by JE Gurley
“Goodnight, son.”
He hung up the telephone, still baffled by his father’s veiled warning. Nothing I can do about it now, he thought as he undressed. In the shower, he let the jet of hot water hammer his back and neck, massaging away the tensions of the past few weeks, turning the water off only when it began to turn tepid.
Next, in spite of the late hour, he dialed room service and ordered a meal of steak and fried potatoes, called kruisskyf and vinegary ‘slap’ chips in Afrikaans, and a bottle of Jakkals Fontein Shiraz. He had grown to enjoy the local South African red wines from the country’s Svartland coastal region. Van Gotts Corporation had paid for the rooms, which included an open room service and bar tab. He intended to test the limits of their generosity.
While sipping his second glass of wine after the satisfying dinner, wearing only his underwear, Alan sat on the balcony staring out into the night. Lightning flashed in the distance, illuminating the underside of the heavy clouds. A russet hoopoe slept safely nestled in the branches of a thorny acacia tree just outside his window, its long, insect-digging bill tucked under its wing. Alan’s troubled thoughts returned to Trace’s comments about the kimberlite.
The Ngomo Mine had been in operation for over five decades. Verkhoen should have been fully aware of any anomalies in the geology of the area. The Witwatersrand was gold country, the sediment bed of an ancient lake tilted on its side and folded by geologic pressure, subsequently brought to the surface by a meteorite impact. There shouldn’t be any kimberlite in the area.
The diamonds associated with most gold mines were of poor quality, their greenish-to-black tints caused by eons of radiation exposure from natural uranium in the rock. The real diamond-producing mines were farther south and west near the city of Kimberly associated with ancient volcanic pipes. Before he allowed any more tunneling, he would have to check out the formations to see what they were getting into. He yawned again, rose from his chair, and returned to his room.
Now for some sleep.
* * * *
His cell phone woke him with a start. Was it his wake-up call? It felt like he had just dozed off. No, the hotel desk would use the room phone. He picked up his watch to check the time, startled to see he had been asleep for less than four hours. He fumbled for his cell phone, managing to turn it on after the third try.
“Boss, we’ve got problems.” The sharp concern in Trace’s tense voice yanked him from his drowsiness.
“Wha … what’s wrong?” he managed to croak, tossing off the covers and sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Vince is missing. So is the security guy.”
Missing? His stomach churned, and he knew it wasn’t from his last repast. “I’ll be right there.”
4
July 4, 2016, 10:00 p.m. Ngomo Mine, 138 Level –
At first, Vince resented his companion, the security guard, Ntulli Masowe. Having an armed guard around seemed like overkill on the mine’s part. The last thing he was interested in was gold. While Masowe stood around arms folded and acting officious, he checked out the Cerberus’ systems by attaching a USB cable from the external port to his laptop. Except for a little more knocking around than they had expected, everything looked fine. The Cerberus was a success, and he felt a surge of excitement at his part in its development. He was also a bit sad. Now that the Cerberus AT10 was a viable product, he could no longer ignore the many offers of work he received each month.
He craved excitement, surfing the cutting edge of technology. It was like a drug to him. He needed a new challenge that could keep his mind occupied. The camaraderie at Hoffman Industries had been like a second home, and while he liked Alan as a friend, Alan would be tied up for the next few years fine-tuning the Cerberus for mass production, a job more suited to Trace or Bill than him. Both were equally capable of managing the Charon’s progress. The details annoyed him. He preferred the overall big picture – the concept development.
“It is cooler than it should be,” Masowe commented, one of the few full sentences he had spoken since they had arrived in the shaft. Vince had wondered if he spoke any English.
Vince sighed softly and glanced up from his readings. “Yeah, I noticed that,” he answered in an offhand manner, annoyed by the interruption. He checked the temperature and whistled. “98 degrees.” He noticed the lack of comprehension on the guard’s face. “That’s 36 degrees Centigrade. At this depth, it should be close to 60 degrees Centigrade, even hotter with the heat radiating from the casing.”
“Why is that?”
