by Fritz Galt
Jake watched the two groups sift through each other, passing wordlessly without acknowledging the other. It was as if two separate worlds existed in the mining camp.
Jake had seen the processing plant, but wanted to follow the scientists today. Where they worked and what they worked on had caught his interest. They were part of no ordinary mine.
“Dr. Omga told us to head this way,” Saran said, and pointed westward to the dark blue sky of the escaping night.
It was exactly where Jake wanted to head. “Let’s go.”
There were a dozen more rows of gers to pass, and they walked through the morning rituals of a waking crew combined with the bedtime rituals of a shift returning home to dinner and sleep. Some brushed their teeth and spat away from their dwellings while others took off their hardhats and carefully hung them on their doorposts.
Saran was leading him toward a phalanx of tall white buildings that they hadn’t passed the night before.
He watched lab workers squeeze into the rear of the buildings. “What’s here?” he asked.
“Shh,” she said. “We don’t belong here.”
They certainly stood out in their olive drab deels and Russian fur hats. Especially since the hurrying shift looked more distinctly Chinese than Mongolian.
“Have you ever been to this side of the camp before?” he asked.
Saran shook her head.
As they passed the last ger, she grabbed the black fur hat off him and veered toward two yellow helmets that hung by the door. She replaced the helmets with their fur hats and brought him a helmet.
“Wear this,” she said, putting on the other helmet.
He grasped intuitively that they were beyond the area of Russian influence.
She led him between two buildings, and he peered through a window. The room’s tile walls were lined with machines. Shiny and covered with valves and gauges, the machines looked relatively high tech. And the long line of scientists standing before the equipment told him the lab was operating at full capacity.
What they were doing, he couldn’t tell.
After another row of laboratories, he felt the penetrating wind full on his face. He blinked several times and covered his eyes to keep out the blowing sand.
But he was hit by something new. It was deep and pervading and smelled like rotten eggs.
And then he saw it.
Where there should have been a pristine desert was the absolute opposite.
Black soot clung to the ground as if it was a permanent resident. Beyond that was a scene of destruction straight out of an apocalyptic movie. Oozing green lakes, as smooth as slate and unmoving in the wind, stretched out as far as he could see. The banks of the lakes were a hardened black foam that was strong enough for a man to stand on. Where the dark shore became green liquid was difficult to define. The lakes themselves looked hard enough to walk on.
Vapors wafted over the lakes in psychedelic patterns that would have been lovely, if it weren’t for the sulfurous stench they brought.
Surrounding the southern shore of the manmade basins were wide pipes that poured a constant flow of glistening black liquid into the lakes. These pipes sat on sturdy supports and trailed across the disturbed land from a series of structures straight out of a previous industrial age. He was looking at a row of buildings wrapped in pipes, festooned with bursts of flames, and topped by a sad birthday cake of smokestacks. Painted a consistent yellow that was the theme of the Altan Tolgoi Mine, the bristling buildings shot plumes of smoke high into the atmosphere and gushed tons of fluid per second into the snaking pipes that emptied into the lakes. The place seemed designed to produce the maximum amount of harm to what was left of Mongolia.
Saran stood there in shock, tears streaming down her cheeks.
No. She had never been to that side of the camp before.
Where in that dystopian nightmare were they going to find Amber?
Her last phone signal had come from the middle of the lakes. As far as he could see through the wisps of evaporation, there was nothing out there on the banks of the rectangular ponds of sludge. Had she met her end in the toxic green liquid?
He pushed the thought out of his mind.
As he was trying to think positive thoughts, his phone vibrated in his pocket. It took peeling back several layers to reach it.
It was a message from Matt.
He stared at the words. “On our way.”
Matt and crew must have fixed the Hyundai’s fuel injection line, filled the tank, and headed south.
He looked to his right, but there was no van in sight. Instead he saw an airport control tower. Had Matt been able to contact the ambassador for a rescue?
“Come to the lakes,” he shot a message back.
Jake shut off the phone, and said, “My group is on its way.”
But Saran seemed too overcome to reply. Or worse. She was looking at a platoon of soldiers that trotted in formation along the southern shore of the lakes.
Jake snapped a quick picture of the scene, then zoomed the camera in on the soldiers. Each man held a short automatic weapon at the ready. In white winter parkas and the mining operation’s yellow helmets, they were either performing a warmup drill or had been deployed for a purpose.
And given that they were heading straight for him, he surmised that he was that purpose.
He quickly snapped another picture and put the phone back in his pocket.
Then he heard a pair of boots shuffle behind him.
“Don’t move,” an icy voice said.
“The hairy man!” Saran cried.
Jake closed his eyes. He recognized the voice.
It was Cal Frost.
Now with the depressing view before him, he could finally place where Cal Frost and his mining client, Kingston-Maes, belonged. They belonged in the ash heap that they had created.
“How can you support all this?” he said, not looking around.
“What’s not to like?” Cal said. “Cerium, yttrium, lanthanum, neodymium?”
“All I see are sulfur pits and giant cesspools.”
“Ha!” Cal said. “You were holding a smartphone. Where do you think that came from?”
Jake was at a loss.
