“Empty the clip as fast as you can. This is it!”
They were twenty feet from the entrance, and as they drew closer, more Sudanese fell, gunned down from above by the unseen assassin. Mercer realized that the Israeli had positioned himself in the middle of where Habte had planted the explosives. He felt nothing that the man who had just helped them was about to die.
He drove the hearty little excavator into the tin shack that housed the safe, crushing one guard between the blade and the metal wall. The building collapsed under the grinding pressure, falling apart like a house of cards. The safe was white and very high-tech, about the size of a steamer trunk. Mercer lowered the blade and scooped it up. Its weight was almost too much and the Bobcat’s engine seethed, but they continued forward with the safe nestled in the bucket.
Fifteen feet from the entrance, Mercer felt the ground shudder. Ten crimson blooms erupted in the darkness above the mine entrance. Habte had fired the charges he’d planted, and the stability of the rock face was gone. The overhanging mountain started to come down in an avalanche. They had ten feet to cover, and the Bobcat’s motor was missing every few moments, an ominous skip that signified a bullet had pierced something critical. Mercer lowered the blade and released the thigh restraints that had locked over him and Selome.
“Be ready to run!” he screamed, seeing a solid wall of dirt, rock, and mud rushing down the mountain, hundreds of tons of debris that forced the air ahead of it in a gust.
The Bobcat surged again, finding a bit of power that carried them into the mine just a fraction of a second before the first of the avalanche plummeted to the desert floor. Mercer kept the throttles to their stops, racing ahead of the debris that started to fill the tunnel itself. The ground continued to shake, rock falling from the ceiling. The tunnel was about to collapse.
“Mercer!” Selome gasped.
The explosion had weakened the ancient tunnel, and it started to come down in huge slabs, cracks and fissures appearing in the walls, the rents racing forward faster than the Bobcat could possibly move. Mercer considered abandoning the excavator, but he needed the safe and the diamonds inside it for bait. Pressure bursts erupted just behind them, chunks of rock exploding down the shaft with the speed of bullets, more rubble clogging the tunnel. Stones rattled off the skiploader’s safety cage.
They drove for two hundred yards with a surging wall of debris chasing their heels. The engine began coughing again just as they started to pace ahead of the wending fissures in the walls. Mercer’s lips worked in a silent entreaty for the rig to keep moving.
After a few more seconds, the sound of falling stone receded. He looked behind them. The cave-in had stopped, though he could still feel the earth shifting as the mountain settled.
He shut down the Bobcat and silence rushed in, he and Selome panting in the dust-choked air.
The string of lights in the tunnel were powered by a generator in the main chamber, and they danced in time with the man-made earthquake. A few of the bulbs had smashed against the ceiling and plunged the drive into shadow. Behind them stood a packed jumble of stones, some as large as automobiles, others mere shards, but still the drive was completely sealed.
“What in the hell was that all about?” Selome coughed, stunned by the ferocity of the avalanche.
“Our entombment,” Mercer replied, unconcerned by the destruction around him.
Valley of Dead Children
Yosef couldn’t believe his eyes when the mountain beneath his sniper’s position suddenly began sliding downward in an unstoppable rush. He was a quarter mile away, higher in the hills that surrounded the valley, and he watched the whole thing through night-vision glasses. Even in the greenish distortion of the second-generation optics, the sight was unbelievable.
One moment, he saw his man work his rifle, the long silencer fitted to the American-made Remington, eliminating all telltale signs of his location while cutting just a fraction off the deadly weapon’s accuracy. And then the hill heaved upward in multiple gouts of earth. The sniper was caught unaware, vanishing into the maelstrom of debris so quickly that Yosef couldn’t track his position as he was swallowed by the avalanche. Nor could he tell if Selome Nagast and Philip Mercer had made it into the tunnel. It was possible they’d been crushed by the tons of rock and dirt.
He radioed his other team, thinking that the mine was under attack. The two-man team reported that nothing was happening at their sector.
If it wasn’t an attack, then Yosef had no idea what had happened. He’d watched Mercer’s escape from the barbed-wire enclosure and tracked him as he moved stealthily around the mining camp, first to a cluster of tents and later to free Selome. Their dash for the mine in the small digging machine was dismaying. Yosef couldn’t understand why they hadn’t tried to escape the valley. And then came the avalanche. He considered that perhaps the explosions were the result of a trip-wire booby trap designed to prevent unauthorized entry into the mine. There could be no other explanation.
Then came the full realization. The ancient mine had been sealed by the landslide! He gaped at the mounds of rock and earth that blocked the entrance and was struck dumb. All the work that had gone into the opening of the mine was lost, and it could only be the fault of Philip Mercer. Yosef prayed that the American had been smeared into a wet stain. Mercer had destroyed Yosef’s chance for ever recovering the Tabernacle of the Lord, the sacred Ark in which Moses had carried the Word of God into Israel.
The Israeli team had kept the mine under observation since the column of equipment had arrived from the west, followed shortly by hundreds of refugees. They had found the valley from the plane they’d rented in Asmara, using the map supplied by Rabbi Yadid. They’d landed twenty miles away, and Yosef and the others had taken only a day to march to the mine and establish observation posts that they’d manned around the clock for the past weeks.
In all that time, none of them had seen anything remotely resembling the Ark of the Covenant removed from the mine, and Yosef assumed that the artifact was still buried inside. The miners would have a better chance than the commandos at finding it, so he had hoped to make his assault when it was discovered and removed from the tunnel. The superior training of his small team would ensure they’d have little trouble stealing the Ark once it was on the surface.
But things back home had changed all that.
During his last contact with Levine, the Defense Minister had told him that his agents in Israel had failed to find Harry White. It was crucial that Yosef find the Ark before White’s debriefing, or the operation would fail. So far no alarms had been sounded within the intelligence community, but both men knew that once the old man told his story, it was only a matter of time before an investigation implicated the minister. Levine ordered Yosef and his men to make a direct approach by taking over the mine and finding the Ark themselves. Yosef noted the strong odor of desperation in Levine’s plan.
At first Levine had wanted the Ark to secure his election to the prime minister’s office, but now the discovery might be needed to protect him from prosecution. He’d promised Yosef that he could still count on close air support from the CH-53 Super Stallion standing by. Levine needed just four hours’ notice to get the chopper and an in-flight tanker into the air and en route.
Choking down his own emotions, Yosef continued to watch the camp below him. He saw the two white leaders of the expedition take charge of the pandemonium. He assumed one of them was Giancarlo Gianelli and the larger man with him was a mining engineer. Yosef couldn’t hear their voices, but the gestures and the speed in which the orders were carried out demonstrated total control. Within minutes, additional lamps had been brought to the landslide and the large crawler excavator was up and running, its twin lights piercing the rain. The mechanical arm began tearing into the loose rubble, ripping out long trenches of debris.