Jack Du Brul - The Medusa Stone

“God, be careful,” Mercer cried. “I don’t have the room in here to get an erection.”

With Selome leading the way, they slowly returned to the area where Mercer had gotten stuck. “What happens now?”

“You keep going. Take the light and the gun, and try to find a way out of here.” Mercer sounded emotionless when he spoke but was glad that she couldn’t see his face.

Panic was a reaction to the unfamiliar, he told himself. But this time he had no experience to give him the confidence to keep from losing his grip with the rational.

“I can’t.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Even as he knew he might not escape alive, he thought about the others. “There are forty trapped miners waiting to be rescued, and if we both die right here, they die too.”

“I don’t care about them, dammit, I care about you.” She was sobbing.

Mercer reached out and stroked her ankle, pulling down her sock so he could touch her smooth skin. “And I care about you, too. But unless you get moving and find some help, I’ll never be able to take you on a sex-filled vacation in some exotic place.”

“Is that a promise?”

“I haven’t let you down yet.” Mercer felt another racking cough coming. The last words came out in a painful gasp.

“I can’t leave you.”

Her cry made him wince. He didn’t want to die alone, but he hardened himself, pushing aside his own needs. He struggled to regain his breath and purged his mouth of more blood. “Just go. You have to find a way out of here. I can’t have your death as the last thing on my conscience. You can’t do that to me.”

She sniffed back tears. “What about the canteen and the flashlight?”

“Take them.”

“Philip, I think that… I…” He could hear her struggling with the words and her own feelings, and before she committed herself, she changed her mind. “I think that we should go to Egypt, maybe a Nile cruise. I’ve always wanted to see the ancient monuments.”

“I’ll call my travel agent when you’re gone.”

Selome slithered away, vanishing from sight after a couple of yards. Mercer could see that a few impossible feet in front of him, the tunnel tantalizingly widened. The rock held him tighter than a straitjacket, and he struggled between panic and frustration. He’d never suffered claustrophobia, but he felt its icy tentacles reaching for him, grabbing him around every inch of his body and squeezing until his lungs convulsed. He drew shallow gulps of air so fouled with dust that he retched.

He was alone, shrouded in a darkness worse than death. He tried to wriggle forward but became more tightly trapped, the tunnel pressing him from all sides, holding him in a grip it would never relinquish. The blackness was so complete he could taste it as it filled his mouth and smell it as it invaded his lungs. His skin crawled with the silence of his tomb. His mind screamed for release from this prison, to move just a fraction of an inch. He could barely swivel his head, and when he did, crumbly mercury ore scraped off the ceiling, more poisonous dust for him to draw into his body.

“Okay, well, this is interesting, isn’t it?” It would only take a few days before his words became the ravings of a madman as he fought against the darkness and the silence and the isolation of his death.

Another spasm of coughing took him. His chest was unable to expand properly and the internal pressure threatened to shatter his ribs like glass. He wondered if pneumonia would develop and kill him before the mercury he was breathing destroyed his motor control and rotted his brain. He remembered that the beginning stage of mercury poisoning was a tremor in the extremities, and he couldn’t tell if the quiver in his legs was real or imagined.

Rather than dwell on the inevitable, he let his mind drift to the blue glow. What if he hadn’t seen a static discharge or a methane explosion? What if it really was the Ark, now crushed beyond recovery? “I’ve got the rest of my life to figure it out.”

Dick Henna broke years of training when he made that call. Since the early days of their marriage, Fay had worked tirelessly to get a little culture into her workaholic husband’s life. She had started out easy on him, the occasional foreign film or ethnic restaurant, and over time she had him going to musicals and actually enjoying the opera. Her only major setback had been a too-early introduction to ballet that had soured him forever, but the night he made the call to Mercer’s phone, she’d crossed another invisible line. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the plight of Tibet, but two hours of gongs and chanting and dance moves he couldn’t identify by the Tibetan National Troupe were just too much.

He’d mumbled an apology to Fay about needing the rest room and slid from the box at the Kennedy Center, dodging out of the huge theater and into the red-carpeted lobby. His Secret Service escorts seemed equally relieved at their temporary escape from the performance. Next to the bronze bust of the late President Kennedy, which to him was the ugliest statue he’d ever seen, he snapped open his cell phone and dialed Mercer for the hundredth time in the past weeks. It was a fruitless gesture, he knew, but he hadn’t had word from his friend and State Department reports about violence in Asmara had him concerned.

He was about to cut the connection after the fifth ring, when an unfamiliar voice answered in accented English. “Hello, you have reached the phone of Philip Mercer. He’s been buried alive. May I help you? My name is Habte Makkonen.”

Their fifteen-minute conversation cut short Henna’s concert. He sent an agent back to his seat to apologize to Fay. Like just about every other husband in the country, he figured he’d spend his retirement making up to his wife for the years of broken promises. The phone in his limo was more secure than his cell phone, and the attached scrambler had the latest in encryption software. He was on it for the entire drive to the Pentagon.

After alerting Marge Doyle, he called the Pentagon and had them track down C. Thomas Morrison. The limo reached the Department of Defense’s sprawling headquarters just as Admiral Morrison was located.

“Evening, Dick, how’re you doing?” the Joint Chiefs’ chairman asked jovially.

“I’ve got a present for you, but you’re going to have to unwrap it,” Henna replied. “Where are you right now?”

“Home. My son’s in town looking at colleges for his daughter. She wants Howard because it’s a black school, and he wants her at Georgetown because of its reputation.”

“Tell them they’re going to have to thumb through the catalogs without you. I’m at the Pentagon and you’re going to want to be here too.”

“What’s happening?”

“I found your Medusa photographs and we’re going to need some firepower to get them back.”

Admiral Morrison’s voice went serious the instant he heard the word Medusa . “Say no more. I’m putting on my shoes right now. I should be there in half an hour.”

Leave it to a military man to know the exact time of his commute no matter what the traffic situation. Twenty-nine minutes later, Morrison strode through the entry doors closest to his E-ring suite of offices, two uniformed aides pacing behind him in an arrowhead formation. He and Henna shook hands and strode to the elevators, arriving at Morrison’s office just an hour after Habte’s call. That hour was the longest delay in the chain of events to follow. Henna quickly outlined his conversation with Habte and the circumstances surrounding it.

“Northern Eritrea, huh?” Morrison studied the world map behind his desk. He chuckled. “Isn’t that a coincidence. Since our last conversation, a detachment of Force Recon Marines found themselves rotated to an amphibious assault ship off the coast of Somalia. There are two hundred soldiers on that ship who’d been planning a piece-of-cake tour in Italy and are mighty pissed off at their new deployment. I bet they’d love to vent some of that anger.”