Glass House (11 page)

Diamonds were found even before kimberlite
pipes were recognized and discovered to be connected to them, of
course. Some were sprayed out in eruptions and found on the ground,
but many more were washed along in river sediments. Because of
that, diamonds were usually mined first as river alluvium. But then
the miners traced the rivers back….

Kimberlite is named for Kimberley, South
Africa, the first area where diamonds were linked to the volcanic
pipes. And South Africa and its neighbors were discovered to be
rich in kimberlite pipes. Which made them rich in diamonds.

Historically, India was the first big source
of diamonds in the world. In 2,000 years, the Indian subcontinent
produced twenty million carats. The big source that followed that
was Brazil, where it took 200 years to get that amount. But in
South Africa, they dug up twenty million carats of diamonds in just
fifteen years.

The southern end of the African continent,
from the Diamond Coast on the Atlantic and around the continent’s
tip, is the most valuable and profitable diamond area in the world,
so much so that colonial powers drew some of their boundaries based
on the stones alone. In Namibia, up the west coast, the Germans
sought to protect the best diamond areas by drawing out the borders
of the
Sperrgebiet
, a forbidden territory that covered 200
miles of Atlantic shoreline and stretched better than 50 miles
inland.

Laurentian was in a region of South Africa
called Namaqualand, in the country’s northwest corner, just south
of the
Sperrgebiet
and in the heart of the Diamond
Coast
.
Like many of the mines in the area, the Laurentian
mining operation in its first form was alluvial. The mines
surrounded and cut into an old, dry river bed. They were staked out
in a wide, wavering line from the interior to the coast, where the
now-missing river had once dumped into the ocean.

The mines were productive in their time.
Rough was present in moderate amounts, and wealth was made. But the
company – originally named for the Laurentian Abyss in an
improvident hope that the lode would be as deep as the seas –
soon started to tap out.

Company managers assessed the books and
projected their expenses. They figured anticipated yields and drew
charts that showed diminishing returns that would make the
operation a zero sum by a particular time. That was when mining
first stopped at Laurentian. The facilities were shut down, the
administrative staff pulled out, and the miners were left hanging.
The mines, the buildings and the town – all of it was
abandoned to the sand, which swallowed it.

It took a change in technology to bring
anyone back.

Laurentian was empty for almost two decades
before a potential buyer came forward. Though they paid little
attention to the dry mines, the South African government still
controlled the area. The property had reverted to them, and they’d
thrown up a second fence around it, but it was never patrolled.

People could come and go as they pleased,
and they did exactly that. The Laurentian grounds were looted to
the point that anything of possible value was gone – any
removable metal or glass, rubber or plastic, furniture or papers.
All of it was taken away, bit by bit. Only the buildings themselves
were left behind.

When the potential buyer made an option
offer for Laurentian, the option allowed for exploration with a
purchase right to follow, but that right really only specified the
land and minerals. Everything else that was meaningful or valuable
was already gone.

The option holders didn’t care, though, and
they didn’t waste any time.

New analyses and approaches to pipe location
and confirmation were put to full use. Geologists, gemologists, and
diggers were brought in, and the collective mass of them combed
over the grounds, every inch of them. From fence to fence, near the
original mine sites or away from them, they measured and mapped,
and they drilled cores and plucked samples of soil every few feet.
They sent them to labs to be pulled apart in every sensible
manner.

The crew at work at Laurentian wasn’t
looking directly for diamonds when they did that. They were looking
for other minerals.

In Botswana, east and north of Laurentian,
the experiences of new technology diamond mining had confirmed
remarkably valuable theories of kimberlite pipe geology. Ants
building their hills had brought subsurface soils up from under the
Kalahari Desert there. They’d carried the sands and other materials
to the surface and deposited them at the ready for anyone who
wanted to know what might lay under the ground. And when those
people looked, what they found were green minerals called
diopsides. More important, they picked out garnets that were marked
by high-chrome and low-calcium content. Purple G10s or other
pyropes.

Those stones were diamond tracers.
Historically found near diamond lodes, the diopsides and garnets
were markers for kimberlite pipes that held diamonds themselves.
The ants in Botswana, through nothing more than the exercise of
their own nature, had led geologists to one of the largest diamond
deposits in the world.

The lead representative in the move to buy
Laurentian, Dennis Sullivan, read every mineral report produced in
his new studies until he came across the one he needed to see. It
was from a corner of the grounds, and the rate of garnet findings
was unusually high.

Sullivan ordered the crew to concentrate on
that area, and the borings and samplings they pulled out over the
next twenty-four hours diagrammed a huge pipe head, almost 250
acres in size. A clamp-down was put in place.

Sullivan exercised the purchase option in
the Laurentian contract that day. A third perimeter fence started
up. Inside the original fence and the one put in place by the South
Africans, this latest addition marked a clear delineation around
the pipe that would form the future of the company.

A security force was in place even before
the fence was completed. It was the first step in a particular
course for the Laurentian partners and the mining company they were
creating. From that day forward, Laurentian security forces were at
the front of everything the company did.

They protected the pipe at first, then the
massive mine and the facilities that followed. The coastal shore
was patrolled. A security cordon was established just outside the
fences, and Laurentian forces accompanied every shipment the new
mine made, first by ground and later by air.

Security watched the miners and surveilled
their families. The dormitories were studied around the clock, and
the nearby shanty town became known for the way news always managed
to reach mining administration even before the people affected had
heard it.

In many ways, Sullivan and the other buyers
didn’t have a clue what they’d helped create. Their loss of control
over Laurentian was still a year or so away, and they had plenty to
occupy them in the meantime.

