The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  “Who’s the first?”

  “Steve Wheeler.”

  Marie knew Steve Wheeler casually. He was a boisterous New Zealander with a penchant for American cowboy hats. They had been on one expedition together, looking for rubidium deposits in the south. Their first night out in the field, Wheeler had made a pass at her, but he had been a gentleman about it and accepted her rebuff with good humor. She could work with him.

  “Let’s say I agree, and we find coltan. Can you promise me that the company won’t strip-mine my home anyway?”

  Karic shook his head. “The company’s resources are stretched pretty thin right now. We would be hard-pressed to take on two major new projects simultaneously, and if it came to a choice between coltan or copper, the numbers argue strongly in favor of coltan.”

  Marie understood the subtext to Karic’s argument. He and Henri Saillard were rivals as well as colleagues. From Kinshasa, Henri had New York’s ear and had arranged to keep Jack in exile in the east. If Karic could get credit for a major coltan find, he could raise his profile in New York while undercutting Saillard’s efforts to seize the copper under Marie’s village. Jack Karic was a snake, but she and he had a common interest in seeing Saillard taken down a peg or two. Of course, Karic would have to do something to make it unmistakably clear to headquarters that he was personally responsible for finding the coltan and critical to the expensive efforts to develop the find. Let him.

  “All right. I’ll do this. But this is the end, Jack. After this, the company and I are finished. When do I leave?”

  “We leave in ten days.”

  “We?”

  “I’m going with you.”

  3

  JUNE 12, 2009

  THE ARUWIMI RIVER VALLEY

  Trekking through the rain forest was akin to being underwater. The thin sunlight filtered through the jungle’s triple canopy reached the ground with barely enough strength left to power photosynthesis. From below, the leaves of the ancient and awe-inspiring trees shone like a monochrome stained-glass mosaic. There was little life at the bottom of this green sea. The vast bulk of the forest’s biomass was located a hundred or more feet up from the floor. In contrast, the ground was covered by a thick mat of decaying vegetation. The roots of the great trunks that held up the forest roof were rotting away even before the trees reached full maturity. Stagnant pools of water covered with a scum of green algae were thick with leeches and parasites. Armchair environmentalists liked to think of the rain forest as teeming with life. Marie Tsiolo knew better. Green as it was, the forest was teeming with death.

  Consolidated Mining typically sent armed guards to protect its expensively educated engineers and scientists. For this trip, the security was unusually heavy. Ten armed guards protected a core of eight company employees and a dozen porters, who carried the camp gear and survey equipment.

  In addition to Marie, the expedition included two other women. Charlotte Swing was a skinny blond hydrologist from Cincinnati who chewed gum constantly and peppered her speech with the word “awesome.” The youngest person on the team, she was also the expedition’s unofficial high-tech wizard. The third woman, Arlene Zimmerman, worked in logistics support. She was somewhere north of fifty and having a hard time with the hiking, though she did her best not to complain. The rest of the team, beginning with Karic and Steve Wheeler, were men. Karic’s number two was Wallace Purcell. As far as Marie could tell, he brought no useful skills to the team and his primary responsibility seemed to be taking copious notes in a black leather journal that he carried with him everywhere. The last two “internationals” were both mining engineers. Sven Norlund was a taciturn Swede with more than two decades of experience in Africa, much of it with Consolidated Mining. Mike Tanner was a dual U.S. and Canadian citizen from Saskatchewan who was trained as a surveyor as well as an engineer.

  Marie was one of two Congolese in positions of authority. The other was Head of Security Faido Omokoko. Jack Karic was in charge of the expedition, but Faido Omokoko was in charge of the guns. A former soldier and bush fighter, the taciturn Omokoko was at least six inches taller than Marie was and covered with a network of scars. Some were the result of deliberate ritual scarring that marked his tribal identity. Others were clearly unintended. One angry scar on his left shoulder had the distinct puckered look of a bullet wound.

  For three days, the Consolidated Mining party had pushed through the jungle looking for coltan. Their path was roughly parallel to the Aruwimi River, one of the Congo’s countless tributaries. Satellites and ground-imaging radar had revolutionized the practice of mining geology. Sensor technology, however, was stymied by the thick roof of the rain forest. In central Congo, the modern prospectors plied their trade in the same way as previous generations of treasure hunters had: on foot.

  “Why so many guards for this trip?” Marie asked Omokoko, as they picked their way slowly through a maze of twisting roots. “On earlier trips, there have never been more than two or three guards.” She spoke in Lingala. Omokoko’s French was good, but he was more comfortable in the trade language.

  Nearly two minutes went by before Omokoko responded. That was not unusual. The former soldier was neither dumb nor slow, but he liked to take time to think over his answers.

  “The company has been having problems in this region recently. Heavy equipment sabotaged, survey teams harassed. Some of our operations have been bombed, burned, or looted.”

  “Who’s responsible?”

  After a long pause, Omokoko shrugged. “The Hammer of God.”

