Like a rickety elevator, the Mil struggled and wheezed and made all sorts of terrifying sounds as it climbed into the dawn. The sun was just beginning to paint the mountain peaks that dominate the skyline to the north and south of the capital city. The snowy crests flashed impossible shades of gold and red when struck by the pure light of such an unpolluted place, and for a moment Mercer could forget the poverty and dinginess of the city sprawled below them.
Only Ahmad and Sykes next to him had headphones, and the Mi-2 was too loud to hold anything short of screaming matches, so Mercer settled in for the two-hour flight toward the tribal regions spanning the Afghan-Pakistan border. In all of recorded history it was one of the few places in the world that could boast it had never been fully conquered.
As they cleared the city, he was reminded of Buzz Aldrin’s line about the moon being “magnificent desolation.” The same could be said of Afghanistan. There was little below them but rock and valley, hilltop and hardscrabble villages scraping by on the edge of fields that were more gravel lot than life-sustaining grove. It was too early in the spring for anything to be in bloom, so the landscape was a patchwork of earth tones that bled and ran into each other in a drab mosaic that stretched to the silvery mountains in the distance. As well traveled as he was, even Mercer had a hard time recalling such a harsh and unforgiving land.
They thundered on. Two of Sykes’s men slept, or at least had their eyes closed. Another scanned the ground to their right, while Booker in the left front seat watched for anything suspicious coming at them from that direction. They were safe enough at altitude and speed from an RPG, and not even the Taliban had any working Stinger missiles left over from the post — Soviet invasion days, but years of being immersed in combat zones made the men rightly cautious.
Mercer continued to push fluids into his body as they flew higher into the mountains. Altitude sickness was a real concern. He’d never really been struck by it in the past, but he would be pushing himself hard over the next twelve or so hours without giving his body the proper amount of time to acclimate. As a precaution, he popped a few Tylenol, knowing headache was usually the first symptom. Their overwatch sniper, Sleep, saw him do this and flashed a diver’s “okay” sign. Mercer responded in kind, and the shooter tucked his cap farther over his dark brow and nodded off again.
Ninety minutes later, Mercer felt Booker Sykes tapping him on the shoulder. He turned in his rear-facing jump seat and stretched his upper body into the cockpit. “What’s up?”
“We’re nearing your coordinates,” Book called over the beat of the rotor and scream of the turbines. “Thought you should see what we’re flying over to get a better picture than those satellite shots.”
Mercer nodded, preoccupied by worry. There was a danger to this mission he had considered from the moment Sherman Smithson rattled off the longitude and latitude coordinates for what Michael Dillman had claimed was the location where he had discovered Sample 681. The danger was that Dillman could have been dozens, or even hundreds of miles off target. Since the minerals were obviously collected long before modern navigation aids like GPS, Dillman was working with a sextant, a chronometer that might not have been calibrated in weeks or months, and making best-guess estimates of a slew of other factors in determining his location.
Dillman had dutifully written out the coordinates for the sample’s origin to a very precise degree, one that Mercer could pinpoint decades later on a satellite photograph as a tight valley that looked like it petered out into the side of a mountain. However, that didn’t mean the written coordinates marked the actual spot where the man had found Sample 681. Mercer had to hope Dillman was accurate enough to get them close, so that his own knowledge of geology and geography could lead them to where X really marked the spot.
The ground below the speeding chopper was a crosshatch of canyons and ridges that had no discernible pattern. It was all chaos but with monotony of color. Rather than brown, like around Kabul, here the world was shades of gray, from nearly black to almost white. It was ugly terrain, and one that he didn’t relish having to march across because the shortest distance in terrain such as this was never a straight line. It also didn’t help that the promising dawn they had left in Kabul was now a leaden sky that seemed to hover scant feet over their heads.
Booker split his attention between the panorama unfolding beneath them and a handheld GPS device that he’d programmed with their destination. Mercer had eyes only for the topography, while behind him in the cabin, Sleep, Grump, and Sneeze watched out for any movement that could betray a Taliban position. Occasionally, Mercer could see Sykes mouthing orders to Ahmad to correct their flight path.
A minute later, Book made an emphatic gesture pointing his thumb down, and Mercer could read his lips as he said to the pilot, “Hover here.”
Mercer studied the ground for anything that looked familiar. At first all the arêtes and gorges and talus slopes looked the same, and then the landscape resolved itself to the images he’d studied earlier. This was where Dillman claimed he’d found the mysterious mineral he’d called a lightning stone, which Herbert Hoover later classified numerically for his collection. As with the satellite pictures, nothing about this location struck Mercer as being geologically significant. It looked like every other godforsaken part of this country, bleak, desolate, totally uninviting and uninhabitable.
Prospects didn’t improve when Sykes handed him a pair of military-grade binoculars. Ahmad kept the Mil in constant motion so they didn’t become an easy target, but Mercer had no trouble studying the ground and for five minutes he peered intently at everything but saw nothing.
“Give me a five-mile perimeter,” he yelled at Book. Sykes nodded and relayed his order to the Afghan pilot. As had been discussed earlier, they only had fifteen minutes’ flying time before Ahmad would need to off-load their extra weight in order to make it to Khost and refuel.
They spiraled out away from the exact coordinates Michael Dillman had provided. Mercer had known not to expect a big glaring sign that advertised an excavation of some sort, but the farther they flew from Dillman’s purported spot, the fewer were their chances of actually finding anything. In searches, one either looked at one locale precisely or combed a massive area; there really wasn’t much by way of middle ground.
He kept the binocs snug to his eyes as the chopper circled the rugged massif, intent on catching every detail he could in the few minutes remaining. Each ridge and hillside looked identical. There were no individual reference points, nothing distinctive to help orient the search. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly, so he wouldn’t know it if he actually saw it. There was little of interest at all, and yet that in itself might be what he sought. It was maddening, and he started to think this whole trip had been a colossal waste of time.
He decided they should head back to the coordinates, land, and hope for the best. He was reaching to tap Book on the shoulder to tell him, when he saw something that caught his attention. It was a crease in the side of a mountain at the head of a narrow canyon. The only way it was recognizable would be by standing at its base or high above as they were now.
He pointed it out to Sykes. “See the top of that one mountain covered in snow that looks like an octopus’s tentacles? Look below that and to the right. That narrow valley. What does it look like to you where those two rounded parts of the mountain meet?”
Sykes used the verbal waypoints to spot the anomaly. He grinned wolfishly. “Looks like a butt crack.”
“Remember what I told you Dillman wrote? The sample came from the anus of the world. Bet you a case of whiskey there’s a cave where those two lobes of the hill come together.”