Cloudburst

by Wilbur Smith

  I wolfed that breakfast down in about three mouthfuls and was out on the kerb with my kitbag in under ten minutes. Langdon could turn up at any time: I wanted us to be gone before he did. And we were. The cab Xander had organised turned up promptly, we made it to the airport without a hitch, and Joseph was exactly where he’d promised Amelia he’d be, waiting outside the departures terminal. The sight of him with his ironed jeans and his pens in his top pocket and that crisp line cut into his hair threw me back to the start of the trip, before anything had gone seriously wrong. I’d just saved Dad’s briefcase from the incompetent thieves on their clapped-out motorcycle when we met him. Dad had been pleased with me. He’d be more grateful still when I found him and Mum. Something about Joseph’s face, its open smile of recognition when he spotted us, made me feel light on my feet, ready and optimistic. He spirited us through the airport to his charter plane. From where I was sitting in the seat behind him I could see him running through his preflight checks, toggling levers, setting dials, jotting down readings and flipping switches with precise and confident fingers. That buoyed me up too. This guy knew what he was doing. I had a problem to solve, but somehow, with Amelia’s help, I’d work it out.

  45.

  Marcel picked us up in the same battered pickup we’d used for our safari. I winced at the memory of Innocent’s cheerful face in the cracked wing mirror. Without him, there was room up front for both Amelia and me, a comfier ride than sitting on our packs in the dusty open tray, but I hesitated before climbing in. It didn’t seem right. Amelia had no such qualms; she jumped up next to Marcel without hesitating.

  The guide seemed genuinely pleased to see us. The fact we were without Caleb might have had something to do with it, and he chatted away with Amelia as we churned through the traffic. They spoke in French but I got the gist of what they were saying. Marcel wanted to know how Xander was doing. Amelia told him. Then she asked whether anything bad had happened to the silverback in the wake of the tragedy. No, Marcel said. All the rangers knew Innocent would never have wanted that. Everyone understood the accident wasn’t the gorilla’s fault. As far as I could tell, the guide stopped short of saying whether everyone also knew who had actually been to blame.

  I’d worked out how to ask Marcel whether his lead had any news of my parents, but Amelia got there ahead of me. My optimism stalled in the pause before he answered her, the light feeling in my stomach hardening into a fist. He was sorry, but no, he eventually said. He’d not been able to track down the guy he was sure Yannick would have used. However, he’d also done some research into Langdon’s mining interests. They were spread far and wide, but by far the biggest project was a flagship modern operation, called the Canonhead Complex, just to the west of the national park.

  ‘Modern?’ I asked Amelia as much as him. ‘Surely all mines are pretty modern these days.’

  Marcel understood my question but his lengthy reply went over my head. Amelia could see I was lost. ‘He says not at all. The vast majority of mining in the DRC, whether it’s for tantalum, cobalt, or any precious metal, even gold, is done by hand with picks and shovels. It’s incredibly dangerous, brutally hard work, and the miners who do it are paid a pittance. At least half of their work feeds a government-backed black market. They sell what they mine for virtually nothing to traders who sell it on to bigger companies who export it to the West and China. So a modern, mechanised, well-regulated mine is an exception.’

  ‘And that’s what Langdon’s doing?’ I said. ‘If so, it’s pretty impressive.’

  Marcel snorted, hearing that. ‘Toute en face,’ he said.

  ‘That means on the face of it,’ Amelia said, though I’d kind of guessed that.

  The truck was rattling along a potholed road now: I realised I had no idea where we were going. It seemed sensible to ask. Marcel again replied at length. I tried to follow but he talked quite fast. I caught the words rivière and oblique, but couldn’t piece his meaning together.

  Amelia translated: ‘Marcel here has done some digging,’ she said. ‘No pun intended. Apparently your mum and dad were headed to this Canonhead place a few days ago. So it makes sense to start the search there. It’s where Caleb is working too. Trouble is, to get anywhere in among the mines requires a whole load of paperwork, permits, vehicle checks and so on. Langdon cut through the red tape for Caleb, but we’re going to have to be a bit more cunning.’

  ‘Cunning how?’

