The Secret Chamber

by Patrick Woodhead

  She stared at his fists, clenching and unclenching in a constant rhythm, and felt a sickness well up inside her. In that moment, he seemed so disgusting, so absolutely wretched, it was as if the ugliness of all those African wars was seeping out of him.

  Later, she realised that the Englishman had been Simon Mann and that her father had been involved in the attempted coup on Equatorial Guinea. Somehow, Jean-Luc had avoided the group arrests in Zimbabwe and had headed north to the Rwandan-Congo border. Now his unit was stationed there, flying helicopters in what was ostensibly a ‘freighting’ business, but with all the contraband coming out of the Eastern DRC each month, from diamonds to coltan, uranium to copper, it was all too obvious that he had become nothing more than a petty smuggler.

  It was nine years since that night in Cape Town, the last time Bear had spoken to her father. She had a new life now; she was married with a two-year-old son. And, most importantly, her family was something that he had never been a part of. But even after all that had happened, and all that he had done, she would still sometimes imagine introducing her son Nathan to his grandfather. But even as she imagined it, the dream would start to collapse. Her father was too far gone now. Just another casualty of Africa’s endless conflicts.

  Through the cockpit of the plane, Bear caught the faint imprint of a settlement rising above the flat horizon. Pulling back the control column, she set the Cessna climbing in a steep arc, pushing Bear back into her seat from the positive G. As the speed bled off, she clicked down the first stage of flap, then the second, turning the plane in a tight, slow circle above the settlement. She could see movement outside the open-cast mine itself, with the conveyor belts fanning out like arteries from the northern entrance to the outlying buildings.

  By flipping the plane on to its other axis, she was able to see the crater from the explosion. It had blown outwards in a massive but near-perfect circle. Reaching into her flying bag on the rear seat, she pulled out a small Lumix camera and took five shots in quick succession. From altitude, it looked like the lab complex had been just beyond the explosion’s reach. It had been close.

  Two hundred feet below the circling plane, three men stood beside a white Toyota pickup truck. All were dressed in khaki shirts with matching shorts and socks pulled up to just below their knees. Despite the scorching sun, none of them wore hats. They stood squinting into the cobalt blue sky, following the plane as it passed the windsock and came into land.

  They heard the propeller speed change in pitch, then with a tiny spray of dust kicking up from the rear wheels, the plane touched down. A few seconds later, it came to a standstill on the far side of their truck.

  The three men moved round the vehicle, their eyes fixed on the interior of the plane as Bear got out, trying to keep her knees as close together as possible.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ the largest of the men said to no one in particular, his voice thick with an Afrikaner accent and a lifetime of smoking. ‘They’ve sent in that fucking kaffir woman again.’

  He pulled himself to a halt, the others drawing up behind him, and crossed his forearms over his rotund belly. The natural scowl on his sun-damaged face deepened as his gaze moved upward from Bear’s ankles and rested somewhere in the vicinity of her crotch. He nodded slowly, his tongue moving over his lips as if wetting the glue on a roll-up cigarette.

  As Bear opened the rear door of the Cessna and pulled out a large canvas bag, Wilhelm squared off his shoulders a little more.

  ‘You know we have this all under control, don’t you?’ he called out to her. ‘Any idiot can see what happened. The compressors have gone. So you want to tell me why the hell head office have sent a little girl to inspect my mine?’

  The man on his left gave a crooked smile, taking a packet of reds from his breast pocket and tapping the filter a couple of times. Putting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he fished out a Zippo from his trouser pocket and went to click it open.

  ‘Would you not do that?’ Bear said, leaning her shoulder against the door of the plane to get the latch closed. The man eyed her disdainfully and, after a moment’s hesitation, ignored her.

  ‘It’s just that you’re standing a couple of feet away from the fuel overflow and, as nice as those tight shorts of yours are, you might not want to see them go up in flames.’

  The man looked at the L-shaped pipe sitting under the wing of the plane and the single drop of fuel which had welled up on its end. He looked back at Bear, then gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

  Wilhelm’s bearish forearms flexed while he watched his colleague slowly lower the lighter.

