African Ice

by Jeff Buick

  “I wish you were wrong,” he said, as they rejoined the team of porters. “But you’re not. How quickly can you find this thing?”

  “Let’s move up to where the last formation is. I’ll be able to tell you better once I’m set up and running the laser ablation.” He agreed and the small team began to move. Twenty minutes later Sam was collecting rocks from the base of the formation. She chiseled the most promising stones, keying in on variations in color and texture that would give her the trace elements she so desperately needed. She took twenty-three pieces from the formation and then began testing. Half an hour later, she reported the results to McNeil.

  “We’ve got it!” she said. Her voice was excited, but tinged with some reservation. He picked up on the hesitation in her voice.

  “You don’t sound totally convinced.”

  “I’m not. And that’s the strange thing. What I’m looking for is there, but in the wrong quantities. I’m lacking two elements almost completely, exactly on with six, and in excess with the last three. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What about diamonds? Keep it simple, you know. Just find the diamonds and to heck with all this trace element stuff.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Diamonds don’t look like much before they’re cut and polished. They blend in with the surrounding rocks, and most times are found buried deep inside the formation. You need to be sure you’re looking in exactly the right spot before you start ripping the rock apart.”

  “It’s not always like that,” he retaliated. “You said so yourself.” She looked at him inquisitively and he continued. “Two weeks ago, you talked about diamonds you sometimes find sitting on the surface. There’s a special name for them.”

  “Alluvial diamonds. And that was in Sierra Leone, not the Congo. The northeastern region of the Congo has never yielded one alluvial diamond. Not one, Travis.” She stopped for a second, then grabbed his arm, staring straight into his eyes. “And yet, we know the other expeditions found diamonds close to where we’re standing.” She looked up from his eyes to the huge ridge next to them, following the cliff to its peak. “Unless . . .” She stared at the top of the ridge.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we’re on the wrong side of the ridge,” she said quietly. “That’s why there has never been a diamond found in any stream or river anywhere in the northern regions of the Congo. The Ruwenzori Mountains, including this ridge, control which way the water flows. The water in this stream,” she pointed to the rivulet they had trudged through earlier in the afternoon, “empties into the Congo River basin and drains into the Atlantic. On the other side of the ridge, the water flows into the Shilango, a small coastal river that’s part of the Nile River basin. No wonder no one ever found it.”

  He looked at the towering cliff with trepidation. “How the hell do you propose we get over this thing?”

  “I don’t think we have to,” Sam said. “The other team found the diamonds, and they weren’t geared to climb something like this. I think there’s another way—a way through the wall.”

  “A tunnel,” he said.

  “Exactly. We just have to find it,” Sam said, checking her watch. “We’ve got about two hours until darkness. I suggest we start looking immediately.”

  He nodded and began organizing the porters. Samantha divided the rock wall into five seventy-foot lengths, one for each of them. From the ground to twenty feet up the wall, they were to poke and prod through the dense vines and lianas for an opening, no matter how small. It took only twenty minutes before one of the porters began to chatter excitedly in his native Bantu tongue. Travis and Samantha arrived at the same time and the man backed off to let them see his find. Travis pulled aside the heavy curtain of vines, then looked at the porter, perplexed. The man waved his arms excitedly, motioning for him to push farther into the damp growth. Travis turned and wormed his way a few feet upward and inward. All that was left showing was his hiking boots when Samantha heard him say, “Holy shit” softly under his breath. A moment later he extracted himself from the tangled mess and shook his head.

  “If I’d been looking here, I would never have found that,” he said. “There’s a round opening about six feet in diameter that burrows right into the rock face. It’s pretty smooth inside, like an ancient river carved it. Hand me up a heavy-duty flashlight and I’ll have a look inside.”

  Samantha checked the battery strength on the largest light they had and handed it up to him. “Watch out for snakes and tarantulas,” she said encouragingly as he started into the tunnel.

  The walls were reasonably smooth and covered with slimy green lichen. An occasional sharp rock protruded from the ceiling, but Travis could walk upright as long as he crouched a few inches. Anyone a few inches shorter than six feet wouldn’t need to duck. He made good progress, encountering nothing living that threatened him, just a few harmless spiders and worms. The footing was tricky, slippery rocks with very little growth on them. He estimated he had traveled slightly over a hundred and fifty feet when the flashlight beam illuminated a wall of vines ahead. He pushed his way through the tangle and into the filtered sunlight. What he saw was unbelievable.

  He was inside a huge crack in the mountain. The base of the crack at the mouth of the tunnel was only fifteen feet across. But the walls that rose above him on all sides were hundreds of feet high. Little sunlight filtered down into the crevice, and not much grew on the rocky walls. But the top of the crevice was engulfed by the rain-forest canopy, making the fissure in the rock impossible to see from above. He stared for a couple of minutes, marveling at the freak of nature. He reentered the tunnel and went back for Sam. She was waiting, along with a thousand questions.

  “Did you get through okay? What’s on the other side?”

  He held up his hand. “Whoa, take it easy. It’s no problem. Let’s grab your gear and get you through to the other side. You can decide whether we’ve found the diamonds.” He grinned at her. “You’re the geologist.”

