African Ice (19 page)

She finished stowing her gear and consulted her topographical map. The direct route to the final location would take them over some extreme terrain, but the indirect route would add hours to the trek. She gave Travis an azimuth and they began to move through the jungle. He altered their course slightly to follow a ridge that ran parallel to their desired route. A small stream trickled along the bottom of the incline and he led the team through the shallow water rather than the thick underbrush. They made much better time not having to hack through the foliage, and just before two o'clock they were closing in on the final location. He signaled for the three porters hauling Sam's geological gear to rest for a minute, and he sat on a felled tree and motioned for her to join him.

“How close are we?”

She studied the lay of the land intently before answering. To their immediate right was a towering ridge, covered with thick vines and totally impassable. It was incredible that anything could grow on such a steep incline, but somehow the thorny lianas and creeping vines managed a foothold. About a hundred feet along the crest of the six-hundred-foot-high-ridge was a substantial outcrop, reaching an additional two hundred feet into the air. She placed her finger on the map exactly where the outcrop occurred, then cross-referenced the data from Billy Hackett's helicopter. She pointed upstream and right to the ridge.

“Two hundred fifty to three hundred feet farther,” she said. “It's going to form part of this ridge we've been following.”

“Excellent,” he said, checking his watch. “We should have time for you to set up—”

A scream from behind them, deep in the bush, stopped him in mid-sentence. With a reflexive motion, a gun appeared in his hand. He held his other hand up to silence the porters. The scream came again, this time the location more identifiable. McNeil counted the porters and silently indicated to Sam that one was missing. He held up his fist, a sign for them to stay put, and moved stealthily into the underbrush. All was quiet for a minute; then he reappeared with a shaking porter in tow. He motioned for Sam to follow him.

“I don't think you're going to like this,” he said, walking back along the same route he had used moments before. They broke into a small clearing, less than twenty feet square, and Sam gasped, horrified. Before her lay a massacre. Skulls littered the clearing—at least fifteen, perhaps more. Bones, gnawed on by jungle carnivores and partially covered with lichens, were interspersed with the hollow skulls. McNeil knelt down and picked up a skull, then another, and another. He looked back at Sam and stuck his finger through a round hole in one of the skulls. A bullet hole.

“They were executed,” he said. “Each one shot once in the head.” He searched the carnage for a while longer as Sam tried to grasp what she was seeing. He gingerly held up a long bone with a loop of nylon rope hanging off it. “Their hands were tied. They didn't stand a chance.”

“Who would do such a thing?” she said, sickened.

“I think this would answer that question,” he replied, digging a piece of metal from a nearby tree. He held it out for her to inspect. It meant nothing to her. “It's a bullet. From a Bofors Carl-Gustaf CGA5.”

She shuddered and went wide-eyed. “That's the make of gun Dan saw in the back of Mugumba's tarped-over truck.” He kicked at something with the toe of his boot, then bent down and retrieved the object from the moss. He held it out to her. “Do you know what this is?”

“Yes, of course. It's a geological hammer. Standard gear for a field geologist. We all carry them.” She stopped and stared at him. “It's them, isn't it?”

He nodded. “It's the expedition that went in a couple of months ago. The bones are reasonably fresh.”

“Mugumba killed them,” she said slowly, and he nodded slightly. “He must have thought they found the diamonds or he wouldn't have killed them. In fact, they
did
find the diamonds.”

“How do you figure that?” he asked, grasping her by the elbow and gently leading her from the clearing.

“If they had rough, uncut diamonds with them when he intercepted them, he would have known they found the vein. But if they suspected Mugumba was going to kill them, they would have held back the location. Mugumba thought he could locate the vein, it was so close, so he slaughtered them. Then he looked but couldn't find it. He reported his failure back to New York, and Kerrigan hired us to finish the job. Kerrigan and Mugumba knew all along the formation was close to here, and that's why Mugumba's men didn't leave Butembo until we started moving our team into this area. He's waiting for us to find it, and then . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

“I wish you were wrong,” he said, as they rejoined the team of porters. “But you're not. How quickly can you find this thing?”

