Blue Gold Read online

  “This is Doctor Marie Pierre,” she said when she connected. “I am a Canadian citizen working for the UN High Commission for Refugees at Nyarugusu Camp. I am in need of protection.” Marie waited while her call was passed onto someone else, then explained again who she was and why she needed protection. “I must tell you there are Congolese refugees in my care whose lives are at risk,” she told the embassy official. Sylvie watched her frown. “But that’s exactly the point,” Marie said with frustration. “This family isn’t safe in the DRC, or Tanzania!” She argued some more with whoever was on the other end of the line, then rang off angrily.

  “What is it?” asked Sylvie.

  Marie gave her a bold smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “When Olivier gets here with your family, we’re leaving for Dar es Salaam. Once we’re inside the embassy, we’ll be safe.”

  “But will they let us in?” asked Sylvie.

  “They have to,” she replied, which wasn’t the reassurance Sylvie was looking for.

  AN HOUR WENT BY. Sylvie and Marie waited anxiously by the gate for Olivier, Mama, and the children. Doctor Van de Velde hadn’t appeared yet, either. The very air around them seemed tense, like the tingle before a lightning storm, and outside the thorn fence, the camp was too quiet. Sylvie wanted to go out to look for Olivier and her family, but Marie told her that if anyone reported to Kayembe that she was here inside the compound, then everyone would be in danger.

  “But he must already know,” Sylvie pointed out. “Luc saw us, remember?”

  Just as this truth dawned on Marie’s face, a single rifle shot splintered the air, then the rapid-fire of an automatic weapon.

  Martin ran out from one of the tents. “Where’s it coming from?”

  “The clinic, I think,” replied Marie.

  Neema and the other nurses and aid workers started to gather, fear in everyone’s eyes.

  “Where are the police?” shrieked Neema. “Who is going to protect us?”

  “Look!” said Martin, pointing.

  They all turned to see a wisp of black smoke rising into the sky, from the direction of the clinic.

  “Doctor Van de Velde!” exclaimed Neema.

  “They won’t hurt him,” Marie told her. “They have no reason to hurt him.” But she sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

  Suddenly, Neema took hold of Sylvie’s arm. “It’s you they want!” She half pushed, half pulled Sylvie toward the gate. “Go! Get out!”

  Marie grabbed hold of Neema—“Leave her alone!”—and all at once the entire group was bickering and shouting, some wanting Sylvie to stay and others all for sending her straight to Kayembe.

  “Kayembe wants me dead, too!” Marie shouted. “Does that mean I should go out there?”

  A piercing whistle silenced them. It was Martin, four fingers in his mouth.

  “Stop it!” he yelled in his fumbling French. “Stop it right now! Sylvie is staying here, and so is Marie!”

  But Sylvie’s gratitude turned quickly to despair when she looked back to see that the wisp of smoke in the distance had turned into leaping orange flames. The clinic was burning. There were more gunshots, coming closer. They’re right, she realized. I have brought this upon them. While the others stared in disbelief at the fire, she dashed for the gate and threw off the wooden bar that kept it locked. Marie reached her just as she pushed the gate open.

  “Sylvie!”

  The rattled peacekeeper swung his gun at them, ready to shoot.

  “No!” Marie cried out, pushing the barrel away with trembling fingers.

  “Marie, go back inside,” pleaded Sylvie. “I have to find my family.”

  Tearfully, Marie told her, “Sylvie, they may already be dead.”

  Sylvie looked into Marie’s eyes, and went numb. She was right. Of course she was right. Too much time had gone by—Kayembe had caught them by now. Mama, Pascal, Lucie. Olivier. Sylvie felt her limbs go weak. Her legs wouldn’t move. Her heart pounded—so hard it felt like it might burst through her chest. She wished it would, and then at last all the pain would be over.

  Sylvie heard the rattle of a heavy truck turning into the lane behind her. She saw Marie’s eyes go wide with dread. The peacekeeper lifted his gun and took aim. A truck full of soldiers, thought Sylvie. Would they kill them all here, or would they take her to Kayembe to give him the satisfaction of doing it himself?

  Then, a strange smile crossed Marie’s face. “My God,” she said in wonder.

