‘I guess there’s only one way to find out.’
He crouched down and peered into the gloom of the tunnel. It was only a couple of feet high at most and so narrow that they would have to squeeze their shoulders through. A sickening draft of air, laced with the smell of sulphur, blew against his face. For a moment he just stared, blinking against the heat.
‘You really don’t have to go in there,’ he said. ‘If this is the mine, I could get a sample for you.’
‘Yeah, but I can’t stay out in the open either. So it looks like I’m screwed either way.’
Luca gave a hollow smile. Drawing the survival knife from its sheath, he untwisted the top. He then pulled off his T-shirt, cutting it into strips from the bottom and carefully winding them around the blade. Taking one of the waterproof matches from the cellophane wrapper, he struck it on the rock and held it under the fabric. The flames licked up, fanning sideways in the draft.
‘Stay close,’ he said, then slithered forward into the darkness. Bear tried to bring herself to follow him, but instead watched as the flickering light of the torch gradually receded deeper inside. She was well used to enclosed spaces from inspecting mines for the company, but there, they had lights and machinery; it was noisy, with a multitude of workers. Here, there was only the scrape of Luca’s boots against the rock and the long, beckoning darkness.
Just as the last glimmer of light faded from view, Bear slid down on to her stomach and shuffled forward. A few feet into the tunnel, the smell of sulphur intensified. It streamed into her nose and eyes. She coughed, feeling herself retch, and tried to cover her mouth with her hand as she leopard-crawled forward. Just ahead of her, she could make out the small bubble of light from Luca’s torch with its flames licking up against the low ceiling. She focused on the light, trying to block out everything else.
On they went, the tunnel narrowing so much that Luca had to stop several times, wriggling through with rough jerks of his shoulders. The rock around them grew hotter with each metre. It was a dull, timeless warmth that made them sweat after only a few seconds of being inside. Just ahead, Bear heard Luca curse, then the yellow flames faltered, before plunging them into darkness. Bear stared ahead but there was not the faintest shade of grey or shadow to be seen. It was just black. She reached forward, her fingers feeling out across the rock until they connected with the heel of Luca’s boot. She grabbed on to it, gripping it tight.
She felt him shuffle forward again, working his way deeper inside the tunnel. They must have been going for only five or ten minutes but each second dragged, the only sound that of their bodies scraping across the bare rock. Her elbows and knees burned from being pressed against the hot surface, while her neck muscles strained to keep her face clear of the ground. Dust clogged her mouth, congealing with her saliva and forcing her to spit every few seconds to get rid of the terrible taste.
‘I see something,’ Luca whispered.
Bear squeezed his foot, the knowledge that it would soon be over lending her a quick burst of energy. They both moved faster, relief flooding through them.
They began to hear noise. There was a thud, followed by the low beat of hammering. They heard a shout and the clank of metal chains. Just ahead of them, Luca found a small opening in the ceiling of the tunnel. He swivelled round so that he was facing upwards, then levered his shoulders through, one after the other, before dragging himself up and out of the tunnel.
Bear followed, desperate to free herself from the claustrophobic heat, but the mineshaft they emerged into was little better. An old electric light at the far end illuminated a long line of crooked timber supports feeding back towards a single opening. On either side the black walls were scarred with drill marks, and small piles of rubble were heaped on the ground in long-forgotten piles. A wooden bucket, black with dust, lay to one side of the tunnel opening, along with a small crowbar and a lump hammer that must have belonged to the dead man outside.
Bear walked forward to the nearest pile of rubble, then crouched down, sifting through it. She brought a couple of chunks up to the light before casting them away again. After a moment she stopped, holding a small fragment of rock in front of her face. She peered at it more closely. In the dull electric light, she could just make out the vein of red lacing through it.
‘It’s the same stuff?’ Luca asked, standing over her.
Bear nodded. ‘Yeah. We were right about this place. This is where the fire coltan’s coming from.’
