Black Pearl Read Online Free

the country planning to do a deal with President Chaka. She would have given them all to Richard Mariner – in the country on the same mission – for she trusted him more than she trusted any member of her family. But Max Asov had a famously successful jewellery business and promised to get her top dollar. It was a promise she and Celine were happy to rely on as they fought to rebuild the finances and infrastructure of their ruined orphanage.
    Intrigued by the colour of the pearl, Max had it tested. And so he found that the mud which gave the oil-dark pearl its unique colour – the mud that formed the bed of Lac Dudo, was the purest form of coltan yet discovered. Suddenly the apparently primary interest in the mysterious black pearls became secondary to what had made them black in the first place.
    Columbite tantalite – coltan for short – is a black metallic ore only found in major quantities in the eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not far to the south of Benin La Bas. Max had contacts who could refine the ore if he could get at it. They were experts in extracting the niobium, which was used in a range of modern equipment from MRI scanners to nuclear power stations. And also the far more precious metallic tantalum, a heat-resistant powder capable of holding a high electrical charge, a vital element in capacitors, the electronic elements that control current flow inside miniature circuit boards. Tantalum capacitors lie at the heart of cell phones, laptops, pagers, flat-screen TVs and almost every other electronic device, from the radar that keeps the international airplanes safe to the control panels that keep the Internet alive. The technology boom of the noughties caused the price of coltan to skyrocket. Max’s experts estimated it would fetch in excess of two hundred and fifty US dollars a kilo, though it had reached more than four hundred dollars a kilo in the past. Even at two-fifty, that meant it was worth a quarter of a million dollars per metric tonne.
    According to the latest maps they could get hold of – those prepared by the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company for Dr Koizumi in 1972, Lac Dudo’s bed was a million square kilometres in area. The depth of sediment on the lake bed, according to the careful Japanese map makers, averaged ten metres, which meant that the lake could contain ten trillion cubic metres of coltan sediment. A cubic metre of sediment weighs roughly a metric tonne. It took Max Asov almost no time at all to calculate that here could be two trillion, five hundred billion dollars’ worth of coltan, therefore, all just waiting for anyone who could get to it and manage to set up an extraction facility on the ruins of Dr Koizumi’s doomed black pearl oyster farm.

Richard
    â€˜L ook, Max,’ repeated Richard Mariner, raising his voice over the thunder of the Kamov’s rotor. ‘Just getting up here in a chopper has taken months of planning. You must see how much tougher it will be to get a permanent team this far by water or on foot. It’ll be a long, hard, dangerous undertaking. You’d be mad to even think of leading it yourself.’ He leaned forward forcefully, frowning with concern, his ice-blue gaze probing his associate’s square Russian face.
    â€˜For two trillion dollars I’d
crawl
up here myself,’ answered Max. ‘Especially, as you say, after everything I have invested in the project already.’
    â€˜Besides,’ added Max’s business partner Felix Makarov, suavely leaning forward to confront Richard, his eyes, like Max’s, alight with the promise of two trillion US dollars, ‘there may be alternatives to coming up the river by boat. Look how far we have managed to come by chopper, for instance. Maybe we could just drop a team in place …’
    â€˜Admitted,’ Richard agreed, leaning back into his comfortable seat, one long finger thoughtfully stroking the