Mercer rolled backward, into deeper cover. With his lungs pumping and his heart pounding in his chest, he was on such an adrenaline high that for a giddy moment he actually laughed at the fluke of his escape. Just one quarter second more and he would have been hurled down the mountain.
Bullets from the phalanx of Kalashnikovs continued to buzz and zip all around him, some pinging off the stone and vanishing farther down the cave. He slid back until they were no longer a threat. Several mortar rounds exploded near the entrance and filled the cavern with dust.
Mercer was safe for the moment, but he also knew he was trapped. Equally disturbing, the presence of the mortar told him these men had lain in ambush and waited until Mercer emerged from the cave in order to catch them all off guard. It was only Sykes’s quick counterfire that bought Mercer the time to find cover, and his bodyguards a chance to escape. Mercer figured his team would seek high ground and a more defensible position, but the large number of attackers meant eventually they would have to withdraw.
And that left him on his own. The Afghanis knew where he was. These were mountain people who could wait out an enemy for years if necessary. Mercer knew his odds of climbing down undetected were virtually zero, so if he didn’t find a way out of this mess quickly, he was going to die in this desolate corner of the globe. The world’s anus, indeed.
He really hated Michael Dillman now.
Mercer stayed low and moved deeper into the mountain, abandoning his pack but keeping his camera’s memory card and the sample when the cavern walls tightened. The ping and whine of ricochets died off to silence, and the mortar, too, had gone quiet. The Taliban or smugglers or whoever they were didn’t have any targets for the moment. He dropped to his knees and began crawling, and then down to his belly to slither when the tunnel constricted further. He passed the spot where Dillman had hit his head. His stomach was knotting up again and his headache was back. His eyesight was narrowing so that a gray halo ringed everything in view, and the halo was growing darker and thicker with each passing minute. On this second trip through the tunnel, however, Mercer noticed evidence that lightning had streaked through the passage, for the walls showed blackened char lines that ran up toward the geode chamber.
He needed a fraction of the time to reach the cave’s terminus this trip, and he didn’t waste precious moments looking at anything other than the collapsed part of the ceiling that had given way after aeons of being struck by lightning. Mercer felt the air blowing down the shaft from the surface. The going would be tight, but for the first ten or so feet he could see he had enough room to maneuver his body. He hoisted himself onto the heap of loose stone, some slabs as large as automobiles, and reached up and found a handhold just above the ceiling level. Mercer pulled himself up, kicking his feet into the rock to find traction. He pressed his back to the side of the chimney and reached up for another handhold, which broke off in his fingers. He dropped it and groped for another. He pried away several more weak stones before finding one he could use to haul himself up another couple of feet.
At times, the path shaped by the unimaginable force of lightning was so tortured and twisted he had to bend like a contortionist to keep climbing. At others, the chimney tightened so it felt like he had to dislocate a shoulder to work it through. If there was any saving grace, the air was fresher the higher he went, and while it didn’t contain much additional oxygen, even an extra little bit gave him strength.
Mercer could discern the pain of his body being pushed too far. Below him, dislodged pieces of stone rattled and pinged as he forged a path up the chimney. When he finally spotted daylight, Mercer could hardly believe his eyes. He was sure the climb would take much longer, and yet the evidence was right above him. The sky was the color of old pewter, but it had never looked better. He fought and clawed those last feet, straining to pull himself from the ground’s cloying embrace.
A moment later, all his enthusiasm vanished. It was as if fate had played the cruelest trick. Above him, the very top of the chimney reduced to a hole smaller than his head. A raccoon might have been able to squeeze through it, or maybe a young child, but there was no way a man his size would ever climb free.
Mercer wanted to scream with frustration, and he felt himself sag in the narrow space. With no energy remaining, he wondered if he would become lodged in this tight passageway, unable to free himself.
Mercer took a deep breath, and when he looked up he saw a crack along one edge of the hole. He reached up and worked one finger into it, and then a second. Mercer heaved at the crack, and a small piece crumbled like a rotten tooth. Erosion had weakened the rock, so it had become friable like sandstone. He clawed until more chunks of stone fell away below him, and he was able to wriggle one arm and part of his shoulder out of the hole.
That’s when he saw a man pass just beyond a nearby clump of shrubbery. Mercer couldn’t be sure in the uncertain light if the man was friend or foe. The man was armed, but it was impossible to see whether the weapon had the distinctive banana clip of an AK, or the boxier magazine for the M-4s. Mercer watched him for a moment and realized the silhouetted figure was stalking another man who was even farther away, and who was angled so that he would never see the approaching hunter.
He had seconds to react, but no idea what to do. He could end up saving one of his own, or giving them all away. He worked his arm back underground and popped the flap for his holster. He thumbed off the Beretta’s safety even as he yanked it back out of the earth.
The distant figure didn’t move. The stalker was coming at an angle. Mercer decided a warning shot would be the best he could do, and hope his guy had better reflexes than the Afghani.
A wave of altitude-induced pain passed through Mercer’s skull, and in its wake he had an instant of clearer vision. He saw the stalker was pulling a knife and that his target’s face was too uniformly black for it to be mere shadow.
Mercer drew down his pistol and fired, the bullet taking the Taliban in the throat. The pistol crack echoed for a brief second before the air erupted in the deadly chorus of another firefight.
Sykes whirled, not seeing Mercer, who was half in and half out of the ground, but he must have spotted another target because his assault rifle came up and he cooked off a three-round burst before dropping to a knee behind some rocks. Tracer fire carved slashing lines through the mist.
Desperate now because he was as much a target as he’d been earlier on the cliff, Mercer fought to free himself. He kicked and pried at the loose stone, chipping away at his rocky prison, until without warning great chunks of earth broke away and the chimney collapsed under him. Had he not lunged for the trunk of a hardscrabble tree, he would have plummeted back down the chute. Mercer pulled himself the rest of the way out of the ground, and found he was ringed by shrubbery, in a depression that had been blasted out by the highly charged onslaught of a million years’ worth of lightning.