Black Pearl

by Peter Tonkin

  Silently, he watched as the helicopter filled the increasingly narrow band of sky between the treetops that stood astride the river as it followed the flow of black water away. Then he moved his head infinitesimally, and started moving noiselessly forward into the stand of bamboo. At once he was surrounded by the better part of fifty soldiers, varying in age from ten to forty, all as well armed as he was, the largest and strongest of whom fell in a step or two ahead of him, using their massive matchets with practised ease to clear a path through the vegetation, following the vanishing chopper down the black stream from the black lake towards the distant River Gir.

  Edge

  As the Kamov followed the river course, Robin’s attention was torn. It was impossible to see much of the dam system immediately below, but it was all too easy to see the overhanging greenery of the canopy on either side. Far more interesting was observing Richard as he worked his magic on Max and Felix.

  Even as Richard leaned forward, Felix reached down for his briefcase once more. This time, as well as the vodka bottle, he pulled out a slim laptop. He opened it and turned it so that the screen covered the lower half of the window. He tapped a couple of buttons and it lit up, showing video feed from the camera mounted under the Kamov’s nose, but Robin still looked out of the window. If she looked up, she could see the leaves of the canopy fluttering in the wind of their passage. If she looked down she could see their roots standing out like huge knotted talons as they gripped the steep banks on either side of the precipitous young river beyond the dam system. Below them, much reduced since its overpowering spate, raced the strange dark tumble of the black water rushing downwards so eagerly to join the stately flow of the distant River Gir. But, as far as she could make out, the jungle itself was deserted. Apart from the plant life, it was dead.

  After a moment, Robin’s attention switched back to Richard. Of course, he would be looking for an edge, she thought. The owners of Heritage Mariner might be apparent spectators here, but Richard never did anything without an ulterior motive and he was as aware as his associates that there was a fabulous fortune to be made. And Heritage Mariner could well do with a share of it.

  On one level, the fact that the Russians had returned to Felix’s vodka bottle might make Richard hope to get past their defences, Robin calculated wryly. But on another, they just became more suspicious and argumentative the more they drank. ‘You’ve just seen for yourselves,’ Richard was saying. ‘Getting upriver is hard.’ He gestured at the laptop screen, which was showing a waterfall that looked to be taller than the hundred-metre trees surrounding it, tumbling beneath the natural bridge of a fallen tree into a lake that was as thick with water hyacinth as Lac Dudo itself had been. ‘Even something like that will take a good deal of time and effort to climb. And I think you’ll find there are more – and bigger – waterfalls between here and the main river. Cataracts and rapids too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Point taken,’ allowed Max. ‘We can go through the video record in more detail when we get back to base. Have a really good look at it. Digitally enhanced. Make proper use of some of these experts I ferried up here at such expense. But on the other hand, if it doesn’t look too difficult down below us now, we can still come upriver anyway. Two-pronged attack. Once we get to the lake we can clear that jungle rubbish away, set up camp and really get to work.’

  ‘There’s a time limit,’ insisted Felix. ‘Word of this is bound to get out, and then …’

  ‘The Chinese,’ said Richard. ‘Yes. I’d worked that out too. Chinese suppliers to Japanese and Korean manufacturers who can’t live without tantalum processors for their laptops, mobile phones and flat screens – let alone the new markets for electric cars and so forth.’

  ‘It’s Sony, Toyota, Cannon, Honda, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, NTT, KDDI and all the others from Kagoshimo to Sopporo,’ Robin emphasized forcefully. She had read the same reports. ‘But the Japanese manufacturers are supplied by Chinese mining companies such as Beijing Jinshan, Dongguan Benyuan and Fuyang Zhongyu to start with just a few of the legitimate ones with interests in the areas closest to this.’

