Back in the cab, Mercer tested the vehicle’s hydraulics, rotating the entire body, extending the arm, flexing its three joints, and tilting the bucket through its ten degrees of play. Satisfied he could gauge the lag between his wrist movements on the joysticks and the machine’s response, he glanced at his audience, a devilish grin on his face.
Selome, Gibby, and the two drivers watched, guessing at Mercer’s intentions but none of them believing he could actually do it. The owner of the rig had a particular smirk on his face when Mercer accidentally overrevved the engine.
“Trust me, Habte, and don’t move,” Mercer warned.
He lowered the bucket to the ground, the sulfurous tip of the match almost, but not quite, touching the hard soil. His hands were feather light on the joysticks. He lowered the bucket that fraction of an inch more, twisting the cab on its gimble. The match flared against a rough stone, and as it burned, he rotated the cab, extending the boom so it swung dangerously through the air, the match nearly flaring out by the movement. Habte closed his eyes as the huge bucket swept at his head.
Mercer’s feet and hands danced over the controls. He had judged perfectly. An instant before the wind extinguished the match, he touched it to the tip of the cigarette in Habte’s mouth. The Eritrean took a nervous drag and laughed delightedly, a jet of smoke blowing from his mouth and nose. Mercer gave a mock salute to the applause from the others.
“How did you do that?” Selome’s question was filled with awe.
He grinned like a boy. “I grew up on machines like this. My grandfather taught me when I was ten or twelve. Habte, ask the driver if I’m qualified to use his machine, then let’s get the excavator reloaded. We’re going for a little drive.”
At the far end of the bowl, under the looming rock face of the northern ridge, Mercer slowed the Land Cruiser. He drove hunched to the windshield so he could study the cliff over their heads, using its irregularities for reference. Finally he stopped and the tractor trailer pulled up behind them. Mercer was on the ground in a minute, running up a long talus slope in the mountain. “Come on,” he called down.
At fifty feet above the plain, he paused to allow Selome, Habte, and the others to reach a wide sandstone plateau. “What do you see?” Mercer invited, pointing out over the bowl.
“Nothing,” Selome breathed.
“I thought the same thing when I first got up here yesterday.” Mercer lowered himself onto his haunches.
“Okay, explanation time. After exploring the mine — which was dug during the Italian occupation, by the way — I had a hard time believing that there could be two different groups of people looking for the same defunct property. They didn’t seem know about each other until the gun fight in Rome, and yet they are playing for the same high stakes. The chances that they were after the same thing without knowing about the other seemed pretty remote. So I started thinking that maybe both groups are after a diamond mine, but not necessarily the same one.”
“What are you suggesting?” As Mercer suspected, there was something besides curiosity in Selome’s tone.
“That there are two mines here, one dug before World War II and one worked a lot longer ago. I’m guessing those Europeans in Asmara must be representatives of the Italian company which built that head gear out there and sank the shaft. The Sudanese are coming at us from a different angle. They must know of the older, earlier mine in this valley but aren’t sure of its precise location.” Selome appeared to accept his explanation, but he noticed a discomfort that hadn’t been there a second ago. In his scenario, however, he had no idea where Harry’s kidnappers fit in. He considered that if Harry’s captors had given him gin and might not be from an Arab terror group, he couldn’t begin to guess at her and the Mossad’s interested in this whole thing.
“Go on,” Habte prompted.
“The older mine must have been lost long before the Italians came here or they would have discovered it themselves when they surveyed the valley. They sank their shaft a couple miles off the mark.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They dug three miles from the kimberlite vent. It was an understandable mistake. Their geologist must have assumed the vent was in the center of this circular depression and drove the shaft accordingly. He didn’t realize that erosion by wind and rain had shifted the surface topography in the past billion years, distorting the rim of mountains so they no longer surrounded the vent, but sat atop it instead. Now, assuming the vent had been mined by someone else before the Italians came, all I had to do was find the ancient workings.”
“And did you?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Mercer replied. “One of the keys to mining is ventilation, moving air into the underground workings to blow out the dust and provide oxygen to the miners. In the big mines in South Africa, they pump about sixteen tons of air into the shafts for every ton of ore they remove. Now, the problems of ventilation for an older mine, say one dug before modern machinery, are even tougher. I jury-rigged an anometer yesterday out of a metal can and a shovel handle after Gibby went to get you, then drove around the bowl, testing wind speed and direction until I found this spot. The wind whips over the northern wall of the depression, curls back on itself in a vortex that can gust to about twenty miles an hour.” Mercer used his finger to draw a crude sketch in the soil. The drawing showed the side of the mountain with a V-shaped symbol pointing at its flank.
“The tricky part comes when you need to channel the air into the shaft, concentrating the flow exactly where you want it. Now, look again on the desert floor right below us.”
It was Gibby, with his younger, sharper eyes who saw it first. “There,” he pointed. “I see what you drew.”
There were two faint lines in the dirt, just a shade darker than the rest of the desert. They were two hundred feet long, angling toward each other so they nearly met below where the party stood. They were too geometrical for nature to be their creator. They were the work of man.
“What are they?”
“All that remains of the foundations of two huge walls. Judging by their width, I’d guess they were at least seventy feet tall, more than enough to catch the wind blowing off the mountains and channel it into a mine entrance. I’m sure there are some vents driven into the mountain to allow an escape outlet for the wind, but I’m not too concerned with those quite yet.”
“You mean, we are standing on top of another mine?”
“That’s right.” Mercer tempered his excitement with difficulty. “A horizontal drift tunneled into the mountain.”
“When was this excavated?” asked Habte.
“I don’t know. We can check the foundations to get an idea, but it’s not really important.”
“The question I want answered is, who dug this in the first place?” Selome said.
Mercer glanced at her, feeling she already knew the answer. “We’ll find that when we open her up.”
An hour later, the excavator was ripping into the side of the hill, clearing away the dirt that had piled against the stone face. Mercer stood next to where the bucket clawed into the ground, using hand gestures to guide the operator. He kept a shovel with him, and every ten minutes or so would descend into the trench dug by the machine. The temperature was again hovering around a hundred degrees, and Mercer worked stripped to the waist. Every trip into the trench was more dangerous than the last. It was already fifteen feet deep and twice as long, its sides loose and crumbling. He used the hand shovel to dig a bit farther into the soil, exposing earth that hadn’t seen daylight in who knew how many years. Carrying samples out of the trench, he examined each minutely before motioning for the excavator to continue.
“What are you looking for?” Selome asked when he emerged after the sixth time. Habte, Gibby, and the truck driver were busy unbundling the pallets of equipment secured to the tractor trailer.
“Overburden, the mine’s waste rock.” Mercer wiped the sweat from his forehead with a saturated bandanna. “When it was first excavated, they would have piled the worthless material at the entrance. It should be easy to detect it from the accumulated surface material.”
“But if the mine’s at the point of the two walls, why don’t we dig into the mountain there?”
“Because I want to know what’s in there before we reopen the shaft. It’s a question of safety,” Mercer explained. “And I’m hoping to discover the mine tailings, the kimberlite that has already been broken down and
