The flashlight cut into the gloom, revealing a long tunnel that was roughly twelve feet wide, six high, and God alone knew how long. Mercer played the light along the ceiling, surprised not to see any bats. In fact, he hadn’t noticed the guano smell so typical to abandoned mines. Like the Valley of Dead Children, the mine too was devoid of life. A chill ran up his spine that had nothing to do with the coolness of the subterranean passage.
He walked fifty yards down the drift before coming to the first cross cut, a right-angle passage roughly the same height as the drift by only half the width. For a moment Mercer considered taking this branch, but thought it better to keep to the main drive. Another cross cut appeared on his left after only a few more yards and then a third shortly after that. As he kept exploring, he again played the beam of the flashlight on the hanging wall — the ceiling, in mining parlance — and saw that bolts hadn’t been driven into it to help its stability. The rock was mostly rhyolite and probably didn’t need the bolts, but it deepened his concern. There was something very wrong about this mine.
He discovered a winze after two hundred yards, an open hole in the floor that dropped directly to the next level down. Such small vertical shafts connected two mining levels and frequently dumped into a haulage, a passage used for the removal of mined material. The wooden railing around the winze was dry and broken, and a descending ladder bolted to one side looked so weak it wouldn’t support a mouse, let alone a man. He continued on. By the time he reached the working face of the drift, fifteen hundred feet from the main shaft, he’d passed a total of eight cross cuts, two winzes, and a raise, an aperture in the hanging wall over his head that meant there was another level above him, one not directly joined to the principal shaft.
His original estimate of the size of the workings was way off the mark. Without exploring the cross cuts, he could only guess that they at least doubled the amount of mined tunnels from just this one drift. There was still a further hundred-foot drop to the bottom of the shaft, and there was no telling how many more drifts there were. Depending on the stability of the rock and the way in which the drifts were driven, there could be several more miles of tunnels shooting off the original bore.
Mercer spent fifteen minutes at the working face minutely examining the rocks. The ore from the last explosive shot hadn’t been cleared when the miners were pulled from the stopes, evidence that they had left in a hurry. Miners never, ever, left unprocessed ore in a mine. He sifted through the debris on the foot wall — the term for the floor — using brute strength to lever aside some of the larger chunks so he could scrutinize the rock face. No matter how he held his light, he could see no evidence of the opaque blue ground, the kimberlite, that would yield the diamonds. He figured about a year had been wasted here with nothing to show for it. This drift had been a bust, worthless.
Back at the main shaft, he tugged on the bosun’s chair, signaling Gibby, and slipped into the harness, cinching it tight around his legs and across his waist. He jerked twice more and stepped out into the void, spinning like a dervish as the rope took up the strain and unkinked itself. His descent was dizzying, but Mercer had done this before and felt no ill effects as Gibby lowered him farther into the earth.
He ignored the next three drifts, knowing he could explore them if necessary on his way back to the surface. As he expected, at the bottom of the shaft lay a twisted pile of machinery and hundreds of feet of braided steel cable. When the mine had been abandoned, the men working it had dumped their equipment into the hole rather than allow it to be taken by their enemies, probably the advancing English army. Mercer landed on a coil of hoist cable, the strands rusted together by Eritrea’s seasonal rains into a solid mass of metal that looked like a modern sculpture. Below it, his flashlight revealed the top of the cage used to haul men out of the mine, and farther into the tangled gear, he saw a large ore skip. He played the light across the debris and saw that the equipment had not actually fallen all the way to the bottom of the shaft; it had jammed together about fifteen feet from the ground. Shining the light around the perimeter walls of the mine’s sump, he jumped back dangerously when the beam flashed across a twisted corpse. It took several seconds for his heart to slow.
He picked his way across the pile of junk to get a closer look, the metal scraping against itself as his weight shifted its precarious balance. The body was in a similar state of decomposition as the Eritrean soldier he and Gibby had buried the day before, and his uniform looked about the same too. Mercer guessed that a curious soldier had stepped too close to the open pit, lost his footing, and plummeted to a quick death. Unhooking himself from the rope again, he signaled Gibby to hold his position — not that the lad would have much of a choice. With Mercer this deep, the line was at full stretch.
