Black Pearl (3 page)

The hyacinth-laden barge swept swiftly downriver, through what had once been prosperous farms and plantations. Past the ruins of fishing villages and mining towns which, like Dr Koizumi's facility, had flourished in the seventies only to die during the relentless onslaughts of the eighties and nineties. Every now and then there would be something newer – projects that had died at birth under the dead hand of the bribe-crippled kleptocracies that had run the place through into the noughties and early twenty-tens, before the IMF, World Bank and interested economies from Chile to China discovered that money invested in Central Africa was even more at risk than that invested in Iceland or Ireland.

Until, at last, the great river entered the inner delta. A stream that had been as broad as the Amazon at Manaos suddenly fractured, shattered, running away into the swampy jungle in a maze of lesser streams. The barge would have been lost, too, but for the force of the flood which held its floating island in midstream so that it followed that tap-root of the River Gir straight into the heart of the inner delta. Here the flood had all but swamped even the hardiest mangroves. But they still reached out, like deadly reefs, until one at last snagged the matted roots of water hyacinth. The mares' nest of vegetation swung inwards towards the shore and became more firmly anchored.

It had reached its final resting place, seemingly almost as high as the simple wooden cross on top of the missionary church, which was the first sign of current human habitation half a kilometre inland on a knoll miraculously above the floodwater. Then the flood beneath the chapel crested and began to recede. The force of the falling water sucked at the hyacinth raft with sufficient force to start breaking it up. The mangroves tore at it as the current began to release them, ripping at it as they sprang back like the claws of the great panthers that had once hunted here, with branches as powerful as the arms of the huge gorillas that had once ruled the jungle on far Mount Karisoke. The raft came apart. Dr Koizumi's skull rolled away into the receding waters. The rest fell into the mud of the river's shore.

The rains eased. The water fell. The river at last resumed its accustomed river course, running gently enough to allow the first couple of orphans from the church school near the chapel to come down to the bank and begin to explore the aftermath of the flood, like creatures recently released from the Ark. And it was they who found the oysters lying like a bunch of misshapen black grapes in the mud of the riverside. They took the oysters to the women who ran the place, Celine Chaka, estranged daughter of the current president of Benin La Bas, and Anastasia Asov, disowned daughter of one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in Russia. It was Anastasia who opened them and discovered the huge black pearls within.

Anastasia gave the largest of the pearls to her father, Maximilian Asov, who was in the country planning to do a deal with President Chaka. She would have given them all to Richard Mariner – in the country on the same mission – for she trusted him more than she trusted any member of her family. But Max Asov had a famously successful jewellery business and promised to get her top dollar. It was a promise she and Celine were happy to rely on as they fought to rebuild the finances and infrastructure of their ruined orphanage.

Intrigued by the colour of the pearl, Max had it tested. And so he found that the mud which gave the oil-dark pearl its unique colour – the mud that formed the bed of Lac Dudo, was the purest form of coltan yet discovered. Suddenly the apparently primary interest in the mysterious black pearls became secondary to what had made them black in the first place.

Columbite tantalite – coltan for short – is a black metallic ore only found in major quantities in the eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not far to the south of Benin La Bas. Max had contacts who could refine the ore if he could get at it. They were experts in extracting the niobium, which was used in a range of modern equipment from MRI scanners to nuclear power stations. And also the far more precious metallic tantalum, a heat-resistant powder capable of holding a high electrical charge, a vital element in capacitors, the electronic elements that control current flow inside miniature circuit boards. Tantalum capacitors lie at the heart of cell phones, laptops, pagers, flat-screen TVs and almost every other electronic device, from the radar that keeps the international airplanes safe to the control panels that keep the Internet alive. The technology boom of the noughties caused the price of coltan to skyrocket. Max's experts estimated it would fetch in excess of two hundred and fifty US dollars a kilo, though it had reached more than four hundred dollars a kilo in the past. Even at two-fifty, that meant it was worth a quarter of a million dollars per metric tonne.

