Deadly Diamonds (12 page)

What Bantu did come to know was that in 1991, the year he was born, a rebel group called the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front, trained in the inhumane arts in Libya, poured across the border of Sierra Leone out of neighboring Liberia. It was not liberation or political revolution that ultimately drove them. It was the soul-sucking
lust to capture and control the regions of Sierra Leone that held the earth's bounty in rough diamonds.

The RUF swelled its ranks of killers by capturing young teens and subteens from the jungle villages in eastern Sierra Leone. They trained them to kill at the point of an AK-47, the cheap, light, plentiful weapon of choice of most African rebel groups. Whatever residue of human conscience remained in their child captives after their first compelled killings, sometimes of their own families, was drowned in a sea of drugs to produce an army as destructive and devoid of conscience as any on the face of the earth.

The evil fed on itself. Once the RUF had control of a diamond rich area, captured child slave labor in the pit gave them a continuing source of the rough gems. Mules in the form of other young slave laborers under close guard trekked the gems across the easy border of Liberia, where the RUF found willing buyers who would pay for the stones with the Russian-developed Kalashnikov AK-47s, ammunition, and even rocket launchers. And, of course, the other weapon of choice, drugs.

Once the sale was completed, the cases of weapons and ammunition were loaded on the backs of the human mules for the twenty-five-mile return trek. Any mule that could not keep pace under the crushing load was disposed of on the spot. His load was then distributed among the remaining mules.

What Bantu came to learn later was that the rough gems, harvested illegally by the rebels in captured territory through the agonies of child slave labor, once across the Liberian border, made their way into the hands of diamond merchants, and then into the mainstream of legal diamonds. From there, it was a direct route to the diamond cutters of Antwerp or London or Mumbai, and then onto the necks or wrists of fine ladies throughout the world with no notion of the price in human suffering that had been paid for their privilege.

Bantu's years in the pits followed seamlessly one on another, interrupted only by an occasional forced march from one pit to another
when the government army would mount an assault to take back a particular diamond-rich area from the rebels. The only extraordinary part of Bantu's subjugation was that it went on years longer than any of the other child laborers who eventually succumbed to the ravages of starvation and exhaustion and were no longer capable of justifying the cup of rice at day's end.

What kept Bantu's aching arms moving and his back bent over the fetid sludge day upon day to earn the cup of life-sustaining rice was one single thought.
My father and my brother are somewhere waiting for me. I am the man of the family. I am the man of the family. I am the man of the family
.

It had been nine years since the world he would never see again had imploded. It was a day like any other. The rainy season had relented. The jungle trails used by the human mules to trek harvested rough diamonds were carpeted in a greasy mud base solid enough to permit movement.

A band of mules had just launched its twenty-five-mile trek to the Liberian border. The turnaround between trips had been shorter in time than usual because of the rebels' need for a resupply of weapons and ammunition to fend off attacks by government troops. The effects of lack of rest on the mules became obvious to the rebel guards before they had been gone half a day. The band of mules were weaving, some dropping from exhaustion within five miles of the start of the trek. The others had little chance of standing under the added weight of cases of bullets and assault rifles on the return trip.

The child leader sent a runner back to the pit for fresher legs. The pit boss barked a command at Bantu to come up out of the pit. Caked in the slime and grit of the pit, he stood, confused by the order. A burst of fire just over his head from the pit boss's rifle jarred him into climbing out of the pit to be marched to where the column of mules had stopped.

Bantu was given a small leather sack to hold ahead of him in plain view of the rifle-bearing guard by his side, and the march began. Bantu knew the sack contained the rough, milky stones that
would be traded for weapons and drugs. He also knew that if he should drop his hand out of sight, the AK-47 would instantly end his dream of finding his father and brother.

While the march under the tightly packed banana and mango vegetation brought relief from the blistering sun and the exhaustion of the pit, it substituted the constant whine of infectious mosquitoes, and wariness for deadly mounds of poisonous ants on the path and snakes that could drop out of the trees.

Each day's march was suspended when darkness made finding the path impossible. By the end of the second day, they were a day's trek short of the Liberian border where one load would be exchanged for another.

They were a half mile from the usual camping spot as the sun's last rays barely lit the path. The three guards in the lead went on ahead to clear the camping ground of anything deadly. That left four of the rebels to guard the halted column of six mules.

Bantu noticed that there was a sudden stillness in the air, a slight absence of the surrounding amalgam of sounds that made the jungle seem a living, breathing creature. The rebel guards who remained with the mules had helped themselves to the white powder contained in one of the sacks. They were arguing in the agitated state the powder always produced. They never noticed the slight change in the atmosphere.

The odd stillness was almost complete, when it was broken by the hoarse rush of air from the lungs of the rearmost rebel guard who plunged headlong into the mule at the back of the line. The mule screamed in shock, as the limp body of the guard rolled off of his back to expose the hilt of a machete jutting from his back.

That scream touched off a cacophony of yells and high-pitched chants out of black bodies that leaped out of the vegetation wielding killing blows of machetes to each of the rebel guards before any of them could swing a rifle into firing position.

Amid the panic of screaming rebels, attackers, and prisoners, Bantu dropped to the ground and rolled his body into the dense mass of vegetation that hid him completely within two seconds. He froze
every muscle, hidden just off the trail, clutching for his life the small sack of gemstones he had been forced to carry.

