Deadly Diamonds (11 page)

“I'll be gone for a while, Mr. Devlin.”

That canceled out the humor. The old scowl was back. He could always smell danger on my part, and he always forbade me to get into it—which is why I seldom told him in advance. This was different.

“Where? How long?”

“Ireland. And I don't know. Maybe a few days. We'll see.”

“Why in the damned hell—?”

“Because it's necessary. Listen, they'll be throwing me out of here in a minute. I'll speak fast. It's like this. You know about the mess our client Kevin O'Byrne got into. You also know about the trouble that suddenly dropped on Father Ryan. I think there's a connection, and I think you agree. We've run out of leads here, but I got a name that might open up something. It's someone in Ireland.”

“Where did you get it?”

“The Irishman who pulled your chestnuts out of the fire last night. He let me in on a piece of what this thing is all about. I better go. Remember, I'm holding you to that promise. Out of sight till I get back. Those boys don't play nice.”

I beat a quick retreat before he could grill me for particulars that would only give him worrying fits. His voice caught me at the door.

“Michael, for the love of the saints, what is it about?”

I said it in the lowest voice that would carry to his bed.

“Diamonds, Mr. D. The kind they call ‘blood diamonds' from Africa.”

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sierra Leone, West Africa, 1999

This was the start of a good day. No, better than that. This was to be the best day of all nine years of Bantu's life. The first rays of sun were just cracking the pall of constant rain clouds of the rainy season. His red dirt village of Koinu in eastern central Sierra Leone on the Atlantic coast of Africa had been soaked by unremitting rainfall for five months. Soon the red clay floor of his family hut would have the respite necessary to absorb the unending drenching of everything in and out of the hut. Even the suffocating hundred-degree heat would subside slightly.

That meant that his father would leave him, his mother, and younger brother and sister to walk deep into the all-but-solid mass of jungle palm and banana bushes to neighboring villages to trade for food and clothing. But what made this year and this day special was that his father's last words to him were a commission, a deputation of trust in his budding maturity.

“You are the man while I'm gone, Bantu. Keep them safe.”

In the years before Bantu was born, those words would have been merely a symbolic gesture of a father's confidence in his son. Since the events of early 1991, they took on a darker significance and laid a ponderous weight on Bantu's immature shoulders.

In leaving, his father counted on the fact that the menace had so far kept its distance from Bantu's village. Word had spread through the mud villages of the Kono region of horrors so inhuman as to be beyond belief. Some villagers avoided the unthinkable by considering
the reports mere offshoots of the superstitions of the neighboring Kamajor tribes. Disbelief kept pace with tales too hellish to be fact.

Then the sounds began echoing off the distant hills and penetrating the protective wall of vegetation. The static bursts of AK-47s punctuating human cries were chilling, but still distant enough to be of another world.

One reassuring thought freed Bantu's father to make his annual trek to the neighboring villages. The sounds were still sufficiently distant that if the monster should approach his village, there would certainly be time for his family to flee into jungle undergrowth so thick that anyone passing within three feet of them would be oblivious to their presence.

His father had been gone a week. Bantu was settling into the self-esteem of his recently elevated position in the family. There were still sporadic reminding echoes from a distance, but nothing to change the village routine.

On the eighth dawn of his father's absence, Bantu was sleeping a short distance from the family hut, close to the slight coolness at the jungle's edge. There was no transition. There was not a split second between his life of sanity and kindness, and the rupture of everything human.

They exploded out of every pore of the jungle wall. Staccato, deafening bursts of automatic gunfire strafed every hut within view. He saw friends he had known since birth, polka dotted with crimson holes, blown off their feet, turning the once red dirt crimson.

The invaders came in hordes, screaming curses and spraying death until Bantu could not count the loss of people who had been his life. And worst yet, if there could be such a thing, their invaders who followed with razor-sharp machetes worked horrors so stunning that he was frozen to the spot.

His father's words, “Keep them safe,” stung him to the core. He started to run through the numbing evidence of death toward his own hut. But he could only cover half the ground before his mother's and sister's cries from inside the hut went suddenly silent.

He saw two of the invaders half drag, half carry his six-year-old
brother off toward the jungle. He ran at an angle to cut them off. He had no idea of what he could do against machetes, but he had to try.

His scrawny legs carried him at their best speed around an outlying hut to charge the two pulling his wailing brother into the brush. He never saw it coming from behind. In the flash of a blade, he was in the mud with a gaping wound in his side. One seized him by the back of his neck and lifted him to his feet. A second came at him with a machete raised.

An instant before the blade came down, an order barked from one in command stopped it in midflight. Another order was barked. His two captors pulled him with feet dragging to the center of the village and threw him in the center of a circle with four other terrified boys of his age.

