The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  Marie pretended she hadn’t heard the last point. “Let’s go inside,” she said, as she pulled two headlamps out of her backpack. She gave one to Thomas and slipped the other over her own head.

  The walls and floor of the tunnel were rough and uneven, nothing like the smooth finish of the established mines she had worked at in South Africa and Botswana. The shaft sloped gently downward, and Marie could see that Katanga had done a creditable job of following the richest vein of ore as he built the main tunnel. The tunnel led into the cliff for about three hundred meters. Marie knew that the men wouldn’t be able to dig much farther without some kind of ventilation. The air was already thick with carbon dioxide. At the base of the tunnel, miners were hard at work hollowing out a large room. Most just nodded hello. A few called out to Marie by name.

  “This is about as far in as the vein goes,” Katanga observed. “We are following two lesser veins that run parallel to the floor, but the richest ore starts to go deep here. We need to start digging down. Until we get some real equipment, it’ll be slow going. I estimate our production will peak sometime in the next week and then start dropping off as we start building down. The boys will have to work short shifts as the air gets stale, and hauling the ore up to the top of the hole is going to add another layer of effort to this.”

  Marie knew Katanga was looking for reassurance. He wanted to hear that Consolidated Mining was riding to the rescue with a barge full of jackhammers and explosives, ventilators and powered winches. This was not going to happen. Katanga had a right to know that. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him.

  “Come, girl, let me show you our smelter.”

  Marie followed Katanga out of the mine and down the winding path to the Mongala River. On the bank of the river, there was a large building with a frame made of palm logs and walls made of a collage of various materials. The roof was corrugated tin, a relatively expensive luxury that spoke to the importance of keeping whatever was inside dry. Black smoke belched from the single chimney that protruded from the middle of the roof. A simple wooden dock stuck out into the river and served as a boat landing.

  A hand-lettered sign over the front door read UNITED LUBA SMELTING. It was true, she realized. This project was already too big for her village to handle on its own. Her father had made deals and alliances with surrounding Luba villages to loan labor, materials, and seed capital to get the mine and smelting operations going. The mine would inevitably reshape the political as well as the physical landscape of the Mongala Valley.

  Katanga was visibly proud as he gave her a tour of the “factory.” At one end of the single large room, a group of women was sorting and washing the ore to remove dirt and other impurities. Nearby, three men were trying to fix a complex but clearly makeshift machine that seemed designed to function as a rock crusher. Marie saw that it was powered by two truck engines linked together with a single driveshaft. The gears of the crusher were heavy-duty propellers, probably stripped from the fishing boats and ferries that plied the Congo River.

  Marie’s background was in mine engineering rather than mineral processing. She had put together the schematics for the smelter operations, but her diagram had said simply “put rock crusher here.” She was in awe of what the villagers had accomplished.

  “This is absolutely amazing, Uncle Thomas. You’ve done so much.”

  “It hasn’t been easy,” Katanga replied. “There have been setbacks. Look at the crusher. One of the engines has burned out again. It happens fairly frequently, but we’ve been able to keep it running most of the time. The propellers were your father’s idea.”

  “Papa always had a gift for making do. Remember when you and he reconfigured the motors in the fishing boats to run on palm oil when there was a diesel shortage? The fleet smelled like fried plantains.”

  A clay kiln sat in the middle of the building, radiating heat from the charcoal fire burning beneath it. This was Marie’s design, based on kilns that Luba tribes had been using long before the Europeans came to central Africa. Two men worked a large bellows to stoke the fire and create the heat necessary to melt the crushed chalcopyrite into copper metal. As Marie watched, one of the men abandoned the bellows and opened the door to the kiln. He used a metal rod with a hook on one end to extract a large steel pot. Using both arms, he shifted the pot to a hook hanging from the ceiling and used the pole to pull down on an edge of the lid. A shimmering orange liquid spilled out of the pot and into a series of rectangular molds on the floor. Metallic brown bricks from earlier castings were piled next to the molds. This was matte, a crude mixture of molten sulfides. The matte would need to be converted into “blister” copper and then refined by heat and electrolysis before it could be sold on the open market.

  This was a low-tech operation. They were skipping a couple of key steps that would have drastically improved the purity of the copper matte. Each step of the smelting process added value to the finished product. The equipment to do this was pretty basic for an operation like Consolidated Mining, but difficult to jury-rig out of boat parts and truck engines. The more sophisticated and expensive equipment was well beyond anything an operation like this could aspire to. The bosses at Consolidated had promised to provide a converter for making blister copper, along with the other specialized machinery that made modern mining the voracious mountain-eating beast it had become.

  “I’m blown away by this. I never dreamed you’d move this fast.”

  “You underestimate us, Marie. You have been away a long time. You have forgotten just what we are capable of. What your father is capable of.”

  “You’re right. I do sometimes forget.” Marie swallowed hard at what she had to say next. “Uncle Thomas,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “They aren’t going to help us. The mining company, I mean. What you have accomplished is extraordinary, but we made our plans based on the idea that Consolidated Mining was going to back us with money, equipment, and technical support. I found out just before the last trip . . . the one that ended badly . . . that they aren’t going to do that.”

