Digging Deeper: An Adventure Novel (Sam Harris Series Book 1) (7 page)

‘So you came back here after Tamazian independence?’

‘Yes, President Jose Dos Manos asked me to help him set up the government.  I ended up marrying his sister, you know.’

‘I didn’t know.   So why is MARFO still fighting?  I thought there was a ceasefire.’

‘MARFO leaders felt cheated after the election.  They did not realise that the people who lived in the cities wanted democracy and not communism.  They couldn’t believe that only a few people in the countryside had voted for them after they won independence from Portugal.  I have negotiated with them many times myself.  I feel kinship but I can’t give them power.’

‘That's very sad,’ said Sam.

‘And you?  How are you doing at Mondongo?  I imagine it’s pretty tough down there.’

‘Yes. I’ll admit I’m struggling a bit.’

‘I am quite well acquainted with your boss, Mr Black.  Have you met him yet?  I know that he is out of the country this week.'

Sam smiled and tried not to catch his eye.

‘Yes, Mr Black and I met in Johannesburg.  I couldn’t say that I know him yet, though.’

‘How is production?  I hear things are going well?’

‘Oh, I really have no idea,’ said Sam. ‘I haven't been there long enough to find out yet.’  She told herself to tread very carefully.  He looked thoughtful but did not enquire further. 

Long after most of the other clientele had left, the General was arranging salt cellars and breadsticks across the table to demonstrate the battles he had fought with his men in the fight for Tamazian independence.  Every now and then, he would shout ‘Boom’ to the consternation of the waiting staff.

Sam was enchanted by his exuberance and charm.  She wondered if all generals were like this.  Probably not.

Finally, the General looked at his watch.  ‘Oops,’ he said. ‘Can’t keep the President waiting.’  As they stepped outside, Sam saw that Eduardo was waiting to take her to the offices of Gemsite.  She turned to thank the General but he was hurrying to his car with a bodyguard on either side. 

‘Thank you!’ she called. 

He turned and beamed at her.  ‘See you soon,' he said and then, ‘very soon, I hope.’ And he was gone in a flurry of doors and dust. 

***

General Fuego was driven to the presidential palace where he was ushered straight through to the president’s private apartments. 

The President was waiting for him.

‘Cunhado, Bom dia.’

‘Bom dia, Senhor Presidente.’

‘How are you and your family?’

‘Very well, thank you, and yours?’

‘Very well, also. How was the meeting with the gringa? Can we use her?’

The President’s abrupt manner indicated to General Fuego that the usual niceties would not be observed.  He was a man on a mission.

‘Yes, Mr President, I think we can.  She responded very well to my irresistible charm.’  He looked the President in the eye and smiled mischievously.

‘Don’t lose focus here, Fuego. We need information on the real production numbers at Gemsite.  I don’t trust Black.  I am sure he is cheating us out of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue.  I want you to liaise with the Minister of Mines and keep him informed of anything that you learn.  We have to find out how much those filhos da puta are really taking out of the ground up there.  I need taxes.’

General Fuego was fond of his brother-in-law but could not imagine what the President needed with more money, given that a rumoured billion dollars of petroleum income went missing every year and he was pretty sure that the President had first dibs.

However, the General was not unhappy with his new assignment and had indeed been quite taken with the spikey young woman.  It would be no hardship to have to spend more time with her and her nice, round bottom.

***

Meanwhile, Eduardo had dropped Sam at the Gemsite office, where she found Bill Collier. ‘Hi Bill, I wondered if you could help me with something?’

‘Hi Sam.  I didn’t expect to see you so soon.  What brings you to Mondongo?’

‘I’m doing a diamond run for Jim.’

‘Ah, the dreaded diamond run.  What can I do for you?’

‘I need some money, just a small amount, buy some postcards.’

She hesitated.  Even as she said it, she knew it sounded naïve.

‘Postcards huh?  You’ll be lucky.  As a member of Kardo staff you’re not allowed any money but seeing as you were hired to work in Mondongo, and the staff in Mondongo are allowed advances on their salaries, I’m sure we can stretch the rules a bit.  How much do you want?’

So that’s how Pedro funds his exploits. 

‘Thirty dollars please.   And can I borrow the driver for an hour to go and look for the postcards?’

‘Sure.  I’ll sort it out.  Wait here.’

Ten minutes later he reappeared with a receipt for her to sign and thirty dollars in cash.

‘I’ll tell the driver to change the money for you.  You don’t want to get cheated.  And let me know if you find any postcards.  It never occurred to me to look to be honest.  We can send them for you, if you give them to my secretary.’

Sam went outside to the car.  They drove into the centre of town.  Mondongo was a chaotic place to look for anything.  The driver changed some of her money at one corner and they entered into a sea of street hawkers who besieged pedestrians and drivers alike. The street traders soon surrounded the car, selling shirts, car spares, carrycots, cigarettes, stereos, cassettes, sunglasses and cartons of juice.

‘Here in Mondongo, you do not go to the shops.  The shops come to you,’ said the driver, gesturing at the women sitting on the sidewalks selling individual cigarettes from open packets.  ‘They give you your change in sweets or bubble gum because there are not enough coins circulating anymore.’

‘What happened to the coins?’

‘I suspect that they have been melted down.’ 

The only real shop Sam had seen in Mondongo was on a corner in the same office building that housed Gemsite’s offices.  It was filled with expensive vases and glassware.  Its windows were protected by a heavy iron grating.  Sam watched people stand for ages outside this shop, staring longingly in the window.  All of the women stopped and pointed out their favourite items, objects of intense desire.  Objects they would never be able to afford.

These women had superb figures and were shaped not unlike some of the vases.  They were very slender with long slim legs that an average British woman would die for.  They had very pretty faces and neat features.  Scatters of beautiful children in their smart clothes accompanied them.  Even the poorer women stood out in their tight wraparound skirts.

