Jack Du Brul - The Medusa Stone

“And then?”

“You and I find the way out of here. We’ll be able to move a lot faster if we don’t have to worry about stragglers and our prisoners.” Mercer glanced back into the darkness, listening to the coughing fits of the men. The air was rank. “Now you know why I didn’t want Habte with us. As much as he smokes, he wouldn’t last five minutes in here. By the time we get out, he should have reached Dick Henna and a couple hundred Marines will have landed, taking care of our former Italian slave master.”

“And then we come back for the rest of the miners?”

“You got it.”

They started out, Mercer in the lead with Selome right behind. They followed the erratic beam of his flashlight as he crawled through the serpentine tunnels on his hands and knees. After an hour, all of them were feeling the effects of the dust their motion kicked up, and the tunnel echoed like a tuberculosis ward. The Eritreans were drinking water at a prodigious rate to salve their burned throats. Mercer was becoming concerned. They needed to find a small chink in the earth’s armor that allowed a seep of air to reach the dark maze.

Another two hours of uninterrupted agony followed as the party oozed through the warren with wormlike slowness. Every few hundred yards, Mercer would test the air for movement, but each time the lighter’s flame held steady. He studied the Medusa pictures at many of the major junctures. Their resolution was so poor that the lines on the photos did not correspond with the three-dimensional map he was creating in his mind. After the fourth frustrating time, he angrily tucked them back in his bag. Their only hope lay with Mercer’s instincts and his intimate knowledge of mines and mining. He was the only one who could navigate this subterranean realm, ignoring large branches and side tunnels that might have tempted another and leading them through tiny crawl spaces that someone else would have ignored.

They were well into their fourth hour when Mercer sparked his lighter again. The small flames swayed away from him, its movement so slight that had he not been staring, he never would have noticed it. Selome saw the expression on his face and grinned.

“I think we’re going to be okay,” he said.

The chamber they found fifteen minutes later was about twenty feet square, and while the quarters were cramped, everyone fit. Mercer noted that the cavity was a natural formation, one that the child miners had discovered and exploited for themselves. It was like a warm womb deep underground, a sanctuary from the agonizing labor they endured until their young lives ended in the darkness. The ceiling of the cave was about six feet tall and was scarred with hundreds of cracks. Through one of these fissures and through a labyrinthine twist in the living rock, a trickle of air descended into the earth, freshening the atmosphere. After the foul odor of the tunnels, the air in the chamber was sweet and joyously refreshing.

Selome settled against Mercer’s chest as he lay against one wall, taking a much needed break. The men were tangled around them like a litter of exhausted puppies, too tired to sort themselves out. Many minutes would pass before the last coughing spell ended with a wet expectoration of blood.

“It’s all downhill from here,” Mercer said.

“You mean it gets easier?”

“No.” Mercer shook his head. “We’ve been climbing toward the surface for the past hour so these tunnels will have to slope downward again if we’re going to find an exit we can use.”

“Okay, mister.” Selome looked at him with mock severity. “You’ve been giving cryptic answers and telling only half the story since we entered the mine, and every time you pull some trick out of your hat. So what’s your trick this time?”

Mercer laughed. “Found me out, did you? Yes, I have another trick. Remember when we first entered the mine after Gianelli caught us at the monastery? I said I was looking for an escape route.” Selome nodded. “I noticed a section of wall a hundred feet from the surface that looked as if it had been rebuilt. The stone was a shade lighter than the blocks used to line the rest of the tunnel. I’m betting our lives that there’s another tunnel behind it that had been covered over, hidden.”

“You think these old mine shafts lead to it.”

He nodded. “But if they don’t, we are seriously screwed.” They rested for another half hour before Mercer decided that if he delayed any longer, he’d be too stiff to continue. He roused Selome and spoke with the gang leaders, again asking her to translate. He laid out his plan and the Eritreans agreed. Their faith in his abilities was an inspiration for Mercer, but also a burden. First it was Harry’s life which depended on what he did, then Selome’s and Habte’s, and now he’d added forty more people, plus the others still in the slave compounds. He cleared his mind of creeping defeatism. It was much too late to doubt his decisions, even if he led them into a possible, and quite literal, dead end.

“Are you ready?” Mercer asked.

“Have I ever said no?”

“That’s my girl.”

They started out of the chamber, exiting through one of the larger tunnels. In only a few seconds, they could no longer see the glow from the two flashlights they’d left with the Eritreans. The beam of their own single light seemed puny in the mounting blackness of the unnatural maze. And as Mercer crawled ahead of Selome, the single AK-47 he’d taken with him seemed just as ineffective if they managed to reach the surface and had to face Gianelli again.

Mahdi had bided his time. He was not a patient man and the quiet waiting had been frustrating, but now it was all about to pay off. He lay with the three other Sudanese soldiers, men who had been under his command for years, men who would kill or die for him. Just having him with them had given his troops the necessary discipline to wait out the American and his Eritrean whore. Lying amid the stinking pile of humanity, Mahdi congratulated himself for getting this far.

Of course, it was pure chance he’d been in the mine talking with his troops when Mercer appeared. He was the soldier to drop his weapon first, sensing that even with superior firepower, Mercer had taken the tactical advantage by holding the white miner. When he saw the whore appear a moment later, her own weapon leveled, Mahdi knew he’d made the correct choice.

Another element of chance at work tonight was the large bandage that swathed the upper half of his face and dressed his right cheek. He’d been practicing fighting moves against one of his lieutenants with unsheathed knives, as was their habit, when the soldier slipped and the blade slashed Mahdi’s face. The wound would heal nicely, adding a new scar to the older wounds marring his body. The bandage his medic had applied hid enough of his features to prevent anyone from recognizing him, and since neither Mercer nor the Eritreans had looked too closely, they hadn’t realized their prisoner was the commander of the Sudanese guard detail.

Mahdi had allowed himself to be taken, cowed like the rest of his men and shepherded along with this suicide mission for no other reason than to see Mercer choke to death on his tongue when there was the chance to cut it out and feed it to him. Maybe he’d have a piece of the whore before he killed her too. He smiled in the dark chamber, a tightening of his facial muscles that on a normal person would look like a grimace. He wondered if he could work it so Mercer was still alive when he stuck it to the Eritrean slut, but he doubted it. Better to just kill the American and then have his fun.

He needed to get after them first. While it would be easy to track them in the dusty tunnels, he didn’t want them getting too far ahead. Waiting for more of the slave laborers to fall asleep, Mahdi used subtle hand signals to communicate with the other guards, a secret code of gestures that they’d used countless times during the civil war in Sudan. Mahdi ordered one of his men to sacrifice himself in a blatant escape attempt that would give him the opportunity to make a break for it. He’d considered trying to overpower their captors but the Eritreans were armed with the guards’ AK-47s. A silent retreat would work the best, and even if Mahdi got out without one of the Kalishnikovs, he still carried a throwing knife in his boot.