While he disliked interruptions, he appreciated the guard’s attempt at conversation. The quiet of the tunnel, aside from the pinging of cooling rock, was disconcerting. A bit of conversation might keep the walls from closing in on him. He enjoyed machinery, even mining machinery, but he didn’t like mines. One thing he had learned in a geology class he had taken one summer was that the earth moved, sometimes at the most inopportune times. The closest he wanted to come to being underground was reading one of Burroughs’s novels, and yet, here he was, 4,000 kilometers underground.
He looked up at Masowe’s strongly chiseled features visible through the clear Plexiglas of Masowe’s oxygen mask. The security guard looked every centimeter the Zulu warrior he claimed to be. He also had an inquisitive mind, or he would have never reached the level of security officer at Van Gotts. There might no longer be legal apartheid in South Africa, but prejudice remained ingrained in many of its people. Ninety percent of the workforce was black, while only five percent of the managers were black. The ratio was slow to change.
“I’m not sure,” he answered.
Masowe nodded his head, as if expecting just such an answer; then, he began removing his mask.
“Don’t,” Vince warned, but it was too late.
Masowe sniffed the air. “It is cool enough.” He dropped the mask and attached a canister of oxygen to the ground, pulled off his heavy gloves, and slid the balaclava from his head, freeing his curly black locks. Vince noticed the grey around the edges, making the guard older than he had thought. Masowe unzipped the upper half of the heat resistant overalls he wore and tied the arms around his waist, leaving him in his short-sleeved undershirt. “Much better,” he said, smiling.
Vince shrugged. The cumbersome gloves and confining mask made it difficult to work. He had been painstakingly typing on the laptop keyboard, slowing his work to a crawl. He didn’t want to look like an American skapie, an Afrikaans word he had picked up since his arrival, a pussy. He followed Masowe’s example and removed his mask; then, drew in a sample breath. The air was hot, but no hotter than a summer day in Nevada. He attributed the slightly bitter taste to rock dust particles floating in the air. Next, he removed his gloves, and balaclava, but only unzipped his overall to his waist.
Masowe pulled a long knife from his belt and pried a rock loose from the wall in front of the Cerberus. The rock was still warm to the touch. He turned it over in his hands a few times to cool it enough to examine.
“This is not gold gravel,” he said, showing it to Vince.
Vince gave it a cursory glance, intent on continuing his inspection of the Cerberus now that the gloves no longer encumbered him. “No. It looks like kimberlite.”
“I have seen much gold ore. I have also worked in a diamond mine. This is like the rock where diamonds are found.”
Vince shrugged his shoulders. “I’m no geologist, but I think you’re right.”
“Something is wrong here,” Masowe insisted, glancing around nervously.
“Well, the mine engineer will be down soon with Alan.” He made a chalk mark on the rock face in front of the Cerberus. “Maybe he’ll have an answer. Now, stand back while I fire up a laser to check the alignment.”
The Zulu guard positioned himself behind the bulk of the Cerberus with Vince.
“Here goes,” Vince said, as he touched the key on his laptop to fire up the jet turbine.
He was glad he had worn earplugs when the deafening turbine ca
me on line, shaking the ground. He waited until the laser array spun up to speed before firing only one of the three lasers. A flash of bright light flared in the tunnel for five seconds, and a wave of heat blasted past them, followed by a loud hissing. Confused by the sound that should not be there, he killed the turbine and stepped from behind the Cerberus.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. Instead of the hole punched through the center of his chalk mark he expected to find, a small section of the rock face had slumped forward, and a rush of cool, moist air poured from an opening in the rock. He turned to the astonished Masowe. “We’ve hit a solution cavity, a void.”
Masowe poked his head into the hole but jerked it back quickly as the heat of the rock hit him. “I see a great opening beyond.” He began to kick at the rock with his heavy boot to enlarge the opening. The soft conglomerate broke apart with little effort. “I will look around. Perhaps this is Uhlanga.”
“Uh … what?” Vince asked.
“Uhlanga, the place of God,” Masowe replied reverently. “My father is a sangoma, a spiritual healer. He told me of such a place when I was young, the place of the spirits of our ancestors. Unkulunkulu, the Creator, fell from the sky into a great underground swamp. He took two reeds and made man and woman. ”
“Have you ever heard of Pellucidar?”
