Jack Du Brul - The Medusa Stone

The South African raised his hands so quickly that his knuckles scraped on the low ceiling. Selome made a tiny scuffing sound as she came up behind du Toit, and if anything, the miner’s hands pressed tighter against the hanging wall.

“Smart choice,” Mercer said softly. “Now, we’re going back to the pit and see if you can convince the guerrillas to do the same thing. Nod if you think that’s a good idea.”

Du Toit bobbed his head vigorously, though his eyes never left the 7.62mm aperture of the AK leveled at his genitals.

“That’s good, because if you aren’t convincing, you’ll be the first to die.”

Mercer stood at the top of the working pit, holding du Toit by the shirt collar, and gave a bellowing, primeval yell. The four Sudanese swiveled their guns to the duo standing ten feet over their heads but held off firing. Selome quickly crawled forward to cover the guards with her own AK.

“Drop your weapons!” she shouted in Tigrinyan, and when one of the Sudanese who understood the language did so, the others followed suit. Eritreans near the guards scrambled to retrieve the assault rifles.

Many of them had been freedom fighters just a few years earlier, and they handled the weapons with easy familiarity, forcing the Sudanese to their knees and asking Selome if they could kill them.

“No,” she called. “We need the ammunition for later, and these dogs may have value when we get out.” She looked at Mercer and repeated what she’d just said in English. “I didn’t think you wanted them dead.”

“Good assumption.” Mercer released du Toit and trotted down the ramp that led to the floor of the mine. He sat at a table used as the underground office, clearing away rock samples and mining gear with a sweep of his arm. “I estimate we have another three hours before Gianelli breaks through, so first we need to put another roadblock in his way. And then we’ve got some serious mining to do.”

“What’s your plan?” Selome joined him.

“First thing is to send some men to drag that safe in here with us. Then we need to drop more of the tunnel hanging wall, close to where it reaches the pit. There’s more than enough explosives here for the job.”

“Didn’t you say something to Hofmyer about needing to channel the explosions away from the chamber to avoid destroying the main dome?”

Mercer chuckled, “Hofmyer might be a miner, but he’s no geologist. That dome’s been here for a billion years, sitting near some of the most active fault lines on the planet. If earthquakes haven’t destroyed it by now, it’d take a nuke to damage it today.”

“So we replug the tunnel. I’m guessing that’s to slow Gianelli again?”

“Correct.”

“And what will we be doing while he’s digging?”

“I told you, we’re going to vanish into thin air.” Mercer slid the Medusa pictures from his kit bag and carefully unfolded them. When he found the one he wanted, he showed it to Selome.

She studied the unintelligible jumble of lines and swirls and splashes of color. “I’m sorry, but those pictures make no sense to me.”

“If Alice had a photograph like these, she never would have gotten lost in Wonderland.” Mercer grinned. “I’ll explain it all in a while, but first we need to get these men working. We’ll split into two teams, so you’ll have to do double duty interpreting for me unless anyone else here speaks English.”

Twenty minutes later, Mercer had a gang of ten men standing in the tunnel. He’d used a can of fluorescent spray to mark where he wanted holes drilled into the ceiling and fashioned a piece of metal wire as a depth gauge. There were about thirty bright orange spots spread along a hundred-foot section of the tunnel. Through Selome’s translations, he explained that he wanted half the holes drilled straight upward and the other half at an angle. Angling the holes would direct the force of their explosives in a more random destructive pattern. The holes didn’t need to be any deeper than the wire gauge. He left instructions to be told when the first fifteen holes had been drilled so he could place the charges needed to bring down the hanging wall.

He watched for several minutes to make certain the men knew what he wanted and was pleased at how proficient they had become with the drills. Each one weighed a hundred pounds and they were as long and unwieldy as railroad ties, yet the Eritreans worked them with the expertise of seasoned professionals. Water from a tank lubricated the drill’s cutting heads, and chips of rock and mud began pouring from the ceiling in a steady drizzle. One of the men paused to wave at Mercer when he removed the drill from the first completed hole.

“Hit it again, man.” Mercer slapped him on the shoulder and the miner started boring into another of the painted marks.

Mercer left them to their task and returned to the table with the Medusa photographs. Selome had laid out some food and water for him and he ate while studying one particular picture. She sat close by, watching him as he worked but he paid her little heed. His face was a mask of concentration, and when he looked up from his task, his eyes were hard and his expression grim.

Without proper tools and measurements, Mercer had set himself a nearly impossible task, and amid the din of the workers rigging the tunnel, he felt the responsibility weighing heavily. He needed a plug that would slow Gianelli, not deter him entirely. Mercer knew there was a chance that when they collapsed more of the tunnel, its entire length would come down. If the Italian abandoned the diamonds Mercer had stolen, there wasn’t enough fuel for the drills or explosives for them to tunnel themselves back out. He’d intentionally buried them alive, and if he continued with his plan, he might seal them in forever, murdering Selome and the other forty people in here with him.

Selome touched Mercer on the back of his scarred hand, and he looked into her dark eyes. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “I believe in you.”

“This time I don’t think it’s going to be enough,” he replied, but hauled himself to his feet and waved over the cluster of miners waiting for instructions.

They walked to one of the deeper shafts that had been dug into the working floor of the mine. The bottom of the fifty-foot hole was lost in the gloom. Mercer scrambled down the ladder, followed by Selome and the Eritrean who was the gang’s leader. He shook the can of spray paint he’d carried with him, the tiny ball bearing clattering like the tail of a rattlesnake. Glancing again at the Medusa picture he’d brought, Mercer painted two bold crisscrossing diagonal lines near the south corner of the shaft.

“X marks the spot.” He tossed the can to the ground. “We dig here faster than Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, and just maybe we’ll make it out of this mess alive.”

Selome’s next question was lost in the bustle of men lowering equipment into the hole. Minutes later, Mercer had stripped off his shirt and stood poised over one of the big drills, its tip resting on the rock floor. “Our only saving grace is there’s no kimberlite down here. The early miners dug like bastards but didn’t find anything. The rock is a much softer matrix; otherwise my plan would never work.”

“What’s beneath us?”

He looked at her. “The real King Solomon’s Mine.” With that, he opened the compressed air valve on the drill. It was as if the shattering sound alone splintered the stone as the cutter head sank into the earth.

Within a few minutes of leaving the camp, Habte Makkonen knew that he had been spotted and followed, yet he did not change his pace or direction. Doing so would alert the stalker. The man who shadowed him was good, an expert actually, and the storm made his job that much easier, but Habte hadn’t survived so many years in the front lines of the rebellion without becoming better still.