Blood Gold in the Congo Read online

“What, by calling their president a liar? You jeopardized every one of those deals we did. How would you have felt if the Chinese had ended up with Prescott’s uranium project? Prescott and the other companies forked out hundreds of millions of dollars. You put their plans at risk. I had to call in every favor owed to me in order to salvage them.”

  “None of them have started construction,” Joseph said. “The monies they paid were bribes. They did nothing to help the Congolese.”

  “You’re bloody naïve. Pure. So wet behind the ears. Don’t you understand how much your firm made while we were in the Congo? Didn’t your father tell you?”

  “George, I didn’t do anything wrong. All I did was tell the truth.”

  “You didn’t have to go. The prosecution didn’t subpoena you. You went of your own volition.”

  “I don’t like murderers not paying for their crimes!”

  “Jesus, as if you can talk about murderers.”

  “I killed in self-defense. There’s a big difference.”

  “You don’t understand anything. There have been millions killed in the Congo over the past twenty years. It’s the way things are, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

  “I might surprise you one day,” Joseph said and smiled. “Have you managed to recall who you sold the New Dawn gold mine to?”

  Faraday rolled his eyes and slowly shook his head. “What is it with you? I told you I didn’t remember. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll back off. Capel & Lambert have a lot of clients who tread on the edge of the law. You keep poking and prodding, you might unearth some skeletons your father and his partners would prefer not to know about.”

  “So you do remember! You’re just not telling. That’s okay. I’ll find out who it was, and when I do, I’ll also know why you’re so anxious to keep it secret.”

  “We should have left you to rot in the jungle. You’re gonna get yourself killed. If you’re not worried about yourself, think about your parents. They’ve given you everything – love, a good home, and a great life. You’ve wanted for nothing,” Faraday said, standing up abruptly. “Oh, and think about Maya’s brother and sister.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m telling you to grow up. The people you’re antagonizing are some of the world’s most powerful. You think your parents are wealthy and influential. They’re not,” Faraday said, as he paused at the door. “There’s nothing you can change in the Congo, and if you try, all you’ll do is hurt those you love.”

  Two days later, the devastating news of Yuma Lidy’s death reached Joseph. He had been a courageous, good man, and courageous good men in the Congo were rare.

  After the heated meeting with Faraday, life returned to normal for Joseph, even though he continued to use every spare hour to hunt through Boucher’s emails. His relationship with Maya continued to grow, but they were both sick of creeping around at nights. When they discussed moving into an apartment, they always came up with the same problems. “How will we look after Moise?” Maya asked. “I’m at college, and you have your work.”

  “We’ll do what other people do,” Joseph replied. “We’ll get him looked after.”

  “He’ll miss your parents. There is nothing Michelle won’t do for him, and Frank comes home early especially to throw the football with him. While you were away, he was in a sprint race at school, and Frank took the afternoon off to watch him.”

  “I know. He won.” Joseph smiled.

  “And he’s got the swimming pool, and that big backyard to play in. He’s not going to have those facilities in an apartment.”

  “We could lease a house.”

  “Yes, but we can’t lease your mom and dad. I think it’ll break their hearts if we go. Let’s stay. They know what’s going on with us. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’ll talk to Dad,” Joseph said. “He’ll think of something.”

  When Yannick’s flight landed in Kalemie, he immediately emailed Leon and asked him to forward the email to Joseph. An hour later he received an email from Joseph saying, “I can’t believe it, my friend. Welcome to the twenty-first century. You’re in my address book. Be careful. Good luck.”

  Yannick was greeted as an all-conquering hero on his return to the village, but he knew he could not stay there. He was a wanted man – a rebel leader, according to the army – and if he stayed, he would put the villagers in danger. But he had rationalized on the plane that if he was going to die for being a rebel, he might as well perform the part. With $5,000 to buy food and guns, he and a small group of young, similar-minded villagers could live in the jungle and wreak havoc on the mines for years.