The pipe at Laurentian was a rich one, with
a varied content that ultimately was found to extend from white
diamonds to fancies that tended toward pink, the first major source
outside Australia. Sullivan had bills and partners to pay, and he
set about doing that with the same speed he’d used to protect the
investment, digging into the pipe with the fervor of a man already
smelling and tasting the wealth.

Laurentian – the new Laurentian –
rebuilt the old facilities, bigger and better than before. They
constructed the dormitories to replace blockhouses where the miners
had slept. They brought in new crushers and conveyors, and they
installed the latest in sorting equipment. They wrote up new
procedures and hired experts to streamline their recovery of
diamonds into the most efficient and profitable manner they could
develop.

Like most modern diamond mines, Laurentian
was all mechanical process. Raw ore was methodically recovered from
the pipe with earth movers, the largest boulders removed from it
and set aside and the rest crushed to a manageable level. The
lighter materials, mainly loose sand and soils, were separated out
by progressive sifting and screening.

That left only any heavy minerals, including
the garnets that had given the pipe away in the first place, but
also including the diamonds themselves. That concentrate of
minerals was sent to final recovery in the main facility, where it
slid down chutes for transport on conveyors that led to X-ray
bombardment.

The same quality that gave diamonds away in
searches of miners’ clothing gave them away in searches of the ore
concentrate – when the stones are subjected to short-waved
light, like ultraviolet beams or X-rays, they fluoresce. They
glow.

As the concentrate fell off the conveyors,
the ore was exposed to X-rays, and any diamonds in it flared. A
photomultiplier picked up even the smallest of those darts of
reactive light, triggering targeted bursts of air. The diamonds
were knocked out of the falling stream of concentrate, and they
were collected in a bin.

It was a process of narrowing. With each
step, with each stage of the movement of the original ore, more and
more was removed from the base material to reach the prize. In many
ways, diamond mining is a CrackerJack industry, filled with people
trying to do nothing more than separate out a prize from all the
material surrounding it.

The remaining work that occurred at the site
in Africa was straightforward. The separated diamonds went to the
cleaning plant, and they were washed in acid. Any soils or other
coatings on the rough were dissolved away, removing anything that
would dull their appearance.

What’s left looks like a peculiar kind of
ice. The rough gems are smooth and shining but irregular on their
surfaces. They’re not cubes, as one might expect, and they aren’t
much like the playing card symbol of a diamond, either.

They also assuredly aren’t anything
resembling a cut and polish job found in a ring. Most rough
diamonds are more or less eight-sided, like two pyramids lifted
from the earth and attached at their square bases.

And colors? Looking into a collection of
washed rough reveals the range they can have. Some are tinted
softly, in colors that people rarely imagine for the stones –
blues, pinks, oranges, greens. The rest, the “white” ones, extend
from clear to yellowed, with any number of nearby shades on the
side.

In its first year, almost $250 million in
diamond rough was taken from the pipe at Laurentian this way. In
its fourth, which came after Sullivan was removed by the forces
he’d put in place to make him safe, the figure was more like $500
million, and the only direction was up.

Just one of those stones was the good and
solid pink that Laurentian superintendent Peter Rupert had been
given after its recovery from Dikembé’s theft. Rupert had shown it
to Anthony to try to push the man to tell what he knew, to get him
to realize it was futile to maintain he wasn’t involved in anything
when the very presence of the pink showed he was.

Dikembé hadn’t listened.

When the Bombardier’s sole passenger stepped
from the stairs that led to the plane’s door, Rupert presented him
with the pink diamond. The mine superintendent held it up, pinched
between his thumb and forefinger, where the light shone through
it.

The man plucked it from Rupert’s hand
without missing a stride as he moved toward one of the two waiting
cars. “He’d taken this?”

Rupert nodded.

“From where?”

“East excavation area,” Rupert said. “A
little toward the north fringe.”

“Toward Ariacht.”

“That direction, no surprise,” Rupert
agreed. “We’ve pulled another collection out of there over the past
two months. None quite the likes of this one, to be sure, but still
a host of pretty rocks, with more expected as long as we can
continue to push that way.”

“Where’s Dikembé now?”

“Gone.”

The man stopped, but it wasn’t a reaction to
the news, which he’d certainly expected. He only paused to look at
the rough in his hand more closely before climbing into the car. He
held it toward the sun and watched the light cut through it,
weighing the color and guessing at what might be found in the
stone.

“And so what about Ariacht?” he asked while
he did that.

“They have a shipment in the next few days.
We’ll pin the timing down in a day, I’d wager, and add whatever
you’d like based on our discussions here. We’ve one other minor
point to deal with after that, then we’re a go, on your okay.”

The man looked away from the stone. “A minor
point?” he asked.

“There’s a SAPS detective,” Rupert said.
“She’s due in tomorrow.”

“About Dikembé?”

“That’s not clear,” Rupert said. “Fair
guess, though, I suspect.”

The man climbed into the car. He shut the
door and rolled the darkly tinted window down. “Make us clean and
give her a show, Mr. Rupert,” he said over the half pane of glass.
“I’ll keep my visit brief. We shall discuss the details on Ariacht
as planned tonight, including anticipated yields, and I’ll be gone
by the time she’s in. You meet with her, and you answer her
questions politely and properly. Walk her on the grand tour we’d
normally provide and show her away. She’ll be fine then, and you’ll
have your
go
on Ariacht in time to deal with it.”

The man passed the pink to Rupert. The
window started up. “And get this out,” he said. “Get it sold.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Rupert said,
watching the man disappear behind the dark glass. He glanced at the
diamond as the car drove away. He was always the one who made sure
of things. Always the one who assured those things were done, and
done well. And the truth was that he was okay with that.

He’d spent his time in the mines, and his
experiences there hadn’t allowed his appreciation for bigger and
better things, because the bigger and better things were never
there. When you’re working at separating rock, the niceties of the
world are far from the tips of your fingers.