by Wilbur Smith
‘No answer,’ I said pointlessly, once I’d hung up.
Amelia had an eye pressed to one of the holes. Her, ‘Don’t worry, you can try him again later,’ sounded weird, and I hoped that was because her mouth was up against the metal of the container, rather than because she was panicking. I felt horribly responsible in that moment, and looked to Marcel. But he’d simply sat down with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed, apparently prepared to wait it out. He looked so resigned, suffering patiently, but I couldn’t do the same.
‘What can you see?’ I asked Amelia, and peered through a hole near hers.
‘Not much,’ she muttered.
She wasn’t wrong. Along that side of the container the pinhole view outside was of nothing at all, or at least just the griddled flank of another metal box about two feet away. Why was she staring at that? I knew better than to ask. We all cope with stress in different ways, and if Amelia wanted to focus on the box next door, so be it. I wasn’t about to do the same though, and instead worked my way round the container, reaching and stooping and even lying down to see whatever I could out of all the various holes. It turned out, unsurprisingly, that we were hemmed in on both sides by the neighbouring containers and the holes all showed close-up nothingness. Fewer had been drilled through the front door, and all that I could glimpse through them was a section of the dusty track we’d been marched down, flanked by a boring section of the perimeter fence. I waited a while, but nothing moved along it. The holes in the rear of the container were a little more promising. Two to the right were obscured by scrubby bushes, but the ones on the left showed a wedge of sky above a slice of prefab hut with its door hanging open, and some grey scree beyond it, sloping away in the direction of the open-cast mine. I couldn’t see any of the mine itself, but trucks crossed that slope from time to time, and I didn’t have to wait long before two guys in hard hats ambled up it and into the hut.
As I watched, the sun cut through the clouds. It may have been my mind playing tricks, but I swear I could feel the container heating up in real time. Amelia, who’d swapped positions to look out of a hole with a view, either felt it too or read my mind. ‘Alternate between looking out of the hole and breathing through it,’ she said. ‘The air’s cooler outside.’
There were still hours to go before the sun went down. What little water we had left we divided as equally as we could, careful not to spill any. The temperature in our prison rose and rose. Every now and then one of us banged on the metal wall, trying to attract attention, but although the noise was horribly loud inside the box, it had to compete with the background rumble of the mine, and nobody came. The nearest people, going in and out of that hut every now and then, didn’t even look up. Had we been put in here to die?
48.
About a year after Mark was killed, Mum bought us a dog. I say bought, but he came from a rescue home. Still, the donation she made to the charity that ran the home was bigger than they were expecting, so in a way she bought him. The dog was a nine-month-old mixed breed – part whippet, part sheepdog – called Chester. When Mum arrived home with him she made the mistake of saying he might help cheer us up. Dad put his coffee down and walked out of the kitchen when she said that. To be honest, I felt the same way. A dog, instead of my dead brother: what was she thinking? I knew she didn’t mean it that way, but when I looked at Chester that morning, I hated him.
Although Dad has never really warmed to Chester – it’s nothing personal, he says, he’s just not really a dog person – I couldn’t help it. A week or so after we’d got him I realised it was pointless blaming an accident I’d caused on a dog who hadn’t even been born when it happened. Also, he had this way of following us around with his head low and a worried look in eyes, as if apologising for wanting to be with us, which was both pathetic and impossible to ignore. I took him out running beside my bike. He loved that immediately and still does, keeps up effortlessly and has an amazing knack of staying dead close without getting in the way. So Mum was right, he did cheer me up, I suppose. What really made me want to take care of him properly though was when I heard how he’d ended up in that home. His previous owners were done for neglect. They’d left Chester and their two other dogs in the back of a car while they went to the cinema. In the daytime. In June. They’d opened the windows a crack and parked in the shade, but – surprise – the sun moved. The dogs got overheated and the other two died. Chester only just survived.
