Sea of Gold

by Nick Elliott

  He didn’t like this. ‘Buwan Bundok is mine,’ he said, his voice soft and intense. ‘I own the land. I own all this land, this island.’ He swept his arm across the room in an arc to encompass the extent of his claim.

  What was it with these megalomaniacs? Kershope, Kaliyagin and now Malatan, all obsessed with ownership, exploitation, wealth and the power it would bring them. They lusted for power over others. Some believed it was their calling, a duty to their people. With others it was greed and an arrogant compulsion to control others, to prove themselves superior. But there was fear of failure and humiliation there too. It was a kind of madness.

  ‘There’s fifteen tons of gold waiting to be shipped to India,’ I said. ‘That’s close to eight hundred million dollars’ worth at today’s prices. You’ll need that for getting the mine into production and then paying an army of mercenaries to help fight your dirty little war for the rest of your life. Where else are you going to find that kind of money?

  ‘And anyway,’ I went on. ‘Coreminex have the legitimate concession on that mine, and you know it. Did your Scottish friends tell you all this and that they’d put a stop to the Coreminex claim to the site?’

  I was dancing with the devil. But Claire’s news had changed things and now I could put my case with more confidence.

  ‘They had planned to fund you from the proceeds of the sale of that gold bullion. Now under the new leadership there, things have changed. The gold will be shipped to India, but not for your mine or your rebellion.’

  I leaned forward. ‘But here’s the good news. You can intercept the gold shipment before it even reaches the hands of these people, and I’ll tell you how.’

  ‘Very well. Tell me how.’ I’d aroused his curiosity. He’d taken the bait. I just had to land him.

  ‘Their strategy was to identify weak or failed states, exploit their gold resources and support insurgencies I say “was” because they suffered their own coup just days ago. The Revival is in disarray but a new leadership is emerging and their aim now is to seize the proceeds of the gold for their own purposes, which do not include investing in your mountain up the road, or in your rebellion.’

  ‘How do you know these things? Prove it to me.’

  ‘Never mind. I know.’

  ‘You still haven’t said why you came here.’

  ‘You must act to protect your interests,’ I said. ‘The bullion will be shipped within the next month but the carrying vessel will call at a Greek port to take on fuel for the voyage to India. It is possible to intercept it and transfer the gold to another vessel under your control.’

  ‘What is your interest? Why you want to help me?’

  ‘They know I have uncovered their plans and they are after me. So I have my reasons, believe me. And an interest in the outcome, but you must trust me. Our interests converge. And what alternatives do you have?’

  ‘I will speak to them and we see whether what you say is true or a lie.’

  ‘Do you really think you’ll get a straight answer? The people you’ve been dealing with there are gone. If you tell them you doubt their promises to you, then you will leave them with no alternative but to neutralise you. And believe me, that is well within their powers, as you’ve probably already noticed.’

  ‘They cannot get to me. I am protected here. But how would I get this gold? I cannot just walk in and take it.’

  ‘I will tell you how you can get it,’ I said, and I told him.

  CHAPTER 29

  North of the ranch the land rose into steep-sided, thickly forested hill country. Malatan had told his son to show me the mountain that meant so much to everyone. The heavyweight minder, whose name I’d learned was Sakib, drove us in the Land Cruiser. It was dark by the time we arrived at Buwan Bundok, the rain and wind stronger now as the storm approached. We got out of the car and walked over to the edge of a scene from hell. We were looking over an almost sheer twenty-metre drop onto a bright yellow scar which ran down the mountainside for three or four hundred metres and half that distance across.

  Floodlights, powered by noisy generators and rigged up around the perimeter of the site, cast a sharp, unnatural light onto the glistening mud. Dozens of men, dressed for the most part only in shorts, laboured under the glare, their brown torsos soaked and shining from the rain. Some were waist-deep in the muddy water of channels which had been dug into the slope. They worked with picks and shovels, plastic buckets and long poles that they used to prod the earth. There seemed to be no group organisation or teamwork – it was each for himself. Yet despite the competition, the men shouted and chattered amongst themselves. These were illegal gold panners driven by the hope of striking it rich yet barely scratching a living from the wretched conditions in this torn-up piece of jungle.