Crouching low, they edged down the long mineshaft towards the light, moving from the shadow of one timber support to the next. The noise grew louder, hammer blow after hammer blow interspersed with the compacted thud of pneumatic drills. They saw a figure shuffle past the opening in front of them, no more than twenty feet away, but it didn’t seem to notice their presence. It was dragging a filthy piece of tarpaulin heaped with black stones to some unseen destination.
They reached the end of the shaft. In front of them stretched a vast cavern with level after level carved into its sides. The levels ran in circular bands around a central atrium, like the contours of a map, before feeding up into a massive domed roof, hundreds of feet above their heads. Natural light poured into the mine through a single hole directly overhead, weakening steadily as it descended lower into the clouds of hanging dust and dark, opaque rock.
There were nine levels in all, each one ringed by a wooden balcony and covered in a mass of metal troughs moving ceaselessly up and down. The troughs were connected by heavy metal chains to a pulley system somewhere further up. Bear and Luca watched as stone from each level was carefully shovelled into the troughs before being hauled away. He could see figures now, tens of them on each level, piling their loads, moving slowly in the suffocating heat.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Luca breathed. He turned to Bear, but she was staring straight ahead at a couple of figures working just in front of them at the base of the mine. Both were withered to the point of starvation, moving listlessly while they scraped away the rock and gradually piled it on to a waiting tarpaulin. They looked to be on the point of collapse, and as one of them turned in the light, Luca saw that he had the same misshapen features and grotesque cranial swelling as the corpse outside. Blood was seeping out of the man’s ears and he shuffled with slow jerking movements, crippled by exhaustion. His unseeing eyes seemed to look right through them.
‘Look at these people,’ Luca whispered, his voice lost to the sound of the drilling. The air was filled with the noise of splintering rock and the clank of metal chains.
Bear pressed her mouth against his ear.
‘Where are the guards? I can’t see any.’
Luca’s eyes steadily moved from figure to figure and up along the levels. Each person simply shuffled forward, tipping their loads into the waiting troughs before retreating into a network of mineshafts dug back from the central atrium.
‘I don’t see any guards either. Where the hell are they?’
‘Maybe they don’t come down here. Would you, if you ended up looking like those miners?’
As Bear said the words, she suddenly realised that the figure of a man was slumped on the ground no more than ten feet away from them. He was resting against the wall, with his knees tucked up to his chest and head lowered. His limbs were angular and wasted, pressed back as if fused to the rock. She was scarcely able to believe that they had been so close without seeing him, but then she started to see others too, half-hidden in the darkness; a single raised limb or the silhouette of a person slumped face down on the ground. The dead were all around them, abandoned and ignored.
Bear felt her stomach cramp. The heat and the stench of sulphur were making her nauseous. Even after all the war-torn hellholes she had been to, she had never seen anywhere more pitiless and desperate.
‘We can’t stay here, Luca,’ she hissed, nudging him with her hand. ‘We’ve got to hurry.’
He nodded hesitantly. ‘OK. We have to ask if they’ve seen Joshua. Someone here must know where he is.�
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‘Luca, look at them. They’re like ghosts. They can barely stand, let alone answer questions.’
‘Then we try one of the other levels further up. We’ve got to keep going until we get an answer.’
Bear grabbed his shoulder.
‘If we go higher, we’ll be caught. We should go, Luca. Get the hell out of here, while we have the chance.’
‘I’m sorry, Bear, but I’ve got to try.’
She stared into his eyes. Now that she had discovered the origin of the fire coltan, she felt a terrible need to get out of here. The impulse overran any sense of control or composure, and she half-turned back towards the lava tunnel. She had to get away from the claustrophobia and death.
Before she could say anything more, Luca crept out of the opening to the mineshaft, skirting round the edge of the central atrium. The floor of the mine was naturally dark, lit only by the remnants of natural light flooding down from outside and the occasional electric bulb. The whole of Luca’s upper body had been smeared black from the dust in the tunnel, greying the sheen of his white skin and helping him melt into the shadows. Bear watched him for a moment, slowly shaking her head as she tried to decide.