  Unconsciously, Marie looked over her shoulder as if expecting to see armed men following them through the trackless rain forest. Of all the paramilitaries that prowled the jungles of eastern Congo, the Hammer of God was the most feared. Joseph Manamakimba, the Hammer of God himself, had left a blood-soaked trail that stretched from Goma to Kisangani. If the Hammer was targeting Consolidated Mining’s interests in the mineral-rich east, it was very bad news for the company’s shareholders. Marie was not surprised that Consolidated was trying to keep that quiet.

  Suddenly, as though passing through a curtain, Marie stepped out of the dense forest and into a wide clearing. Other members of the survey team who had been walking ahead of her were standing in the field blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight.

  A neat row of huts made of mud bricks and palm thatch lined a red dirt path that led in the direction of the river. Vegetables grew in small gardens between the huts, and Marie could see larger fields of manioc, sorghum, and maize on the far side of the village.

  The villagers greeted the arrival of the Consolidated Mining party with obvious concern. The unannounced arrival of heavily armed strangers was rarely good news in the Congo. Shouts of alarm echoed through the village in a language that Marie did not recognize. Women and children vanished into the huts or the surrounding jungle. The men gathered in what was roughly the center of town with only primitive farm tools to use in self-defense.

  Karic was hopeless as a diplomat, and he stood there looking confused. It was Marie who stepped forward in an effort to defuse the tension.

  “You have nothing to fear from us,” she began in Lingala. “We are engineers, not soldiers. The guns we carry are only for self-protection. We did not expect to find anyone here. There is no village here on our maps.”

  The carefully neutral expressions on the faces of the men in front of her did not change, but Marie thought that she detected a slight softening in the set of their shoulders, and the tension of the moment seemed to ease almost imperceptibly. An older man with nearly pure-white hair stepped forward from the cluster of villagers. He was barefoot and naked from the waist up. His smile revealed a mouth with no more than three or four teeth.

  “If your appearance here is an accident, then perhaps it is a happy one,” he offered. The Chief—for Marie had spent enough time around chiefs to know that he was one—held his hands to the side,
palms down, and the villagers slowly lowered their wholly inadequate weapons. Grins broke out on both sides as the threat of violence disappeared, and the villagers eagerly clasped hands with the mining company employees.

  Hospitality was an enormously important part of Congolese culture. The wars of the last decade had blunted that tradition, but had not yet managed to extinguish it. Marie, Faido, and the international staff were welcomed into the homes of the villagers. The porters and guards pitched their tents in the village’s fields. Marie’s host family was the Chief’s eldest sister. Her daughter, a pretty fourteen-year-old named Sifa, was assigned to take care of her.

  While most of the villagers were busy preparing the welcome feast planned for the evening, Sifa took Marie for a walk through the village. It did not take long to see just about everything there was to see. Beyond the small stretch of mud-brick huts, there were a few shelters for goats and a handful of dairy cows, a village well, and neat fields marked out by fences made of woven sticks. There was a large flat rock under a towering kapok tree that Sifa said was one of her favorite places in the village. They sat in the shade and shared a small package of Hertzog cookies stuffed with coconut and jam from a secret stash that Marie kept hidden in one of the porter’s bundles. At first, Sifa looked at the cookie suspiciously. After one bite, however, any reservations were abandoned and the girl wolfed down most of the package with astonishing speed.

  “What are you looking for in the jungle?” Sifa asked with open curiosity as she licked coconut crumbs from her fingers. They spoke in French, a language Sifa spoke well, with only a hint of tribal accent. “Are you searching for a place to make a village? No,” she corrected herself, “that could not be it. You are traveling with white people, and white people do not make villages.”

  “We’re not looking to settle here, Sifa, although this is a beautiful place. How long have your people lived here?”

  “We’ve been here for three rainy seasons. Before that, we lived upriver. But the militiamen burned our village and we couldn’t stay there. We walked for weeks through the jungle before we found a place where we could build a new village.” For just a moment, Sifa got a faraway look in her eyes, and Marie understood that the hardships of that experience had left permanent scars. Then, as though a switch had been flipped, the slightly impish look of curiosity returned to her face.

  “Don’t think that I have forgotten my question,” Sifa continued slyly.

  “I’m quite certain that you have not. Very well. We are looking for minerals.”

  “Minerals?” She repeated the word carefully as though she had never heard it before.

  “Certain kinds of rocks that can be made into valuable metals like iron or copper.”

  “What will you do with these rocks?”

  “Mine them. We dig them up and sell them.”

  “You’re in luck. We have many rocks here. Our farmers are constantly digging them out of the ground. They complain about them all the time.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Marie said. “But not every rock is valuable. Each has a story to tell, but only a few can be used for what we have in mind.”

  “I see.” Sifa looked at Marie thoughtfully for a moment. “And what do you do? You’re quite pretty, so I thought at first that you were the woman of the big man with the rifle. But then I saw you treat with the Chief. I wasn’t supposed to look. Mother said it was dangerous. But I did.”

  “I’m an engineer and a geologist. It’s my job to find the valuable rocks from among all the others and make a plan for getting them out of the ground.”

  “How is it that you know how to do that?”

  “Well . . . first I went to school for a long time and I studied very hard. Once you learn how to tell the rocks apart, then you have to go out and find them. That part takes practice. It’s not as easy as you might think.”