  ‘Right,’ said Richard at his most forceful. ‘Everything from Anhul Beijing Chenzhou Developments to Xin Yingkou Zenjiang by way of Han Wuhan Extraction! At the last count our commercial intelligence department at London Centre listed more than fifty Chinese companies applying to set up mining concessions in nearby countries within easy reach of Benin La Bas – just to the north or the south. The only reason they’re not here yet is that the place has been too dangerous – far too hostile to strangers under the last couple of governments anyhow – and apparently too worthless up till now. We are the only people who know about Lac Dudo – so far. Once they hear about this two point five trillion dollar honey pot, will they ever come swarming round!’

  ‘But of course we have an edge,’ purred Robin.

  ‘How do you reckon that?’ asked Max morosely, his eyes fixed on the laptop screen, no doubt thinking about the tantalum processors that made the microelectronic circuitry work as he watched the picture showing all too clearly another vertiginous waterfall that would be hell on earth to climb.

  ‘We already know where the deposits are located,’ answered Richard matter-of-factly. ‘You’re already in tight with the president. And so are we.’

  ‘And we’re in tight with the leader of the opposition,’ concluded Robin. ‘However the upcoming elections go, someone will have their foot in the door. And,’ she added again, leaning forward, ‘the fact that the leader of the opposition was damn near killed by the Army of Christ the Infant means that even during the hurly burly of an election campaign, the best of the country’s special forces will be on their way up here any day now on a mission to make the jungle safe.’

  Richard couldn’t resist a Blues Brothers joke. ‘A mission from God, even if it is against the Army of Christ,’ he said.

  ‘And, with luck,’ added Felix thoughtfully, ‘I’ll be able to sell the president a couple of my Zubr hovercraft to get his troops upriver at top speed.’

  ‘Which would, if we time things right,’ said Richard, lowering his voice as though fearful of being overheard in his shocking deviousness, ‘liberate the Zubrs to take you on upriver as far as the first major waterfall and give you a good head-start if you want to follow the river route in.’

  ‘A win-win situation,’ mused Max. ‘I like this!’ He reached down on to the floor by his foot and produced a briefcase identical to Felix’s, which turned out to contain an identical bottle of Stolichnaya Elit. ‘Now that’s the kind of edge I approve of!’

  Talk

  The president’s office, inherited from the more grandiose days of the kleptocratic President Liye Banda, was based on the White House Oval Office of the Bush administration, rather than the more conservative Obama makeover. Even after all the years of General – later President – Julius Chaka’s dominance, little had changed. Richard might have been waiting in that exclusively privileged environment to be speaking with the present occupant of the White House – except that instead of a Rose Garden outside the French windows there was now a precinct made slightly disturbing by the inverted red claws of hundreds of huge Flame Lilies. It was a national flower Benin La Bas shared with the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo. But it still looked like the blood-covered talons of recently feeding vultures to him.

  ‘I haven’t much time to talk, Richard,’ warned President Chaka as he strode in from his private quarters and closed the door decidedly on the anxious countenance of his chief of staff. ‘I’m due at an election rally in forty-five minutes.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Mr President,’ countered Richard calculatedly. ‘But I know you plan a dramatic entrance by the helicopter waiting in the garden and it’s only a ten-minute flight from here to the National Stadium.’

  Julius Chaka threw up his hands. ‘Touché. Now what can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s important, Mr President, or we wouldn’t be disturbing you. Robin is j
ust coming with something I think you should see as a matter of urgency. It’s on a laptop and she’s just having it all checked by your security people. I came on ahead to explain the background as I know you’re pressed for time.’

  ‘Very well.’ President Chaka leaned back against the presidential desk.

  ‘You are aware that we went up to Lac Dudo yesterday?’

  ‘Of course. Not altogether successfully, I understand.’

  ‘Not in terms of exploring the area in any detail, no sir. But we brought back a good deal of information that will be of use to us in preparing our negotiations with your ministerial team when the time comes.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ purred President Chaka.

  ‘We took video footage of everything the Kamov flew over.’

  At this point Robin entered, clutching the laptop that had shared Max’s briefcase with the vodka bottle.

  ‘If you would just take a look at this, Mr President, I believe our point will become self-evident,’ said Richard.