A few metres distant, Luca had stopped beside one of the thick-set timber supports, trying to work out how best to climb it. Bear watched him for a moment, cursing under her breath. Then, abruptly, she stepped out from the mineshaft and swiftly clambered into one of the metal troughs. As Luca scrambled to get in next to her, the trough jolted and was slowly hoisted into the air.
They passed one level, then the next, keeping their backs bent into the metal frame and their heads low. Over the lip of the trough they could see more people now, working in the long lines of shafts which fanned out from the central atrium. Each one silently dug, hammered, or carried. There was an overwhelming air of sadness to them all, as if the rest of their lives had been stripped away along with the last vestiges of hope.
Luca squeezed Bear’s arm as they slowly clunked past another level. Both of them leaped from the trough, landing with a thud on the rough wooden decking. They crouched down, terrified that someone had heard, but with all the noise and commotion of the mine, no one had even noticed.
‘Keep away from the main area,’ Luca warned, grabbing Bear’s arm and pulling her down the nearest shaft. They ran further inside, turning one ninety-degree corner and then another, before coming across a man hammering a small metal spike into the rock. He moved slowly, struggling to keep the spike steady. Bear touched his shoulder to attract his attention. As he turned towards her, she saw that his eyes were laced with bloodshot veins and an ugly swelling bulged at his neck.
‘Avez-vous vu un blanc?’ Have you seen a white man, Bear asked, then when his expression didn’t alter, tried asking in Hema and then Swahili. The miner just stared, uncomprehendingly.
‘Come on, we’ve got to try someone else,’ Luca interrupted, pulling her back along the mineshaft.
Retracing their steps, they waited by the entrance to the main atrium, searching for guards. There was still no sign of them and it looked more and more as though the miners were being left to their own devices. Clambering on board another trough, they moved two levels higher, repeating the same process. Here, they immediately noticed the heat was less severe, while the swelling the miners suffered was also less pronounced. Each man they questioned reacted more quickly, able to focus better and actually understand what Bear was saying.
But despite this, the result was always the same. None of them had ever seen or heard of another white man in the mine.
Eventually, Bear grabbed hold of Luca’s arm.
‘We’ve been here too long,’ she said. ‘We can’t keep going like this.’
‘Just another …’
‘Non! Assez!’ Enough, Bear hissed, trying to control her voice. ‘Luca …’
‘We’ve got to find Joshua,’ Luca pleaded. ‘He’s … got to be here.’
Bear shook her head. ‘Enough, Luca. We’re in the middle of the LRA base, and if we carry on like this, we’re going to get caught.’
‘Please,’ he said, grabbing her hand. ‘Please, just one more.’
Bear shut her eyes, the situation suddenly feeling utterly hopeless. What Luca was doing was sheer insanity. They would never be able to find Joshua in all this.
They turned back to the central atrium, and crouched beside the opening as they looked from one face to the next. As they searched, Bear suddenly became aware of a man’s presence just behind them. She turned, and before her was a miner they hadn’t seen before, standing with a crowbar held loosely in his hands. He didn’t move for several seconds, his bloodshot eyes blinking slowly.
‘Blanc,’ White man, he whispered, his voice gravelly from disuse. Then he jerked his finger to the balcony two levels higher on the opposite side of the atrium.
‘Oui, un blanc,’ Bear repeated. ‘Vous avez vu un blanc là-bas?’ You’ve seen a white man over there?
The man nodded slowly, before his eyes settled on the distant light coming through from the domed natural roof of the mine. He stayed like that, eyes drifting in and out of focus as if he hadn’t seen the light in years.
‘Merci, merci,’ Thank you, Bear stammered. They raced around the side of the wooden balcony and climbed into a half-full trough moving higher. They lay perfectly still, the seconds dragging as it trundled upwards with the chains clanking from the added strain. Jumping out at the fourth level from the top, they moved into the nearest mineshaft, sprinting down it and hurdling the low piles of rubble as they ran. Some miners there were using pneumatic drills and the nearest of them stopped as they approached, his drill jerking to a standstill in his hands.
