by Jack Du Brul
She forced bravery into her voice. “Americans pay taxes in April. I’m Eritrean.”
The next chamber they found was high enough for them to stand, and unlike the others, it was enormous. Their flashlight could penetrate only a fraction of the way across, but by gauging the echoes, Mercer estimated the cavity was nearly the size of a football field. He immediately recognized the mining technique used to excavate the space. Room and pillar mining called for huge spaces to be gouged into the ore while leaving support columns of undisturbed rock to hold up the hanging wall. It was a common technique in coal mining, but not very efficient in a diamond mine, and he was surprised it had been used to work this kimberlite vein. The pillars were so numerous, it felt as if they were walking among the trunks of a dense petrified forest or in the eerie catacombs under an ancient cathedral. He was stunned that the mine overseers had conceived and engineered the system as he led Selome across the expanse. Over their heads, the hanging wall was in terrible shape, cracked and scored by the enormous pressure of the earth bearing down on it. He guessed that in another hundred years or so, the pillars would succumb to the strain and the entire room would collapse.
Halfway to the other side of the room a shadow caught Mercer’s eye, and when he turned to investigate, Selome gave a startled scream and was thrown to the floor. Mercer was flattened by a rushing apparition that materialized out of the darkness. His head cracked against the ground, his mind spinning. It was impossible that anything alive could be down here with them; the mine had been sealed for thousands of years. A vicious kick to his stomach pulled him back to reality. It didn’t matter who or what was with them, they were about to be killed. A knife glinted sharply in the beam of the flashlight that had flown from his stunned hands. The AK-47 lay out of reach beyond the penumbra.
The thing jumped on Mercer as he lay stunned. He managed to raise a hand and deflect the blade plunging at his chest. He twisted his assailant enough for him to counter with a crushing punch, the blow snapping a couple of short ribs. Rather than being slowed by the shot, the attacker went wild, striking Mercer across the jaw with his elbow, and the darkness of the cavern rushed into Mercer’s brain. He would have lost the fight right then had Selome not leaped on the assailant’s back, drawing him off Mercer for a moment.
For her effort, Mercer saw her catch a savage punch in the face that sent her reeling, her body falling like a deflated balloon. He scrambled to find his assault rifle and the attacker was on him again, this time sinking the knife into the fleshy part of Mercer’s thigh. Screaming with the needle-hot pain, Mercer torqued and back-handed the creature across the cheek. To his horror, he felt his hand sink into its putrid face and saw a chunk of flesh fly off. The wound did nothing to deter the assault and Mercer realized he really was fighting some demon who roamed the labyrinth.
He scrambled out of the monster’s reach, dodging around a pillar and into total darkness. From his vantage point he could see the creature shuffling to the abandoned light. The beam caught the apparition in the face, and Mercer recognized Gianelli’s principal henchman, the leader of the rebels, Mahdi. He remembered one of the guards he’d taken prisoner had worn a bandage—that was what he’d wiped off Mahdi’s face.
Mercer had no time to consider how he had escaped the Eritreans or managed to track them. He knew Mahdi would go for the AK next, and he had to get to the gun first. He concentrated on his exact position when Mahdi had first hit him and the most logical direction the gun would have sailed. A glint in the distance caught Mercer’s attention, but it was too far away to be the gun. He struck out boldly, his hands in front of him to avoid slamming into one of the stone columns. In the darkness, Selome was still screaming as if she believed that some specter stalked these galleries.
Both men spotted the weapon when it caught the light’s beam. Mahdi had a shorter distance to run to reach it, but Mercer’s reactions were quicker and they both dove and got a hand on it at the same time.
Mercer had a better grip on the AK and used it to twist the weapon away from the soldier. Mahdi kneed him viciously in the inside of his forearm and Mercer’s entire hand went numb. Suddenly the gun was in Mahdi’s control. Struggling under the man’s weight and only able to use his bad arm to deflect the gloating Sudanese, Mercer reached into the kit bag still slung around his shoulder.