“It came from here. It’s places like this that make technology like that possible, and don’t forget it.”
“I thought my phone was made in China.”
“These buildings behind you refine the tailings from the copper and gold mine to extract all the rare earths necessary to run the modern world. Heck, your smartphone depends on it.”
“Like what?”
“Cerium? It’s used to polish the glass on your phone. Yttrium? How do you think the touchscreen on your phone works? Lanthanum? It improves the tiny lenses in your camera. Neodymium? Your phone’s tiny microphone is made possible with a neodymium magnet. Need I go on?”
So that was Cal’s game. He was all about technology no matter the cost. Cal might be speaking the truth about modern technology, but they were in Mongolia, and the approaching troops didn’t look Mongolian to him.
“What are the Chinese doing here?”
“They’re our partners. We supply the technology and they refine the rare earths. This just happens to be in Mongolia.”
“‘Just happens’ is not a trivial fact.”
At that point, the soldiers reached them and, with a screeched command, came to a coordinated halt.
Not to look guilty or anything, but Saran was already reaching for the sky. Palms upturned, it seemed like she was praying to the heavens.
The commander ordered the two of them seized and Jake had no choice but to raise his hands in surrender.
As he reached for the sky he saw something new, a faint contrail that marked a jet descending from the north.
If that was the ambassador coming to their rescue, Jake had better get out of the hands of the mine guards first.
Saran was pulled from her prayerful pose and manhandled by several soldiers.
&
nbsp; “Now give me your phone,” Cal said.
Jake was happy to give it to the technology lobbyist so that he could drown in his silicon.
With both hands, he reached for his deel and slowly unclasped the outer flap.
“Hurry up,” Cal said, and thrust the muzzle of a weapon into Jake’s back.
“Do you mind? I have several layers to get through.”
He turned and leaned over slightly to get to an inner layer. But he wasn’t going for his phone.
He continued his awkward turn and found his gun. With his left hand, he racked the slide.
Spinning, he elbowed Cal’s weapon aside. Cal had no time to react. In the same move, Jake thrust his gun against Cal’s head.
“You’re under arrest,” Jake said.
The soldiers dropped to one knee and leveled their weapons at him.
“Drop your gun,” he told Cal.
A pistol fell to the ground.
Jake looked at Saran.
“Let her go.”
He put Cal in a chokehold and prepared to blow his brains out. Then Jake jerked his head to communicate with the soldiers to let Saran go.
They looked at their commander for orders. The leader frowned and stared at Cal, his lips stuck in an expression of contempt.
Finally the commander issued an order, and his soldiers unhanded Saran.
Jake was getting nervous with the row of guns pointed at him.
“Drop your weapons,” he told the rest of the soldiers, and shoved his gun deep into Cal’s quivering jowls.
“Fangqi jiao chu!” Cal Frost cried out in perfect Chinese.
Whatever it meant, they dropped their weapons on the American’s command.
Saran wasted no time in picking the weapons out of the snow. Going down the line, she flung each into the lake.
They landed not with a splash but a slurp, and half-sank into the goo.
Holding the final two automatic weapons, one in each hand, she looked like a propaganda poster for the Mongolian military.
“Now take me to Amber Jones,” Jake said.
“Gurgle, gurgle,” Cal replied.
Jake loosened his grip.
“Ah, Amber,” Cal said, choking on his words. He almost sounded nostalgic.
“You didn’t do anything to her,” Jake said.
“Not for lack of trying.”
Jake knew what that meant.
“Take us to Amber!”
They backed away from the disarmed squad of Chinese soldiers, and Cal directed Jake onto a path between two of the lakes.
Saran took over prodding Cal with her guns and Jake took the Chinese commander hostage. The four marched single file across the former steppe that had been turned into a vast grid of putrid-smelling lakes.
Mongolia might have been a geologist’s dream, a treasure trove for prospectors, and a get-rich-quick scheme for profiteers. But their bonanza of underground wealth had made the country vulnerable. With Chinese operating illegally and Russians trying to home in on their mines, they were caught in a squeeze by their more powerful neighbors.
It was up to Jake to get the word out. The whole thing was killing the nation.
Over one shoulder, he saw the jet land and scoot down the runway. Was help on its way?
After fifteen minutes at a steady clip, Jake saw a tiny shed. At the intersection of the four lakes, the small gray building was surrounded by a cluster of pipes that spewed the sludge of modern technology into all four lakes.
Amber’s cell phone had last been pinpointed by the NSA at that exact spot. Was she inside?
A man came running toward them on the embankment from the north. He must have come straight from the landing strip. But it wasn’t a friendly face. Brandishing a handgun was the young Hank Frost.
“Let go of my father,” he called across the acrid waft of vapors.
So that was the ambassador’s response? The plane wasn’t there to rescue them. They had sent in the CIA.
Just as he was trying to figure out how to deal with the new menace from the north, Jake became aware of voices beyond the shed where Amber was likely imprisoned.
Emerging from the Hyundai van to the west were Matt and his wife, the gang of scientists and Peace Corps volunteers, and the vociferous Bill Frost.
“Get a closeup of this!” he cried. “Now pan over the lake.”