  ‘Marcel’s thought it through. We need to take an oblique route. That means indirect.’

  Sometimes Amelia takes me for an idiot. I dug my elbow into her side and said, ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, returning the prod with her own elbow just below my ribcage. ‘Just trying to be clear. Anyway, he’s lined up motorbikes.’

  I looked across Amelia at Marcel. He was leaning forward in his seat, squinting as he wove the pickup through a chicane of potholes filled with water the colour of mustard. ‘It’s very kind of Marcel to help,’ I said. And more quietly, to Amelia, ‘What’s in it for him exactly?’

  ‘You’ve lost your parents. He wants to help find them. He’s one of the good guys,’ she said, adding, to Marcel, ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Peut-être,’ he answered, smiling sideways at her.

  ‘Also money,’ Amelia said matter-of-factly. ‘I offered him double his normal day rate.’

  We drove for a good couple of hours down that appalling dirt road without making it particularly far, and finally wound up in a village – just a few huts really – beyond which the truck couldn’t go. This was where Marcel had arranged to pick up the motorbikes, two old scramblers: all I saw at first glance was dented fuel tanks, a bent brake lever and half a front mudguard. The guy who owned the bikes was tinkering with the more beaten-up of the two, though the distinction was marginal. I didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad sign that he was working on the bike right before handing it over, but he gave the keys to Marcel confidently enough.

  Marcel immediately tossed one of the sets of keys to me. ‘Amelia dit que tu montes,’ he said.

  Amelia, deadpan: ‘You do, right, ride something like this?’

  ‘A mountain bike, yes, but not one of these,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You’ll get the hang of it, I’m sure,’ she said, climbing onto the back of Marcel’s bike.

  ‘Mine has pedals,’ I muttered under my breath.

  Mercifully the motorbikes came with helmets. I took my time adjusting the straps and putting mine on. It looked like I was being safety conscious, but in reality I was simply trying to remember everything I’d learned the one time I’d ridden my friend Justin’s scrambler, on his parents’ farm in Wales. That was over a year ago. I knew how to work the clutch and gears at least. This meant I didn’t make a complete fool of myself as Marcel set off, expecting me to follow. But I wasn’t that smooth: I nearly came off, swerving to avoid a small, stark-naked child who wandered across the track as we headed out of the village, and I pulled an unintentional wheelie accelerating too hard when Marcel opened up the throttle in front of me. I got into the riding though. The smell of the exhaust fumes from Marcel and Amelia’s bike was instantly the same as the smell of the bike on the farm, and weirdly the scenery rushing past, all green and gold and full of flying mud, though thousands of miles distant, felt pretty similar, too. I had to concentrate. The bike squirreled and squirmed in the rutted muck. Marcel didn’t hold back: we had ground to cover. I kept an eye on the line he was taking, gritted my teeth, fought the handlebars and by doing my damnedest I just about managed to keep up.

  46.

  We rode for six hours straight. It was tough: my shoulders seized up with the effort of hauling the bike left and right, and the rattling, bucking bike frame, shot through with vibrations, made my feet, hands and bum so numb I could barely feel them. The burden of my pack didn’t make it any easier to keep the bike upright. And the ancient helmet was heavier than I’m used to as well. My head felt like it was abo
ut to come off. We kept having to slow down to cross tiny streams, either through the water itself or across crude bridges made of little more than branches. I got wet. Ahead of me, I could see Amelia struggling to stay balanced on the back of Marcel’s bike. Every now and then she’d tense up rigid, the tendons standing out in her neck, and on more than one occasion I saw her bump helmets with Marcel. But she didn’t call a halt, and Marcel didn’t either obviously. So neither did I. I battled on, though before long every part of me seemed to be screaming, ‘I need a rest!’

  Just as I was about to give in and admit I had to stop, we rounded a bend in the track and came upon a sizeable river. It was one of the thousands of tributaries to the mighty Congo, about a football pitch wide and the colour of milky tea. The water seemed so still that to begin with I couldn’t tell which way it was flowing. Though we’d barely seen anyone as we’d fought our way to this point, there was a man waiting next to the river. He was skeletally thin and leaning on an old bicycle hung with big, heavy-looking plastic containers. Amelia immediately jumped down and started talking to him with Marcel. Apparently he was transporting palm oil. His bike, I noticed, had no pedals: he was using it as a means of lugging his wares. It struck me that if it had taken us all those hours to motorbike here, he must have been pushing his incredibly heavy load down that miserable track for days. Immediately I felt less sorry for myself.

