The American Mission (13 page)

“It's okay, Marie. I understand. Your father understands.”

“He told you already, didn't he? You knew all the while you were giving me the grand tour.”

“He told me last night after you went to bed. It's a difficult situation, but perhaps not as desperate as it might seem. We have options.”

“Yes, we do. We can bury the mine. We fill in the entrance to the mineshaft and cover the scars with brush. Then we lose the charts and burn the smelter to the ground. We can pull up the survey stakes and relocate them on the other side of the river valley. In the meantime, we can think of something else.”

“We already have. Your father, that is. Come. Let me show you.”

•   •   •

K
atanga led Marie back toward the village. In the field just on the edge of Busu-Mouli where Marie and her friends had once played soccer, a group of young men was training with rifles. Twenty men—boys really, Marie realized—were taking turns charging four at a time with fixed bayonets at dummies made of straw and wrapped in canvas. Another group of boys was practicing marksmanship, firing at wooden targets oriented so that stray rounds would land harmlessly in the forest. Other small groups were practicing a range of military skills. A few were marching. Some were disassembling and cleaning rifles. Nearly all of the “soldiers,” and Marie put imaginary quotes around the word even as she thought it, were barefoot. A few carried tree branches rather than rifles.

“We have been investing some of the profits from the mining operation in our army,” Katanga explained. “Copper for guns. Jean-Baptiste has been in charge of that. Your father has appointed him Captain of the Guard.”

Marie almost laughed at the grandiosity of the title. But she took a moment to observe the tall, well-built man leading the riflery training. Jean-Baptiste seemed comfortable in command.

Katanga pointed out an older man in a military uniform who was teaching some of the younger boys how to strip and clean a Kalashnikov. Marie recognized her father's old army uniform even before
recognizing her beloved papa. Chief Tsiolo smiled when he saw his daughter and beckoned her and Katanga to join him on the field.

“Well, Marie. How is your mine?” he asked.

“My mine, Papa?”

“If it isn't yours, then who does it belong to?”

“All of us, I suppose. How are your soldiers doing?”

“How do they look?”

Marie thought about the disciplined and battle-hardened troops that Manamakimba had led against the Consolidated Mining team. Then she surveyed the young boys just becoming familiar with the seductive power of the gun. There was no comparison.

“Magnificent, Papa,” she answered.

J
UNE
30, 2009
B
USU
-M
OULI

I
t was an unlovely, ungainly contraption—Marie would not go so far as to call it a machine—but it was getting the job done. Her homemade rock drill was never going to take the market by storm. Instead of hydraulic pumps, Marie's drill used a system of sandbag counterweights and the muscle of three of the village's young men. Another villager on a modified bicycle powered the chain drive that turned the drill bit. The Chinese-made tricone bit at the bottom of the shaft was the one honest-to-God piece of mining equipment she was using. Katanga had traded for it, and it had cost nearly two days of production. It was worth every ounce of copper. The saving grace of the project was the depth she was drilling to. By Marie's math, she and her crew had to drill down no more than fifty feet through solid stone before intersecting the mine. She had surveyed the site carefully to make absolutely certain that she would hit the target. Now they were very close.

“Not much longer, Uncle, I can feel it,” Marie said.

“I hope so. The air in the mine is getting pretty stale. There's not enough oxygen to keep a candle lit.”

Almost on cue, the sandbags pushed the metal pipes through the roof of the mine and crashed to the ground with a heavy thud.

“We're in,” Marie shouted. Katanga wrapped her up in an affectionate hug.

“That's my girl,” he said.

Marie put her hand over the end of the pipe and could feel the warm, foul air rushing up from below. Cool, oxygenated air would be forced in through the mouth of the tunnel because of the change in pressure. At some point a fire underneath the vent might help to hurry things along, but for now Mother Nature should be able to handle the load.

Once she was satisfied that the hole was clean and solid and in no risk of collapsing in on itself, Marie supervised the dismantling and storage of her rock drill. If everything continued to go well, they would need it again at some point.

Then she went back to her baby, the smelter.

Marie and Katanga had agreed on a rough division of labor. He would oversee the mining operations, calling on Marie for assistance when he encountered a particularly challenging technical problem such as ventilating the mine shaft. Marie, meanwhile, would take over the smelter and look for ways to improve the quality of the finished product.

She had taken to sleeping most nights in the back room of the smelter that she had converted into an office. Before Marie's return, Katanga hadn't bothered to keep any records on production. Whatever came in as raw ore was processed as quickly as possible. Whatever came out as metal was sold or traded. It was simple. No one had thought to write it down.

