It scurried off into the darkness of a midwestern autumn night, surely not to be the cause of any future trouble. After all, it was only an ant.
The End
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Prologue: Tshikapa, Congo
Arthur Mabele dug in the muddy clay of the Vermeulen mines next to the Kasai River, a tributary of the mighty Congo and itself deeper than most rivers in the world. On the other side of the river from the mine is thick rainforest jungle, most of which has never been charted by man, even today. Satellites cannot see through the ceiling of foliage, and there would be little reason to do so anyway—it is a terra incognita, which isn’t worth the trouble financially, and scientists or others interested in penetrating its mysteries are not the kind who get funding.
But Vermeulen Mining Corp. and other commercial miners of rare earth metals and diamonds do find it very financially rewarding to occupy that part of Congo. Diamonds are dug up by hand by the people of the area, some from holes dug fifty feet into the banks of the Kasai where the water has to be pumped out by methods old when the Romans built their aqueducts.
So the miners dig by hand, getting maybe five dollars for a gem that, when cut and polished, will bring ten thousand or more. Diamonds are very plentiful in Tshikapa, so supply and demand keeps prices shrinkingly low and lets Vermeulen and other companies buy them for almost nothing.
Arthur Mabele had been extraordinarily lucky at his mining endeavors, and got his entire family spending fifteen hours a day digging for what passed for treasure there. They lived in the tent city at the mines like everyone else to protect them from the militias that wanted control of Vermeulen’s property, but they had a television set and one of those dishes that gets television from space back at home, plus a box that let them watch everything for free.
His favorite show when they took days off, which was infrequently, was Cryptids Alive! a show in which the beautiful Ellie White led viewers on a search for mythical creatures that probably actually existed. They had never found one that they could get video of, but that didn’t matter. They were always so close, and that’s what was exciting. It was in English, but that didn’t matter—monsters were monsters, and there were lots of “artist’s conceptions” and Ellie running toward or away from giant cryptids to keep Arthur and his family mesmerized.
It was night at the mine, too dark to see anything except the security lights on at the Vermeulen building, and Arthur was bone-tired after a day in which he found six rocks—six, enough for his family to have something other than gristle and skin for their meal. But, as sometimes happened, his body was too thoroughly worn out for him to immediately fall asleep, so he left his sleeping wife and boy and girl in the tent as he went out to look at the stars. It was relaxing and reminded him that there was a universe outside the diamond mines, a mysterious universe that enchanted him as much as the mysteries on Cryptids Alive!
It was also as silent as it got this close to the rainforest’s edge. He could hear the cawing birds and the occasional screech of the monkeys, but the sounds themselves were muffled, swallowed by the thick vegetation. That’s why he could hear a motorboat revving across the river and landing on the mine’s side. That sound was followed by loud whispers and the slap-slap-slap of someone in boots running through the mud of the mine area—they had to know what they were doing, because the bank was marked by deep holes and shallow ones—and then between the workers’ tents, heading for the far side.
Arthur couldn’t make them out well, except as silhouetted by the company building’s floodlights, but he could see it was two men in military-type uniforms and caps, one of them carrying … a big smooth rock? Something inside a sack? Whatever it was, it seemed heavy and the man carrying it let out a huge sigh of relief when he put it down next to the tent closest to the mine complex’s entry gate. Then, as far as Arthur could tell since they ran off into the darkness, they left through that way. He heard a vehicle start up and drive off.
Lots of weird things happened in a Congo mine, but this was crazy. The military in Tshikapa never entered the Vermeulen area, it being officially Belgian property, even a poor miner like Arthur Mabele knew that. But the militias who everybody knew wanted control of the mines and to force out the Belgians, they snuck into the mines whenever they could, something butchering the unfortunate workers as a warning not to work for foreigners, to refuse to mine for them so they would leave and the militias could take what “belongs to the people of Congo.”
The murders certainly didn’t help morale among the miners, but what could they do? They had to work if they were to eat. It wasn’t like the militias were inviting them to dinner so they wouldn’t have to toil for the Belgians.
Was it a bomb, this thing that the two soldiers had placed next to that far tent? Arthur wasn’t religious and had no interest in being a martyr, but he found a mystery even as probably banal as this one irresistible. He stood up from the crouch he had assumed when he heard the men coming and very slowly and silently placed his bare feet in the mud, then the dirt, as he approached the edge of the tent city, where the object