There were gaps between some of the equipment, a tangled warren of openings that Mercer could possibly edge his way through, gaining access to the mine’s deepest drift, whose entrance was buried by the abandoned mining gear. Yet even in the best circumstances, making the attempt was dangerous. The scrap could shift, crushing him or trapping him without any hope of rescue. If he became stuck, there wouldn’t be any way to signal Gibby, and even if he could, there wasn’t anything one person could do to set him free.
But he didn’t have a choice. Mercer took a moment to work his muscles, limbering himself for the challenge. He dropped to his knees, peering down into the shadowed jumble, picking his first moves with his eyes before committing his body. Like a contortionist, he twisted through the equipment, torquing and shifting constantly, lowering himself across the scaly steel, cutting his hands on the sharp edges, smearing skin off his legs and back. His clothes were reduced to rags. It was like moving through a huge knot of barbed wire. If he found a passage to the drift, it would be easy to retrace the trail of blood back to the top of the debris.
Eight feet into the pile, he maneuvered himself into a head-down position, flashing the light under the elevator cage where it had wedged against the wall of the shaft. The beam was swallowed by the darkness of another drift, the last one. His position put him at the inky tunnel’s ceiling. Wriggling like a landed fish, he worked his body under the cage, holding his breath when a section of ruined equipment settled, grinding like a huge pair of steel jaws. He felt the pile was ready to collapse. Ignoring the pain as a piece of metal ripped across his back, he forced himself those last feet, tumbling into the drift as the junk gave out. The tons of machinery, precariously balanced for half a century, collapsed deeper into the mine’s sump with an echoing crash, kicking up a choking cloud of dust. Had Mercer been a second slower, his body would have been cut in two as the cage sheared across the entrance to the drift like the blade of a guillotine.
His breathing raged despite his efforts to slow it, drawing in rancid dust with each inhalation. He took a second to check the worst of his bloody injuries. Once he’d recovered, he cast the light toward the clogged shaft. The drift’s rectangular opening was completely blocked with an impassable wall of debris packed so tightly now that Mercer couldn’t get his arm more than a few inches into it. He gripped a steel I-beam and heaved at it until stars and pin-wheels flared behind his closed eyes. Yet the beam didn’t move more than a fraction of an inch. When it collapsed, the cables, hoists, cages, skips, and all the other equipment thrown into the shaft had keyed into itself, locking together like puzzle pieces, plugging his exit. It would take explosives to dislodge any of it.
Mercer was trapped.
“Well, this is an unexpected wrinkle,” he said aloud.
Mercer knew panic resulted from fear of the unfamiliar, and for better or worse, he had been trapped in mines before. He kept his fear firmly in check. As calmly as a man walking to his office, he turned and started down the dark passage. After only a couple of yards, he stopped short. Blood drained from his face, and his gorge rose acidly in his throat.
The long tunnel was a crypt with hundreds of bodies laid out like cordwood. Ranks of them lined both walls for as far as Mercer’s flashlight could penetrate. He first thought they had been trapped down here like himself, but he realized that their postures were too orderly. These men would have struggled until the last possible second to get themselves out of the chamber. They would have been clustered at the shaft, not resting in these peaceful poses. He inspected the man lying closest to him, and understood. In the parched skin of his forehead, a neat hole had been drilled through his skull. Judging by their clothes, these men were the miners who had excavated the tunnels. They had been shot when the Italians had fled, their bodies abandoned here, the secret of the mine kept by their eternal silence.
“Jesus.” Mercer was reminded of the slave labor gangs used by the Nazis to dig the clandestine underground factories for their rockets and jet fighters.
Walking by the grisly ranks, he judged there were more than four hundred bodies in the drift. Even as he fought his pity for them, he considered just what this meant and had no answer.
Delaying his search for a way out of the drift, Mercer took the time to walk all the way to its end. It ran for more than a mile, branching numerous times to both left and right. The hanging wall was just inches from the top of his miner’s helmet. This tunnel alone doubled again his estimates of the size of the mine and the time taken to create it. Like the first drift he’d explored, the working face had been abandoned shortly after a shot. A mechanical
