The Medusa Stone - v5

by Jack Du Brul

  “Forty.” Hofmyer didn’t catch the edge of anxiety in his superior’s voice. “Once we get to work, I bet half of them will either take off when they get a taste of real work or die in the mine. The northern, fuzzier, kaffir is a delicate creature and can die on you without any warning.”

  “You’ve worked with Sudanese and Eritreans before?”

  “Ja, in the Zambia copper mines when the country was still Northern Rhodesia. A few hundred of ’em came down to work the pits, but in five months they were gone again, half of ’em dead and the others willing to starve to death in the big famines up here.”

  “I hadn’t realized,” Gianelli remarked, sensing a serious problem.

  “Don’t worry about it. When it’s time to go into Eritrea, we’ll have enough of the bastards to take up the slack of those that drop or take off. Any word on when we’re heading in?”

  “Nothing yet.” No sooner had he said this than Mahdi appeared at the tent. He was layered with sweat, and his chest heaved in the hot air. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Sir,” Mahdi panted, “I was just at the refugee camp. About fifty men and their families crossed the border last night with a nomad who came here to recruit them. The rumor is that a great mine has been opened in Eritrea and men are needed to work it. Many other families are packing now to join them. I’ve learned that the nomad was sent here by a white man.”

  “That’s it!” Gianelli bolted to his feet. “Mercer has found it!”

  “Yes, sir, they are talking about a white overseer who knows how to talk to rock.”

  Emotion filled Gianelli in waves. The Medusa pictures had shown that Enrico had been right all along, and Mercer had used them to find the mine. There was a kimberlite pipe in northern Eritrea, one of the rarest geological features on the planet, and Enrico had found it decades ago without any modern aids. Enrico’s Folly was now within Giancarlo’s grasp.

  Of course, Giancarlo had never known his great-uncle, but a large part of him admired the elder Gianelli for the independent streak that had driven him. Giancarlo had it too, that ceaseless desire to prove the impossible, to follow a belief to its only conclusion. He thought about his plan that followed the diamonds’ recovery and smiled wickedly. While restoring Enrico’s name was a noble goal, Gianelli had also made provisions to profit handsomely from this adventure. He debated making the call to London now, then decided it was better to wait and see just how many diamonds they could find before the Central Selling System’s next meeting. His target was five thousand carats and, getting a sense of Joppi Hofmyer’s brutality, he had little doubt they’d reach that goal.

  “Mahdi, alert your men. We must move out quickly.”

  Gianelli’s emotions raised his voice to a shout. “The refugees have a head start on us that we’ll make up in the trucks, but I don’t want them getting too far ahead. Joppi, I think our friend Mercer has gotten the rest of the men you needed to work the mine. Those Eritreans will supplement the men you’ve already recruited. Is everything packed on the trucks?”

  “Ja.” The Africaaner grinned. He was plainly relieved to escape the boredom of the camp. “We repacked them after checking each load.”

  “Mahdi, how fast can that refugee caravan walk through the desert?”

  “If they left their women and children behind, twenty or more miles a day, but they are bringing their families. That would cut their progress in half.”

  “Good.” The refugees moving so slowly tempered Gianelli’s haste and changed his plans slightly. “Send out scouts to track them. It shouldn’t be too difficult. We’ll remain in camp until they get a few days ahead of us. That way we won’t trip over them when we leave. That also gives us more time to get another fuel truck from Khartoum.”

  “Mr. Gianelli, if there are that many people at the mine, we’re going to need more water too,” Joppi remarked.

  Giancarlo opened his laptop again and began a list. “Water, fuel, what else?”

  The three of them worked for an hour, refining the list. By the time they had finished, they had the provisions to sustain the camp for several weeks without resupply. After that, they would start to bring stores from Sudan, which wasn’t a problem given Gianelli’s influence. In addition to his support to the rebels, he also maintained contacts with the government in Khartoum, working both sides of the civil war.

