Before she could say anything more, Luca crept out of the opening to the mineshaft, skirting round the edge of the central atrium. The floor of the mine was naturally dark, lit only by the remnants of natural light flooding down from outside and the occasional electric bulb. The whole of Luca’s upper body had been smeared black from the dust in the tunnel, greying the sheen of his white skin and helping him melt into the shadows. Bear watched him for a moment, slowly shaking her head as she tried to decide.
A few metres distant, Luca had stopped beside one of the thick-set timber supports, trying to work out how best to climb it. Bear watched him for a moment, cursing under her breath. Then, abruptly, she stepped out from the mineshaft and swiftly clambered into one of the metal troughs. As Luca scrambled to get in next to her, the trough jolted and was slowly hoisted into the air.
They passed one level, then the next, keeping their backs bent into the metal frame and their heads low. Over the lip of the trough they could see more people now, working in the long lines of shafts which fanned out from the central
atrium
. Each one silently dug, hammered, or carried. There was an overwhelming air of sadness to them all, as if the rest of their lives had been stripped away along with the last vestiges of hope.
Luca squeezed Bear’s arm as they slowly clunked past another level. Both of them leaped from the trough, landing with a thud on the rough wooden decking. They crouched down, terrified that someone had heard, but with all the noise and commotion of the mine, no one had even noticed.
‘Keep away from the main area,’ Luca warned, grabbing Bear’s arm and pulling her down the nearest shaft. They ran further inside, turning one ninety-degree corner and then another, before coming across a man hammering a small metal spike into the rock. He moved slowly, struggling to keep the spike steady. Bear touched his shoulder to attract his attention. As he turned towards her, she saw that his eyes were laced with bloodshot veins and an ugly swelling bulged at his neck.
‘
Avez-vous vu un blanc?
’ Have you seen a white man, Bear asked, then when his expression didn’t alter, tried asking in Hema and then Swahili. The miner just stared, uncomprehendingly.
‘Come on, we’ve got to try someone else,’ Luca interrupted, pulling her back along the mineshaft.
Retracing their steps, they waited by the entrance to the main atrium, searching for guards. There was still no sign of them and it looked more and more as though the miners were being left to their own devices. Clambering on board another trough, they moved two levels higher, repeating the
same
process. Here, they immediately noticed the heat was less severe, while the swelling the miners suffered was also less pronounced. Each man they questioned reacted more quickly, able to focus better and actually understand what Bear was saying.
But despite this, the result was always the same. None of them had ever seen or heard of another white man in the mine.
Eventually, Bear grabbed hold of Luca’s arm.
‘We’ve been here too long,’ she said. ‘We can’t keep going like this.’
‘Just another …’
‘
Non! Assez!
’ Enough, Bear hissed, trying to control her voice. ‘Luca …’
‘We’ve got to find Joshua,’ Luca pleaded. ‘He’s … got to be here.’
Bear shook her head. ‘Enough, Luca. We’re in the middle of the LRA base, and if we carry on like this, we’re going to get caught.’
‘Please,’ he said, grabbing her hand. ‘Please, just one more.’
Bear shut her eyes, the situation suddenly feeling utterly hopeless. What Luca was doing was sheer insanity. They would never be able to find Joshua in all this.
They turned back to the central atrium, and crouched beside the opening as they looked from one face to the next. As they searched, Bear suddenly became aware of a man’s presence just behind them. She turned, and before her was a miner they hadn’t seen before, standing with a crowbar
held
loosely in his hands. He didn’t move for several seconds, his bloodshot eyes blinking slowly.
‘
Blanc
,’ White man, he whispered, his voice gravelly from disuse. Then he jerked his finger to the balcony two levels higher on the opposite side of the atrium.
‘
Oui, un blanc
,’ Bear repeated. ‘
Vous avez vu un blanc là-bas?
’ You’ve seen a white man over there?