  Although she had promised herself that she wasn’t going to cry, Marie felt her eyes fill, and Katanga’s face shimmered slightly as she looked at him through her tears.

  He reached out and took hold of both of her arms, clasping her biceps firmly and urgently. “We know that, child. In truth, your father and I, we never expected that they would. We are prepared; we do not need your mining friends.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Marie continued. “It isn’t that they are going to leave us alone. When the big bosses in New York saw the test results on the ore samples I brought them, they got greedy. Then the Chinese started snapping up every ton of copper and steel and manganese and you-name-it that came on the market. This is a rich find, maybe the richest in the Congo. They want it for themselves. It was one thing to offer us help when it looked like there was little at stake. The ore samples changed that picture for them. The company is negotiating its own deal with the Ministry for Mines and Metals in Kinshasa. Consolidated will buy the usual army of politicians and bureaucrats, and through them, they’ll get exclusive mineral rights to the valley. They are going to chop the top off the mountain, fill in the river, and leach the tailings with acid to extract every last damn molecule of copper. And it’s my fault, Uncle. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Marie. I understand. Your father understands.”

  “He told you already, didn’t he? You knew all the while you were giving me the grand tour.”

  “He told me last night after you went to bed. It’s a difficult situation, but perhaps not as desperate as it might seem. We have options.”

  “Yes, we do. We can bury the mine. We fill in the entrance to the mineshaft and cover the scars with brush. Then we lose the charts and burn the smelter to the ground. We can pull up the survey stakes and relocate them on the other side of the river valley. In the meantime, we can think of something el
se.”

  “We already have. Your father, that is. Come. Let me show you.”

  • • •

  Katanga led Marie back toward the village. In the field just on the edge of Busu-Mouli where Marie and her friends had once played soccer, a group of young men was training with rifles. Twenty men—boys really, Marie realized—were taking turns charging four at a time with fixed bayonets at dummies made of straw and wrapped in canvas. Another group of boys was practicing marksmanship, firing at wooden targets oriented so that stray rounds would land harmlessly in the forest. Other small groups were practicing a range of military skills. A few were marching. Some were disassembling and cleaning rifles. Nearly all of the “soldiers,” and Marie put imaginary quotes around the word even as she thought it, were barefoot. A few carried tree branches rather than rifles.

  “We have been investing some of the profits from the mining operation in our army,” Katanga explained. “Copper for guns. Jean-Baptiste has been in charge of that. Your father has appointed him Captain of the Guard.”

  Marie almost laughed at the grandiosity of the title. But she took a moment to observe the tall, well-built man leading the riflery training. Jean-Baptiste seemed comfortable in command.

  Katanga pointed out an older man in a military uniform who was teaching some of the younger boys how to strip and clean a Kalashnikov. Marie recognized her father’s old army uniform even before recognizing her beloved papa. Chief Tsiolo smiled when he saw his daughter and beckoned her and Katanga to join him on the field.

  “Well, Marie. How is your mine?” he asked.

  “My mine, Papa?”

  “If it isn’t yours, then who does it belong to?”

  “All of us, I suppose. How are your soldiers doing?”

  “How do they look?”

  Marie thought about the disciplined and battle-hardened troops that Manamakimba had led against the Consolidated Mining team. Then she surveyed the young boys just becoming familiar with the seductive power of the gun. There was no comparison.

  “Magnificent, Papa,” she answered.

  12

  JUNE 30, 2009

  BUSU-MOULI

  It was an unlovely, ungainly contraption—Marie would not go so far as to call it a machine—but it was getting the job done. Her homemade rock drill was never going to take the market by storm. Instead of hydraulic pumps, Marie’s drill used a system of sandbag counterweights and the muscle of three of the village’s young men. Another villager on a modified bicycle powered the chain drive that turned the drill bit. The Chinese-made tricone bit at the bottom of the shaft was the one honest-to-God piece of mining equipment she was using. Katanga had traded for it, and it had cost nearly two days of production. It was worth every ounce of copper. The saving grace of the project was the depth she was drilling to. By Marie’s math, she and her crew had to drill down no more than fifty feet through solid stone before intersecting the mine. She had surveyed the site carefully to make absolutely certain that she would hit the target. Now they were very close.

  “Not much longer, Uncle, I can feel it,” Marie said.

  “I hope so. The air in the mine is getting pretty stale. There’s not enough oxygen to keep a candle lit.”

  Almost on cue, the sandbags pushed the metal pipes through the roof of the mine and crashed to the ground with a heavy thud.

  “We’re in,” Marie shouted. Katanga wrapped her up in an affectionate hug.

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  Marie put her hand over the end of the pipe and could feel the warm, foul air rushing up from below. Cool, oxygenated air would be forced in through the mouth of the tunnel because of the change in pressure. At some point a fire underneath the vent might help to hurry things along, but for now Mother Nature should be able to handle the load.

