Mercer looked a little sheepish. “Well, not exactly. Remember, the resolution on those pictures was terrible. It’s not quite guesswork on my part, but damn close. Still, I think where those men are drilling will lead to the older tunnels, the ones Ephraim told us about.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but what if it doesn’t?”
“Then Gianelli’s going to break into this mine and gun down everyone he sees.” Mercer shrugged. “I’ve gotten us this far, haven’t I? Maybe our luck will hold.”
They blasted the drop mat as soon as Mercer had rigged the last charge, everyone having taken an impromptu vote to either surrender to Gianelli or try to find a way out on their own. Mercer felt he owed them that. He explained the pitfalls and the danger, but the vote was unanimous to seal off the mine again.
When the crew had finished blocking the tunnel, Mercer shifted them to the pit. They drilled for another hour, the men working with machine-like efficiency, Mercer in the thick of it. He was operating one of the drills when the bit struck a void in the rock and the entire rig sank up to its couplings. Not wanting to hope too much, but feeling a building excitement, he hauled the drill back up, aligned it a few inches away, and fired in another hole. A section of floor collapsed and he found himself standing above a black hollow that hadn’t seen light in three thousand years. His triumphant whoop alerted the other men, and they crowded around, recoiling at the fetid, decaying odor that belched from the depths.
Mercer shut down the drill and signaled to a man above to silence the generators. In moments the shaft was filled with excited voices as those workers not otherwise engaged clambered to look into the darkness.
“You did it,” Selome shrieked, and threw her arms around Mercer’s shoulders. Her passionate kiss brought a round of cheering from the workers and a delighted smile to Mercer.
“Little early for the champagne,” he warned. “There’s something I forgot, and it may already be too late. Cave disease.”
“Cave disease, what’s that?”
“Cryptococcus. It’s a fungus that lives in undisturbed areas like caves and abandoned mines. Once inhaled, it germinates in the lungs and can cause fatal meningitis if not treated quickly. The main tunnel was safe because Hofmyer vented it before sending in workers, but this other mine may be rife with the stuff.” Mercer paused, assessing the odds. “We’ve already breathed the air blowing out of the hole, and we don’t have a choice but to continue.”
“Is there a cure?”
“Yeah, um, amphotericin and flourocytosine, I think. But we don’t have time to worry about that now. Gianelli should be working on the blast mat, and we have to get everyone into the original mine and hide every trace that we were ever here.” Mercer then added with a fiendish grin, “And that includes the safe full of diamonds.”
Another twenty minutes and they were ready to abandon the chamber. Mercer had rigged a coffer dam above the pit that led to the old mine and loaded it with tons of rubble. He configured it so its contents could be dumped into the shaft after they had escaped through the hole in its bottom. He also ordered the destruction of the remaining mining equipment and scrawled a personal greeting to Gianelli and Hofmyer for their arrival. Dropping the safe into the hole widened it enough for the men to begin lowering themselves into the cramped tunnels below.
Mercer considered leaving du Toit and the Sudanese behind, but they would give away the escape route the instant Gianelli reached the chamber. He couldn’t bring himself to murder them. They were prisoners and deserved some sort of fair treatment. He made sure they were securely bound and well guarded before allowing them into the tunnel.
He was the last one to descend into the children’s mine, dragging the lanyard that would breach the coffer dam behind him. Once in the cramped tunnel, he moved away from the hole connecting the two mines. When he judged he was far enough, he yanked the line and held his breath as debris filled the pit above them. Unless Hofmyer possessed a photographic memory, he would never know the pit had been filled or how Mercer had taken his people out of the main chamber.
It was only after the last of the rubble settled that he took a moment to investigate their surroundings. In the beam of his flashlight, the tunnel was only three feet tall and maybe as wide, circular rather than squared. All the surfaces were rough, showing the marks where they had been worked by primitive stone tools. The air was just rich enough to breathe, but it was a struggle. In the few moments since the tunnel had been sealed, the air was starting to foul. Mercer realized he had to string out the forty men with him if he was to avoid depleting the oxygen in one section, yet he couldn’t have them too far apart for fear of losing someone.
From where he sat, he could see three branch tunnels meandering off, one to left, one to right, and one rising up and over this one. The claustrophobic tunnels reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the myriad branches in a human lung or the den of some burrowing rodent. A man could become hopelessly lost after only a few feet. He crawled over the supine men until he had reached the front of the group, passing the Sudanese guards, oblivious to their wrathful stares. Selome waited for him with her own flashlight. They had only two others, but these lights were powered by hand crank mechanisms that required no batteries so there wasn’t any danger of them dying. Still, the tunnel was so dim that it was impossible to see beyond just a couple of yards.
“What now, fearless leader?” Selome asked, her pride in Mercer evident in her eyes and smile.
Mercer’s kit bag bulged with items he thought he might need for the ordeal to come. He dug out one of the lighters. He sparked the wheel and watched the flame until the metal top was too hot to touch. The flame remained in a solid column, not flickering in the slightest. “No air movement, but that doesn’t mean we won’t find some. It just means we are too far back to feel it. What I want to do is find a place to leave everyone behind, a chamber like the children would have used as a dormitory. Chances are it will be situated near a natural air vent.”
“And then?”
“You and I find the way out of here. We’ll be able to move a lot faster if we don’t have to worry about stragglers and our prisoners.” Mercer glanced back into the darkness, listening to the coughing fits of the men. The air was rank. “Now you know why I didn’t want Habte with us. As much as he smokes, he wouldn’t last five minutes in here. By the time we get out, he should have reached Dick Henna and a couple hundred Marines will have landed, taking care of our former Italian slave master.”
“And then we come back for the rest of the miners?”
“You got it.”
They started out, Mercer in the lead with Selome right behind. They followed the erratic beam of his flashlight as he crawled through the serpentine tunnels on his hands and knees. After an hour, all of them were feeling the effects of the dust their motion kicked up, and the tunnel echoed like a tuberculosis ward. The Eritreans were drinking water at a prodigious rate to salve their burned throats. Mercer was becoming concerned. They needed to find a small chink in the earth’s armor that allowed a seep of air to reach the dark maze.
Another two hours of uninterrupted agony followed as the party oozed through the warren with wormlike slowness. Every few hundred yards, Mercer would test the air for movement, but each time the lighter’s flame held steady. He studied the Medusa pictures at many of the major junctures. Their resolution was so poor that the lines on the photos did not correspond with the three-dimensional map he was creating in his mind. After the fourth frustrating time, he angrily tucked them back in his bag. Their only hope lay with Mercer’s instincts and his intimate knowledge of mines and mining. He was the only one who could navigate this subterranean realm, ignoring large branches and side tunnels that might have tempted another and leading them through tiny crawl spaces that someone else would have ignored.
They were well into their fourth hour when Mercer sparked his lighter again. The small flames swayed away from him, its movement so slight that had he not been staring, he never would have noticed it. Selome saw the expression on his face and grinned.
“I think we’re going to be okay,” he said.
The chamber they found fifteen minutes later was about twenty feet square, and while the quarters were cramped, everyone fit. Mercer noted that the cavity was a natural formation, one that the child miners had discovered and exploited for themselves. It was like a warm womb deep underground, a sanctuary from the agonizing labor they endured until their young lives ended in the darkness. The ceiling of the cave was about six feet tall and was scarred with hundreds of cracks. Through one of these fissures and through a labyrinthine twist in the living rock, a trickle of air descended into the earth, freshening the atmosphere. After the foul odor of the tunnels, the air in the chamber was sweet and joyously refreshing.
Selome settled against Mercer’s chest as he lay against one wall, taking a much needed break. The men