The man nodded slowly, before his eyes settled on the distant light coming through from the domed natural roof of the mine. He stayed like that, eyes drifting in and out of focus as if he hadn’t seen the light in years.
‘
Merci, merci
,’ Thank you, Bear stammered. They raced around the side of the wooden balcony and climbed into a half-full trough moving higher. They lay perfectly still, the seconds dragging as it trundled upwards with the chains clanking from the added strain. Jumping out at the fourth level from the top, they moved into the nearest mineshaft, sprinting down it and hurdling the low piles of rubble as they ran. Some miners there were using pneumatic drills and the nearest of them stopped as they approached, his drill jerking to a standstill in his hands.
‘
Où est le blanc?
’ Where’s the white man? Bear shouted above the din. A man slowly raised his hand, pointing further along the mineshaft. Around the second bend, Luca suddenly stopped, his boots skidding to a halt on the gravel floor. A white man was sitting with his back to them. He was desperately thin, the vertebrae of his spine visible through the soiled and ripped T-shirt he was wearing. His head was bent forward as he sorted through a small pile of rocks.
‘Josh,’ Luca whispered, edging closer. ‘Josh, is that you?’
The man’s head slowly turned at the sound, his body twisting as he tried to see behind him. As his face came into the light, Luca immediately recognised the pale blue eyes of his old friend.
Dropping down on his knees, Luca folded him in his arms, almost squeezing the wind out of Joshua’s frail body as he hugged him close. Joshua’s eyes were blank with shock. He tried to speak, but his cracked lips only parted a little.
‘Luca?’ he managed.
Luca pulled back, a broad smile breaking through the layers of dirt on his face as he nodded. His eyes shone with happiness as he grasped Joshua by his shoulders, shaking him lightly as if to wake him from a dream.
‘What …’ Joshua stammered, trying to understand what was happening. ‘Don’t tell me they got you too?’
Luca’s hands gripped his shoulders.
‘No, Josh, we got in through a tunnel at the base of the mine. We’re here to rescue you.’
Joshua’s face twisted in confusion as he stared at his old friend. He motioned for Luca to help him up, and staggered to his feet.
‘Rescue?’ he asked, gripping on to Luca’s forearm. ‘There’s another way out?’
Luca nodded. ‘We found the tunnel from the outside. One of the miners had been drilling down when he must have broken into an old lava flow and followed it out. We’ve been running through the whole damn’ mine looking for you.’
Joshua stood, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘You found a way out?’ he gasped.
‘Yeah, we did,’ Luca said, smiling widely. ‘And we’re getting you the hell out of here.’
Joshua went rigid at the prospect of escape. He glanced past Luca and Bear to where three other miners had followed them down the tunnel. They were staring expectantly, their whole bodies taut with nervous excitement.
‘
Dites aux autres, nous partirons d’ici
,’ Joshua announced before Luca could stop him. He’d come to rescue only his friend, but it seemed Joshua had other ideas.
TWO MORE MEN
arrived at the end of the mineshaft. They were covered in dirt from head to toe, every pore clogged with dust and the palms of their hands charcoal black. They stood in an awkward group, wretched and emaciated, their clothes no more than tatters of old fabric.
Luca turned as Bear came nearer.
‘
C’est fou!
’ This is madness, she whispered. ‘He wants to bring the whole damn’ mine. What do you not understand about this? We’re going to get caught.’
Luca nodded and grabbed hold of Joshua’s arm. ‘We’ve been here too long, Josh. We’ve got to move.’
Joshua looked around in despair. There were so many others, so many desperate others, he should try to save. Over the last few months, some of them had learned that he was a doctor and had asked him to treat their wounds. More often than not, there was nothing he could do, but they still looked to him as their leader, heaping what remained of their hopes on his shoulders.
‘Josh,’ Luca pleaded. ‘We can’t take any more. We have to leave
now
!’