Masowe stared at Vince. “Is this a country?”
Vince laughed. “Kind of. It’s a land under the earth.”
Masowe smiled. “Like Uhlanga.”
“Exactly.” Vince pointed to Masowe’s beaded necklace, just visible through his open collar. “Is that part of your magic?”
Masowe held out the colorful necklace for Vince to inspect. “It is an ibheqe, a lover’s gift to her man.” He smiled. “It is from my wife.” He pulled a small bead-covered gourd from his pants pocket. “This is my ishungu. It contains muti, or medicine against misfortune.”
“You take all of this seriously, don’t you?”
“My people have believed in Unkulunkulu longer than your people have believed in your God Jesus. Our beliefs are diluted by your Christian myths now, but some remember the ancient ways.”
“Do you?”
Masowe stared at Vince for a moment, as if sizing him up. “My father believed. I have seen … things you would not understand.” He scratched a design on the ground with the tip of his knife. To Vince, it looked like a mandala of some sort.
“What is this?”
“It is to ward off the Intulo, an evil being that lives in the earth.”
“You won’t find much living down here, I’m afraid,” he told Masowe. “It looks pretty sterile. There may be some lichens or bacteria, but I don’t suppose we’ll find any jungles.” So much for childhood dreams, he thought. “Still, I had better check the air quality for the presence of fire damp. We don’t want a methane explosion.” He held the probe of the air sensor just inside the hole. “The air pressure is slightly higher inside the cavity, but the air is mostly oxygen and carbon dioxide with traces of hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and methane.”
Masowe peered through the opening. “No. No swamp, but it is a very large cavity. The machine’s lights do not penetrate its full depths.” He turned to face Vince. “It is a strange place. I wish to explore it.”
“Uh, that’s not a good idea.” He knew he should stay with the Cerberus and complete his tests, but Masowe’s enthusiasm aroused his curiosity and sense of adventure; besides, he thought, it’s a cave. Maybe I’ll find Pellucidar. The chance to fulfill a childhood fantasy was too strong to ignore. He tossed a mental coin and it landed on heads. “Wait. I’ll come with you. Let me contact Trace first.”
He punched in Trace’s number on his cell phone before remembering that he had no reception underground. He opened the outside panel in the Cerberus containing a telephone connecting to the Shack, but only heard static. “Damn phone. It must be a bug in the system. Oh, well, he can see us through the camera.” He waved at the camera, smiled, and pointed at the hole for Trace or Bill’s benefit, whoever was playing video chaperone.
Satisfied with his handiwork at enlarging the opening, Masowe disappeared into the hole he had made. Vince grabbed a flashlight and followed, his sense of adventure making his skin tingle. He emerged into a wide tunnel. The tunnel was about thirty meters wide and slightly less in height. It sloped at an angle of twelve degrees, running perpendicular to the gold-bearing vein. Verkhoen had informed them the new tunnel the Cerberus had dug would intersect the gold vein. The ground penetrating radar could not have missed such a large cavity; the change in density would have been obvious. Therefore, Verkhoen had known about the tunnel. Why was he keeping secrets?
It was impossible to see far because of the slope, even with the powerful flashlights they carried. The tunnel walls and ceiling were smooth, almost as regular as the fresh tunnel the Cerberus had bored, but the rock was more brittle. Large sections of the ceiling and walls had sloughed away to form long berms and piles of rock on the floor, around which they had to navigate as they explored the tunnel. Lacey stalactites, some as thin as pencils, others like folded velvet, ribbons dripped from the roof, their surfaces moist with mineral-laden water. Accompanying stalagmites jutted from the tunnel floor, some needle sharp, others shaped like melted blobs.
“It looks like a lava tube,” Vince said in wonder, examining the walls. “See how smooth it is, and the multiple ledges along the bottom indicate different levels of lava flow over time. I’ve never heard of a lava tube so far underground.” He shined his light on one of the stalactites. “Surface water is filtering down through the differing strata.”
Masowe played his flashlight up and down the tube. “It is very long,” he said and began walking. Vince followed.
