‘Careful. It contains thorium. Some uranium, too.’
A white-coated technician passed a portable instrument over the ore.
Click . . . click . . . CLICK CLICK CLICK
The rattle of a Geiger counter triggered a memory he would rather forget. The old fear grabbed him by the throat, a dry pressure that could not be swallowed away. Beads of sweat blossomed on his brow and began to trickle down his temples. Before the trembling in his limbs took control, he let the lump of ore fall to the bench and looked around for a seat.
CLICK CLICK CLICK . . . click . . . click
‘Turn that thing off!’
Using the laboratory benches for support, hand over hand, Frank manoeuvred himself towards the desk where he sank into a chair in front of the computer. He took six tablets and his breathing gradually returned to normal.
The Chinese Zagrovyl technician brought the screen to life.
‘Radioactive decay. That’s how we found where your crystal sample came from.’ He pointed to the fragment Frank had brought to the lab. The piece Frank had hacked off from the base of Sophie’s jade cup before returning it. ‘The isotopes all have different rates of decay. The ratio gives us the age of the rock.’
‘And?’
‘Your sample is about sixty million years old. Formed in pegmatite, slow-cooling igneous rocks. And with a unique signature. See here.’
He pointed to a table with the results of the analysis, a list of elements and their percentages.
‘The highest levels of dysprosium and holmium I have ever seen. Incredibly pure. Just as you thought. A real game changer.’
‘How big is the deposit?’
‘Huge. These rocks have been shredded by glaciers. Now the ice is melting, the rivers have washed and sorted the heavy minerals. The sands rich in rare earths stretch right across the border.’
Say goodbye to your monopoly, my friends. Rare earth prices are about to take a dive.
Say hello to the new vice president of Zagrovyl Green Energy.
Once again in control.
Once again unstoppable.
Vladivostok, Russia
The old man lay back on his pillow.
He stroked his neck where the jade pendant once lay. Giving it away had lifted a burden from his soul. Acknowledging Timur as his son had brought him Nina’s child, Ru, the daughter he thought was dead.
All this time amassing stuff. For what? You can’t take it with you. Why had the realisation come to him so late?
He’d done what he had to do. Now he could let go.
His life had been far from perfect; he’d been part of things he wished he could undo. But time moves forward, not back.
No one knows what is going to happen next.
He took his last breath and prepared to find out.
Author’s Note
As a professional engineer, I have been involved with projects in China for over thirty years. The speed of change has been extraordinary; I might not have believed it possible had I not witnessed it with my own eyes. This is a story; I made thing up. But sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Art thefts
The Qianlong emperor ruled China for sixty years from 1736 to 1795, at a time when China was the wealthiest and most populous nation in the world. He studied Chinese painting, was an expert calligrapher, a passionate poet and essayist and an astute collector of art, as well as one of China’s most successful rulers, the fourth and longest-living emperor of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).
After the Opium Wars, and the 1860 Treaty of Peking (which ceded Outer Manchuria including modern-day Vladivostok to Russia), French soldiers sacked the Summer Palace in Peking, stealing the Qianlong art collection housed there, some of which found its way into European museums.
A spate of thefts from European museums starting in 2010 exhibited a pattern suggesting that specific ancient Chinese objects were being repatriated to order. Thieves first smashed their way into the Chinese Pavilion in the grounds of Drottningholm Palace, Stockholm, Sweden. They fled by moped to a nearby lake, ditched their bikes into the water and escaped by speedboat. The heist took less than six minutes, and the thieves were never caught.
A month later, in Bergen, Norway, intruders descended from a glass ceiling and plucked objects from the Chinese Collection at the KODE Museum. In England, the Oriental Museum at Durham University and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University were targeted before a hit on the Château de Fontainebleau, just outside Paris in France.
Floods
The rivers of China bring both life and peril to the agricultural communities they sustain. Floods in 1837 and 1931 killed millions. But not all the river disasters in China were natural.
In 1938, a terrible act of ‘sacrifice’ was inflicted on Chinese civilians by the retreating National Revolutionary Army led by Chiang Kai-shek. In a futile attempt to halt the Japanese invasion, a dam was breached at Zhengzhou. The surge of water flooded the plain, drowning all in its path, and shifted the mouth of the Yellow river hundreds of kilometres to the south. Official government estimates put the death toll at 800,000 Chinese civilians, with a further 10 million displaced. The invading army simply took another route.
In 1975 the ‘iron dam’ at Banqiao failed. Freak weather conditions caused unusually high rainfall, which exceeded the design capacity of the dam. Blame the weather? Or blame the design? A huge programme of dam-building began in the early 1950s with the help of Russian specialists. But there was insufficient surveying or planning, and the advice of the expert Chinese hydrogeologist, Chen Xing, was ignored. His repeated warnings proved tragically prophetic. In the disaster of 1975 at least 26,000 people drowned (other estimates put the number at 230,000), and perhaps as many as one million people died from the subsequent famine and disease, with 11 million people becoming refugees in their own land.