  Gianelli concluded their meeting. “Mahdi, send out those scouts now, have them take a hand radio to report their progress. I’m going to order the rest of the equipment and supplies from Khartoum and make the necessary security arrangements. Joppi, you just make damned sure your men are ready to go.”

  “Yes, sir,” both men said in unison. In the bizarre twist of Joppi Hofmyer’s racism that made him hate the group but not the individuals, he held the tent fly open for Mahdi as they left the screened enclosure.

  Valley of Dead Children

  It was just before dusk when Habte, Selome, and Gibby arrived in the Valley of Dead Children on the half-loaded tractor trailer. Five minutes after the rig had crossed the secret bowl of land and trundled to the head gear, a bright yellow excavator tracked onto the plain, its hydraulic arm coiled to the boxy, rotatable cab. The operator had been forced to clear away part of the ancient landslide at the valley’s entrance to allow the truck access to the mine site. Rather than reload the cumbersome machine, he’d driven it to the former Italian installation.

  Wind whipped the dust of their progress across the landscape, eddies and gyres forming and collapsing in their wake. At the camp, both vehicles were shut down, and silence rushed in on them. Habte quickly followed Selome out of the truck, and he dodged into the main bunkhouse. Returning outdoors, he shielded his eyes against the red sun nestled on the western rim of the bowl and scanned for Mercer. The Toyota Land Cruiser was gone and there was no sign of him.

  “Gibby,” he called, and the boy scrambled off the trailer. “This is the right place. Where’s Mercer?”

  “I don’t know,” Gibby admitted. “He said he was going to wait here for us. He was upset that the mine was empty and seemed eager to talk to us. I can’t guess where he went.”

  Habte ignored a creeping sense of alarm when Selome and the two hired drivers joined them. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Mercer should have met us. But I don’t see him.” They walked over to the head gear, both peering into the inky depth of the abandoned mine.

  “Could he have been that upset?” Selome put to words the fear both were thinking.

  “No,” Habte replied sharply. “I just wanted to see down there for myself.” He turned away from the pit. “It’ll be dark soon. We should make camp.”

  “Where’s the Toyota?”

  “Mercer must have gone off exploring. He took the camping gear from the bunk house. I doubt we’ll see him tonight.”

  “Will he be okay?” There was something deeper than friendly concern in Selome’s question.

  Habte recognized it even if she did not. “He knows Africa. He’ll be fine.”

  An hour passed while they removed their camping gear from the tractor trailer. Selome spent more time looking across the horizon for a telltale plume of dust than helping Habte and the others. They ate dinner in the old bunkhouse by the hissing light of hurricane lamps, but there was little conversation. The men fell sleep long before Selome. She lay awake, her ears straining for the first hint of an engine’s beat. But eventually she, too, dozed off.

  Mercer swept into the cabin after midnight, waking everybody. His face and clothing were filthy, his hair matted with so much dust it looked like he wore a sand-colored skull cap. He was exhausted, his eyes closed to near slits, and he slumped gratefully to the ground near the camping stove. Lamps were quickly lit, and in their glow Mecer spooned the remains of their dinner onto the plate, avoiding the questioning looks they all gave him.

  “Where have you been?” Selome finally asked, her voice full of emotion.

  Mercer smiled at her. She was still a mystery, but he
could feel her concern was genuine.

  “If at first you don’t succeed…” He grinned, then turned to Habte. “Any problems getting the gear?”

  “We had to use the excavator to build a temporary ford over the Adohba River. It was flooding and we won’t get the vehicles back across until it loses its swell. The good news is, we saw no signs of trouble in town. It is possible the Europeans have given up.”

  “No. They just don’t know where we are.” Mercer sopped up the last of his food with a piece of injera bread. “Damn, I needed that. I haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

  “Gibby tells me you went down into the mine.” Habte’s statement invited an explanation.

  “Yeah, it’s a bust. They never hit the kimberlite, and Lord knows, they dug enough tunnels.” Mercer accepted a cup of thermos coffee from Selome.