As they strode down the lava tube, each footstep reverberated loudly from the walls and echoed into the distance. Their lights picked out shiny striations in the walls that looked like metals. Vince scraped one with his knife.
“Copper, I think,” he said to Masowe. “This other one looks like nickel. If there’s more of this about, it could be worth a fortune in itself. It looks like pure metal.”
He looked up and noticed Masowe was not paying attention to him. The guard focused his light farther down the tunnel. The light reflected on something brighter than the rich metal ore deposits. They advanced slowly, curious but cautious. As Vince rounded a small stalactite protruding from the ceiling, a cavesicle, he drew in his breath at the vista before him. Embedded in the wall were dozens of crystal nodules as large as his fist, glittering in the flashlight’s beam. As he played the light about, he discovered hundreds more of varying sizes, shapes, and colors.
“Smoky quartz?” he asked, but he knew by the look of astonishment on Masowe’s face that they were not.
“Diamonds,” Masowe exclaimed, “thousands of carats of diamonds.” He shined his light along the opposite wall, revealing even more diamonds. They had discovered a pocket of diamonds ten meters long on each side of the pipe.
Vince stooped to pick up a glittering stone as large as a walnut lying at his feet.
“Put it back,” Masowe growled. His eyes narrowed as he stared at Vince. His hand gripped his knife tighter.
Vince looked at the towering Zulu him for a moment before dropping the diamond. He wasn’t sure the security guard would resort to violence to protect the mine, but he wasn’t taking any chances. “I was just looking.”
Masowe’s face softened to one of shame. He relaxed his stance and put away his knife. “I am sorry,” he said. “I dealt with thieves when I worked in one of Van Gotts’ diamond mines. They swallowed diamonds; stuffed them up their asses, in their ears, in the foreskin of their penises – any orifice they could find. It became a habit to be suspicious.” He picked up a diamond about ten carats large and handed it to Vince. “Take it to your girlfriend. Van Gotts will not miss it in all this.” He waved his hands about, indicating the riches around them.
Vince took the diamond and secreted it
in the pocket of his laptop bag. “What about you? One of these would make you a rich man.”
Masowe smiled. “I am a black man, a kaffir. They will search me inside and out when I leave the mines. If I managed to smuggle it from the mine, any dealer would believe it an illegal blood diamond and immediately report me to the authorities. I prefer to keep my job and feed my five children; besides, I am a Zulu warrior and I have given my word to Van Gotts Corporation and to my boss, Security Chief Duchamps. I will honor it.” He looked around uneasily. “We should go back. I do not like this place. It smells klankie.”
“Klankie?” Vince asked.
“Bad. The air smells bad,” Masowe explained.
Vince sniffed the air. Now, he too caught a whiff of something strange, like rotten meat or dead vegetation. No, he realized, it smells musty like the Egyptian mummy case at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. He checked the air with his portable gas analyzer. “No carbon monoxide, no radon; methane is below combustible levels … wait, this can’t be right. It shows the O2 is much too high, three percent higher than normal. Okay, let’s go. I need to double check these stats.”
Masowe was reluctant to leave. He stared at the diamonds for several minutes before joining Vince. Once back at the Cerberus, Vince tried once more to report to the Shack. The phone still didn’t work. He waved at the camera and smiled at whoever was manning the monitor. He wrote ‘Taking a break’ on his laptop screen and held it up to the camera. Then, he sat down and considered his good fortune. Between the diamond and his bonus for the job, he could just manage a down payment on that new Corvette he had been looking at, a chick magnet if there ever was one. A tour up and down the Pacific Coast, hitting all the beaches along the way, would make a nice vacation.
He checked his watch. The others weren’t due to show up for another five hours. He had been running on little sleep for over a week. Now, he had time for a nap. He made himself comfortable just inside the lava tube where the air was cooler. Masowe sat cross-legged beside his flashlight, now set on end to become a lantern, softly singing in his native tongue and swaying his upper body while he tapped one foot against the ground. Vince, too, felt inebriated by the increased oxygen level. He felt his tension slide away, as Masowe sang quietly.