  Within three months, his band of freedom fighters had grown to fifty, and he realized that after buying weapons and ammunition, $5,000 didn’t go far. Fortunately, Joseph had continued making transfers. When Yannick checked on the Internet, the balance in his account was slightly more than $3,000. One small trader, who had been providing groceries, had refused to continue supplying without a $500 payment. When Yannick punched in his details and hit pay, nothing happened. After confirming the trader’s banking details, Yannick tried again, without success. He smiled as he recalled Belvie’s last message: “When you are suspicious, go with your gut.”

  The following morning before dawn broke, Yannick, nine of his best men, and a sixteen-year-old boy who had learned to become a whiz on the Internet in only a few days, set off in an old truck for the one-hundred-fifty-mile drive to the bank in Kalemie. They arrived on the outskirts of the city just after noon, parked in dense foliage, and again went over their plan. Two of the men remained with the truck, while the others broke into groups of three and headed for the bank. One had been a powder monkey at the mine and carried a small suitcase packed with explosives. Yannick hoped he wouldn’t have to use them.

  Five minutes before closing time, the young boy went to the ATM at the front of the bank and attempted to withdraw 100,000 Congolese francs, the equivalent of $100, from Yannick’s account. Nothing happened, and when he tried again, four soldiers came out of the front door of the bank and seized him. Yannick raised his hand to caution the others, wanting to make sure there were no more soldiers. They started to march the boy into the bank, and as they reached the front doors, Yannick gave the signal. Such was the soldiers’ excitement, they had been oblivious to anyone else, and were shocked to feel the cold steel of handguns thrust into their ribs. “Drop your weapons,” Yannick said, “and you won’t get hurt.”

  Another of Yannick’s men locked the doors of the bank and pulled down the drapes. Three others waved their handguns around and shouted at the customers and staff to get on the floor. The boy collected their cellphones, turned them off, and piled them in the middle of the floor.

  Yannick quickly took control. “Find two bags or satchels for the guns and phones,” he shouted to one of his men. Then he demanded to see the manager. “I am not here to steal,” he said. “All I want is what is in my account. It was transferred in U.S. dollars, and that is what I want.”

  “We-we don’t hav-have any U.S. dollars,” the trembling little man replied.

  Yannick slowly removed the Glock from his shoulder holster and gently tapped the barrel into his palm, never taking his eyes off the manager. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  The manager’s eyes were watering, and without warning he vomited all over the floor.

  Yannick gave him thirty seconds to recover, then said, “No more messing around. Get my money.”

  The manager went to one of the tellers’ cages with Yannick close behind and counted out $3,050 in U.S. bills. “Thank you. Show me the vault.”

  The size of the enormous vault brought a smile to Yannick’s face. His men herded the soldiers, customers, and staff into it. “There’s not enough air in here for us to survive until morning,” the manager whined.

  “I don’t believe you,” Yannick said, as his men closed the heavy door.

  One of the men said, “We should clean o
ut the tellers’ cages. We’ll never get another opportunity like this.”

  “No,” Yannick said, “we got what we came for. We’ll leave in twos at one-minute intervals. Whatever you do, don’t run. Act naturally. I’ll go last. Make sure the truck is running and ready to go by the time I get back.”

  As Yannick nonchalantly walked down the main street, he emailed Joseph and asked him to stop transferring funds. When he reached the truck, he ordered his men to get rid of the bags and phones in the foliage. On the trip back to his jungle headquarters, he asked himself, not for the first time, whether he should have stolen from the bank. Running, feeding, and funding an ever growing army was not an easy task. He told himself he had done the right thing. He was not going to steal money from the banks or their customers.

  Then out of the blue, a thought came to him, and he smiled. His money problems were over, and he’d never need to bother Joseph again. For the next two weeks, he meticulously planned an operation that would enable him to feed, clothe, and arm his freedom fighters.