  “This is the mine everyone is interested in?” Habte asked. It was obvious to them all that Mercer wasn’t as upset as Gibby had led them to believe.

  Mercer rested his back against the wall, struggling to keep his eyes open, an enigmatic smile on his face. “Oh, someone’s interested, all right. I just don’t know who.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are two groups after us, right? And considering what Habte saw in Asmara and what I saw in Rome, they don’t play well together. I think one group is after this mine, and the other wants something else entirely.”

  “Like what?” Selome asked quickly.

  “Like another mine,” he said, enjoying the astonished looks. He’d figured it out yesterday and had spent today testing his theory. “I’ll explain everything in the morning,” he sighed. “It’s been one hell of a day, and right now I need some sleep.” He was snoring softly before Habte could extinguish the lamps.

  Mercer roused them at dawn and hustled them to get moving. He’d already made coffee and laid out bread and butter for breakfast. “We’ve got a full day ahead of us and sunshine is wasting.” He offered no explanation to his good mood.

  The owner of the excavator was the first Eritrean out of the old camp building, and when he saw Mercer seated in the cab of his machine, he started yelling, windmilling his arms to get him back off the vehicle.

  “What’s he saying?” Mercer asked Habte, who had come outside, drawn by the angry shouts.

  “He says you are not qualified to operate his excavator. He must work it at all times.” Habte was fumbling with a pack of wooden matches to light his first cigarette.

  “Ask him if I can give him a demonstration of my qualifications,” Mercer laughed.

  The driver agreed to the request, and Mercer remounted the tracked excavator. The engine gauge showed the machine had been worked for several thousand hours and he doubted it had seen much maintenance in its long life, but it fired at the first turn of the key. He dismounted as the engine warmed, and he took the matches from Habte.

  “I’ll give them right back,” he promised. He secured one of the wooden matches to the longest steel tooth on the excavator’s bucket with some tape he’d found in the cab. He eyed the ground for a second before asking Habte to move a few feet closer to the excavator.

  Back in the cab, Mercer tested the vehicle’s hydraulics, rotating the entire body, extending the arm, flexing its three joints, and tilting the bucket through its ten degrees of play. Satisfied he could gauge the lag between his wrist movements on the joysticks and the machine’s response, he glanced at his audience, a devilish grin on his face. Damn, it feels good to be on some iron again, he thought.

  Selome, Gibby, and the two drivers watched, guessing at Mercer’s intentions but none of them believing he could actually do it. The owner of the rig had a particular smirk on his face when Mercer accidentally overrevved the engine.

  “Trust me, Habte, and don’t move,” Mercer warned.

  He lowered the bucket to the ground, the sulfurous tip of the match almost, but not quite, touching the hard soil. His hands were feather light on the joysticks. He lowered the bucket that fraction of an inch more, twisting the cab on its gimble. The match flared against a rough stone, and as it burned, he rotated the cab, extending the boom so it swung dangerously through the air, the match nearly flaring out by the movement. Habte closed his eyes as the huge bucket swept at his head.

  Mercer’s feet and hands danced over the controls. He had judged perfectly. An instant before the wind extinguished the match, he touched it to the tip of the cigarette in Habte’s mouth. The Eritrean took a nervous drag and laughed delightedly, a jet of smoke blowing from his mouth and nose. Mercer gave a mock salute to the applause from the others.

  “How did you do that?” Selome’s question was filled with awe.

  He grinned like a boy. “I grew up on machines like this. My grandfather taught me when I was ten or twelve. Habte, ask the driver if I’m qualified to use his machine, then let’s get the excavator reloaded. We’re going for a little drive.”

  At the far end of the bowl, under the looming rock face of the northern ridge, Mercer slowed the Land Cruiser. He drove hunched to the windshield so he could study the cliff over their heads, using its irregularities for reference. Finally he stopped and the tractor trailer pulled up behind them. Mercer was on the ground in a minute, running up a long talus slope in the mountain. “Come on,” he called down.