Strippers
It was common practice in rural China to hire strippers for large events, even for funerals. A public decency campaign led to a ban on scantily clad women appearing in corporate advertising, but no similar restriction was applied to naked men. Western male models were employed to add sex appeal, and a new beer was launched with a pan-China tour featuring male strippers.
Lingchi
Lingchi – death by a thousand cuts (also known as slow slicing or lingering death) – was an ancient form of torture and execution officially outlawed in China in 1905.
Female murderers
Sasebo, a small city in the Nagasaki Prefecture of Japan, was the location of two murders of female children by their classmates, a decade apart. In 2004 an eleven-year-old girl murdered a twelve-year-old in an empty school classroom during the lunch break, slitting the victim’s arms and throat with a knife, before returning to afternoon classes covered in blood. In 2014, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl invited a classmate to her apartment, where she beat and strangled her, before decapitating and partially dismembering the body. She had bought the tools herself with the intention of committing murder, after studying medical textbooks and killing and dissecting a cat as practice. The age of criminal responsibility in China is fourteen.
Lychee Festival
The Lychee and Dog Meat Festival is celebrated annually in Yulin, Guangxi, China, during the summer solstice in June. During the ten days of festivities, dogs are paraded in wooden crates and metal cages and are taken to be skinned and cooked for consumption by festival visitors and local residents. Opposition from inside and outside China has led to violent incidents.
Sinking yachts
In May 2014, the sailing yacht Cheeky Rafiki capsized in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of four experienced English sailors. Investigation showed that the keel had parted from the hull. The connection between hull, matrix and keel had been repaired several times after repeated prior groundings.
Rare earth metals
Most of the seventeen rare earth metals (fifteen lanthanides (atomic numbers 57–71) plus yttrium (39) and scandium (21)) are
not actually rare at all, but as they exist in low concentrations in minerals in rock, they are extremely difficult to extract.
Neodymium (60) and dysprosium (66) are essential components for wind turbines, hybrid and electric car batteries, computer hard disks and mobile phones. All of the world’s heavy rare earths (such as dysprosium) come from China.
In 2010 the Chinese authorities imposed strict quotas on the export of rare earth metals in order to conserve scarce resources, increase prices to cover the environmental costs of production and encourage the growth of domestic high-tech industries.
Prices rocketed. The price of dysprosium rose over 2000% in six months.
In 2015 Chinese export restrictions were lifted after a ruling from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and prices stabilised.
Oddo–Harkins rule
Named after two scientists who never met, the rule states that elements with an even atomic number1 are roughly twice as abundant as adjacent2 elements with an odd number. The exception to the rule is hydrogen (1) which is the most abundant element in the universe. For all other elements, proton pairing enhances stability.
Shetland wind farm
I had the great good fortune to work on Shetland, and I can confirm that it is both breathtakingly beautiful and breathtakingly windy. Located just a few miles outside of Lerwick, the first three wind turbines – Mina, Betsy and Brenda (660kW turbines with 47-metre rotors) – were commissioned in 2000 and soon achieved a world record of 57.9% availability (or load factor = the actual output of a turbine divided by its theoretical maximum output in a year); the UK onshore average is less than half of that. The 2005 plan to build further large-scale wind farms on Shetland (150 turbines, 600MW of power) has been challenged, delayed and reduced in scope, but ultimately sanctioned. Construction work is about to start at the time of writing.
Green energy
The Anthropocene, the age of human control of our environment, has brought light and power and warmth and connectivity to billions of people. But no technology is without risk. Stored energy of any sort – in oil, gas, coal, uranium, wind, sun or water – must be carefully controlled. Based on deaths per kilowatt hour generated, hydroelectric power remains the most dangerous form of energy, and based on the number of deaths by drowning every year, water continues to be the most dangerous substance on earth.
As Ella Fitzgerald sang, ‘T’aint What You Do, It’s The Way That Cha Do It’.
Teesside energy
A parmo is a Teesside delicacy, served in restaurants, pubs, works canteens and from food vans in and around Stockton and Middlesbrough, England. It consists of a piece of chicken breast deep-fried in breadcrumbs, topped with a white sauce and cheese and served with chips. A typical takeaway dish contains 2,600 calories and 150g of fat. It is delicious.
_____________________
1 The atomic number is the number of protons in the nucleus. The periodic table is a map of all 118 elements organised in rows by increasing atomic number and in columns by common properties.
2 Adjacent here means side by side in the periodic table.
Bibliography
Mr China by Tim Clissold (London: Constable, 2010, new edn) tells a rip-roaring tale of greed, skulduggery and cultural conflict. A Chinese-speaking Englishman, Tim Clissold, acted as an adviser to foreign investors who flocked to the new Wild West between 1995 and 2005.
