1 Chapter 1
Copyright © 2020 by Oscar Luis Rigiroli
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Dramatis Personæ
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
From the Author
About the Author
Books by Oscar Luis Rigiroli
Coordinates of the Author
About the Publisher Dramatis Personæ
Alisha Shankar Chand: Young Indian woman of high caste.
Vijai Anand Chand: Father of Alisha, descendant of the Rajas of Bilaspur.
Romain Mercier: Geologist of Canadian origin.
Vadish Chand: Brother of Alisha, son of Vijai.
Yusuf Kasali: Congolese guide, also a negotiator and a linguist or translator of dialects.
Jerome Kanza: Driver of the expedition, Yusuf's brother-in-law.
Mokili: Congolese informant.
Branko Popovic: Head of a group of Serbian mercenaries.
Vadim Petrovich Sokolov: Former Sergeant of the Russian Army, member of Popovic's group.
Bogdan, Danilo, Mirko: Other members of the Serbian mercenary group.
Colonel Honoré Kazembe: Warlord, head of an armed group in North Kivu.
Zhang Wei: Alleged Chinese wood merchant.
Claes Jacobs, Gabriel Janssens: Belgian traders active in international coltan trafficking.
Hans Jungmann: Contractor of mercenary groups in Africa.
Mukisa: Ugandan villager. Head of his community.
Federica Bragadin: Venetian aristocrat friend of Alisha.
Armin von Wernicke: Federica's close friend.
Berthe Gabriac: Mother of Romain Mercier.
Davide Bressan: Captain of the Arma dei Carabinieri in Venice.
Giuseppe Talarico: Calabrian criminal
Yevgeny Andarbek: Former colonel of the Chechen army.
Luca Colombo: Carabiniero, Bressan's assistant.
Klaus: Black Hat, German hacker friend of Armin.
Introduction
Coltan is a dark mineral made up of a solid solution of two substances, columbite and tantalite, which give rise to the name of the mineral; the proportions in which both substances occur in the mineral in nature is variable and depends on the origin of the sample. Columbite is a niobium, iron and manganese oxide, and tantalite is a tantalum oxide, also with iron and manganese.
The economic interest of coltan is due to its character as a source of tantalum, so that the percentage of tantalite in the mineral, which varies strongly between 10% and 60%, is the determinant of its value. Tantalum is used in the manufacture of electrolytic capacitors, and in other uses present in a large number of electronic devices such as cell phones, computers, video games, and other more sophisticated ones. As the production of these devices has literally exploited in the last decades, coltan evolved from being a mineralogical rarity to an essential element in the modern economy. The properties that make this metal so valuable are related to its superconductivity of electricity as well as its resistance to corrosion and high temperature. Although there are no formal markets, its international value is estimated to be around four hundred thousand US dollars per ton.
It is a relatively scarce mineral in nature and the deposits detected are found in Australia, Canada, Brazil and China but mainly in Africa, especially in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the neighboring states Rwanda and Burundi. Some imprecise estimates agree that the Democratic Republic of the Congo owns 80% of the planet's coltan reserves.
The demand for the mineral is growing exponentially and the main powers are fight for control of the producing sites, in particular the United States, China, Russia and various countries of the European Union. Present interests mix producing countries, the powers mentioned above as consumers, multinational companies and all kinds of non-institutional players such as guerrillas, smugglers, independent prospectors and intermediaries and traffickers. According to the United Nations, this mineral has been, along with other minerals, the cause of wars in the Congo and its neighbors, with millions of victims and displaced persons. Another consequence of uncontrolled mining of coltan has been the pollution of lakes and rivers with serious damage to public health. Due to its consequences for the civilian population, this mineral has been compared with the “blood diamonds” of dire consequences in Angola, Sierra Leona and other countries in West Africa.
The equinoxes (from the Latin aequinoctium (aequus nocte), "equal night") are the times of the year when the Sun is located on the plane of the celestial equator. That day and for an observer at the Earth's equator, the Sun reaches its zenith (the highest point in the sky in relation to the observer, which is just above its head, that is, at 90 °). The declination parallel of the Sun and the celestial equator then coincide.
It occurs twice a year: March 20 or 21 and September 22 or 23 of every year.
As its name indicates, on the dates when the equinoxes occur, the day lasts approximately equal to the night in all parts of the Earth. The duration is not exactly the same due to the size of the sun (with respect to its central point), and to atmospheric refraction, which cause differences in the length of the day at different latitudes.
Equinoxes are used to fix the onset of spring and fall in each terrestrial hemisphere.
Prologue
Alisha ran to answer the incoming call on her satellite phone. Her heart was pounding because for days she had not heard from her brother who was in a geological survey mission in the North Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the fact that Vadish did not wish to alarm her, the latest communications reported veiled military activities in the area, with bloody clashes between the Congolese army and rebel militias formed by irregular Hutus from neighboring Rwanda, from which they had had to flee to avoid the retaliation of the rival Tutsi ethnic group, who wanted revenge on the carnage committed for the first twenty years ago. Vadish and her friend Robert Bruce were conducting surveys related to the immense mineral wealth of the Congo, responsible for both its potential and its suffering.