  Once she was satisfied that the hole was clean and solid and in no risk of collapsing in on itself, Marie supervised the dismantling and storage of her rock drill. If everything continued to go well, they would need it again at some point.

  Then she went back to her baby, the smelter.

  Marie and Katanga had agreed on a rough division of labor. He would oversee the mining operations, calling on Marie for assistance when he encountered a particularly challenging technical problem such as ventilating the mine shaft. Marie, meanwhile, would take over the smelter and look for ways to improve the quality of the finished product.

  She had taken to sleeping most nights in the back room of the smelter that she had converted into an office. Before Marie’s return, Katanga hadn’t bothered to keep any records on production. Whatever came in as raw ore was processed as quickly as possible. Whatever came out as metal was sold or traded. It was simple. No one had thought to write it down.

  Marie surveyed the charts and graphs she had tacked up on the walls behind her desk, which was nothing more than an old door laid across two oil drums. The charts tracked only the last ten days of production, but she could see that there had been a noticeable rise in both the quantity of metal produced and the purity of the copper. Some of the refinements she had initiated were already paying dividends. It was a start, but it wasn’t enough. There is more I can do, Marie thought. I am sure of it.

  Flora, one of the older villagers who served as an unofficial shift leader, stuck her head into the office.

  “Marie, one of the belts on the rock crusher snapped again. We had to shut the machine down.”

  Marie sighed. The crusher was the most temperamental element of the smelter operations. Nearly every day, something went wrong.

  “Get Omer or one of his boys to look at it. If he has to scavenge a belt from one of the fishing boats, so be it.”

  Flora nodded, but looked none too happy. Marie knew that if Omer Mputu couldn’t get the machine up and running in short order, Flora would browbeat him until the screws were spinning again and happily crushing big rocks into small rocks.

  • • •

  At first, Marie thought that the crusher had jammed and the drive shaft was stripping the gears. But it was the middle of the night, and she quickly realized that what she was hearing was gunfire. Instantly awake and alert, she threw off the thin blanket covering her and jumped to her feet. It was dark in the windowless office where she had been sleeping on a straw pallet. The generator had been shut down for the night, so there were no lights to turn on. She fumbled for the flashlight she kept on the desk, hoping that the batteries were still charged. She breathed a little easier when she hit the button and a dim brown glow lit up the room.

  Marie reached under the desk and pulled on the strip of duct tape that held a pistol in place. She stripped the tape from the handgun, a Yugoslav Zastava, and made sure the safety was off. The red dot on the side was clearly visible. Red is dead, she remembered from one of the security training courses they had put her through at Consolidated. Marie had fired the gun maybe three or four times in that course.

  There was another round of gunfire, closer this time. Marie’s first thoughts were for her smelter. One of the changes she had implemented after taking over was to put a night watchman in place to prevent looting. When Marie had turned in, a sixteen-year-old boy named Kamba had just started his shift.

  “Where the hell is he,” Marie whispered to herself.

  She moved slowly and carefully out of her office and into the main hall of the smelter. She held the pistol in her right hand and the flashlight in her left. The beam was too weak to illuminate the far side of the facility. The flashlight cast a half circle of brown light extending out about six feet. Beyond that, the room was in darkness.

  “Kamba,” she said softly. And then a little louder. “Kamba, are you here?”

  There was no response.

  The pistol felt heavy and awkward in her hand. Marie checked again to make sure the safety was off. Red is dead. Red is dead. Another chattering round of automatic-weapons fire
. This time, she could see the muzzle flash framed in one of the windows. Closer than before.

  Marie made her way carefully to the door on the far side. She stepped across the threshold, making almost no sound in her bare feet.

  “Kamba, where are you?” She was whispering again.

  Outside the door, Marie shone the light to her right and swung it in a wide arc. As she was doing so, she stepped back away from the door and stumbled over something soft and sticky. She knew immediately what it was and had to consciously stifle the sob that welled up unbidden from inside her. She turned the flashlight onto the body of the young boy. His throat had been slit.

  There was a distinct odor of gasoline in the air, and Marie could hear muffled noises coming from around the corner of the smelter. Her smelter.

  She turned off the flashlight and placed it gently on the ground beside Kamba’s body. With its weak beam, it was more of a liability than an asset. It would not help her find the intruders, but it would give them something to shoot at. Pressing her body flat against the side of the building, Marie moved slowly and carefully to the corner. A three-quarters moon emerged from behind the clouds and cast enough light to see by. She looked around the edge of the building. She saw three men. One was kneeling by the side of the smelter pouring the contents of a jerry can of what could only be gasoline onto the walls. The other two stood behind him, watching him work.

  “You finish up here,” she heard one of them say in slightly accented French. “Juvenal, come with me and we’ll take care of the inside.” Marie recognized the accent. It was Rwandan. These were almost certainly Hutu genocidaires. What the hell where they doing here and why did they want to burn down her smelter?

  Marie was damned if they were going to do that without a fight.