Jack Du Brul - The Medusa Stone

“Gold doubloon I’m not.”

He couldn’t believe how good it felt to be sore. It meant he was still alive. He swayed to his feet, reaching to brush a tendril of hair from Selome’s face. “I didn’t think you were coming back.” His voice was thick. He wanted to tell her what had happened when she left him alone, but he couldn’t. What he felt went beyond words. He simply stepped into her embrace, soaking up the heat of her body. “Thank you.”

There was just enough amber incandescence from the flashlight for him to visually explore the chamber they occupied and to understand how she had gotten him out of his tomb. The gallery was roughly rectangular and at least thirty feet tall with a shallow alcove at one end. Its walls had been covered with blocks of dressed stone. Mercer recognized the stones used in the closet-sized niche. He had seen them before. They were the same type as those lining the main tunnel from the surface. This room had been a staging area, a link between the direct path to the kimberlite ore beds and the older, more meandering tunnels. Behind him, a towering pile of dirt reached almost to the ceiling. At its summit, he saw the tiny round hole that led to the rest of the old mine and had held him prisoner for so long.

When the new, straighter drift had been driven into the mountain, the workers must have back-filled the passageway to the room and pillar mine chamber. In the thousands of years since then, the fill had settled enough for Mercer to crawl almost to the point where it emptied into this room. Of course, Selome had recognized that if she dug into the base of the mountain of dirt, it would collapse into the room and free him.

“I’m sorry it took so long, but when I fell into this chamber, I cracked my head against the floor and blacked out.” There was an angry bruise above her left eye.

“You won’t hear me complaining.” Mercer gulped half the remaining water from their canteen and examined the shovel Selome had used to loosen his earthen constraints. “It’s a shame you had to use that. It’s a beautiful example of a bronze-aged tool.”

“Then I’m glad you’re not an archaeologist. I ruined about five of these things getting you out.”

There was a collection of primitive tools in one corner of the room, picks and shovels, some scaled for an adult’s use, other miniature versions for the child slaves. Next to them sat rotted piles of leather that had been buckets and water flasks. A little bit off lay stacks of clay lamps.

“We can bemoan lost artifacts later,” Mercer said. “Right now I want to get us out of here and take care of some business.”

He rigged the stones blocking the alcove exit with explosives from his kit bag, careful to use just enough to take down a section of the wall and not blow it apart. He had no idea what was happening in the main tunnel beyond the barrier and didn’t want to advertise his presence until he was ready.

“What about fuse? Didn’t you use it against Mahdi?”

Mercer plucked another coil from his bag and snipped off a length. “Second rule of hard rock mining: you can never have enough fuse.”

“What’s the first rule?”

Mercer held up more dynamite. “You can never have enough explosives.”

The fuse was much slower than the one he’d used to disable Mahdi, so they had plenty of time to make it to the trench redoubt he’d dug with Selome’s help. He covered his head with one arm, keeping his body over Selome. When the charge blew, the concussion pelted them with debris.

He looked up and blinked. The wall hadn’t crumbled, but there was a three-foot crawl space at its bottom and light from the outside spilled into the chamber. Neither of them had ever thought they would see sunshine again and they embraced in its comforting aura.

“Now, let’s see this put to an end.” Mercer slung his bag over his shoulder, snatched up the AK-47, and led Selome into the tunnel.

The echoing sounds of a gun battle reverberated down the length of the shaft, stray tracer rounds winking by. Mercer quickly shoved Selome back into the chamber.

“Stay here and don’t move until I come for you. You just saved my life. Now it’s my turn.” He stepped out, keeping low to the footwall, the AK at the ready.

Mercer couldn’t tell who was using the mine as a cover position so he started crawling forward as more rounds streaked over his head. His eyes adjusted to the sunlight filling the shaft, but the haze of cordite smoke was nearly blinding and he had to get close to recognize the men firing out toward the camp. They were Sudanese soldiers. Habte must have made the call because he guessed the return fire ricocheting down the drive was from the Marines.

The rebels held an unassailable position against the American soldiers as long as they had ammunition. Unless a rocket launcher was used, there was no way to dislodge them. The Marines surely knew Habte’s warning to Henna about the trapped miners, so explosives were not an option. Remembering Mahdi’s sneak attack in the mine and the brutal raping that had taken place outside the women’s stockade, Mercer felt nothing as he brought the AK to his shoulder.

With controlled double taps on semiautomatic, he shot four Sudanese in the back and the remaining two in the chest when they whirled to face the threat that had come unexpectedly from behind. He scrambled up to their barricade and searched frantically for something white to wave at the Marines still pouring rounds into the tunnel entrance. He had to make do with the well-used handkerchief he found in the pocket of one of the dead man. A second after waving it over the barricade, he heard a command in English to hold fire.

He stood. “Don’t shoot. I’m an American.”

“Dr. Mercer?” a Texas drawl asked over the din of a continuing battle farther from the mine.

“Yeah, I’m Mercer.” The euphoria he should be feeling had been suppressed by his desire to make the Sudanese and especially Gianelli suffer for what had happened in the past weeks. “I’ve got a woman with me, and there are forty miners still trapped in here.” He looked to where he thought the Marines had taken cover, but he couldn’t see them. There were too many places to hide on the desert floor-behind the scattered equipment boxes or near some of the heavy equipment that hadn’t been damaged during the battle or behind one of the countless piles of dirt excavated from the mine.

“Ya’ll have to hold tight for a spell longer. This is one hot LZ.” The soldier’s comment was drowned by the thundering rotors of an AH-64 Apache gunship as it crabbed across the desert, its chin gun pouring a steady stream of 20mm rounds into the far side of the camp.

Mercer spotted the cluster of Force Recon Marines huddled next to an overturned and still burning D-4 bulldozer. The soldier in charge saw him, waved in acknowledgment, and led his squad across the camp. Mercer drained the contents of two Sudanese canteens, and when the Marines were out of sight, he bolted from the mine, jinxing around toppled lighting towers and mountains of overburden. Though the rain had stopped, the sky was thick with clouds. The heat and humidity made his dash slow, and his bruised chest protested every breath. The knife wound in his leg was a sharp throb. Suddenly, the sky directly overhead exploded. A pressure wave of air slammed him to the earth, the concussion blasting against his eardrums. He rolled to his back and began scrabbling across the ground.

Two hundred feet above him, the flaming carapace of the Apache gyrated out of control, streamers of greasy smoke belching from its engine, its tail rotor assembly coming apart like a shrapnel bomb. One of the rebels had fired a surface-to-air missile into the helo and scored a direct hit. The gunship crashed close enough to throw Mercer again, fiery sheets of aviation fuel raining around him, but incredibly none landed on his clothes or skin.