by Jack Du Brul
“Hope I’m not too late?” he whispered to Selome.
She composed herself. “I’d say you were right on time.”
“We’ve got about three minutes to meet up with Habte. Come on.” They ran from the stockade.
“The other women are going to make a break for it,” Selome said as they passed the guards’ tent. “They’ll try to free the men and scatter into the surrounding hills.”
“That should make Gianelli’s job of finding the rest of us a little more difficult.” He prayed that the Italian’s revenge when he rounded them back again would wait until after he’d dealt with Mercer’s group.
Near the mine opening, another large razor-wire enclosure encircled the area where the women and children crushed the kimberlite ore. It was deserted now except for a couple of guards standing under the cover of a metal shed erected to hold the safe Gianelli was using to store the diamonds. A generator hummed nearby, and a single floodlight shone in the rain. Mercer and Selome approached cautiously, using the big Caterpillar excavator as cover.
They were late. Habte should be around here someplace, waiting for them, having worked his way into position from above. Before their dash to the mine, Mercer had to meet up with him because the Eritrean had another task to perform tonight, something more important than anything else.
“What now?”
Mercer’s eyes rested on the Bobcat sitting a short distance away. “Ah, instant tank. Follow me.”
As they reached the skiploader, Habte raced from behind a mound of mining debris to join them.
“I was starting to wonder if you had gone off to elope,” he said, struggling with the unfamiliar word.
“Thought about it, but she wanted a big ceremony. You know how women can be.” Mercer clasped Habte’s hand. “Everything ready?”
“Detonator is lying behind that hill where I was waiting, and there are thirty pounds of explosives rigged above the mine entrance.”
“Any trouble?”
“No. You were right. It was easy to smash into the explosive locker with the hammer.”
“They were relying on the guards to prevent us from getting to them and didn’t bother with a stronger lock.”
“Lucky guess,” Selome quipped.
“Elementary, my dear Selome.” Mercer reached into his kit bag and extracted his Iridium satellite phone. He handed it to Habte. This was the one with the stronger charge, so he wasn’t concerned about draining the batteries when he powered it up. “The number is programmed into the phone, just hit this button here and dial 25. You may have to get away from the surrounding mountains to get a signal, I’m not sure. The man you’ll be talking to is named Dick Henna. If he needs verification that you’re with me, remind him about our conversation in his car and tell him that if he and his wife do get a dog, they should get a tail-less Pembrooke corgi. He’ll know what it means. Tell him what’s been happening and to send troops here as soon as possible. He can get our exact location by contacting the NSA. They’ll be able to determine our position by triangulating which communication satellites are handling the call. Make sure he notes the exact time of your call. It’ll make the technician’s job a hell of a lot quicker.
“Tell him that Harry White is being held by Israeli extremists linked to Defense Minister Chaim Levine and to start working on getting him freed. Make sure he knows that we’re in a bad way here, and the longer it takes to get the Marines on the ground, the more people are going to die.”
“Shouldn’t Selome make the call? Her English is better than mine.”
“No, I’m going to need her.” Mercer turned to Selome. “Unless you want to go and do it.”
“No, I’m staying with you.”
“Okay. Habte, as soon as we’re twenty feet from the mine entrance, I want you to blow those explosives.”
“But with this phone we can contact the authorities, and by tomorrow the Eritrean military will be here.”
“In an hour the guards I killed tonight will be discovered, and you can believe the refugees will pay for their deaths. Gianelli’s going to realize I took the phone, and he and his band of bastards will be safely across the Sudan border by the time the army arrives. We need to keep them here. This is the only way. Get into position at the detonator, and after you seal the mine, get away from here and make that call.” Mercer hopped into the bucket seat of the skiploader and motioned Selome to get on his lap.
Habte vanished back into the storm, and Mercer handed the AK-47 to Selome. “As soon as you see someone notice us, take them out.”
The key was in the overhead ignition, and Mercer gave it a twist, timing the firing of the diesel with a rolling boom of thunder. He feathered the throttle to its lowest setting and eased the twin control arms forward. The heavy tires clawed into the mud, slipping for a full revolution before finding purchase, and the Bobcat was under way. Twisting the wrist actuators on the controls brought the bucket up to partially shield them from gunfire.
When the skiploader entered the glow from the tall spotlight atop the shed, the guards saw the unauthorized vehicle and opened fire, winking eyes of flame jetting from their weapons. Selome shrieked as a fusillade rattled against the bucket, sparks shooting off the metal. “Fire back!” Mercer screamed.
The Bobcat was taking a pounding, both front tires deflating when struck, though the vehicle continued to crawl forward. Mercer rammed the throttle to its stops. Despite the increased speed, it was obvious he’d underestimated the number of guards at the mine entrance and their accuracy. Selome was returning fire, controlled three-round bursts that pinned men behind cover, but had yet to diminish the Sudanese ranks.
Mercer chanced a look under the bucket just as one of the guerrillas caught a bullet and flew back into the mud. He was about to congratulate Selome on her shot when he realized she was changing clips. Another Sudanese went down, punched through the mouth so his entire skull erupted as the round passed through. Mercer thought Habte was shooting from his cover behind the mound of tailings, but the angle was all wrong. It was during a second-long pause in the murderous exchange of fire that he heard the sharp, distinctive whip crack of a high-powered rifle.