Alisha raised the tone of the set and could hear a series of confused noises and metallic hisses from static discharges in the transmission. The woman could barely hear a human voice that she could barely recognize.
“Vadish! It's you? I am Alisha. Do you hear me?
The young woman was walking hurriedly down the narrow street where she found her father's palazzo in Venice. Although in general she was satisfied with the general security level of the city, as the shadows lengthened she wanted to return home as soon as possible. In fact, she had agreed to call her friend Federica when she arrived home.
T lady had attended a conference at the Casa di Carlo Goldoni, transformed into a museum, and had done so dressed in gala, in uncomfortable high-heeled shoes that now did not allow her to hurry. While she was walking Alisha was looking at the screen of her cell phone to see if she had received any message from her boyfriend, who was in Africa and from whom she had not received news for days. Although this fact was not unprecedented, it did not stop worrying her; the woman longed for the time when they could both live together, at least in the same city, but his profession made it difficult to achieve that ambition. As she stared at the artifact's screen, her mind caught what seemed like a singular event. Parked on the near side of the street was a van that reminded her of bakery and business delivery companies of that type, only that there was no one inside the cabin or around the vehicle despite the fact that the engine of the van was running.
Although her eyes perceived it and sent the information to her brain the woman discarded the visual data while still immersed in her worries. So she could not anticipate what suddenly happened. A cloth covered her nose and mouth, also obstructing her vision, and a pungent odor entered her airways, quickly reaching her frontal sinuses. Then the waking functions ceased and her body loosened, slowly collapsing but not reaching the floor because something or someone was holding her. Chapter 1
X Weeks before
The Air France plane arrived at the N´Djili Airport with a half hour delay, as a result of its departure from Paris almost an hour late, partially recovered on the trip.
No sooner had the ladder descended and the thick air of the African equatorial zone permeated him as he followed the long line of passengers heading towards the air terminal building carrying their hand luggage, some of them simple bags tied with straps. There were from executives and representatives of European companies who came for their businesses related to the country's mineral production, a large number of Chinese nationals on trade, diplomatic or political missions, and finally a motley and colorful mix of Africans who returned to their country after a more or less prolonged stay in Europe.
Romain Mercier couldn't help sighing. As he wiped his neck from the sweat produced by the greasy heat with a handkerchief, the discomfort of the tropics was momentarily overshadowed by the memories of his first arrival in the Congo, ten years earlier when he was a young geologist recently graduated from McGill University, in Montreal, the closest city to his hometown Trois Pistoles, in Quebec. When he was completing his thesis, he had decided to specialize in the prospecting and extraction of coltan, that miraculous mineral from which tantalum was obtained, a product of irreplaceable use in printed circuits of cell phones, capacitors and all kinds of electronic material, the use of which continued to grow year after year, hand in hand with the growth of these devices.
He had then arrived with a dose of idealism mixed with ambition; the time spent in Africa and also in Europe had eroded all romantic ideas from his mind but the ambition remained, although controlled by his will to avoid the effects of its overflows.
His memories went from the subhuman conditions in which mining took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African sites, to the excessive pressure of agents of the Chinese government and other companies that use the mineral. Then the memories extended to the incidents produced by his shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, his rescue by Alisha and the sequences of his stay in southern France culminating in Venice. As his mind landed on the latter city, his thoughts turned from the somber tint they had hitherto had to a lively emotion at the thought of the young Indian woman and her farewell two days before in the city of canals.
(cf. The Legacy of the Cathars by the same author)
The process in the Migrations area was cumbersome as he had anticipated, but the man had already practiced a convincing explanation and was finally able to overcome the mistrust of the officer who attended him. He then sat down in one of the few seats available to wait for the departure time of his connection to Goma, in a flight of the Compagnie Africaine d´Aviation. As he did not find wi-fi in the airport area where he was, he had to limit himself to reviewing on his laptop a report containing all the details of the procedures he had to carry out, the dubious characters he had to interview, and finally some files with maps extracted from Google Maps. Then he took out of his backpack a folder with the old paper maps that had guided his previous exploration in the Congolese province of North Kivu and in the neighboring republic of Rwanda.
Reviewing the background of his future interlocutors, his stomach clenched. It included a detailed list of smugglers, insurgents, mercenaries, and even genocides in some cases with requests for international capture by Interpol.
No, Romain Mercier had decidedly no illusions about his task in later times. His skills as a cold negotiator in dangerous environments would be severely tested. As it happened to him whenever he was close to similar situations, he reassessed the decision he had made long before to become a freelance geological prospector instead of working for some of the major Canadian mining companies with business in all parts of the world, which would have guaranteed him a fixed salary, comfortable working conditions and a pension at the end of the road. But this was not what Romain longed for.
Time passed and finally the loudspeakers called his flight to Goma.
