“It’s going to start getting busy around here, huh? Between babysitting the PAC, defending this little fish farm, keeping track of Nigel and finding the story on the uranium mining, it’s really going to cut into our dating.”
“Yeah, and you left out the part where we take on the PAC army of ten thousand infantry with heavy weapons.”
“Right. And there’s that,” she said. She looked around and no one was nearby. She leaned over and kissed him. “I love you, by the way.”
Cascaes smiled and felt startled. While he had made the comment before their trip about marrying her one day, neither of them had ever actually used the “L word” before. She laughed at his startled face.
“I only said that because we’ll both probably be dead in a couple of days.”
“Whew, for a minute there I thought this was getting serious,” said Chris.
“Pretty serious,” she said, this time seriously. He leaned over and kissed her back. “I love you, too,” he said, “But that is classified.”
They walked back to their command hut where Mackey was on the horn with Moose over at the airfield. They packed gear quietly as Mackey spoke with the team at the PAC camp. They finished packing and were starting to head out when Mackey ended his conversation and turned to Cascaes and Julia.
“Moose said the camp is getting busier. Lots of shooting—live fire exercises with their new weapons. Maybe they are getting ready to go operational sooner than we think. They’ll stay out their watching all night. You guys be careful and get back tonight. Stay in radio contact every hour and make sure your GPS locators are working. I hate having my people scattered all over when there is a chance that World War Three is gonna start. Who are you taking?”
“Julia, Cohen, and McCoy are with me. Smitty and Ernie P are finishing the defensive preparations for the farm. They’ve got daisy-chains a mile long. Moose, Ripper, Jones, Hodges, Koches, Woods, and Theresa are still up at the PAC camp?” asked Cascaes, counting on his fingers.
“Check,” said Mackey.
Cascaes was doing roll call in his head. “Where’s Cory?” he asked. Cory Stewart was CIA, and was an old contact of Mackey’s. Cory was older than most of the others, and a quiet, loner type who was all business, all the time. While he enjoyed listening to the joking and funning amongst his team, he was usually just the observer. Like many CIA field agents, Cory tended to be “in the background” and easy to miss in a crowd. Prior to his recruitment to “the team,” Cory had always worked alone in the field.
“He should be halfway to Kinshasa by now,” said Mackey.
“What the fuck?” asked Cascaes, obviously pissed that he wasn’t informed ahead of time.
“Sorry, Skipper,” said Mackey. “Langley’s orders. He’s supposed to make contact with the DRC government contacts we have and update them on their options. The director sent the order a couple of hours ago.”
“You might have mentioned it,” said Cascaes. “Anybody else?”
“Nope. Just Cory. He hopped the train a few hours ago. It’s almost eight hundred miles—gonna take a while on that piece of junk. I’ll brief you later. For now, get what you can at the mine, and hustle back. By tomorrow, we should all be reassembled and prepared to take offensive action against PAC forces, if we get the order. The situation changes every time I call. Just go take some pictures, and get your ass back here in one piece.”
Cascaes wasn’t particularly happy being left out of the loop, but was somewhat used to it. Rarely did anyone ever have “all the pieces” of the puzzle. He grunted a “yes, sir” to Mackey and grabbed his combat pack. “Let’s go,” he said to Julia, and headed out to find Jon and Pete and start the journey to the uranium mine.
33.
Chris, Julia, Pete, and Jon met up at the campfire and hopped in the old pickup truck. They headed off towards the reported location of the illegal mining operations north of Lubumbashi. It would be three hours or so each way, bouncing along the dirt roads. At a little after two o’clock, and eighty-five degrees with relatively high humidity, it was not a great day for a drive in the country.
They drove through tall grasslands, remaining relatively quiet as they observed the raw beauty that was Africa. The countryside was wide open and there were no signs of human activity for the first two hours. As they grew closer to the mine, a makeshift village appeared. Thousands of Africans, mostly very young men or boys, had come to the area to work the mines. One of the biggest problems in fighting illiteracy was combating the dropout rate of boys who could easily be talked into working for low wages at the mines. The village was merely a shantytown of sorts, with garbage strewn everywhere. When they got closer, they stopped the truck and got out to walk. They spread out and approached the edge of the village cautiously.
Cascaes called in their location and the fact that they had made contact. Pete snapped a few pictures that were uplinked to Langley, and they walked closer. The first thing that got their attention was a small graveyard outside the village. There were easily a hundred recently dug graves with small stones as markers. Pete snapped a few pictures of that as well.
“Radiation sickness?” asked Julia to Cascaes. He shrugged.
They walked closer until they were at the edge of the village. The place reeked of latrines and garbage. “That’s what happens when a village has no women to oversee the men,” thought Julia. Chris motioned for Jon and Pete to stay put and cover them, while he and Julia dropped their packs and weapons. They walked slowly into the hellhole that was the village until they saw their first person, a young boy of maybe ten or so. Julia approached him with her warm smile and said “hello” in French.
“Hello,” he replied, but didn’t smile.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I can’t work today,” he said. “My little brother is sick.”
“Where is he?” she asked.
