Temple of Gold

by A. J. Stewart

  “No,” said Lenny. “It is very much alive.”

  “We can handle the tiger,” said Lucas, tapping his M16. “But we need to get your people out of the valley. If they can work, they can hike.”

  Jarani looked at Lucas. Her eyes were moist but stoic. “You go see,” she said, gently gesturing with her head.

  Lucas nodded and stood, and he and Lenny wandered over to the first hut. There were no kerosene lamps here, so Lucas used his flashlight. He pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  The smell was rotten, the acidic tang of decay. Lucas swept the light across the room. There were four burlap sacks stuffed with leaves and grass, which served as beds. On each lay a person, or the framework of one. They looked like the stick figure frames an artist might draw before fleshing out the bodies in detail. Their cheeks were hollow and their eyes fell deep in their sockets. Their breath was slow and low and rancid. Lucas focused the light on one person—man or woman, it was impossible to say—and looked them over. Their black hair was matted, but thin and patchy so he could see the moist scalp underneath. None of these people looked like they could walk to the campfire, let alone to the landing zone where the Huey waited.

  Lucas and Lenny moved to the next hut and found these people were in slightly better shape—enough so that they glanced at the light. They might have been able to make the hike.

  They returned to the firepit, where the rice had boiled. Lucas scooped it into bowls and he and Lenny took it to the huts themselves, leaving Jarani by the fire. Lenny found some of the people within were able to feed themselves, others needed help. A few were beyond consuming solid food, so Lenny offered them water.

  When the people were fed, Lucas prepared a bowl of rice for Jarani, but she made no move to take it. He pulled a camp spoon from his pack and scooped up some rice and held it to her mouth. For a moment she watched him, perhaps looking for his ulterior motive. Her gaze moved across Lucas’s face and came to rest on his eyes. Hers didn’t soften at all, but she opened her mouth just a touch and allowed him to feed her.

  They remained silent while Jarani ate. As she did, Lenny took something from his pack and walked back to the first hut. He stepped inside but didn’t bother to turn on his flashlight. What he did switch on was the Geiger counter.

  It clicked spasmodically, its harsh tones incapable of nuance. Lenny didn’t need to see the meter to know the sounds hadn’t spiked, so he stepped back out of the hut and listened again. The meter crackled still but with less urgency. There was always radioactivity in the atmosphere.

  Lenny returned to the firepit. Jarani had finished eating, and Lucas put the bowl down and looked questioningly at Lenny.

  “It’s not just malnourishment,” said Lenny. He placed the Geiger counter on the dirt. “There’s something making them sick, and I think it might be radioactivity.”

  “How so?” asked Lucas.

  “The meter goes off a touch more in the hut than outside of it, but both readings are lower than what I remember from the campsite.”

  “What are you saying? The camp’s radioactive?”

  “By itself, I’d say the readings are inconclusive. This meter isn’t that accurate, I don’t think. But when you look at those people? Some of them are losing their hair.”

  “Malnourishment can do that.”

  “Sure, but look at the evidence together. Sick people, some losing their hair. A Geiger reading that is low in the village here, a touch higher in the hut, and a touch higher again in the camp. And what’s different at the camp?”

  “There’s a mine,” said Lucas.

  “Right. I don’t know enough about mining, but could it be uranium?”

  Lucas pursed his lips. “It’s possible. In favor, you’ve got what you just said, sick people and some radioactivity, plus you’ve got a road being built in secret.”

  “You don’t need to hide a gold mine, but you might want to hide a uranium mine.”

  “Right. But against? I’ve seen uranium mines in the Northern Territory. Some blokes took me fishing out on the East Alligator River. There’s a big new mine out there—Ranger mine. Open-pit, just like this one, but a million times bigger. They’re pulling out ore in trucks that have tires twice the height of a man. Massive setup. And no one’s getting sick from it. I just don’t think uranium ore is that radioactive.”

  “Something doesn’t add up,” said Lenny as he watched Lucas’s eyes glaze over, like he was retrieving something from the deepest recesses of his mind.

  “What?” asked Lenny.

  “I’m just thinking about the Ranger mine. It wasn’t the ore that got trucked out of there. It was yellowcake.”

  “What the hell is yellowcake?”

  “It’s refined uranium. If I remember right, the ore only has a little uranium in it, just like it only has a little gold. So you’ve got to get the metal out. In the Northern Territory, they did that using a process they called leaching. They used acid to soak the ore and leach out the uranium. Then they pump out the water and dry what’s left, and what you get is a powder called yellowcake, which is like 80 or 90 percent uranium.”

  “Yellow metal,” said Lenny.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that radioactive?”

  “It is, but it must be manageable because that’s how it was transported. I remember they used to truck the yellowcake out in drums and then ship it like that to whoever was going to use it. See, it’s not any good for anything, in that form. But once it got to wherever it was going it had to be refined further in order to be usable in nuclear power plants, for example.”

  “Or warheads?”