Joshua hesitated for a moment more, then shuffled towards Luca. As he moved, he reached out one arm for balance, leaning his whole weight on his friend’s shoulder. His right leg was totally useless, pulling behind him with the toes just dragging across the ground.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ Luca asked.
‘Mordecai,’ Joshua replied, in a low voice. ‘I got caught trying to escape and he severed my hamstring. Bastard crippled me for life.’ He looked into Luca’s eyes. ‘We are going to make it out this time, aren’t we?’
Luca nodded. ‘Yeah. This time we’re going home.’
‘Home,’ Joshua repeated, drawing out the word.
‘Yeah, but come on. We ain’t there yet.’
Joshua went up to one of the miners who had just arrived. The man carefully unfolded a filthy rag. Inside was an old metal compass with the glass face torn off and the dial faded by the sun. Beside it were a box of matches, a small knife with a crude wooden handle, bound together with wire, and a sealed cylindrical cardboard tube with Chinese characters stamped on one side. It was an old military flare left behind by one of the guards.
‘Our escape kit,’ Joshua said, staring down at the pathetic collection of possessions. It was all that they had been able to scrape together over four months. The miner then handed Joshua a small plastic gourd of water. He drank from it deeply, before giving it to Luca.
‘Come on,’ Luca said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’
The group set off down the mineshaft with one of the miners leading the way and Bear closely tucked in behind. She moved stealthily, with her body pressed flat against the roughly hewn rock and her eyes fixed on the distant light of the atrium. As they drew closer, they heard the noise of the metal chains grow louder; the troughs moving up and down in constant motion.
‘Where the hell are all the guards?’ Luca whispered.
‘They’re too scared of the fire coltan to come down here,’ panted Joshua, his eyes narrowing in pain as he forced himself forward. ‘They’ve barricaded us in from the outside, leaving only a few of them on the top level to send down the bread and water each day. But every few weeks this evil son-of-a-bitch Captain comes in and they flush everyone down to the next level.’
‘So how come you’re still up here? You’ve been missing for months.’
‘We managed to dig ourselves a hiding place and they missed us the last three rotations.’
Joshua swallowed, trying to get some moisture into his mouth. He hadn’t spoken this much in as long as he could remember.
‘Mordecai himself even comes into the mine. He preaches at us, shouting down like some kind of goddamn’ Messiah, saying that we have to pass through the nine levels to “cleanse” our ways before they’ll let us out. Some even believe him, but most of us know that down there …’ he paused, the lines around his eyes tightening ‘… down there, there’s only death.’
‘So what the hell is happening to everyone?’ Luca whispered. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘He’s got us all down here digging, but something bad happens when this new coltan combines with heat. Tumours start developing, the cancer spreading faster than anything I’ve ever seen before. And the greater the heat, the worse it gets. Down on the lowest levels, those poor bastards only last a couple of weeks before the swelling gets into their brain.’
Bear and the lead miner reached the entrance to the atrium. The others waited, keeping out of sight in the mineshaft. Luca could see her crouching down, her face tilted up, searching for guards.
Joshua nodded grimly. ‘It’s like some sort of sick, fucking merry-go-round. Fresh workers brought in to the top, the dead flushed out from the bottom. Then, they just toss the bodies into the river and let them float off downstream.’
He slumped back against the wall, chest heaving from the effort of moving so fast. Luca could see his collarbones rising up and down above the threadbare neck of his T-shirt, his flesh sunken from malnutrition. Joshua was so weak, he barely had the strength to stand.
‘The worst part is, I don’t even know what they use it for. Here we all are, dying down here … and for what?’
Luca turned back to him, pressing his shoulder under Joshua’s arm to prop him up. ‘All we know is that it’s taken out of here by helicopter and then sold to the Chinese in Goma. We don’t know what happens after that, but Bear thinks it’s something to do with mobile phones.’
‘Mobile phones? We’re all dying so that somebody can make a fucking phone call?’
Luca nodded slowly. ‘It looks that way.’