Geologist and adventurer Philip Mercer is visiting an old friend who’s working far down in Minnesota’s Leister Deep Mine—but he arrives too late to save Abe Jacobs and his climate-research team from a shocking, brutal attack. Mercer vows to seek revenge as well as answers, hoping to pick up Jacobs’s search for a cache of the rare crystals known as lightning stones—rumored to have been aboard Amelia Earhart’s plane when it vanished in 1937. From a harrowing close call in the Midwestern U.S. to a nailbiting showdown in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, to a remote island in the middle of the Pacific, Mercer must race to stay ahead of a team of highly-trained assassins—and to figure out if he’s chasing a rare scientific discovery, or merely a historical fairy tale. “Jack Du Brul just gets better with every book. This is the most un-put-downable thriller I’ve read in ages.” —Lincoln Child “Fresh, original, and incredibly ingenious. This is wall-to-wall excitement! Nobody writes like Du Brul.” —Brad Thor , bestselling author of Code of Conduct “A perfect blend of menace with normality. Without question, Jack Du Brul is one of the thriller genre’s acknowledged masters.” —Steve Berry, bestselling author of The Patriot Threat “A rip-roaring, globe-trotting, seat-of-your-pants adventure novel extraordinaire. An absolutely first rate novel and a gripping good read!” —Christopher Reich, bestselling author of Invasion of Privacy Jack Du Brul became a #1 New York Times bestselling author with Clive Cussler, co-wrtiing the Oregon series, which has beome a fan favorite. Du Brul is also the author of earlier betselling novels featuring Philip Mercer. He lives in Vermont with his wife. jackdubrulbooks.com chapter 1 Leister Deep Mine, Minnesota Today For the trapped miner the blackness was an absolute. It was his entire world. It filled every nook and cranny in the collapsed tunnel. It was a clammy presence on his skin, like he was pressed up against a corpse. The black had weight, like it was squeezing him as though he wore a too-tight diving suit. And that weight intensified every time he breathed, for the black invaded his lungs, crushing them, making him feel like he was taking in a warm liquid that he had to cough out. It coated the back of his throat like a noxious oil, slick and cloying. It filled his ears, jamming them so even when he screamed as loudly as possible, it sounded like a distant echo of a child’s whimper. The black. It was his entire world, and if rescue didn’t come soon he was certain that it would begin to invade his mind as it had already subsumed his body. Fifty yards and a world away, Hans Gruber, a taciturn German who was sick of the jokes people made about his name, picked his way past a jumble of crushed rock—detritus from the cave-in that littered the floor of the shaft some one thousand feet below the midwestern prairie. He wore heavy work clothes that were streaked and caked with dirt. An oxygen tank was strapped to his back although he and his team hadn’t detected any poisonous gases. The LED lamp on his helmet cast a bright blue cone in the otherwise stygian realm in which he worked. Making the going even tougher were the four-foot-long steel bolts that had once held the collapsed ceiling together. There were hundreds of them sticking up in the rubble that blocked the tunnel, and each one seemed to snag at his clothes and tear at his skin like skeletal fingers. The dust was mostly settled since the cave-in, but motes still hung suspended. The air was perfectly still—a sure sign that the ventilation was not working in this section of the mine. Another in a long string of omens. Behind him the rest of his crew was busy with the screw jacks. A steel forest had grown in their wake. His men had erected dozens of polelike jacks to help stabilize the hanging wall over their heads and hold back, at least until they could finish with the rescue, the millions of tons of rock above them. Three hours earlier, on what was otherwise a normal Tuesday in the mines, a crew was shoring up the roof in this section of tunnel by drilling holes into the ceiling and then using a pneumatic tool to twist the screw bolt into the living rock, binding the otherwise unstable matrix until it was no longer a threat to those who had to work under it. This mine was known for poor rock conditions, but men had worked it successfully for years without a fatality from a cave-in. The techniques and safety protocols were perfected and the men followed them to the letter, and yet Mother Nature and gravity care not for proper preparations. Without so much as a groan, a fifty-foot-long section of ceiling at least six feet thick had crashed to the floor of the tunnel. Fortunately the men coming behind the “screw crew” to fill the holes with grout to prevent the metal from rusting in the hot humid air hadn’t yet reached the site of the collapse, so none of them were st