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razor-straight scar on his cheekbone as he thought through Felix’s statement. ‘But hopping up for a look-see in the company Kamov is one thing. Setting up a facility to extract the coltan is quite another. Besides, an aircraft of any kind is only useful if you can land it. And at the moment I’ll be damned if I can see anywhere suitable down there.’
    The three men grouped round the table at the front of Max’s executive Kamov which belonged to his mining company Bashnev/Sevmash, looking out of the window at the relentless green of the jungle’s upper canopy. From this angle the virgin rainforest looked like head after head of broccoli to Richard – countless thousands of them; maybe millions reaching to the horizon on their right, where the borders with the countries of Central Africa lay hidden, and to the horizon on their left. Behind them it seemed to reach in an unbroken carpet to the coast, but Richard knew this was an illusion. And ahead of them, the jungle mounted to the ragged, flood-damaged tree line high on the slopes of the huge and restless volcano called Mount Karisoke and the border with the neighbouring country of Congo Libre. But it was hard to get a grip of the fact that each one of the apparently numberless green humps of foliage was standing about a hundred metres above the actual ground, encompassing a cubic area larger than a cathedral.
    It had taken the Kamov eight hours’ solid flying time to get here from Granville Harbour at the distant mouth of the River Gir, powering through the low, humid sky above the great waterway at its maximum speed. Eight hours that did not count the layover every two hours in increasingly remote wilderness areas where Max had set up fuel dumps. The whole project had taken six months to get even this far – the first sortie up to the fabulous lake itself. A trip that
biznizmen
Max and Felix insisted on leading themselves – and which the Mariners would not have missed for the world. Here, as in their dealings all over the globe, from the oilfields of the Arctic to those off the shores of Benin La Bas, whatever Bashnev/Sevmash discovered, drilled or mined, Heritage Miner shipped for them – and usually by water.
    The last executive seat was occupied by Richard’s wife and business partner, Robin. ‘Even so,’ she said now, shaking her golden curls and frowning as she picked up on Richard’s point, ‘you’re looking at two thousand kilometres in from the coast. Two thousand kilometres from civilization to this Lac Dudo. And that’s as the crow flies. It must be another five hundred or so if you follow the river. Always assuming you can follow the river. What with the waterfalls, cataracts and white-water rapids we’ve flown over during the flight so far. And then there’s still
this
at the end of it.’ She gave a shudder, looking down.
    â€˜But there is civil infrastructure down there already,’ insisted Max, straining round and unsuccessfully trying to catch the eye of whichever local government historian present on the Kamov had described the transport system in its seventies heyday to him. ‘There are roads, a railway, the whole communications network built in the late sixties and early seventies when this place was booming. There’s a twelve-lane highway joining Cite La Bas with CiteMatadi, then going straight on down to Granville Harbour and the coast.’
    â€˜I’ve seen it – been on some of it,’ countered Robin. ‘It’s useless. Cite La Bas is dead and CiteMatadi is not much better. Cite La Bas was never all it was cracked up to be in the first place. They talked it up as the New York of West Africa – a buzzing twentieth-century hub. But it was little more than a frontier town with big ambitions.’
    â€˜More like Tombstone in the Wild West rather than Tokyo, perhaps,’ offered Richard grimly. ‘Aptly enough, all things