scraper hulked just before the face, and the cables that maneuvered the plow-shaped machine ran back to a four- cylinder donkey engine. The miners had even left their picks, shovels, and pry bars a little way off, the metal kept pristine by the dry air.
A number of questions were answered for Mercer as he studied the rock face itself and examined the ore that had broken away from the stope. He turned away sadly. “Oh, you poor bastards, you never had a chance, did you?”
There was a whole other set of questions Mercer needed to think through, but first he had to get back to the surface. Having spent much of his professional career in the subterranean realm, he had developed the ability to map these three-dimensional mazes as he walked, part of his brain counting distances and angles without really being conscious of it. It was a skill honed with years of practice and allowed him to move underground with relative ease. He back-tracked to the first raise he’d come across on this level. Peering up the black hole, he sensed that it wouldn’t lead to the level above but would branch off into a subdrift. He searched for a cross cut that led to another drift, shorter than the main one and angled downward. A short distance down this tunnel, he came to another raise and inspected the ladder that ran upward. The wood had grayed through the years and was so riddled with dry rot that it felt chalky to the touch. Mercer tested the bottom rung, and his foot snapped the strut with only a tiny amount of pressure.
“Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.”
Instinct told him that at the top of this vertical raise would be a tunnel to the main shaft above the pile of ruined machinery. And his rope to safety. There was enough loose stone on the floor for him to build a mounded pyramid below the aperture. He hummed to himself as he worked, often switching off the flashlight to conserve the batteries, working in a darkness more total than the deepest night. After twenty minutes, the pile was high enough. With a ceiling height of just over six feet, he’d needed a platform of stones three feet tall and had built one nearly four. He aimed the light up the raise, but its ray vanished in the gloom.
The rubble was loose under his boots as he climbed to the top of the pile, ducking into the opening so the rim brushed against his thighs. Just to be certain, he tested another section of the ladder, tugging it gently, but the wood splintered in his hand. Mercer took a deep breath and jammed one foot against the side of the three-foot square vertical shaft. He levered his shoulder against the rock, kicked upward, and swung his other foot against the stone, lifting himself off the pile of gravel and bits of rock. Standing in the chimney with his legs akimbo, he would need both hands to steady himself as he continued the ascent, so he tucked the Maglite into his belt, shifted his weight to his left foot, raised his right a few inches, and rammed it against the wall again.
It took him fifteen minutes to shimmy twenty feet up the shaft because he could take only six-inch steps safely and had to force his palms against the rock face to help distribute his weight. He thought the raise would have ended by now, landing him in another drift, but still it rose into the darkness. To his horror, Mercer realized the shaft was widening; his legs were now spread more than four feet and the strain on his groin muscles and upper thighs was becoming unbearable. For the first time since the collapse of the machinery in the sump, he was starting to have doubts about getting out. He shifted positions, pressing both feet against one wall and forcing his shoulders against the opposite so that his body spanned the void.
Rolling his shoulders alternately and walking up the far wall, Mercer resumed his climb, blood soaking his shirt and running into his khaki pants. The shaft continued to widen as he climbed, making it necessary to exert more pressure against the walls to maintain his perch. If it opened much farther, Mercer knew he wouldn’t have the leverage to bridge the opening and still be able to climb. He shut his mind to that possibility, but he was becoming desperate, his body aching in areas he didn’t know existed. He was running out of strength, his muscles cramping, and knew he would never be able to control his descent if it became necessary. A fall from even thirty feet against the stone floor below would break bones. And in his position, he knew the most likely were his neck and back. Mercer climbed doggedly.
He realized he’d made it to the top of the raise when he could no longer hear stone scratching against his metal miner’s helmet. Levering himself upward another six inches, he was able to kick with both legs and torque his body to the side, rolling himself onto the floor of the upper drift. He lay there panting, his cheek pressed to the cold stone, blood dripping from the cuts in his back and from the scrapes on his hands.
Five minutes ticked by before he could move again. He stood shakily, brushed himself off, and flipped on the flashlight. Ignoring the passage to his left, he moved off to the right, knowing he was in a main artery because of its size. After two hundred yards he could see shadows in the darkness cast from light spilling down from the surface. He looked at the luminous dots on his watch. It was not yet noon, but he felt as if he’d been in the mine for a day or more.
The rope was dangling just out of his reach at the drift entrance, and he had to use his belt to snag it and draw it to him. In the gloom below he could see the abandoned machinery that had nearly trapped him forever. He gave the rope a sharp tug. Immediately, Gibby started hauling. When the bosun’s chair reached this level, Mercer jerked the line again to signal Gibby to stop. It was only when he had stepped into the harness and secured himself that he pulled a flare from his pocket and sparked the igniter off the stone wall. This was Gibby’s signal to start the Toyota and back the vehicle away from the head gear. The chair rose like a silent elevator.
The sun was a blessed relief after so many hours of darkness, and had Mercer’s eyes not possessed a feline quickness to adjust, the brightness would have left him blinded. He shucked the harness and was leaning against the head gear’s struts when Gibby drove back. Mercer felt an exhaustion that had nothing to do with his morning’s work. Gibby had the foresight to retrieve Mercer’s last beer and hand it over. Mercer downed the warm, gassy brew with several heavy swallows, belching so loudly it brought a startled guffaw from the Eritrean.
“Well,
Mercer looked up at him, squinting against the blazing sun. Gibby looked like the image of a black Jesus Christ, a halo of sacred light cast around his head. Mercer dug something out of his breast pocket, a small misshapen lump. He tossed it to the eager teen, bowing his head.
Gibby stared at the bit of metal for a long time, his expression that of total confusion.
“It ain’t riches, kid. It’s lead from a bullet fired into the head of a man at the bottom of the mine, just like the four hundred other men who’d worked with him,” Mercer said.
He’d discovered the body slumped over the controls of the scraper at the end of the lowest drift. He’d been murdered like all the others, executed not only to preserve the mine’s secret location, but also to hide the fact that the entire project had been a failure. They had never hit the fabled blue ground, the kimberlite that held the diamonds. They had tunneled for years with their blood and their sweat, yet turned up nothing. And their reward? Their reward had been a summary shot to the head.
There were diamonds here, someplace, Mercer was sure. And with a couple of years, a few thousand men, and a couple hundred million dollars, he would be able to find them and bring them up. None of which he had, none of which would save Harry. The men holding him had said they wanted Mercer to find a mine, which he had, but he knew they would never accept this bust-out. They wanted diamonds, not a big hole in the ground, and they could set deadlines from now until doomsday and there was nothing Mercer could do to satisfy them.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, dammed-up tears of frustration and grief and pain finally spilling onto his cheeks.
The Eritrea-Sudan Border
There were two rugged gravel roads that crossed the lonely border, both of them traversing a deep gorge bridged with rickety wooden structures that dated back decades. Near both crossings, roughly forty kilometers apart, refugee camps had grown out of the scrub plain, tens of thousands of miserable people huddling together in tents that offered little protection from the wind or the brutal sun. The tent cities housed Eritreans who could not return to their homeland. Since the intensification of Sudan’s civil war, Sudanese natives too were seeking shelter here, hoping for the chance of a better life in Eritrea. Such was their desperation, they saw their impoverished neighbor as a promised land.
Situated close to the border and thus easier to reach, these camps were in much better condition than the reservations in Sudan’s interior. The people here received regular visits from United Nations and EC trucks carrying
