At first it wasn’t a noise — merely the absence of the all-consuming silence. Mercer strained to listen, his ears ringing with the effort and his eyes watering as he stared into the sable blackness. There! A tiny sound existing only in the deepest level of his consciousness, a hissing like a gentle whisper. He tried to shout, but his mouth was cemented closed by his thirst and he could manage only a hoarse croak.
Time might have passed, he had no way to tell, but he was sure that the mysterious hiss was growing louder. He wouldn’t let himself hope. He couldn’t do that if he was wrong. Then he saw a light, just a muted flicker. To him, it was like a blinding star burst. He drank it in, his eyes streaming with the joyous pain of it.
“Hello?” he rasped.
“Hello yourself,” Selome called cheerily from a short distance away. “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes.”
“What are you doing?” Mercer’s question was too quiet for her to hear, so there was no response.
It took ten more minutes, but he didn’t care. Selome was coming for him. The tears behind his eyes were no longer caused by the light. As he waited in his stone cocoon, he had a thought that tempered his joy. He’d given up on himself. He’d actually believed that he was going to die. He’d never, ever been one to quit until the very end, but this time he’d really thought he was finished. Even as he was about to be rescued, he was furious with himself, and even worse, disappointed.
Mercer suddenly felt the dirt beneath him begin to shift.
The constricting pressure against his chest slackened. He could hear Selome more clearly now. She was digging furiously, using some sort of heavy spade, and with every slash into the dirt ahead of him, Mercer felt the tunnel floor sink a fraction of an inch. When he tried to wriggle, he gained ground, his shoulders scraping against the walls, his back no longer squashed to the ceiling.
Then in a rush like childbirth, he was free, sliding forward dangerously fast, gaining speed as the slope steepened and the ceiling vanished above him. He started to tumble, caught in a cascade of loose soil and rocks that scored his eyes and nose and jammed solidly into his ears. He banged against the walls as he fell, wanting to cry out at the agony of a smashed shin, but there was so much dirt boiling around him that if he opened his mouth, he would suffocate. Then his headlong plunge stopped, and he lay still as more rubble poured over him, the weight of it increasing with every second.
He was about to black out when the dirt blanketing his body was thrust aside. He felt a hand grasp his belt and shake him. Dirt flew like water from a spaniel and he could breathe again. He cleared the filth from his eyes and peered around. His first sight was of Selome standing over him.
“I should dig for buried treasure more often. It’s amazing what a girl can find.” She looked radiant even in the glimmer from the flashlight.
“Gold doubloon I’m not.”
He couldn’t believe how good it felt to be sore. It meant he was still alive. He swayed to his feet, reaching to brush a tendril of hair from Selome’s face. “I didn’t think you were coming back.” His voice was thick. He wanted to tell her what had happened when she left him alone, but he couldn’t. What he felt went beyond words. He simply stepped into her embrace, soaking up the heat of her body. “Thank you.”
There was just enough amber incandescence from the flashlight for him to visually explore the chamber they occupied and to understand how she had gotten him out of his tomb. The gallery was roughly rectangular and at least thirty feet tall with a shallow alcove at one end. Its walls had been covered with blocks of dressed stone. Mercer recognized the stones used in the closet-sized niche. He had seen them before. They were the same type as those lining the main tunnel from the surface. This room had been a staging area, a link between the direct path to the kimberlite ore beds and the older, more meandering tunnels. Behind him, a towering pile of dirt reached almost to the ceiling. At its summit, he saw the tiny round hole that led to the rest of the old mine and had held him prisoner for so long.
When the new, straighter drift had been driven into the mountain, the workers must have back-filled the passageway to the room and pillar mine chamber. In the thousands of years since then, the fill had settled enough for Mercer to crawl almost to the point where it emptied into this room. Of course, Selome had recognized that if she dug into the base of the mountain of dirt, it would collapse into the room and free him.
“I’m sorry it took so long, but when I fell into this chamber, I cracked my head against the floor and blacked out.” There was an angry bruise above her left eye.
“You won’t hear me complaining.” Mercer gulped half the remaining water from their canteen and examined the shovel Selome had used to loosen his earthen constraints. “It’s a shame you had to use that. It’s a beautiful example of a bronze-aged tool.”
“Then I’m glad you’re not an archaeologist. I ruined about five of these things getting you out.”
There was a collection of primitive tools in one corner of the room, picks and shovels, some scaled for an adult’s use, other miniature versions for the child slaves. Next to them sat rotted piles of leather that had been buckets and water flasks. A little bit off lay stacks of clay lamps.
“We can bemoan lost artifacts later,” Mercer said. “Right now I want to get us out of here and take care of some business.”
He rigged the stones blocking the alcove exit with explosives from his kit bag, careful to use just enough to take down a section of the wall and not blow it apart. He had no idea what was happening in the main tunnel beyond the barrier and didn’t want to advertise his presence until he was ready.
“What about fuse? Didn’t you use it against Mahdi?”
Mercer plucked another coil from his bag and snipped off a length. “Second rule of hard rock mining: you can never have enough fuse.”
“What’s the first rule?”
Mercer held up more dynamite. “You can never have enough explosives.”
The fuse was much slower than the one he’d used to disable Mahdi, so they had plenty of time to make it to the trench redoubt he’d dug with Selome’s help. He covered his head with one arm, keeping his body over Selome. When the charge blew, the concussion pelted them with debris.
He looked up and blinked. The wall hadn’t crumbled, but there was a three-foot crawl space at its bottom and light from the outside spilled into the chamber. Neither of them had ever thought they would see sunshine again and they embraced in its comforting aura.
“Now, let’s see this put to an end.” Mercer slung his bag over his shoulder, snatched up the AK-47, and led Selome into the tunnel.
The echoing sounds of a gun battle reverberated down the length of the shaft, stray tracer rounds winking by. Mercer quickly shoved Selome back into the chamber.
“Stay here and don’t move until I come for you. You just saved my life. Now it’s my turn.” He stepped out, keeping low to the footwall, the AK at the ready.
Mercer couldn’t tell who was using the mine as a cover position so he started crawling forward as more rounds streaked over his head. His eyes adjusted to the sunlight filling the shaft, but the haze of cordite smoke was nearly blinding and he had to get close to recognize the men firing out toward the camp. They were Sudanese soldiers. Habte must have made the call because he guessed the return fire ricocheting down the drive was from the Marines.
The rebels held an unassailable position against the American soldiers as long as they had ammunition. Unless a rocket launcher was used, there was no way to dislodge them. The Marines surely knew Habte’s warning to Henna about the trapped miners, so explosives were not an option. Remembering Mahdi’s sneak attack in the mine and the brutal raping that had taken place outside the women’s stockade, Mercer felt nothing as he brought the AK to his shoulder.