  ‘Now you listen to me,’ he growled, his chin tilting upwards, ‘we don’t need some kaffir woman coming here and telling us how to run our own bloody mine. Why don’t you climb on board your pretty plane and piss off back to the city?’

  Bear swung the bag over her shoulder and stopped in front of him. Her eyes were fixed on Wilhelm, but her expression remained unreadable; neither confrontational nor compliant. His eyes met hers, then seemed to settle on her right eye. There was something strange about it … Only as he looked closer did he realise that there was a loss of pigmentation across the very top of the iris, leaving a clear white fleck that made it appear as if the eye was constantly reflecting some distant light.

  ‘Listen, Wilhelm, because I’m only going to say this once,’ Bear said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘We both know I’m the only one here qualified to assess the damage. So instead of wasting everybody’s time, why don’t you just take me to those compressors?’

  ‘I don’t need you …’

  ‘Just this once,’ Bear cut in, ‘try thinking with your head and not your balls. You’ve got a Cat-4 explosion on an open mine site. You could have all sorts of shit leaking out here.’

  There was a pause while Wilhelm hesitated, torn between his pride and what he knew to be true. Without waiting for a response, Bear pushed past him and climbed on to the back of the pickup, throwing her bag into the corrugated well of the truck before settling herself on the edge with her knees clamped together.

  ‘And by the way, I’ve got a Congolese mother and French father, but stick to “kaffir” as I don’t want to confuse you. So why don’t you just get in and drive the fucking truck?’

  Bear could see Wilhelm’s entire frame quiver with rage. She knew only too well how proud the Afrikaners could be. She silently chastised herself for rising to the bait. Her job was to contain the site, not win a petty argument with a halfwit Boer. Turning her head away from Wilhelm’s reddening face and looking out at the first of the prefabricated buildings, Bear spoke again, her voice softer this time.

  ‘Look, it’s your mine, Wilhelm. I’m just trying to make it safe. That’s all. Let’s get this over with as soon as possible and all of us can go home.’

  Wilhelm took a cigarette from the breast pocket of his shirt and lit it, closing the lid of his Zippo with a flick of his wrist. His eyes darted towards the fuel overflow pipe while he drew down on the cigarette, the paper crackling softly as it burned.

  ‘Take her to the site then, but give her ten minutes. That’s all,’ he said, spitting a thick globule of phlegm on to the dry ground.

  As they drove closer to the building complex, Bear saw that the explosion had ripped a near-perfect circle across the entire circumference of the mine. The sheer scale of the explosion was vast, and while she had heard of compressors exploding, she had never before seen anything like this.

  Climbing down from the truck and unzipping her canvas bag, Bear quickly put on a rubberised protective suit, ignoring the stares from the men as she hoisted her skirt up to get her legs through the trousers. Zipping it up at the back like a wetsuit, she sealed in her elbow-length gloves with gaff tape and tightened the straps on her gas mask. With her tool bag under one arm, she slowly walked forward to the edge of the crater, listening to the gravelly intake of her breath as it passed through the mask’s filters.

  At the cent
re of the mine, slabs of the natural red rock had been charred black, while loose piles of smouldering ash still smoked in crooked vertical lines. Amongst the debris were recognisable parts of what had been the compressor building; a corner join of the roof, metallic shelving units twisted in on themselves, and even lagging from pipes that had fed into the compressors.

  To Bear’s eyes, there was something about the shape of the crater that didn’t seem right. The blast radius was strangely uniform, almost like a mortar shell’s. The explosion had obviously emanated from a single point, instead of one compressor setting off the next in a chain reaction as it should have done. She shook her head slowly, wondering what the hell could have triggered it all.

  Climbing down into the crater, Bear methodically moved through the wreckage, scooping up soil samples in one of the circular heat-proof dishes which she kept in a pouch on the trouser leg of her suit. As she reached the centre of the depression, she stopped. On the underside of one of the sections of broken piping was a thin, clear residue glinting in the bright sunshine. She lifted the piping into the air, feeling the warm glow of heat through her protective gloves. The residue had glazed into a hard film from the heat and she turned it slowly in the light, wondering what it could be.

