He pulled in, the four-by-four’s tires crunching over broken glass and the grit laid down atop the previous winter’s snow and ice. Light from the office spilled out just enough for him to see a woman emerge from a back room, her hands to her face as she knuckled sleep from her eyes. Mercer thought she must have been the employee of the year to hear him pull up and be ready before he stepped into the lobby, but then he saw her pick up a blanket-wrapped bundle from behind the counter and gently place it against her shoulder above her heavy breasts. He could now hear the faint bleats of a crying infant.
Mercer killed the engine and grabbed the bundle of clothes he’d taken from the trailer back at the mine. His eyes felt as gritty as his skin, and he hoped this place had enough hot water for its — he counted: ten, eleven, twelve — twelve rooms, because he planned on using it all.
He opened the glass door softly so the bell attached near its upper hinge didn’t disturb the child, who’d quieted during his approach. The girl, no more than nineteen, had bad skin and a rather bovine expression. She said nothing by way of greeting.
“I’d like a room,” Mercer finally said in a quiet whisper.
“Sixty bucks,” she replied, “but you’re like filthy. I can’t let you stay here.”
Mercer looked down at his coveralls. They were a mess, but then he doubted she would have cared much if it wasn’t her responsibility to clean the room in the morning after he’d gone.
“Tell you what.” He peeled two hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “This is for the room and any damage. I doubt there’s much in this place worth more than one forty.”
For some reason that made the girl giggle.
“I just need a shower and a few hours rack time.”
“I need your name for the register,” the girl said, flipping open a dog-eared registration book.
Mercer placed the cash on the scarred counter, leaned past her, and pulled a red plastic fob and its attached key from a cubbyhole behind the desk. He’d taken a room close to the center of the building — and, he hoped, its hot water supply. “My ID is on the two bills. My name’s Ben Franklin.”
She said nothing more as he turned and headed back out. He parked the truck two doors down from his own room and let himself in with the key. The lightbulbs had been replaced with low-watt fluorescents, so the room remained cloaked in shadow and murk. He couldn’t care less. He allowed himself a half hour under the hottest water he could stand, needed three of the threadbare towels to properly dry himself, and collapsed onto the sagging full-size with the tapioca-colored spread and mismatched pillows.
No sooner had his head hit the low-thread-count cotton than he knew he’d been kidding himself. It was true he shouldn’t be driving, but there was no way he was going to sleep. His mind didn’t work that way. He’d tried to outrun his feelings by pouring on mile after mile, but the fact remained that his friend was dead along with six others and he’d been unable to stop any of the slaughter. Mercer wasn’t Catholic but he understood guilt better than most. It was his motivator and anchor at the same time. To assuage it he would go to any lengths even when, more often than not, the guilt was not his to shoulder. It was a burden he took up out of duty rather than true responsibility. This meant sometimes he could not forgive himself things for which he was wholly blameless. A shrink would have told him his feelings dated back to his parents’ death, and the fact that he’d been unable to prevent the tragedy. Now Mercer felt he should have stopped Abe’s vicious murder, so the guilt weighed especially heavy.
That hadn’t been the case when a then twentysomething Philip Mercer had gone back to Penn State for his doctorate, following two years at the Colorado School of Mines.
Over Christmas break that first year into his PhD studies, Abe had secured a research grant to take a few of his best students to West Africa for a ten-day trip to assist in a mineral prospecting expedition. The grad students would essentially be unpaid load bearers and Sherpas for the field team, but they had jumped at the opportunity.
The first week of the trip had gone off without a hitch. The team of eight Westerners, including Abe and his three top students, plus four armed native Cameroonians, had scoured streambeds and exposed rock formations for interesting geological markers. They were investigating the belief that this particular region in the highlands contained coltan, a mineral necessary for the newly burgeoning cellular phone market. They hadn’t yet found any of the dull metallic ore, but that hadn’t dampened any spirits, especially among the grad students.
Their final day dawned cool and misty. The camp stirred to life slowly, but soon cooking fires were lit and instant coffee was being passed around. A breakfast of powdered eggs was about to be served when dark shapes flitted through the surrounding mist, and a staccato solo of mechanized death rang out. There had been talk of rebels in this area, but they were supposed to be across the border in Nigeria, over forty miles away.
One of their Cameroonian guards was hit in the opening barrage. He went down as if body-slammed, with blood and other matter oozing from a gaping hole in the back of his head. By all rights, Mercer should have been frozen where he sat, opposite Abe and another student from California named Lance. This was similar to the ambush that took his parents; all that was missing was the battered pickup his mother was driving with his injured father in the back when they were gunned down.
But Mercer didn’t hesitate. In that first split second, Abe became the parents he hadn’t been able to save. Mercer didn’t think about himself, didn’t consider the danger at all. He had failed to prevent two parents being lost to the violence of this savage continent, he wasn’t going to lose a man he now considered a third. He just moved on adrenaline-fueled instinct to protect Abe Jacobs, or die trying.
Mercer leapt through the flames of the cooking fires and tackled both his fellow student and Abe as fresh bursts of automatic fire ripped through the camp. He pressed the two into the loamy ground with his body weight as strings of bullets crisscrossed over their heads. Off to one side, it sounded as though another one of their guards had fled into the jungle.
One summer years earlier, Mercer’s best friend, Mike, had been given a .22-caliber rifle by his father. The two fourteen-year-olds had spent the summer working every odd job they could think of in order to feed that little rifle’s insatiable appetite for ammunition. No sooner had the boys been paid than they were at a local gun shop buying boxes of rounds, much like some teens hung out at convenience stores hoping someone would buy beer for them. Then it was off to an old gravel pit where they took turns shooting the gun as though they were movie action heroes. When school and then winter finally ended their shooting trips, they had both pumped thousands of rounds through the .22, damaging its barrel so it no longer shot true, and yet both had become superior marksmen from every shooting position they had studied in an old World War II — era army training booklet they’d found at the gun store.