The Medusa Stone pm-3 Read online

  Click.

  He felt the dusty ground give just a tiny fraction of an inch. The sound was like a distant finger snap, muted by his own weight on the mine. It was the primer, and in the millimetric sliver of time before main charge blew, he could only hope that Selome would get clear.

  Working on instinct, with his weight barely pressing on the can-sized bomb, he shifted his body in mid-stride, heaving himself forward in an awkward lurch. But his desperate leap wasn’t necessary. After lying dormant for fifteen years, the mine had been fouled by dirt and corrosion. The primer could not detonate the principal explosive. Mercer smashed into the rock with his shoulder, too stunned at being alive to roll with the impact. In his shock, he almost slid back off the tor and into the dirt. Scrambling, he turned and planted his heels on the stone, arresting his slide.

  “Selome, come on,” he shouted.

  Like a sprinter in the blocks who reacts even as the gun fires, she was in motion, her face scrunched in concentration. She bounded from print to print, her arms pumping in perfect synch, and even in his wasted emotional state, Mercer appreciated the shifting play of her breasts as she moved. In seconds she was at his side.

  “Are you okay?” she panted.

  “Later.” Mercer was on his feet again, leading her over the hill and across a flat table of stone toward the foothills of one of the region’s numerous mountains.

  A quarter mile and five minutes after clearing the mine field, they heard a muffled explosion behind them. Mercer turned. A Fiat half-ton truck was parked directly behind their four-wheel drive. Two Africans, Sudanese no doubt, stood in its open rear bed, and he could just make out the shadow of two more in the cab. They were all looking at the rumpled figure lying doll-like a few dozen feet from the vehicles. There was a new crater in the desert, wisps of gray smoke blowing from it on the gentle breeze. The body leaked blood from the stump of his left leg, the severed member bleeding into the soil a few feet away. Mercer guessed that one of their pursuers had tried to chase on foot, trying to duplicate their feat, and paid the ultimate price for failure. He and Selome continued on without comment. Soon afterward, they had lost themselves in the rugged terrain, and Mercer slowed their pace, no longer concerned about being followed.

  Selome called a halt hours later, her face blistered with sweat and dark patches appearing beneath her arms. She lowered herself to a stone plateau, lying flat and stretching her arms luxuriously over her head. Mercer flopped next to her, his attention riveted to the cache of goods in the two knapsacks he’d taken from the Land Cruiser. One of them had been Selome’s, and he dumped out the cosmetics and extra clothing. Selome ignored him and stared up into the hazy sky.

  “Selome?”

  She looked at him and her eyes widened. He held another full magazine for her Heckler and Koch. “Oops.”

  “Oops is right.” Mercer shook his head. He combined and consolidated the useful items into one pack, discarding stuff that had no value for the trek to come. Those things he did keep were pathetically few in number, some rope, a hammer, several lengths of fuse. He took the Medusa pictures from his vest and stuffed them in with the rest of the gear.

  “I feel so terrible about Gibby,” she said after a few minutes. “Not only about his death, but the disrespect we showed his body. That wasn’t right. He deserved a Christian burial.”

  Gibby’s death was one more on Mercer’s conscience. The Fiat proved the Sudanese were in the area, and they would find the mine long before Mercer could warn away the refugees he’d asked Negga’s son to bring to the valley. They would be arriving soon, and their plight was his responsibility too. “Please don’t talk about religion for a while. I’m not in the mood.”

  She was about to respond when Mercer leaned over and reached a hand to the wedge of skin showing between the collars of her bush shirt. A thin gold chain rested against her glossy skin and disappeared between her breasts. Mercer tugged it from its resting place, keeping his eyes locked with Selome’s even as the necklace popped free, revealing a golden Star of David.

  “Mossad?” he asked quietly.

  “No. Shin Bet.” There was a defiance in her voice. “It’s like your FBI.”

