The Twain Maxim (22 page)

Baz had been waiting in the private room at the embassy for twenty-nine minutes exactly. He watched the second hand on his watch sweep around the dial. In twenty-five seconds he would get up and go. Sure enough, when the second hand hit twelve, he stood up and walked out. As he went past the inner reception desk a tall, strong-looking bald African guy in a blue suit, expensive white shirt and silk tie walked his way. He looked down on Baz and smiled.

“Baz?”

Baz recognized the fruity English accent. “Yes indeed.”

“You’re not leaving, are you?”

“I was,” he said.

“It’s Julien.” He shook Baz’s hand with both of his hands, a politician’s smile wide on his face. “I’m so glad I caught you.”

Baz put on a tired grin. “So am I, Julien.”

“Shall we?” Julius said, gesturing with an open palm at the meeting-room door.

They went inside and sat down.

“What has happened to my mine?” said Julius. “The price has collapsed.”

“Which mine is that?” said Baz.

“Barron, of course,” said Julius, smiling, perhaps mischievously.

“I seem to recall it being my mine,” said Baz, “or, in theory at least, my shareholders’ mine.”

“All mines in Congo are my mines, Baz,” said Julius.

“Yeah, I imagine that could be true.”

“So what’s happened?”

“Well, someone’s parked their fucking army on it, haven’t they?”

“Was that wrong of me?”

“No, just stupid.”

Julius took the comment like an unexpected splash of bird shit to the face.

“I see.”

“What do you want, Julius? Some payola? You sit on fifty trillion dollars’ worth of minerals and you look to me for a nice little bung? Is that the limit of your vision?”

Julius sat back, his nostrils flared.

“You’ve got it all wrong, mate. You’re playing Russian roulette but at the small-stakes table.” Baz grinned. “I’ve already made my hundred million from this and you can have my piece of jungle back and grow fucking pineapples on it. If you’d only learn not be so greedy you’d make yourself so much richer.”

Julius looked down his nose at him. “Teach me, then,” he said, tilting his head back angrily.

“OK,” Baz said. “Look at the balance sheets of the big miners. They’re billions and billions in debt, yet they own mines and when they dig the stuff out and sell it they get cash immediately. Why? Well, it’s because they have to scrape around on shit prospects and squeeze the last gram of mineral out of their poxy crap mines. You’ve got mineral deposits so rich that people are mining them with
kitchenware – not spades the size of office blocks. You have resources so rich you can spot them by looking for bald patches on the ground where the copper kills all the plants. You could borrow all the money in the world against those kinds of mineral deposits, if you have the right ideas and backing, and then,” he chuckled, “once you’ve borrowed it, you could steal it.” Baz grinned. “But you’re not going to, are you? Because you don’t know how to and everybody would be on to your game in a second. You haven’t got the expertise, you haven’t got the contacts and you haven’t got the time. In short, you haven’t got me.” Baz was trying not to laugh but the sneer was all over his face.

“Think about it. I made forty square miles of coconuts worth a billion. Imagine what I could do with a mine as big as Europe.” Baz stood up.

“Wait,” said Julius, smiling again. “How do we go forwards?”

“First off, you can get those rebels off my mine and then I’ll know you’re serious.”

“We will go there, you and I, and I will show you that these rebels are not only in my power but my servants too.”

“OK,” said Baz.

Julius shook his hand with a firm muscular grip. “Give me your card and a car will pick you up in the morning.”

“I’m at the Dorchester.”

“Even I can remember that address,” laughed Julius. “I will see you tomorrow.”

Jim thought he was seeing things. Pierre, Alan and his merry men had a soldier in black with them and it was Jane. He jumped up and ran to her. He would have thrown his arms around her but they wouldn’t have reached around her pack, so he grabbed her shoulders and kissed her. She didn’t respond. He stepped back. “That’s not appropriate,” she said.

“To hell with that,” he said, and kissed her again. He was expecting some sharp ninja response, but suddenly she was kissing him too.

“Oh, a friend,” shrieked Pierre, “quite a good friend.” He was hopping up and down, laughing, and the pygmies were nodding to each other as if something was suddenly making sense.

“God, am I glad to see you! We’re up Queer Street here. We’ve found Kitson and he’s alive.”

“Alive?” she said, “I thought he went skydiving without a chute.”

“He did but he survived it.”

“And you’re going to give me some shit about not leaving without him, aren’t you?”