He pointed to the small hut behind them. “Sleeping inside.”
Julia asked if she could see him, and maybe help. That got a smile. “Are you a doctor?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “but I have some medical experience.”
They followed the boy inside the hut. It was even hotter inside. A boy of maybe seven or eight was lying on his side on the dirt floor. He looked seriously ill. His skin color was pale for a dark-skinned boy, and his eyes were glazed-looking in hollowed out cheeks. He looked like he was freezing. He didn’t stir when they walked in.
The older brother sat next to him and whispered to him in Swahili, “The white lady is going to make you better.” Still no response.
“How long has he been sick?” she asked.
The older boy, who told them his was named Soffee, said that his little brother, Imika, started with diarrhea last week, and wouldn’t eat. Then he started getting cold, then hot and weak. He had drunk water from the creek by the mine, even though they had been told not to. Imika had boiled it first, which they had been taught would kill bad things in the water by the Peace Corps some years back, but they didn’t understand that uranium and heavy metals couldn’t be boiled out.
Cascaes asked Julia to translate his questions. “How many times did he drink that water?” Soffee shrugged. Most of the villagers had been drinking it for weeks. Cascaes asked where the water was, and Soffee said he threw it away. Cascaes asked where the creek was, and Soffee said he would show him if Julia would help his little brother. Cascaes quietly told Julia not to even think about bringing the boy back to camp. Julia narrowed her eyes with anger.
She stayed with Imika, holding his cold hand, watching his labored breathing, trying not to cry. He was too weak to even lift his head. Chris followed Soffee through the center of “town” towards the site of much activity. They walked on baked mud and dead, brown grass, past the huts that housed the laborers. Beyond the corrugated steel huts and makeshift cabins, thousands of Africans were digging by hand
in an open pit with the aid of water cannons that ran off large generators near the town’s water source.
The open pit mine was the size of ten football fields, but there was very little in the way of heavy machinery. The land was simply being “overpowered” by sheer will. Water cannons tore open huge holes in the mud, and then workers with pick axes and shovels would dig through the dirt looking for the Uraninite ore, or “pitchblende,” that they had been trained to identify. They stood in ankle-deep, orange-tinted, foamy water and oozy mud that would kill a fish or frog in a matter of seconds. The ore in this location held the highest concentration of uranium yet discovered on the planet. “Oh great,” thought Cascaes, “Use the water to mine the ore, then drink the water.”
Cascaes stopped when they got close enough to see several Chinese men overseeing the workers. The Chinese wore lead lined waterproof boots and took iodine tablets daily. The Africans were barefoot in the poisoned mud.
He stepped behind a hut and called back to Jon on his throat mic. “Fishboy—you read me?” he asked.
“Loud and clear, boss,” said Jon.
“Come up the center road, quick and quiet with your camera and concealed side arms only. Chinese are on site. Jackpot. Out.”
He waited for almost five minutes, and sure enough, Jon and Pete came hustling up the same dirt road through the shantytown. Cascaes called to them when he saw them, and they ducked back behind a shed with him and the small boy.
“Smells great around here,” said Jon quietly with a grimace on his face.
“Like a shit sandwich without the bread,” said Cascaes. “The mine is up ahead. This little kid is Soffee. His brother is dying up the hill over there. They’ve been drinking the water. Same water the Chinese are using in the water cannons to strip mine.”
“Brilliant,” said Jon. Pete pulled his lens cap off and hustled up ahead to get a look. He started filming, taking particular care to show the Chinese men directing the workers. He also filmed the African workers carrying out another small body and laying it to the side for burial later. They couldn’t stop working yet.
“Unfuckingbelievable,” said Pete to himself as he filmed. When he had ten minutes of footage, panning over the huge area of ravaged earth where thousands of boys and men dug through poisoned mud, he hustled back to Cascaes. “Got it all, Skipper.”
“Okay, let’s get Julia and get the fuck out of here,” said Cascaes. He held up several small vials filled with water samples and showed them to Pete.
They ran back to the hut where Julia sat crying with the young boy. His eyes were rolled back, showing only the whites, and he was convulsing quietly.
“Oh shit,” said Pete when he saw the kid.
Julia shook her head at Chris. “He’s so sick, Chris. He’d never make the trip anyway.” She held up her hand to Soffee, who took it, looking scared. She explained in French that his little brother was dying, and that Soffee should go home as soon as Imika had passed on. He should go home and never come back to this place that was poisoned.
Soffee sat next to his brother and cried, and Cascaes gave him his thermos of fresh water and some MREs. “Tell him to eat and drink only this until he gets home.”
Jon looked at Cascaes. He pulled a few morphine syringes out of his fatigues. “Skipper, we can make it easier for him.”
Cascaes squatted next to the two young boys and asked Julia to translate. “Tell Soffee that this will help his brother sleep comfortably until he goes to the next world. He’ll have happy dreams.”
Julia translated and Soffee hugged his brother and cried and nodded his head.
“Who’s gonna do it?” asked Jon, his mouth suddenly so dry he could barely get the words out. They exchanged glances in complete silence.