Locked in that container, I couldn’t get his ordeal out of my mind, for obvious reasons. Amelia kept asking Marcel if he knew what was happening, but he clearly knew no more than us, and the meditative trance he’d decided to go into didn’t reassure me much. He sat fixed as a tree stump, the occasional bead of sweat dripping from his nose.
I called Langdon again and left a message this time, trying to convey the seriousness of the situation but keep the panic from my voice so as not to alarm Amelia. Then, for want of anything else to do, I put my eye to the best peephole and left it there. Nothing had changed about the scene, and nothing much did. It got marginally worse at one point when a flatbed truck carrying concrete tubes parked up near the Portakabin thing, blocking out the grey scree. I was passing the time counting the concrete tubes when something beneath the truck, or on the other side of it, rather, made me switch eyes: a flicker of lime green, jerking along beneath some legs, supporting a person I couldn’t see because of the damned truck, moving from left to right. I whipped out my camera and zoomed in as far as the telephoto lens would go.
‘Really? You’re still thinking about your photo-journalism thing? Now?’ said Amelia.
‘I can’t believe it. That has to be him,’ I said, and banged on the wall of the container as hard as I could with my free hand.
The shoes kept walking. Just before they disappeared from view, I clicked the shutter. They were still only tiny on the display screen, but I knew Amelia would recognise Caleb’s stupid boots. As soon as I tilted the screen her way, she did.
‘Why didn’t I think of him earlier?’ she said.
‘It’s no use,’ I muttered. ‘He can’t hear us.’
She looked at me with a spark of the usual are-you-actually-an-idiot glinting in her eye. I was genuinely relieved to see it, as it generally means she’s thought of some clever idea. This solution was actually simple enough to make me feel stupid. Amelia pulled her phone from its case and called Caleb’s number.
It’s idiotic, but the fact that he was already stored in her contacts made me shiver, despite the ridiculous heat.
‘Hey, Caleb,’ she said beside me. If there had been panic in her voice a moment ago, she now sounded ridiculously matter-of-fact. ‘Are you wearing your very green boots?’
I was still pressed up against the drill hole with my camera, so couldn’t hear his reply.
‘Cool. And are you at work,’ she went on, ‘doing whatever they’ve got you doing at your father’s mine?’
The truck hadn’t moved, and neither had anything beneath or beyond it.
‘Cool,’ she said again. ‘Because we’re here too and we could sort of use some help.’
Cool? Sort of? She wasn’t just trying to be matter-of-fact, I realised. She was trying to sound off-hand! ‘If you give that to me, I’ll talk him to us,’ I said as levelly as I could, reaching for the phone. I pretty much had to prise the thing from her fingers.
‘Yeah, hi, Caleb, it’s me. We’re locked in a container. It’s the third one of four in a row along the inside of the northern perimeter fence, on the left as you come through the main entrance to this mine-complex place. I just saw you, through a tiny hole in the metal wall. You were walking away from us, behind that truck with all the concrete tubes on it, heading east. If you could –’
‘You’re locked where?’ he cut in.
As patiently as I could, I said, ‘Just retrace your steps, quickly, please. We’re melting in here, seriously.’
I was still looking through the hole. When his shoes appeared again,
tiny ticks of lime-green hope, I let out a breath. ‘Stop,’ I said. The shoes stopped. ‘Turn left, towards the main entrance.’ Astonishingly the shoes turned right, heading for the hut. ‘Left!’ I said. ‘Round the back of the truck.’ The whole of him, phone held out like a little tray in front of his chin, the way idiots use them in the street sometimes, came into view. ‘That’s it. Now look to the north. You’ll see the containers.’
To be fair to him, he broke into a trot once he got himself orientated up the hill, and although I lost sight of him he was quickly outside the door, fighting to open it. The lock defeated him at first, but having shouted that he’d be back immediately with help, he summoned a key quickly too, and I could hear him giving whoever he’d got hold of a hard time: ‘Quick, you moron. When my father hears about this, the fool who thought it was a good idea will regret it.’