  Relief flooded through Mercer. He knew there would be no more lies. “I’ve heard of it. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I guess I owe you.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  She blew out a long breath. “A few months ago, the Medusa photographs came to the attention of an Israeli fanatic group.”

  It was an answer Mercer was unprepared for. “Israeli? I thought Muslims were behind this.”

  Selome shook her head. “Those Europeans Habte saw in Asmara are Jewish extremists headed by Defense Minister Chaim Levine. We’ve known about them for a while, but we didn’t realize until recently how powerful they’d become.”

  Mercer realized they’d all been duped. Dick Henna must have followed carefully placed false clues leading both of them to believe it was Arabs who had masterminded Harry’s abduction. He was both stunned and impressed by how cleverly this had been worked out.

  So many things came clear as he studied her. That’s what Harry had been trying to tell him when he said his captors had given him Boodles gin or something. Harry must have known that he’d been abducted to the Mideast, but recognized that his abductors weren’t Muslims. Mercer should have made the connection, and that oversight rekindled his anger at himself. He wondered how many more mistakes he’d made and how much others had paid for them.

  Selome continued. “Levine and his followers want to make Israel a totalitarian theocracy. He recognized what the Medusa photos revealed and knew such a discovery, accredited to him, would ensure him the prime ministership. He tried to have them stolen from your National Reconnaissance Office, but instead they were sold to Prescott Hyde. Hyde, too, saw something in them, something that would bolster his shaky position within the State Department. We learned about all of this shortly after Hyde bought them, and I was sent to the United States to work with him. Shin Bet paid off a member of the Eritrean mission in Washington to vouch for me so Hyde never knew of my connection to Israel. My mission was to gather intelligence, especially if Levine’s people tried to contact Hyde directly.

  “Unfortunately for Hyde, he called you soon after I arrived in D.C. and you joined his search for the mine, shutting down that option for Levine’s agents. Hyde and his wife were killed the morning you and I left for Africa.”

  Hyde dead too? Jesus, where was this going to end? “You left me in Rome to report your findings about Hyde to your control in Israel?”

  “Is that how you figured out I was Israeli?”

  “I was told by Dick Henna before we left Washington. Also, the night you came to Tiny’s Bar, my best friend, Harry, was kidnapped to Beruit.”

  It was obvious from her expression that this was new information. “The old guy who introduced himself as you?”

  “The same,” Mercer replied. “The abductors appeared to have Middle Eastern connections, so I figured Israel would fit in eventually.” He told her the whole story about Harry’s kidnapping and about the assassination at da Vinci Airport. “I didn’t know if you were on my side or not. Remember, you were working with Hyde when we met.”

  “It must be Levine’s people holding your friend. After you turned down Hyde, they must have grabbed him to compel you to come to Africa and find the mine. The man killed in Rome was undoubtedly Ibriham Bein, Levine’s top agent.”

  Mercer guessed Bein’s warning in Rome about not harming Selome was because the Israeli feared a problem if Levine’s plot had caused the death of a Shin Bet agent. They were already planning for the day they had Israel in their grasp.

  “Levine’s a fascist,” Selome said bitterly. “I know that sounds strange for one Jew to call another that, but he is. He believes in the purity of the Jewish people and wants all others out of Israel. He wants to build concentration camps and corral the Palestinians in f
enced stockades.

  “He’s been planning this for years. I don’t know if you remember the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the eighties, but he was a major supporter of the operation. He said it was for humanitarian reasons, but even then he wanted to do away with the Palestinians who perform many of the menial jobs in Israel and replace them with African refugees.”

  So, Mercer thought, he and Harry had gotten in the middle of an internal Israeli problem and not some international terrorist plot. Selome was trying to stop Levine from using the Medusa photographs to give himself unfair advantage in the elections. All of his suspicions about her ebbed away. For the first time he felt that he could trust her. A dam was breaking inside of him. He’d been on his own for too long and now he had an ally. He felt like hugging her. “So your job was to keep an eye on this group and report their activities?”

  “And to stop them if I could. But we came to Eritrea before I got close.”