His young acolyte Courtney Appleton was holding up her smartphone and recording in response to his directions.
“Good. Now get a closeup of my expression as I see the lake for the first time.”
As if the Frost threesome converging on poor Amber wasn’t enough, another contingent was jogging in tight formation up the narrow strip of land from the south.
Having returned from their quarters rearmed, the mine’s Chinese guards had reconstituted themselves and were on a collision course with the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.
And in the middle of all the confluence a cry from the shed. “Jeez, let me out.”
It was Amber. She was alive!
Only to be caught in the crosshairs of four hostile parties.
A shot rang out from the Chinese side, and at the same moment, Jake felt a bullet crease his construction helmet.
Saran crouched and unloaded a burst of fire on the Chinese, and several soldiers hit the dirt.
Instantly, guns were drawn on all sides.
The Chinese wanted Jake dead. Saran wanted the Chinese dead. Hank wanted his father back. Jake wanted Amber back. And, unarmed, Matt cried out for a ceasefire.
The Chinese weren’t through with Saran, and they unloaded a hail of bullets at her, with Cal caught in the crossfire.
Jake saw soil fly up as shots embedded in the ground. Saran spun around like a ballerina in a death dance. The bullets struck her mercilessly.
“Ugh!” Cal was hit. He fell away from Saran. His hair flew upward then completely off his once well-coiffed head.
Struck by stray fire from both Hank and the Chinese, Saran had no chance. She was dead before she hit the ground. And Cal was thrown facedown into the lake.
“Cease fire!” Matt repeated over the loud chatter of gunfire.
The scene was a battleground, with bodies lying on two banks, Hank crouching to unload more firepower on Saran, and Jake clutching the commander as a shield.
There were Chinese, Americans, and Mongolians dead or dying. One Frost was down, and his brother was filming the whole event.
The commander in Jake’s clutches yelled at his troops to go away. His words were harsh and his emotions raw.
The intensity of the tirade took his men by surprise. They gathered up their dead and wounded and, heavily burdened, trudged back toward their Disney castle of chimneys.
Jake tossed the commander aside and ran to Saran’s aid. She lay face up, her mouth agape. There was no movement. No breathing. He saw the deep blue sky reflected in her wide-open eyes. It was the last thing she saw.
He gently rested her back on her woolen cap. Moonlight had died bravely for her land.
He wrenched himself away and went to check on Cal Frost. His onetime nemesis lay at the water’s edge, facedown in the green soup. His shock of hair, blown off by his son’s gunfire, lay at his feet where he fell.
Jake dragged the lobbyist out of the muck and flipped him over. All the death around them had been caused by a single man. And he had destroyed the world of the Gobi as well.
Hank came running through the water to his stricken father.
He shook the big guy by the shoulders and used a sleeve to wipe the green sludge off his face.
There was a cough. Cal Frost was still alive.
Bill Frost limped around the shed and came to stand over his brother, incomprehension written on his face.
His heart heavy, Jake regained his feet. All around him, people slowly tried to put the pieces back together.
Tracy stooped down to gather a sample of lake water.
“She finally got to run her spectrometer last night,�
�� Nils came over and explained.
“What did she find?” Jake asked, his heart no longer in it.
“As you know, she gathered samples from animals, food, and water all the way down to these tailings ponds. In all of them, she found varying levels of cyanide, arsenic, mercury, nitric and sulfuric acid, and high levels of radiation. All very toxic.”
Jake watched the scientist stand up and put a cork in her final sample.
Eve was chasing the Chinese soldiers away.
“You bad boys!” she cried out.
Matt came over to Jake and watched his wife give it to her fellow countrymen.
She probably wouldn’t stop until they crossed the border.
Jake hadn’t fired a single shot, and could finally put his gun away.
Matt placed a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s get Amber.”
Three sets of dead bolt locks had prevented her from leaving.
Jake slid them all back.
“It’s me,” he said wearily. “It’s all clear.”
The sunlight caught her full on the face as she emerged from the darkness. Stuffed like a shriveled child in an enormous, soot-covered deel with a fur-lined hood, Amber locked her eyes on Jake.
“Special Agent Maguire?”
“Teem,” Jake said. “I mean sain baina uu.”
“What are you talking about?”
He smiled. She had been held captive in that tiny, cold shed for four days and hadn’t changed a bit.
But for him, everything had changed.
With Hank in custody and with Saran’s inert body and a writhing Cal on makeshift stretchers, the party of Americans returned to the ger camp.
Jake found the doctor’s ger by following the trail. First were Saran and his fur hats, then the spittle still frozen on the ground, and finally the discarded wine bottles half-buried in the snow.
Jake knocked and the doctor answered.
“Why do you knock? Come in.”
They carefully laid Saran on one of the low beds that lined the curved wall, and threw Cal Frost into the other.
The doctor recognized Saran at once. He could also see that her deel was soaked in her own blood.
He listened briefly to her heart and lungs, then reluctantly removed his stethoscope from his ears.
He crossed her hands over her chest, gently closed her eyes, and pulled the blanket over her head. Then he muttered several private phrases in Mongolian.
