by Jack Du Brul
Mercer pulled the folded Medusa photographs from the map pocket sown into the back of his khaki photographer’s vest. “Doesn’t matter. They didn’t get what they wanted.”
“You had them with you the whole time?” Selome asked.
“Can’t imagine a safer place,” he chuckled, coming down from the adrenaline high.
“That was one hell of a risk,” she admonished.
“The bigger risk is the Europeans.”
“What do you mean?”
“Habte just said he heard the shots.” Mercer received a nod from the former soldier. “If the men who broke into my room were connected to the Sudanese who just tried for us, they would have had silencers on their weapons. Yet Habte heard unsilenced shots, return fire by the Europeans, not the Sudanese.”
“Who are these Europeans?”
“I don’t know.” Mercer hid his suspicions. “Do you?”
Selome looked right at him when she replied in the negative, though he could see the shadow of a lie behind her eyes.
No one followed them out of the city and traffic was light, only a few lumbering trucks loaded with cotton grinding across the arid landscape. There were signs of the war along the road’s verges, the rusted hulks of military equipment slowly disintegrating back into the soil. Soviet trucks and T-55 tanks, badly damaged by mines or missiles, littered the highway like the decomposing bodies of mechanical dinosaurs.
Mercer had read that the highlands were Eritrea’s most fertile region, yet the land was rocky and nearly barren, wiped clean by scouring winds and left to bake in the unrelenting sun. The little vegetation was predominantly low scrubs, sage, and cactus. He spotted a farmer working behind two draft oxen, his plow not much more advanced than those developed in Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. The plow dug deep runnels in his field, turning back the soil that was as parched as the surface. It seemed futile, but with a peasant’s patience, he continued on.
They passed through small villages, rough clutches of adobe and brick roofed with thatch or metal. Many of the buildings were round, cone-topped structures called agdos. The few people on the dusty streets were thin and drawn, dressed in long plain shifts similar to Egyptian galabia.
Two hours later, they reached Keren, a city smaller than Asmara but possessing the same colonial charm with low bungalows and palm-lined streets. The majority of the population was Muslim, so many of the women were draped in long black chadors that absorbed the heat brutally. Habte parked the Toyota behind the Keren Hotel, a rambling building with a covered verandah screened by bougainvillea. “We need to get food and fuel here before continuing north.”
“Okay, but I don’t want to be here long.” Mercer unlimbered himself from the truck.
“Agreed,” Habte nodded. “Gibby and I will get what we need in the market. I have a lot of friends here. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Selome turned to Mercer. “No offense, but we’d better keep you out of sight. Whites don’t make it to Keren very often, and it’s best if no one sees you.”
The cargo rack atop the Land Cruiser was loaded with boxes and jerry cans by the time Selome led Mercer back to the steps of the hotel. They’d waited in a nearby alley. Gibby was sitting in the backseat, but there was no sign of Habte. Mercer leapt into the vehicle and asked Gibby to duck into the Keren Hotel’s bar to make a few purchases. Habte was in the driver’s seat when the lad returned.
“I spoke to some people.” Habte cranked the engine. “If any Sudanese come through here from Asmara in the next few days, they’re going to find it difficult to continue.” There was a smirk on his face.
Mercer pulled a map from the glove compartment. “That takes care of one interested party and now it’s time to throw off the other. According to this, there’s an airport in Nacfa and I bet the Europeans may try to leapfrog us and meet us there. Why don’t we swing west?” Mercer pointed to the map for Habte to see. “This road here bypasses Nacfa and meets up with the main tract again at Itaro.”
“The rains haven’t come yet, so it should be passable,” Habte agreed. “But what about the excavator waiting in Nacfa?”
“We won’t need it for a while. Once we’re in open country, no one will be able to find us. If I can pinpoint the pipe’s location in the next few weeks, Selome can use her contacts in the government to get us some proper protection and then we’ll call for the excavator.”