  “Even more refined, I think. You need all kinds of high-tech gear, centrifuges and whatnot.”

  “I didn’t see anything like that,” said Lenny.

  “No, and that’s the point. They aren’t processing the ore here, at least not yet. But I reckon maybe they’re going to.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The equipment to get the ore out of the ground can be the same whether it’s gold or uranium or whatever. But leaching the ore means you would need tanks and pipes and somewhere to pump the water into afterward.”

  “The pipes laid out up there. And the concrete slab—they might be building an area for holding tanks.”

  “Which could then be piped out into a reservoir that they have dug.”

  “It’s not a swimming pool or a tiger trap,” said Lenny.

  “It’s also all based on wild guesswork.”

  “Educated guesswork. And there’s another thing. All that stuff in the shed? The sodium chlorate, did you call it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The acid to leach out the uranium?”

  “Sodium chlorate’s alkaline. The opposite of an acid.”

  “Really? So it wouldn’t work?”

  “Actually, now that I think about it, maybe it would. I think the bloke at the mine said they could use either an acid or an alkaline, but they used acid because it was cheaper.”

  “I’m no chemistry major, but they sure had a lot of it.”

  “Yeah, they did. But there’s still a problem with the theory.”

  “Which is?”

  “They’re not doing it. They might be planning to do it, they might even be tooling up to do it, but they aren’t actually doing it. The pipes aren’t laid, and the reservoir is still a tiger trap, and the sodium chlorate is in storage. So there’s no yellowcake there yet.”

  “So?”

  “So what’s making these people sick?” asked Lucas. “Future plans don’t make people crook in the now.”

  “We’re missing something,” said Lenny.

  “Yeah,” said Lucas, turning to Jarani. “The sick people. They aren’t in the pit. Those are kids. Where are these villagers going every day?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t talk bad things. They say very little. They say go down hole, come out, get sick. That’s it.”

  “They go down a hole? Lik
e underground?”

  Jarani shrugged, and winced.

  Lucas raised an eyebrow to Lenny.

  Lenny nodded. “There’s another mine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lucas had a lot of questions, and only one way to answer them. He told Jarani to get rest, and she tried to stand but couldn’t, so he gave her some pain meds, and then over her protests, he picked her up and carried her back to her hut. There were two other women inside, both sleeping. Lucas placed her gently on her burlap cot and brushed the hair from her forehead. In the darkness, he could see the outline of her but not her features.

  “Did the truck drivers do this to you?” he asked.

  He couldn’t see if she was nodding or shaking her head.

  “Tell me.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “One of Tan’s men?”

  “No.”

  “Then who? Who did this to you?”

  He heard her let out a low sigh. “General Tan.”

  “Tan himself? He did this?”

  “Yes. He very mad.”

  “At what?”

  “You. He very mad you escape. He think you tell about what he doing. He think I help.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “He say there no way through minefield. No way you come on track. Only way, you must get help.”

  Lucas felt his guts tighten. There were always unforeseen consequences to even the noblest of actions. She had been hurt because of his presence. He decided he was done being noble.

  “Sleep,” he said. “We’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll get you out tomorrow.”

  He didn’t know if she believed him or if she even heard. Her breathing became soft as if she had fallen asleep, but he wasn’t so sure sleep would have come that easy. He left her and walked back to the firepit.

  Lenny stood ready, pack on his back, rifle in his hand.

  Lenny led the way across the rice paddy and into the hills. This time, they didn’t hide their packs for the sake of speed; next time they returned to the village, they would bring as little gear as possible. They kept up a brisk pace until they reached the river, where the Huey sat in the middle of the riverbed. Lenny didn’t bother to call out to the Pilot. He would no doubt hear them, and if he didn’t, it didn’t matter.

  He heard them. He sauntered over from his position on the opposite bank and greeted them as if they had only been for an evening stroll along the boardwalk.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Nothing a beer couldn’t fix,” said Lucas.

  The pilot pulled an ice chest from under one of the chopper’s jump seats and pulled out three ice-cold beers. Lenny and Lucas slammed theirs down fast. The Pilot opened another two.

  “Better go easy,” said Lucas. “Big day tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” asked the Pilot.

  “There’s sick people in there,” said Lenny, nodding toward the jungle. “We’ve got to get them out. That okay with you?”

  The Pilot shrugged. “Sure, why not.”

  Lenny and Lucas ate their MREs and drank two large bottles of water each. Lenny checked his watch several times.

  The Pilot finished his beer and told them to sleep in the chopper, and then he walked back to his position on the opposite bank. Perhaps he would keep watch, perhaps not. Both Lenny and Lucas were too tired to care.

  Lucas said he was going to take a whiz and wandered away. Lenny slipped into the cockpit and checked his watch again. He took a radio out of a case from under the seat. It was a brand new technology: a key-encrypted radio that Lenny had borrowed from the supply store at Ventura’s import–export business. The CIA used it to pass sensitive material to other stations in Southeast Asia. Lenny fired the radio up and then put a call out to the ether.

