The last thing Mercer remembered clearly was the sound of Selome’s voice. Then he was assaulted by a jumbled whirl of images, screams, and pain, the earth erupting under the Land Cruiser and the jarring crush as it slammed into the ground again.
His ears ringing, Mercer wiped his face, and his trembling hand came away covered with blood. His whole body ached as his senses slowly returned. He couldn’t feel the pain that would indicate a wound capable of producing the amount of blood splattered on his clothes. His first thought was Selome. He tried to turn and check on her, but he couldn’t move from where he was wedged under the steering wheel. A heavy weight pressed on him, and he recognized it was Gibby. Or what was left of him.
The explosion had been channeled into the passenger-side foot well, shredding the boy’s legs so badly that only a few stringy bits of flesh kept them attached to his body. Massive tissue trauma had killed him immediately, but ropes of blood still drooled from the ragged wounds, pouring onto Mercer, saturating him. Seeing the dead Eritrean sharpened Mercer’s mind, and vomit flooded his mouth. He choked it back painfully.
“Selome?” he called.
She was sobbing. Thank God! Slowly, he eased Gibby’s body off him. When he stood on the smashed-in door, a wave of nausea nearly dropped him back on top of the corpse. He ignored any injuries he might have and concentrated on Selome. She lay curled on the driver’s-side rear door, her face cupped in her hands, her shoulders heaving. Mercer called her name again and finally she looked up. Her face was filthy, her hair bushed around her head, but he saw no blood, and while her eyes were made enormous by fear, she didn’t appear to be in shock.
“Give me your hand.” He hadn’t forgotten the Fiat still behind them. “We have to get out of here.”
She reached for him tentatively, and as soon as her fingers laced with his, Mercer pulled her to her feet. She winced when her weight pressed against her right foot, the one closest to the explosion. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was small and frail.
“We have to get moving. That other truck will be on us in no time.” Mercer looked beyond the shattered rear window and saw a plume of dust speeding out of the shifting sandstorm like some questing tentacle. The Fiat was too distant to see yet, but Mercer knew he only had minutes before it reached them.
“Give me your gun,” he demanded quickly.
“What?”
“Your gun, Selome, give it to me.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her acting job was unconvincing. “We have about five minutes before they reach us, and if you want to live beyond then, give me your goddamned gun.”
She stared at him, her face a mixture of fear and confusion, then she reached into her knapsack to retrieve a big automatic. “How did you know?”
Even in this situation, Mercer felt relief that the wall of secrecy between them was starting to come down.
“I’ll tell you later. You know, we could have used this in the cattle pens in Asmara.” Mercer took the Heckler and Koch. Selome shrugged but couldn’t meet his eye. Mercer levered himself out of the destroyed four-wheel drive, twisted on his perch, and lowered his hand back to Selome. “Climb up to me. I’ll help you, but don’t look in the front seat. Gibby didn’t make it.”
The Fiat’s trail of dust no longer merged with the storm dying behind it. Mercer jumped to the ground, held up his arms, and Selome leaped to him. “Stay here.”
At the back of the Toyota, a five-gallon jerry can of gasoline was clamped tightly in a special bracket. Mercer unclipped it from its mounts, grabbed a pair of knapsacks that had been tossed from the roof storage rack, and returned to Selome’s side. The crater left by the landmine looked like a tiny, smoking volcano. He judged that the Land Cruiser had been thrown nearly fifteen feet by the blast.
“What are we going to do? We’re in the middle of a mine field.”
Mercer didn’t answer her question, nor could he ignore it either. The desert here was loose and sandy, the surface raked smooth by the storm. However, there was a rocky outcrop about fifty yards away that would be free of mines. The trick was to get from the stranded Toyota to the rocks without blowing themselves up and doing it quickly enough so the pursuing Fiat didn’t discover their escape. He twisted the lid off the gas can and began dumping its contents onto the Land Cruiser.
“Mercer, I need to get—”
He cut her off. “No time. I’m sorry.”
The Fiat was about a half mile away; its roof was visible as it drove in a shallow depression. Mercer scanned the ground as he worked, hoping to see the imprints of mines, but praying he’d never see another one again. Finished dousing the vehicle, he led her a few yards away, using its battered hulk to cover their escape. Whenever he was working in the field, Mercer carried half a dozen cigarette lighters with him. It was a safety precaution that went way beyond the Boy Scout motto, but he’d been in situations where he’d needed all of them.
Using his left hand, he sparked open a Zippo and tossed it underhand into the pool of gasoline beneath the Toyota. In a continuous motion, he began shooting into the ground as a whooshing explosion engulfed the four-wheel-drive, masking the sharp cracks of the H&K. A wall of heat overwhelmed them as they stood in the open. Selome tried to move away from the raging flames, but Mercer held her wrist tightly. He fired off the entire magazine, walking his shots toward the boulders a short way off, each bullet plowing a small crater in the dirt roughly five feet beyond the previous one. Had a round hit a mine, it would have carried the power to detonate the charge, but there was no secondary explosion.
Mercer released Selome’s hand and jumped into the first pock created by the 9mm bullets.
“Land where I step,” he cautioned and jumped again, leaping into the next shallow depression.
It took every bit of his balance to land in the tiny craters, teetering on one foot for breathless seconds, his arms windmilling until he could center himself again. Then he would leap to the next, Selome at his heels. Unencumbered by the two knapsacks Mercer carried, Selome bounded easily, her long legs covering the distance with the grace of a gymnast. If her foot was bothering her, she didn’t let it show.
“Give me another clip,” Mercer said when he reached the last impact hole.
“That’s what I wanted to go back for,” Selome answered. “The rest of my ammo was in the Toyota. I don’t have any more.”
Mercer’s eyes went wide as he stared at the seventy-five feet of open space separating them from the safety of the rocks; seventy-five feet of mine-sown no-man’s land with only one way across. He couldn’t hear the engine noise of the approaching Fiat over the fiery eruption behind them, but he knew only a few seconds remained before the vehicle rumbled into view. Mercer took the deep, final breath of a man bent on suicide.
Fighting an instinct to yell and vent some of the pent-up emotion, he started running. It took his entire will not to stretch his gait to its fullest. He had to leave footprints close enough for Selome to use as stepping stones.
With every step, Mercer expected the detonation that would come like a sledgehammer at full swing; a shearing pain that at best would kill him and at worst would immobilize him for the pursuers to finish the job. He covered the first half of the distance without incident, but took no solace from this. The law of averages was working against him, and with every step, the ratio tipped more and more out of his favor. With just ten more feet to cover, he moaned aloud in frustration for not being able to leap those last few yards. He could have done it in a flying dive, but again he thought of Selome and took a step that cut the distance in half and made it safe for her.