Jack Du Brul - The Medusa Stone

The advantage shifted when the Israeli grasped the dangling bunch of Habte’s genitals and squeezed them with all of his strength. Habte howled, arching his body in an effort to break the grip, but the sniper held on with the tenacity of a remora. Managing to free one hand, Habte wrapped his fingers around the Israeli’s throat and angled the sniper for a vicious head butt that shattered teeth and forced blood to pool in the soldier’s mouth. Choking on his own blood and with his wind pipe almost crushed, the sniper started to die, his grip on Habte’s balls loosening.

Habte maintained the pressure long after the sniper stopped struggling and only stood when he felt that all the life had been crushed from the body. He studied the face and recognized him as the driver of the car parked outside the Ambasoira Hotel when the Sudanese and the Israelis had clashed in Mercer’s room. Habte wished it was the Israeli team’s leader lying here covered in mud and soaked with his own blood, but that would have to wait.

The phone’s ring shocked Habte, and he lifted himself painfully from the ground and found the small device half buried in the mud. It had landed about an inch from the lip of the mine shaft.

Habte snapped it open and pressed the button to accept the call. His voice was a painful wheeze. “Hello, you have reached the phone of Philip Mercer. He’s been buried alive. May I help you? My name is Habte Makkonen.”

The men working to clear the mine entrance heard and felt another explosion deep within the earth, a jolt that shook the ground. In the pause that followed, Gianelli asked Joppi Hofmyer if he knew the origin of the subterranean detonation. The South African had no answer, and rather than speculate, as Gianelli seemed to want, Hofmyer put the crews back to work. It took another forty minutes to clear the entrance enough for a man to slip inside.

Hofmyer went first, a powerful flashlight supplementing the lamp on his miner’s helmet. Gianelli scrambled after him, and the two started down the near-black tunnel. Hofmyer kept his eyes on the walls and ceiling, looking for new cracks in the rock. Every few feet he would tap the stone with a hammer, listening for a dull thud that would indicate a rotten place. In contrast, Gianelli stared into the gloom ahead of them, his mind focused on recovering his diamonds.

“They must have tried to blow open the safe. That’s what we heard,” he told an uninterested Hofmyer. “Mercer warned about using explosives under the dome without blast mats, so it couldn’t be anything else.”

The lights cut just a few feet into the choking veil of dust that mingled with the chemical stench of explosives. So far the path into the mountain was clear. Nothing seemed out of place amid the dressed stones that lined the walls and ceiling.

Hofmyer was the first to see a new plug in the tunnel, when he estimated they were only about two hundred feet from the pit. Rubble blocked the drive from floor to ceiling, but this avalanche wasn’t as tightly packed as the first one. The rock was loose and shifted with just a tap of his foot, and when he levered a few pieces out of the pile, nothing new fell from above.

“What’s this all about?” Gianelli asked.

“No idea, but if Mercer thinks this’ll stop us for long, he’s out of his bloody head,” Hofmyer sneered. “It’ll take nothing to move this out of the way and get to the pit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, the ceiling seems stable, but just to be safe, we’ll shore this lot up as we clear the muck outa the way.” Hofmyer finished his examination of the pile of debris and turned to his employer. Gianelli had promised him a bonus commensurate with the speed in which the diamonds were recovered, so he had a newfound desire to get into the mine. “I told ya I heard of this Mercer before from some of the trade magazines and from mates back in South Africa, and I expected a hell of a lot more from him. Blocking the tunnel like this is child’s play. I don’t know what he’s playing at, but this is starting to piss me off.”

“When we get our hands on him, he’ll wish he had died in the avalanche.”

Once the entrance to the main tunnel was completely cleared, Hofmyer ordered the Eritreans to remove the debris from Mercer’s drop mat. The explosives had rendered the waste into easily maneuvered chunks, and a human chain was quickly established to transfer the debris outside. It still took nearly two hours because of the distance to the surface and because Hofmyer used specially designed screw jacks to prop up the hanging wall.

Gianelli was standing next to the South African when they broke through to the pit. Hofmyer poked his head into the chamber, a pistol held in his fist, just in case. He was silent for a long moment.

“Well?” Gianelli panted.

Hofmyer didn’t answer. He directed a couple of workers to clear away the last of the rubble and crawled into the domed chamber. Emboldened by Hofmyer’s actions, Gianelli dogged his heels. They found themselves standing on the ledge above the ancient mine floor. Lights still blazed brightly, running on internal battery power because the generators were silent. In fact, they had been destroyed, their mechanical guts spread around them in pools of oil. The drills were lined up next to the generators, and they, too, had been wrecked, the couplings for the air hoses smashed beyond repair.

Apart from the equipment, the chamber was empty.

“Gone,” Gianelli said, not believing his eyes. “They are all gone.”

Hofmyer stood next to him, slack-jawed incredulity on his face. There was no sign of Mercer or the Eritrean miners or the Sudanese guards. Mercer had made the entire group vanish.

On the far wall of the pit, written with neon yellow paint in letters five feet tall was a simple six-word message composed, no doubt, by Philip Mercer. It sent a deep chill through Hofmyer and especially Gianelli. They both felt that somehow it was true.

I’M WAITING FOR YOU IN HELL

An hour before Gianelli broke through the first avalanche and encountered the drop mat, the working floor of the mine had been far different. Machinery thrummed and ratcheted, echoing off the arched roof and drowning the shouts and oaths of the Eritrean workers. The activity was frantic as they strove to reach Mercer’s nearly impossible deadline. They tore into the deep shaft like madmen, jack-hammering out chunks of stone that had to be muscled from the pit. They had bored a man-sized hole a further fifteen feet into the soft stone, deflected at an angle from the main shaft in strict accordance to Mercer’s instructions.

In the entry tunnel, the scene was less hectic but just as noisy, the crew continuing to drill ten-foot-deep holes into the hanging wall. Mercer had left the work in the pit and joined this crew, following behind them with bundles of explosives. He placed each charge carefully, not letting the pressure of time rush the delicate process. Selome worked with him, handing him the cylinders of plastique from a cart they had dragged into the tunnel. The drillers were far enough ahead so they could hold a shouted conversation.

“Are you finally going to explain what we’re doing?” she asked.

Mercer didn’t look up from the charge he was wiring. “Yeah. This drop mat is going to buy us a few more hours before Gianelli reaches us.”

“You already told me that,” Selome replied. “And you said you’re going to make us all disappear, but what do you mean?”

Mercer answered her question with one of his own. “Did you notice something incongruous between the mine that Brother Ephraim described and this tunnel here?” Selome shook her head. “He said that Solomon’s mine was excavated by children working in slave conditions, right?”