He barely breathed. He was sure the attackers were Kamajor tribesmen, the only force other than the army that challenged the strongholds of the rebels. Their physical weapons were basic knives and machetes, easily outpowered by the rifles and rocket launchers of the rebels. But they combined these with the clever use of surprise and an emboldening superstitious belief in the power of chants and fetishes to make them impervious to bullets and even invisible to their enemies.

Bantu froze where he was in the bush. He knew that what he held in the bag would ensure his death under the blade of a diamond-hungry Kamajor as quickly as from a rebel bullet. The only light now came from flashes of fire and tracer bullets from the rifles of the returning patrol of the rebels. Within seconds, the firepower of the rebels laid waste the Kamajor warriors and spread the bullet-ridden bodies of the mules caught in the fire across the path.

When the firing ceased, the night blackness was absolute. Bantu listened to the confused squabbling of the rebels over their next move. The dark was a major ally of any other Kamajors in the area and neutralized the rebels' superiority of weapons. In spite of the dangers of night travel in the jungle, they had to move out. The shouting was over which direction. The decision to advance toward the Liberian border was driven by the fear of returning to the rebel leadership without fresh rifles and ammunition.

Bantu's decision was easy. He couldn't go back to life in the pit. He couldn't stay where he was or go deeper into the jungle for a dozen different natural deadly reasons. He chose to follow in the wake of the rebels to the border. If he stayed just out of sight, he could follow the dim light of their flashlights in the hopes that the sound of their movement might clear the way of anything lethal—human or otherwise.

Before leaving, Bantu stripped the camouflage shirt and brown pants off the rebel closest to his fit. The clothes were streaked with blood, but that would not appear totally out of character for a rebel.

By dawn, the foot-weary train of rebels and mules had crossed the border into Liberia. Since Bantu had never in his life left the immediate area of his village until he was taken captive, the rest of the world was an unexplored labyrinth.

He watched from a distance as the exchange of gems for weapons with men waiting in trucks was completed close to the border. The rebels themselves had to replace the human beasts of burden. Once they cleared Bantu's line of sight on their return across the border, there was no choice but to go forward on the path to whatever town or village lay ahead.

It was mid-morning when the path led Bantu to the largest village he had ever seen. What had been mud huts in the only village he had ever known were mostly decrepit thatched-roof cinder block shacks, crowded together along a wide, garbage-strewn mud road that carried the main coagulation of humanity's dregs. Refugees in every state of dysfunction from lost limbs to untreated malaria and polio wandered in what seemed aimless begging paths among those with business to do. And the only business was obvious. The main street was rife with crude signs over doorless entrances that announced “Diamond Merchant.”

Even given his previous nine years in the pit, Bantu thought this town, with its stench of stagnant water and festering wounds, was a way station to hell.

The bloodied camouflage shirt and brown pants he was wearing clearly identified him as RUF, but his boney face and skeletal body said otherwise. His first concern was that any of the dozens of RUF child soldiers who wandered the same street could put the two together and spot him as an escapee. His worst nightmare of the moment was recapture.

As he moved farther through the amalgam, he began to realize that the RUF there were too heavily drugged to take notice, and no one else could see beyond their own plight. His fears of recognition and return to the pit fell away as he blended into the disconnection of each of the wandering souls from all of the other lost souls.

Bantu's body was screaming for two immediate needs: rest and almost anything to eat, in that order. He found an alleyway between two cinder block shacks wide enough to accommodate his body and fell in a state of exhaustion. His last move before giving in to unconsciousness was to find a chink in one of the cinder blocks large enough to stash the leather bag of rough gems he had clutched for his life.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The sun was well down when Bantu felt light blows to his feet. They pulled him out of one darkness into another. He became aware that a massive figure, lit from behind by the faint glow of a bulb from the main street, was casting a large shadow over him.

“Hey dere. How's wichu? You alive?”

The voice was accompanied by gentle nudges to the bottom of his feet. Bantu went rigid. For nine years he had not met a single human being who did not want to do him harm.

The voice laughed. The laugh had the kind of hearty, good-natured sound that Bantu had not heard since the day his world fractured. He sat up, but braced himself against the cinder block wall.

“Don't chu have no fear 'bout Jimbo. I don't mean you no harm a'tall. Come on outta dere.”

The wall of distrust built over nine years did not fall in an instant.

“Hey you, fella. Come on now. Jimbo take care of you. You hungry?”

The words brought him back to the type of English Bantu had learned in his village school. The last word in particular stung his awareness. He had passed hunger two days ago. Whatever this giant had in store for him, if it included anything edible, the temptation overcame all fears.

The voice continued to tempt him. “You don't worry a bit. I'm Mandingo. No RUF here. I got no trouble for you. Maybe even good for you. Come on.”

Bantu seized on the word, “Mandingo.” He had heard his RUF captors talking about this breed of wandering dealers in rough diamonds. They had no scruples about the legal or illegal source of the
stones, but he had never heard of them doing anyone harm. They were apparently go-betweens, arranging sales from the RUF to whoever was willing to pay a price in cash or guns.

Bantu got to his feet and moved out into the dim light.

“Come on, lad. You need food, yes? How you called?”

Bantu followed this largest man he had ever seen, but remained silent. They moved through the waves of begging humanity to a building larger than the rest with a hand-scrawled sign, “Cantina.” Bantu wondered why this giant ignored every desperately needy beggar at his knees, and yet offered to feed him. No matter. He'd worry about that after food had passed his lips.