night told me he knew of this mine from one of their ancient texts, a book lost long ago, but its oral tradition had been maintained.” Mercer hoped he was spinning enough fact with the fiction to satisfy Gianelli. “He said that this mine was worked for centuries until there was an invasion. The people who operated it sealed it entirely rather than see it captured.”
“My God, it sounds like King Solomon’s Mine,” Gianelli gasped.
“Maybe, I don’t know.” The Italian had gotten too close to the truth, and Mercer had to derail him. “It could be that this was the basis for the legend, but as I’m sure Yappy here can tell you, there are countless spots all over Africa that also claim that distinction.”
Joppi Hofmyer growled at the bastardization of his name.
“Fascinating,” Gianelli said. It was evident that he was more impressed with his prisoner than with the man he had hired to excavate the mine.
Mercer saw this and started to make it work to his advantage. “If I may make a suggestion. You mentioned bringing explosives into this chamber. I wouldn’t. The dome may look solid, but unless you have blast mats to deflect the shock of a detonation down the tunnel, you may find yourself proving the hard way that it’s not.”
“Do we have blast mats?” Giancarlo demanded of Joppi.
“No, sir, but it would only take a few days to get them from Khartoum.” Hofmyer seethed at being so easily undercut.
“And while you’re at it,” Mercer continued, taking an almost casual command of the conversation, “I saw outside that you’re about to resift the original tailings for diamonds that might have been missed by the original workers. Don’t bother. The tailings I checked had been crushed down so fine that unless you brought a portable fluoroscope with you, it’ll be a complete waste of time and manpower that I doubt you can spare.”
Hofmyer shot Mercer such a scathing look that it appeared he would physically attack him. Sorting through the tailings had been his idea.
“Sounds logical,” Giancarlo said, enjoying the frustration on his overseer’s face. “If I had gone through the difficult task of mining the ore, I imagine that I would also make certain not a single stone had been overlooked.” He smiled. “Fetching you back here was a good idea. I think it would be another good idea if I kept you around for a while longer. For the time being, you will be my chief among slaves.”
For a fraction of a second, Mercer’s thoughts played openly across his face, but fortunately Gianelli had looked away. Mercer didn’t want the Italian to see the hatred or the resolve that flashed in his eyes. Those he was keeping to himself, knowing that they would help him when the time came. Slave, he’d been called. And slave he would be. Right up to the moment he would slip his hands around Gianelli’s throat and squeeze until the son of a bitch was dead.
The Mine
Two weeks passed. Two weeks in which Mercer saw a man beaten to death. Two weeks in which he saw others drop dead from exhaustion. Two weeks in which men and machine toiled endlessly to yank the kimberlite from the womb of the earth, tearing it free with picks and pneumatic drills and bare hands. Two weeks in which his own body was pushed mercilessly.
Gianelli and Joppi Hofmyer worked the male refugees, including Mercer and Habte, in twelve-hour shifts, allowing just ten minutes every two hours for a little food and a meager water ration. The pace wasn’t enough to kill a healthy adult, but many of the refugees had arrived at the mine on the verge of starvation and the labor pushed several of the older ones over the edge. Because of his expertise, Mercer was named an underground manager for his shift, watched over by one of Hofmyer’s South Africans, a man named du Toit. At least ten armed Sudanese also guarded the work. The pit echoed with the machine-gun rattle of compressed air drills and jackhammers, a deafening roar of man’s fight against earth’s strength. It was impossible to look across the workings. The air was thick with dust and fumes, and the miners were covered with so much grit that it was difficult to tell white from black. A flexible ventilator tube with high-speed fans had been rigged along the tunnel leading to the work, but it did little to alleviate the dust or the incredible heat in the chamber.
Taking a lesson from the British prisoners of war who had built the Kwai River bridge, Mercer dedicated himself to mining the kimberlite to the best of his ability. He selected those refugees with the strength and stamina to work the drills and jackhammers, teaching them the basics and a few tricks to make their task easier. Others he employed as pick men and priers, and still others to haul the ore back to the surface, where more people hammered it apart to search for the elusive diamonds.
But the stones weren’t that elusive. The kimberlite here was the richest Mercer had ever seen. While he was not allowed in the secure area near the mine’s entrance where the ore was crushed and the diamonds were stored in a safe, he learned enough to guess that the mine was paying out better than twelve carats a ton, an astronomically high value. He did have the opportunity to see a few stones that were found right in the mine. At first the Eritreans were dumbfounded at the value placed on the small symmetrical lumps of crystal when Mercer pointed them out, because there is little of a diamond’s hidden fire to be seen before the stone is cut and polished. The biggest stone Mercer saw for himself was a nice twenty carats, but he’d heard rumors about a monster stone, some said the size of a man’s fist, that had been found by one of the women sorting the ore.
It was in the pit that one of the guards beat an Eritrean to death. It wasn’t known if the refugee had broken one of Hofmyer’s numerous rules or if the young Sudanese had just done it for the thrill. The reason didn’t matter to the victim, nor did it really matter to those who witnessed the Sudanese using the butt of his AK-47 to split open the man’s head.
Mercer had been on break when it happened, and he sprang to his feet at the first blow. Habte was next to him. He recognized the danger Mercer was about to put himself in, and Habte wrapped his arm around Mercer’s leg, tumbling him back to the ground.
“Don’t, Mercer, just don’t. That man is already dead and you are still alive,” Habte whispered. “I learned during the war that no man’s life is worth a defiant gesture.”
The beating lasted at least a minute, and when it was over, du Toit ordered the crew back to work. The corpse lay where it had fallen until the end of the shift, the workers ducking their eyes reverently as they passed by.
For two weeks the mining went on, a continuous chain of men burdened with baskets of kimberlite wending their way along the tunnel to the surface and returning to the workings for more. By the end of the second week, Mercer realized that Gianelli intended to work everyone to death, not only to ensure their silence, but to make certain that every possible diamond could be found in the time he’d allowed himself.
Late at night, when Mercer and Habte were lying on the ground in the barbed-wire stockade that acted as their quarters, they would discuss theories behind Gianelli’s rushed schedule. Habte maintained that the Italian was afraid the location would be discovered by someone else and reported to the government in Asmara, but Mercer suspected that there was another purpose behind the killer pace.
“Habte, be reasonable,” Mercer said. “We never saw another person when we were first searching for this place, and the nomad in Badn said this region is avoided because of some superstition. And don’t forget, the landmines act as one hell of a deterrent. Shit, I haven’t even seen a plane fly over.”
“All this is true,” Habte murmured tiredly, rolling so he could pluck a sharp stone from under his back. “But why is Gianelli pushing so hard?”
“I don’t know,” Mercer admitted, too tired to think through the problem.
It had been plaguing him from the start of the mining operation, but at night it took all of his concentration just to eat the weak stew served by the wives of the refugees.
The other thought dogging him was Selome’s safety. They hadn’t been able to speak to each other. She was in a separate compound with the other women, forced to cook for the workers, a slave as surely as he. Whenever Mercer saw her as he was getting his stew, he tried to smile and put up a brave front, but knew that concern darkened his eyes. He could see that she had been hit a couple of times, for purple bruises showed on her arms and face. Each night Mercer and the others could hear guards drag a few of the women off for their own pleasure. He didn’t know if Selome had been similarly treated, and his inability to help her, or the others, ate at him like cancer.
