They slowly worked their way round the volcano’s flank and into a vast moraine field filled with huge black boulders. Here, the heat was more intense; the air hot and dry, tinged with the bitter stench of sulphur. They tried to fight the burning in their throats, but a fine black dust covered everything, making them cough almost continuously. It swirled around their ankles in the slow breeze, clinging to their clothes and skin, and blackening the palms of their hands.
They had been going for almost an hour, passing several narrow tunnels that fed back into the rock along the side of the river. Luca had stopped beside each one, crawling a couple of feet inside before reaching a dead end or the tunnel becoming too narrow for him to continue. He was just crouching down near the opening to a small cave, when Bear suddenly stopped. A hundred yards further on,
she
could see the dim silhouette of a figure lying on the ground.
‘It’s got to be one of the guards,’ she whispered.
Luca nodded. The figure was lying with its head towards the sun and one knee slightly raised. They waited for a couple of minutes, but there wasn’t the slightest movement.
‘Looks like he’s asleep. We could climb higher and get above him.’
Bear stared at him, her skin darkened by the black dust. It made the whites of her eyes appear brighter, while her once-white vest had blackened to such an extent that it was practically indistinguishable from the rest of her body.
‘This is crazy. What if he wakes up and sounds the alarm?’ she said.
‘We’ll go high and just pass around the top of him. Don’t worry, he won’t see us.’
‘What the hell was I thinking? We should never have crossed the river.’
Luca raised his finger to his lips, indicating for her to lower her voice.
‘Just give me ten minutes.’
He pushed forward, quickly climbing the rocks directly above them. He then worked his way horizontally until he was positioned over the slumbering figure but still hidden behind one of the many boulders. Craning round, he was trying to get a better view when the toe of his right boot dislodged a rock, sending it clattering down the hill. It spun noisily, kicking up puffs of dust with each turn, before
plunging
into the shallow waters off the riverbank. It had missed the figure by only a few feet.
Breaking cover, Luca skidded downhill until he was standing only ten feet away. With a rock held in his right hand to use as a weapon, he crept closer, trying to see into the man’s face.
‘
Putain
,’ Shit, Bear breathed, wanting to cry out and stop him. She watched as he came right up to the man, then saw his hand slowly lower as he pitched the rock back on to the ground.
Bear ran over. In front of Luca’s feet lay a corpse locked in rigor mortis. The face was turned towards them, with the palm of the right hand outstretched as if clasping at something, while a layer of dust covered the man’s open eyes, dimming the dead pupils. Two congealed lines of blood ran down from his nose and the whole left side of his face was hideously deformed. A thick swelling distorted his neck and the side of his cheek, disguising his natural features and making them look somehow twisted and monstrous.
Just to the right of the corpse lay a slab of overhanging rock and beneath it the dark entrance to a tunnel. At some point in the distant past, an old lava flow had burst out of the side of the volcano, leaving a trail of igneous rock that wound down the slope like a dried-up river.
Bear crouched down, staring closer at the man’s face. ‘He looks like a Bantu. Maybe from one of the villages near here. But if he managed to escape, why didn’t he make a break for it? Try and hide out in the jungle or something.’
‘Maybe he was too weak to make it any further,’ Luca
replied
. The man’s frame looked ravaged from starvation and forced labour. ‘Poor bastard.’
‘What’s that swelling on the side of his face? You ever seen anything like that before?’
Luca shook his head. ‘No, but we met a doctor in Goma who said he’d seen swelling on the bodies dumped in the river. It’s got to be the same thing.’
‘So what the hell is causing it?’
Luca didn’t respond. Until that moment, he had only focused on trying to track down Joshua, not sparing a thought for the kind of condition he might be in if they eventually found him.
‘I wonder if they’re all like that,’ he whispered. ‘The miners, I mean.’
Bear guessed what he was thinking.
‘That doesn’t mean your friend is the same. We don’t even know what’s causing it or what we are dealing with here.’
Luca’s eyes turned to the entrance to the tunnel.
‘I guess there’s only one way to find out.’
He crouched down and peered into the gloom of the tunnel. It was only a couple of feet high at most and so narrow that they would have to squeeze their shoulders through. A sickening draft of air, laced with the smell of sulphur, blew against his face. For a moment he just stared, blinking against the heat.
‘You really don’t have to go in there,’ he said. ‘If this is the mine, I could get a sample for you.’
‘Yeah, but I can’t stay out in the open either. So it looks like I’m screwed either way.’
Luca gave a hollow smile. Drawing the survival knife from its sheath, he untwisted the top. He then pulled off his T-shirt, cutting it into strips from the bottom and carefully winding them around the blade. Taking one of the waterproof matches from the cellophane wrapper, he struck it on the rock and held it under the fabric. The flames licked up, fanning sideways in the draft.
‘Stay close,’ he said, then slithered forward into the darkness. Bear tried to bring herself to follow him, but instead watched as the flickering light of the torch gradually receded deeper inside. She was well used to enclosed spaces from inspecting mines for the company, but there, they had lights and machinery; it was noisy, with a multitude of workers. Here, there was only the scrape of Luca’s boots against the rock and the long, beckoning darkness.
Just as the last glimmer of light faded from view, Bear slid down on to her stomach and shuffled forward. A few feet into the tunnel, the smell of sulphur intensified. It streamed into her nose and eyes. She coughed, feeling herself retch, and tried to cover her mouth with her hand as she leopard-crawled forward. Just ahead of her, she could make out the small bubble of light from Luca’s torch with its flames licking up against the low ceiling. She focused on the light, trying to block out everything else.