  Robin placed the laptop on the desktop and opened it. The screen came alive at once with the picture that the Kamov’s camera took of Lac Dudo just at the instant it turned and headed down the river towards the Gir. As the pilot dipped the chopper’s nose to follow the valley down past Dr Koizumi’s dam system towards the first of the waterfalls, the camera caught a flash of what was happening behind the fuselage. Richard’s long finger pointed to the centre of the screen where, frame by frame in slow motion, the ferns parted and a figure stepped out. Richard pressed zoom until it filled the screen in close-up from beret to belt buckle.

  ‘Who is this man?’ demanded the president.

  ‘You may need to check with the leader of the opposition,’ said Robin. ‘Celine’s the one who got the closest look at him the last time the Army of Christ the Infant invaded Benin La Bas, but I think that’s Colonel Odem, the man who replaced Moses Nlong as their leader after their last incursion into Benin La Bas. But there’s more …’

  President Chaka held up his hand, went behind the desk and sat at his own computer. He engaged Skype and contacted the leader of the opposition. She answered on her mobile, her face betraying surprise that the president should be calling her up instead of heading to the rally she was clearly at herself. ‘I want to talk to you as my daughter for a moment,’ said Chaka. ‘Not as the leader of the opposition and my political opponent.’

  ‘Of course, Father,’ answered Celine guardedly.

  ‘Robin Mariner is just about to send you a picture. Can you identify it?’

  Chaka looked up and Robin sent the picture from her laptop.

  Celine gasped. ‘That’s him!’ she said. ‘That’s Odem! When was this picture taken? Where is he?’

  ‘We’ll talk after the rally,’ decided the president. ‘And we’ll talk as father and daughter, not as political opponents.’

  ‘As you wish,’ she answered, without hesitation this time.

  They broke contact. Chaka looked down for a moment. His campaign chief came in without knocking. ‘Time’s getting tight, Mr President,’ he said in his gentle Harvard accent. ‘Everyone’s waiting.’

  Chaka stood up; he seemed to expand in size and stature. Within a second he had moved from concerned parent to magisterial president. Once again, the power of his personality filled the room like a magnesium flare.

  ‘You said you had more to show me,’ he snapped at Richard, gesturing for the campaign chief to open the French windows.

  ‘Yes, Mr President,’ answered Richard.

  ‘Come aboard my helicopter, both of you. You have ten more minutes to brief me further.’

  The Mariners joined Chaka and his campaign chief in the executive section of the presidential chopper, whose interior was laid out like the Bashnev/Sevmash Kamov although it was a Chinese Harbin equivalent of the EC175 Eurocopter. Richard sat beside the president next to the window, so he would get the first bullet if there were any snipers about. Robin sat opposite him, looking down at the two government ministers on the ground below whose places they had usurped and whose undying hatred they had earned in so doing. I hope Celine wins the election, she thought as her downward gaze met their upward enmity. If those two stay in office then Heritage Mariner is simply dead in the water.

  ‘The next point is this, Mr President,’ Richard was explaining. ‘It’s a communication from my commercial intelligence people at London Centre. A photograph, in fact, snapped on a digital phone. It was forwarded to me under our highest company security because there is a legitimate business concern roused by the meeting of these two men in the centre of the picture. It is filed under our Company Most Secret.’ He leaned forward, making sure the campaign chief saw nothing of the picture on the screen. ‘Are the men in the picture familiar to you?’ he asked.

  ‘These two are,’ answered the president unhappily. ‘This one is Bala Ngama, whom I recently replaced as the minister of the outer delta and removed from my government al-together. This other is Gabriel Fola, the prime minister of Congo Libre, our nearest neighbour inland.’

  ‘The gentleman whose influence begins where yours ends, sir,’ Richard emphasized. ‘On the north-eastern slope of Karisoke.’ He paused for a moment, making sure his point had soaked in. ‘And have you any idea about the third man?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ answered President Chaka. ‘Who is he?’