Marcel didn’t break from his statue-like trance until the key turned in the lock. I’ve never been so happy to see a door open. The rush of air felt positively cool compared to our little oven. The first thing I saw was Caleb pushing the security guy away, hard. That was surprising enough, but nothing compared to the expression on his face when he turned back to greet us. In the few days we’d been apart, it seemed the stuffing had been sucked out of my cousin. He looked gaunt, bloodlessly pale. Also, the shape of him had changed. Gone was the puffed-out chest and high chin; in its place was a stooped, rounded thing. He couldn’t meet my eye.
‘Guys,’ he said, inspecting the dirt between our feet. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Why?’ said Amelia. ‘You didn’t lock us in here. You got us out.’
‘I know but …’ he petered out.
‘Without you we’d probably have cooked in fact,’ Amelia went on, desperate to cheer him up. ‘So you’ve literally saved our lives.’
‘Someone else would have come eventually,’ he said.
‘Maybe, but nobody had until now. I’m not sure how much longer we’d have lasted.’
Caleb was shaking his head, eyes still fixed on the floor. The penny dropped for Amelia. She changed tack. ‘Oh, so the sorry isn’t about your father’s security detail locking us in here. Well, at least that makes sense. But what else do you have to apologise for?’
A horrible thought flashed through me: did he know something about Mum and Dad? I opened my mouth to ask, but before I could get the question out Caleb glanced up at Marcel, shook his head and said two words: ‘For Innocent.’
I’m ashamed to say it, but instead of sadness in that moment I felt relief. If this new hollowed-out version of Caleb meant that he actually felt guilty about Innocent’s death, then good. It was what he deserved.
‘But that was an accident!’ Amelia said a bit too loudly. She meant to reassure him, but the false brightness in her voice made it obvious she knew the ‘accident’ could have been prevented. Nevertheless, she stepped forward and put an arm around Caleb’s hunched shoulders to comfort him.
It seemed to work; his mouth twitched in a pitiful half-smile. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he said.
I told him why we’d come. I so wanted him to give me news about my parents that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for it directly. To his credit, as I was rambling on about our motorbike journey he cut in. ‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ he said. ‘If they were here, I’d know. Either they’d have arrived with a fanfare, or security would have picked them up: the place is pretty much a fortress, as you guys found out.’ He paused, then went on tentatively, ‘I can help you look for them though. If they’re touring the … er … less professional mines in the area, someone here is bound to know.’
‘What do you mean by less professional?’ Amelia asked.
‘Let’s get you some water,’ he replied, ‘and I’ll explain.’
49.
Caleb led us to a standpipe set on the other side of the very Portakabin I’d spent so long watching through my peephole. Though Marcel hung back, I insisted he and he and Amelia drink before me. It was my fault they’d nearly been cooked alive after all. Once I’d drunk my own fill I’d ducked my whole head under the tap and let the blissful coolness run down the inside of my T-shirt. Then I looked around. From here we could see right into the huge open-cast mine, criss-crossed by diggers and trucks, plumes of dust in their wake. Caleb was banging on about the size of the operation, its efficiency and profitability, but not in a boastful way. He seemed to want to get something off his chest.
To help him I cut to the chase: ‘It’s a big mine. So what?’
‘It looks like a big mine, you’re right. But it’s a bigger processing plant.’
I looked at him blankly.
‘A lot more tantalum gets brought here from outside than is dug up mechanically on site.’
‘And that’s important why?’
‘Because of where it comes from, and who does the digging.’
Marcel, shifting from foot to foot, was listening intently, but Amelia said, ‘You mean it’s a front, a laundering operation of sorts, processing minerals dug up from restricted areas.’
Caleb nodded. ‘Guys deliver stuff here from all over by pickup, bike, even on foot. They’re counted in, paid in cash and counted out. The place is secure from prying eyes, but on the inside it’s an open secret: we take black-market precious minerals, process them and sell on the good stuff. Nobody here tries to hide it.’