‘Où est le blanc?’ Where’s the white man? Bear shouted above the din. A man slowly raised his hand, pointing further along the mineshaft. Around the second bend, Luca suddenly stopped, his boots skidding to a halt on the gravel floor. A white man was sitting with his back to them. He was desperately thin, the vertebrae of his spine visible through the soiled and ripped T-shirt he was wearing. His head was bent forward as he sorted through a small pile of rocks.
‘Josh,’ Luca whispered, edging closer. ‘Josh, is that you?’
The man’s head slowly turned at the sound, his body twisting as he tried to see behind him. As his face came into the light, Luca immediately recognised the pale blue eyes of his old friend.
Dropping down on his knees, Luca folded him in his arms, almost squeezing the wind out of Joshua’s frail body as he hugged him close. Joshua’s eyes were blank with shock. He tried to speak, but his cracked lips only parted a little.
‘Luca?’ he managed.
Luca pulled back, a broad smile breaking through the layers of dirt on his face as he nodded. His eyes shone with happiness as he grasped Joshua by his shoulders, shaking him lightly as if to wake him from a dream.
‘What …’ Joshua stammered, trying to understand what was happening. ‘Don’t tell me they got you too?’
Luca’s hands gripped his shoulders.
‘No, Josh, we got in through a tunnel at the base of the mine. We’re here to rescue you.’
Joshua’s face twisted in confusion as he stared at his old friend. He motioned for Luca to help him up, and staggered to his feet.
‘Rescue?’ he asked, gripping on to Luca’s forearm. ‘There’s another way out?’
Luca nodded. ‘We found the tunnel from the outside. One of the miners had been drilling down when he must have broken into an old lava flow and followed it out. We’ve been running through the whole damn’ mine looking for you.’
Joshua stood, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘You found a way out?’ he gasped.
‘Yeah, we did,’ Luca said, smiling widely. ‘And we’re getting you the hell out of here.’
Joshua went rigid at the prospect of escape. He glanced past Luca and Bear to where three other miners had followed them down the tunnel. They were staring expectantly, their whole bod
ies taut with nervous excitement.
‘Dites aux autres, nous partirons d’ici,’ Joshua announced before Luca could stop him. He’d come to rescue only his friend, but it seemed Joshua had other ideas.
Chapter 25
TWO MORE MEN arrived at the end of the mineshaft. They were covered in dirt from head to toe, every pore clogged with dust and the palms of their hands charcoal black. They stood in an awkward group, wretched and emaciated, their clothes no more than tatters of old fabric.
Luca turned as Bear came nearer.
‘C’est fou!’ This is madness, she whispered. ‘He wants to bring the whole damn’ mine. What do you not understand about this? We’re going to get caught.’
Luca nodded and grabbed hold of Joshua’s arm. ‘We’ve been here too long, Josh. We’ve got to move.’
Joshua looked around in despair. There were so many others, so many desperate others, he should try to save. Over the last few months, some of them had learned that he was a doctor and had asked him to treat their wounds. More often than not, there was nothing he could do, but they still looked to him as their leader, heaping what remained of their hopes on his shoulders.
‘Josh,’ Luca pleaded. ‘We can’t take any more. We have to leave now!’
Joshua hesitated for a moment more, then shuffled towards Luca. As he moved, he reached out one arm for balance, leaning his whole weight on his friend’s shoulder. His right leg was totally useless, pulling behind him with the toes just dragging across the ground.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ Luca asked.
‘Mordecai,’ Joshua replied, in a low voice. ‘I got caught trying to escape and he severed my hamstring. Bastard crippled me for life.’ He looked into Luca’s eyes. ‘We are going to make it out this time, aren’t we?’
Luca nodded. ‘Yeah. This time we’re going home.’
‘Home,’ Joshua repeated, drawing out the word.
‘Yeah, but come on. We ain’t there yet.’
Joshua went up to one of the miners who had just arrived. The man carefully unfolded a filthy rag. Inside was an old metal compass with the glass face torn off and the dial faded by the sun. Beside it were a box of matches, a small knife with a crude wooden handle, bound together with wire, and a sealed cylindrical cardboard tube with Chinese characters stamped on one side. It was an old military flare left behind by one of the guards.
The Secret Chamber Page 21
