The American Mission

by Matthew Palmer

  The plaintiff was a middle-aged woman in a dress that would probably have been tight on her ten years earlier. Her name was Beatrice and Marie had known her all her life. Of course, she knew the defendant equally well. That was one of the strangest things about being Chief. It was like being both the father and the mother of a large extended family. Some days she was the nurturing mother who looked after the sick and the needy. Although the villagers called her Chief Marie because there was only one Chief Tsiolo, today she was the father.

  “Is what Beatrice says true, Zawadi?” Marie asked. The defendant was thin and somewhat sickly looking. She had never recovered completely from a bad case of dengue fever that she had contracted three years ago. She had four sons with reputations that ensured no mother wanted her daughter spending time in their company.

  Zawadi glared defiantly at Beatrice. “It is true that my son had relations with this girl, Nanette. But he was hardly the first. Many boys and not a few men have been where my son has gone. He has taken nothing from her that was not taken long ago.”

  Beatrice shook with fury at the insult. “That is a brazen lie,” she shouted. “This cow would dare accuse my Nanette of such behavior? She was innocent of such things, Chief Marie, before this boy ruined her forever.”

  This situation would have been farcical if it had not been so deadly serious. Family was a significant financial investment in the Congo. Marriages were alliances between families, and a good bride-price for a prime daughter could be the difference between a comfortable old age and starvation. No one in Busu-Mouli would starve as long as Marie was Chief, but for the women involved in this dispute, the stakes were high.

  “What do the children wish to do?” Marie asked. The two women looked slightly befuddled. Who cares what they want? Marie read in their expressions. This doesn’t concern them.

  It was Zawadi who spoke up. “My son would marry this girl if I let him. He claims to love her. But he can do much better than Nanette, I am sure of it.”

  “You would not be saying that if your Patrice had not so dishonored my daughter.”

  Marie held up her hand and the two women broke off the exchange before it became too heated.

  “And what of Nanette?” Marie asked Beatrice. “What are her wishes?”

  “She would marry this scoundrel, Patrice. She also claims it is love. I support her in this now only because I fear that what was done to her will become widely known.”

  If it wasn’t going to before, Marie thought, you certainly made sure that it would.

  “Very well,” Marie announced, “it is my decision that Patrice and Nanette are to be married, consistent with the wishes of the two young people involved. It is also my judgment, however, that Zawadi’s family will be asked to pay only one-half of the normal bride-price of twelve goats. This is to acknowledge the family’s loss of opportunity to negotiate the best possible arrangement for Patrice. So it is decided.”

  These last words were the ritualistic close to a ruling by the Chief that meant he—or in this case, she—would brook no opposition and no further argument. The women nodded respectfully. Neither seemed dissatisfied with the decision. Marie did not know whether her ruling was just, but it certainly was expedient. Old King Solomon had had the right idea, even if his methods may have been somewhat extreme.

  Her chiefly duties done for the day, Marie headed up to the mine to check out the progress the team had made. B shaft was still a concern. The rock in that section of the hill had proven to be exceptionally brittle. She had wanted to close the tunnel, but Katanga had persuaded her that the rich vein of ore that B shaft was tracking was worth the risk.

  She was still nearly a kilometer from the mine when she heard three short, sharp blasts from an air horn. The harsh sound of the horn carried all the way down to the village. She and Katanga had set up a simple system of communication. One long blast was a summons for Katanga or Marie. Two blasts announced an equipment failure requiring the attention of Mputu or one of his sons. Three short blasts was a disaster: a fire, a serious injury, or a cave-in.

  Marie ran.

  Katanga was standing at the mouth of the mine. A cloud of copper-colored dust hanging in the air hinted at a collapsed tunnel.

  “What happened?” she asked, gasping for breath after the run up the steep final section of trail. “Is anyone still in there?” Marie was gripped by a double sense of responsibility. As Chief Engineer, the mine was hers to run. As Chief of Busu-Mouli, all of the villagers were hers to protect. She had failed in both responsibilities.

  “There are three boys inside, two miners and Mputu’s eldest son. The generator seized up and he was trying to get it working again.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  Katanga spread his hands helplessly. “It looks like the ceiling collapsed in B shaft. Four other boys were working the face of the main tunnel and they made it out.”

  Behind Katanga, Marie could see the four miners who had just survived a close brush with death. They were caked in yellow-gray dust so thick that they looked more like ghosts than men.

  Marie called to them. “Boys, quickly,” she said, with a clear undercurrent of urgency in her voice. “Tell me what happened in there.”

  “We’re not sure, Chief Marie,” one of the men replied. “We were digging the rock when we heard a loud crack, like splitting wood, and then a roar. Next thing we knew, the tunnel was full of dust and smoke, and we got out as fast as we could.”

  “Did you see a rockfall?”

  “Yes, Chief,” said another boy. “The tunnel is almost entirely closed up. There were men in there.”

  “I know,” Marie replied. They are my men.

  She used a knife to cut a piece of cloth from her shirt that she wrapped around her mouth and nose.

