Page 22 of Soul on Fire
They said no a hundred times. Elliot’s team was cleared.
The CIA team was ordered into observational quarantine, with Ashley separated from the rest.
“Lieutenant.” Admiral Kline waited for him outside sickbay, shadowed by the man in the suit. The Agency bureaucrat. “Follow us to the CDC.”
“Yes sir.” Pulsing waves of rage flowed off Kline, enough to make a tuning fork wail. For once, it wasn’t directed at him. He hoped.
Kline guided them to the tactical display table in the CDC again and leaned into it, both hands gripping the edges until his knuckles went white. Elliot noticed, and he tried to catch Kline’s gaze. Other than his white-knuckling the table, his expression was blank, purposely so.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “let me introduce you to Mr. Haig, our Agency representative. He arrived with his own portable isolation unit.”
Every Navy ship carried them, but apparently Haig didn’t know that. Elliot’s eyebrows rose. “So you knew what we were walking into down there?”
“There was a chance one of our officers in the field had come into contact with an infected patient at a local hospital—”
“A chance?” Elliot scoffed. “Your station chief says he deliberately went to the hospitals searching out patients to ID some rebel leader! Says he came back and put himself in quarantine, so I’d say there was more than a God damn chance! You knew, and you let us walk into that!”
Haig stared, impassive. Kline nodded to Elliot.
“You might want to give Peter more credit. Because of him, we’ve uncovered a potential global catastrophe.”
Elliot rolled his eyes. “It’s always a global catastrophe with you guys.”
“Don’t scoff, Lieutenant. This is real.” Haig plugged a drive into the tactical table, and photos, maps, and classified briefs loaded on the display. Elliot dragged a photo across the touch screen, spinning it until he was staring at a black man, thin but strong in a lean, powerful way. Olive uniform, mirrored sunglasses, rifle on his shoulder. His face was angular, broad and sharp at the same time, with cheek bones and a jaw that flared and stretched his deep black skin over his taut face. There was something in the way he held himself, how he looked at the world. There was a cruelty in him in the tilt of his head, the set of his shoulders.
“That’s our target. Well, one of them.” Haig sent another photo across the table, a larger African man with muscles and a shaved head covered by a skullcap. He, too, wore sunglasses and an olive uniform, the sleeves rolled up to show off his biceps. “Majambu and Idrissa. We’ve only just now identified them as the leaders of the Congo ADF.”
“Those are the rebels pushing through the forest and moving on Goma.” Elliot’s eyes narrowed.
“Those are one of the rebel factions in the forest,” Haig corrected. “Eastern Congo is home to a multitude of rebels. Some of them are state-sponsored, from Rwanda and Uganda, mostly. It all stems from the Rwandan Genocide back in the nineties. The Hutus, who slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, fled across the border into the Congo when Kagame led his Rwandan soldiers across the border to end the genocide and take control of Kigali and the Rwandan government. Rwanda propped up a rebel force in the Congo to hunt those Hutus down, and in response, Uganda propped up a counter force, fighting Rwanda on Congolese soil. These rebels decided to knock the old Congolese president out of power, and Kabila and his child soldiers slaughtered their way to Kinshasa.”
“This history lesson going somewhere?” Elliot knew about the Rwandan Genocide. It had seared into his soul, reading about it in high school, Africans slaughtered at a speed that eclipsed that of the Jewish Holocaust. But there was no international war to stop the genocide in Rwanda, no Western troops liberating and saving slaughtered Africans. Why wasn’t it taught more in school? Why did he have to go seek out information about what had happened?
“So, what you’re going to tell me next is that you’re arming one of these factions, right? That’s how this CIA script goes.” Elliot folded his arms over her chest.
“No. Not this time. We’re hands off in Africa.”
“God damnit!” Elliot snapped. “If you’re hands off then why did my team just pull your asses out of Goma? What are youdoingthere if you’re not willing to help? Why do you have four covert stations across the Congo?”
“Because of this.” Haig flipped to a new display, a map of the entire nation. Overlaid on the map were a hundred different locations of mines. Diamonds, gold, uranium, and cobalt. “The Congo is crammed full of precious resources. Resources we need.”
It always came down to resources. Oil. Diamonds. Gold. Uranium. Cobalt.
“You want to secure the uranium mines—”
“Those are inconsequential to us. We’re not concerned with uranium. We are concerned about the cobalt.”
“The hell is that?”
“Look around you,” Haig said. He smirked, spreading his hands wide. “Every electronic device on this ship, every display, every computer, every cell phone you’ve ever held. All of it has cobalt. Cobalt is in everything from capacitors to satellites, jet engines to cancer treatments. And ninety percent of the world’s cobalt comes from right here—" His finger landed on the map. “Congo.”
Elliot stayed quiet.
“Once the rebels figured out they were sitting on the world’s most valuable resources, they stopped fighting for control of Kinshasa and started fighting for control of the mines and minerals. More groups popped up, each one trying to grab and control more of the country’s resources. Rwanda and Uganda are still pumping support for their factions, too. They smuggle what their rebel groups mine over the border and export it. Uganda exported 500 million in gold last year, Rwanda 260 million. Impressive, considering neither country has gold deposits.”
“So how much is the CIA pulling out of the Congo?”
“We’re not the enemy you think we are. You think Uganda and Rwanda pulling gold and diamonds out of the Congo is bad? Consider this: there’s a new player in town. China has been building mines faster than we can count. Pit mines, tunnel mines, blast mines. They’re scraping cobalt out of the country by the tons and shipping it back to China.That’swhat we’re keeping an eye on.”