According to the latest maps they could get hold of – those prepared by the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company for Dr Koizumi in 1972, Lac Dudo's bed was a million square kilometres in area. The depth of sediment on the lake bed, according to the careful Japanese map makers, averaged ten metres, which meant that the lake could contain ten trillion cubic metres of coltan sediment. A cubic metre of sediment weighs roughly a metric tonne. It took Max Asov almost no time at all to calculate that here could be two trillion, five hundred billion dollars' worth of coltan, therefore, all just waiting for anyone who could get to it and manage to set up an extraction facility on the ruins of Dr Koizumi's doomed black pearl oyster farm.

‘L
ook, Max,' repeated Richard Mariner, raising his voice over the thunder of the Kamov's rotor. ‘Just getting up here in a chopper has taken months of planning. You must see how much tougher it will be to get a permanent team this far by water or on foot. It'll be a long, hard, dangerous undertaking. You'd be mad to even think of leading it yourself.' He leaned forward forcefully, frowning with concern, his ice-blue gaze probing his associate's square Russian face.

‘For two trillion dollars I'd
crawl
up here myself,' answered Max. ‘Especially, as you say, after everything I have invested in the project already.'

‘Besides,' added Max's business partner Felix Makarov, suavely leaning forward to confront Richard, his eyes, like Max's, alight with the promise of two trillion US dollars, ‘there may be alternatives to coming up the river by boat. Look how far we have managed to come by chopper, for instance. Maybe we could just drop a team in place …'

‘Admitted,' Richard agreed, leaning back into his comfortable seat, one long finger thoughtfully stroking the razor-straight scar on his cheekbone as he thought through Felix's statement. ‘But hopping up for a look-see in the company Kamov is one thing. Setting up a facility to extract the coltan is quite another. Besides, an aircraft of any kind is only useful if you can land it. And at the moment I'll be damned if I can see anywhere suitable down there.'

The three men grouped round the table at the front of Max's executive Kamov which belonged to his mining company Bashnev/Sevmash, looking out of the window at the relentless green of the jungle's upper canopy. From this angle the virgin rainforest looked like head after head of broccoli to Richard – countless thousands of them; maybe millions reaching to the horizon on their right, where the borders with the countries of Central Africa lay hidden, and to the horizon on their left. Behind them it seemed to reach in an unbroken carpet to the coast, but Richard knew this was an illusion. And ahead of them, the jungle mounted to the ragged, flood-damaged tree line high on the slopes of the huge and restless volcano called Mount Karisoke and the border with the neighbouring country of Congo Libre. But it was hard to get a grip of the fact that each one of the apparently numberless green humps of foliage was standing about a hundred metres above the actual ground, encompassing a cubic area larger than a cathedral.

It had taken the Kamov eight hours' solid flying time to get here from Granville Harbour at the distant mouth of the River Gir, powering through the low, humid sky above the great waterway at its maximum speed. Eight hours that did not count the layover every two hours in increasingly remote wilderness areas where Max had set up fuel dumps. The whole project had taken six months to get even this far – the first sortie up to the fabulous lake itself. A trip that
biznizmen
Max and Felix insisted on leading themselves – and which the Mariners would not have missed for the world. Here, as in their dealings all over the globe, from the oilfields of the Arctic to those off the shores of Benin La Bas, whatever Bashnev/Sevmash discovered, drilled or mined, Heritage Miner shipped for them – and usually by water.

The last executive seat was occupied by Richard's wife and business partner, Robin. ‘Even so,' she said now, shaking her golden curls and frowning as she picked up on Richard's point, ‘you're looking at two thousand kilometres in from the coast. Two thousand kilometres from civilization to this Lac Dudo. And that's as the crow flies. It must be another five hundred or so if you follow the river. Always assuming you can follow the river. What with the waterfalls, cataracts and white-water rapids we've flown over during the flight so far. And then there's still
this
at the end of it.' She gave a shudder, looking down.

