Wilbur Smith - Gold Mine

by Gold Mine(Lit)

  "Tomorrow we'll shoot her six times," he told Big King.

  "Maybe seven, "said Big King.

  Hettie was waiting for him in the lounge when he got home. She flew to him and threw her arms about his neck.

  "Did you bring me a present?" she asked with her lips against his ear, and Johnny laughed tantalizingly. It was very seldom that he did not have a gift for her.

  "You did!" she exclaimed, and began to run her hands over his pockets.

  "There!" She thrust her hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, and brought out the little white jeweller's box.

  "Oh!" She opened it, and then her expression changed slightly.

  "You don't like them? "Johnny asked anxiously.

  "How much did they cost?" she enquired as she examined the porcelain and lacquer earrings, representing two vividly coloured. parrots.

  "Well," Johnny looked shamefaced, "you see, Hettie, it's the end of the month, you see, and well, like I'm a bit short till pay day, you see, so I couldn't-"

  "How much?"

  "Well, you see," he took a breath, "two rand fifty." "Oh," said Hettie, "they're nice." And she promptly lost interest in them. She tossed the box carelessly onto the crowded mantelpiece and set off for the kitchen.

  "Hey, Hettie," Johnny called after her. "How about we go across to Fochvill? There's a dance there tonight. We go and twist, hey?"

  Hettie turned back, her expression alive again.

  "Gee, yes, man!" she enthused. "Let's do that. I'll go and change, hey!" And she ran up the passage.

  Davy came out of his bedroom, on his way to work.

  "Hey, Davy." Johnny stopped him. "You got any money on you?"

  "Are you broke again?"

  "Just till pay day."

  "Hell, man, Johnny, you got a cheque for eleven hundred the beginning of the month. You spent it all?"

  "Next month," Johnny winked, "I'm going to get a cheque for two or three thousand. Then watch me go! Come, Davy, lend me fifty. I'm taking Hettie dancing."

  or Rod the days flicked past like telegraph poles viewed from a speeding automobile. Each day he gained confidence in his own ability.

  He had never doubted that he could handle the underground operation and now he found that he had a firm grasp on the surface as well. He knew that his campaign to reduce working costs was having effect, but its full harvest would only be apparent when the quarterly reports were drafted.

  Yet he lay awake in the big Manager's residence on the ridge in which he and his few sticks of furniture seemed lost and lonely, and he worried. There were always myriad nagging little problems, but there were others more serious.

  This morning Lily Jordan had come through into his office.

  "Mr. Innes is coming up to see you at nine."

  "What's he want?" Herbert Innes was the Manager of the Sander Ditch Reduction works.

  "He wouldn't tell me," Lily answered. The end of the month had come and gone and Lily was still with him. Rod presumed that he had been approved.

  Herby Innes, burly and red-faced, sat down and drank a cup of tea that Lily provided, while he regaled Rod with the stroke by stroke account of his Sunday afternoon golf round. Rod interrupted him after he had hit a nine-iron short at the third and sanked his chip.

  "Okay, Herby. What's the problem?"

  "We've got a leak, Rod." "Bad?"

  "Bad enough," Herby grunted. To him the loss of a single ounce of gold during the process of recovery and refinement was catastrophic.

  "What do you reckon?"

  "Between the wash and the pour we are losing a couple hundred ounces a week."

  "Yes," Rod agreed. "That is bad enough." 20,000 rand a month, 120,000 a year.

  "Have you any ideas?"

  "It's been going on for some time, even in Frank Lemmer's day. We have tried everything." Rod was a little hazy about the workings of the reduction plant, not that he would admit that, but he was. He knew that the ore was weighed and sampled when it reached the surface, from this a fairly accurate estimate of gold content was made and compared with actual recovery. Any discrepancy had to be investigated and traced.

  "What is your recovery rate for the last quarter?"

  "Ninety-six point seven-three."

  "That's pretty good," Rod admitted. It was impossible to recover all the gold in the ore that was surfaced but Herby was getting most of it out. 96.73 percent of it, to be precise.

  Which meant that very little of the missing 200 ounces was being lost into the dump and the slimes dam.

  "I tell you what, Herby," Rod decided. "I'll come down to the plant this afternoon. We'll go over it together, perhaps a fresh eye may be able to spot the trouble."

  "May do." Herby was sceptical. "We've tried everything else. We are pouring this afternoon. What time shall I expect you?"

  "Two o'clock." They started at the shaft head, where the ore cage, the co pie arrived at the surface every four minutes with its cargo Of rock which it dumped into a concrete shute. Each load was classified as either" reef" or "waste".

  The reef was dropped into the massive storage bins, while the waste was carried off on a conveyor to the wash house to be sluiced down before going to the dump. Tiny particles of gold sticking to the waste rock were gathered in this way.

  Herby put his lips close to Rod's ear to make himself heard above the rumbling roar of rock rolling down the chute.