  Scratching a few shards into one of her dishes, she turned to see the two Afrikaners standing at the edge of the crater, signalling to her that her time was up. Bear ignored them, turning her back as her eyes traced once more over the line of rubble.

  Whatever had triggered the explosion, there was one thing she was certain of. The compressors had had nothing to do with it.

  Chapter 3

  THE AMERICAN STOOD with his back to the rest of the group, talking loudly on a satellite phone. His body was partially silhouetted by the evening light, framed on both sides by the steep lines of Himalayan mountains.

  As the man adjusted his balance, his eyes switched across to the Nepalese porters arriving over the crest of the pathway. They huddled together in a group, neck muscles swollen from the massive loads strapped across their foreheads, as they waited for him to signal where he wanted the campsite to be built.

  ‘You’re not reading me,’ the man said into the satellite phone, turning to gaze out over the view again and ignoring the porters. ‘This ain’t some Alpine trek. This is the Himalayas. It’s us against the mountain out here.’

  There was a pause as he waited for the journalist on the other end of the line to finish her question.

  ‘Yeah, I guess there is always some fear,’ he continued, nodding slowly to himself. ‘But you have to conquer that fear, like you conquer the mountain. People back in civilisation can’t understand what drives a man like me to be out here. It’s more …’

  He broke off, squinting down at the handset, and saw that the signal had dropped to zero. As he wondered how much of what he had said had got through, his shoulders slowly hunched.

  ‘Bob, they want to know where you want the campsite fixed,’ prompted a petite blonde women standing at the edge of the pathway. She was dressed in the same bright yellow Gore-Tex jacket as the rest of the climbing team, but it looked a couple of sizes too big, bunching out over her hips.

  Bob glanced up, then absent-mindedly waved his arm towards a wider section of grass directly behind him. As the sherpas gratefully dropped their loads and began unpacking the tents, he stalked across to the woman, waving the satellite phone in front of him as if that would somehow help with the signal.

  ‘What is it with this goddamn’ Iridium network, Sally?’ he asked, his broad face creasing into a scowl. ‘You get about two minutes before the satellite goes out of range. Why the hell didn’t we use another system?’

  Sally’s head tilted downwards, her eyes dulling as Bob leaned in towards her.

  ‘You know, if people are making mistakes like that down here, it’s gotta make you think what’s going to happen higher up.’ He paused, his scowl deepening as if pained by his own premonition. ‘You hear what I’m saying, Sally? And I’m saying this for the sake of the team.’

  As he dragged the last word out, his gaze swung round towards the group of sherpas to where a sixteen-year-old boy had unclipped the Pelican case he had been carrying, and was uncoiling the thick computer wiring contained within.

  ‘No touch!’ Bob shouted, moving closer and waving his finger in front of the boy’s nose with exaggerated slowness. ‘No touch this!’

  Sally watched, her cheeks flushing red with frustration, before turning away and staring out towards the lower reaches of the mountain. She let her eyes blur, exhaling deeply as she tried to force herself to relax. Why were the Wall Street set always so obnoxious? One minute they wanted to be a mountaineer, the next a goddamn’ astronaut. She should have known it would be like this; every day a new reproach, a new reminder of her status as the newbie on the team, but she had taken the position anyway. Financing a Himalaya expedition was just too expensive to go it alone.

  As Sally stared down the mountainside, she suddenly noticed a figure moving up the pathway towards their campsite. The man was moving fast despite the massive load he was carrying, more running up the zigzagging trail than walking.

  A minute later, Luca Matthews climbed up the last remaining steps of the path and stopped. He stood for a moment, eyes passing over one person to the next in the group, before pulling off the thick rope strap across his forehead and deftly swinging his body out from beneath the enormous pack.