  Beneath the gash in the mountainside and off to one side I could make out the tin roofs of a shanty, the little huts perilously close to the site itself.

  ‘These men shouldn’t be here,’ Junior announced from underneath his brightly coloured golfing umbrella. ‘They’re on our land and they are stealing our gold. My father has told me to clear the site. It may teach them a lesson.’

  At first I didn’t grasp what he meant. Sakib had started climbing up towards the top of the slope, a phone in his hand. ‘We planted explosives earlier. We are using a radio-controlled IED with a modified cell phone connected to an electrical firing circuit,’ Junior was explaining authoritatively. ‘Cell phones operate in the UHF band if there’s line of sight with the base station. A paging signal by phone is sufficient to trigger it. You’ll see.’

  ‘You’re going to start a landslide?’ I shouted. ‘You crazy bastard!’

  I reacted without thinking, racing up the slope towards Sakib, who was already some distance away. I reached him and grabbed his arm, but the ground was wet and slippery. We grappled for a moment. I still had a grip on his right arm but then with a violent shove he threw me off. For a moment I thought I’d saved myself. Sakib stared at me. If he’d bothered he could have reached out and held me, but he didn’t and I toppled over the edge, sliding down the almost vertical bank towards the men below and coming to rest in a trench of muddy water. I scrambled to get out but the thick mud beneath me sucked at my legs. The panners looked at me, aghast. Then two of them waded over and began dragging me out of the morass.

  I cleared my eyes of the gritty sludge and looked up. As I did there came the dull thump of the explosion followed by a deep rumbling sound. The ground shook as a huge swathe of greenery detached itself and, in slow motion, began to slide intact down the mountain. We stared up. Then slowly and hopelessly, as in a nightmare, our limbs weighed down by the mud, we tried to scramble to the edge of the site. But the mass of vegetation and mud from the upper slope was gathering speed, churning its way down the mountain.

  I looked up to see Junior’s brightly coloured umbrella some fifty metres or more above me. Then the first rush of the mudslide hit and there was darkness.

  I came up fighting for breath, my nose, mouth, eyes and ears full of mud. I coughed up the viscous sludge then breathed in more of it. I was drowning in it. This was how it was going to end: my worst nightmare becoming the reality of my own death. I was flailing my arms in panic. But along with the mud, I breathed in air – not much but some. I stopped moving. I was in total darkness. Struggling to control the claustrophobia, I wiped a hand across my face squeezing mud from my nostrils and spitting it from my mouth. The panic I was trying to suppress had taken me back to Hong Kong, to memories long buried and recently disturbed.

  As I gained control, a measure of calm and reason returned. I became aware of a shooting pain in my shoulder, but I discovered there was at least some breathing space here. I was lying on my back. I felt upwards and touched something hard. Running my fingers across its rough surface I realised it was a sheet of corrugated iron; part of a roof perhaps from a shanty hut or workers’ bunkhouse. My fear was that above this ‘roof’ was a sea of mud, and that only this rusting scrap of m
etal was protecting me from drowning in it. I was reluctant to try and shift it. Eventually I convinced myself that if I could slide it a fraction down near my feet, then I’d be able to gauge what lay above.

  Using my left hand and both feet I pushed up against the metal sheet and tried to slide it back towards me. At first nothing happened. I applied more force and heard an ominous sound above me. It was the mudslide still on the move and seeping in through the gap I’d created. But there was something else. It wasn’t just mud seeping in, it was rain. And air. I forced the sheet back further. Still darkness, but air too. I pushed it right back behind me, looked up at the night sky and felt the rain on my face. And as I gulped in the fetid tropical air, an overwhelming sense of joy swept over me.

  CHAPTER 30

  I don’t know how long I lay in that muddy grave or how long it took me to get out but I emerged into a world of misery and chaos. The lights that had flooded the site before were gone, the generators silent, the sweep and flash of a torch here and there, providing the only illumination. The land had stopped moving but the rain was heavier than before. There was frantic human activity around me but little sense of order.

