The Medusa stone (29 page)
Authors: Jack Du Brul
Both men spotted the weapon when it caught the light's beam. Mahdi had a shorter distance to run to reach it, but Mercer's reactions were quicker and they both dove and got a hand on it at the same time.
Mercer had a better grip on the AK and used it to twist the weapon away from the soldier. Mahdi kneed him viciously in the inside of his forearm and Mercer's entire hand went numb. Suddenly the gun was in Mahdi's control. Struggling under the man's weight and only able to use his bad arm to deflect the gloating Sudanese, Mercer reached into the kit bag still slung around his shoulder.
He'd planned to use the high-speed fuse in conjunction with the dynamite he carried if they'd needed to blast any obstacles that got in their way, but now it had a more urgent purpose. Mahdi either didn't notice or didn't care as Mercer dropped the two-hundred-foot coil of fuse over his head. The rebel was laughing, knowing he had the advantage, but when he spied a tiny flame shooting from the Zippo in Mercer's fingers, his eyes went wide with terror. In those last seconds he understood what Mercer had looped over him.
The fuse burned at twenty-two thousand feet per second, so the entire coil cooked off faster than the eye could see. Even under its protective coating, the temperature of the burning chemicals snt>
Mahdi's finger tightened on the AK's trigger even as his eyes rolled back into his skull. A full clip arrowed into the ceiling, ricocheting and filling the chamber with deadly lead. The crashing shots and the echoes weakened a section of the scaly hanging wall, and a fifty-ton slab of stone crashed to the floor a short distance away, followed seconds later by several more.
The whole ceiling was giving way! Mercer rolled out from under the struggling terrorist, grabbed up the assault rifle by its hot barrel, and grasped the flashlight in his other hand. More stones let go, huge chunks whose impact loosened even more of the ceiling in a domino effect. It was as if the earth had come alive and they were caught in its jaws. With the weight shifting its balance, one of the pillars exploded like a bomb, crushed beyond its structural tolerance, hurtling rock like grapeshot.
Mercer heaved Selome off the floor as if she was no more than a child. As more debris rained around them, they ducked into a side tunnel. He took just a second to look back and watched a slab of rock larger than an automobile land squarely on Mahdi as he writhed with the pain of his burned neck. The weight of the stone forced the contents of his torso toward his head, but they could not erupt through the cranium. Mercer saw Mahdi's throat expand like that of a bull frog's until the entire bulbous mass exploded in a red mist and the body lay still.
He trained the light to the far end of the gallery where he had seen the distant glint. Just before his view was obliterated by the crumbling chamber, he watched an eerie blue light radiate from the gloom, burning brighter and brighter until a chunk of stone crashed right in front of him, sealing the room forever.
The side tunnel's roof was lower than most of the others they'd encountered, and Mercer had to ease Selome to the ground and coax her to follow as more of the chamber behind them collapsed. Huge clouds of dust blew into the tunnel, enveloping them, choking them until they could no longer open their eyes and every breath was torture. And still more of the room fell, a roaring sound that filled their world and threatened to tear away their sanity. They scrambled from it, ripping skin from their hands and knees as this tunnel began to fill with debris.
They covered fifty yards before the cave-in ended. The sudden silence left their ears ringing. Looking back the way they'd come, Mercer saw that they were cut off from the others by untold billions of tons of earth. Even if they had wanted to, there was no way they would ever be able to return.
What the hell was that glow?
The blue light had to be a static discharge, he thought. When rock is crushed, it can give off a small amount of electricity. Given the amount of moving stone, the phenomenon could easily explain what he'd seen. Or maybe it was a pocket of methane catching fire after being ignited by a spark. He had several other naturally occurring explanations, but deep in the back of his mind, he knew there was also an unnatural one.
No, it couldn't be.
The blue light had to be a static discharge, he thought. When rock is crushed, it can give off a small amount of electricity. Given the amount of moving stone, the phenomenon could easily explain what he'd seen. Or maybe it was a pocket of methane catching fire after being ignited by a spark. He had several other naturally occurring explanations, but deep in the back of his mind, he knew there was also an unnatural one.
No, it couldn't be.
"What happened in there?"
"Mahdi suffered a crushing defeat," Mercer rasped, waiting for Selome to take a drink from their canteen. He wanted to give her time to recover before telling her that this tunnel went in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go. There was no way he was going to tell her what else he'd seen.
"You have no p.
"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."
Washington, D.C.
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 crosst i.
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."
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."
Henna's reply had the same mocking tone. "Coincidences are compounding as we speak. I called Lloyd Easton at the State Department while I was waiting >Admiral ea that an American training exercise in his country would be in his best interests."
"What about authorization from the president?"
"As soon as we're done here, I'll contact him. In light of our conversation with Israel's prime minister, he's been expecting that something like this might happen. He'll be astounded when he hears Gianelli is involved. Marge pulled his file for me when I was in my limo and it must be a foot thick. Interpol has never been able to directly link him to anything illegal, but if we're quick here, we'll nail the bastard to the wall. It'll be a feather in the president's cap during the next G-7 summit if we can haul him into a courtroom."
"As long as the political end's covered, I'll handle the military side. It'll take some time to get this ball rolling." Morrison snatched up a phone and ordered a call put through to the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. He offered Henna a zeppelin-sized Cohiba when he finished. "We're going to need some photo intelligence of the area, and the Marines are going to need some prep time."
"I've got to call Habte Makkonen back and give him a time line. What do you think?"
"Six hours minimum and even that's pushing it too hard."
"Not from where Mercer's sitting," Henna said through a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke.
The phone rang, and Morrison spoke with the duty officer at the NRO. "There's a civilian on the ground reporting a heavy cloud cover in the area, but there's a lot of machinery working at the site. If you can't get clear pictures, switch to IR and we'll find the bastards by their heat signature." He clamped his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke to Henna. "This is going to take a while. If you want, use the phone on my secretary's desk to brief the Old Man and reach Makkonen. Tell him what to expect and to get his butt under cover when the Marines hit the mine."
Henna left Morrison coordinating satellite coverage and planted himself at a desk in the outer office. He figured he could afford a little time, so he placed a call he felt was equally important. He'd personally met the plane carrying Harry White from Israel at Dulles, driving into the city with the octogenarian and seeing him ensconced at an FBI safe house until the situation settled. True to his word, Harry was stone sober and didn't complain through the subsequent hours of questioning. It wasn't until after Henna's agents had finished that Harry demanded to know what had happened to Mercer. His glare had spoken volumes when Henna admitted that they had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.
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