Cloudburst

by Wilbur Smith

‘Take us to Bleu-Neuf-Cinq first,’ Caleb instructed Francis. With less certainty he continued, ‘You know where that is, right?’

  The driver had lines of scar-tissue bisecting both cheeks. They creased up with the quick smile of relief that accompanied his nodding. Clearly he wanted to please Caleb. ‘Of course, sir,’ he said, flipping down the mirrored sunglasses perched on his head.

  ‘Very good,’ said Caleb. ‘Quick as possible, please.’ He sat back and started fiddling with the handheld GPS Butcher had given him. Last time I’d travelled with him he’d have cut off a finger before admitting he didn’t know how to read it, but today he simply handed the device to Amelia and said, ‘You’ll probably work this thing out quicker than me.’

  As it happened, I got the device working. Simple stuff like on-off buttons aren’t Amelia’s strong point. But I admit she took over after that, programming in the coordinates Butcher had dutifully texted to Caleb. Having done this, she spent a while fiddling with her phone, cross-checking maps she’d downloaded with information she pulled off the GPS. At length she sat back.

  ‘The coordinates of two of these five suppliers place them within protected areas. The mine we’re heading for is one of them.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ I stupidly asked.

  ‘No, I’m guessing at random. What do you think!’

  With Amelia’s help, I monitored our progress towards the first secret mine. It wasn’t quick. As in we were barely one-third of the way there when the orange sunset we were driving towards dropped like a guillotine through purple to black. Francis sped on into the cone of our headlights. He didn’t even take off his sunglasses. Caleb’s ‘quick as possible’ clearly meant something to him.

  I have to admit that despite the bumps and twists and turns I drifted off. I woke when we stopped and peered out. ‘Bleu-Neuf-Cinq’ seemed to be a deserted fork in the dirt road. The headlights lit up scrub and nothingness – anyone Caleb might have expected to see there had apparently gone to bed. It seemed we had no choice but to do the same. Francis – job done: he’d got us there – turned his head to one side and began snoring immediately. Marcel did the same. The rest of us slept one way or another on the big back seat. At some point I came to with Amelia’s head on my chest. Her mouth was open. My arm was numb behind her back, but I didn’t have the heart to move it. There are worse things than a numb arm anyway.

  My dreams that night were Mark-shaped.

  51.

  Caleb was already out of the Land Cruiser when I woke up properly, morning having broken. He was sitting on the truck’s running board opposite Francis, who was squatting in the dirt. The driver had already boiled a pan of water over a little propane stove. He passed me a cup of tea so full of sugar you could pretty much have stood up a spoon in it, and in case that wasn’t sweet enough his idea of provisions for this trip was plastic-wrapped chocolate biscuits. Lots of them. He’d brought a big box and, as far as I could see, nothing else. I was so hungry I ate about ten and shoved more in my pockets.

  ‘Francis knows people here,’ Caleb told me as I munched. ‘If your parents have been through, they’ll tell us.’

  As if on cue, a group of men and women appeared up the track, walking unhurriedly towards us. Each of them was carrying something. The guy in the lead had a spade over his shoulder, the one next to him was lugging a load of hessian sacks rolled up under his arm, and the skinny woman bringing up the rear of this first team was carrying a pickaxe. Another couple of shovels followed in the next knot of men. Also a crowbar slung from a rope. More bags on the back of a guy with torn, dirt-smeared shorts. Everyone’s clothes were filthy in fact. Holey T-shirts, mismatched gumboots, bare feet. a boy there who looked not much older than me had a Make America Great Again cap on, its stained brim angled comically to the sky. Where had he got that from? None of these guys were wasting breath talking to one another, and they didn’t say anything to us either. They already looked exhausted. When they reached the junction we’d parked at they simply turned downhill, one or two of them eyeing the Land Cruiser uncertainly. I took a photograph of the group before a bend in the track folded them out of sight. As the last of the men rounded it I had an absurd urge to whistle the tune the seven dwarfs sing when they say goodbye to Snow White and head off to work. If Xander had been there I’d probably have followed through. He would have understood.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I said instead.

