So what would he do? Just sit down and wait? Come here hoping to be struck by lightning?
“You wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, didn’t you?” Mercer said to the capsized corpse. “And to make sure that happened, I am willing to bet…”
He let his voice trail off and examined the claw-like hands, fully expecting to see the spindly fingers curled around one of the crystals, but they were empty. He swore, sure that he’d been right, and then another thought struck him. Fighting both revulsion and the returning nausea brought on by the altitude, he pried open the disarticulated skull’s locked jaw. Bits of desiccated flesh and skin sloughed off in disgusting flakes. The teeth were loose and a couple dropped out as Mercer prodded, but his fingers found purchase on something that would have been held trapped under the tongue, which was now nothing more than a scaly sac that crumbled to powder.
Mercer’s hand returned from its repulsive quest, and into the yellow beam of his flashlight came a nub of crystal the size of an acorn that was the same color, and had the same lifeless dinginess, as a ball of mud. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment. For no other reason than that treasures are always supposed to dazzle the eye, he’d expected something magical and exquisite, something with the fire of a diamond, or the mystery of a ruby or the spellbinding depth of an emerald. This stone made even the dimmest smoke quartz look luminous.
He decided right there that Dillman had taken just a small amount of this unlikely gem with him and only returned when told it had value, most likely by Herbert Hoover, and probably on his orders.
Studying the uninteresting lump, Mercer also deduced that Sample 681, the piece Abe had died for, was probably from that first foray into these mountains, but then wondered what happened to the lion’s share of the crystals after Dillman came back and wrested them from the geode.
“Shit,” he muttered in the empty echo of the chamber. He’d come here to solve one mystery and ended up with another, and one that might well not have a solution because the trail had gone as cold and as dead as the shaman staring at him from his ridiculous stiffened position. Mercer quickly righted the mummified mystic so that he could face eternity without his butt half in the air and then plucked a waterproof digital camera from his bag. He used crisp dollar bills as a reference by placing one on the floor of the geode and sticking another to a wall with a bit of chewing gum and snapped the better part of two hundred pictures. There was a photo interpretation business he knew outside of Washington that did a lot of work with the National Reconnaissance Office and would be able to stitch the pics together to form a three-dimensional composite of the chamber and extrapolate its exact volume. In this way he would know how many pounds of crystal Dillman had removed.
For now, though, his goal was to run a battery of tests on the sample he did have. He slipped the lump of cloudy crystal into a plastic baggie. Sealed it. Slipped that into another, sealed that one, and then finally slipped it into a third before stuffing it into a zippered pocket.
He exited the way he had entered, crawling like a commando on his elbows and the outsides of his boots, slithering inch by inch but mindful of the dust. The initial burst of adrenaline had long since worn off. His head pounded and his mouth felt stuffed with cotton. Using just the flashlight Mercer couldn’t tell how much his vision was diminished, but the pressure behind his eyes told him it was fading fast. And he was bone-achingly exhausted. He knew that if he paused for a second while lying on the cave floor he’d be asleep before he could stop himself.
Contemplating the slog out of the mountains drained him even further.
When the cave opened up enough for him to stand, he clicked off his light. Outside, the sky remained murky as more storm clouds moved through the valleys. Mercer heard the distant rumble of thunder, and he purposely touched the crystal nestled in his pocket. He wondered how attractive to lightning it really was.
He clicked his climbing harness onto the rope and gave the line a tug to warn the others he was coming back. He got a quick tug in reply. By the gray-faced TAG Heuer he’d worn for twenty years, he saw he’d been inside the cave for forty minutes. Sykes would be anxious.
He started climbing back across the cliff, certain that the security team would be shortening the line every few minutes to keep him properly belayed.
Another crump of thunder sounded, an odd echoing clap that hit concussively. Suddenly Mercer heard Booker Sykes shout, “Incoming!”
It wasn’t thunder, but the hollow whomp of a mortar round being fired from somewhere out in the valley.
Mercer turned to look and saw a puff of smoke being shredded by the wind several hundred yards away. That momentary reflex — to find the source of the danger — cost him his perch on the slick rock. With an irreversible drop, Mercer fell and his body pendulumed at the end of the safety line, arcing across the stone so quickly it was all he could do to keep his legs pedaling and stop himself from getting smeared against the cliff. Above him came the ferocious response to the mortar shot from Sykes and his team. They poured a massive amount of lead down the valley even before the mortar finished its parabola and exploded to the right and below the team.
Mercer came to the end of his Tarzan-like swing along the cliff and twisted quickly before he started arcing back. Rather than let gravity do the work, this time he pushed himself hard, knowing he was as inviting a target as a metal duck at a shooting gallery. From below came another blast from the mortar, followed by the mechanical crash of Kalashnikovs joining the fray. Hooded fighters emerged from cover and started firing. Each long pull on the AKs’ triggers blew a jet of flame that looked like rocket exhaust in the dishwater-gray pre-storm light.
The protective detail ducked as the second mortar round came arrowing in, landing much closer as the crew zeroed on their target. The next round would land right where the men defended the ridge and Mercer’s anchor point.
With adrenaline once again beating back the symptoms of altitude sickness, Mercer raced across the front of the cliff with the buzz of bullets swarming around him. Bits of rock exploded off the wall when struck by the copper-jacketed rounds, and stung like wasp strikes. He could feel the momentum running out of his arc as he neared its apogee, and he pushed harder, pounding his feet into the rock to gain precious inches, his hand outstretched, and his fingers touching but not finding purchase on the lip of stone ringing the cave.
Like a cat, Mercer reversed himself. As bullets peppered the cliff he ran flat out across its face once again, punishing the safety rope as it chafed against the stone where it was anchored. Sykes and the others tried to provide cover fire as best they could, but twenty native fighters were shooting up from the valley below; no matter how accurate the team was, the Afghanis continued to advance.
The mortar popped again, and this time the Americans had no choice but to abandon their position. The round would likely be coming in for a direct hit.
Mercer was forced to swing back again when the line came up hard against his climbing harness, and for a second attempt he ran across the cliff face at the cave entrance, shouting incoherently, his entire focus on making it to its relative safety. He was almost there when the mortar round impacted with a deafening blast, directly where Sykes had tied him off to a slab of rock. Stone chips and smoke boiled into the air.
Mercer paid no attention to the distraction, and stretched himself like an outfielder going for a pop-up. He had built up so much momentum in his headlong plunge that he was able to hook one forearm into the cave, followed by the other. Mercer fought until he pulled his lower body onto the outer lip of the cavern floor. When he glanced up the cliff face, he beheld a terrifying sight. The thousand-pound anchor boulder was now tumbling from its perch, starting to bounce down the cliff, his nylon line still knotted around its bulk. Mercer only had seconds. His hands were stiff from the cold and hurting from the climb, and yet they flew toward the steel carabiner on his belt. The boulder streaking past the cave opening would tear him from his perch, tossing him bodily down to the valley floor below. With a click the D link opened and was torn from his hands so violently by the plummeting stone that it ripped off his right glove.