  Fifty miles south of the New Dawn gold mine in a heavily treed area, a sharp bend swung hard left on the gravel road leading to Lubumbashi. Just after five o’clock on Friday morning, Yannick and twenty-five of his heavily armed freedom fighters crammed into two old trucks and converged on the area. After hiding the vehicles, five men manning shovels started digging around the roots of a mukula tree approximately sixty feet tall. Two men carrying long, thick ropes scaled it. After they had wrapped the ropes securely around the upper trunk, they dropped them to the ground. An hour later, with some strenuous pulling on the ropes, the tree came crashing down across the road. Yannick checked the tree’s base and was pleased to see the root system had concealed any sign of the digging. After carefully checking the area, he positioned his men, ensuring there was no possibility of them being hit by crossfire, and then called for complete silence. Having spent weeks planning the attack, he was nervous but confident. He silently prayed another vehicle would not be using the road and foil his plan.

  He heard the small convoy when it was still a mile away and fought off another bout of nerves. A Jeep carrying an officer and three soldiers sped around the bend, coming to an abrupt halt at the sight of the tree. Immediately following was a compact black truck bearing the New Dawn Gold Mining Company signage. Bringing up the rear was another Jeep and four more soldiers. The officer leaped out onto the road and looked nervously around him before inspecting the base of the tree. “Uprooted,” he shouted, “get the chainsaws.”

  The soldiers visibly relaxed. Some put their machine guns on the ground, another rolled a cigarette, and two others took chainsaws from the back of the truck. Finally, the two men in the truck got out, and as they did, Yannick stood up and shouted, “Drop your weapons and you’ll come to no harm.”

  As the soldiers looked up, they saw more than twenty guns pointing directly at them. One soldier moved to pick up his machine gun, and Yannick screamed, “Don’t do it, or you’re dead.”

  “What do you want?” the officer demanded.

  Yannick laughed. “I thought it would be obvious. Tell your men to take their clothes off. Everything! You do the same.”

  “No,” the officer shouted.

  Yannick nodded to the man next to him and a bullet smacked into the ground no further than six inches from the officer’s feet. “No more talking. Now,” he said.

  “You will die for this,” the officer snarled, removing his shirt.

  “Tie them up,” Yannick said, “hands behind their backs and ankles. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  One of the men took the keys out of the truck ignition and opened the rear doors to reveal a heavy safe with two keyholes in the door. “Where are the keys?” Yannick asked the officer.

  “You can’t open it,” he responded. “I have one key, and the other is at the airport. The have to be simultaneously inserted. You’ll never get it open without the second key.”

  Yannick called his powder monkey over and showed him the safe. Another of his men moved the rear Jeep out of the way, and the powder monkey and one of his helpers reversed the truck a hundred yards. Five minutes later an almighty explosion tore the truck apart. Yannick ran down the gravel road to see parts of the safe everywhere, and seven large ingots.

  “Sorry,” the powder monkey said, “I might have used a little too much explosive.”

  “You did great.” Yannick grinned. “Bring the Jeep up and load these in the back. We have to get out of here.”

  He walked back to his men and told them to bundle up the soldiers’ clothes and their weapons.

  Yannick gave his smartphone to his sixteen-year-old assistant. “Get some photos of them before we leave,” he said.

  “You can’t leave us tied up without clothes or guns,” the officer whined.

  “If you reversed our roles, you would’ve killed us,” Yannick said, cutting the bindings from the officer’s hands. “We’re going to leave you a Jeep, a chainsaw, and a pistol. You’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll pay for this.”

  “Shut up and watch,” Yannick said, as he hurled the pistol deep into the bush, followed by the keys to the Jeep. “That should keep you busy. If you want to find me, I’ll be in the jungle, but if you come after me, you’ll die.”

  Two days later, The Congo Daily Times reported the biggest robbery in the country’s history. Rebels had stolen gold ingots valued at more than $5 million from the New Dawn Gold Mining Company while the precious metal was being transported to the airport. Soldiers guarding the gold arrived in Lubumbashi, naked, weaponless, and humiliated. Photographs of the soldiers, naked and bound, appeared next to the article. Yannick Kyenge was declared public enemy number one. The government offered a reward of 100 million Congolese francs ($100,000) for information leading to his apprehension, dead or alive.