“What’s the correct answer?” said Jim.

“No,” she said.

“Yes, I think I am,” he said.

“Great,” she said angrily, and almost stamped her foot.

“Look,” said Jim, “there are two hundred soldiers down there after our blood and I have no idea how to get out of this fix, but I don’t want to leave Terry here to die.”

“Correction,” said Jane. “There are two thousand soldiers out there heading this way.”

“That’s all right, then,” said Jim. “We can slip off in all the confusion.”

“Yeah, right, let’s try that.”

“Two thousand,” said Pierre, clearly horrified. “That is the whole Christ Reunion.”

“CRA, huh?” said Jane. “Oh, good, this is going to be
Dawn of the Dead Two
.”

Jim heard a noise behind them and turned to see that Kitson had dragged himself out of his hut. “Is this our salvation, Jim?” he asked, as pathetically desperate as a man could be.

“Sure,” said Jane, kneeling in front of him. “We’ll find a way out of here.” She stood up. “I’ve got to link in.” She broke out a notebook and a sat dish and phoned home.

When Will and Bill were on the screen she updated them quickly.

“We’re sending a squadron of Big Dog Doombahs,” said Bill.

“Sixty-four to be precise.”

“OK,” said Jane. “Are they in Beta?”

“Nope,” said Bill. “Halfway through Alpha, but they can be there tomorrow, whereas troopers will be three days and then of limited use, unless you can get yourself to somewhere we can dust you off.”

“Apart from the fact I know you can’t pick us up from that bunch of molten lava we landed me on, I’ve got no visibility on that.”

“OK,” said Will. “Since we have such a high-resource priority, we’ve formulated a plan. We’re going to tungsten the Barron mine and drop in Big Dog Doombahs. Then you and the Doombahs fight your way to the mine and we dust you off there. The Doombahs can carry casualties so we can get your other friend out. Otherwise you’re going to have to hole up till we can get a force big enough to fight a full-scale jungle war.”

“How do you rate these ‘Big Dogs’?”

“Awesome,” said Bill and Will together.

“Just awesome,” repeated Will. He was panting with some kind of lust. “It’s the future.”

“They have no fear,” said Bill, “or anger, they don’t seek revenge, they have no sympathy, remorse or shame and they absolutely do obey orders.”

They were describing her, she thought. “Cool,” she said. “We’ll get along just fine. Promise me they don’t crash or break down.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Will.

“When do they get in?”

“In about four hours, and we’ll try not to drop any on you,” said Bill. “We’ve got other fall-back plans. If the tungsten doesn’t work we’ll go thermobaric. Whichever, keep well away from the camp.”

“You’re really going to drop the first HE for me?” said Jane.

“Oh, yeah,” said Bill.

“Can’t drop them anywhere but Africa,” said Will. “Looks
too much like an ICBM – that’s an intercontinental ballistic missile, Jim, if you’re listening – which could be bad, heading anywhere else. This might make a few early-warning systems sit up but it clearly isn’t going to look like it’s heading any nuke-wielder’s way. Mind you, we gotta hope the Russkies can actually tell.”

Jane shuddered but managed a laugh.

“We thought,” said Bill, “if we can cut the head off the command with a huge pyrotechnic, the rest of the force might go home. Just don’t be within a one-mile radius.”

“What about civilians?”

“The area’s clear,” said Will, “and anyway the civilians are fleeing the zone for twenty miles around. They think a war’s going to start and I guess they’re right.”

“I’m relying on you,” said Jane. “Don’t make an oversight I’m going to regret.”

“We’ll keep evaluating,” said Bill. “Until we let go, we can always switch to a Herc flambéing the spot. It’ll just hold things up a day or two.”

“OK, going dark till the morning.”

“What was that about HE? Is that high explosive?” asked Jim.

“No,” said Jane. “High energy.”

“And what’s that when it’s at home?”

“They bust tanks these days with so-called HE rounds, sharp lumps of tungsten fired out of a tank barrel. Tungsten is heavier than gold and hard and sharp. When you fire it at a tank it cuts through it and vaporizes everyone inside with the heat of the energy on impact. If it didn’t vaporize everything it would cut it to pieces with all the shrapnel. When it strikes, anyone in the tank is beamed straight to heaven. Now take 
that idea a bit further. You put a rack of tungsten rods in high orbit, and when you don’t like someone, you drop a rod of tungsten on their head from space and,
foop
, they and everything for about a mile around them simply aren’t there any more. It’s like the Big Dog Doombahs, all top-secret cutting-edge stuff.”