There was someone else involved in the fight! A sniper helping Mercer and Selome make it to cover, and he knew who it was. The Israeli commandos, the men he’d thought, hoped, he had lost weeks ago. He had no idea how long they had been watching the camp or what their plans were, but Mercer wasn’t about to lose the advantage they were giving him.
“Empty the clip as fast as you can. This is it!”
They were twenty feet from the entrance, and as they drew closer, more Sudanese fell, gunned down from above by the unseen assassin. Mercer realized that the Israeli had positioned himself in the middle of where Habte had planted the explosives. He felt nothing that the man who had just helped them was about to die.
He drove the hearty little excavator into the tin shack that housed the safe, crushing one guard between the blade and the metal wall. The building collapsed under the grinding pressure, falling apart like a house of cards. The safe was white and very high-tech, about the size of a steamer trunk. Mercer lowered the blade and scooped it up. Its weight was almost too much and the Bobcat’s engine seethed, but they continued forward with the safe nestled in the bucket.
Fifteen feet from the entrance, Mercer felt the ground shudder. Ten crimson blooms erupted in the darkness above the mine entrance. Habte had fired the charges he’d planted, and the stability of the rock face was gone. The overhanging mountain started to come down in an avalanche. They had ten feet to cover, and the Bobcat’s motor was missing every few moments, an ominous skip that signified a bullet had pierced something critical. Mercer lowered the blade and released the thigh restraints that had locked over him and Selome.
“Be ready to run!” he screamed, seeing a solid wall of dirt, rock, and mud rushing down the mountain, hundreds of tons of debris that forced the air ahead of it in a gust.
The Bobcat surged again,
finding a bit of power that carried them into the mine just a fraction of a second before the first of the avalanche plummeted to the desert floor. Mercer kept the throttles to their stops, racing ahead of the debris that started to fill the tunnel itself. The ground continued to shake, rock falling from the ceiling. The tunnel was about to collapse.
“Mercer!” Selome gasped.
The explosion had weakened the ancient tunnel, and it started to come down in huge slabs, cracks and fissures appearing in the walls, the rents racing forward faster than the Bobcat could possibly move. Mercer considered abandoning the excavator, but he needed the safe and the diamonds inside it for bait. Pressure bursts erupted just behind them, chunks of rock exploding down the shaft with the speed of bullets, more rubble clogging the tunnel. Stones rattled off the skiploader’s safety cage.
They drove for two hundred yards with a surging wall of debris chasing their heels. The engine began coughing again just as they started to pace ahead of the wending fissures in the walls. Mercer’s lips worked in a silent entreaty for the rig to keep moving.
After a few more seconds, the sound of falling stone receded. He looked behind them. The cave-in had stopped, though he could still feel the earth shifting as the mountain settled.
He shut down the Bobcat and silence rushed in, he and Selome panting in the dust-choked air.
The string of lights in the tunnel were powered by a generator in the main chamber, and they danced in time with the man-made earthquake. A few of the bulbs had smashed against the ceiling and plunged the drive into shadow. Behind them stood a packed jumble of stones, some as large as automobiles, others mere shards, but still the drive was completely sealed.
“What in the hell was that all about?” Selome coughed, stunned by the ferocity of the avalanche.
“Our entombment,” Mercer replied, unconcerned by the destruction around him.
Valley of Dead Children
Yosef couldn’t believe his eyes when the mountain beneath his sniper’s position suddenly began sliding downward in an unstoppable rush. He was a quarter mile away, higher in the hills that surrounded the valley, and he watched the whole thing through night-vision glasses. Even in the greenish distortion of the second-generation optics, the sight was unbelievable.
One moment, he saw his man work his rifle, the long silencer fitted to the American-made Remington, eliminating all telltale signs of his location while cutting just a fraction off the deadly weapon’s accuracy. And then the hill heaved upward in multiple gouts of earth. The sniper was caught unaware, vanishing into the maelstrom of debris so quickly that Yosef couldn’t track his position as he was swallowed by the avalanche. Nor could he tell if Selome Nagast and Philip Mercer had made it into the tunnel. It was possible they’d been crushed by the tons of rock and dirt.
He radioed his other team, thinking that the mine was under attack. The two-man team reported that nothing was happening at their sector.
If it wasn’t an attack, then Yosef had no idea what had happened. He’d watched Mercer’s escape from the barbed-wire enclosure and tracked him as he moved stealthily around the mining camp, first to a cluster of tents and later to free Selome. Their dash for the mine in the small digging machine was dismaying. Yosef couldn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to escape the valley. And then came the avalanche. He considered that perhaps the explosions were the result of a trip-wire booby trap designed to prevent unauthorized entry into the mine. There could be no other explanation.
Then came the full realization. The ancient mine had been sealed by the landslide! He gaped at the mounds of rock and earth that blocked the entrance and was struck dumb. All the work that had gone into the opening of the mine was lost, and it could only be the fault of Philip Mercer. Yosef prayed that the American had been smeared into a wet stain. Mercer had destroyed Yosef’s chance for ever recovering the Tabernacle of the Lord, the sacred Ark in which Moses had carried the Word of God into Israel.