He’d planned to use the high-speed fuse in conjunction with the dynamite he carried if they’d needed to blast any obstacles that got in their way, but now it had a more urgent purpose. Mahdi either didn’t notice or didn’t care as Mercer dropped the two-hundred-foot coil of fuse over his head. The rebel was laughing, knowing he had the advantage, but when he spied a tiny flame shooting from the Zippo in Mercer’s fingers, his eyes went wide with terror. In those last seconds he understood what Mercer had looped over him.
The fuse burned at twenty-two thousand feet per second, so the entire coil cooked off faster than the eye could see. Even under its protective coating, the temperature of the burning chemicals skyrocketed. The smell was almost as bad as the screech when the veins in Mahdi’s throat burst under the pressure of his blood turning to steam. His flesh roasted like a joint of meat.
Mahdi’s finger tightened on the AK’s trigger even as his eyes rolled back into his skull. A full clip arrowed into the ceiling, ricocheting and filling the chamber with deadly lead. The crashing shots and the echoes weakened a section of the scaly hanging wall, and a fifty-ton slab of stone crashed to the floor a short distance away, followed seconds later by several more.
The whole ceiling was giving way! Mercer rolled out from under the struggling terrorist, grabbed up the assault rifle by its hot barrel, and grasped the flashlight in his other hand. More stones let go, huge chunks whose impact loosened even more of the ceiling in a domino effect. It was as if the earth had come alive and they were caught in its jaws. With the weight shifting its balance, one of the pillars exploded like a bomb, crushed beyond its structural tolerance, hurtling rock like grapeshot.
Mercer heaved Selome off the floor as if she was no more than a child. As more debris rained around them, they ducked into a side tunnel. He took just a second to look back and watched a slab of rock larger than an automobile land squarely on Mahdi as he writhed with the pain of his burned neck. The weight of the stone forced the contents of his torso toward his head, but they could not erupt through the cranium. Mercer saw Mahdi’s throat expand like that of a bull frog’s until the entire bulbous mass exploded in a red mist and the body lay still.
He trained the light to the far end of the gallery where he had seen the distant glint. Just before his view was obliterated by the crumbling chamber, he watched an eerie blue light radiate from the gloom, burning brighter and brighter until a chunk of stone crashed right in front of him, sealing the room forever.
The side tunnel’s roof was lower than most of the others they’d encountered, and Mercer had to ease Selome to the ground and coax her to follow as more of the chamber behind them collapsed. Huge clouds of dust blew into the tunnel, enveloping them, choking them until they could no longer open their eyes and every breath was torture. And still more of the room fell, a roaring sound that filled their world and threatened to tear away their sanity. They scrambled from it, ripping skin from their hands and knees as this tunnel began to fill with debris.
They covered fifty yards before the cave-in ended. The sudden silence left their ears ringing. Looking back the way they’d come, Mercer saw that they were cut off from the others by untold billions of tons of earth. Even if they had wanted to, there was no way they would ever be able to return.
What the hell was that glow? The blue light had to be a static discharge, he thought. When rock is crushed, it can give off a small amount of electricity. Given the amount of moving stone, the phenomenon could easily explain what he’d seen. Or maybe it was a pocket of methane catching fire after being ignited by a spark. He had several other naturally occurring explanations, but deep in the back of his mind, he knew there w
as also an unnatural one. No, it couldn’t be.
“What happened in there?”
“Mahdi suffered a crushing defeat,” Mercer rasped, waiting for Selome to take a drink from their canteen. He wanted to give her time to recover before telling her that this tunnel went in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go. There was no way he was going to tell her what else he’d seen.
“You have no idea what I was thinking in there when he attacked us,” Selome replied, wiping her lips against the delicate bones on the back of her hand.
“Can’t be any weirder than what was going through my mind,” Mercer agreed. “Are you okay?”
“My jaw hurts and I’m sure it’ll be black and blue in a few hours, but I’m fine. You?”