River Town by Peter Hessler (London: John Murray, 2002, new edn) shows China through the eyes of an American schoolteacher, who slowly begins to understand just how far the group matters more the individual.
The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham (London: Yale University Press, 2017) explores the sourcing of rare metals essential to modern technology and delves into the political, economic and environmental implications of their scarcity.
Wild Swans by Jung Chang (London: William Collins, 2012, new edn) is still banned in China. A deeply moving personal history, it also covers key historical events in detail: the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the rise of Communism, the Japanese invasion starting in Manchuria in 1931 and the Second World War, which continued into a civil war ending only after 1949 when Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China.
In the 1950s the USSR sought to strengthen ties with its neighbour and sent Soviet engineers and scientists to assist in modernising newly communist China.
Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958–1962) was an attempt to industrialise China. Instant results were required – ‘Survey, Design and Execute Simultaneously’. The Great Sparrow Campaign (part of the Four Pests Campaign) resulted in ecological imbalance. The ‘backyard furnaces’ turned useful agricultural implements into useless pig iron. The collectivisation of agriculture, along with communist pseudoscience, led to a catastrophic drop in crop yields and the famine of 1959–1961.
The Russian experts were recalled in 1960 after Mao and Khrushchev fell out.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (London: Head of Zeus, 2018) brilliantly translated by Ken Liu is a Chinese science fiction novel. It opens during the Cultural Revolution (1969–1976) and charts the attack on science by extraterrestrials ahead of an invasion. Using the freedom of science fiction and a mind-bendingly surrealist plot, the story charts the rise of opposing extremist factions in response to the perceived threat, revealing a great deal about China yesterday, today and tomorrow.
From the Chinese invention of gunpowder in 220 BC to the development of plastic explosives after the Second World War, The Chemistry of Explosives by Jacqueline Akhavan (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2011, 3rd edn) is my go-to reference book for things that go bang.
Acknowledgements
Thanks:
To Sensei Matt Zahand, former US Navy sailor and karate instructor moonlighting as a stripper, who took his clothes off beside a pool in Los Angeles and shared his life story.
To all my wonderful Chinese colleagues, especially to those who indulged my peculiar wish to visit the Banqiao Dam in Henan Province, China, and made it such a memorable day.
To my Beta Readers: Dr Lorraine Wilson, who stopped me burning an early draft. John Schofield (www.saltyjohn.com) who turned my flimsy dinghy into a powerful yacht and then helped me blast it to smithereens (his blog and free book, Sailing Snippets, is heartily recommended for sailors and landlubbers alike and can be found at www.saltyjohntheblog.com). Ian and Claire Barnard, who make me laugh while pointing out my errors and are actively making the world a cleaner place, reusing valuable resources rather than throwing them away (Right to Repair https://manchesterdeclaration.org and https://www.facebook.com/creditonrepaircafe). Helen Greenough, for being young and whip-smart and multilingual – the most insightful millennial reader you could wish for. Ivan Vince, for being wise and patient enough to check some of my calculations. Helen Atkinson and Andrew Erskine, for wielding red pens like magic wands. Marjory Flynn, my best friend, for reading despite eye surgery and always telling it like it is – one day I’ll listen.
All mistakes are my own.
To Viv Groskop for her inspiring book on public speaking, How to Own the Room, and William Gibson for his unrivalled description of jet lag in the brilliant Pattern Recognition.
To KLM and Grand Central for keeping the outside world connected to Teesside. To the Raby Hunt Restaurant for its second Michelin star, and The Waiting Room, Café Lilli, Muse, The Devonport and many others for culinary inspiration.
To the crime writing and reading and blogging community: what an extraordinarily friendly and supportive bunch of people you are. To all the brilliant bookshops including Drake in Stockton, The Golden Hare in Edinburgh, Far from the Madding Crowd in Linlithgow, Forum in Corbridge and the knowledgeable and helpful staff in Waterstones everywhere. To all the friendly book groups, especially the Belmont Babes and the Stockton Specials.
To the team at Oneworld – Jenny Parrott, my fabulous editor, Harriet Wade, her insightful assistant, Je
nny Page, my copy editor, Molly Scull, Thanhmai Bui-Van, Anna Murphy, Margot Weale, Paul Nash, Ben Summers and too many others to mention.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my agent, Juliet Mushens. Her perceptive comments galvanised me at a key stage of the project.
And finally, to my family: Spike the magic cat and feline muse, my beautiful sons, Andrew and Joseph, who tolerate endless embarrassment from their mother with perfect equanimity, and to my husband, Jonathan, the love of my life.
A Point Blank Book
First published in Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Australia
by Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld Publications, 2020
This ebook published 2020
Copyright © Fiona Erskine 2020
The moral right of Fiona Erskine to be identified as the Author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78607-757-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-78607-734-9 (ebook)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses,
organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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