Black Pearl Read online

  On the twelfth storey of the hospital, Ajani was too high above the streets to see individuals. The window was double-glazed and the air-conditioning fitfully alive, so he heard nothing of their panicked flight southward. All he really saw was a wall of flame-footed smoke that swept incredibly rapidly into the city on his right. He reeled unsteadily, fighting to take in what his eyes were revealing to him in a kind of drug-enhanced slow motion. Fire ran relentlessly through city blocks. Vehicles of all sizes were swept aside, burning, exploding. Buildings reeled, collapsed, ignited. Petrol stations detonated as though hit by bunker-buster bombs. Power went out. The air-con choked – then the back-up generators kicked in and gave it the kiss of life. Ajani bashed his forehead against the glass as he strained to see more. He watched, unbelieving, as the red flood swept through the airport, covering the runway and sweeping at last into the massive avgas storage tanks. The explosion as they blew apart shook the hospital more forcefully than the collapse of the volcano wall had done.

  Ajani fell backwards and hit his head on the floor. He pulled himself erect and reeled to the little cubicle in which he kept his equipment. Here he vomited so forcefully that the whole world seemed to shake and swirl. He passed out into a coma deep enough to block out the shrilling of the hospital’s fire alarms and the bustle of rushing feet. During the time he was unconscious, the building was evacuated. All the patients assembled, in beds and wheelchairs as necessary, in the car park outside, well away from every danger of the molten lava except for the sulphurous stench of it. Here they waited expectantly for help. But the flawlessly executed procedure proved useless. For Karisoke was joined by Lac Dudo in another grim little joke.

  The floor of the lake, like the floor of the caldera high above it, was hollow. Beneath a thin crust on its southern side was a chamber, sealed for centuries. This did not contain magma but a range of gases, mostly consisting of carbon dioxide but also hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. As the caldera emptied, pouring lava past the lake’s eastern shore, so the bubble burst. The southern section of the lake – far away from Dr Kuozomi’s oyster beds – boiled fiercely for several minutes as millions of cubic metres of gas burst up into the air. It rolled in an invisible cloud down the hillside beside the lava, also guided by the various folds of the mountain’s topography – and, indeed, that of the valley at its foot where the city lay trapped in a deep depression. It flooded into the western suburbs of the city that the molten rock had left untouched. Heavier than air, it swept into the streets and buildings in an invisible wall five stories high. It filled rooms, apartments, corridors, ventilation systems and lift shafts. It flooded into basements and tunnels. It filled the city’s once-vaunted underground train system. It washed through the south-western suburbs and out on to the farmland that clothed the foothills of the next mountain range, then, dammed there, it washed back and settled. It filled the streets and parks, the gardens and the open spaces. It filled the car park where the patients, doctors and nurses were waiting and smothered them all in moments. Everywhere it went it snuffed out life as efficiently as if the entire area had become one huge shower stall in Auschwitz.

  So that, although he never knew it, Ajani was the last man left alive in Cite La Bas when he came staggering out of his tiny cubicle and started to look around. The fire alarms were still ringing. The air-conditioning was still wheezing. The lights and signs were all still illuminated. Ajani knew the procedure well enough. If the alarms were on, the lifts were out of bounds. But the thought of going down the twenty-four flights of stairs that would take him down twelve stories was more than the staggering man could contemplate. He hit the button on the nearest lift, therefore, and leaned against the wall, listening as the car wheezed asthmatically up towards him. Apart from that mechanical gasping and the shrilling of the alarm, the whole place – the whole city – seemed silent. Ajani decided that as soon as he reached the ground floor he would check out the pharmacy. With any luck he would be able to get his hands on more drugs. From the look of things there would be a ready market for anything he could steal. Though The Ahia was, like the airport, somewhere under whatever had come blazing down the mountainside.