Habte’s military experience made him leery of an enemy who still posed a danger. “It would be wiser to eliminate the Europeans first.”
“Wiser, yes. But not possible. We don’t have any weapons. We’re going to have to trust that the desert that hid your armies during the war can hide us for a few weeks.”
Still unconvinced, Habte agreed, and when the road forked ten miles north of Keren, he steered them westward.
Nacfa, Eritrea
For three days they waited in Nacfa, roughly sixty miles south of the Sudanese border, before accepting that Mercer had slipped by them. When the refugee buses stopped passing through following Sudan’s border closure, activity in the town came to a halt. There was little to do except drink endless cups of coffee and watch work crews repairing the roads. For Yosef’s team, boredom was the most difficult problem they faced while waiting for Mercer and Selome.
Yosef had the added distraction of thinking about what had happened in Asmara. He remembered the maid’s scream while he and one of his men were sitting in the lobby reading a week-old issue of the Profile, Asmara’s only English-language newspaper. Both of them threw aside the meager papers and charged up the stairs. Yosef caught a glimpse of a tall African in Mercer’s room holding a silenced automatic while his partner tore apart one of Mercer’s suitcases. Instinct and training took control, and Yosef jumped aside a fraction of a second before the Sudanese fired. The younger Israeli caught two rounds high in the chest, propelling his lifeless body over the second-floor balcony to the lobby below. Yosef unholstered the big Desert Eagle from under his coat, paused for half a heartbeat, and rolled across the threshold of Mercer’s room, the gun booming three times in a continuous thundering crash. Both Sudanese went down, their bodies leeching blood from massive wounds.
Yosef had scooped up his partner’s weapon before fleeing, meeting up with the rest of his team where they waited in a different hotel. By the time they got reorganized and scouted the Ambasoira again, Mercer’s Toyota Land Cruiser was gone. Yosef had lost him.
In an effort to get ahead of the geologist, the Israelis had chartered a plane in Asmara and flown to the rough strip just outside of Nacfa. He had one of his men drive northward on the off chance he could spot Mercer and his party. But now, three days had passed and still nothing. Mercer had taken a different route than Yosef had suspected. The Israelis had little choice but to return to Asmara and cultivate some contacts to gather information.
Yosef didn’t like relying on second-party information, but their failure to follow Mercer made it necessary. He felt control of the operation slipping. His men were still loyal and eager; the failure was with him only. He cursed and turned to the two men with him. The other agent was outside watching the southern approach to the town.
“We’re getting out of this shithole,” he said angrily. “Get Avi and bring the car around. I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”
He had underestimated Mercer for the last time. The next chance he got, Yosef would torture the mine’s location from the American and dump his body far in the wasteland. As for the Sudanese, who he realized must be responsible for Ibriham’s murder in Rome, that would be another battle for another time.
Northern Eritrea
South of the Hajer Plateau
For ten long days and equally long nights they slowly roamed across the desert with nothing to show for their efforts except a dangerously low fuel gauge. The attitude of the team was going sour with frustration and tedium. They were feeling the effects of the Land Cruiser’s bone-jarring suspension, the molten air that beat down with the in
tensity of a blast furnace, and the swarms of stinging insects that found them the moment they stopped. Habte and Selome rarely spoke to each other, and since Gibby idolized his older cousin, he too had gone quiet around her. The silences in the stifling truck were draining.
Only Mercer seemed not to notice any of this. He was in his element and had managed to put everything out of his mind except the geology and geography of the area. Using the Medusa photographs, Habte’s recollections, and his own sense of the earth, he guided them almost randomly, never losing his good spirits.
Even after ten days of fruitless searching, his dedication hadn’t faltered. In fact, he seemed to move with ever greater assurance as the days passed. But the task was still daunting. He felt like a grizzled Forty-niner who had opened California’s gold rush with little more than a pick and high hopes. Used to being part of a well-financed expedition, he had only his years of experience and his innate intuition to rely on.