  “Uncle, bring a hammer and a metal pipe,” Marie said to Katanga, as she strode purposefully toward the tunnel entrance. If those boys were still alive, she would dig them out with her fingernails if she had to.

  Katanga gathered the tools and, as he had promised, followed his niece into the jaws of Hell.

  • • •

  Inside the tunnel, the dust was thick and choking. The flashlight that Marie had taken from the emergency locker struggled to cut through the cloud of dust. A thin, feeble beam illuminated the tunnel ahead for maybe ten feet. Beyond that was just a fog of yellow-gray.

  She knew where she wanted to go. She had the mine’s schematics committed to memory. B shaft was approximately 150 meters in on the left. It was about half as wide as the other shafts. Marie had ordered this as a precaution against just the kind of cave-in they had suffered. The rock here was rotten and treacherous. B shaft should have been abandoned weeks ago. She had been greedy.

  Rock dust stung her eyes and worked its way through her makeshift mask into her throat. Marie coughed convulsively and steadied herself with a hand on the tunnel wall. She was about where she thought B shaft should be. She nearly walked past it. There was no longer an entrance to the side tunnel, just a gap in the wall of the main tunnel that was filled to the top with rubble. The light from Katanga’s flashlight joined her own. Marie took the heavy hammer from her uncle and banged it against the rockfall three times. Then she paused to listen. She heard nothing. She tried again and this time pressed her ear up against the wall of the tunnel. She heard three notes that sounded like metal on stone. At least one of the miners had survived the collapse. That meant there was an air pocket of some sort behind this wall. They had some time, but without knowing the size of the fall, it was impossible to know how much time.

  “Uncle, try to drive that pipe into the rubble pile. See if we can make a hole into the air pocket where our men are trapped.”

  Katanga located a gap in the stones and tried to force the pipe through with repeated blows of the heavy sledge. Marie heard a clatter of steel against rock. She turned her light toward t
he sound and saw that she and Katanga had been joined by the four men they had left at the entrance. Two were simple laborers, but the other two were experienced miners who would be a real asset if the only answer proved to be digging out the poor souls trapped in B shaft. These men had themselves just escaped being buried alive. On their own, they had come back underground to help their less fortunate brothers. Marie was immensely proud of them.

  “Good boys. We need you. You two,” she said to the inexperienced laborers, “see if you can help Katanga get that pipe pushed through the rocks. He’ll tell you what to do. You boys,” she said to the miners, “start taking the pile apart. Be careful. We can’t afford a secondary slide. I’d rather you take more time and get the job done without an accident. If we work together, we’ll get those men out. I promise.”

  Imitating Marie, the miners tied strips of cloth around the lower half of their face and attacked the rock fall with picks and crowbars. Marie directed their efforts at first, instructing them to start in one of the upper corners and work their way down at an angle to the fall. They were not trying to dig the trapped miners out. They were simply hoping to open a hole to the outside world before the men inside ran out of air.

  It quickly became clear that Katanga was not going to be able to drive the pipe into the pocket behind the cave-in. The fall was just too dense. Marie thought back to her schooling, trying to dredge up some idea or insight that would help her here. There wasn’t much. The mandatory emergency-management course at Witwatersrand had been geared toward the high-tech environment of a modern mining operation.

  Marie’s mind was racing and she made a conscious effort to slow both her thinking and her pulse rate. She would make better decisions calm. The boys trapped in B shaft deserved no less from her. Closing her eyes, she sought to visualize the schematics of the tunnel system. B shaft angled up slightly and was almost perpendicular to the central shaft. The longer C shaft was about fifty meters back and curved sharply as it followed the twisting path of the richest veins of ore. At some point, B shaft was supposed to actually cross over C shaft, and Marie had ordered that section of C shaft reinforced as insurance against the roof’s collapsing. How far had the tunnel progressed? Had it reached its intersection with C shaft or were there still unknown meters of rock ahead?

  Marie explained what she was thinking to Katanga. Her uncle was not certain that they had dug far enough for her plan to work. Moreover, there was a risk that they could make things considerably worse.

  “I know that, Uncle. Is it worth the risk?”

  Katanga paused as he weighed the unpalatable options. “It’s worth it.”

  • • •

  The dust was starting to settle and it was a little easier to see. Marie made her way carefully back to the main entrance. She wanted to run, but she did not dare risk being injured. Outside, it was already getting dark. The trapped miners were running out of time.

  There was a small shed built up against the cliff wall. Inside, Marie found what she had come for. Explosives. One wall was lined with military hardware, including small artillery shells and land mines. Commercial blasting material was hard to come by, but the Congo was awash in weapons, and military-grade explosives were as common as stray dogs. Katanga and Mputu had been working together on adapting these weapons of war to a new purpose. Their initial tests had been encouraging. Even so, these tools were nowhere near ready for regular use. They were too unpredictable. Marie found what she was looking for, a bulky antitank mine with a simple timing fuse grafted to it. She also took a roll of duct tape from the supply chest.

  Marie was grateful to find that the entrance to C shaft was clear of debris and looked undamaged. Katanga was already inside, knocking down the timber joists in the section of the tunnel that in theory was directly below B shaft. There could be as little as a meter of rock above them, but the reality of the tunnel complex was likely different than the paper plans. Marie tried not to think about everything that could go wrong.