‘But there is civil infrastructure down there already,' insisted Max, straining round and unsuccessfully trying to catch the eye of whichever local government historian present on the Kamov had described the transport system in its seventies heyday to him. ‘There are roads, a railway, the whole communications network built in the late sixties and early seventies when this place was booming. There's a twelve-lane highway joining Cite La Bas with CiteMatadi, then going straight on down to Granville Harbour and the coast.'

‘I've seen it – been on some of it,' countered Robin. ‘It's useless. Cite La Bas is dead and CiteMatadi is not much better. Cite La Bas was never all it was cracked up to be in the first place. They talked it up as the New York of West Africa – a buzzing twentieth-century hub. But it was little more than a frontier town with big ambitions.'

‘More like Tombstone in the Wild West rather than Tokyo, perhaps,' offered Richard grimly. ‘Aptly enough, all things considered …'

‘Very witty, darling. Moreover, Max, the infrastructure between them hasn't been touched for forty years. It's all just jungle now. As far as I know the only way along your twelve-lane highway is by motorbike and on foot. God knows what's happened to the railroad. Don't fool yourselves, either of you. You'd need to start from scratch.'

‘It's as though we haven't just come up the river,' added Richard thoughtfully, ‘it's as though we've gone back in time! It's like Jurassic Park down there.'

‘Robin!' laughed Max. ‘Get a grip! And you, Richard – Tombstone …
Jurassic Park
! I ask you!' But for once the booming Russian's confident tone sounded a little hollow. For the last two hours there had been nothing to see other than the jungle, and that had been depressing enough. But now they were coming over the deserted suburbs of Cite La Bas.

After an hour's flight at maximum cruising speed they were nearly three hundred kilometres from the River Gir now, approaching Cite La Bas from the south-west, so they were confronted at first by the stunted overgrowth of secondary jungle that had developed exponentially in the years since the gas cloud had killed those who had survived the eruption and the lava flow. City block after city block was literally running to seed. Plants burgeoned everywhere, given gigantic expansion by the rainforest climate. It was hard to see most of the houses, draped as they were with ivies, creepers and lianas. Huge trees rose, not only in gardens but through entire dwellings. It was hard not to see the secondary jungle as a living thing ruthlessly reinvading the land that humanity could no longer defend.

Awe-inspiring though this huge destruction was, it shrank to insignificance beside the utter devastation of the north-eastern suburbs. Here everything was black instead of green. Starkly, gauntly dead instead of threateningly fecund. Even after all these years – and after all that nature had dealt it, cars stuck up out of the cinder-black ground, half buried, frozen in place. All of them battered and rusting, many of them burst open like obscene flowers where their petrol tanks had exploded. Buses, trucks, lorries, pantechnicons stuck up like toys thrown on to an ash heap. Richard's eyes swept over the devastation almost unbelievingly. A black-throated pit appeared, seemingly leading halfway to the centre of the earth; big enough to make him wonder if this was an offspring of the volcano itself.

‘That must be where the avgas tanks went up,' said Max, who had read the report prepared for the government in the months after the disaster, when the international community had been throwing money, aid and volunteers at the place. Before it became obvious that almost nothing was getting past ex-president Liye Banda's venal clique, who were growing fat while the dwindling survivors up-country were simply wasting away. And there was precious little that could be done in any case, especially in the face of the marauding Interahamwe, the Lord's Resistance Army and the Army of Christ the Infant. Before they all pulled out again and left Benin La Bas well alone. ‘The explosion took out all the airport buildings and everything on the apron, so it says in the report.'

Richard just shook his head, beyond speech. He glanced at Robin. Her grey eyes were wide and full of tears. The state of the once-great city emphasized the point she had been making about the country's infrastructure more powerfully than any words ever could have done.

‘Damn,' said Max. ‘I'd hoped we could land on the runway at the airport or – at the worst – on the lava itself. The government report said the shield was flat, like the flows in Hawaii.' He swung round, glaring at the experts cowering down the length of the cabin behind him. The two nearest glanced up guiltily. But in fact they were looking at the Japanese map and the GPS handset and were unlikely to have been the ones advising Max on the state of the lava flow.