little room between her body and the tunnel walls, Mercer was so constricted that every cough seemed stillborn in his chest, exploding within his body without finding a proper outlet. He had to prepare himself for the pain when he felt one coming. Already he could taste the coppery salt of blood in his mouth from ruptured lung tissue.
Mercer jammed.
Fighting panic, he rolled his shoulders and tried to work them forward, but the more he struggled, the more it seemed the walls tightened around him like the remorseless coils of a python. The tunnel floor was compacted dirt, and he tried to tear into it with his hands, but it was as hard as cement and left his fingers bleeding.
Selome saw his frantic movements and slid back to avoid his flailing feet. “What’s happening?”
“I’m afraid I’m stuck.”
“What do you mean stuck?”
“I mean I can’t move. I can’t go back and I can’t go forward.”
“Well, try!” In the confines of the tunnel, her voice was muted, dead, like she was speaking from the other side of a wall.
“And you think I’ve been lying here taking a nap,” Mercer snapped, but he couldn’t draw a deep enough breath to give force to his words. He felt like he was drowning.
“I’m sorry,” Selome said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Grab my feet and pull as hard as you can.” He needed to breathe. He wanted to scream. The rock wouldn’t let him.
It took five minutes to pull him back enough for him to gain some working room. Mercer calmed again, but he could feel panic clawing at the back of his thoughts. His shoulders and back were flecked with blood. “Now we go back again.”
“But that way is blocked by the cave-in.”
“Not that far back. We need to find a place where you can crawl over me and take the lead. I think you will be able to squeeze through.”
“What about you?”
“We’ll burn that bridge after we cross it.”
It took two hours of slithering backward for them to find an area with enough ceiling height for Selome to crawl over him. When she was lying on his back, she rested her head against his neck for a moment, her breath in his ear.
“God, be careful,” Mercer cried. “I don’t have the room in here to get an erection.”
With Selome leading the way, they slowly returned to the area where Mercer had gotten stuck. “What happens now?”
“You keep going. Take the light and the gun, and try to find a way out of here.” Mercer sounded emotionless when he spoke but was glad that she couldn’t see his face.
Panic was a reaction to the unfamiliar, he told himself. But this time he had no experience to give him the confidence to keep from losing his grip with the rational.
“I can’t.”
“You don’t have a choice.” Even as he knew he might not escape alive, he thought about the others. “There are forty trapped miners waiting to be rescued, and if we both die right here, they die too.”
“I don’t care about them, dammit, I care about you.” She was sobbing.
Mercer reached out and stroked her ankle, pulling down her sock so he could touch her smooth skin. “And I care about you, too. But unless you get moving and find some help, I’ll never be able to take you on a sex-filled vacation in some exotic place.”
“Is that a promise?”
“I haven’t let you down yet.” Mercer felt another racking cough coming. The last words came out in a painful gasp.
“I can’t leave you.”
Her cry made him wince. He didn’t want to die alone, but he hardened himself, pushing aside his own needs. He struggled to regain his breath and purged his mouth of more blood. “Just go. You have to find a way out of here. I can’t have your death as the last thing on my conscience. You can’t do that to me.”
She sniffed back tears. “What about the canteen and the flashlight?”
“Take them.”
“Philip, I think that… I…” He could hear her struggling with the words and her own feelings, and before she committed herself, she changed her mind. “I think that we should go to Egypt, maybe a Nile cruise. I’ve always wanted to see the ancient monuments.”
“I’ll call my travel agent when you’re gone.”
Selome slithered away, vanishing from sight after a couple of yards. Mercer could see that a few impossible feet in front of him, the tunnel tantalizingly widened. The rock held him tighter than a straitjacket, and he struggled between panic and frustration. He’d never suffered claustrophobia, but he felt its icy tentacles reaching for him, grabbing him around every inch of his body and squeezing until his lungs convulsed. He drew shallow gulps of air so fouled with dust that he retched.
He was alone, shrouded in a darkness worse than death. He tried to wriggle forward but became more tightly trapped, the tunnel pressing him from all sides, holding him in a grip it would never relinquish. The blackness was so complete he could taste it as it filled his mouth and smell it as it invaded his lungs. His skin crawled with the silence of his tomb. His mind screamed for release from this prison, to move just a fraction of an inch. He could barely swivel his head, and when he did, crumbly mercury ore scraped off the ceiling, more poisonous dust for him to draw into his body.
“Okay, well, this is interesting, isn’t it?” It would only take a few days before his words became the ravings of a madman as he fought against the darkness and the silence and the isolation of his death.
Another spasm of coughing took him. His chest was unable to expand properly and the internal pressure threatened to shatter his ribs like glass. He wondered if pneumonia would develop and kill him before the mercury he was breathing destroyed his motor control and rotted his brain. He remembered that the beginning stage of mercury poisoning was a tremor in the extremities, and he couldn’t tell if the quiver in his legs was real or imagined.
Rather than dwell on the inevitable, he let his mind drift to the blue glow. What if he hadn’t seen a static discharge or a methane explosion? What if it really was the Ark, now crushed beyond recovery? “I’ve got the rest of my life to figure it out.”
Washington, D.C
Dick Henna broke years of training when he made that call. Since the early days of their marriage, Fay had worked tirelessly to get a little culture into her workaholic husband’s life. She had started out easy on him, the occasional foreign film or ethnic restaurant, and over time she had him going to musicals and actually enjoying the opera. Her only major setback had been a too-early introduction to ballet that had soured him forever, but the night he made the call to Mercer’s phone, she’d crossed another invisible line. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the plight of Tibet, but two hours of gongs and chanting and dance moves he couldn’t identify by the Tibetan National Troupe were just too much.
He’d mumbled an apology to Fay about needing the rest room and slid from the box at the Kennedy Center, dodging out of the huge theater and into the red-carpeted lobby. His Secret Service escorts seemed equally relieved at their temporary escape from the performance. Next to the bronze bust of the late President Kennedy, which to him was the ugliest statue he’d ever seen, he snapped open his cell phone and dialed Mercer for the hundredth time in the past weeks. It was a fruitless gesture, he knew, but he hadn’t had word from his friend and State Department reports about violence in Asmara had him concerned.
He was about to cut the connection after the fifth ring, when an unfamiliar voice answered in accented English. “Hello, you have reached the phone of Philip Mercer. He’s been buried alive. May I help you? My name is Habte Makkonen.”
Their fifteen-minute conversation cut short Henna’s concert. He sent an agent back to his seat to apologize