Mercer removed his pants and began working on the knife wound in his leg. He didn’t waste any of their precious water cleaning the gash but slapped a fragment of his shirt over the incision and secured it with a strips of silvery duct tape from his bag. “Dr. Mercer’s antiseptic surgery, secondary infections are our specialty.”
“Is it bad?”
“Nothing major was hit,” Mercer said, then added with dark humor, “and it’ll stiffen long before we get to see your black and blues.”
The dust was still too thick to rest this close to the cave-in, so Mercer donned his pants and they started out of the area. Particles lay heavily in the air, and the powerful light could cut only a feeble swath through it. After a further hundred yards, the tunnel had shrunk in diameter so that their backs scraped the ceiling as they crawled. Still they were dogged by chocking clouds of grit.
“This may take a while to settle.” Mercer gagged each time he opened his mouth and his nose felt scored by acid.
They were forced to lower themselves even more as the tunnel continued to shrink. In moments the shoulders of Mercer’s shirt were ripped through and the abraded skin began to bleed. Without choice or option, they continued, using their elbows and toes to propel themselves forward.
“Mercer, what’s happening?” Selome cried.
“I don’t know.”
The tunnel was no larger than a coffin, just wide enough for them to squirm on their bellies, and in the murky light Mercer could see its diameter constricting even further. For the first time he considered that this tunnel might pinch out into solid rock. As if reading his thoughts, Selome called his name again, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria.
“I know, I know.” It was becoming tougher for him to move. He’d taken off his kit bag a while back and pushed it and the AK-47 ahead of him. He had to twist and struggle to gain every inch.
For a while, the tunnel remained the same size, neither growing or shrinking, but their progress was cut to a snail’s pace. Rock encircled Mercer completely; not one section of his body was out of contact with its jagged embrace. The tunnel walls were pure, blood-red mercury ore. In a few places, raw mercury had worked itself from the ceiling and dripped into little hollows and troughs on the floor.
“How long did you say we could stay in here?”
“I’m not sure.” The light revealed a stretch of tunnel glittering with hundreds of tiny pools of quicksilver. “Remember, mercury can be absorbed through the skin, so don’t let it touch any open wounds you might have.”
“My entire body is an open wound.”
They made it through the severely contaminated section and started down a gentle slope. Mercer could see where the mercury had cut canals in the floor as it flowed downhill.
His coughing fits were becoming less frequent, but their severity was punishing. Unlike Selome, who had a little room between her body and the tunnel walls, Mercer was so constricted that every cough seemed stillborn in his chest, exploding within his body without finding a proper outlet. He had to prepare himself for the pain when he felt one coming. Already he could taste the coppery salt of blood in his mouth from ruptured lung tissue.
Mercer jammed.
Fighting panic, he rolled his shoulders and tried to work them forward, but the more he struggled, the more it seemed the walls tightened around him like the remorseless coils of a python. The tunnel floor was compacted dirt, and he tried to tear into it with his hands, but it was as hard as cement and left his fingers bleeding.
Selome saw his frantic movements and slid back to avoid his flailing feet. “What’s happening?”
“I’m afraid I’m stuck.”
“What do you mean stuck?”
“I mean I can’t move. I can’t go back and I can’t go forward.”
“Well, try!” In the confines of the tunnel, her voice was muted, dead, like she was speaking from the other side of a wall.
“And you think I’ve been lying here taking a nap,” Mercer snapped, but he couldn’t draw a deep enough breath to give force to his words. He felt like he was drowning.
“I’m sorry,” Selome said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Grab my feet and pull as hard as you can.” He needed to breathe. He wanted to scream. The rock wouldn’t let him.
It took five minutes to pull him back enough for him to gain some working room. Mercer calmed again, but he could feel panic clawing at the back of his thoughts. His shoulders and back were flecked with blood. “Now we go back again.”
“But that way is blocked by the cave-in.”
“Not that far back. We need to find a place where you can crawl over me and take the lead. I think you will be able to squeeze through.”
“What about you?”
“We’ll burn that bridge after we cross it.”
It took two hours of slithering backward for them to find an area with enough ceiling height for Selome to crawl over him. When she was lying on his back, she rested her head against his neck for a moment, her breath in his ear.