  Yannick knew the army would send in a huge contingent of soldiers to recover the gold, and kill him and his freedom fighters. On his return to the village, he immediately evacuated the villagers deep into the jungle, a place the soldiers lived in mortal fear of, and would never venture. For a week they searched the outskirts of the jungle and then, in frustration, set the village on fire. Yannick watched from afar, knowing he could replace the huts and that for once, the soldiers would go back to Kinshasa without having raped or murdered any villagers.

  CHAPTER 37

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  JOSEPH COULDN’T CATCH A BREAK and was becoming increasingly frustrated. He had read every email in Boucher’s inbox, plus the sent and deleted items folders, over an eight-year period, but he still didn’t know who Thibault was. The emails showed that the New Dawn Gold Mining Company was incredibly profitable, paid hardly any income tax, and made sizeable transfers to tax haven bank accounts of senior military personnel and politicians. By far the largest transfers were made to a numbered account in the Virgin Islands. Joseph knew it had to be Thibault’s account.

  As the first anniversary of his escape from Kinshasa approached, Joseph despaired of ever finding out who the real owners of the New Dawn Gold Mining Company were. He was sure the mysterious calling he had experienced was inextricably linked to the mine, and each night he prayed the day would come when the answers he was desperately seeking revealed themselves.

  He was skimming the financial news on his iPad one morning before leaving for the office and pondered whether that day had finally come. An article in The Wall Street Journal had a photo of Marc Boucher, baton under his arm, surrounded by delegates at a Mining in Africa Conference in London. Boucher was the keynote speaker, and the journalist spoke glowingly of his thirty-year mining career in the “Dark Continent.” Joseph had an overwhelming urge to jump on a plane.

  The following morning another article – far more exciting – appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The South Africans had discovered Boucher was in London and had applied to have him extradited. In an astonishing turn of events, he had fled to the Embassy of the Democratic Republi
c of the Congo in London and sought asylum.

  Joseph was intrigued by what was occurring in London and, knowing Jack Costigan would know precisely what was going on, called him. The State Department man was gruff. “You’ve got some nerve calling me after what you got up to in the Congo. If the Chinese had shafted us on that uranium deal, I would’ve lost my job. Where do you get off calling their president a liar?”

  “Jesus, Jack, that’s old news. We didn’t lose any deals. Besides, without me, you never would’ve gotten them in the first place.”

  “So you say. What do you want? I’m a busy man.”

  “Have you been following the Marc Boucher saga in London?”

  “Ah, you want to know what’s going on. Are you going to storm the embassy because he weaseled his way out of answering the prosecutor’s questions? That horse has bolted. It’s over. There’s nothing you can do. Forget about it, and get on with your life.”

  “I’m just curious,” Joseph said. “Will he have to remain permanently in the embassy? Virtually under house arrest?”

  Costigan laughed. “You don’t know anything about diplomacy, do you? The Brits invented it. Put yourself in their shoes. The South Africans need their capital, and they export huge volumes of everything to the U.K. Whereas the Brits, like the rest of the world, are desperate for a piece of the action in the Congo. What do you think they’re going to do?”

  “But the extradition application is to the British courts. There’s nothing the diplomats can do.”

  “You have a lot to learn. Here’s what’s going to happen. The courts will say they don’t have jurisdiction and dismiss the application. The diplomats will go back to the South Africans, who they’ve just screwed, and tell them how hard they tried, and the court’s decision stinks. Then they’ll tell the Congolese it was their backroom maneuverings that resulted in the court throwing the application out.”

  “That’s terrible. I can’t believe it.”

  “Diplomacy: the art of simultaneously deceiving your wife and your girlfriend with the utmost sincerity.” Costigan raucously laughed.