  Suddenly something didn’t make sense. “I understand Levine is a maniac, but I also read that his election was all but guaranteed even before we left Washington. Why is he willing to ruin his chances by going after a worthless fifty-year-old diamond mine?”

  “He’s not.” Selome laughed for the first time in a long time. “You already know we have no interest in the Italian facility. I think the Sudanese and their backers are looking for that one. That’s how they stumbled on us. Our two missions come from different directions but end at the same location.”

  Mercer matched her smile, the horrors of the morning sloughing off at least for a few seconds. “Before you’d arrived in the valley, when I was exploring for the older workings, I’d already guessed that you were aware of another mine in the area.”

  Mercer’s expression suddenly changed as a new thought struck him. The white rock he’d found in the kimberlite tailings was a stone-aged tool, a hammer used thousands of years ago to crush the ore to get at the precious gems. Suddenly everything tied together: Jews, ancient mines, religious fanatics. He finally realized why the stakes were so high, and it had nothing to do with diamonds. Oh, my God! He tried to repress the wild thought but couldn’t. “Is that mine what I think it is?” He could barely speak.

  “We’re on our way to talk to some priests who will confirm it, but yes, it is.” Selome smiled at his breathless wonderment. “It’ll be the greatest find of your life. The stuff of legend.”

  When he said it, it came out as a whisper. “King Solomon’s Mine.”

  The Eritrea-Sudan Border

  Gianelli felt like a conquering Caesar as his trucks rumbled into Eritrea. He sat in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, the windows rolled down so he could smell the dry desert and hear the bellowing of the big twelve-cylinder turbo-diesels. Chuckling, he realized that the heavy-duty transporters loaded with mining gear and provisions weighed twice as much as the CV.35 light battle tanks Mussolini had used to invade Abyssinia. Kitted out in de rigueur khaki, with a bush hat clamped on his head and sunglasses protecting his eyes from the worst of the driving sun, Gianelli was at the very pinnacle of his life. Everything up to this moment, every deal and every decision, had led to this instant. Leading the trucks back to the mine that his uncle had opened decades before was the culmination of his existence. Let others wonder at his wealth and power — they were nothing, merely an extension of what had been handed to him through his family, a quirk of genetics. This was what he saw as his destiny.

  Soon after the Eritrean refugees had left their camps in Sudan under the leadership of a nomad prince, Mahdi had approached Gianelli with his idea of searching ahead of the column so they could reach the mine more quickly. The refugees were covering only a couple of miles a day, and the lethargic pace rankled the Italian. Gianelli agreed and sent out a scout truck. Three days later the radio call had come saying they had found the mine in a bowl of land at the end of a narrow valley after hearing an explosion. Gianelli ordered the main convoy to bypass the refugees and speed to where the advance scouts waited. A short time after, another call from them reported a Toyota Land Cruiser driven by a white man was attempting to flee the valley. Gianelli’s first thought was the fools had given away their presence to Mercer, but realized that Mahdi’s people wouldn’t have made such a blunder.

  He instructed the Sudanese rebels to stop the Toyota and made it clear that Mercer was not to be harmed. He learned a few hours later that Mercer had escaped through a mine field at the cost of one of Mahdi’s men. Gianelli cursed the whole team over the radio until his fist nearly crushed the microphone. Mahdi listened to the exchange as he sat on the back bench seat of the ten-wheeled Fiat truck. When his turn came, he took Gianelli’s wrath without comment. His employer was fully in his right. Mercer never should have escaped. His men’s failure was inexcusable, and their punishment, when the cargo trucks reached the valley, would be more severe than Gianelli’s verbal tirade.

  The radio crackled again, and he snatched up the handset. “Yes?”

  “We are back at the valley now and have it secured. The American left only three people here, Eritreans. They have some excavating equipment but are not working at the mine.”

  “What are they doing?” Gianelli asked the leader of the advance detachment he had sent out to leapfrog the meandering refugee column.