Cascaes took the syringe from Jon, swallowed hard, and popped it into Imika’s skinny thigh. They watched the boy drift away. At least he wouldn’t be suffering. They sat with Imika while he sang a song they didn’t understand, but cried just the same. They shared a quick prayer, and left the boys, all four of them wiping tears, and jogged out of the village back into the grass, where Pete set up his satellite computer and sent the film to Langley.
Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Different country, same shit. Sweatshops in China, slave-wage farmers in Mexico, baby miners in Africa—no one gives a shit as long as what they want to buy is cheap.”
“That about sums it up,” said Cascaes.
Jon kept seeing Imika’s face and skinny body. “I’ve never been able to understand how it is that Africa and South America, two continents so rich in natural resources, are so fucked up.”
“Don’t get her started,” said Cascaes, stiffening. “You two can figure out the world’s political and economic picture when we get back to the Land of Wasteful Spending. For right now, keep your shit together and stay focused. We’ve got ten thousand armed thugs itching to start a revolution so they can make this little mine scene a national pastime. If you really want to help these people, stay alert.”
Pete whispered over to the three of them. “Uplink is finished, Skipper.”
“Okay, let’s boogie on back to the fish farm and see what’s going on. World War Three could have started already for all we know.”
They stood up and started walking. Julia looked at Cascaes. “You know, she was right.”
“Who was right?” he asked.
“Deirdre. Back in Langley. That slide show didn’t really paint the picture.”
34.
Kinshasa
Cory Stewart walked through the streets of Kinshasa in jeans and a polo shirt, looking like the other white men trying to find business opportunities in the third world. Kinshasa was a strange city. Some avenues were the same wide streets you would see in any major city, except that some of the side streets were literally dirt roads. Old primitive houses were down the block from large apartment buildings. An occasional new Mercedes would zip past an ox drawn cart. Worlds had definitely collided here.
Most of the people on the streets were Africans, but the whites and Asians seemed to be from every corner of the globe. As Cory walked, he could hear the lilt of Irish accents, Indians speaking in Hindi and accented English, Russian, American English, and various Middle Eastern dialects. Occasional Chinese banter would catch his attention, but there was nothing to be learned by walking the busy business district. He was on his way to a secret meeting with one of Prime Minister Gugunga’s most trusted people, his chief of staff, a man named Lucien Zabanga.
The meeting between Zabanga and Cory Stewart had been set up by a Congolese businessman named Michael Motumba that Langley had recruited the year prior. He was in the computer business and anxious to see his country enter the twenty-first century. CIA had convinced him that his cooperation would ensure the future of his nation, and more importantly, his failing company. Langley had “signed a contract” for his computer services for fifty-thousand dollars, US. They had received nothing for this contract other than the ability to call Michael whenever they needed him. He was a low-level asset, but in this case, he had ties to the prime minister that made him extremely valuable.
Michael Motumba had contacted the prime minister’s office to arrange the meeting, but never actually spoke to him personally. He had been given to Lucien Zabanga, his chief of staff, and Zabanga had agreed to meet with Cory Stewart. Motumba had told Zabanga that Stewart was an important American with government ties, and came to offer the prime minister and the president support ‘in this most perilous time for their government.’
Michael led Cory down the busy streets of Kinshasa until they reached an office building that appeared fairly new. It was ten stories high, and was impressive looking in a skyline that lacked many skyscrapers. When they arrived, Michael told Cory to go to room 515 on the fifth floor. He would meet him down the block at the outdoor cafe on the corner when he was finished.
Seated in front of him was indeed, Lucien Zabanga. But, seated next to him were two Chinese men and three large Africans with their automatic weapons across their laps. As Cory reached for the doorknob behind him, to try and make a break for it, a large man stepped up from behind him and pressed a Glock 17 into his ribs.
“Have a seat, Mr. Stewart,” said Zabanga. “Or shall I call you something else? How many names do you have?”
Cory felt the sick feeling of defeat creep into his stomach. The air seemed to leave his lungs instantly. He had been a field agent for fifteen years and been in and out of some hairy places. To be taken down so casually was as embarrassing as it was final. He felt a sudden calm as he realized his fate. With such a large team in the field, he made his decision instantly. He was dead anyway. He wasn’t going to say anything that would get the entire team killed with him.
Cory threw his elbow as hard as he could into the man’s throat behind him, and with his other hand, grabbed the pistol. The gun went off as he grabbed it, but missed Cory. He popped his knee twice into the man’s face as he went down, the three large men behind the desk diving across the office at him, furniture flying everywhere. Cory yanked the weapon free from the man’s limp hand and rolled across the office floor getting his finger into the trigger guard. The three men dove at him, wanting him alive, and Cory managed to fire three rounds quickly into the first man now grabbing his ankles. The other two were on him quickly, tackling his legs. Cory knew he’d never take them all. He couldn’t risk it. He shoved the Glock into his mouth and pulled the trigger before the men could get it out of his hand. He never heard the gun go off or the screaming of Lucien Zabanga and the Chinese, desperate to take him alive.
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