“What are Big Dog Doombahs?”

“Doom dogs? You’ll be meeting them tomorrow. I don’t even know where to start explaining that one. You’ll just have to wait and see.”

All the magazines on the plane were in Chinese and the privately owned Airbus clearly belonged to someone extremely rich and important – and very unlikely to be Congolese. The Congolese flew in 1970s aircraft that were unfit to land anywhere outside Africa, so this was definitely on loan. The servants on the plane were also Chinese.

China was desperate for raw materials and was making big moves to secure them. Turning imported commodities into finished products for export was the strategy the country had chosen to drag itself out of poverty, even if that meant dragging everyone else into bankruptcy. The likelihood that China flooding the world with cheap goods might break the hungry consumers of the West might have seemed ludicrous a few years before but the recent disastrous credit crunch had its roots in the US trade deficit, which had ballooned and refused to deflate.

This was another reason China was in love with raw materials. As it hollowed out American wealth, it was slowly but surely destroying the dollar. It would move heaven and earth to get out of dollars, and it was literally doing so by taking America’s currency and swapping it for commodities. They were denominated in dollars but a copper ingot could not be debased and therefore was better than a piece of
paper, which could be devalued.

It seemed like a clever gamble but it didn’t take into account that, at a certain price, an infinite amount of commodities would gush from the ground and miners would, in effect, do what the Chinese government was afraid the US authorities would do: devalue the wealth its treasury was hoarding. Dollars might prove better than gold in the long run, but that ran against the grain for a resource-strapped, cash-rich, command-and-control dictatorship.

Baz knew this was the flaw but, clearly, China was more scared of the US Treasury than a bunch of implacable miners. That was a mistake in its own right. People like him would stop at nothing to make a buck – they’d be wheeling and dealing long after bureaucrats were tucked up in bed. If they wanted to swap rocks for cash, they could step right up.

Because the People’s Republic had made the decision to get out of the greenback, the Chinese were all over Africa, building roads, railways and ports to spend dollars to facilitate the extraction of resources. Unlike the old colonial powers, they didn’t want gratitude or deference and kowtowing, they just wanted cheap unfettered access to raw materials. They didn’t observe any rules of international transparency or bother with accountability: they just did a deal, did the work, carted off the result and cut a cheque. They didn’t give away old clothes on the dock or dig village wells; they didn’t spread the word of God or hand out condoms. They just asked to be left alone to ship ore on to waiting ships and carry it away with no strings attached.

It wasn’t a charming strategy but it worked. The Western powers were not used to fighting for attention in Africa and weren’t sure how to respond.

The old-boy networks of Europe and America were at a loss as to how to compete. The competitor had no colonial desires, just that voracious hunger for raw materials and was prepared to pay top dollar for them. The cosy zones of influence were dissolving under a new wave of
macroeconomics
and the West was losing at its own game of beggaring the customer for their finished goods. In fact, China was doing to the West what the West had been doing to Africa for generations: playing to its vices and hollowing out its core. Baz thought it was funny, the biter bitten.

This was no colonial African “great game”: it was bigger than that, driven by commerce, the world playing for global ascendancy – and China was winning.

Julius had clearly plugged into this new source of pragmatic deal-making. Was he dragging Baz into a complex and dangerous game of geopolitics? That was way out of his league but he was loving it.

He was eating macadamia nuts from a white porcelain bowl and drinking a beer. “So tell me, Baz, what is your big idea?”

Baz was trying to get a piece of nut out of a back tooth that had decided to welcome it as a permanent fixture. He gave up and picked up his whisky. “There are mines and then there’s mining. Not the same thing,” he said. “Mines are about hope but mining is about logistics.” He drank. “Mining is like the brain-dead bit. You’re digging and shipping and digging and filling. It’s as boring as fuck. No one likes you, no one wants you. They’ll take your profits and not even say thank you. It always has and always will be like that. A mine is a different thing all together. You know the saying, ‘A woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke’?”

Julius was smiling politely. “Rudyard Kipling, I believe?”

“Oh,” said Baz. “I thought it was Groucho Marx. Anyway, the real value of a mine is just the pure hope it can inspire. When a mine is proved, it’s like a bond. You dig out some copper at so many dollars a tonne and make so much profit. It’s a fixed yield, its worth is a simple calculation and it’s boring and limited. By the time this is the value of a mine, the mine is finished. What is of real value in a mine is what else might be in it, because finding new resources can completely change its value. That’s where the big bucks are. And that’s what you have for millions of square miles.” Baz was grinning.

