He was the last one to descend into the children’s mine, dragging the lanyard that would breach the coffer dam behind him. Once in the cramped tunnel, he moved away from the hole connecting the two mines. When he judged he was far enough, he yanked the line and held his breath as debris filled the pit above them. Unless Hofmyer possessed a photographic memory, he would never know the pit had been filled or how Mercer had taken his people out of the main chamber.
It was only after the last of the rubble settled that he took a moment to investigate their surroundings. In the beam of his flashlight, the tunnel was only three feet tall and maybe as wide, circular rather than squared. All the surfaces were rough, showing the marks where they had been worked by primitive stone tools. The air was just rich enough to breathe, but it was a struggle. In the few moments since the tunnel had been sealed, the air was starting to foul. Mercer realized he had to string out the forty men with him if he was to avoid depleting the oxygen in one section, yet he couldn’t have them too far apart for fear of losing someone.
From where he sat, he could see three branch tunnels meandering off, one to left, one to right, and one rising up and over this one. The claustrophobic tunnels reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the myriad branches in a human lung or the den of some burrowing rodent. A man could become hopelessly lost after only a few feet. He crawled over the supine men until he had reached the front of the group, passing the Sudanese guards, oblivious to their wrathful stares. Selome waited for him with her own flashlight. They had only two others, but these lights were powered by hand crank mechanisms that required no batteries so there wasn’t any danger of them dying. Still, the tunnel was so dim that it was impossible to see beyond just a couple of yards.
“What now, fearless leader?” Selome asked, her pride in Mercer evident in her eyes and smile.
Mercer’s kit bag bulged with items he thought he might need for the ordeal to come. He dug out one of the lighters. He sparked the wheel and watched the flame until the metal top was too hot to touch. The flame remained in a solid column, not flickering in the slightest. “No air movement, but that doesn’t mean we won’t find some. It just means we are too far back to feel it. What I want to do is find a place to leave everyone behind, a chamber like the children would have used as a dormitory. Chances are it will be situated near a natural air vent.”
“And then?”
“You and I find the way out of here. We’ll be able to move a lot faster if we don’t have to worry about stragglers and our prisoners.” Mercer glanced back into the darkness, listening to the coughing fits of the men. The air was rank. “Now you know why I didn’t want Habte with us. As much as he smokes, he wouldn’t last five minutes in here. By the time we get out, he should have reached Dick Henna and a couple hundred Marines will have landed, taking care of our former Italian slave master.”
“And then we come back for the rest of the miners?”
“You got it.”
They started out, Mercer in the lead with Selome right behind. They followed the erratic beam of his flashlight as he crawled through the serpentine tunnels on his hands and knees. After an hour, all of them were feeling the effects of the dust their motion kicked up, and the tunnel echoed like a tuberculosis ward. The Eritreans were drinking water at a prodigious rate to salve their burned throats. Mercer was becoming concerned. They needed to find a small chink in the earth’s armor that allowed a seep of air to reach the dark maze.
Another two hours of uninterrupted agony followed as the party oozed through the warren with wormlike slowness. Every few hundred yards, Mercer would test the air for movement, but each time the lighter’s flame held steady. He studied the Medusa pictures at many of the major junctures. Their resolution was so poor that the lines on the photos did not correspond with the three-dimensional map he was creating in his mind. After the fourth frustrating time, he angrily tucked them back in his bag. Their only hope lay with Mercer’s instincts and his intimate knowledge of mines and mining. He was the only one who could navigate this subterranean realm, ignoring large branches and side tunnels that might have tempted another and leading them through tiny crawl spaces that someone else would have ignored.
They were well into their fourth hour when Mercer sparked his lighter again. The small flames swayed away from him, its movement so slight that had he not been staring, he never would have noticed it. Selome saw the expression on his face and grinned.
“I think we’re going to be okay,” he said.
The chamber they found fifteen minutes later was about twenty feet square, and while the quarters were cramped, everyone fit. Mercer noted that the cavity was a natural formation, one that the child miners had discovered and exploited for themselves. It was like a warm womb deep underground, a sanctuary from the agonizing labor they endured until their young lives ended in the darkness. The ceiling of the cave was about six feet tall and was scarred with hundreds of cracks. Through one of these fissures and through a labyrinthine twist in the living rock, a trickle of air descended into the earth, freshening the atmosphere. After the foul odor of the tunnels, the air in the chamber was sweet and joyously refreshing.
Selome settled against Mercer’s chest as he lay against one wall, taking a much needed break. The men were tangled around them like a litter of exhausted puppies, too tired to sort themselves out. Many minutes would pass before the last coughing spell ended with a wet expectoration of blood.
“It’s all downhill from here,” Mercer said.
“You mean it gets easier?”
“No.” Mercer shook his head. “We’ve been climbing toward the surface for the past hour so these tunnels will have to slope downward again if we’re going to find an exit we can use.”
“Okay, mister.” Selome looked at him with mock severity. “You’ve been giving cryptic answers and telling only half the story since we entered the mine, and every time you pull some trick out of your hat. So what’s your trick this time?”
Mercer laughed. “Found me out, did you? Yes, I have another trick. Remember when we first entered the mine after Gianelli caught us at the monastery? I said I was looking for an escape route.” Selome nodded. “I noticed a section of wall a hundred feet from the surface that looked as if it had been rebuilt. The stone was a shade lighter than the blocks used to line the rest of the tunnel. I’m betting our lives that there’s another tunnel behind it that had been covered over, hidden.”
“You think these old mine shafts lead to it.”
He nodded. “But if they don’t, we are seriously screwed.” They rested for another half hour before Mercer decided that if he delayed any longer, he’d be too stiff to continue. He roused Selome and spoke with the gang leaders, again asking her to translate. He laid out his plan and the Eritreans agreed. Their faith in his abilities was an inspiration for Mercer, but also a burden. First it was Harry’s life which depended on what he did, then Selome’s and Habte’s, and now he’d added forty more people, plus the others still in the slave compounds. He cleared his mind of creeping defeatism. It was much too late to doubt his decisions, even if he led them into a possible, and quite literal, dead end.
“Are you ready?” Mercer asked.
“Have I ever said no?”
“That’s my girl.”
They started out of the chamber, exiting through one of the larger tunnels. In only a few seconds, they could no longer see the glow from the two flashlights they’d left with the Eritreans. The beam of their own single light seemed puny in the mounting blackness of the unnatural maze. And as Mercer crawled ahead of Selome, the single AK-47 he’d taken with him seemed just as ineffective if they managed to reach the surface and had to face Gianelli again.