Black Onyx Duology (8 page)

18

It was morning in Honolulu and Dillon woke up early, about six, and called James.

“
Where the devil are you?”

“Back home.”

“Home in Honolulu?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve only been gone twelve hours. Are you telling me you went from Antarctica to Hawaii in twelve hours?”

“No, like two
, actually. I stopped a few places. But that’s not why I’m calling. I want you to know I’m heading to Zaire.”

“Dillon, just stop. Stop whatever you’re doing and just wait for me. I should be there in—”

“You want me to wait for you so you can talk me out of it.”

“You’re bloody damn right I’m talking you out of it. I’ve spoken to George. We’re both in agreeance that we’re selling the suit to the highest bidder. Henry has already gotten interest from a buyer representing the
Israeli government and—”

“I’ll see you when you get here,
James.”

“Dillon, Dillon! Don’t you hang up on me!
”

Dillon hung up. He smiled as he
stood and went out to the garage. The suit was there, in the corner. He went up and touched it before going back inside and having a shower. Then he came out wearing just sweats and a T-shirt. The suit opened for him and he got inside: the rush of power causing butterflies in his stomach.

He opened the garage, ensuring no one was on the street, grabbed the gym
bag he had prepared the night before, and then rocketed into the sky. He was easily two hundred feet up when he stopped and looked down to the little island that had been his home for so long. It was quiet up here, quieter than anywhere else he had ever experienced in his life, and he enjoyed the silence a bit before placing the strap of the gym bag around his chest and then drifting forward. He straightened out, and began gaining speed.

Before he knew
it, he was over Japan, and then China, and then India, and then the Arabian Peninsula. He would stop every so often and check the GPS on his iPhone to ensure he was heading the right way, but his flight was surprisingly accurate for how quickly he was moving. It was almost as if the suit knew where he wanted to go and took him there.

Africa appeared different than everywhere else. It had every environment of every other country. Deserts and mountains covered in ice and snow, and thick jungles and forests and rocky
, almost alien, terrain. To someone that’d never been here before it could be like going to Mars.

But Dillon knew the Congo well. They’d been here before but had been denied access in Zaire to going anywhere near the diamond mines.

Diamonds are one of the most abundant minerals on earth. They are, in reality, worthless. But because the De Beers company had stockpiled them and worked out monopolies with foreign governments, they cut supply and increased demand, making diamonds more expensive than gold.

And to the tribes and warlords that were granted protection and mining contracts with De Beers in the third-world countries they mined, it was a fortune.
One that had caused slaughter and mass rape and genocide. And they guarded their fountains of wealth viciously.

Dillon knew exactly where he was going.
A mine near Zaire, known to only a few. James—and his contacts in the Congo—were some of those few.

Dillon found the large mountain shaped like an ice cream cone, covered in lush green vegetation
, the sun bright in the sky. He put away his phone in the gym bag and slowly made his way down. On the far side, crowds of men worked in the large mine. He could see children hauling supplies in and out of the mine, their faces caked in dirt and sweat. Some of them unable to afford shoes, their feet leaving bloody tracks in the dirt paths.

Dillon took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
What the hell am I doing?
he said to himself.
Getting rich
, was the reply.

He jumped off the mounta
in in a free dive, headfirst, and gained speed as his chest was several inches from the jagged rocks below. Then he pulled himself up and twisted around, aimed directly at the entrance of the mine. He pointed himself like an arrow and shot inside the mine, a gust of wind and a blur the only things the miners experienced.

The mine was lit with lamps. He navigated the narrow corridors until he came to a large vein that several miners were busy at. He slowed, but couldn’t stop.

“Whoa…whoaaaaa—”

He slammed into the
stone wall, massive chunks of stone breaking away and the space filling with dust and dirt. Dillon found himself on his back and he slowly rose. The miners were coughing and running: they thought it was a collapse.

Dillon turned to the vein and could see enormous chunks of pure diamond. He began tearing them out of the wall like a bulldozer and s
hoving handfuls into his gym bag. He was able to tear into the walls in a way the miner’s machines weren’t able to. He felt grumblings underneath his feet and knew that the mine was weak, set up with just enough precautions so they could get the diamonds but not enough to ensure the safety of the workers.

He filled half his
gym bag, digging further and further down, before he turned and began flying out of the mine. At the very lip was a young boy. His feet were cut and he was malnourished. He stood silently and watched the figure floating above him.

Dillon reached into his
gym bag and took out a large diamond. He flung it to the boy, who immediately hid it in his clothing. Dillon winked at him.

He shot into the air and was gone.

19

Night had just fallen as Dillon sat on the beach, a towel laid out in front of him. On it were, by his estimation, about four million dollars in unrefined milky diamonds. The moonlight was reflecting off the water in shattered splinters, making the light appear like it was alive. Dillon watched the stars as he heard footsteps behind him and Jaime sat down next to him.

“Sounds like another party at your house,” Dillon said.

“Just my family. I want you to meet them, actually. My mom is really anxious to meet you. She saw your article in
Outside
.”

He looked to her. “Really?”

“Don’t be so shocked, it was a nice article.”

“Read by ten people, three of which were my friends. Doesn’t matter
, though. I’ve got something that…Jaime, I don’t even know how to describe it.”

“What?”

“No, I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to show you. Tonight. Give me…one hour.”

“Oh,” she said with a smile, “why Mr. Mentzer
, you have me intrigued.”

“You majored in art history, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You’re
gonna love it. One hour?”