  Richard looked pointedly across at the campaign chief. President Chaka frowned, then gave a brief nod. ‘Go and check on the security squad,’ he ordered. ‘I want things smooth when we land.’

  Richard waited until the Harvard man was well away before he continued, in little more than a whisper, ‘He is Chen Shufu, Doctor Chen, chairman of Han Wuhan Extraction, the most cut-throat and ruthless of the one hundred and fifty Chinese mining companies currently working in Africa – fifty of whom, I may say, are working within a five hundred kilometre radius of Lac Dudo. They may not have permission to work on your land, sir, but as Odem and his army prove, there’s no one there to stop them crossing your borders at will, probably from Congo Libre.

  ‘It’s an open secret that Han Wuhan are the people behind the majority of the conflict mineral extraction in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the last few years. They’ve admitted they have contacts with both the FDLR – Rwanda’s army – and the FARDC, the Congo equivalent. Both have been accused of participating in this bloody business – even after the Dodd-Frank legislation in the US which banned the trading of conflict minerals in the United States – but which of course doesn’t apply to Han Wuhan directly. And they have, so it is believed, been funding the Lord’s Resistance Army and several other unregulated militias who have been involved in supplying this kind of thing.’ He leaned forward even more forcefully. ‘Doctor Chen is up to his armpits in conflict minerals. Conflict diamonds. Anything, profitable, in fact. No matter where it comes from or no matter how it was obtained!’

  Robin leaned forward too. ‘I know this is something that would come from Richard under normal circumstances,’ she said quietly. ‘But they don’t call him Dr No like in James Bond. They call him Dr Yao, which is Mandarin for Yes. Yes to anything, no matter what …’

  ‘You were quite right to bring this to my attention,’ said President Chaka, pulling himself erect and consulting his watch once more. ‘This Doctor Chen sounds like an extremely dangerous proposition. But I’m not certain it was worth interrupting my preparations for the rally.’

  ‘I agree, Mr President. And if that was all I would have brought it to the attention of Colonel Kebila, your chief of security and, via him, to Mr Ngama’s replacement as minister of the outer delta. But there is more.’ Richard took a deep breath, then continued. ‘If we zoom into the background of this picture as we did to the picture of Lac Dudo … There. You see? A fourth man, trying very hard to remain in the shadows. And I’m sure you can recognize him, now.’

  ‘Odem,’ said President Chaka. ‘It’s Colonel Odem. Once again.’

  The Kivu G
ambit

  Richard was woken the next morning by the only piece of communications equipment in the Granville Royal Lodge hotel’s Nelson Mandela suite which did not require tantalum processors. He put the handset of his old-fashioned bedside phone to his ear after the third ring. ‘Mariner?’ he said sleepily.

  ‘This is Andre Wanago, Captain Mariner,’ said the precise voice of the general manager. ‘I have Colonel Laurent Kebila here and he wonders if you could spare a moment to talk to him. The matter is as urgent, apparently, as that with which you disturbed the president’s plans last evening.’

  Richard sat up, frowning thoughtfully. Benin La Bas’s chief of security was clearly on his best behaviour. In the past he had simply come banging on the suite’s main door with a squad of soldiers at his back. They had first met like that in the bad old days, when Liye Banda had been president, Celine Chaka had been a political prisoner in the regime’s torture chambers and her father had been the general commanding an irregular army in the delta, seemingly little more politically powerful than Odem’s Army of Christ the Infant. It was in Granville Harbour’s central police station, shortly after Kebila had arrested him, that Richard first met Celine – in the days before her father took over the country and it emerged that young Captain Kebila had been the only reason she had survived her arrest and interrogation. The only reason they had both survived.

  Robin stirred sleepily. ‘Who is it, Richard?’

  ‘Kebila,’ he answered.

  She sat up at once, pulling the duvet over her pink-tipped chest like an outraged Victorian virgin. And putting one hand to her golden curls to assess whether they were fit to be seen. ‘Here?’ She looked around, half-expecting the colonel to be standing at the bedroom door.