For the first time since the furies of hell exploded into what was now unrecognizable as his village, he saw their faces, and the horror of what was happening was magnified twofold. They were the faces of boys not three years older than his nine years. But they were faces such as he could never imagine. They were human faces without the least trace of humanity. The eyes were glass, lit with the unnatural fire of what he would come to know too well as drugs.

The terror around him continued as if feeding on itself until Bantu's mind could no longer bear the assault and shut down. The merciful balm of unconsciousness let him keep a slim grasp on his sanity. But the Bantu who had laid down by the jungle's edge the night before was gone forever.

He woke with no sense of time, tied to a tree in the center of the camp of the child soldiers who had taken all but his life. Boys and girls within two or three years of his own age, dressed in faded camouflage T-shirts and brown slacks, wandered among the refuse of their camp as if in a drug-induced abandonment of reality. Most carried the omnipresent AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Others wielded machetes in sporadic outbreaks of fights among themselves.

Bantu noticed an older boy, probably as old as fourteen, giving the orders. Each order was accompanied by a gesture with the automatic
rifle toward one of his village friends tied to a tree. Each was, in turn, untied and raised to his feet. He was pushed toward the center of the circle while the leader watched him walk. If he was unable to walk steadily, the execution order was given and carried out immediately.

When Bantu's turn came, in spite of the pain from his wounded side, he knew he had to walk upright for his life. He apparently passed the scrutiny of the leader because an order was barked. Two of the child soldiers tied his hands in line with the other prisoners who had passed the test, and the trek began.

He walked on the heels of the boy ahead of him from that morning's sunrise until the scant light that penetrated the growth of jungle ceiling was below the horizon. The pain in his side was all that kept him conscious to move one foot ahead of the other after exhaustion had set in.

Not all of the boys survived the trek, but Bantu allowed one thought to keep him on his feet when his strength could no longer sustain him. Somewhere in the horror the world had become were his father and younger brother, and if God could still find Bantu in all of this hell to deliver him, he'd find them. In the years that followed, he never let that thought diminish.

On the evening of the third day of endless slogging through jungle mud, the small band of survivors came to a sight so foreign to Bantu that he had no idea what he was seeing. The jungle opened onto a clearing with a massive sixty-foot circular pit of mud at the center. Ten or twelve bone-thin male figures clad only in torn shorts stood knee-deep in the reddish-brown fetid liquid, covered in mud and slime.

Their bodies moved in the macabre rhythm of exhaustion. They appeared to dredge pails full of solids from the bottom of the pit and dump them onto mounds of the sludge by the bank. Another five or six of the cadaverous figures filled circular wooden pans with sieved bottoms from the piles of sludge. They shook and sluiced the material in the pit's liquid until small stones collected in the center. They scanned the stones in the pans, emptied them, and refilled the
pans from the sludge pile on the bank. Occasionally, one of the stones caused an alert. It was taken from the pan and immediately handed over to the armed guard hovering over the ritual.

While Bantu soon realized that his life had been spared to become one of the skeletal workers in the pit, driven by the child guards with AK-47s overseeing the operation, he had no notion of what was worth the suffering that was spent on the task. Clearly, nothing edible could survive in the noxious sludge of the pit.

His confusion was lifted his first day in the pit. The few forbidden words that could be stealthily exchanged between laborers when the attention of the guards was drawn to something in one of the pans opened a world to Bantu that no one of his age, or any age, should experience. He came to realize that all of the killing, the torture, the satanic inhumanity was driven by the insatiable lure of the small chunks of milky-white rock that occasionally appeared in the sluicing pans. Now he knew what, but he still had no idea why. Even the name meant nothing to him, but he knew it would rule whatever was left of his life—diamonds.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Bantu's days ground on in the monotony and painful exhaustion of work in the pit. The days, then the weeks, then the months, then the years. Thoughts of escape died early in the first week. Instead of chains, his captors used the weapon of sheer exhaustion. The back-breaking labor began at first light and ended with darkness. There were no breaks, and the only sustenance was a cup of rice at day's end if his labors were judged worthy of keeping him alive.

The other prison wall was the jungle itself. One man or boy running alone would be unlikely to survive the swarms of malarial mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and what was worse than both of those—venomous black ants.

In the enforced isolation from communication with other prisoners, it was years before Bantu was able to piece together an understanding of what it was that had so completely despoiled every spark of humanity that had originally been born in the child soldiers who dominated every painful moment of his day. What he didn't know was that the seeds of the country's devastation began in the 1930s, when a British geologist discovered rough diamonds strewn on or just under the ground in certain regions of eastern Sierra Leone. No other substance on earth could have so thoroughly cursed the life of the entire country.