Mercer pushed down on the two Americans for good measure and rolled through the short grass for the dead guard. The mist was lifting, and he could see the muzzle flashes of at least five shooters moving in on the camp. The two remaining guards were pinned behind a craggy bit of rock that jutted from the jungle floor. Their cover would vanish in another thirty seconds as the shooters advanced.
He reached the dead guard and pulled the AK-47 from his lifeless grip and two spare magazines from a pouch on the man’s chest. His name was Paul. He had taken to Mercer because he had a son named Philippe.
Although Mercer had never fired an automatic weapon, muscle memory from those teenaged shooting trips left him feeling comfortable with the Kalashnikov in his hands, and he used it as though it were an extension of his own body. From an awkward prone position he loosened a short burst that caught one of the shooters just as he stepped into the clearing where the prospectors had made their camp. Mercer could tell the man was dead even before he fell, so he switched his aim toward the muzzle flash of another attacker who was still hiding among the trees and semitropical shrubs that surrounded them.
The unseen gunman screamed when his body was raked by the burst, then fell into a silence so profound that it could only mean he was dead.
The two hired guards, sensing a shift in the battle’s momentum, popped up from their cover position and added their combined fire to the hail of lead exploding all around the camp.
Mercer’s eyes never rested on one spot for more than a few seconds while he scanned for additional targets. He also checked that the AK’s bolt was closed, meaning there was a round in the chamber, and he quickly changed out the magazine. His fingers were a little less sure than they’d been on the old Ruger, but he got it done.
Another of the attackers went down when targeted by the two guards. He screamed even louder than the man Mercer had taken, and it seemed his high keening cry for help was enough to unman the remaining attackers. Their guns fell silent as they retreated into the forest. Mercer sprang from where he’d been crouching and started after them. He felt certain that whoever led the guerrillas would reorganize them quickly and they’d be back. He raced into the jungle, the AK held low on the hip, his finger ready to squeeze the trigger. One of the many things he’d never anticipated about a firefight, despite what he’d seen on television, was the unimaginable level of noise. The multiple discharging guns had left him deafened, his ears ringing as though he were standing next to some enormous electrical generator.
Mercer reached another small clearing two hundred yards from where they’d camped. He spotted four men across the way, maybe thirty yards out. Three were armed natives dressed in street clothes and battered tennis shoes. The other two wore paramilitary camouflage with matching packs and slouch hats on their heads. They didn’t carry Africa’s ubiquitous weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov. They were fitted out with black assault rifles, mounting scopes, and boxy twenty-round mags. These were Western guns, expensive and recognizable as the tools of professional mercenaries. In the murky light of dawn it was hard to be sure, but Mercer felt the two dressed as soldiers were white men, not black.
He skidded to a stop. The other men saw him and their guns all came up, but Mercer was already set to fire and even with the AK down low, he sent a scything barrage across the clearing. The two Africans died immediately, and one of the white mercenaries took a round that spun him in place and he dropped from view. The other got his gun to his shoulder and opened fire. Mercer had no cover, so he dove back into the jungle, his finger still on the trigger, the AK’s bolt slamming back and forth like an industrial loom stitching out bullets.
He never took his eyes off the target, so he saw in the flash from the other man’s gun that the shooter was white, not much older than Mercer himself, and had a port-wine birthmark covering part of his left cheek. He stood up to the wild blast Mercer had fired at him because he was used to dealing with poorly trained boys who thought the sound of a machine gun was as deadly as its aim. But in an instant one of Mercer’s bullets struck him in the center of that purplish mark, and blood formed a halo around his head as he was knocked flat by the kinetic shock.
Mercer reached to reload his empty weapon only to realize the second spare magazine had dropped from his back pocket somewhere on the trail from camp. He looked back at where the men had been. The first white mercenary he’d tagged was getting to his feet, and one of the native gunmen was also stirring.
Wounded game was especially deadly, and injured men were no exception. Mercer moved back into the jungle and retraced his steps until he’d returned to the camp. Abe was tending to an injured prospector, while one of the remaining guards gathered equipment. The other man watched over the camp warily, his rifle at the ready. There was no sign of the guard who’d run away. Someone had already draped a tarp over Paul’s corpse.
“Mercer,” Abe cried. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Mercer said, panting and a little shaky. “I caught up with them about two hundred yards out. I got a few of them, but two are injured and they might regroup and come back — we should get going.”
Mercer grabbed a spare banana mag and rammed it into his AK, racking the slide to chamber a round as if he’d done it a million times.
He looked at Abe working on the prospecting geologist, but all he saw was his own parents dying while he ran away with his nanny. Abe looked up with a smile, relieved that the injured man would be okay, and that his star student had saved their lives. Mercer hadn’t failed this time, and he vowed that to the best of his abilities he would never do so again.
They made it to their predetermined rendezvous without incident and met the truck that was waiting to take them out of the wilderness. The guard who had run away at the outset of the attack was never seen again, and the company that had hired the guards made certain Paul’s widow and orphan child would be provided for. They never learned for certain what was behind the deadly attack, but rumor was a local warlord was trying to exert control over the territory for its mineral wealth and had hired white soldiers of fortune.
It was this incident that a few short months later would make Abe recommend his best pupil for a mission into Iraq when the CIA needed a geologist to help an insertion team assess whether or not Saddam Hussein had enough domestic uranium ore to start an enrichment project. That mission was the pivot point for Mercer’s career to veer as much into countering terrorism as finding Earth’s natural resources. So much of what Mercer was proud of, and also that for which he was most deeply ashamed, had its genesis in that one incident when he had saved Abe’s life. Losing him now didn’t change his past, but it did make him regret not thanking his old mentor one last time.
As a scattering of cars hissed by the road outside the Bell Tower Motor Court, and dawn started creeping past the sheer drapes, Mercer replayed the mine attack in his head again and again and again. He recalled, too, the incident in the jungle. One battle a victory, the other a defeat. Bookends to a friendship that ended too soon.