  Sylvie turned slowly. The truck was large, like the ones Kayembe’s men used to carry coltan. Seated in the cab were Olivier and Doctor Van De Velde. She blinked twice to make sure that what she was seeing was real, and broke into a grin. Yes, Fiston was driving! As the truck creaked to a stop, the Belgian leaped out.

  “You two,” he said to Marie and Sylvie. “Quickly! Get in the back!”

  Fiston leaned out the driver’s window.

  “It is my pleasure to take you as far as Dar es Salaam, mesdemoiselles,” he said. “After that, Fiston must seek new work—preferably outside the reach of my previous employer.”

  “Hurry! Get in!” shouted Olivier, jumping down from the passenger side, cradling the AK-47 at the ready. “The others are in the back.”

  Marie turned to Doctor Van de Velde. “You can’t stay, either. They’ll come to the compound.”

  “Go!” he said. “We’ll be all right. The army is almost here. I spoke to them an hour ago.”

  Marie threw her arms around his neck. “I’ll see you soon!” she said, and hurried to the back of the truck.

  Sylvie lingered for a moment. “When I become a doctor,” she promised him, “I’m coming back.”

  “By the time you are a doctor, Sylvie,” he told her, “I pray to all that is holy that this place will no longer be needed.”

  Olivier held open the canvas flap at the back of the truck. “Let’s go!” he shouted, glancing urgently down the lane behind them. “They’re not far behind!”

  Inside, Pascal and Lucie were taking turns to see who could throw the scraps of coltan nuggets that littered the floor the furthest, oblivious to the danger they were in. Marie was seated beside Mama, who gripped her hand anxiously.

  “Where are we going?” Mama fretted when she saw Sylvie. “How will Patrice find us?”

  Sylvie took her mother’s other hand. “We’re going someplace safe,” she told her.

  But no sooner had she spoken the words than a new burst of gunfire rang out—much closer than before. Pascal and Lucie stopped their game. Sylvie slid over and peeked through the canvas to see a jeep rounding a corner into the lane, still a good distance behind them but approaching fast. There was a machine gun mounted on top, and one of Kayembe’s men was firing it wildly into the air.

  The UN peacekeeper gaped. Olivier stood his ground at the rear of the truck, gun raised, poised to shoot. Fiston joined him from the driver’s side of the truck, removing the safety from his automatic rifle as he ran.

  “Can we outrun them?” Olivier asked him.

  “With our weight? Not a chance.” Fiston saw Sylvie looking out the canvas. “Tell everyone to get down!”

  Sylvie did as she was told, making Pascal and Lucie flatten themselves against the bed of the truck, while Marie helped Mama. She heard shots ring out from Olivier and Fiston, and then the rat-a-tat of the jeep’s machine gun, coming closer. Papa, she prayed silently, be with Olivier now. Help him to save us.

  WHEN MIN SAW LAIPING’S INJURIES, she insisted on taking her to the campus clinic, where a doctor told her one of her ribs was cracked, and cleaned out the cuts under her left eye and at the corner of her mouth. Laiping noticed the doctor did not ask how her injuries happened.

  “That could have been you,” Min said, when Laiping told her abut Kai being taken away in the van. “This isn’t our village. You can’t trust anybody.”

  But Laiping had already learned this lesson. Lesson Number…she had lost count.

  Laiping got a note from the
clinic allowing her to miss her shift in the factory for one night. She went back to the dorm and lay flat on her bunk—the only position in which the cracked rib didn’t hurt—and waited for Fen to come back in the evening. Fen’s shock when she saw Laiping’s bruises seemed real, but she was less convincing when she denied knowing anything about the police and the meeting.

  “You found the address in my mobile. You gave it to the company,” Laiping accused her.

  “Don’t be crazy. Why would I do that?”

  Laiping was prepared for Fen to lie—she’d known she was a liar since the first day they met. “Because you’re a company spy,” she told her.

  “Ai ya! You must have mental problems,” she replied hotly. “Troublemakers always get punished. That’s just the way it is.”

  “Including your father?” asked Laiping.

  “Don’t talk about my father! Everything bad that happened to my family happened because of him.”