  Katanga pointed at the land mine in her hand.

  “We don’t know what the explosive force of that charge is,” he observed. “If it’s too strong, we could bring the whole tunnel down.”

  “I know. We don’t have time to do the math. It’s either this or those boys die.”

  “Okay, Chief. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Me too.”

  Katanga found a timber that was nearly as tall as the ceiling. Marie used the duct tape to affix the mine to the top of the timber. Katanga lifted the timber to press the business end of the mine flat up against the ceiling while Marie jammed broken pieces of wood underneath to shim it firmly in place. Without resistance from below, the explosive force of the charge would be spent driving the land mine back to the floor. There was also a risk, of course, that the charge would be too strong and the miners trapped above would be killed by either the pressure wave or stone shrapnel. Having made the preparations, Marie now had to make a decision. They could wait until the teams working on B shaft had worked their way in from the front, which could be many hours, or they could set off this charge and pray for a decent outcome. For a moment, she was racked with uncertainty.

  “Make a decision, Marie,” Katanga ventured. “We will support you no matter what you choose and no man will hold you to blame for the outcome.”

  “What would you do, Uncle?”

  “I am not Chief.”

  “You are my family. You are all the family I have.”

  “If it were me in there, I would not want to wait while the air grew thick and foul. If it is fated to be my time, better a quick death than a long, slow one.”

  “Evacuate the others.”

  She waited a few minutes to give Katanga time to get the villagers outside to safety while she examined the mechanics of the land mine’s new triggering system. Mputu had deactivated the pressure fuse. The timing device that would trigger the explosion was a switch attached to a cheap Chinese-made alarm clock. Marie set the timer for three minutes and scrambled down the tunnel.

  They clustered together a safe distance from the tunnel entrance and waited. The minutes ticked off slowly, painfully slowly. Exactly three minutes after she set the charge, they felt the rumble of an explosion and a few seconds later a fist of sound and dust leaped out of the tunnel mouth. Marie rewrapped the cloth around her face and went back underground. The others followed close behind their chief. They picked their way through the rubble and collapsed beams to the site of the explosion. A hole at least two meters wide had been punched in the ceiling. Katanga helped lift one of the miners up into the hole. No more than a minute later, they heard his whoop of joy.

  “They’re alive,” they heard him call.

  The three men who had been trapped in B shaft were hypoxic. Another twenty minutes and they almost certainly would have been dead. Mputu’s boy had been slightly injured by stone chips generated by the explosion. The two miners were untouched. All three would survive. It took them nearly half an hour to get the men through the hole in the floor and out to fresh air. Night had fallen and the cool evening breeze stood in blessed contrast to the stale air of the tunnels. Marie’s ears were ringing. It took her a moment to realize that this was not a result of the explosion. She was hearing bells, the warning bells of the village.

  “Oh dear God,” she said, sprinting down the footpath to where she had a clear view of the village below. Her knees went weak when she saw the orange glow coming up from the forest floor.

  The village of Busu-Mouli was on fire.

  23

  JULY 16, 2009

  KINSHASA

  On most nights in most embassies, the lights stayed on late in a few offices, including the CIA station, the executive office, and the political section. At ten on a Tuesday night, however, Alex was all but alone in the chancery. Spence was long gone and Jonah Keeler’s office door, a monstrous piece of steel with a coded ci
pher lock and an elaborate system of dead bolts, was alarmed. At this hour, the only other person in the mission was the Marine guard on duty, alternating his time between the guard booth at Post One and patrols through the mission to sweep for unsecured classified material.

  Alex was sitting at his computer, staring at a blank cable template and trying to think of how to begin. What he had seen last night at the airfield had persuaded him that he needed to take action. Consolidated Mining was dirty. The company was partnered with some of the most murderous thugs in history, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. Alex could not bring himself to accept that Spence was part of this. Somehow, the mining company was misleading the Ambassador, taking advantage of his commitment to U.S. security. At the same time, it was painfully clear that the Embassy was at least enabling Consolidated in its predatory behavior.

  From his desktop, Alex could send a cable to any post in the world. This one had only one addressee, SECSTATE, WASHDC. On the template, the next line down was called the caption line. There were a variety of captions indicating special handling instructions for the message. NODIS or EXDIS captions, for “No Distribution” and “Executive Distribution,” meant that only a select few should be permitted to read these cables. DG channel meant that it was a sensitive personnel issue for action by the Director General of the Foreign Service.

  The caption line on the cable template on Alex’s computer screen read in capital letters “DISSENT CHANNEL.” Alex had never sent a cable like this. Hell, he thought, he didn’t even know any FSOs who had. For the better part of an hour, he had been sitting there looking at the blank template and trying to shape his thoughts into a coherent argument. He knew what he wanted to do. He also knew what he had to avoid. He wanted Washington to understand what was happening here and launch an investigation into Consolidated Mining and its activities in the Congo. He also wanted to protect Spence, to make clear that he was not accusing his ambassador—his friend—of complicity in what for all intents and purposes amounted to murder on a grand scale.