  I made out bodies face down in the mud, others still struggling like myself to get to dry ground. I had slid towards the bottom of the site, landing amongst the shanty huts, and these had been my salvation. I struggled on hands and knees towards a group of people, villagers I supposed, who stood on the far side of the site from where I had fallen. Men, women and children staring, shouting, some making a concerted effort to help those trapped in the mud.

  As I struggled closer someone threw a plank of wood towards me. I reached out and seized it, using it to edge myself closer to safety. My right shoulder and arm were next to useless. I was making little progress. The more I struggled the more the mud sucked at me. And I was losing what little strength and leverage I had left. Finally the man who’d thrown the plank waded into the mud himself, grabbed hold of the far end of the plank from where I was gripping it and, struggling backwards, began hauling it, with me attached, towards the bank. Others helped him. Finally I was on stable ground.

  They were shouting at me but I didn’t understand a word. Covered in mud as I was, perhaps they didn’t recognise me as a foreigner. And one thing I realised in my confused and exhausted state was that I was in no hurry to be identified. I didn’t know whether my elimination had been planned, but the longer the Malatan gang thought I was dead or missing the better, I reckoned. For now at least.

  I was being pushed and pulled back away from the site. The pain in my shoulder was excruciating. And I was still retching and coughing up mud. My throat and lungs felt on fire. Despite appearances, the villagers were doing what they could to organise a rescue operation of sorts. I joined a small group of other survivors and we were led down and away from the site, along a track through thick jungle vegetation and, after a walk of fifteen minutes or so, to a barangay. By this time the two men leading us had realised I was not home-grown and were eyeing me curiously.

  We came to a house raised six feet or so off the ground. Its side walls were barely three feet high but the roof of dried grass overhung the sides of the house to give some protection from the elements.

  One of the guides hurried me into the house. He spoke with an old woman. She looked at me as if she’d seen a ghost. I smiled but this seemed to unsettle her further. A discussion ensued. Finally, I was ushered into a makeshift bathroom at the back of the house. Needlessly, the woman gestured to me to wash. I stripped off my clothes and stood under the feeble, gravity-fed shower until I’d washed most of the mud off. There was a deep gash in my shoulder where I’d struck the piece of corrugated iron roofing that had saved me. The skin around the cut was red and swollen, blood still oozing from it. It needed cleaning and dressing properly. At least my watch was still working. As I washed it I saw it was two-forty in the morning. Then I saw the date. It said twenty-five: Christmas Day.

  The old woman had laid out a sarong and shirt for me. With difficulty I slipped into the clothes and emerged into their living space. I needed to speak with someone.

  ‘Speak English?’ I asked the old woman. She had recovered from her initial fright and I even got a grin revealing a few teeth stained with betel nut juice. It was a warm smile and her eyes twinkled. She bustled off, little brass bells jingling from her belt.

  I sat down on a wooden bench and took stock. Had those bastards just committed callous, indiscriminate murder by setting off the mudslide? Yes, I thought, just as they or their cronies had on the Astro Maria. And this time I’d damned nearly become a victim myself.

  I was pondering what to do next when a man appeared. He was of a similar age to the old woman, who trailed in behind him. The man grinned too but he had a couple of gold teeth on display which glinted in the dim light.

  ‘You lucky man,’ he croaked. I agreed with him.

  ‘Doctor, nurse come now.’ He sat down on a bench opposite me. ‘Many people hurt. Some die,’ he said. The woman emerged carrying a rice dish and a hot drink, a sweet tea of some kind.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘My name is Angus.’

  ‘Me Sammy,’ the old man said, then, pointing to the woman, ‘Leni. We are B’laan. Our mountains,’ he said sweeping his arm round through a wide arc. ‘Holy to us.’

  I admired the way the old man spoke such simple English but still made himself perfectly clear.