The men were also slim and quite striking.  There were a lot of very protruding bottoms, which looked like ripe fruits in their tight trousers with their belts pulled tight to emphasise their figures.   

After scouring the wares of practically every street seller in the whole of the commercial district, Sam found eight identical slightly out-of-focus postcards in a little booth on the side of the road.  They were left over from pre-independence days and featured the fortress on the mainland side of the bridge to the island in Mondongo Bay.  The fortress overlooked the bay toward the National Bank of Tamazia.  It had once been used to protect the bay, but it had since been used to store confiscated MARFO weapons.

The postcards cost the equivalent of one dollar each, despite their advanced state of decay.  The driver told Sam that she was being robbed but she did not care.  She imagined how reassuring it would be for her parents to receive a postcard from Tamazia.  She wrote the postcards and gave them to the secretary at the Gemsite office so she could put Tamazian stamps on them.  She wondered if they would ever arrive in England. 

Next she was driven to Villa Alice to wait for her flight back to Kardo.  She looked forward to seeing Sky News and catching up on the world outside. They only had radios in Kardo, and the BBC World Service only reached them for a few hours a day.

However, the airwaves were full of interminable drivel about Princess Diana.  It was the fifth anniversary of her death in a car crash and the media were making the most of it.  Sam fell asleep on the sofa and was only woken when the power cut out late that night.  She realised that the flight must have been cancelled again and she wandered into an empty bedroom and fell into the soft bed with a sigh of relief to have a night away from Kardo.

After a particularly unappetising breakfast the next morning, Sam decided to make use of her time in Mondongo to explore the geological office above the garages in the compound, where she would be working after her training period at Kardo.  She went to the Gemsite office to ask Bill Collier for the keys.

‘Ah, the geology office, the holy of holies,’ said Bill.  ‘You need to unlock three doors to get into the office, and you’re supposed to lock yourself in while you’re there.   No one is allowed into the office without a permit except Black himself.’

‘That sounds a bit lonely,’ said Sam, although she also thought that perhaps being away from most of the people she had met so far was not too tragic.

‘Anyway, here are the keys.  Give them back to me when you are finished.’

Sam walked over to the compound and went up the metal steps to the door of the technical office.  She forced the keys into the seldom-used locks and opened the door.  The room was gloomy and covered in spiders’ webs.   It was filled with dated computers, printers and a scanner.  She wondered if anyone had passwords for the computer files.  She sorted though some old maps and papers which were scattered on the floor and the desks.  Underneath one of the piles she discovered a telephone.  She picked it up.  It had a dial tone.  She dialled her parents’ number and was amazed when she heard ringing at the other end.

Her mother picked it up.

‘Hi, Mummy.’

‘Darling, how are you?  Are you in London?  The line is so clear.’

‘No, I’m still in Tamazia, in the office in Mondongo actually.  How are you and Daddy?’

‘We are both fine, dear.  How is the job?  Have you met anyone at the tennis club yet?'

‘The job’s okay.  I’ve not had a chance to go to the club yet.  We’ve been pretty busy.’  She winced at the lie but she could not tell her mother that the club had probably been closed after independence.

‘Now don’t work too hard, dear.  You need to have a social life, too.  Are there any nice people there?’

‘I’m sure there are, Mummy.  Just haven’t met them yet.’

‘Are you okay, darling, really?’

‘Still in one piece, I promise.  I can’t chat now.  I just called so you would know that I got here safely.  Give Daddy a hug from me, will you?’

‘Okay, darling.  Look after yourself.’

Sam hung up the phone.  She was economical with the truth at the best of times when it came to her parents.  There was no point in telling them things that might upset them, like where she was really working and why.  She had not felt in any real danger yet. 

There were disadvantages to her new office besides having to be locked in all day.  It did not take long for her to realise that there was no toilet.  She had to leave the office, lock all the doors, walk to the transit trailers and find an open one so that she could use the toilet in the trailer.  She prayed never to get diarrhoea whilst in Mondongo.

At lunchtime, she went to a spare trailer, where her precious boxes of belongings had been stored after they had been rescued from customs, to fish out a tampon from her supplies.  At that moment, Pedro turned up unannounced and wanted to drag her off to lunch.  There was an awkward moment when he offered her his hand to shake and she had to kiss him because she had a tampon in her right hand and did not want to give him a heart attack. 

Sam was well aware that Latin men were not very good with that sort of thing.  He’d probably never seen a tampon before.

Sam and Pedro went to a nice restaurant with an oval bar around which people ate and drank.

Pedro flirted with all his considerable charm. 

‘I can’t wait for you to come to Mondongo to work.  It’s going to be a lot of fun.’

‘I don’t think I’d call working in that isolated office fun,’ she said.

‘I’m talking about after work.’

‘Oh, and who are you going to have fun with?’

‘You, of course.’

‘Me?  Oh, I don’t really like fun.  I’m a very serious person.’

‘Not that sort of fun.  You know what I mean?’

‘No, I don’t, would you like to spell it out?’

‘I love it when a woman plays hard to get.’

‘Impossible to get more like it.’

‘Don’t be mean, Sam.  I know what I want.’

‘You know what you think you want.  You don’t know me Pedro and I don’t know you.’

‘But we’re going to be so good together.’

Sam wondered if he thought that she fancied him after the kiss-to-hide-the-tampon incident.  However, she had to admit that she enjoyed being the focus of his attention.  It was fascinating to watch a man work that hard at seduction.  She was not a prime catch.  She was less plump now but not glamorous, as she was dressed in field gear ready for her flight.  It was amazing what the laws of supply and demand could do for a woman’s sex appeal.