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 intensity 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