At least twenty times a day since reaching the Barka Province, Mercer ordered Habte to stop the truck so he could race across the hardpan, a pointed geologist’s hammer in his fist. He would scramble up some nameless hill, chip away at the stone, examine it for up to half an hour, using his tongue to moisten some samples to change their reflective properties. Sometimes he asked Gibby to join him with two shovels, and for an hour or more, they dug trenches in the scaly soil. Wordlessly, they returned to the Land-Cruiser. Mercer would point in a new direction, and off they would go again.
They established primitive camps at night. Habte had managed to pack only two tents before their flight from Asmara. He and Gibby shared one, Mercer had the other to himself, and Selome slept on the Toyota’s rear bench seat. Their meals were equally crude: millet cakes, turnips or potatoes, and canned meat. The highlight of every day was the seemingly endless bottles of brandy Mercer produced from his luggage, some brought from the United States and a couple purchased for him by Gibby at the Keren Hotel. The three Eritreans usually fell into a death-like sleep soon after their meal, but Mercer worked deep into the night. A hurricane lantern hissed in his tent as he scribbled in a thick notebook, the satellite pictures spread on his knees.
Mercer had intended to use the truck for about a week of exploratory sorties and then return to Asmara to charter a plane and study the terrain from the air, cross-referencing the aerial view with his ground observations and the Medusa pictures. That was now, of course, impossible. It would be suicide for any of them to return to the capital. He was limited to what he could see from the ground and forced to match it to the surface topography from the photos.
At dawn on the eleventh day, the sun was diffused by banks of clouds. Far to the east, the rains had come. The sunrise cast a rose hue on the desert, rouging the sand and casting bizarre shadows on the western mountains. Mercer emerged from his tent before the others awoke, enjoying the solitude of the early morning. They were camped on the bank of one of the rare streams. For the first time in days, water was readily available. Mercer took a few minutes to strip and wash the sweat and grit from his body, dressing again in the same clothes but changing into a fresh pair of socks and boxer shorts. His skin cooled quickly in the dawn chill, and goose flesh rose along his arms and chest. The sensation was wonderful.
Habte emerged from his shared tent with a cigarette already smoldering between his thin lips. He kicked life back into the embers of their fire and heated a pot of water for coffee.
Mercer accepted a mug gratefully, cupping his hands around the warm container. They drank in contented silence. Gibby and Selome awoke a short time later, she going off to perform her morning ablutions and Gibby and Habte falling into a conversation in Tigrinyan, leaving Mercer to watch the grotesque shapes of distant outcrops materialize from the gloom.
“We must return to Badn today,” Habte said when Gibby went off into the desert to relieve himself.
They had negotiated with a group of nomads staying around the village of Badn to travel to Nacfa and purchase gasoline. Their camel caravan would have returned by now, and even with extended tanks, the Toyota would just make it to town.
“I know,” Mercer replied absently, watching Selome’s sinuous return to the camp. Despite the harsh conditions, each morning she managed to look fresh and beautiful. She wore ballooning jodhpurs and a man’s large overshirt. Her hair formed a dense halo from under the wide brim of a straw hat, its fuchsia band adding a touch of feminine color to the ensemble. Her lightweight clothes were better suited to the desert than the jeans she had started out wearing.
She curled into a cross-legged position on the ground across the fire from Mercer. There was a trace of blush on her cheeks. She’d been aware of his gaze.
“We’re heading back to Badn this morning,” Mercer announced, and he could see relief in her eyes. The pace he had set for the past days had been brutal, and they all anticipated at least a small break in the tiny hamlet. “I want to hire those nomads again to return to Nacfa and have them guide the excavator here.”
Both Habte and Selome gaped at him. It was Selome who found her voice first. “You found the mine?”
Mercer looked at her sharply, then dashed her hopes with a quick shake of his head. “No, not yet, but the rains are coming soon, and if we don’t get the excavator across the Adohba River now, we may never be able to. There aren’t any bridges across it strong enough to take the weight of the tractor trailer and crawler.” Disappointment made her face collapse. “However, I do have good news.”