  That was the last time Laiping and Fen spoke. A few days after Kai’s arrest, Fen was promoted to a job as an office clerk in another building. Laiping heard her boasting to some of the girls in their dorm room that she was hired because the boss was impressed by her knowledge of English. But Laiping knew exactly how she got the job.

  You can’t trust anybody.

  Laiping tried phoning Kai’s number, but a recording told her it was no longer in service. She used a pay phone to do this, just in case the company tried to trace the call back to her mobile. The thought of another beating made her careful about drawing attention to herself. She wondered where Kai was. Maybe he had been fired, like the man on Min’s line who complained too loudly about the chemical they were forced to use. Or maybe he was in one of the work camps he’d told her about, where they send people simply for wanting things to change.

  LAIPING WENT BACK TO WORK on Friday night, her side aching from the cracked rib. Mr. Wu yelled at her when she couldn’t keep up her usual pace on the production line. From the corner of her eye, she could see the girl who’d replaced Bohai smirking, but she kept her head bowed over her work, ignoring her. No one asked what happened to her face, and she noticed in the dorm and in the factory that people seemed to avoid talking to her.

  On Sunday, Laiping had the day off. She phoned Auntie and learned that the hospital had sent her father back home to the village to wait for the surgery. Laiping asked if she could speak to him, and Auntie took the phone over to her parents’ house, where he was confined to bed. When Laiping heard his voice, she burst into tears.

  “Baba, I want to come home!” she cried.

  “What’s wrong, Laiping? What’s happened?” he asked with concern. In the background, she could hear her mother asking the same questions, and her father telling her to be quiet—he couldn’t hear Laiping.

  “I don’t like it here,” Laiping told him. She wanted to explain about Kai and the beating, but she was afraid it would be bad for his heart.

  “You must give it a chance,” he told her.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Baba! They work us so hard, and everyone’s so mean.”

  “Let me talk to her!” she heard her mother saying, and pictured her grabbing the phone out of his hands. “Laiping,” she said when she came on the line, her voice hard and scolding, “what are you thinking, upsetting Baba like this when he’s just out of the hospital?”

  “I didn’t mean to upset him,” said Laiping, wiping her eyes.

  “What’s this about you coming home?”

  “I’ve made up my mind. As soon as they give me my back pay, I’m quitting.”

  There was a hesitation, then, “Laiping, you can’t quit.”

  “I’ll make sure I get the money for the surgery first.”

  “You have to keep your job.”

  “Mama, I hate it here!”

  “Think, Laiping! Your father can’t work anymore, and I have to look after him. How will we live if you don’t have a job?”

  “We’ll run the farm, you and me!”

  “You’re being foolish! The farm barely feeds us as it is! Besides, we can’t do the heavy work.”

  Laiping tried to picture herself behind the plow, the blade catching in the mud, the ox balking. She remembered the suffocating heat of the fields, and the sticky sweat. Was factory life really so much worse than that? The sickness in her soul when she thought about the monotonous nights at her work station, of the endless fatigue, of the bullying supervisors—of Kai’s bloodied face, and her own—told her it was.

  “Mama,” she said, “it’s too hard here.”

  “Bitter first, sweet after, Laiping. A good daughter obeys her parents. You must stay and learn to tolerate the work.”

  A deadening weight took hold of Laiping. It started in her stomach and moved out through every nerve in her body—extinguishing hope as it went, leaving her limbs heavy and her mind dull. There was no point in struggling against it.

  “Yes, Mama,” she replied.

  After she said goodbye, Laiping lay down on her bunk. She stayed there for hours, too self-conscious to go out because of the bruises on her face, too sleepless to drive away visions of her future in the factory, stretching before her in endless repetition, day after day after day.

  But the very next night in the factory, something exciting happened.

  “Tonight we will have special visitors, and a great honor,” Miss Lau announced over the loudspeaker. “Mr. Chen has given his permission for a film crew all the way from America to come in to shoot video of our factory.”

  Laiping remembered the video of protesting Americans Kai had shown her and wondered if that was why the film crew was coming, to see the conditions in the factory for themselves. For once, she was glad for the bruises on her face—maybe she would have the chance to tell the gweilo how it happened. But when Laiping went to take her station following marching exercises, Mr. Wu stopped her.

