

  "No," she called. "We need the ammunition for later, and these dogs may have value when we get out." She looked at Mercer and repeated what she'dhat led to the floor of the mine. He sat at a table used as the underground office, clearing away rock samples and mining gear with a sweep of his arm. "I estimate we have another three hours before Gianelli breaks through, so first we need to put another roadblock in his way. And then we've got some serious mining to do."

  "What's your plan?" Selome joined him.

  "First thing is to send some men to drag that safe in here with us. Then we need to drop more of the tunnel hanging wall, close to where it reaches the pit. There's more than enough explosives here for the job."

  "Didn't you say something to Hofmyer about needing to channel the explosions away from the chamber to avoid destroying the main dome?"

  Mercer chuckled,. "Hofmyer might be a miner, but he's no geologist. That dome's been here for a billion years, sitting near some of the most active fault lines on the planet. If earthquakes haven't destroyed it by now, it'd take a nuke to damage it today."

  "So we replug the tunnel. I'm guessing that's to slow Gianelli again?"

  "Correct."

  "And what will we be doing while he's digging?"

  "I told you, we're going to vanish into thin air." Mercer slid the Medusa pictures from his kit bag and carefully unfolded them. When he found the one he wanted, he showed it to Selome.

  She studied the unintelligible jumble of lines and swirls and splashes of color. "I'm sorry, but those pictures make no sense to me."

  "If Alice had a photograph like these, she never would have gotten lost in Wonderland." Mercer grinned. "I'll explain it all in a while, but first we need to get these men working. We'll split into two teams, so you'll have to do double duty interpreting for me unless anyone else here speaks English."

  Twenty minutes later, Mercer had a gang of ten men standing in the tunnel. He'd used a can of fluorescent spray to mark where he wanted holes drilled into the ceiling and fashioned a piece of metal wire as a depth gauge. There were about thirty bright orange spots spread along a hundred-foot section of the tunnel. Through Selome's translations, he explained that he wanted half the holes drilled straight upward and the other half at an angle. Angling the holes would direct the force of their explosives in a more random destructive pattern. The holes didn't need to be any deeper than the wire gauge. He left instructions to be told when the first fifteen holes had been drilled so he could place the charges needed to bring down the hanging wall.

  He watched for several minutes to make certain the men knew what he wanted and was pleased at how proficient they had become with the drills. Each one weighed a hundred pounds and they were as long and unwieldy as railroad ties, yet the Eritreans worked them with the expertise of seasoned professionals. Water from a tank lubricated the drill's cutting heads, and chips of rock and mud began pouring from the ceiling in a steady drizzle. One of the men paused to wave at Mercer when he removed the drill from the first completed hole.

  "Hit it again, man." Mercer slapped him on the shoulder and the miner started boring into another of the painted marks.

  Mercer left them to their task and returned to the table with the Medusa photographs. Selome had laid out some food and water for him and he ate while studying one particular picture. She sat close by, watching him as he worked but he paid her little heed. His face was a mask of conark wi 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 sniperkendth="1em">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 ofsqueezed 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?"

  "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

  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 aot lers 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 Wash
ington, 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. 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.