war and walking into the teeth of another.
While these images haunted the darkest nightmares his sleep could generate, they could not prepare him for the six photographs before him. One showed an old man lying against a rusted drum, his legs looking like gnarled twigs. A feral dog chewed on one of his feet as the last of the man’s blood soaked into the ground. Another was of a young girl, her face peaceful in death, while in the background uniformed men waited in line to rape her corpse. Another showed a child — Mercer couldn’t tell the sex — waving at the camera with its body covered in suppurating wounds, dark leaking holes in its flesh that were eating away what little starvation had left behind.
He didn’t want to look at the other three. Here were images of the worst humans could do to each other, and he felt the impotency he’d experienced in Rwanda. The tides of misery were endless, and no matter how much he’d thrown himself at the problem, it never went away. He was also enraged that the photographer had stayed behind the anonymity of his camera and not stepped in to help.
“I’m sorry that you had to see those before we ate,” Hyde said, but there was no apology in his voice. The pictures were designed to provoke a deliberate response and Mercer knew it. He steeled himself for what was to come. “I believe we have the ability to help these people, to give Eritrea hope for the first time.
“In 1989,” Hyde continued, “NASA and the U.S. Air Force launched a spy satellite code-named Medusa. It was meant to be the eyes of the Star Wars defense program. But there was an accident, and it crashed before completing a single orbit.
“As it came down, its cameras exposed a series of pictures. Because the area photographed was not deemed strategically important and because the Air Force hadn’t been able to calibrate the satellite, the photos lay forgotten for over a decade. Even after they were declassified, no one paid any attention to them. Much of what they show is gibberish even to those who developed the system.
“The clearest Medusa pictures show what is now northern Eritrea and eastern Sudan.” Hyde pulled more photos out of the file and placed them before Mercer.
Though familiar with satellite photography, Mercer had never seen pictures like these before. These shots, twenty in total, resembled X rays. It was as if he was looking inside the earth, rock strata showing up in various shades of gray, what he assumed to be underground water appearing as bright white rings and whorls cutting across each shot, all beneath a ghost image of the surface topography.
“These shots are of northern Eritrea, each one representing a deeper level below the surface. As Medusa went down, its onboard computer followed preprogrammed instructions, increasing the power to its photographic element between each picture,” Hyde explained as Mercer shuffled through the stack, noting similarities between them. It was like looking at a cutaway model, peeling back successive layers with each photograph.
Mercer was awed by the satellite’s capabilities. “What in the hell was this Medusa?”
“It had abilities that go far beyond what you see here. When I first became aware of these pictures, I asked the same question. The Air Force liaison who showed them to me equated Medusa to a medical CAT scanner or an MRI, which make old-style X rays seem like a throwback to the nineteenth century. We’re talking about one of the most sophisticated machines man has ever built. If it hadn’t crashed, Medusa would have forever put the United States on the forefront of orbital surveillance and intelligence gathering.”
“Fascinating.” Mercer had no idea where Hyde was heading with all of this, but he couldn’t help being intrigued. “But I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Let me show you this and see what you think.” Hyde pulled another picture from the file.
Mercer glanced at it quickly; it looked no different from the other Medusa pictures.
“One of the scientists who built the satellite was a geology buff. A rock hound is what he called himself. Anyway, while modeling for the system, he was tasked with developing computer simulations of what Medusa’s potential would be. Because so much of South Africa’s underground makeup, its geology, has been studied by mining companies, it’s one of the best-catalogued regions for what lies under the earth’s surface. What you are seeing there is what they believed the area around Kimberley, South Africa, would look like if Medusa were to use its positron camera on it.”
Mercer understood and then he saw it.
First known as Colesberg Kopje because of the small hillock on the African veldt that was nothing more than a blister on the open savanna, Kimberley had grown into a boom town before the turn of the twentieth century when diamonds were discovered there. Within a few years, a city had grown up on the plain and germinated the fortunes of such notables as Cecil Rhodes and the DeBeers Corporation. The diamonds had long since run out at Kimberley, but in their wake, the miners had left a mile-wide, mile-deep hole in the earth. It was the mouth of what was known as a kimberlite pipe.
Kimberlite was the name given to a diamond mine’s lodestone. In fact, Mercer had a large chunk of it in his home office that acted as his good luck piece. The two minerals went hand in hand, much like gold and quartz. The kimberlite pipes are channels to the earth’s heart, openings where molten material, including diamonds, are thrust up toward the surface under tremendous pressure. Born in the planet’s liquid interior, diamonds are nothing more than elemental carbon, no different from coal or the graphite found in pencils, except that nature spent a little more time cooking the atoms and compressing them into perfect crystals. From their first discovery on the Indian subcontinent, Mercer knew, diamonds have had the power to captivate men and drive nations to war. Their dazzling beauty is the mirror reflection of our own greed, and their purity is the foil to humanity’s ugliness.
Placing the Kimberley computer projection next to one of the actual Medusa pictures, Mercer quickly traced nearly a dozen similar features between the two. Rather than let his imagination run wild, he studied them more closely. But the truth was right there. His heart raced, and his fingers and palms began to sweat as excitement tore into him. Such a discovery was made once in a lifetime, and Hyde was setting it right in front of him. Buried in the wasteland of northern Eritrea was a kimberlite pipe very much like the one discovered accidentally a century and a half ago in South Africa. He looked up at Hyde, his amazed expression verifying Hyde’s suspicion.
“Some of our people think so too. If there is a diamond-bearing pipe in Eritrea, it could mean economic prosperity for a nation that has absolutely no other prospects.”
Mercer reined in his excitement, forcing neutrality into his voice. “Intriguing, but from what I know of the region, there has never been any indication of diamonds or their marker minerals in the area. I can’t say for certain that Eritrea has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb, but it’s pretty unlikely that a find like this has gone unnoticed for the past hundred years. Especially since Eritrea fell under British protection after World War Two. The Brits rarely miss things like this.”
“But they didn’t have Medusa,” Hyde said. “Because Medusa was destroyed before it was calibrated, we have no way of knowing the depth of the pipe or exactly where it is on the map. It could be anywhere between the surface and ten thousand feet underground. It’s impossible to tell until we get a man on site, stake the area out, so to speak, and assay it for what treasures lie hidden.”
Despite himself, Mercer felt drawn to the possibilities. The pragmatic side of him knew the chances that what was on the picture was actually a kimberlite pipe were remote. And even if it were, it was likely it didn’t contain diamonds; many pipes had been found to be barren. Or its glittering cache had been washed away by erosion over the eons since the vent first reached the surface if, in fact, it ever had. A team could spend a lifetime scouring the wilderness and never find even a trace of the pipe.
“You can guess why I wanted to talk with you now,” Hyde said. “I’ve got to warn you that the best we can give you from the pictures is a two-hundred-square-mile area for your search in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. But I’ve every confidence you can find the kimberlite pipe and prove whether or not there are diamonds present.”
Hyde paused while a waiter cleared their plates. “I also have to tell you that until independence, that part of Eritrea saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war and is littered with a quarter-million land mines courtesy of Ethiopia’s Soviet backers. And bandits from Sudan prey on the region regularly. Just a few months ago, I got word about an Austrian archaeologist who was killed, butchered really, very close to the epicenter of the search area.”
“Is this part of your sales pitch?” He should have been turned away by those two admissions, but Mercer’s interest increased. He’d talked with Harry about his need for a challenge that went beyond his normal job, and Hyde was laying a big one on him.
“No.” Hyde smiled disarmingly. “But I want to tell you everything I know. I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. This mission is not without its risks, and I want you to be fully apprised before you make a