He went to his tent and returned with his notebook and the now dog-eared photographs. He spread the material on the ground, anchoring the corners of a rolled-up map with fist-size rocks. Habte and Selome clustered over his shoulder while Gibby made himself busy breaking down their camp. “Since my Global Positioning Satellite receiver was left in Asmara, all the reference marks on the map are just estimates. They could be off as much as a mile or two, and a margin of error that big doesn’t help our cause.”
He pointed at a spot twenty miles north of Badn. “We’re roughly here now. The asterisks on the map represent sites where I’ve taken samples.” There were dozens of such notations. Despite the seemingly random route Mercer had taken, the marks were laid out in perfect symmetry, each about half a mile from its neighbor in every direction. Habte and Selome were impressed by his orienteering skills. “The marks in red show where I discovered traces of garnet and ilmenites that may or may not mean the presence of diamonds. The problem is their quantity. There doesn’t seem to be enough for me to believe the kimberlite pipe ever reached the surface to be eroded down and its contents spread by these ancient water courses.” He pointed at several twisting lines he’d drawn on the map, certain the others hadn’t been aware that they’d traveled in any streambeds, such were the changes wrought in the millions of years since they’d been carved. “If the pipe’s still buried under the surface, we may never find it.”
“So what is our next move?” Habte asked.
Mercer thumbed through his notebook until he came to a pencil sketch of a buttress of rock bisected by a deep valley. Through the valley’s sheer aperture, an open plain beyond was revealed in detail. The drawing was harsh in its economy of line, but there was a depth of skill and just a bit of evocative emotion in its composition. “This is the best I can deduce from the surface details revealed by the Medusa pictures. They weren’t calibrated when the shots were taken, and the above-ground features suffered the most from this. But this is what the area around the kimberlite pipe should look like from ground level. I wanted to have this drawing finished a while ago, but it wasn’t until last night that I was finally satisfied with the results. If the pipe exists, it’s going to be behind these ramparts in the valley. Habte, do you recognize any features like this?”
Habte would have easily remembered because the drawing’s detail made it very recognizable. But he had never seen the sheer mountain wall with such a narrow ax-stroke cut in its face. “No, but we can show it to the nomads in Badn; they may
know of it. I’m guessing this is farther north, near the Hajer Plateau.”
“Do you know the region?”
“Bad country up there. Shifta control much of the area. The government doesn’t even bother to patrol that far north. During the war the whole area was heavily mined by the Ethiopians to prevent us from using Sudan as a safe haven. It is not safe to leave the road that passes through Itaro to the east. The nomads and shepherds avoid the area, but still a few are killed or maimed by mines every year.”
Mercer cursed because of the added danger. Military planners called them “perfect soldiers.” Once planted, landmines sat silently, effective for decades, waiting long after the wars were over. It took only a few pounds of pressure to set one off, detonating a measure of high explosive that caught its victim unaware. Children usually found and triggered the devices as they played far from their villages.
“Is there anything else up there?”
“There’s a monastery. It was abandoned during the war, but I think the monks have come back.”
The mines would never be deactivated, Mercer knew, for the cost was astronomical. Northern Eritrea would be contaminated for decades, as lifeless and unsafe as the environs around Chernobyl. “We don’t have a choice. If any of you want to abandon the search, I’ll understand, but I am going on.”
“We’re with you,” Selome said quickly, and Habte and Gibby nodded.
“Thank you.” The two men were risking their lives for him, and Mercer was deeply touched by their dedication. They barely knew him, yet were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Selome, on the other hand, was on her own mission, and her willingness to continue gave him a glimpse of her commitment. “I’m going to take a chance and ignore the desert between us and the Hajer Plateau. To get the excavator up here, we can use the main road as far north as Itaro, and the nomads can guide it to this point here.” He used his pencil to circle the village of Ila Babu on the Adobha River. “Now, let’s get going.”