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“To where?” another answered. “We can’t swim away. The water is too cold, and the fishing boats are heavily guarded when they return, and they are only here long enough to dump their nets on the dock. You’ve seen the mountains. Even if you get past the guards, which no one has been able to do, you wouldn’t last a day out there.”
“They own us,” a third man remarked. “From the moment we said we wanted to leave China, they own us. Does it matter if we work ourselves to death here, in a textile factory back home, or in a sweatshop in New York City? This is what the gods meant for us, for all Chinese peasants. We work and then we die. I have been here ten months. All the men originally assigned this room are now gone. Go ahead with your fantasies of escape, my friend. In the end there is only one way out — and that is death.”
Eddie wasn’t sure if he should tell them who he really was. From what he saw as the men shuffled to the cabin, they were all in terrible condition, so he doubted the mine’s overseers had planted any informants within the ranks. However, he couldn’t discount the idea he’d be exposed by one of them for an extra ration of food or a dry blanket. As much as he wanted to give these wretched souls a glimmer of hope, it went against his years of training and experience. In the end he allowed exhaustion to overcome his wet bedding and the knots of pain radiating from every joint in his body. Two of his cabin mates coughed and hacked throughout the night. Pneumonia or worse. He imagined the squalid conditions and meager food rations meant disease was already rampant throughout the operation.
It was on the third day of shivering cold, and constant wet that pruned and paled his skin, and backbreaking work, that Eddie began to realize rescue might be a long time in coming. Surely Juan could have flown someone to Russia where they could rent a helicopter and at least fly over the area. But there had been no such overflight. Instead, he’d worked with the others, mindlessly hauling mud down the mountain, like ants who know nothing but to follow their instincts.
He’d already lost his shoes, and every time he took a deep breath he felt a slight rattle in the depths of his lungs. He’s started off in much better shape than the others, but his body was used to regular food and rest, unlike the peasants who had lived their entire lives on a starvation diet and knew nothing but hard labor. Two of the men from his cabin were already dead. One of them had been buried by an avalanche, and the other was beaten by a guard so severely he died with blood dripping from his ears and from around his eyes.
By the fifth day, his back stinging from a particularly brutal whipping that he’d done nothing to trigger, Eddie Seng realized two things. One was that the burst transmitter in his leg had failed, and the second was that he was going to die on this forlorn coast.
On the morning of the sixth day, as the work crews were being led outside into the predawn chill, a huge ship had appeared in the bay. Eddie paused on the ramp leading to the beach to note that it was a floating drydock but mistakenly assumed it was the Maus and not her sister. Even at a distance the stench emanating from the black-hulled behemoth was overpowering, and flocks of gulls swooped around open ports to pluck the human waste that had spilled out from within.
As a guard prodded Eddie with a baton jab to the kidneys, he realized she was a slave ship, loaded with workers to replace the ones who’d died or were so weak they could no longer rise from their bunks no matter how hard they were beaten. How many hundreds or thousands had already perished, he wondered, only to be replaced with a steady supply of hopeful immigrants thinking they’d bought their one chance at freedom?
“That is how I was brought here,” Tang, one of his roommates, remarked as they trudged up the slick hillside. Tang was the one who’d said he’d been here for four months already. His body was stick thin, and Eddie could clearly see his breastbone and rib cage through his torn shirt. He was twenty-seven years old but looked sixty. “We were loaded onto an old ship, and then it was swallowed up inside an even bigger ship like that one
. If you can imagine, the journey here was worse than the work they force us to do.”
By the time they’d filled their buckets for the journey down to the sluice boxes, a rust-coated ship was slowly emerging from the belly of the drydock, and workers were throwing large bundles off its deck.
“Bodies,” Tang said. “I was forced to do that. We had to dump over the corpses of those who didn’t survive the journey.”
“How many?”
“A hundred, perhaps more. I myself had to dump the bodies of my two cousins and my best friend.”
Tang didn’t slow his pace, but Eddie could tell the memory was taking its toll. “So they will beach the boat and use it to house more workers?”
“First they will pile rocks around it and cover it with nets so it can’t be seen from the air.”
“What about the water? This whole operation is exposed to the sea.”
Tang shook his head. “Other than the two fishing boats, I haven’t seen any other ships since I arrived. I think we are too far from anywhere for ships to pass close by.”
