Stuart Kaminsky - People Who Walk In Darkness

Luc O’Neil was lost.

He wasn’t particularly worried.

His cell phone wouldn’t work down in the labyrinth nine hundred feet below the frozen layer of earth, but the homing device required of everyone entering the mine was glowing bright green. The pipe, the vein of rock that contained the diamonds, was a reasonably rich one. Nothing exceptional but productive, small, brown gems that would go mainly into industrial tools and the vast stockpile of the Russian diamond monopoly Alorosa, which in turn sold its holdings to DeBeers.

Twenty percent of all diamonds mined worldwide were from Russia and all of the mines, Luc knew, were located in Siberia. If they dared, which they would not do because there would be no profit in it, Alorosa could challenge DeBeers and flood the market with relatively inexpensive diamonds of all quality levels. It was a standing, unspoken suicidal threat, a doomsday scenario for the diamond market. The price paid by the world for diamonds allowed Russia a preferred seat at the table.

The value of diamonds, as Luc knew, was not dependent on their rarity, but on the ability of the diamond cartel to control their flow and price. Luc was well aware that diamonds are nothing but pieces of compressed carbon found not only in Siberia but in Botswana, Australia, South Africa, and, to a smaller degree, all over the planet.

But production was down in this mine. Or at least that was what Luc had been told. His job was to find out if the mine was so tapped out that it would not pay to keep it operating.

Luc was a geologist with a good underground sense of direction. But if that failed him, he could always follow the dull yellow lights that glowed indifferently every fifty yards or so on the jagged walls of the tunnel.

He was contracted with and well paid by the Canadian company that owned a piece of this operation. And so, screw ’em. He had a job to do, plain and simple. He would get it done and get out of here, e-mail his report to London, let DeBeers deal with it, and get the hell back to Toronto. Luc had missed his son’s birthday only two months ago, when he was in Australia. Collette had not bothered to reproach him. What was the point? Let the boy know what kind of father he had, she had said. Well, she was right.

Luc scanned the walls for signs. He had been doing this for a decade. He didn’t have to think about what he was looking for. It either felt right or it didn’t. The diamond sense was a part of him. He was a human detector.

Dobson had told Luc he had been selected because he had more experience in this sort of thing. What sort of thing? Going into underground diamond mines, finding out why production was down, and determining if the mines were finally tapped out?

Dobson was at a surface mine in Botswana. Hundreds of thousands of tons of fickle rock did not threaten above Dobson’s head.

Dobson could get to Capetown in less than three hours from even the most distant company mine in Southern Africa. There were places in Capetown, good food, warm beds, and warmer women ranging from pale, ghostly white to dark, smooth ebony. And then Dobson would be stopping to meet with diamond cutters in Tel Aviv where, in spite of the slight threat of suicide bombers, he would stay overnight in a luxury suite in the Dan Tel Aviv Hotel. Luc, on the other hand, would spend the night in a visitor’s room in the four-story concrete block that housed the mine’s middle-management workers here in Devochka.

Luc knelt next to the wall to his right. He had insisted on coming this way, even climbing over the dust-covered yellow machinery and down the slight incline. There was a feel of something this way.

His guide, an old night-duty mine watchman, Boris Anton-ovich, had told him that this shaft needed shearing up. Boris, tall, sullen, hulking, and bearded would not have been Luc’s choice as a guide, but Boris had one advantage. He could speak a little French.

Luc had not even bothered to answer when Boris issued his warning about the shaft. The geologist had simply gone down the tunnel, examining the walls, taking samples, seeing nothing of great interest, going deeper and deeper, farther and farther. And then he had noticed that Boris was not behind him.

Probably back there sulking because Luc had come this way instead of to the tunnel to the right that Boris had suggested.

“This is an old shaft,” Boris had said. “It’s not worked anymore.”

Luc had known this.

“It is dangerous,” Boris had said.

“Danger is relative,” Luc answered.

“Physical danger is absolute.”

A Russian philosopher in Siberia. Just what Luc needed.

“I’m going in,” Luc had said.

Boris had shrugged and shook his head.

The large tunnel was arched, with a craggy roof and wall and an even, flat floor. Rubber-reinforced trucks, with beds that could hold 10,000 tons of ore, had ample room to rumble into the darkness at the end of the yellow tunnel.

Boris’s arguments for not going into this particular shaft were very persuasive, but not in the way the Russian desired. The more Boris warned, the more determined Luc had been to go this way. In a battle of wills between a Russian and a Canadian, the man with the money and the gun will always win. Luc had a gun.

Luc was no fool. He had started carrying the weapon at first because of the stories others had told about being threatened, attacked. Rumor was that an Australian geologist who worked for the company had been beaten to death at a mine site in the Outback.

Luc, on his third trip to a site, had been attacked by a black mine worker in Namibia. The man was tall, lean, his open shirt revealing taut muscles, his face revealing rage, his mouth spewing, cracking with a babble of language Luc didn’t understand.

In the man’s right hand had been a rock. He had run at Luc, who was aware of voices, dark faces behind the man with the rock. Luc had fired. Once. The lean man fell to his knees, still looking at Luc, still babbling. The lean man didn’t die. He had attacked Luc because he was the only white man present. He had attacked Luc because the man’s wife had died and the man didn’t have enough money to bury her properly. He blamed the mine, the humming, dark, maddening tunnels. He blamed the managers, the vague sense of the mine’s white owners.

The doctor who operated on the crazed man to remove the bullet told Luc that his patient’s babbling had been a rant ending with, “It is alive. It breathes. It waits.”

So Luc carried a small but effective gun in the leather bag over his shoulder.

He knelt. He looked. He focused his laser flashlight on the wall in front of him. Someone had covered a four-foot section of the wall with dirt that almost matched the rest of the wall. Most people wouldn’t have noticed.

Luc rubbed at the dirt-covered wall, took out a chemical spray, and washed a section. Even before the spray finished its work, Luc could see what had been hidden, a wooden panel about three-feet square. The panel had been carefully covered with chips of rock and dirt to simulate the surrounding wall.

Luc removed the panel and placed it against the tunnel wall. Then he shined his light inside a cave that extended about six feet into the rock. Luc crawled into the cave, coughed, and examined the walls around him.

He could see immediately. He needed no tests. An untrained eye would see nothing. Luc saw everything. He chipped away a small outcrop to his right, just above his head. Bits of rock rained down on his head and back. He examined the rocky ore in his hand and decided. It was, if he were not mistaken, a reasonably rich outcropping.