  “Hoya, hoya,” he said.

  He waited a while, and then repeated the call. The radio crackled back.

  “Hoya Saxa,” came the reply. He couldn’t help but smile. The Hoyas were the athletics teams at Georgetown University. It was a strange name, and he’d learned it had come from the term Hoya Saxa. Hoya: Greek for “what.” And Saxa: Latin for “rocks.” It was a mongrel of a saying, which Lenny appreciated. He appreciated hearing Alice Brooks say it even more.

  “How’s the night air?” he asked.

  “Clear,” she said. “What are you wearing?”

  He frowned. That wasn’t part of their code. “What am I wearing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What I’ve been wearing for days. What are you wearing?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  For a moment he pictured her in her apartment, the radio pulled out of the closet and set up on the kitchen counter at their prearranged time. He saw her in his mind, sitting on a stool with a glass of chardonnay, stark naked.

  “That doesn’t help me focus,” he said, wondering if it was true, and if she had been undressed like that waiting for his call the previous night, too.

  “On the contrary,” she said. “It should sharpen your thinking.” He heard the smile in her voice despite the poor call quality. “What’s the news?”

  He gave her a brief rundown of events. He didn’t name names or locations. He didn’t need to. He also left out the part about the tiger. It seemed like too much information.

  “Any thoughts?” he asked. “Yellow metal might be uranium, or just gold.”

  “I’m not seeing gold.”

  “Me neither. You don’t need a secret road for gold.”

  “It’s not the road I’m worried about. It’s the pipes and the sodium chlorate,” she said.

  “You think they might be building something to process yellowcake?”

  “It seems far-fetched, but for one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “The writing. The Chinese writing.”

  “I thought we were supposed to be worried about the Russians?”

  “We are worried about the Russians. But so are the Chinese. They might be keeping quiet in this whole Cold War thing, but don’t forget, if Russia and the US go off at each other, who’s getting caught in the middle?”

  “China.”

  “Exactly. We know they have some nuclear capability, and we know they’re not currently a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, but they have given assurances to the administration that they have no active program for weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.”

  “How would we know?”

  “I’m not privy to it, but we track such things, I’m sure. Pretty much everything you buy in the US these days is made in Japan. The Chinese would like some of that stuff to be made in China. Reagan has offered trade benefits in return for restricted arms proliferation, and we’re negotiating for them to become a signatory to the treaty.”

  “So why would they be mining uranium in Kampuchea? How does that make sense?”

  “At the top level it doesn’t. They’re going to have their own deterrent, we know that. But there have been whispers about a fracture within the Chinese politburo. If what you’ve seen is accurate, then there is the possibility that a splinter group is working with the Khmer Rouge to create a secret weapons program.”

  “Why, if they already have weapons?”

  “Some intel suggests there are those within China who believe they are giving up too much in return for Reagan’s entreaties. They may believe that China should be a superpower, the equivalent of the US or the Soviets.”

  “China a superpower? That sounds pretty far-fetched.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But it could explain why your guy has gone from mining gold to mining something else. And why they’re trying to keep it secret.”

  “But this road they’re building, it doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Alice.

  Lenny sat in the cockpit and looked out at the darkened riverbed. Large rocks and pebbles had been sanded smooth by water and time, and the low stream that cut its way down from the mountains was purling gently. It was a bucolic view, fr
om the windshield of a military helicopter.

  “You there?” asked Alice.

  “Roger.”

  “So I’m looking at a map. Getting anything from your position to China via the road would be tough going. There’s Thailand to the west and north, Vietnamese-controlled Kampuchea all the way to Laos, and then Laos itself before they get anywhere near the Chinese border.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But if your road cuts out to the main road south . . . yes, it dead-ends as a noted road on the map, but what if it somehow continues through the mountains? The distance wouldn’t be far, and then there’s another marked road on the south side of the Phnum Sankoh wildlife sanctuary.”

  “That still doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Not so. It goes to the coast, to a township called Koh Kong.”

  “And?”

  “And there’s a shallow water port in Koh Kong. Infrastructure onward to Phnom Penh is limited from there, so I don’t think it does a lot of international trade, plus it can’t handle bigger ships, but . . .”

  “You’re saying they could sneak in there and then take a slow boat to China?”

  “You’re very good. You should do stand-up.”

  “I’m here all week.”

  “A shipment could be out into the Gulf of Thailand and then straight into the South China Sea. From there you could choose your port in China.”

  “Might explain how they’ve gotten the materials in so far. But this China conspiracy feels a bit much.”

  “Only because you’re focused on the Soviets. Everyone thinks the only other nuclear power is Moscow. But China has nukes, we think India and Pakistan have nukes—they’ve both certainly done tests. This is not a two-horse race, despite what the administration might suggest.”

  “All right,” said Lenny. “That might explain what’s going on, but it doesn’t solve my problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “There are sick people here. If our guesses are right, they may have radiation poisoning. Either way, adults and kids are being used as slaves. We need to get them out.”