  Travis got on the radio to Alain at base camp while the porters readied the gear. Travis advised him to reverse the polarity on the GPS system, then move camp by a few hundred yards. That would send Mugumba’s troops in the wrong direction, for a while at least. Travis told Alain to have Dan set charges around the area the soldiers would be approaching, and to have the camp on highest alert; Mugumba was coming. They should strip Koko of his transmitter and leave it pinned to a tree near the GPS. That would give Mugumba the confirmation of their location. Or rather, their trap. And then he told his team about the discovery of the previous expedition’s bones, just to ensure they realized Mugumba was serious. He cut off the transmission and joined Sam at the mouth of the tunnel. He motioned for the porters to scatter into the bush and wait until they returned; then he and Sam entered the dank confines of the underground passage.

  Travis led the way, carrying the heaviest of Sam’s prospecting gear. He checked back on occasion, but she was having no trouble keeping up with him. They reached the far end of the tunnel and he pushed through the vines, then set the gear down gently on the other side. He jumped out and grabbed her hand as she came through the tangle that hid the opening. He watched her as she took in the spectacle.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “This is unreal.”

  The rock face towering hundreds of feet above her was streaked with varying hues of yellow and blue. Muted shades, barely visible in the dim light that struggled to reach the depths of the chasm, mutated and slowly changed color as she moved along the bottom of the cliff. She stared upward at the spectacle, her feet unsteady on the loose rock that littered the ground. She slipped once, almost falling before Travis caught her, but her gaze never left the smooth rock face. Finally, she turned to him, her eyes more alive than he had ever seen.

  “Unbelievable,” was all she said.

  “Do you need your equipment set up?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “No, that’s not necessary.” She took a lingering look at
the surrounding walls and continued. “I don’t need to run the tests. This is it. We’re standing in the center of a kimberlitic pipe. This is the diamondiferous formation we’ve been searching for.”

  “You can tell that by just looking?”

  “Oh, yes. This is a geologist’s dream, the mother lode you search for your entire life and never find. Geology at its simplest, yet its grandest. Mother Nature giving us a glimpse of how she can transform coal into diamonds.” She moved to the far end of the aperture, about forty feet from the hole in the wall where they had entered, and pointed up. “See where the rock juts out on one side; there’s an indent on the opposite side. This is a giant crack in the mountain. And that crack split a massive kimberlite pipe right in half. We are standing inside a rock formation that is millions of years old, once under intense heat and pressure. Enough pressure to squeeze chunks of coal into diamonds.” She scanned the wall in front of her intently, then pulled her hammer from her belt and chipped away at the rock. A few moments later, she held a greenish tinged rock up for him to see.

  “This is a raw, uncut diamond,” she said. “Probably ten carats, give or take. It would be a rare find in a fully operational diamond mining operation, yet commonplace in these walls. I could dig out a million dollars in stones in twenty minutes. Ten million in less than two hours.”

  Samantha handed the stone to him, knelt down and began sifting through the rabble that covered the ground. A minute later she held up a small rock, another diamond.

  “This explains why there were never any alluvial stones found in the riverbeds on either side of the Ruwenzori,” she said. He looked confused and she elaborated. “As the diamonds eroded from the rock, very slowly because they were so well protected from wind and water, they fell to the ground and stayed exactly where they fell. There were no water currents to wash them downstream, no pools for them to sink into, no chance they would be discovered by a native washing her clothes. Unless you found the tunnel we used to get in here, you would never know this place existed.” She stopped and stooped down, pushing aside a tiny fern and lifting a small object from amidst the loose rocks. It was a time-worn, rusted geologist’s hammer. She rubbed the metal head and squinted at the engraving on the side.

  “It’s hard to read, but I think it says DSC,” she said, handing it to him. He studied it for a minute, then nodded.

  “It has more engraving on the other side,” he said, wiping the rust and moisture off. “AIPG—1994. What does that mean?”

  “The AIPG is the American Institute of Professional Geologists,” she answered. “Whoever dropped this hammer was a professional geologist, and an American. I guess they got the hammer in 1994. Who knows?” She shrugged.

  They both froze where they stood at a sudden distant sound—the rapid staccato of automatic gunfire. Travis motioned to her not to move, slipped his revolver from his belt and pushed through the vines into the tunnel. He removed the safety and kept the gun pointed ahead as he moved through the darkness. He reached the curtain of vines that covered the tunnel entrance and carefully pushed a few strands aside until he could see out. What he could see was not good.

  Three of Mugumba’s soldiers stood over one of the porters who had accompanied them through the jungle. The man lay on his side on the jungle floor, alive, but bleeding badly from a gash on his head. Beside him, a few feet away, lay two bodies contorted in death—the other two porters. McNeil watched in horror as one of the soldiers yelled at the still-alive man and continuously beat his head with a rifle butt. The language was indistinguishable, but the meaning was not. The soldiers wanted to know where McNeil and Samantha were. McNeil’s mind raced as he tried to sort out what to do.