“The American civil war was won because of one mine, the Comstock,” he went on. “Half of South America was conquered because of El Dorado, a fantasy mine that never existed. The whole Middle East is based on one giant mineral complex. Everyone knows if you kick the right stone you can find billions right there under your foot. The money in mining is selling the sizzle, not the steak, selling the possibility not the reality. What you need is someone to sell the sizzle and make sure you get to keep the steak. Ker, ker, ker.” He laughed his trademark cackle.

“How could that work?”

“Well,” said Baz, “I could have just found a whole new region of copper.”

“Have you?”

“No, but that’s not the point. I could have, and I could raise five billion to exploit it with your government’s backing. I could then have a lot of fun spending the money and making sure you were getting the bulk of the cash flow.

“Um,” responded Julius, appreciatively.

“Halfway through spending the first lot of the money we
could do another couple before the first started to disappoint. You see, you have to sell hope backed by credibility, but know the outcome before you start. You raise the money and then you steal it – it’s that simple.”

“And you think you could pull this off.”

“I’ve been doing just that for twenty-five years. The possibility here is the size of the opportunity. I’ve been doing eight-and nine-figure deals, but with you, it could be ten, eleven figures.” Baz was thinking of Barron. “The funny thing is, we could actually end up with mines that work. There’s so much potential out there that we can cheat and actually deliver something.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Julius. “You see, I wish to build on my position in government and for that you need backers and money, but the sort of backing I need is not forthcoming – not on the scale I need it.”

Baz sipped his whisky.

“This country needs to be turned upside-down and for that it needs a strong man to take control, and that kind of strength needs hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars. Now, mining is lucrative for us but there are limits to how much my plans can benefit. Most of the deposits are dangerous, disputed and therefore unattractive. Big companies are also unable, by law, to help me to help them. I’m attracted to your proposal but you must understand I need action and it must be fast and definite and money must flow quickly.”

“Look, Julien, I’m in the same spot you are, only different. Look at me and you see someone who doesn’t think he’s going to live forever. I’ve got my dough. I don’t need to go another round for a hundred million dollars – that’s not exciting to me any more.”

Julius was smiling, but underneath he was livid: why did these men always have the upper hand? A hundred million was a vast fortune, one that would fund an army for years.

“A billion or two, that’s different,” said Baz, “I’ll get out of bed for that.”

“So what are your terms?”

“Twenty per cent.”

“I make a billion, you make four billion. I make two billion, and you make eight.”

Julius’s eyes lit up – he couldn’t help himself. “Over how long a period?”

“Four or five years. After five I’m out of it anyway – I’m not putting off my happy retirement longer than that, not for all the copper in Congo.” He smirked. “All you’ve got to do is show me the power, and if you can shoo those bleeding militia men off Barron, I’ll know you’re the man. Frankly, if you can do that, then you run the fucking place as far as I’m concerned and we can make a fortune together – a big country-sized fortune, an old-fashioned nineteenth-century one.”

“I don’t run Congo, but if you can keep your promise I will soon enough. You do understand what you are committing to do?”

“Yeah,” said Baz. “I think I know what you’re capable of, so let’s leave it at that.” He smiled. “You have to be nice to me. If you’re nice to me, I’ll make you the richest man in Africa, and if you’re right, the fucking Emperor of Congo.” He winked at Julius.

Julius laughed. “If I didn’t know your mines’ stock performance I would believe you were a conman, Baz. A big conman.”

“I am,” said Baz. “That’s exactly what I am, and I’m going to be working for you on the biggest theft in history.”

“I’ll be nice to you, Baz, but you must be straight with me at all times. Such big money will make everyone nervous so I need to have everything clear between us. I need no voicemail, I need no excuses and I need no surprises. Money must come without asking.”

“We’ll be in this together, mate.”

Julius caught the Chinese hostess, who was topping up his glass, around the waist and she squealed, half in shock and half in polite embarrassment. She ran away.

Julius shook his head. “These girls are no fun. Do you like girls, Baz?”

“Yeah,” said Baz, “occasionally – but not more than three at a time.”

Julius saluted him. “I’m glad,” he said. “I like to work with real men.”