The Israeli team had kept the mine under observation since the column of equipment had arrived from the west, followed shortly by hundreds of refugees. They had found the valley from the plane they’d rented in Asmara, using the map supplied by Rabbi Yadid. They’d landed twenty miles away, and Yosef and the others had taken only a day to march to the mine and establish observation posts that they’d manned around the clock for the past weeks.
In all that time, none of them had seen anything remotely resembling the Ark of the Covenant removed from the mine, and Yosef assumed that the artifact was still buried inside. The miners would have a better chance than the commandos at finding it, so he had hoped to make his assault when it was discovered and removed from the tunnel. The superior training of his small team would ensure they’d have little trouble stealing the Ark once it was on the surface.
But things back home had changed all that.
During his last contact with Levine, the Defense Minister had told him that his agents in Israel had failed to find Harry White. It was crucial that Yosef find the Ark before White’s debriefing, or the operation would fail. So far no alarms had been sounded within the intelligence community, but both men knew that once the old man told his story, it was only a matter of time before an investigation implicated the minister. Levine ordered Yosef and his men to make a direct approach by taking over the mine and finding the Ark themselves. Yosef noted the strong odor of desperation in Levine’s plan.
At first Levine had wanted the Ark to secure his election to the prime minister’s office, but now the discovery might be needed to protect him from prosecution. He’d promised Yosef that he could still count on close air support from the CH-53 Super Stallion standing by. Levine needed just four hours’ notice to get the chopper and an in-flight tanker into the air and en route.
Choking down his own emotions, Yosef continued to watch the camp below him. He saw the two white leaders of the expedition take charge of the pandemonium. He assumed one of them was Giancarlo Gianelli and the larger man with him was a mining engineer. Yosef couldn’t hear their voices, but the gestures and the speed in which the orders were carried out demonstrated total control. Within minutes, additional lamps had been brought to the landslide and the large crawler excavator was up and running, its twin lights piercing the rain. The mechanical arm began tearing into the loose rubble, ripping out long trenches of debris.
Yosef saw some of the armed Sudanese lope off into the night and assumed they were chasing the few Eritreans who had escaped the stockades after Mercer and Selome. Only twenty minutes after the disaster, nearly a quarter of the detritus had been cleared. The Israeli was amazed at the efficiency with which the white men worked the crews.
Perhaps, Yosef thought, hope remained. They looked as though they would get the shaft cleared in just a few hours. This meant Yosef and his people could still sneak in later to search for their prize. Even as he watched, more Eritreans were put to the task, crawling over the mounds of rubble with shovels and picks, adding their labor to the machine’s.
Yosef lay cradled in a hollow between several boulders. Rain pounded mercilessly, turning the top layer of soil into a slipping mass that oozed downhill. He hated that the Ark was going to become just another political tool, its very symbolism tarnished by the manner of its recovery. Yet as long as it went to the people of Israel, he felt justified. With Levine now backed into a corner, recovering the artifact could mean the difference between prison and freedom for all of them.
A noise pulled his attention from the workers clearing the mine. Someone was on the mountain with him, moving laterally to get away from the encampment. He thought it was one of the fleeing Eritrean refugees. He hunkered a little deeper into his burrow. If either an Eritrean or one of the armed guards stumbled onto his position, he would kill without hesitation. If he remained undiscovered, he would leave them to their nocturnal fumbling.
He put the noise out of his mind and redirected his attention to the mine when a voice disturbed him again. He thought maybe two Eritreans had
linked up in the dark and was about to turn back to his vigil when he realized he could hear only one voice. A man was speaking on a phone.
And he was speaking in English.
Inside the Mine
No sooner had the earth stopped trembling than Mercer began smashing the light bulbs that had survived the collapse with the butt of Selome’s AK-47. She took no notice of his peculiar behavior. Instead, she stared down the drive, her eyes misted with emotion. This was only the second time she had seen the interior of the mine, and it filled her mind with wonderment about the people who had built it. She knew it had been dug by slaves, children who were worked to death, but it still represented a tangible piece of her history, and as a Jew, she knew how little physical evidence remained of her faith.
“Selome,” Mercer called.
“What?”
“Get hold of yourself. The guards down in the pit are going to come to investigate, and we need to be ready.” He came up to her in the dark, touching her hand to reassure her of his location in the darkness. “Take this light.” He handed her a small penlight he’d kept in his kit bag and settled them next to the dead skiploader. “When I squeeze your hand, I want you to turn it on and shine it down the tunnel.”
The drive was a mile and a half long, and it took a few minutes for the Sudanese guarding the slave workers to send someone to see what had taken place and for the hapless guard to reach the end of the shaft. Mercer could hear tentative steps shuffling on the dusty foot wall as the rebel drew nearer, crossing into the darkened section of the tunnel where he waited with Selome. When he gauged the guerrilla was about twenty feet away, probing the wall like a blind man in an unfamiliar place, he gave Selome’s fingers a gentle squeeze.