“Let's move up to where the last formation is. I'll be able to tell you better once I'm set up and running the laser ablation.” He agreed and the small team began to move. Twenty minutes later Sam was collecting rocks from the base of the formation. She chiseled the most promising stones, keying in on variations in color and texture that would give her the trace elements she so desperately needed. She took twenty-three pieces from the formation and then began testing. Half an hour later, she reported the results to McNeil.

“We've got it!” she said. Her voice was excited, but tinged with some reservation. He picked up on the hesitation in her voice.

“You don't sound totally convinced.”

“I'm not. And that's the strange thing. What I'm looking for is there, but in the wrong quantities. I'm lacking two elements almost completely, exactly on with six, and in excess with the last three. It doesn't make sense.”

“What about diamonds? Keep it simple, you know. Just find the diamonds and to heck with all this trace element stuff.”

She shook her head. “It's not that simple. Diamonds don't look like much before they're cut and polished. They blend in with the surrounding rocks, and most times are found buried deep inside the formation. You need to be sure you're looking in exactly the right spot before you start ripping the rock apart.”

“It's not always like that,” he retaliated. “You said so yourself.” She looked at him inquisitively and he continued. “Two weeks ago, you talked about diamonds you sometimes find sitting on the surface. There's a special name for them.”

“Alluvial diamonds. And that was in Sierra Leone, not the Congo. The northeastern region of the Congo has never yielded one alluvial diamond. Not one, Travis.” She stopped for a second, then grabbed his arm, staring straight into his eyes. “And yet, we know the other expeditions found diamonds close to where we're standing.” She looked up from his eyes to the huge ridge next to them, following the cliff to its peak. “Unless . . .” She stared at the top of the ridge.

“Unless what?”

“Unless we're on the wrong side of the ridge,” she said quietly. “That's why there has never been a diamond found in any stream or river anywhere in the northern regions of the Congo. The Ruwenzori Mountains, including this ridge, control which way the water flows. The water in this stream,” she pointed to the rivulet they had trudged through earlier in the afternoon, “empties into the Congo River basin and drains into the Atlantic. On the other side of the ridge, the water flows into the Shilango, a small coastal river that's part of the Nile River basin. No wonder no one ever found it.”

He looked at the towering cliff with trepidation. “How the hell do you propose we get over this thing?”

“I don't think we have to,” Sam said. “The other team found the diamonds, and they weren't geared to climb something like this. I think there's another way—a way through the wall.”

“A tunnel,” he said.

“Exactly. We just have to find it,” Sam said, checking her watch. “We've got about two hours until darkness. I suggest we start looking immediately.”

He nodded and began organizing the porters. Samantha divided the rock wall into five seventy-foot lengths, one for each of them. From the ground to twenty feet up the wall, they were to poke and prod through the dense vines and lianas for an opening, no matter how small. It took only twenty minutes before one of the porters began to chatter excitedly in his native Bantu tongue. Travis and Samantha arrived at the same time and the man backed off to let them see his find. Travis pulled aside the heavy curtain of vines, then looked at the porter, perplexed. The man waved his arms excitedly, motioning for him to push farther into the damp growth. Travis turned and wormed his way a few feet upward and inward. All that was left showing was his hiking boots when Samantha heard him say, “Holy shit” softly under his breath. A moment later he extracted himself from the tangled mess and shook his head.

“If I'd been looking here, I would never have found that,” he said. “There's a round opening about six feet in diameter that burrows right into the rock face. It's pretty smooth inside, like an ancient river carved it. Hand me up a heavy-duty flashlight and I'll have a look inside.”

Samantha checked the battery strength on the largest light they had and handed it up to him. “Watch out for snakes and tarantulas,” she said encouragingly as he started into the tunnel.