‘Why are you telling us this?’ I asked.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Amelia.
‘Not to me.’
‘Your mum and dad’s suspicions about Langdon’s business are true,’ she said flatly. ‘He’s corrupt.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Caleb said he wanted to help,’ said Amelia, a note of indignation in her voice. ‘What’s hard to get about it?’
For me: everything! Why would Caleb rat on his dad like this? When I searched his face for an answer he looked at his feet again, so I asked him outright: ‘What’s in this for you?’
‘Since I arrived here I’ve talked to people,’ he muttered. ‘I’m the boss’s son, the heir to the empire, so to speak. Naturally they think I’m on his side. Also, they’re kind of scared of me. So they have to tell me the truth. They’ve admitted a lot of these smaller mines we get stuff from are inside the national park. Sooner or later the government will let people mine there anyway, they think, so all they’re doing is getting ahead of the game. They’re proud of it! But I’m not.’ Though his chin was still low, he met my eye for the first time and went on quietly, ‘I can’t undo what happened to Innocent. We all know it was my fault. The best I can do is honour his memory. He was all about protecting Congo’s wildlife. I don’t want any part in destroying –’
A metal-on-metal shriek rose up from the mine to slice the end off Caleb’s sentence, but it didn’t matter. Everything about him in that moment – his slumped shoulders, the way his fingers were gnawing at one another, his quick-blinking eyes – told me he was sincere. I trust my instincts. Marcel seemed to have to come to the same conclusion. He put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder, left it there for a moment, then patted his upper arm twice. If he could offer Caleb this forgiveness, how could I not do the same? I wanted to. Amelia, as so often happens, beat me to it.
‘Satisfied?’ she said.
Sometimes an apology can be hard to take. You have to climb down off your own high horse to accept it. Amelia’s clunky, obvious rightness, swept the awkwardness away. It made me smile at Caleb. Only briefly, but enough to prompt a nanosecond-long half-smile back. This was enough.
‘Let’s get on with it then,’ he said.
‘With what?’ asked Amelia.
‘Finding Jack’s parents,’ he said, holding his hands out, palms up. ‘So we can help them clean up this mess.’
50.
With the air between us cleared, Caleb sprang into action. Though he’d shrunk with shame in the time we’d been apart, he inflated again as we approached his father’s foreman, who was among a group of workers squatting besid
e a digger with a broken caterpillar track.
‘Butcher!’ Caleb hollered as soon as we were within earshot.
A fat white guy in a hard hat jumped up.
‘I need Francis, provisions, a Land Cruiser with a full tank of diesel, a working GPS and the coordinates of our five biggest below-the-line suppliers. Text the coordinates to my phone. Right away. As in, we leave in ten minutes.’
This Butcher fellow scratched the two-day-old stubble on his double chin with one hand and cupped his belly protectively with the other. It was obvious he wanted to ask who we were and what Caleb had in mind but thought better of it. Instead he scuttled off and returned riding up front in an enormous, dusty Toyota 4 x 4, evidently expecting to come with us.
‘Get out,’ said Caleb.
‘But shouldn’t I –’
‘Do as I say? Yes,’ Caleb said simply. ‘You’re in charge here at the moment, are you not? My father will want to tell you when to hand over the reins in person.’ More kindly, his voice lowering conspiratorially, he went on. ‘Mind the fort, there’s a good chap. Jack here’s family and Dad has asked me to show them what’s what.’
Before Butcher had a chance to object, Caleb opened the passenger door, and ushered him out, motioning for Marcel to take his place. The three of us promptly climbed into the air-conditioned rear. Caleb’s boss-like sense of entitlement was contagious. None of us so much as glanced at Butcher as Francis, the driver, did as Caleb ordered and slewed the truck round in a three-point turn, raising a cloud of dust that blotted out the foreman as we sped off towards the setting sun and chain-link boundary fence.