  ‘Nous les suivons,’ said Marcel, dusting himself down.

  ‘How far is it?’ asked Amelia.

  As another gaggle of men appeared up the track, Caleb said, ‘The mine’s close, a short walk. Some of these guys will have trekked for a couple of hours in the dark to get here this morning.’

  We fell in behind this group. The path was well worn, steep in places, a yellow scar cut through the undergrowth. It wasn’t the only route down to the mine. We’d been walking just fifteen minutes when another path joined ours, and when the great gash of the mine opened up ahead of us it was obvious you could come in from the other side too.

  The place was alive with activity. A swarm of men and women, more than a hundred of them, were already hard at work on the tiered, filthy plateau cut away beneath us. The expanse of raw dirt was at least ten times the size of the football pitch at school, ragged edged, multi-levelled, a great scab picked off the face of the earth. When I say men and women hard at work, I mean exactly that: everywhere I looked men were wielding shovels and picks and filling bags with dirt and hefting those bags this way and that, heaping them in little pyramids down below for other men to lug up to that lip while yet more men hacked rock from the wall over there for others to shovel into heaps to be picked through by … my eyes snagged on the four little guys at work not fifty metres away.

  They weren’t little men; they were children.

  And in fact, looking harder at the scene, there were other children, kids way younger than me, at work among the adults. Instinctively I stepped forward, camera raised, to take a closer look, but I hadn’t taken many shots or steps before a man with his back to me cradling his shovel in his arms turned round to reveal that the shovel was in fact a rifle. Seeing me advancing, with Caleb and Amelia just a few metres behind me, as pinkly out of place as I was, , he shouted something unintelligible in French. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand him, because he brought his gun up onto his hip at the same time, making it very clear that if I took another step he’d shoot.

  52.

  I stayed where I was, welded to the spot.

  Caleb, however, was undeterred by the man’s gun. ‘Francis!’ he said. ‘Tell this idiot who we are.’

  I was gobsmacked by my cousin’s acting abilities. Knowing how cut up about Innocent he was, deep down, made all this ‘I’m in charge’ stuff impressive. Backed by his father’s name, it worked too. Francis, with Marcel in tow, only had to have the briefest of chats with the gun-toting guard to make him sling his rifle onto his back and spread out his hands in a ‘my bad, please let it go!’ way. He didn’t even object when I raised my camera to my eye again. I took a few wide-angle shots to start with, trying to capture the great spread of ramshackle activity before me, before switching lenses and zooming in on the detail. The big lens sucked the children in the distance full-frame. They were even younger than I’d thought. One was filling a sack with what looked like grit, using his bare hands, while the littler of the two squatted next to the pile, picking out bits of whatever it was with his fingers. Having cropped out the rest of the mine, these kids could simply have been playing in the dirt, but they weren’t. Like everyone else here, they were working.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said to Amelia.

  ‘Where? Why?’

  ‘Just come.’

  The guard followed us with his eyes, but carried on talking to our chaperone as Amelia and I picked our way forward. We skirted mounds of dirt and rock and mud, passed open holes full of water, heard scraping and thudding and sifting and grunting, a cough here and a gasp there, soun
ds so puny and human, completely unlike the mechanised rumble at Langdon’s mining HQ, it was hard to imagine those tools had been invented. The most high-tech thing they had here were bicycles. People were using them to wheel sacks of whatever it was they’d dug up to a set of filthy-looking interconnected puddles, where more men, women and children were busy sluicing the muck, picking through it with their fingers. I made a beeline towards the littlest kid I could see. He was so absorbed in what he was doing that he didn’t notice us approaching, but when he did clock us he was all eye-whites, so surprised by my, ‘Hi,’ I thought he might burst into tears.

  I squatted next to his pile of dirt. It was the colour of ash, as were the boy’s hands and feet. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  He blinked at me as Amelia translated the question, and replied so quietly I barely caught what he said.

  ‘Beno.’

  ‘Et quel âge as-tu?’ I managed.

  ‘Six,’ he whispered. It sounded like seess.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ I said, as much to myself as to Amelia.

