were tangled around them like a litter of exhausted puppies, too tired to sort themselves out. Many minutes would pass before the last coughing spell ended with a wet expectoration of blood.
“It’s all downhill from here,” Mercer said.
“You mean it gets easier?”
“No.” Mercer shook his head. “We’ve been climbing toward the surface for the past hour so these tunnels will have to slope downward again if we’re going to find an exit we can use.”
“Okay, mister.” Selome looked at him with mock severity. “You’ve been giving cryptic answers and telling only half the story since we entered the mine, and every time you pull some trick out of your hat. So what’s your trick this time?”
Mercer laughed. “Found me out, did you? Yes, I have another trick. Remember when we first entered the mine after Gianelli caught us at the monastery? I said I was looking for an escape route.” Selome nodded. “I noticed a section of wall a hundred feet from the surface that looked as if it had been rebuilt. The stone was a shade lighter than the blocks used to line the rest of the tunnel. I’m betting our lives that there’s another tunnel behind it that had been covered over, hidden.”
“You think these old mine shafts lead to it.”
He nodded. “But if they don’t, we are seriously screwed.” They rested for another half hour before Mercer decided that if he delayed any longer, he’d be too stiff to continue. He roused Selome and spoke with the gang leaders, again asking her to translate. He laid out his plan and the Eritreans agreed. Their faith in his abilities was an inspiration for Mercer, but also a burden. First it was Harry’s life which depended on what he did, then Selome’s and Habte’s, and now he’d added forty more people, plus the others still in the slave compounds. He cleared his mind of creeping defeatism. It was much too late to doubt his decisions, even if he led them into a possible, and quite literal, dead end.
“Are you ready?” Mercer asked.
“Have I ever said no?”
“That’s my girl.”
They started out of the chamber, exiting through one of the larger tunnels. In only a few seconds, they could no longer see the glow from the two flashlights they’d left with the Eritreans. The beam of their own single light seemed puny in the mounting blackness of the unnatural maze. And as Mercer crawled ahead of Selome, the single AK-47 he’d taken with him seemed just as ineffective if they managed to reach the surface and had to face Gianelli again.
Mahdi had bided his time. He was not a patient man and the quiet waiting had been frustrating, but now it was all about to pay off. He lay with the three other Sudanese soldiers, men who had been under his command for years, men who would kill or die for him. Just having him with them had given his troops the necessary discipline to wait out the American and his Eritrean whore. Lying amid the stinking pile of humanity, Mahdi congratulated himself for getting this far.
Of course, it was pure chance he’d been in the mine talking with his troops when Mercer appeared. He was the soldier to drop his weapon first, sensing that even with superior firepower, Mercer had taken the tactical advantage by holding the white miner. When he saw the whore appear a moment later, her own weapon leveled, Mahdi knew he’d made the correct choice.
Another element of chance at work tonight was the large bandage that swathed the upper half of his face and dressed his right cheek. He’d been practicing fighting moves against one of his lieutenants with unsheathed knives, as was their habit, when the soldier slipped and the blade slashed Mahdi’s face. The wound would heal nicely, adding a new scar to the older wounds marring his body. The bandage his medic had applied hid enough of his features to prevent anyone from recognizing him, and since neither Mercer nor the Eritreans had looked too closely, they hadn’t realized their prisoner was the commander of the Sudanese guard detail.
Mahdi had allowed himself to be taken, cowed like the rest of his men and shepherded along with this suicide mission for no other reason than to see Mercer choke to death on his tongue when there was the chance to cut it out and feed it to him. Maybe he’d have a piece of the whore before he killed her too. He smiled in the dark chamber, a tightening of his facial muscles that on a normal person would look like a grimace. He wondered if he could work it so Mercer was still alive when he stuck it to the Eritrean slut, but he doubted it. Better to just kill the American and then have his fun.
He needed to get after them first. While it would be easy to track them in the dusty tunnels, he didn’t want them getting too far ahead. Waiting for more of the slave laborers to fall asleep, Mahdi used subtle hand signals to communicate with the other guards, a secret code of gestures that they’d used countless times during the civil war in Sudan. Mahdi ordered one of his men to sacrifice himself in a blatant escape attempt that would give him the opportunity to make a break for it. He’d considered trying to overpower their captors but the Eritreans were armed with the guards’ AK-47s. A silent retreat would work the best, and even if Mahdi got out without one of the Kalishnikovs, he still carried a throwing knife in his boot.
Waiting for the right moment, he glanced at the boots and remembered the fat bald man who had once owned them. That had been a boring hunt but a very satisfying kill, he recalled. Hadn’t his victim said he was an archeologist? Clever cover, but Mahdi had already been warned by Gianelli that the man was searching for the lost mine. Mahdi knew now that the man need not have died; he had been searching fifty miles from the mine. But Mahdi liked the boots.
When three quarters of the Eritreans were asleep, including one of the armed ones, he decided that it was time. Mahdi showed his comrade the old cavalryman’s signal of a closed fist and the waiting soldier gave a sharp nod. Charge.
The trooper didn’t hesitate. He leaped to his feet, kicking sleeping miners as he rushed toward a side tunnel away from where Mercer and Selome had disappeared, screaming unintelligible curses as he went. Mahdi too was in motion, using the other Sudanese as shields as he twisted away from the group, blending himself into the darkness beyond the feeble glow of the single lit flashlight.
The Eritreans came awake, one of them taking aim in the gloom and gave the trigger a quick tap. Three red explosions appeared on the diversionary guerrilla’s back, and he pitched forward, his body collapsing against the wall next to the exit. In the confusion, Mahdi rolled away from the group, the rope binding his hands making it difficult to move, but still he managed to grasp the spare light on his way out of the cavern.
He regained his feet and stumbled on. The tunnel was so dark he walked with his eyes closed, keeping his arms stretched to one side so he could brush along the wall. After passing several side branches, he ducked into another one and snapped on the light. It took him only a moment to pluck the knife from his boot and cut through the hemp securing his wrists. His men would destroy the other flashlight left with the Eritreans in the melee following his escape, so he was now immune from pursuit. He, and he alone, was the hunter in this hellish world, and Mercer would never know what was coming.
If Mercer thought the early part of their trek was torturous, it was nothing compared to the past couple of hours. It seemed he could do no wrong leading the miners to the fresh air chamber, but since then he’d led Selome up two long blind alleys and had been forced to wriggle through areas that even the children who’d dug these galleries would have trouble negotiating. It was as though they were trapped in the body of some enormous creature not willing to give up its latest meal. As they corkscrewed through the twisting intersections and aimless shafts, Mercer was beginning to think he would get them hopelessly lost. So far their motion had created a trail in the dust, but if they passed a spot that was clean, it would be impossible to backtrack to where the Eritreans waited.
Finally they entered another tall cavern, one that lacked fresh air but had been mined extensively. The flashlight’s beam revealed a sight that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Unlike the bodies he’d discovered in the Italian mine, these were not neatly laid out. It appeared they had been left where they had died. Their poses were agonizing. There were maybe a dozen of them, desiccated mummies with skin stretched tightly over screams of pain. The corpses were all of children, the oldest not more than ten or twelve. Even in death, their suffering transcended the millennia.
“Oh, God.” Selome gagged.
Mercer said nothing. He looked at the pitiable remains of the slave children, trying to keep emotions from clouding his judgment. By the ore piled around a couple of them, he could see that work had continued without