Marie surveyed the charts and graphs she had tacked up on the
walls behind her desk, which was nothing more than an old door laid across two oil drums. The charts tracked only the last ten days of production, but she could see that there had been a noticeable rise in both the quantity of metal produced and the purity of the copper. Some of the refinements she had initiated were already paying dividends. It was a start, but it wasn't enough.
There is more I can do
, Marie thought.
I am sure of it
.

Flora, one of the older villagers who served as an unofficial shift leader, stuck her head into the office.

“Marie, one of the belts on the rock crusher snapped again. We had to shut the machine down.”

Marie sighed. The crusher was the most temperamental element of the smelter operations. Nearly every day, something went wrong.

“Get Omer or one of his boys to look at it. If he has to scavenge a belt from one of the fishing boats, so be it.”

Flora nodded, but looked none too happy. Marie knew that if Omer Mputu couldn't get the machine up and running in short order, Flora would browbeat him until the screws were spinning again and happily crushing big rocks into small rocks.

•   •   •

A
t first, Marie thought that the crusher had jammed and the drive shaft was stripping the gears. But it was the middle of the night, and she quickly realized that what she was hearing was gunfire. Instantly awake and alert, she threw off the thin blanket covering her and jumped to her feet. It was dark in the windowless office where she had been sleeping on a straw pallet. The generator had been shut down for the night, so there were no lights to turn on. She fumbled for the flashlight she kept on the desk, hoping that the batteries were still charged. She breathed a little easier when she hit the button and a dim brown glow lit up the room.

Marie reached under the desk and pulled on the strip of duct tape
that held a pistol in place. She stripped the tape from the handgun, a Yugoslav Zastava, and made sure the safety was off. The red dot on the side was clearly visible.
Red is dead
, she remembered from one of the security training courses they had put her through at Consolidated. Marie had fired the gun maybe three or four times in that course.

There was another round of gunfire, closer this time. Marie's first thoughts were for her smelter. One of the changes she had implemented after taking over was to put a night watchman in place to prevent looting. When Marie had turned in, a sixteen-year-old boy named Kamba had just started his shift.

“Where the hell is he,” Marie whispered to herself.

She moved slowly and carefully out of her office and into the main hall of the smelter. She held the pistol in her right hand and the flashlight in her left. The beam was too weak to illuminate the far side of the facility. The flashlight cast a half circle of brown light extending out about six feet. Beyond that, the room was in darkness.

“Kamba,” she said softly. And then a little louder. “Kamba, are you here?”

There was no response.

The pistol felt heavy and awkward in her hand. Marie checked again to make sure the safety was off.
Red is dead. Red is dead
. Another chattering round of automatic-weapons fire. This time, she could see the muzzle flash framed in one of the windows. Closer than before.

Marie made her way carefully to the door on the far side. She stepped across the threshold, making almost no sound in her bare feet.

“Kamba, where are you?” She was whispering again.

Outside the door, Marie shone the light to her right and swung it in a wide arc. As she was doing so, she stepped back away from the door and stumbled over something soft and sticky. She knew immediately what it was and had to consciously stifle the sob that welled up unbidden from inside her. She turned the flashlight onto the body of the young boy. His throat had been slit.

There was a distinct odor of gasoline in the air, and Marie could hear muffled noises coming from around the corner of the smelter. Her smelter.

She turned off the flashlight and placed it gently on the ground beside Kamba's body. With its weak beam, it was more of a liability than an asset. It would not help her find the intruders, but it would give them something to shoot at. Pressing her body flat against the side of the building, Marie moved slowly and carefully to the corner. A three-quarters moon emerged from behind the clouds and cast enough light to see by. She looked around the edge of the building. She saw three men. One was kneeling by the side of the smelter pouring the contents of a jerry can of what could only be gasoline onto the walls. The other two stood behind him, watching him work.

“You finish up here,” she heard one of them say in slightly accented French. “Juvenal, come with me and we'll take care of the inside.” Marie recognized the accent. It was Rwandan. These were almost certainly Hutu
genocidaires
. What the hell where they doing here and why did they want to burn down her smelter?

Marie was damned if they were going to do that without a fight.

Without a clear idea of what she was going to accomplish, Marie aimed the heavy pistol at the only man not carrying a heavy can of gas on the assumption that he was the leader. She squeezed off three shots in rapid succession. All three shots missed. Shooting a man, she realized, was not the same thing as shooting paper targets.

The
genocidaires
seemed uncertain which direction the shots had come from. The man she had shot at was carrying an assault rifle and he sprayed an entire magazine in a wide arc. Most of the rounds sailed harmlessly into the jungle, but one bullet slammed into the smelter wall near Marie's head. She jerked her head back from the corner.