  "I'm not worried about this end. it's all bulk here and very little shine." Herby used the reduction plant slang for gold. "The closer we get to the end, the more dangerous it IS.

  Rod nodded and followed Herby down the steel ladder until they reached a door below the storage bins. They went through into a long underground tunnel very similar to the ore tunnel on 100 level. Again there was a massive conveyor belt moving steadily along the tunnel while ore from the bins above was fed onto it. Rod and Herby walked along beside the belt until it passed under a massive electromagnet.

  Here they paused for a while. The magnet was extracting from the ore all those pieces of metal which had found their way into the ore passes and bins.

  "How much you picking up? "Rod asked.

  "Last week fourteen tons," Herby answered, and taking Rod's arm led him through the door beside them. They were in an open yard that looked like a scrap-metal merchant's premises. A mountain of pinch bars jumper bits, shovels, steel wire rope, snatch blocks, chains, spanners, fourteen-pound hammers, and other twisted and unrecognizable pieces of metal filled the yard. All of it was rusted, much of it unusable. It had been separated from the ore by the magnet.

  Rod's mouth tightened. Here he was presented with indisputable evidence of the carelessness and it belongs to the company attitude of his men. This pile of scrap represented a waste that would total hundreds of thousands of rand annually.

  "We will see about that he muttered.

  "If one of those hammers got into my jaw mills it would smash it to pieces," Herby told him dolefully and led him back into the conveyor tunnel.

  The belt angled upwards sharply and they followed the catwalk beside it. They climbed steadily for five minutes and Herby was puffing like a steam engine. Through the holes in the honeycomb steel plate under his feet, Rod could see that they were now a few hundred feet above ground level.

  The conveyor reached the head of a tall tower and dumped its load of ore into the gaping mouths of the screeners. As the rock fell down the tower to ground level again it was sorted for size, and the larger pieces diverted to the jaw crushers' which chewed it into fistsize bites.

  "See anything?"Herby asked, barely concealing the sarcasm.

  Rod grinned at him.

  They climbed down the steel ladders that seemed endless. The screeners rattling and the crushers hammering, until Rod's eardrums pleaded for mercy.

  At last they reached ground level and went through into the mill room.

  This was a cavernous galvanized, iron shed the size of a large aircraft hangar. At least one hundred yards long and fift
y feet high, it was filled with long rows of the cylindrical tube mills.

  Forty of them in all, they were as thick as the boiler of a steam locomotive and about twice as long. Into one end of them was fed the ore which had been reduced in size by the jaw crushers. The tube mills revolved and the loose steel balls within them pounded the rock to powder.

  If the noise before had been bad, it was hideous in the mill room.

  Rod and Herby made no effort to speak to each other until they had walked through into the comparative quiet of the first heavy-media separator room. "Now," Herby explained. "This is where we start worrying." He indicated the rows of pale blue six-inch piping that came through the wall from the mill room.

  "In there is the powdered rock mixed with water to a smooth flowing paste. About forty percent of the gold is free."

  "No one can get into those pipes and you've checked for any possible leak?" Rod asked. Herby nodded.

  "But," he said, "have a look here. Along the far wall was a series of cages. They were made of heavy steel mesh, the perforations would not allow a man's finger through. The heavy steel doors were barred and locked. Outside each battery of cages stood a Bantu attendant in clean white overalls. They were all concentrating on the manipulation of the turricock that obviously regulated the flow of the powdered ore through the pipes.

  Herby stopped at one of the cages.

  "Shine!" He pointed. Beyond the heavy guard screen the grey paste of rock powder was flowing from a series of nozzles over an inclined black rubber sheet. The surface of the rubber sheet was deeply corrugated, and in each corrugation the free gold was collecting, held there by its own weight. The gold was thick as butter in a Dagwood sandwich, greasy yellow-looking in the folds of rubber.

  Rod laid hold of the steel screen and shook it.

  "No," Herby laughed. "No one will get in that way."

  "How do you clean the gold off that sheet? Does someone have access to the separator?" Rod asked.

  "The separator cleans itself automatically," Herby answered. "Look!"

  Rod noticed for the first time that the rubber sheet was moving very slowly, it was also an endless belt running round two rollers. As the belt inverted, so fine jets of water washed the gold from the corrugations into a collection tank.

  "I'm the only one who has access. We change the collection tanks daily," said Herby.

  It looked foolproof, Rod had to admit.

  Rod turned and glanced down the row of four Bantu attendants. They were all intent on their duties, and Rod knew that each of them had a high security rating. They had been carefully selected and screened before being allowed into the reduction works.

  "Satisfied?" Herby asked.

  "Okay," Rod nodded, and the two of them went out through the door in the far wall. Locking it behind them.

  Immediately they had gone the four Bantu attendants reacted. They straightened up, the scowls of concentration smoothed out to be replaced by grins of relief. One made a remark and they all laughed, and opened the waist bands of their tunics. From inside each trouser leg they drew a length of quarter-inch copper wire and began probing them through the steel screen.