  At fifty feet above the plain, he paused to allow Selome, Habte, and the others to reach a wide sandstone plateau. “What do you see?” Mercer invited, pointing out over the bowl.

  “Nothing,” Selome breathed.

  “I thought the same thing when I first got up here yesterday.” Mercer lowered himself onto his haunches.

  “Okay, explanation time. After exploring the mine—which was dug during the Italian occupation, by the way—I had a hard time believing that there could be two different groups of people looking for the same defunct property. They didn’t seem know about each other until the gun fight in Rome, and yet they are playing for the same high stakes. The chances that they were after the same thing without knowing about the other seemed pretty remote. So I started thinking that maybe both groups are after a diamond mine, but not necessarily the same one.”

  “What are you suggesting?” As Mercer suspected, there was something besides curiosity in Selome’s tone.

  “That there are two mines here, one dug before World War II and one worked a lot longer ago. I’m guessing those Europeans in Asmara must be representatives of the Italian company which built that head gear out there and sank the shaft. The Sudanese are coming at us from a different angle. They must know of the older, earlier mine in this valley but aren’t sure of its precise location.” Selome appeared to accept his explanation, but he noticed a discomfort that hadn’t been there a second ago. In his scenario, however, he had no idea where Harry’s kidnappers fit in. He considered that if Harry’s captors had given him gin and might not be from an Arab terror group, he couldn’t begin to guess at her and the Mossad’s interested in this whole thing.

  “Go on,” Habte prompted.

  “The older mine must have been lost long before the Italians came here or they would have discovered it themselves when they surveyed the valley. They sank their shaft a couple miles off the mark.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They dug three miles from the kimberlite vent. It was an understandable mistake. Their geologist must have assumed the vent was in the center of this circular depression and drove the shaft accordingly. He didn’t realize that erosion by wind and rain had shifted the surface topography in the past billion years, distorting the rim of mountains so they no longer surrounded the vent, but sat atop it instead. Now, assuming the vent had been mined by someone else before the Italians came, all I had to do was find the ancient workings.”

  “And did you?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Mercer replied. “One of the keys to mining is ventilation, moving air into the underground workings to blow out the dust and provide oxygen to the miners. In the big mines in South
Africa, they pump about sixteen tons of air into the shafts for every ton of ore they remove. Now, the problems of ventilation for an older mine, say one dug before modern machinery, are even tougher. I jury-rigged an anometer yesterday out of a metal can and a shovel handle after Gibby went to get you, then drove around the bowl, testing wind speed and direction until I found this spot. The wind whips over the northern wall of the depression, curls back on itself in a vortex that can gust to about twenty miles an hour.” Mercer used his finger to draw a crude sketch in the soil. The drawing showed the side of the mountain with a V-shaped symbol pointing at its flank.

  “The tricky part comes when you need to channel the air into the shaft, concentrating the flow exactly where you want it. Now, look again on the desert floor right below us.”

  It was Gibby, with his younger, sharper eyes who saw it first. “There,” he pointed. “I see what you drew.”

  There were two faint lines in the dirt, just a shade darker than the rest of the desert. They were two hundred feet long, angling toward each other so they nearly met below where the party stood. They were too geometrical for nature to be their creator. They were the work of man.

  “What are they?”

  “All that remains of the foundations of two huge walls. Judging by their width, I’d guess they were at least seventy feet tall, more than enough to catch the wind blowing off the mountains and channel it into a mine entrance. I’m sure there are some vents driven into the mountain to allow an escape outlet for the wind, but I’m not too concerned with those quite yet.”

  “You mean, we are standing on top of another mine?”

  “That’s right.” Mercer tempered his excitement with difficulty. “A horizontal drift tunneled into the mountain.”

  “When was this excavated?” asked Habte.

  “I don’t know. We can check the foundations to get an idea, but it’s not really important.”