Mercer wanted to start backtracking down the old streambed to its source right away, but they had to wait until morning. He lay down in the Toyota, knowing sleep wouldn’t come. This was it. He’d done it. The men holding Harry would be calling again tomorrow at midnight, and he thought about what he would tell them. He didn’t want to disclose this find, but he had to give them something, just enough so they believed he was close. Finding diamonds this quickly was a huge advantage. He had four weeks left on his deadline and wanted that time to figure some way to end-run the kidnappers. If he had to, he would just give them the location, but he’d regained enough confidence to try and stop them first. They were going to pay for what they’d done.
He finally did sleep, and when he woke the next morning, his body had stiffened. Even the most minor movement brought a groan to his lips. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
He roused Gibby, and soon they were driving again. The streambed meandered in long, lazy bends, forming a huge oxbow once and rising up a cliff that had been a waterfall at some point in history. They needed the tow winch to clear the former falls. Mercer took the time to scout the area with his antenna probe, losing several hours in the process.
The river led more or less in a direct north-south course. It appeared they were heading toward the main bulk of the Hajer Plateau, a huge up-thrust that overshadowed everything in the region. Mercer thought about abandoning the serpentine streambed and driving straight for the mountain, but he knew caution was his only ally here and stayed with the winding path.
“
Mercer’s drawing was nearly perfect. The Valley of Dead Children was there, cut into the side of a three- hundred-foot mountain, looking exactly as he had envisioned it, right down to a tumbling rock slide that had torn away one side of the steep valley wall near its entrance, partially filling the near vertical chasm. The mountain, with its inviting cleft, was about half a mile away.
The land between it and the riverbed was an open expanse pocked severely by impact craters, most likely from Ethiopian artillery. The churned-up ground near some of the scars was still blackened by explosives.
“Jesus,” Mercer breathed. The devastated area looked like the pictures he had seen of No-Man’s-Land during World War I.
He didn’t want to think about the men who had probably been caught in the open when the big guns began to rain death on them. He looked around for a makeshift cemetery but recognized the gesture was pointless. There wouldn’t be enough left of the men caught in the barrage to bury. Gibby was also affected by the sight. Too young to have seen the worst of the fighting, he could still comprehend the suffering that had made his nation free.
“We’re about to make it all worthwhile,” Mercer promised him.
He felt a degree of sacrilege as he drove across the killing field, knowing the tires were likely disturbing the bones of brave men. He wondered if the battlefield had served as a deterrent to others wanting to explore this area. Perhaps that was why no one had been to this region in so many years.
The Valley of Dead Children was roughly two hundred feet wide at its base and only twice that width at its top, a steep V-shaped notch in a nameless mountain. Mercer had to use low-range again to power the Land Cruiser over the loose scree that had tumbled into the valley’s entrance, racing the engine until it sounded like a turbine. The valley ran almost straight into the mountain for a half mile. Its sides weren’t solid rock but layers of sedimentary sandstone that had built up over the millennia. They were unstable; bits of rock and dirt pelted the roof of the four-wheel drive as he eased them through.
“No wonder the diamonds were never discovered before,” he said as the Land Cruiser broke into a huge open bowl of land at the valley’s end. “The geology is all wrong. This should be rhyolite or basalt.”
Once through the valley, they broke into an open pan roughly five miles across, the distant ring of mountains lost in shimmering waves of heat. Mercer could begin to understand why the nomads avoided this place. While vegetation was always scarce in the country, the bowl was devoid of even the hearty sage or cacti. The land was as lifeless as the surface of the moon. Gibby looked stricken as they drove deeper into the dead zone, his hands clutched in front of his chest as if in prayer.
“I do not like it here,” he muttered.
“Me either.” Mercer couldn’t shake his own feelings of disquiet.
They were halfway across when Mercer spotted something. About a mile away. Near where the protective ramparts rose off the bowl’s floor, stood a man-made structure of some sort. “What the hell is that?”
He recognized it when they were a quarter mile off. “I’ll be damned! It’s a head gear, a mine’s hoisting derrick.”
The structure resembled an oil well drill tower, a tall spiderweb of rusted steel girders supporting a large flywheel forty feet above the ground. Next to the tower was a cluster of crumbling wood buildings, one of which, Mercer knew, would contain the head gear’s machinery. The tower worked as the elevator mechanism for a mine. It would lower men into the bowels of the earth and haul mineral-rich material back to the surface in giant containers called skips.
After finding the diamond yesterday, he’d expected this discovery to be anticlimactic, but it wasn’t. Every step that took him closer to Harry was better than the last. He was grinning at the old mine when a sudden thought struck him.
There were diamonds here. The Medusa pictures were a strong indication, and the stone rattling in a dashboard cup holder was the proof. Why, then, had the mine been abandoned? Mercer guessed the buildings were at least fifty years old, and that age made him understand. Most likely, this had been an Italian operation built during their occupation of Eritrea and abandoned when British forces ousted them in 1941. It was possible that the Brits didn’t know about the mine site. Its location was remote enough to ensure its secrecy, and if Negga was any indication, the nomads avoided this valley. It was quite plausible that the mine had never been rediscovered, and if it had, during the revolutionary war maybe, the men who found it had been pounded into the earth by the long- distance artillery barrage.
Another question tickled the back of his mind. Eritrea’s civil war had been over for a few years. Why hadn’t the Italians returned and resumed their work? It was possible they hadn’t struck the diamondiferous kimberlite, but they had to know of its presence. Surely they would have come back. And then he wondered if the kidnappers were Italian and not Middle Eastern — a complication that he hadn’t even considered. This discovery was changing everything. Again.
Mercer braked next to the head gear, throwing open his door. Since this was a “lost mine,” he felt confident that the ground had not been sown with explosives. The head gear tower straddled a twenty-foot square opening in the earth, an ominous black pit that dropped into the stygian underworld like the mouth of Hades. At its edge, Mercer tossed a stone into the hole, his eyes glued to the second hand of his watch. His wait was longer than expected. Finally, there was a faint click from deep below. He calculated the drop: one hundred and sixty feet. “Jesus.”
“
The building looked like something out of an old Western, rough planking and a shallow roof covered with rusted metal. Mercer peered through the doorway over Gibby’s shoulder, forcing himself to remain calm after he recognized the object on the floor. A mummy sat propped against one wall, the body of an Eritrean soldier left here by his comrades when they made their suicidal race out of the valley and into the waiting guns. The body had been so dried by the desert air that the skin on his face looked like a tight leather mask and his hands resembled claws. A dark stain blotted the front of his battle jacket. Obviously he had been wounded in a previous engagement and had either died here or was abandoned because of his injuries. The eye sockets were empty holes, the ragged teeth exposed in a gruesome rictus. Gibby dashed off and returned with the tarp, draping it reverently over the corpse, crossing himself repeatedly.
There were other reminders of the men who had camped here: empty shell casings, the mangled clip spring from a broken ammunition magazine, a blackened circle of stones that had been a fire pit, a heap of trash in one corner.
“We’ll bury the body before sundown and use this building as our base,” Mercer said. “It’s too late to explore the mine shaft.”
It was dark by the time Mercer and Gibby finished their grim task. Gibby fashioned a cross from a tent pole he’d snapped in two, thrusting it into the ground, praying over it silently. An hour later, the young man was snoring softly. Mercer rested with his back against the bungalow’s wall. Though he was tired, it was still easy for him to