  ‘He’s waiting for the ferry,’ Amelia explained. ‘Apparently there’s one due today.’

  ‘Just “today”?’

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  ‘What do we do until it gets here?’ I asked.

  It was a stupid question and it got the answer it deserved from Marcel. ‘Nous attendons,’ he said, adding the translation himself: ‘We wait.’

  A cloud of mosquitoes had already gathered, whining around us, but since we were here on account of me I couldn’t complain, and as it was we didn’t have long to wait. Marcel had just broken out some water for us to drink, and we were passing it round, when the ‘ferry’ drifted into view. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but not this. The boat was a hollowed out tree trunk. In the distance it looked like the black husk of a seed pod. Up close it was actually pretty big.

  ‘What do you call that?’ I said to myself as much as anyone.

  ‘The French name is pirogue, but you can call it a dugout canoe,’ Amelia replied.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Think about it: no seams. It’s all one piece. Properly watertight. This design hasn’t changed for hundreds of years.’

  Two men were piloting the ferry, one at the front and one at the back. They swung it into the bank gently and three women climbed out. All of them were carrying plastic drums that looked as heavy as the cycle-pusher’s. One also had a package on her head, wrapped in yellow leaves and tied up with actual vines. She smiled at me as she passed us, and the kindness in her eyes was so like Mum’s I had to look away. Where was my mum now? Was this attempt to track her and Dad down a fool’s errand? I couldn’t allow myself to think that. But here we were, in the middle of nowhere. The landscape around me stretched infinitely in that moment. I fought back a sudden, stabbing hopelessness by manhandling my motorbike to the edge of the river bank.

  The dugout was surprisingly deep: the tree it was cut from must have been massive. Even so, I didn’t expect the ferryman to load both our bikes, our packs and the bicycle laden with palm oil into it in one go. But that’s what he did, and with all of us passengers loaded in as well we sat low in the water, the surface less than a handspan from the gunwales.

  I stayed very still in the bottom of that canoe. We all did. If the oarsmen had caught a crab and rocked the boat more than a little one way or the other it would have filled with water and sunk instantly. But having presumably made the trip thousands of times, the pilots moved as gently as the river and we were soon safely on the other side.

  Marcel had in mind a village he wanted us to reach before nightfall. I didn’t much fancy sleeping out in the open, so readied myself to set off again quickly. Amelia asked if she could ride with me this time. It felt like a compliment. I had to wear my pack on my front to make room for her, and handling the bike with the two of us on it was doubly hard to start with, but the track was better defined this side of the river and she’d learned to ride pillion well with Marcel. I quickly grew used to the weight of her pressing against my back. We forged on. At dusk Marcel turned on his bike’s headlamp. I did the same. The two beams scissored wildly ahead of us, full of insects. I couldn’t have gone on much longer, but just as the river had saved me earlier in the day, we arrived in the village abruptly. There were no electric lights here. After a quick meal of heavily salted vegetable mush Marcel negotiated us floor space in what seemed little more than a shack. I didn’t care. Curled in my sleeping bag, with Amelia already breathing deeply next to me, I shut my eyes and fell into a weird half-sleep, the muddy track still unspooling ahead of me, the bike’s engine still loud in my ears.

  47.

  We made it to Langdon’s flagship mine, Canonhead, the following afternoon. The landscape we were biking through had opened up by then. Marcel crested a low hill ahead of me and as I drew up alongside him the operation was laid out beneath us, an open wound cut into the brush, reaching into the distance. It was big, a proper sprawl of prefab huts to one side of a cavernous, tiered open pit, swarming with men and stabbed full of heavy machinery, diggers, trucks. The day was a muggy one. Standing on that ridge, the heat seemed to come from the mine, spread out down there beneath a dirty yellow haze.