  These were the people Peter Stark and Carlos had talked of. Carlos had explained to me how the B’laan had kept themselves culturally, politically and economically distinct from their Muslim neighbours. ‘They have never succumbed to the rule of the datuships,’ he’d said. ‘So most of their traditions, customs, their way of life, have remained intact.’

  But logging and mining had devastated their sacred lands, lands they held dear as a gift from Adwata, their god.

  ‘There is gold here in your mountains,’ I said, ‘and copper.’

  ‘There is gold but they come to take gold. Many die. This not first time.’ He looked more closely at me now. ‘What you doing here? You want our gold?’ he asked warily.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not after gold.’ I told him I was a journalist investigating illegal mining activities in the Philippines. I don’t know if he believed me. I didn’t feel good about lying to him but the truth was too complicated to explain.

  The mountains and rivers around them were sacred to these people. The forest and the animals that lived there held deep spiritual significance for them. Yet although the illegal gold panners were despoiling the B’laan lands, these villagers were the first to help them when greed got the panners into such desperate trouble.

  ‘I thought the Malatan clan treated this mountain as theirs,’ I said to the old man.

  He shook his head. ‘They are not good men. Greedy for the gold. Not theirs but they have guns and many men.’ He paused. I think he was weighing me up, deciding whether he could trust me with his views, and with their dilemma. ‘But we make pangayaw for what is ours.’ Carlos had told me of pangayaw. It meant tribal war – quite different from the rido. Yes, I thought. There are scores to be settled around here, but what chance would these people stand against the Malatans?

  ‘If Malatans take this gold, this copper, they kill our land, poison our fields and crops. We must work with others to make Buwan Bundok well for the B’laan, for everyone.’

  ‘There is a company you work with?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, they say they make land better after they finish. They build schools, help our people.’ Suddenly he looked dispirited, defeated.

  I wasn’t feeling well myself. My shoulder hurt like hell and I was fighting off bouts of nausea that threatened to sweep over me.

  ‘I must get back to GenSan,’ I said. ‘Where can I get a car, a Jeepney, anything?

  ‘Not tonight. You wait for nurse.’

  ‘Okay, but I must get a message to my friend. Can I send a text from here?’

  He looked
puzzled. I still had my phone. It had been zipped into a pocket in my trousers. I wiped it clean and switched it on. To my surprise it came alive but showed no signal. I showed it to him.

  ‘You wait.’ He came back with a young girl.

  ‘My brother girl,’ he announced with a note of pride.

  I held up my phone. ‘Text?’ I asked.

  ‘I have,’ she said looking at me uncertainly then, smiling, pulled out a her phone.

  ‘Ah!’ I said admiringly. ‘There’s a signal?’

  ‘Down the hill there is, yes.’

  I turned to her uncle. ‘Can she send it for me?’

  The girl answered. ‘I go down to other barangay now. I can send from there.’

  She smiled shyly and handed me the phone. I keyed a message to Carlos’s number: ‘Keep silent. Will be in touch. Angus.’ I couldn’t afford the risk of Carlos coming looking for me and, in doing so, alerting the Malatans. I would need to talk to Malatan again, but not until I was ready. I handed her the phone and she hurried off.

  The weariness was overwhelming me. ‘Thank you,’ I remember saying to the old couple, again. They were looking at me with some alarm. I must have passed out then.

  ***

  I came to with a start. I was lying on a bed in another room of the house. A nurse was by my side. She was squeezing warm water onto and into the wound in my shoulder with a sponge. She looked down at me. ‘You are lucky,’ she said. I was glad to hear how lucky everyone thought I was. My shoulder was throbbing deeply and painfully.

  ‘I clean it now, get the dirt out, then I must dress it. It will hurt.’ It did. She applied iodine antiseptic cream then gauze dressings. She wrapped an elastic bandage in a figure of eight over my upper arm and shoulder, diagonally across my chest under my other arm and up round my back creating a secure band. She asked whether it was too tight. Having taped it up she assembled a sling from a colourful embroidered fabric my hostess, who was hovering in the background, had provided.