  The door hissed open. Ajani stepped in and hit the ground-floor button. The door slithered closed. Ajani looked at his reflection in the mirror on the back wall. His eyes were watering, he noted with some surprise. Then he noticed that his adenoids were burning. His nostrils twitched strongly enough to make the scars of his tribal Poro initiation writhe like snakes beneath the skin of his cheeks. Abruptly it seemed as though the whole area behind his nose was prickling uncomfortably. He sneezed; dragged his hand down over his face. Sneezed again and gasped. Abruptly, he realized his throat was hurting also. He frowned, shaking his head. Perhaps he had picked something up, he thought. The other cleaners were always getting infections from the wards and the patients. Ajani never had – perhaps because the medications he took were strong enough to keep everything else at bay, along with the pain. He looked over his shoulder. The lift was at the fifth floor. Not long now, he thought dreamily. But the pain in his throat had spread with unexpected swiftness into his chest and he was suddenly finding it hard to catch his breath.

  Then, between floors five and four, the lift stopped, so abruptly that Ajani fell to his knees. Damn, he thought. Now I’ll have to call for help. That means I won’t be able to get to the pharmacy so easily. He reached up for the alarm button but he couldn’t quite reach it. He took firm hold of the handrail which ran at waist height round the car and started to pull himself up. Only to find, with some surprise, that he no longer had the strength to do so.

  A sudden realization stabbed through him. He might be in really serious trouble here. He sucked in a good lungful of air to call for help, but all he could do was cough and choke. He gathered his knees up to his chin and hugged them as hard as he could. The whole of his torso seemed to be on fire. Like the volcano Karisoke, burning wildly on the inside. He never really understood that he was being smothered by poison gases. Hardly even registered, in his dreamy, drugged-up state, that he was dying. The lights went out and a huge, dark silence seemed to close over him like the waters of the strange black lake so close to where he had slaughtered the Japanese workers so long ago.

  2013

  Then, a decade later, the rains came. Torrential, unrelenting, month after month. In a vicious meteorological irony, all the areas of East Africa where huge populations tried to scratch a living were almost totally destroyed by drought. But on the empty and forsaken forests surrounding the Central African mountain chain that is the headwater of the great River Gir – which fed the black lake – five years’ rainfall tore down in less than a month. There were mudslides on Karisoke’s upper slopes powerful enough to tear down even the deserted virgin jungle. More huge trees joined the monster beside which Mizuki’s bones lay. The wide black path of the lava flow – as slick as a highway two kilometres wide even after a decade – was transformed into a wild torrent. Great rocks tore the lower sections into a black moonscape. The deserted, half-buried ruin of Cite La Bas was briefly flooded. And Lac Dudo burst its banks.

  As well as his precious orchidarium, Dr Koizumi had overseen the construction of a series of dams and sluices to protect his priceless oysters and the black pearls he hoped they would bear to enrich the ill-fated Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company, which had employed him and sent him and his little team out here to seed the black lake with Japanese Biwa oysters. But they were no match for floods such as these. As the lake burst free of its natural boundaries, so it burst out of the doctor’s system as well. The raging torrent tore away the reed bed through which Mizuki had fled, and uncovered the grinning skull which was all that was left of Dr Koizumi. The flood rolled the skull like a boulder into the ruined orchidarium where the precious plants had continued to blossom untended through all those years. It swept them on to a black-foaming crest and washed them on to a bed of water hyacinth.

  But the power of the deluge was so massive t
hat it ripped away the floor of the lake as easily as it tore free some of the plant-choked surface, so that Dr Koizumi’s skull was joined on the floating bed of hyacinth not only by his beloved orchids but also by a dozen or more of his huge black pearl-rich oysters. And that bed of hyacinth, a thickly woven mat of stems and roots almost as big as a barge, stayed coherent as it was swept down into the river system that the waters from the black lake fed. Miraculously, the orchids, the oysters and the skull remained wedged in place as the hyacinth barge slid over waterfalls and cataracts, through races and rapids until it sailed safely out on to the broad stream of the main river. The river that was the life’s blood of Benin La Bas, the great River Gir.