  “You’re being transferred,” he told her.

  Laiping was sent with a group of a hundred or so workers to a different building, where they were given white smocks instead of blue, and where instead of soldering capacitors to circuit boards, they checked the finished product to make sure that the smartphones worked. Laiping noticed that most of the workers who were moved were very young, perhaps underage. She thought, How clever of Steve Chen to let the American cameras see only what the company wants them to see. She remembered Kai’s words: There are things you need to know. But if the company had its way, the world would never know. Just like Laiping would never know what happened to Kai.

  “Smile!” said the young girl next to her on the assembly line.

  She pointed a smartphone at Laiping. There was a clicking sound.

  “This one works,” the girl said, checking the photo she’d taken.

  She showed it to her. Laiping barely recognized the girl in the white smock and cap as herself. That girl could be anybody. Not happy, or unhappy. Not a city girl, or a country girl. Except for the purple-gray bruise around her eye, she was just a factory girl, like a hundred thousand others.

  SYLVIE LAY FLAT against the bed of the truck, holding Pascal and Lucie close to her. Beyond the canvas flap covering the back, the rapid fire of the machine gun grew louder as the jeep closed in on them, answered by shots from Olivier and Fiston. The truck’s engine was still running—Sylvie could feel the vibrations through the floor, and she tasted diesel fumes along with the tang of fear. She looked over to where Marie lay with her arm over Mama, their eyes meeting in shared terror.

  The canvas flap flew up—Doctor Van de Velde held it open for them. “Get out of there!” he shouted. “You’re sitting ducks!”

  Behind him, Sylvie could see Olivier and Fiston shooting their guns. The UN peacekeeper stood with them, firing his rifle at the approaching jeep. Sylvie started to move toward the Belgian, but suddenly he arched his back, his face widening in surprise as a bullet hit his shoulder.

  “Bernard!” Marie shrieked, inching forward on her stomach.
/>
  Together, she and Sylvie managed to pull Doctor Van de Velde into the truck. A cry of pain from the peacekeeper rang out; Sylvie saw him go down just as the flap fell shut.

  “Olivier, get in and drive!” they heard Fiston yell.

  “You said we can’t outrun them!” came Olivier’s reply.

  “We can’t outshoot them, either. Go!”

  Abruptly, the shooting stopped. Sylvie heard the jeep rumbling closer, and the squeal of its brakes. She prayed for the truck to move, but the engine continued to idle. Marie, cradling Doctor Van de Velde, gave her a desperate look, while Lucie and Pascal huddled in terror with Mama behind them.

  “What’s happening?” mouthed Marie.

  Sylvie lifted a corner of the canvas and saw Fiston with his hands in the air, his rifle on the ground. The scrawny fighter, the one Fiston called Arsène, was at the wheel of the jeep.

  The man behind the machine gun kept the barrel aimed at Fiston as Arsène climbed out of the jeep and walked stealthily down the driver’s side of the truck, tightly gripping his AK-47. As he came back into Sylvie’s view, he dipped down, sweeping the barrel of his gun under the truck.

  “Where did Olivier run to?” he said, relaxing a little as he turned to Fiston. “Decided to save himself, did he?” Arsène kicked the rifle out of Fiston’s reach, taunting, “How much did they pay you, Fiston, to throw your life away?”

  “Not enough,” said Fiston, trying to joke with him. But Sylvie could see he was sweating. “Let us go, Arsène. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  For a moment, Arsène seemed to consider Fiston’s offer. Then he nodded to the man in the jeep. There was a burst of machine gun fire, and Fiston fell to the ground. Sylvie recoiled into the truck, sickened. In the next instant, Arsène threw back the canvas. He was pointing his AK-47 at them now, and the soldier in the jeep was directing the machine gun toward the truck, too. Sylvie heard Mama let out a cry, but she didn’t dare turn to her.

  Arsène looked them over, as though deciding who should die first. “You,” he said, waving his gun at Marie. “Get down here.” Marie didn’t move. Arsène fired into the air, making all of them jump. Lucie was sobbing. “Now!” he commanded. He began undoing his belt.