  ‘Not really,’ she replied.

  I glanced up at her sharply.

  ‘I mean, it’s common knowledge child labour is a thing here.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it right!’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say it did,’ she said, and I immediately felt bad for snapping at her, because on closer inspection it was obvious from her compressed lips and deliberate breathing that she was as shocked as I was. ‘“Artisanal mining”, it’s called,’ she went on quietly. ‘Huge un-mechanised pits like this employ whole families for next to nothing, making even the youngest kids work in these terrible conditions, chemicals everywhere, breathing in poison, with middle men selling on the fruits of their labours at a handsome profit.’

  In French she asked the boy, Beno, if his parents also worked at the mine.

  ‘Non.’

  When she asked why, I understood his answer easily enough. ‘Ils sont morts.’

  I winced when she immediately asked him what killed them, but her directness didn’t seem to bother Beno, who explained that both his mother and father had been sick before they died.

  In response to Amelia’s follow-up ‘What with?’ the boy just shrugged.

  ‘Qui vis-tu avec maintenant?’ Amelia asked him.

  The boy flicked his eyes at a group shovelling dirt into sacks fifty or so metres away. ‘Mon oncle,’ he said.

  Looking more closely, I saw that not all of the men and women in the group were working. One guy, wearing jeans whose legs had for some reason been ripped off at different heights, one above the knee the other below it, had his hands on his hips and was watching us. When my eyes met his he called out in French, but not to us, it turned out. He was yelling at Beno. The little boy squatted down in the dirt and started picking through it again. When I looked back to the man – his uncle, presumably – I saw he’d also returned to his sack-filling. We’d interrupted Beno’s work, and when told to get back to it that’s what he’d done, immediately.

  53.

  Amelia was still asking Beno questions. When had he last eaten, how many days a week did he spend here, what time did he start and stop, but although I wanted to know more about his life too, I sensed what she didn’t: if we stopped him working again, he’d probably pay for it. I shushed her and we both took a step back. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to just walk away. As I watched, a fly landed on the boy’s thin neck and crawled up towards his hairline. He didn’t bother to wave it off.

  ‘How can we help him?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not just him though, is it?’ said Amelia.

  Of course it wasn’t. Beyond Beno, another slightly bigger boy was also sifting muck, and dotted around us there were other boys and girls mixed in with the adults.

  Without consciously knowing why, I’d been digging around in my pockets. My hand emerged clutching one of Francis’s chocolate biscuits. I knelt down next to the boy and offered it to him. He took it very quickly, as if worried I might think twice about the offer if he hung around.

  ‘Merci,’ he added, once the biscuit was safely snatched.

  Merci. Mercy. I gulped, fighting the comparison, but it came anyway. This kid had lost both his parents. For now, I’d also lost mine. Beno’s situation was beyond desperate, but I was desperate too, desperate to get Mum and Dad back.

  ‘I’m not sure a snack is going to solve much,’ said Amelia. She wasn’t being hostile, just stating the truth.

  ‘I know, but what else can I do?’

  ‘Your parents came out here to gather evidence, right? Of illegal mining. Seeing as you’re the one with the big camera, they should probably have brought you with them in the first place. I’d take as many pictures as you can, if I were you.’

  The fact we still didn’t know who had hold of Mum and Dad must have played in my face. Amelia went on. ‘They’d want you to document this and put it the evidence in the right hands. Theirs, preferably. But if your parents don’t make it to the summit, they’d want you show people the photos there yourself, yes?’

  The summit was still a way off and Mum and Dad would surely make it there in person. I couldn’t let myself think anything else, but said, ‘I suppose so,’ to Amelia all the same.

  ‘Get on with it then – take as many as you can before one of these guards realises Caleb’s not as important as he’s pretending to be.’

  She was right of course. ‘I’ll take the kids’ photographs, you get their names and ages,’ I said, and we set to, working our way around the piles of rocks and puddles and holes and sacks and heaps of dirt, everything filthy and alive with apparently pointless physical work of some sort, a termite mound that only made sense when you thought of how all the backbreaking tasks – hacking and digging and shovelling and lifting and pouring and picking and sluicing and sifting – came together in the form of something valuable to sell.