  “Are there many girls who do this?” Sifa asked in something approaching awe.

  “Not many, no.” Marie well understood what lay behind the question. In village life, there were few roles for women beyond child rearing and domestic chores. Marie was fortunate in that her father, Chief Tsiolo, was unusually enlightened. She knew, however, that she was equally fortunate to be an only child. If her father had had a son, Marie might not have had the opportunities she had had: school, travel, knowledge of the world outside the village.

  “How do you do it? Find the valuable rocks, I mean,” Sifa asked.

  “Would you like me to show you?”

  The girl’s beaming smile was an unmistakable answer.

  Marie retrieved her field bag from Sifa’s house. The porters carried the bulk of the gear, including the survey equipment and heavier scientific instruments. In a small backpack that she carried with her on the trail, Marie kept some of the basic tools of the geologist side of her training, including a rock hammer, a powerful magnifying glass, and a selection of chemicals and reagents she could use to run simple field tests.

  Sifa led her down the path toward the river. The path led through a meadow of wildflowers and sawgrass to a broad, flat peninsula covered with sand and rock. The village had been built on an alluvial flood plain at the foot of a volcanic range. The volcanoes were the reason why the soil the villagers farmed was so rich and why it was mixed with a range of igneous and metamorphic rocks. Marie knelt down and picked up an irregularly shaped gray rock about the size of her fist.

  “This is feldspar,” she told Sifa, handing her the rock. “It almost certainly was made in one of the volcanoes upriver, and over the course of millions of years it washed down the mountain and wound up here.”

  “It’s not very pretty,” Sifa said dubiously.

  “It is . . . in its own way.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh. What about this one? It’s quite pretty.” Sifa bent over and picked up a small pink rock that sparkled in the sun. “What is it?”

  “It’s called quartz. It’s a kind of crystal. The crystal itself is clear. The color comes from some very small amounts of metal trapped inside. Different metals make different colors.”

  One rock at a time, Marie taught Sifa some of the basics of geology. She showed her how to use the rock hammer to break open the small stones and how to read the story of the earth that was written inside them. Sifa was an eager student and a quick study. After a little more than an hour of exploring, the teenager found a treasure.

  It was a dull brown rock about the size and shape of a potato. But something seemed special about it, and Sifa brought it to Marie for inspection with undisguised eagerness. Marie agreed that she had found something interesting.

  “Watch this.” From her backpack, Marie pulled out a small stone chisel and set it in the middle of the rock. Then she handed the rock hammer to Sifa.

  “Hit the end of the chisel.”

  Sifa did as she was told.

  “Harder.”

  Sifa hit it again, this time with considerable force. The rock split easily down the middle, exposing a hollow center filled with glittering purple crystals. Sifa picked up one half and looked at their find with an expression of sheer wonder.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s a geode. Sometimes an air bubble in the lava will form into a rock with the conditions just right to grow crystals inside. These purple ones are called amethyst. In the cities, women like to wear jewelry made from these crystals. If you’d like, I can help you smooth and polish the edges. It’d make a nice gift for your mother.”

  Sifa’s face assumed a look of determination. “I have made up my mind,” she said with the absolute certainty of youth. “I am going to be a geologist like you and travel the world looking for valuable . . . minerals.” She rolled the last unfamiliar word off her tongue with a deliberate slowness.

  Marie smiled and was about to reply when a glint of
black in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Just about any other geologist would likely have missed it. It was such a small thing. But for Marie, a number of data points that she had picked up almost subliminally clicked into place. This was why Karic had wanted her on the expedition. Geology was a hard science, but successful prospecting favored intuition. Without having to look, she somehow knew what was buried there under the sand. Coltan. With a small trowel from her backpack, Marie turned over the sandy soil and inspected the silicates. The black flecks in the sand could be coltan. She separated out enough of the material to run some simple chemical tests.

  After fishing around in the bottom of the pack, she pulled out a small pan with a zinc plate on the bottom and two bottles labeled POTASSIUM HYDROXIDE and CHLOROHYDRIC ACID. She mixed the ore and chemicals in the zinc pan. The solution foamed up rapidly with an audible hiss. This field test was far from definitive. To confirm the presence of coltan in commercially exploitable quantities, the team would need to dig a series of slit trenches and use the diesel-powered water pump that the porters carried broken down in pieces to force the material down a sluice that would separate the heavier coltan particles from the sand and clay. Karic would insist on this step. The textbooks and company operating manuals demanded it. Marie knew in her bones that it was unnecessary. She was standing on a large deposit of one of the most valuable minerals on earth.

  The sun was setting and the meadow was lit by the soft light of early evening. It was, as she had told Sifa, a truly beautiful place. Because of the techniques involved, coltan mining was exceptionally destructive. For an instant, Marie had a vision of the lush clearing turned into a moonscape of craters and trenches, the river thick with mud and the soil poisoned with heavy metals. Sifa and her family would again be refugees. Could she trade Sifa’s village for her own? Could she live with herself if she did?

  “What is it, Marie? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Did you find something?”