  His line of vision was severely restricted by the size of the opening and the shrouding vines. There could be more soldiers nearby, and he wouldn’t know what he was up against until he left the safety of the tunnel. Taking on three highly trained soldiers armed with automatic weapons while he was armed with only a revolver was risky, perhaps even stupid. If he was lucky enough to kill all three but more soldiers were nearby, he would be gunned down and Samantha’s position compromised. He took a couple of deep breaths as he pondered the best course of action. A few moments later, the decision was made for him. The soldier smashing the porter’s head suddenly turned the gun around, pointed it at the man’s temple and pulled the trigger. His body jerked for a moment, then fell sideways to the ground, lifeless.

  McNeil gripped his revolver tightly, his temples pounding with pressure as his blood coursed through his body. He knew the moment to act and save the man’s life had passed, and only his professional training kept him from bursting out of the tunnel, gun blazing. He felt the pressure in his head subside as he remained motionless, watching the aftermath of the execution. He wanted desperately to avenge the three deaths, but instead waited and listened. A few minutes later, from the left of the tunnel opening, two more soldiers sauntered into his line of sight. He took a long deep breath, knowing that his decision to remain hidden had been the right one. Had he taken on the three soldiers he could see, he would have been cut down by the two he couldn’t. It was a small consolation.

  The soldiers eventually dragged the bodies a few yards into the jungle. Dusk was approaching, and they lit a fire and began preparing dinner. He backed away from the tunnel entrance, now reasonably sure that at least five of Mugumba’s men were on the other side of the vines. He retraced his steps and found Samantha sitting on a narrow ledge, her back to the rock wall. She started as he appeared from the quickly darkening hole.

  “What’s going on?” she asked apprehensively.

  “Five of Mugumba’s soldiers are outside the entrance to the tunnel,” he said. She didn’t ask, and he finally volunteered the bad news. “They killed the porters.”

  Samantha’s face went red with anger; she clenched her teeth and took a few deep breaths. “What do we do now?”

  “We’ve got a couple of options. We can call in to the expedition and have them come to us. I think that’s extremely dangerous. It’ll just lead the remainder of Mugumba’s force to our location.”

  “He must have known the location, Travis,” Samantha countered. “How else do his men suddenly show up here? And a lot quicker than you expected. You said they would need at least two days, maybe three, to get this far north of the bridge.”

  “You’re right. The only explanation is that Mugumba has at least one helicopter at his disposal, perhaps more. The five guys camped out there must have been dropped fairly close by and then they hoofed it in from the drop zone. Shit. I suspected he’d have a chopper, but I was hoping not.”

  “It also means that Mugumba knows almost exactly where this place is. To within a few hundred yards. He just can’t find the tunnel.” Sam was quiet for a moment. “You said we had a couple of options. What’s the other one?”

  “Simple. I sneak out of here in the middle of the night and kill the five guys while they sleep.”

  Samantha stared at him. “Get a grip, Travis. You may be good at what you do, but nobody is that good.”

  “It’s our only other option, Sam,” he said. “I’m not all that happy with it, but unless you can think of some other plan, it’s the one we’ll have to use.”

  “We can wait it out. The rest of the expedition will come looking for us.”

  “That would be really stupid,” he said, his voice matter-offact. “If they survive Mugumba’s men moving up from the south, they’d run into these guys. And we can’t warn them.”

  “Why not? We’ve got one of the Panther units with us. Alain said they were untraceable.”

  “Absolutely untraceable. But any energy surge is going to be detected. They won’t be able to pinpoint where we are, but they’ll know for sure we’re here. Right now, they must suspect we’re close by, but firing up one of these things would just confirm their suspicions. It’s not a good idea.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching as the dusk turned into night a
nd any residual light filtering from above disappeared. They sat in absolute darkness, only feet apart but completely invisible to each other. She knew he was right. Their only chance was for him to sneak out and try to eliminate the five while they slept. She also knew that the chances were good that Travis would die trying. And that she did not want. Finally, she reached out her hand in the blackness and grasped his.

  “Do what you have to, Travis,” she said quietly. “But for God’s sake, please come back.” She felt pressure on her fingers as he lightly squeezed. Then he was gone. She wiped away a tear that formed in the corner of her eye and briefly wondered why she’d chosen such a bizarre career. Most women, and men for that matter, lived normal lives. They had houses in the suburbs, jobs in the city, and kids in Little League. But not her. She had taken an interesting vocation and turned it into a daily struggle to survive. Crocodiles, snakes, bottomless gorges, angry pygmies, and now corrupt government soldiers. Christ, what a month. She rested her head against the billion-dollar rock wall and, surprisingly, slept.

  Travis reached the tunnel opening and peered through. His eyes acclimatized to the absolute blackness, and the pale moon that shone above the rain-forest canopy lit up the jungle floor. The soldiers’ fire was reduced to a smoldering heap of embers, and he kept his eyes from looking at the red glow and thus reducing his night vision. He slowly parted the vines and slipped from the opening to the root-covered ground at the base of the cliff. He crouched, heading away from the lightly glowing fire and into the jungle. He counted three bodies scattered around the fire, leaving two on sentry duty, somewhere nearby in the underbrush. He desperately hoped they were dozing.