  Sally stared at him, taking in his shoulder-length hair, matted by dirt and scraped back from his forehead by a faded brown rag. His face was deeply tanned, but his cheeks were hollow from the long hours of exercise and a meagre daily diet. Across his jawline she could see a light beard, patchy from being trimmed without a mirror or care, and as he adjusted his balance and his face tilted a little bit further towards her, she caught sight of his pale blue eyes. They stared blankly ahead, almost mechanically, as if somewhere along the endless Himalaya paths, their light had been slowly snuffed out.

  ‘Hi,’ Sally began to say, when suddenly a chorus of ‘Namaste!’ erupted from behind her. Each of the Nepalese porters had their hands pressed together in the traditional greeting and raised towards Luca.

  At the sudden commotion, Bob looked up. A disapproving scowl quickly darkened his face as he watched Luca drag his pack up from the ground and begin moving over to the other side of the campsite. Just as he drew level, Bob reached out a hand to stop him, but instead of gripping on to Luca’s arm, his fingers slowly curled back into his own palm. Instead, he simply watched as Luca delved into the top of his pack and pulled out a battered hipflask. He took a massive swig and roughly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, before passing the alcohol over to one of the other sherpas.

  Bob clicked his fingers, signalling towards his head porter.

  ‘Gygme, what the hell is this? Some other climber stays at my campsite and he doesn’t even ask permission?’

  Gygme smiled politely.

  ‘But, sir, he is not a climber. He is one of my porters.’

  Bob’s nose wrinkled as if he had just caught wind of an unpleasant smell.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Luca is one of my porters, just the same as the rest of us. He has been part of my team for nearly six months and is proving to be a most fine worker.’

  ‘But he’s white,’ Bob said, pointing at Luca as if the fact might have escaped Gygme’s notice.

  ‘He is indeed white,’ the head sherpa agreed, the smile on his face thinning, ‘but so far that has not proved too much of a disadvantage.’

  As dawn broke over the far ridge of the mountains, Sally unzipped the fly-sheet of her tent and stepped out into the cold. The grass was hardened from frost. As she padded across it, there was a soft crunching sound underfoot.

  Carefully picking her way around each tent, she stopped at the edge of the campsite and inhaled deeply, feeling the freezing air burn her lungs. She tilted her head up, marvelling at the immensity of the night sky.
It felt somehow open and exposed, as if the cold had stripped it bare. The night’s black was already turning a deep shade of blue, and over to the east the first flecks of dawn were backlighting the line of mountains like a halo.

  Despite the lack of sleep and the headache from altitude, Sally suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of calm and majesty. The Himalayas were just spectacular.

  She was about to turn back to her tent when there was a low groan from somewhere to her right. Turning in surprise, she saw Luca lying almost entirely outside his tent, with the main part of his torso resting on the hard ground and only a thin woollen rug loosely wrapped across his chest. His feet were shoved into an empty rucksack and frost had plastered the hair to the side of his face.

  Crouching down, Sally found herself reaching out her hand as if to steady him, but before her fingers touched his chest, Luca’s whole body suddenly jolted. His shoulders lifted off the ground, almost sending her toppling backwards in fright. Staring into his face, she could see his eyelids twitching in spasm. It looked like he was having some kind of seizure.

  Then she realised it wasn’t a seizure or even the cold. Luca was dreaming.

  He jolted again, his expression twisting at some distant memory of pain before he let out another low groan and lay still. Sally watched him for a moment more before a voice suddenly rang out behind her.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about him, Miss Sally.’

  She turned on her haunches to see Gygme standing outside his tent, arms reaching out to the heavens as he stretched out the night’s stiffness. ‘He always sleeps badly. Sometimes he even keeps the rest of us awake, but it’s never stopped him from carrying his share in the morning. Come have some tea. He’ll be all right.’

  Sally straightened up. Dusting off some imaginary dirt from the front of her jacket, she walked towards Gygme and the centre of the campsite. There were a few other rustling noises from within the tents as the other members of the climbing team slowly clambered out of their sleeping bags. Soon, everyone was up and huddled around the smouldering remains of the campfire.