Both men spotted the weapon when it caught the light’s beam. Mahdi had a shorter distance to run to reach it, but Mercer’s reactions were quicker and they both dove and got a hand on it at the same time.
Mercer had a better grip on the AK and used it to twist the weapon away from the soldier. Mahdi kneed him viciously in the inside of his forearm and Mercer’s entire hand went numb. Suddenly the gun was in Mahdi’s control. Struggling under the man’s weight and only able to use his bad arm to deflect the gloating Sudanese, Mercer reached into the kit bag still slung around his shoulder.
He’d planned to use the high-speed fuse in conjunction with the dynamite he carried if they’d needed to blast any obstacles that got in their way, but now it had a more urgent purpose. Mahdi either didn’t notice or didn’t care as Mercer dropped the two-hundred-foot coil of fuse over his head. The rebel was laughing, knowing he had the advantage, but when he spied a tiny flame shooting from the Zippo in Mercer’s fingers, his eyes went wide with terror. In those last seconds he understood what Mercer had looped over him.
The fuse burned at twenty-two thousand feet per second, so the entire coil cooked off faster than the eye could see. Even under its protective coating, the temperature of the burning chemicals skyrocketed. The smell was almost as bad as the screech when the veins in Mahdi’s throat burst under the pressure of his blood turning to steam. His flesh roasted like a joint of meat.
Mahdi’s finger tightened on the AK’s trigger even as his eyes rolled back into his skull. A full clip arrowed into the ceiling, ricocheting and filling the chamber with deadly lead. The crashing shots and the echoes weakened a section of the scaly hanging wall, and a fifty-ton slab of stone crashed to the floor a short distance away, followed seconds later by several more.
The whole ceiling was giving way! Mercer rolled out from under the struggling terrorist, grabbed up the assault rifle by its hot barrel, and grasped the flashlight in his other hand. More stones let go, huge chunks whose impact loosened even more of the ceiling in a domino effect. It was as if the earth had come alive and they were caught in its jaws. With the weight shifting its balance, one of the pillars exploded like a bomb, crushed beyond its structural tolerance, hurtling rock like grapeshot.
Mercer heaved Selome off the floor as if she was no more than a child. As more debris rained around them, they ducked into a side tunnel. He took just a second to look back and watched a slab of rock larger than an automobile land squarely on Mahdi as he writhed with the pain of his burned neck. The weight of the stone forced the contents of his torso toward his head, but they could not erupt through the cranium. Mercer saw Mahdi’s throat expand like that of a bull frog’s until the entire bulbous mass exploded in a red mist and the body lay still.
He trained the light to the far end of the gallery where he had seen the distant glint. Just before his view was obliterated by the crumbling chamber, he watched an eerie blue light radiate from the gloom, burning brighter and brighter until a chunk of stone crashed right in front of him, sealing the room forever.
The side tunnel’s roof was lower than most of the others they’d encountered, and Mercer had to ease Selome to the ground and coax her to follow as more of the chamber behind them collapsed. Huge clouds of dust blew into the tunnel, enveloping them, choking them until they could no longer open their eyes and every breath was torture. And still more of the room fell, a roaring sound that filled their world and threatened to tear away their sanity. They scrambled from it, ripping skin from their hands and knees as this tunnel began to fill with debris.
They covered fifty yards before the cave-in ended. The sudden silence left their ears ringing. Looking back the way they’d come, Mercer saw that they were cut off from the others by untold billions of tons of earth. Even if they had wanted to, there was no way they would ever be able to return.
What the hell was that glow? The blue light had to be a static discharge, he thought. When rock is crushed, it can give off a small amount of electricity. Given the amount of moving stone, the phenomenon could easily explain what he’d seen. Or maybe it was a pocket of methane catching fire after being ignited by a spark. He had several other naturally occurring explanations, but deep in the back of his mind, he knew there was also an unnatural one. No, it couldn’t be.
“What happened in there?”
“Mahdi suffered a crushing defeat,” Mercer rasped, waiting for Selome to take a drink from their canteen. He wanted to give her time to recover before telling her that this tunnel went in the opposite direction from where they wanted to go. There was no way he was going to tell her what else he’d seen.
“You have no idea what I was thinking in there when he attacked us,” Selome replied, wiping her lips against the delicate bones on the back of her hand.
“Can’t be any weirder than what was going through my mind,” Mercer agreed. “Are you okay?”
“My jaw hurts and I’m sure it’ll be black and blue in a few hours, but I’m fine. You?”
Mercer removed his pants and began working on the knife wound in his leg. He didn’t waste any of their precious water cleaning the gash but slapped a fragment of his shirt over the incision and secured it with a strips of silvery duct tape from his bag. “Dr. Mercer’s antiseptic surgery, secondary infections are our specialty.”
“Is it bad?”
“Nothing major was hit,” Mercer said, then added with dark humor, “and it’ll stiffen long before we get to see your black and blues.”
The dust was still too thick to rest this close to the cave-in, so Mercer donned his pants and they started out of the area. Particles lay heavily in the air, and the powerful light could cut only a feeble swath through it. After a further hundred yards, the tunnel had shrunk in diameter so that their backs scraped the ceiling as they crawled. Still they were dogged by chocking clouds of grit.
“This may take a while to settle.” Mercer gagged each time he opened his mouth and his nose felt scored by acid.
They were forced to lower themselves even more as the tunnel continued to shrink. In moments the shoulders of Mercer’s shirt were ripped through and the abraded skin began to bleed. Without choice or option, they continued, using their elbows and toes to propel themselves forward.
“Mercer, what’s happening?” Selome cried.
“I don’t know.”
The tunnel was no larger than a coffin, just wide enough for them to squirm on their bellies, and in the murky light Mercer could see its diameter constricting even further. For the first time he considered that this tunnel might pinch out into solid rock. As if reading his thoughts, Selome called his name again, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria.
“I know, I know.” It was becoming tougher for him to move. He’d taken off his kit bag a while back and pushed it and the AK-47 ahead of him. He had to twist and struggle to gain every inch.
For a while, the tunnel remained the same size, neither growing or shrinking, but their progress was cut to a snail’s pace. Rock encircled Mercer completely; not one section of his body was out of contact with its jagged embrace. The tunnel walls were pure, blood-red mercury ore. In a few places, raw mercury had worked itself from the ceiling and dripped into little hollows and troughs on the floor.