  We’d taken a cross-country route to avoid the checkpoints dotted along what passed for main roads. Without the right paperwork, Marcel had explained, the government officials – or vigilantes – who manned those posts wouldn’t let us pass. I hoped that by dropping my uncle’s name hard enough at the mine itself I’d be able to get a meeting with the head guy or those close to him, anyone who might know something about my parents’ visit. But I hoped wrong. We hadn’t even made it to the perimeter fence which ran round the southern edge of the settlement – which on approach seemed actually the size of a small town – to the main entrance, when a guy with a gun materialised on the path ahead of us and started yelling in French. We were wheeling the bikes at this point, though the clanking, grinding noise of machinery in the mine would have masked them. Marcel kicked down his stand and put his hands above his head. I didn’t need Amelia to interpret, just followed suit. Marcel started to say something in his most soothing voice, but he stopped pretty quickly when the guy yelled ‘Ferme ta gueule!’ and swung his rifle onto his hip.

  The end of the gun’s muzzle was as unblinking as the guard’s eyes. He waved it at us lazily, motioning us on. Something wasn’t right with him. Was he drunk, or high on something? I don’t know, but everything about him unnerved me. He ushered us along the fence-line. I tried to remain calm by focusing on the track ahead of us, overgrown with weeds, but couldn’t stop myself glancing sideways at every now and then. I noticed that although the guard had a uniform – of sorts, it was filthy and his shirt and trousers were different shades of khaki – he wore no shoes. Marcel tried talking to him again; I heard the words Monsieur Langdon Courtney more than once, but the guard didn’t reply. Presumably he was taking us to his boss. That would make sense. We could explain ourselves to him and get back on track, surely?

  Sadly not. The guard spoke only to make it clear we had to leave the bikes at the entrance to the compound. Then he marched us straight through the big gates, past a gaggle of men who barely looked up as he led us along a dirt track lined with huts. The track led to a row of shipping containers plonked on breeze blocks in the mud. One had its door open. The guard stood back from this and, though Amelia and Marcel were both pleading with him for a chance to explain ourselves, he didn’t listen. Instead he told us to get in the container. There was something completely unarguable-with about this guy. He was a robot with a screw loose, not exactly threatening to shoot u
s, but apparently unhinged enough for it to be a possibility if we annoyed him. ‘It’s OK,’ I found myself whispering to Amelia. ‘He’s probably just parking us here while he goes to fetch someone.’ I wasn’t convinced by this myself, but she was shaking beside me and it was all I could think of to persuade her that we should comply and step inside.

  As soon as we did, he slammed the door with a great metallic clang. A rusty screech followed as he locked it. Mercifully we weren’t plunged into complete darkness. Though there were no windows, somebody had drilled a few holes through the sides and top of the container. Pencils of light speared though these in all directions, more than enough beams for us to see by, but menacing somehow: it was as if we were pinned down by snipers. That imaginary horror wasn’t as bad as the real problem though. It was muggy outside and hotter in the container. If the sun came out properly, we’d bake to death.

  ‘What do we do now?’ said Amelia.

  It was a fair question.

  Dust motes swam in the beams while I thought.

  ‘I’ll try Langdon,’ I replied eventually, pulling out my phone. Though we’d gone behind his back to come here, he was the only solution I could think of, the only person who might be able to get us out of the mess we – by which I mean I – had created. ‘This is his mine after all.’

  I ignited my phone with a sense of dread, doubting there’d be a signal somewhere this remote, let alone one strong enough to penetrate the metal box we’d managed to get ourselves shut in. But there was. A solid three bars at that. I breathed out and hit Langdon’s number with a different sense of trepidation. How angry would he be that I’d cut him out of the loop and set off to find my folks myself?

  I needn’t have worried.

  Not, sadly, because he instantly forgave me, but because although the phone rang straight away, it went on ringing and ringing and ringing, all the way to his ridiculous ‘Langdon Courtney, speak to me!’ voicemail greeting. I didn’t have it in me to leave a message confessing to what I’d done there and then. I learned long ago that bad news is always best delivered directly. He’d see I’d tried to contact him anyway, and would no doubt call me back.