  “They were just digging into the side of one of the mountains. They haven’t said yet what they were looking for.”

  “They knew about my uncle’s mine, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier replied, then lowered his tone, knowing his next statement would not please his superior. “The man left in charge here said that there were no minerals in the mine. He told us the American explored the shaft and said there was nothing in it of any value.”

  “That can’t be right,” Gianelli stammered, the buoyant mood that had carried him across the frontier evaporating quickly.

  Despite their increased speed, it took eight hours before the convoy eased between the ramparts that guarded the bowl of land called the Valley of Dead Children. Listening to the chatter of the men in the backseat with Mahdi, Gianelli learned that they knew of this place and held it in superstitious dread. He asked Mahdi about it, and the soldier couldn’t give him a definitive answer. He told his employer that the region’s taboo went back many generations, but no one knew its origins. The myths surrounding it had spread as far as Sudan and Ethiopia.

  “Rubbish,” Giancarlo said dismissively.

  His expression was fevered with anticipation, a sense of history weighing on his shoulders. The valley looked nothing like what he’d thought as a child, but now that he was here, he could imagine it no other way.

  Across the open pan, he saw the skeleton of the head gear rising out of a watery heat mirage, recognized the support buildings next to it, and after a few minutes, saw the open Fiat his advance scouts had driven. His heart pounded with eagerness.

  The trucks lumbered to the abandoned mine, wheezing as their overworked engines spooled to silence, air brakes hissing. Gianelli launched himself from the cab, running across the desert to the rim of the open shaft.

  Joppi Hofmyer was the first to join him.

  “This is it,” Giancarlo gasped. “Two lifetimes of work, mine and my uncle’s, and here it is.” He gave no consideration to the earlier news that the mine was empty. It was a possibility he would not allow.

  There was no way the mine could be worthless, he thought. Enrico had been sure there were diamonds in the area, had died believing it. Gianelli had always felt that if his uncle’s plane hadn’t been shot down during the war, he would have given the family proof. Mercer hadn’t taken enough time to properly explore the subterranean tunnels, he told himself, nor did he have the proper equipment for a thorough search. The diamonds were here.

  “Yes, sir,” the South African replied uneasily. “Ah, Mr. Gianelli, I’d like to know how you want to handle this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now that we’re here, do you want me to t
ake charge of the men, or are you going to be issuing the orders?”

  Gianelli’s laugh was a quick barking sound. “Joppi, my friend, I am one of those people who knows how to hire others for their knowledge and abilities. I’m paying you because you know how to extract minerals from the ground, an art that I know nothing about. From now on, you are in complete control. However you want to handle this operation, whatever steps you feel necessary, are fine. Consider me nothing more than an interested observer.”

  Hofmyer turned away, more disturbed by Gianelli’s sudden bonhomie than he cared to admit. “Okay, you fookin’ kaffirs,” he bellowed at the Sudanese troopers clustered near the trucks. “Until those refugees get here, you bastards are going to be miners. You take orders from Mahdi, and as of this moment Mahdi takes orders from me. Once I get the checklist, I want ten men unloading the camp stores and setting up the tents.

  “I want the rest of you unloading the mining gear, separating underground equipment from surface stuff. If you don’t know what something is, ask either me or one of the other white miners and don’t forget to call him Baas.” The four other South Africans grinned at this. “You boys,” he said to the whites, “I want the explosives off-loaded and placed in a protective redoubtment no closer than five hundred yards from the mine or the camp. Now, someone bring me the three kaffirs who were already here when the scouts arrived.”

  Habte sat handcuffed in the shade of the scout’s Fiat with the two Eritrean equipment operators. Neither of the hired workers understood what was happening. Their fear was palpable, but ever since Asmara, Habte had been expecting something like this. He figured that these men were allied to the ones who had attacked Mercer and Selome in the market square. As of yet, the Caucasians he had seen at the Ambasoira Hotel had not made their appearance. When they did, he knew that he could expect little help from them. This time the enemy of his enemy was not his friend.