People Who Walk in Darkness

Chapter OneLuc O'Neil was lost.He wasn't particularly worried.His cell phone wouldn't work down in the labyrinth nine hundred feet below the frozen layer of earth, but the homing device required of everyone entering the mine was glowing bright green. The pipe, the vein of rock that contained the diamonds, was a reasonably rich one. Nothing exceptional but productive, small, brown gems that would go mainly into industrial tools and the vast stockpile of the Russian diamond monopoly Alorosa, which in turn sold its holdings to DeBeers.Twenty percent of all diamonds mined worldwide were from Russia and all of the mines, Luc knew, were located in Siberia. If they dared, which they would not do because there would be no profit in it, Alorosa could challenge DeBeers and flood the market with relatively inexpensive diamonds of all quality levels. It was a standing, unspoken suicidal threat, a doomsday scenario for the diamond market. The price paid bythe world for diamonds allowed Russia a preferred seat at the table.The value of diamonds, as Luc knew, was not dependent on their rarity, but on the ability of the diamond cartel to control their flow and price. Luc was well aware that diamonds are nothing but pieces of compressed carbon found not only in Siberia but in Botswana, Australia, South Africa, and, to a smaller degree, all over the planet.But production was down in this mine. Or at least that was what Luc had been told. His job was to find out if the mine was so tapped out that it would not pay to keep it operating.Luc was a geologist with a good underground sense of direction. But if that failed him, he could always follow the dull yellow lights that glowed indifferently every fifty yards or so on the jagged walls of the tunnel.He was contracted with and well paid by the Canadian company that owned a piece of this operation. And so, screw 'em. He had a job to do, plain and simple. He would get it done and get out of here, e-mail his report to London, let DeBeers deal with it, and get the hell back to Toronto. Luc had missed his son's birthday only two months ago, when he was in Australia. Collette had not bothered to reproach him. What was the point? Let the boy know what kind of father he had, she had said. Well, she was right.Luc scannedthe walls for signs. He had been doing this for a decade. He didn't have to think about what he was looking for. It either felt right or it didn't. The diamond sense was a part of him. He was a human detector.Dobson had told Luc he had been selected because he had more experience in this sort of thing. What sort of thing? Going into underground diamond mines, finding out why production was down, and determining if the mines were finally tapped out?Dobson was at a surface mine in Botswana. Hundreds of thousands of tons of fickle rock did not threaten above Dobson's head.Dobson could get to Capetown in less than three hours from even the most distant company mine in Southern Africa. There were places in Capetown, good food, warm beds, and warmer women ranging from pale, ghostly white to dark, smooth ebony. And then Dobson would be stopping to meet with diamond cutters in Tel Aviv where, in spite of the slight threat of suicide bombers, he would stay overnight in a luxury suite in the Dan Tel Aviv Hotel. Luc, on the other hand, would spend the night in a visitor's room in the four-story concrete block that housed the mine's middle-management workers here in Devochka.Luc knelt next to the wall to his right. He had insisted on coming this way, even climbing over the dust-covered yellow machinery and down the slight incline. There was a feel of something this way.His guide, an old night-duty mine watchman, Boris Antonovich, had told him that this shaft needed shearing up. Boris, tall,Kaminsky, Stuart M. is the author of 'People Who Walk in Darkness' with ISBN 9780765318862 and ISBN 0765318865.