With this lift, unlike a commercial one, Mercer could open the gate to gain direct access to the elevator shaft itself. Miners were well trained in elevator safety and could be trusted not to kill themselves by doing anything deliberately stupid. Like Mercer was doing now.
The elevator was a functional three-chambered steel cage attached to a hoist on the surface. Simple signals told the operator at which level to stop the lift. They were at the lowest level, and Mercer knew this elevator was going straight for the surface.
A cable dangled in a loop from under the car. It was a standard armored metal electrical wire that had worked itself loose from a couple of brackets. Below it, the shaft dropped another twelve feet into a sump to collect rainwater seepage. A nearby pump kept the water at manageable levels.
Mercer didn’t break stride or think through what he was doing. As the monstrous elevator car began its ascent, he jumped for the cable just before it rose out of reach. Mercer barely got his fingertips around the steel before his momentum slammed him against the roughhewn shaft wall and nearly wrenched his shoulder from its socket. He scrambled to get a better grip as he pendulumed beneath the fast-rising elevator. He finally got his second hand onto the wire and chanced looking down. The light from the loading station appeared as distant as the glow of a celestial constellation. And even as he watched, the elevator rose high enough for the light to fade completely. Darkness sucked at his dangling boots.
Mercer wriggled an arm through the cable loop to take the strain off his hands, and another of the riveted brackets securing the cable to the car snapped. The pop couldn’t be heard over the mechanical grind of the car, but Mercer’s sudden gasp as he fell a few inches sounded to him like a thunderous scream. Not twenty feet above him were four heavily armed men who showed no compunction over committing murder. With a good flashlight, they could easily see Mercer through the car’s floor and ceiling grates.
He readjusted his position, gaining a better grip on the cable, which for now seemed to be holding. He looked up. Two of the shooters held lit flashlights, but neither was directed downward. They were already five hundred feet up from the bottom of the shaft, with another thousand to go. Had there been sufficient light, Mercer probably would have started panicking. As it was he forced himself not to think of the widening chasm between his bicycling legs and the ground far below.
The elevator continued to rocket upward, rattling and scraping in a trip that never seemed to end. They shot past the level where Mercer had been teaching mine rescue. There were no lights to mark the opening, but he felt the brief change in air pressure as they soared beyond it.
Mercer’s arms were beginning to tire as lactic acid built up in muscles that were already sore after a day spent crawling through simulated cave-ins. He swung his body just enough to throw a leg over the loop, and he hung there like a lemur, alternating hands to give each a rest.
He had no idea how he was going to get out of the shaft once he reached the top, but for now all that mattered was keeping close to the shooters. It struck him that the killers had probably shot their way into the mine in the first place, and the operator above was likely at gunpoint.
With a loud pop Mercer’s weight caused another bracket to let go, and the downward jerk on the cable snapped two more in rapid succession. His snug little perch, where he could use a hand to steady himself against the elevator’s underside, now became a wild swinging ride that saw each arc grow in amplitude and frequency. Mercer’s heart raged in his chest as he desperately clutched the cable. The jerkiness made him lose his leg grip, so once again he was hanging over the void with only his hands — which burned with fatigue and felt as though the tendons were going to erupt through the skin.
Thirty agonizing seconds later, the elevator began to slow. It wasn’t the staid deceleration of a skyscraper’s ergonomically designed lift, which felt as gentle as a jetliner’s final approach. This was the brutal jarring slowdown of a military transport dropping into Bagram when the Afghans were launching SAMs at every inbound flight.
Momentum nearly slammed Mercer into the underside of the lift.
The car came to a stop a moment later. The top of the Leister Deep’s main shaft was housed in a huge warehouselike building, surrounded by a massive concrete pad. There was just enough light for Mercer to see that below him was a yawning porthole to the abyss, and a drop of more than fifteen hundred feet.
His hands were shaking.
He had to get himself clear as soon as possible. The exit gate was above him. There was only one way to reach it, and that was free climbing in the cramped space between the elevator car itself and the side of the shaft.
Mercer positioned himself so he could contort his body and begin to sway back and forth, building up speed with each turn. He timed it at the height of one of his looping swings and reached out one hand to grab the edge of the car, his fingers fitting into the metal grate. He let go his other hand and quickly threaded it into the grate too so he’d only taken the strain on one hand for a second.
The shooters were talking quietly as they shuffled off the elevator. Had Mercer led the team, he would have sent the elevator back into the depths and disabled it, as well as the smaller secondary lift, so that the murders wouldn’t have been discovered for the days it would take to repair them.
He got lucky that the gunmen weren’t so thorough.
He heaved and struggled to raise himself in the narrow gap between the shaft wall and the lift. There was barely enough room for his head, and he had to deflate his lungs to get his chest to fit. Blood flowed from where the steel had cut into his fingers. Mercer ignored it all. The killers were already out of the elevator and headed, he supposed, to a getaway vehicle. He had to move fast or he was going to lose them.
He slithered his way to the lowest of the personnel platforms and unlatched the accordion gate. He slid it open just enough to squeeze through. He could hear voices above him. He slowly climbed out and up to ground level. Across from him and up in a control booth was the lift operator’s station. It had a large plate-glass window that overlooked the loading platform. The window was spattered with blood, and the body of the operator was slumped in his chair. The blood was still running and oozing down the glass. The local mine worker had done his job by operating the lift, as ordered, and was summarily executed.
A fifth gunman clad in black tacticals was waiting for the others next to a tall rolling door and an idling four-door Ford F-350 pickup. Mercer noted the rear license plate had been removed. He assumed the truck was stolen.
The four men who’d gone down into the mine linked up with their surface support guy. He made a big deal of the backpack, and then they loaded themselves into the dually pickup. In seconds they had pulled out of the building and vanished around a corner.
Mercer launched himself from the stairwell and raced after the truck. He pulled up short when he got outside. It was late afternoon and a cold rain was falling. It was mid-April, but the bitter air held March’s chill. The truck was already being swallowed by the gloom. Its taillights flashed as it slowed to let a bucket loader from the nearby gravel quarry pass. And then the truck started to pull away.
The access road to the mine complex was only a mile long, but it went through several tight hairpins as it descended down to a valley where it tied in with a local two-laner. Mercer ran for the bucket loader. It was as large as a semitrailer, with tires that stood as tall as he did, but the excavator moved slowly enough for him to catch up and then vault onto a ladder leading up to the operator’s cab.
The driver was shocked when Mercer suddenly appeared and opened the door.