Rolling his shoulders alternately and walking up the far wall, Mercer resumed his climb, blood soaking his shirt and running into his khaki pants. The shaft continued to widen as he climbed, making it necessary to exert more pressure against the walls to maintain his perch. If it opened much farther, Mercer knew he wouldn’t have the leverage to bridge the opening and still be able to climb. He shut his mind to that possibility, but he was becoming desperate, his body aching in areas he didn’t know existed. He was running out of strength, his muscles cramping, and knew he would never be able to control his descent if it became necessary. A fall from even thirty feet against the stone floor below would break bones. And in his position, he knew the most likely were his neck and back. Mercer climbed doggedly.
He realized he’d made it to the top of the raise when he could no longer hear stone scratching against his metal miner’s helmet. Levering himself upward another six inches, he was able to kick with both legs and torque his body to the side, rolling himself onto the floor of the upper drift. He lay there panting, his cheek pressed to the cold stone, blood dripping from the cuts in his back and from the scrapes on his hands.
Five minutes ticked by before he could move again. He stood shakily, brushed himself off, and flipped on the flashlight. Ignoring the passage to his left, he moved off to the right, knowing he was in a main artery because of its size. After two hundred yards he could see shadows in the darkness cast from light spilling down from the surface. He looked at the luminous dots on his watch. It was not yet noon, but he felt as if he’d been in the mine for a day or more.
The rope was dangling just out of his reach at the drift entrance, and he had to use his belt to snag it and draw it to him. In the gloom below he could see the abandoned machinery that had nearly trapped him forever. He gave the rope a sharp tug. Immediately, Gibby started hauling. When the bosun’s chair reached this level, Mercer jerked the line again to signal Gibby to stop. It was only when he had stepped into the harness and secured himself that he pulled a flare from his pocket and sparked the igniter off the stone wall. This was Gibby’s signal to start the Toyota and back the vehicle away from the head gear. The chair rose like a silent elevator.
The sun was a blessed relief after so many hours of darkness, and had Mercer’s eyes not possessed a feline quickness to adjust, the brightness would have left him blinded. He shucked the harness and was leaning against the head gear’s struts when Gibby drove back. Mercer felt an exhaustion that had nothing to do with his morning’s work. Gibby had the foresight to retrieve Mercer’s last beer and hand it over. Mercer downed the warm, gassy brew with several heavy swallows, belching so loudly it brought a startled guffaw from the Eritrean.
“Well, effendi?” The boy couldn’t contain his excitement. “Show me more of the stones that will make our nation rich.”
Mercer looked up at him, squinting against the blazing sun. Gibby looked like the image of a black Jesus Christ, a halo of sacred light cast around his head. Mercer dug something out of his breast pocket, a small misshapen lump. He tossed it to the eager teen, bowing his head.
Gibby stared at the bit of metal for a long time, his expression that of total confusion.
“It ain’t riches, kid. It’s lead from a bullet fired into the head of a man at the bottom of the mine, just like the four hundred other men who’d worked with him,” Mercer said.
He’d discovered the body slumped over the controls of the scraper at the end of the lowest drift. He’d been murdered like all the others, executed not only to preserve the mine’s secret location, but also to hide the fact that the entire project had been a failure. They had never hit the fabled blue ground, the kimberlite that held the diamonds. They had tunneled for years with their blood and their sweat, yet turned up nothing. And their reward? Their reward had been a summary shot to the head.
There were diamonds here, someplace, Mercer was sure. And with a couple of years, a few thousand men, and a couple hundred million dollars, he would be able to find them and bring them up. None of which he had, none of which would save Harry. The men holding him had said they wanted Mercer to find a mine, which he had, but he knew they would never accept this bust-out. They wanted diamonds, not a big hole in the ground, and they could set deadlines from now until doomsday and there was nothing Mercer could do to satisfy them.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, dammed-up tears of frustration and grief and pain finally spilling onto his cheeks.
The Eritrea-Sudan Border
There were two rugged gravel roads that crossed the lonely border, both of them traversing a deep gorge bridged with rickety wooden structures that dated back decades. Near both crossings, roughly forty kilometers apart, refugee camps had grown out of the scrub plain, tens of thousands of miserable people huddling together in tents that offered little protection from the wind or the brutal sun. The tent cities housed Eritreans who could not return to their homeland. Since the intensification of Sudan’s civil war, Sudanese natives too were seeking shelter here, hoping for the chance of a better life in Eritrea. Such was their desperation, they saw their impoverished neighbor as a promised land.
Situated close to the border and thus easier to reach, these camps were in much better condition than the reservations in Sudan’s interior. The people here received regular visits from United Nations and EC trucks carrying food, medicine, and clothing transshipped through Eritrea.
At the bottom of the gorge, a thin trickle of water passed the camps, and each camp had a continuous chain of girls making the trip down and back, heavy pots of water balanced on their heads. Washing and latrines were situated a short way from where they took their drinking water, but by the time the stream reached the downstream camp, it was fouled by its neighbor. Diseases such as dysentery and other bacterial infections raged.
A farther ten miles south from the second camp was a third, one occupied by soldiers rather than refugees. A compound had been carved out of a rare grove of camel thorn trees, tents erected in their meager shade. A generator hummed a short distance from the camp, and a pump drew water from the gorge through a two-inch hose. A team of three men tended the fires for boiling the water, purifying it with heat before it was further chemically treated.
Despite the efforts to maintain a sanitary encampment, the fetid smell from the refugee camp wafted on the breeze, carrying with it the stink of sewage. That and the constant buzzing of metallic green flies were the two biggest drawbacks to the soldiers’ camp, in Giancarlo Gianelli’s opinion. He found everything else to his liking. His tent was large and air-conditioned, and the cooking was surprisingly good. One of Mahdi’s rebel troopers had been a chef in Khartoum before taking up arms, and he delighted in the equipment Gianelli had brought into the bush. If he could ignore the armed troopers bivouacked around him, with their continuous arms practice and parade formations, Gianelli would have likened this to one of the elegant “Hemingway” camps run by the big safari companies in Kenya or South Africa.
Gianelli sat in the shade of his tent’s awning, his view of the world beyond made indistinct by gauzy mosquito netting. His desk was mahogany, but cleverly constructed so it could be folded flat and easily moved. The matching chair was covered with zebra hide. A glass of sparkling water, blistered with condensation, rested in easy reach next to a laptop computer, allowing him to keep in contact with the many branches of Gianelli SpA through a satellite link.