  The hyacinth-laden barge swept swiftly downriver, through what had once been prosperous farms and plantations. Past the ruins of fishing villages and mining towns which, like Dr Koizumi’s facility, had flourished in the seventies only to die during the relentless onslaughts of the eighties and nineties. Every now and then there would be something newer – projects that had died at birth under the dead hand of the bribe-crippled kleptocracies that had run the place through into the noughties and early twenty-tens, before the IMF, World Bank and interested economies from Chile to China discovered that money invested in Central Africa was even more at risk than that invested in Iceland or Ireland.

  Until, at last, the great river entered the inner delta. A stream that had been as broad as the Amazon at Manaos suddenly fractured, shattered, running away into the swampy jungle in a maze of lesser streams. The barge would have been lost, too, but for the force of the flood which held its floating island in midstream so that it followed that tap-root of the River Gir straight into the heart of the inner delta. Here the flood had all but swamped even the hardiest mangroves. But they still reached out, like deadly reefs, until one at last snagged the matted roots of water hyacinth. The mares’ nest of vegetation swung inwards towards the shore and became more firmly anchored.

  It had reached its final resting place, seemingly almost as high as the simple wooden cross on top of the missionary church, which was the first sign of current human habitation half a kilometre inland on a knoll miraculously above the floodwater. Then the flood beneath the chapel crested and began to recede. The force of the falling water sucked at the hyacinth raft with sufficient force to start breaking it up. The mangroves tore at it as the current began to release them, ripping at it as they sprang back like the claws of the great panthers that had once hunted here, with branches as powerful as the arms of the huge gorillas that had once ruled the jungle on far Mount Karisoke. The raft came apart. Dr Koizumi’s skull rolled away into the receding waters. The rest fell into the mud of the river’s shore.

  The rains eased. The water fell. The river at last resumed its accustomed river course, running gently enough to allow the first couple of orphans from the church school near the chapel to come down to the bank and begin to explore the aftermath of the flood, like creatures recently released from the Ark. And it was they who found the oysters lying like a bunch of misshapen black grapes in the mud of the riverside. They took the oysters to the women who ran the place, Celine Chaka, estranged daughter of the current president of Benin La Bas, and Anastasia Asov, disowned daughter of one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in Russia. It was Anastasia who opened them and discovered the huge black pearls within.

  Anastasia gave the largest of the pearls to her father, Maximilian Asov, who was in the country planning to do a deal with President Chaka. She would have given them all to Richard Mariner – in the country on the same mission – for she trusted him more than she trusted any member of her family. But Max Asov had a famously successful jewellery business and promised to get her top dollar. It was a promise she and Celine were happy to rely on as they fought to rebuild the finances and infrastructure of their ruined orphanage.

  Intrigued by the colour of the pearl, Max had it tested. And so he found that the mud which gave the oil-dark pearl its unique colour – the mud that formed the bed of Lac Dudo, was the purest form of coltan yet discovered. Suddenly the apparently primary interest in the mysterious black pearls became secondary to what had made them black in the first place.

  Columbite tantalite – coltan for short – is a black metallic ore only found in major quantities in the eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not far to the south of Benin La Bas. Max had contacts who could refine the ore if he could get at it. They were experts in extracting the niobium, which was used in a range of modern equipment from MRI scanners to nuclear power stations. And also the far more precious metallic tantalum, a heat-resistant powder capable of holding a high electrical charge, a vital element in capacitors, the electronic elements that control current flow inside miniature circuit boards. Tantalum capacitors lie at the heart of cell phones, laptops, pagers, flat-screen TVs and almost every other electronic device, from the radar that keeps the international airplanes safe to the control panels that keep the Internet alive. The technology boom of the noughties caused the price of coltan to skyrocket. Max’s experts estimated it would fetch in excess of two hundred and fifty US dollars a kilo, though it had reached more than four hundred dollars a kilo in the past. Even at two-fifty, that meant it was worth a quarter of a million dollars per metric tonne.

  According to the latest maps they could get hold of – those prepared by the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company for Dr Koizumi in 1972, Lac Dudo’s bed was a million square kilometres in area. The depth of sediment on the lake bed, according to the careful Japanese map makers, averaged ten metres, which meant that the lake could contain ten trillion cubic metres of coltan sediment. A cubic metre of sediment weighs roughly a metric tonne. It took Max Asov almost no time at all to calculate that here could be two trillion, five hundred billion dollars’ worth of coltan, therefore, all just waiting for anyone who could get to it and manage to set up an extraction facility on the ruins of Dr Koizumi’s doomed black pearl oyster farm.