“God, be careful,” Mercer cried. “I don’t have the room in here to get an erection.”
With Selome leading the way, they slowly returned to the area where Mercer had gotten stuck. “What happens now?”
“You keep going. Take the light and the gun, and try to find a way out of here.” Mercer sounded emotionless when he spoke but was glad that she couldn’t see his face.
Panic was a reaction to the unfamiliar, he told himself. But this time he had no experience to give him the confidence to keep from losing his grip with the rational.
“I can’t.”
“You don’t have a choice.” Even as he knew he might not escape alive, he thought about the others. “There are forty trapped miners waiting to be rescued, and if we both die right here, they die too.”
“I don’t care about them, dammit, I care about you.” She was sobbing.
Mercer reached out and stroked her ankle, pulling down her sock so he could touch her smooth skin. “And I care about you, too. But unless you get moving and find some help, I’ll never be able to take you on a sex-filled vacation in some exotic place.”
“Is that a promise?”
“I haven’t let you down yet.” Mercer felt another racking cough coming. The last words came out in a painful gasp.
“I can’t leave you.”
Her cry made him wince. He didn’t want to die alone, but he hardened himself, pushing aside his own needs. He struggled to regain his breath and purged his mouth of more blood. “Just go. You have to find a way out of here. I can’t have your death as the last thing on my conscience. You can’t do that to me.”
She sniffed back tears. “What about the canteen and the flashlight?”
“Take them.”
“Philip, I think that… I…” He could hear her struggling with the words and her own feelings, and before she committed herself, she changed her mind. “I think that we should go to Egypt, maybe a Nile cruise. I’ve always wanted to see the ancient monuments.”
“I’ll call my travel agent when you’re gone.”
Selome slithered away, vanishing from sight after a couple of yards. Mercer could see that a few impossible feet in front of him, the tunnel tantalizing
ly widened. The rock held him tighter than a straitjacket, and he struggled between panic and frustration. He’d never suffered claustrophobia, but he felt its icy tentacles reaching for him, grabbing him around every inch of his body and squeezing until his lungs convulsed. He drew shallow gulps of air so fouled with dust that he retched.
He was alone, shrouded in a darkness worse than death. He tried to wriggle forward but became more tightly trapped, the tunnel pressing him from all sides, holding him in a grip it would never relinquish. The blackness was so complete he could taste it as it filled his mouth and smell it as it invaded his lungs. His skin crawled with the silence of his tomb. His mind screamed for release from this prison, to move just a fraction of an inch. He could barely swivel his head, and when he did, crumbly mercury ore scraped off the ceiling, more poisonous dust for him to draw into his body.
“Okay, well, this is interesting, isn’t it?” It would only take a few days before his words became the ravings of a madman as he fought against the darkness and the silence and the isolation of his death.
Another spasm of coughing took him. His chest was unable to expand properly and the internal pressure threatened to shatter his ribs like glass. He wondered if pneumonia would develop and kill him before the mercury he was breathing destroyed his motor control and rotted his brain. He remembered that the beginning stage of mercury poisoning was a tremor in the extremities, and he couldn’t tell if the quiver in his legs was real or imagined.
Rather than dwell on the inevitable, he let his mind drift to the blue glow. What if he hadn’t seen a static discharge or a methane explosion? What if it really was the Ark, now crushed beyond recovery? “I’ve got the rest of my life to figure it out.”
Washington, D.C.
Dick Henna broke years of training when he made that call. Since the early days of their marriage, Fay had worked tirelessly to get a little culture into her workaholic husband’s life. She had started out easy on him, the occasional foreign film or ethnic restaurant, and over time she had him going to musicals and actually enjoying the opera. Her only major setback had been a too-early introduction to ballet that had soured him forever, but the night he made the call to Mercer’s phone, she’d crossed another invisible line. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the plight of Tibet, but two hours of gongs and chanting and dance moves he couldn’t identify by the Tibetan National Troupe were just too much.