On they went, the tunnel narrowing so much that Luca had to stop several times, wriggling through with rough jerks of his shoulders. The rock around them grew hotter with each metre. It was a dull, timeless warmth that made them sweat after only a few seconds of being inside. Just ahead,
Bear
heard Luca curse, then the yellow flames faltered, before plunging them into darkness. Bear stared ahead but there was not the faintest shade of grey or shadow to be seen. It was just black. She reached forward, her fingers feeling out across the rock until they connected with the heel of Luca’s boot. She grabbed on to it, gripping it tight.
She felt him shuffle forward again, working his way deeper inside the tunnel. They must have been going for only five or ten minutes but each second dragged, the only sound that of their bodies scraping across the bare rock. Her elbows and knees burned from being pressed against the hot surface, while her neck muscles strained to keep her face clear of the ground. Dust clogged her mouth, congealing with her saliva and forcing her to spit every few seconds to get rid of the terrible taste.
‘I see something,’ Luca whispered.
Bear squeezed his foot, the knowledge that it would soon be over lending her a quick burst of energy. They both moved faster, relief flooding through them.
They began to hear noise. There was a thud, followed by the low beat of hammering. They heard a shout and the clank of metal chains. Just ahead of them, Luca found a small opening in the ceiling of the tunnel. He swivelled round so that he was facing upwards, then levered his shoulders through, one after the other, before dragging himself up and out of the tunnel.
Bear followed, desperate to free herself from the claustrophobic heat, but the mineshaft they emerged into was little better. An old electric light at the far end illuminated a long
line
of crooked timber supports feeding back towards a single opening. On either side the black walls were scarred with drill marks, and small piles of rubble were heaped on the ground in long-forgotten piles. A wooden bucket, black with dust, lay to one side of the tunnel opening, along with a small crowbar and a lump hammer that must have belonged to the dead man outside.
Bear walked forward to the nearest pile of rubble, then crouched down, sifting through it. She brought a couple of chunks up to the light before casting them away again. After a moment she stopped, holding a small fragment of rock in front of her face. She peered at it more closely. In the dull electric light, she could just make out the vein of red lacing through it.
‘It’s the same stuff?’ Luca asked, standing over her.
Bear nodded. ‘Yeah. We were right about this place. This is where the fire coltan’s coming from.’
Crouching low, they edged down the long mineshaft towards the light, moving from the shadow of one timber support to the next. The noise grew louder, hammer blow after hammer blow interspersed with the compacted thud of pneumatic drills. They saw a figure shuffle past the opening in front of them, no more than twenty feet away, but it didn’t seem to notice their presence. It was dragging a filthy piece of tarpaulin heaped with black stones to some unseen destination.
They reached the end of the shaft. In front of them stretched a vast cavern with level after level carved into its sides. The levels ran in circular bands around a central
atrium
, like the contours of a map, before feeding up into a massive domed roof, hundreds of feet above their heads. Natural light poured into the mine through a single hole directly overhead, weakening steadily as it descended lower into the clouds of hanging dust and dark, opaque rock.
There were nine levels in all, each one ringed by a wooden balcony and covered in a mass of metal troughs moving ceaselessly up and down. The troughs were connected by heavy metal chains to a pulley system somewhere further up. Bear and Luca watched as stone from each level was carefully shovelled into the troughs before being hauled away. He could see figures now, tens of them on each level, piling their loads, moving slowly in the suffocating heat.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Luca breathed. He turned to Bear, but she was staring straight ahead at a couple of figures working just in front of them at the base of the mine. Both were withered to the point of starvation, moving listlessly while they scraped away the rock and gradually piled it on to a waiting tarpaulin. They looked to be on the point of collapse, and as one of them turned in the light, Luca saw that he had the same misshapen features and grotesque cranial swelling as the corpse outside. Blood was seeping out of the man’s ears and he shuffled with slow jerking movements, crippled by exhaustion. His unseeing eyes seemed to look right through them.
‘Look at these people,’ Luca whispered, his voice lost to the sound of the drilling. The air was filled with the noise of splintering rock and the clank of metal chains.
Bear pressed her mouth against his ear.
‘Where are the guards? I can’t see any.’
Luca’s eyes steadily moved from figure to figure and up along the levels. Each person simply shuffled forward, tipping their loads into the waiting troughs before retreating into a network of mineshafts dug back from the central atrium.
‘I don’t see any guards either. Where the hell are they?’
‘Maybe they don’t come down here. Would you, if you ended up looking like those miners?’
As Bear said the words, she suddenly realised that the figure of a man was slumped on the ground no more than ten feet away from them. He was resting against the wall, with his knees tucked up to his chest and head lowered. His limbs were angular and wasted, pressed back as if fused to the rock. She was scarcely able to believe that they had been so close without seeing him, but then she started to see others too, half-hidden in the darkness; a single raised limb or the silhouette of a person slumped face down on the ground. The dead were all around them, abandoned and ignored.
Bear felt her stomach cramp. The heat and the stench of sulphur were making her nauseous. Even after all the war-torn hellholes she had been to, she had never seen anywhere more pitiless and desperate.
‘We can’t stay here, Luca,’ she hissed, nudging him with her hand. ‘We’ve got to hurry.’
He nodded hesitantly. ‘OK. We have to ask if they’ve seen Joshua. Someone here must know where he is.’
‘Luca, look at them. They’re like ghosts. They can barely stand, let alone answer questions.’
‘Then we try one of the other levels further up. We’ve got to keep going until we get an answer.’
Bear grabbed his shoulder.
‘If we go higher, we’ll be caught. We should go, Luca. Get the hell out of here, while we have the chance.’
‘I’m sorry, Bear, but I’ve got to try.’
She stared into his eyes. Now that she had discovered the origin of the fire coltan, she felt a terrible need to get out of here. The impulse overran any sense of control or composure, and she half-turned back towards the lava tunnel. She had to get away from the claustrophobia and death.