  Richard

  ‘Look, Max,’ repeated Richard Mariner, raising his voice over the thunder of the Kamov’s rotor. ‘Just getting up here in a chopper has taken months of planning. You must see how much tougher it will be to get a permanent team this far by water or on foot. It’ll be a long, hard, dangerous undertaking. You’d be mad to even think of leading it yourself.’ He leaned forward forcefully, frowning with concern, his ice-blue gaze probing his associate’s square Russian face.

  ‘For two trillion dollars I’d crawl up here myself,’ answered Max. ‘Especially, as you say, after everything I have invested in the project already.’

  ‘Besides,’ added Max’s business partner Felix Makarov, suavely leaning forward to confront Richard, his eyes, like Max’s, alight with the promise of two trillion US dollars, ‘there may be alternatives to coming up the river by boat. Look how far we have managed to come by chopper, for instance. Maybe we could just drop a team in place …’

  ‘Admitted,’ Richard agreed, leaning back into his comfortable seat, one long finger thoughtfully stroking the razor-straight scar on his cheekbone as he thought through Felix’s statement. ‘But hopping up for a look-see in the company Kamov is one thing. Setting up a facility to extract the coltan is quite another. Besides, an aircraft of any kind is only useful if you can land it. And at the moment I’ll be damned if I can see anywhere suitable down there.’

  The three men grouped round the table at the front of Max’s executive Kamov which belonged to his mining company Bashnev/Sevmash, looking out of the window at the relentless green of the jungle’s upper canopy. From this angle the virgin rainforest looked like head after head of broccoli to Richard – countless thousands of them; maybe millions reaching to the horizon on their right, where the borders with the countries of Central Africa lay hidden, and to the horizon on their left. Behind them it seemed to reach in an unbroken carpet to the coast, but Richard knew this was an illusion. And ahead of them, the jungle mounted to the ragged, flood-damaged tree line high on the slopes
of the huge and restless volcano called Mount Karisoke and the border with the neighbouring country of Congo Libre. But it was hard to get a grip of the fact that each one of the apparently numberless green humps of foliage was standing about a hundred metres above the actual ground, encompassing a cubic area larger than a cathedral.

  It had taken the Kamov eight hours’ solid flying time to get here from Granville Harbour at the distant mouth of the River Gir, powering through the low, humid sky above the great waterway at its maximum speed. Eight hours that did not count the layover every two hours in increasingly remote wilderness areas where Max had set up fuel dumps. The whole project had taken six months to get even this far – the first sortie up to the fabulous lake itself. A trip that biznizmen Max and Felix insisted on leading themselves – and which the Mariners would not have missed for the world. Here, as in their dealings all over the globe, from the oilfields of the Arctic to those off the shores of Benin La Bas, whatever Bashnev/Sevmash discovered, drilled or mined, Heritage Miner shipped for them – and usually by water.

  The last executive seat was occupied by Richard’s wife and business partner, Robin. ‘Even so,’ she said now, shaking her golden curls and frowning as she picked up on Richard’s point, ‘you’re looking at two thousand kilometres in from the coast. Two thousand kilometres from civilization to this Lac Dudo. And that’s as the crow flies. It must be another five hundred or so if you follow the river. Always assuming you can follow the river. What with the waterfalls, cataracts and white-water rapids we’ve flown over during the flight so far. And then there’s still this at the end of it.’ She gave a shudder, looking down.

  ‘But there is civil infrastructure down there already,’ insisted Max, straining round and unsuccessfully trying to catch the eye of whichever local government historian present on the Kamov had described the transport system in its seventies heyday to him. ‘There are roads, a railway, the whole communications network built in the late sixties and early seventies when this place was booming. There’s a twelve-lane highway joining Cite La Bas with CiteMatadi, then going straight on down to Granville Harbour and the coast.’