The Rwandans were experienced. They spread out to make themselves a more difficult target and moved aggressively toward Marie's
side of the smelter. Marie fired two more rounds around the corner without even aiming and ran back to the door.

Inside, the smelter was almost pitch-black. The pale moonlight that filtered through the door and the few small windows did little more than define several different shades of darkness. For a moment Marie was afraid that the
genocidaires
were not going to follow her; that they would simply burn the building down with her inside it. But they did come after her; maybe they were still uncertain about how many opponents they were facing and unwilling to turn their backs on a potential danger. Unlike Marie, the Rwandans had decent flashlights, and they swung their beams around the room looking for someone to shoot.

“Split up,” she heard them say. “Find whoever it is and kill them. No prisoners today.”

Marie huddled behind the furnace, her mind racing as she looked for a way out. She could hear her breath coming in rapid gasps and she struggled for calm.

A shaft of light swept through the air over her head. She could tell from watching the beam that one of the Rwandans was moving from the back end of the furnace toward the door. In front of the door, Marie knew, a heavy steel cauldron used for smelting copper ore was hanging from a chain. It was almost directly above her. Maybe just a couple of feet to the right. She tucked the pistol into the waistband of her pants. When the
genocidaire
was almost exactly across from her, Marie rose and pushed the heavy cauldron forward with both hands. It slammed into the Rwandan's face with a satisfying crunch of bone. The flashlight went skittering across the floor, and Marie heard both the soldier and his rifle fall to ground.

Marie pushed herself deep into the shadow of the machinery and listened carefully. She could hear one
genocidaire
across the room, probably next to the rock crusher. The other seemed to be moving carefully toward the office, where she had been sleeping less than fifteen minutes earlier.

“Juvenal. Forget this. Let's just finish the job.”

There was no response. Juvenal, Marie realized, must be the one sleeping the sleep of the cracked skull.

“Juvenal. Can you hear me?” The voice came from the area near the tables where the village women sorted and washed the copper ore before it was smelted. Marie could see the flashlight beam of the third
genocidaire
panning across the far wall near the office. There was no one between her and the door. It might yet be possible to live through this. Live through this and save her smelter.

Marie crawled carefully toward the door. She stayed low to the ground, using every shadow to her advantage. Once outside, she planned to empty the jerry cans of gasoline into the river and then go for help. It was the best she could do on short notice.

The door frame was only about twenty meters away, but it seemed to take forever to cover the distance. Marie was close to the door, no more than five meters away, when she suddenly found herself impaled at the center of a bright circle of blue-white light. She froze. The light felt like an actual weight pressing on her spine. It was as though she could feel the individual photons holding her in place like a bug pinned to a mat.

“Well, look at that. It's just a girl.” The speaker was the one Marie had tentatively identified as the leader. She recognized his voice. He had been waiting for her, Marie realized. He knew that she would try for the door.

“There must be others.” The voice of the remaining
genocidaire
—the arsonist—came from her left. He had covered the distance from the office quickly and quietly, closing the door of the trap that Marie now found herself in.

“I don't think so. I think the girl is all there is. I'll take care of her.”

With the flashlight beams shining into her face, Marie couldn't see so much as an outline of the Rwandans
.
She had heard stories about what the Hutu had done to the Tutsi in Rwanda. Crimes so awful the
perpetrators could never go home. She reached carefully for the pistol in the waistband of her pants.

“Don't do that, little girl.” It was the leader's voice. “It'll be easier for you that way.”

The Rwandan raised his rifle and the shadow of the barrel fell across Marie's face. Involuntarily, she closed her eyes.

The staccato chatter of automatic-weapons fire was the last sound Marie expected to hear in her young life. It was followed almost immediately by a scream that she realized with some surprise was not her own. She opened her eyes.

The arsonist still stood to her right, but his head was cocked at an unnatural angle and much of it seemed to be missing. The leader was lying on the floor. The flashlight lying next to him cast monstrous shadows of his profile onto the far wall of the smelter. The
genocidaire
's screams grew weak and raspy. Marie saw a stream of blood flowing from his chest, following the dips and valleys in the uneven floor.

She was still uncertain about what had happened. She reached down and touched the barrel of her pistol. It was tucked into her waistband. She hadn't shot them. Marie carefully shifted first onto her hands and knees, and then into a kneeling position behind the rock crusher. She could see a flashlight beam searching back and forth through the smelter. Whoever had shot the two Rwandans was looking for more targets.