“
One hour.”

Dillon gathered his towel, making sure the diamonds were hidden, just as the alarm on his watch went off. It was time to go.

“One hour,” he said, walking away.

She just smiled
and watched him leave.

Dillon was
in the suit above the clouds. He drifted over them lazily, dipping his hand into them as if he were on a boat with his fingers running over the surface of water. Then he remembered he had a schedule to keep. He could play later.

He ducked his head and aligned his body, shooting forward with such force his stomach seemed to jump into his throat. It was a silent force
and inside the suit he could only hear a soft wind.

The dark landscape was before him as he checked his GPS. He was less than a mile from where he need
ed to be. Flying down, he came to the top of a small hill overlooking a village. Thrusting out his legs, he slammed into the earth, his hands down on the ground, the suit absorbing the impact. He stood up, his eyes taking on the blue glow that turned on in the dark.

The village below him wasn’t really a village. It was a compound
. A warlord named Sabba controlled this region. Inside that compound were the result of years of mining in Sierra Leone, both diamonds and precious gems. Dillon didn’t doubt that there would also be an ample supply of gold and silver but that was more than he could carry in a gym bag.

He observed the compound. About twenty g
uards on the exterior, maybe thirty on the interior, all armed with semi-automatic rifles. He saw a tank and several jeeps with massive guns secured on top.

Most of the compound
was barracks and training facilities, but at the center, guarded by the bulk of the men, was a cement bunker. He knew of this compound like he knew about most things of the world: from James, who should be getting back to the house by now and wondering where Dillon was.

James
would complain about this, but would retire as a millionaire. Forget renting a condo on a beach; when Dillon was through and he gave James his cut, he and Niles could retire on their own island.

Dillon sprinted through the dense jungle, entire trees breaking and collapsing as he came through. As he neared the compound, he leapt into the air, held up in the night like an owl observin
g mice, and hurtled himself toward the cement bunker. The men jumped out of the way, only vaguely aware that something very fast was coming directly at them.

The bunker
exploded in a hail of cement chunks and steel. Fine, powdery dust went up in clouds and shielded the view. Underneath the rubble, Dillon began to dig. The jewels wouldn’t be on the first level: they’d be hidden underground.

He came through into a chamber and flung his way
past a wall into another room. Shelves upon shelves bolted to the walls. Filled with gems and diamonds, weapons, gold, cash in euros and dollars… the list went on and on. A treasure from decades of robbing and killing. Dillon began filling his gym bag. He couldn’t help but prance around quickly and it must’ve looked ridiculous in a seven-foot onyx suit…

Onyx. That’s what the material appeared like to him.
A deep, shimmering, onyx. Darker than any he had ever seen.

As he was filling the bag with a particularly lucrative shelf of rubies and sapphires, he heard something from a room next to him. He paused and looked over.
His blue eyes illuminating the darkness. A door was there. Behind it, he heard a voice.

He walked to the door, hesitating a second before opening it. He prepared himself to repel anything that came at him.

Strapped in a chair was a woman in her early twenties. She was nude except for some rags thrown over her and her body was bruised, her face a mass of swelling. He walked to her and saw the fear in her eyes.

“Oh, no. I’m a friend. Friend.”

He bent down and tore away the ropes binding her. She fell out of the chair and crawled to the corner of the room. Behind her was another door. Dillon walked to it as the woman closed her eyes and chanted something, like a prayer. Behind that door were more women. They were chained to cots and didn’t yet appear beaten. Some were just little girls, no more than ten or eleven.

He turned to the woman on the floor. Every inch of her
was bruised. Looking back to the other women in the next room, a young girl walked over to him. She smiled as she touched his suit. He stood over her, feeling the warmth of tears in his eyes as she spoke something to him.

They were slaves.

“Ggrrrahh!”

He b
urst through the ceiling and layers of dirt like they weren’t there. On the surface, men were standing around trying to figure out what had happened. Shouting filled his ears and then the pop of rifle fire as they saw the entity in front of them.

Dillon held up his hands as the slugs raced toward him. Though they moved too fast to see, from the small pops surrounding the men he knew the slugs were being turned back on them. One
man was hit in the shoulder and another through the side. The men began to run.

He looked to his right and saw two men preparing a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. A burst of flame as the rocket shot toward him. He faced it head-on, holding up his hand. The rocket began to turn around. He pulled his hand back and the rocket froze in mid air, the propulsion flaming and fizzling. He lifted it into the air higher and then lower, and then side-to-side. The men sat shocked,
and Dillon smiled as he flung the rocket back at them. They scattered and the rocket flew past them into a truck, blowing it six feet into the air and turning it into a mass of flaming metal.

A round struck him in the shoulder. He turned toward it.
A sniper, up on one of the compound’s buildings. Dillon flew into the air and then rushed forward with his fists. The man had to jump off the building, breaking his legs from the fall as Dillon burst into the structure where he had been standing, tore through the rooms, and came out the other side.

A tank fired into the night. Dillon moved out of the way as the HEAT round from the
tank’s main gun went off into the darkness and disappeared behind him into the jungle. He flew down and grabbed the tank at the base. Lifting it into the air, he flung it across the compound and it bounced twice before slamming into a building, collapsing it.

Men were shouting and scattering out of the compound now. He walked casually over to where the bunker had been, and began digging out a path. He cleared away most of the rubble and created a slope out of the cement. He went below to where the young girl was standing and held out his hand. She took it, and he helped her climb out of the bunker, into the warm night.