  I focused on the kids, tried to take photos that showed the punishing practicalities of what they were doing as well as who they were, and for each kid I photographed, Amelia asked their name. I remember a Fabrice and a Justin, a Gabriel and a Pierre, a Mpenda and even a Sublime, but to be honest I was more bothered about getting well-composed, properly lit, sharp photos than I was on who was who. After we’d photographed about fifteen kids I realised Amelia wasn’t writing down the names and made the mistake of suggesting it might be a good idea. She gave me a fake-withering glare and muttered, ‘For you, maybe. Just do your bit and let me do mine.’

  I’m not sure how long we worked; I got so caught up in what I was doing that I lost track of time. It seemed ages, but probably wasn’t long. Still, Caleb managed to ask the gathered guards if they’d heard anything about a visit from a middle-aged white couple linked to his father, and the next thing I knew he was by my side, apologetically giving me the bad news: nobody knew anything at all.

  ‘Also, you should probably wrap it up with the camera. They’re getting pretty antsy.’

  I glanced over to the gaggle of guards. Two of them were arguing with Francis while a third looked on, and the original man who’d stopped us, and was still hugging his rifle as if it was a cat, was giving me a proper thousand-yard death stare. Marcel, squatting next to this group, held up one big hand palm down and wobbled it from side to side, the universal ‘this is iffy’ signal. I turned away and took one last photograph – of the GPS screen, to pinpoint the location of this place for future investigation – before returning the camera to its padded pocket in the bottom of my rucksack. By the time I was done, the guards’ argument was audible over the squelching of feet and thump of spades in the hole I’d just photographed.

  They wanted us gone, that much was clear. So Caleb and I hurried Amelia up the slope to where Francis and Marcel were now openly pleading with the guards, who’d sort of surrounded them, a bit like a crew of school bullies on the brink of making their move. Caleb either didn’t notice or decided not to care. Fair play to him: he barged right into the middle
of the men, wagging his finger, and saying, ‘No, no, no!’ very loudly indeed. Again, it was an impressive act. He looked very entitled. But the guards seemed to have grown; for all his work in the gym, Caleb stood out as puny by comparison.

  ‘What’s he objecting to, precisely?’ Amelia asked me.

  ‘I’m not sure, but it seems to be working.’

  The main guard had taken a couple of steps backwards. Now the others followed suit, the noose of their circle relaxing.

  ‘Take names,’ Caleb was telling Francis. ‘Tell them my father will be pleased to hear of their vigilance. Explain that we’ve undertaken this visit on his behalf. They’ll be rewarded.’

  Francis began relaying all this before Caleb finished saying it, and Marcel somehow got himself between the guards and the three of us while the translation was going on, shepherding us away up the hill with an insistent, ‘Suivez-moi!’

  We did as we were told and backed away further up the slope. I kept my eyes on the guard with the rifle. Mesmerised by those fidgety fingers, I wasn’t exactly focusing on where I was stepping, and I lost my footing on the uneven ground and sat down in a pool of sludge. The guards all looked my way when this happened and mercifully found it funny. I slapped my forehead, very clown-like, which made one of them laugh out loud. This gave Francis the opportunity to disentangle himself from the conversation.

  ‘Physical comedy is weird like that,’ Amelia said, helping me up. ‘I’ve no idea why, but it defuses tension.’

  ‘Deliberate ploy,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ she asked, looking impressed.

  I didn’t tell her the truth.

  54.

  Covered in muck, I led the way out of the mine the way we had come, picked up the steep path and quickened our pace despite the gradient, desperate to get out of there. When it became clear that nobody was following, my heart rate dropped by about a third; I hadn’t realised it was beating so fast until it slowed. In the wake of panic, a hollow ache spread across my chest. Mum and Dad would be proud of the evidence I’d managed to photograph, but the trip had drawn a blank as far as actually finding them was concerned. Caleb, who’d fallen into step beside me, seemed to know what I was thinking.