They had just reached the sluice boxes when Eddie suddenly fell flat on his back as though a rug had been yanked out from under him. Stunned, he looked around to see hundreds of others had also fallen. That was when he felt the ground shaking.
Even as he realized it was an earthquake, the shaking subsided, but a deep roar continued to echo like distant thunder.
He got to his feet, wiping the worst of the clinging mud from his tattered clothes. His attention and soon that of every person at the mine was drawn upward toward the central-most mountain peak that dominated the workings. Steam and dark ash gushed from near its peak in an ever-expanding cloud that would soon blot out the sun. Lightning crackled around the summit like Saint Elmo’s fire.
The separating plant’s door burst open, and a man rushed out, stripping off a gas mask as he ran. He was the first white person Eddie had seen this whole time at the mine.
“That is Jan Paulus,” Tang whispered as the man ran toward them. “He is the overseer.”
Jan Paulus was a solid-looking man, broad across the shoulders with weathered features and hands as big as anvils. He stopped just a few paces from Eddie and Tang and studied the now-active volcano that towered above the bay. He watched it for only a moment before pulling a clunky satellite phone from a holster strapped around his waist. He flipped up the antenna, waited a beat to ensure he had a signal, then dialed.
“Anton, it’s Paulus,” he said in English but with a Dutch or Afrikaans accent. He listened before saying, “I’m not surprised you felt it in Petropavlovsk. Shook the shit out of us. Worst one yet, but that’s not why I called. The volcano above the site is active.” A pause. “Because we’ve talked about this possibility a dozen times, and I’m looking at a bloody great cloud of ash and steam, that’s how I know. If that thing really lets go, we’re finished.”
As if to punctuate his sentence, the ground shook again in a mild aftershock. “Feel that one, too, Savich?” the South African asked sarcastically. He listened for a beat. “Your assurances don’t mean anything. It’s my arse out here while yours is sitting in a hotel sauna three hundred kilometers away.” He glanced around as he listened again. Eddie quickly dipped his bucket into the sluice, hoping that the mine’s foreman hadn’t noticed him eavesdropping. “Yeah, the Souri just arrived. They’re offloading the latest batch of Chinese in another of Shere Singh’s rust buckets. As soon as they’re ready, I’m going to load the first shipment like we talked about last week.”
Paulus shot Eddie a scowl. He had no choice but to move on, but still he listened for as long as he could. “We just finished another run with the mercury smelter, so now would be a good time to think about at least towing the processing plant off the beach until we know what’s happening with the volcano. You have the influence to stop your fellow Russkies from sending any scientists over to have a look-see, but you sure as hell can’t stop that mountain from blowing. Why don’t you chopper over and take a look? In the meantime I’m going to make plans to get out of here.” The miner’s voice rose, as though the connection was fading. “What? Who cares about them? We can evacuate the guards using the Souri. Singh can get us more ships, and there’s a million Chinese a year trying to get out. We can replace the lot of them…So what if we lose a month or two, we’ve already got enough raw material to keep the minters going for at least that long…All right, see you in a couple of hours.”
Tang had gone on ahead, ascending the mountain with the dull gait of a pack animal. Eddie made no effort to catch up. He watched the ballooning ash cloud high above, digesting what he’d just heard. The foreman wanted to evacuate his people and the guards, but it sounded like he needed the permission of someone named Anton, someone with enough pull to keep Russian volcanologists from visiting the area. The South African had argued that now was the perfect time. The drydock was here with its powerful tugs ready to go, and it sounded as though they had already amassed a large stockpile of gold destined to be struck into coins. The separating plant, arguably the most important and expensive piece of equipment, could be towed to safety. The beached ships being used as dormitories were worth only their scrap price, and it sounded like they had a line on how to obtain more. That just left the workers, and as Paulus had said, with a million illegal Chinese riding the snake every year, replacing their slave force would be simple enough.
Eddie understood their twisted logic. The only thing of value they would really lose is time.
Another temblor struck. Eddie knew there was a real danger that the volcano would erupt, and he envisioned a cataclysmic explosion like the one that leveled a couple hundred square miles around Mount Saint Helens. There was no way he or anyone else left behind could escape such a blast. Over the past few days he’d resigned himself to work the weeks or even months it would take Juan to find him, and of his eventual rescue he had no doubt. The Corporation did not leave its people behind.