  It had taken Crooked Leg, the photographer, almost a year to work out a means of milking gold from the heavily screened and guarded separators.

  The method which he had discovered was, like all workable plans, extremely simple.

  Mercury, quicksilver, absorbs gold the way blotting paper sucks up moisture." It will suck in any speck of gold that comes in contact with it. Mercury has a further property, it can be made to spread on copper like butter on bread. This layer of mercury on copper retains its powers of absorbing gold.

  Crooked Leg had devised the idea of coating lengths of copper wire with mercury. The wire could be inserted through the apertures in the steel mesh and the wire laid across the corrugated rubber sheet, where it set about mopping up every speck of gold that flowed over it. The lengths of wire could be quickly slipped down the trouser leg at the approach of an official, and they could be smuggled in and out of the reduction works the same way.

  Every evening Crooked Leg retrieved the gold-thickened wire, and issued his four accomplices with newly coated lengths. Every night in the abandoned workings beyond the ridge he boiled the mercury to make it release its gold.

  "Now," Herby could speak normally in the blessed quiet of the cyanide plant, "we have skimmed off the free gold and we are left with the sulphide gold." He offered Rod a cigarette as they made their way between the massive steel tanks that spread over many acres. "We pump this into the tanks and add cyanide. The cyanide dissolves the gold and takes it into solution. We tap it off and run it through zinc powder. The gold is deposited on the zinc, we burn away the zinc and we are left with the gold." Rod lit his cigarette. He knew all this but Herby was giving him a Cooks" tour for visiting VIPS. He flicked his lighter for Herby. "There is no way anyone could swipe it when it's in solution." Herby shook his head, exhaling smoke. "Apart from anything else, cyanide is a deadly poison." He glanced at his watch.

  "Three-twenty, they'll be pouring now. Shall we go across to the smelt house?" The smelt house was the only brick building among all the galvanized iron. It stood a little isolated. Its windows were high up and heavily barred.

  At the steel door Herby buzzed, and a peephole opened in the door.

  He and Rod were immediately recognised and the door swung open. They were in a cage of bars which could only be opened once the door was closed behind them.

  "Afternoon, Mr. Ironsides, Mr. Innes." The guard was apologetic.

  "Would you sign, please?" He was a retired policeman with a paunch and a holstered revolver on his hip.

  They signed and the guard signalled to his mate on the steel catwalk high above the smelt room floor. This guard tucked his pump action shotgun under one arm, and threw the switch on the walk beside him.

  The cage door opened and they went through.

  Along the far wall the electric furnaces were set into the brickwork.

  They resembled the doors of the bread ovens in a bakery.

  The concrete floor of the room was uncluttered, except for the mechanical loader that carried the gold crucible in its steel arms, and the moulds before it. The half dozen personnel of the smelt house barely looked up as Rod and Herby approached.

  The pour was well advanced, the arms of the loader tilted and a thin stream of molten gold issued from the spout of the crucible, and fell into the mould. The gold hissed and smoked and crackled, and tiny red and blue sparks twinkled on its surface as it cooled.

  Already forty or fifty bars were laid out on the rubber-wheeled trolley beside the mould. Each bar was a little smaller than a cigar box. It had the knobby bumpy look of roughly cast metal.

  Rod stopped and touched one of the bars. It was still hot and it had the slightly greasy feeling that new gold always has.

  "How much? "he asked Herby, and Herby shrugged.

  "About a million rand's worth, perhaps a little more." So that's what a million rand looks like, Rod mused, it's not very impressive.

  "What's the procedure now? "Rod asked.

  "We weigh it, and stamp the weight and batch number into each bar." He pointed to a massive circular safe deposit door in the near wall. "It's stored there overnight, and tomorrow a refinery armoured car will come out from Johannesburg and pick it up." Herby led the way out of the smelt house. "Anyway, that's not the trouble. Our leak is sucking off the shine before it ever reaches the smelt house."

  "Let me think about it for a few days," Rod said. "Then we'll get together again, try and find the solution." He was still thinking about it now. Lying in the darkness and smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  There seemed to be only one solution. They would have to plant Bantu police in the reduction works.

  It was an endless game involving all the mining companies and their reduction plant personnel. An inventive mind would devise a new system of sucking off the shine.

  The C
ompany would become aware of the activity by comparison of estimated and actual recovery and they would work on the leak for a week, a month, sometimes a year. Then they would break the system.

  There would be prosecutions, stiff gaol sentences, and the Company would circularize its neighbours, and they would all settle back and wait for the next customer to appear.

  Gold has many remarkable properties, its weight, its non-corruptibility and, not least, the greed and lust it conjures up in the hearts of men.

  Rod stubbed his cigarette, rolled onto his side and pulled the bedclothes up over his shoulders. His last thought before sleep was for the major problem that, these days, was never very far from the surface of his mind.