The walls were reasonably smooth and covered with slimy green lichen. An occasional sharp rock protruded from the ceiling, but Travis could walk upright as long as he crouched a few inches. Anyone a few inches shorter than six feet wouldn't need to duck. He made good progress, encountering nothing living that threatened him, just a few harmless spiders and worms. The footing was tricky, slippery rocks with very little growth on them. He estimated he had traveled slightly over a hundred and fifty feet when the flashlight beam illuminated a wall of vines ahead. He pushed his way through the tangle and into the filtered sunlight. What he saw was unbelievable.

He was inside a huge crack in the mountain. The base of the crack at the mouth of the tunnel was only fifteen feet across. But the walls that rose above him on all sides were hundreds of feet high. Little sunlight filtered down into the crevice, and not much grew on the rocky walls. But the top of the crevice was engulfed by the rain-forest canopy, making the fissure in the rock impossible to see from above. He stared for a couple of minutes, marveling at the freak of nature. He reentered the tunnel and went back for Sam. She was waiting, along with a thousand questions.

“Did you get through okay? What's on the other side?”

He held up his hand. “Whoa, take it easy. It's no problem. Let's grab your gear and get you through to the other side. You can decide whether we've found the diamonds.” He grinned at her. “You're the geologist.”

Travis got on the radio to Alain at base camp while the porters readied the gear. Travis advised him to reverse the polarity on the GPS system, then move camp by a few hundred yards. That would send Mugumba's troops in the wrong direction, for a while at least. Travis told Alain to have Dan set charges around the area the soldiers would be approaching, and to have the camp on highest alert; Mugumba was coming. They should strip Koko of his transmitter and leave it pinned to a tree near the GPS. That would give Mugumba the confirmation of their location. Or rather, their trap. And then he told his team about the discovery of the previous expedition's bones, just to ensure they realized Mugumba was serious. He cut off the transmission and joined Sam at the mouth of the tunnel. He motioned for the porters to scatter into the bush and wait until they returned; then he and Sam entered the dank confines of the underground passage.

Travis led the way, carrying the heaviest of Sam's prospecting gear. He checked back on occasion, but she was having no trouble keeping up with him. They reached the far end of the tunnel and he pushed through the vines, then set the gear down gently on the other side. He jumped out and grabbed her hand as she came through the tangle that hid the opening. He watched her as she took in the spectacle.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “This is unreal.”

The rock face towering hundreds of feet above her was streaked with varying hues of yellow and blue. Muted shades, barely visible in the dim light that struggled to reach the depths of the chasm, mutated and slowly changed color as she moved along the bottom of the cliff. She stared upward at the spectacle, her feet unsteady on the loose rock that littered the ground. She slipped once, almost falling before Travis caught her, but her gaze never left the smooth rock face. Finally, she turned to him, her eyes more alive than he had ever seen.

“Unbelievable,” was all she said.

“Do you need your equipment set up?”

“No,” she said quickly. “No, that's not necessary.” She took a lingering look at the surrounding walls and continued. “I don't need to run the tests. This is it. We're standing in the center of a kimberlitic pipe. This is the diamondiferous formation we've been searching for.”

“You can tell that by just looking?”

“Oh, yes. This is a geologist's dream, the mother lode you search for your entire life and never find. Geology at its simplest, yet its grandest. Mother Nature giving us a glimpse of how she can transform coal into diamonds.” She moved to the far end of the aperture, about forty feet from the hole in the wall where they had entered, and pointed up. “See where the rock juts out on one side; there's an indent on the opposite side. This is a giant crack in the mountain. And that crack split a massive kimberlite pipe right in half. We are standing inside a rock formation that is millions of years old, once under intense heat and pressure. Enough pressure to squeeze chunks of coal into diamonds.” She scanned the wall in front of her intently, then pulled her hammer from her belt and chipped away at the rock. A few moments later, she held a greenish tinged rock up for him to see.

“This is a raw, uncut diamond,” she said. “Probably ten carats, give or take. It would be a rare find in a fully operational diamond mining operation, yet commonplace in these walls. I could dig out a million dollars in stones in twenty minutes. Ten million in less than two hours.”