Page 50 of Soul on Fire
“What happens after they sell the rocks?”
“The traders take them to be refined, mostly in China, but sometimes India or South Africa. Refined cobalt is sold for two hundred times more. If only the Congo could keep that profit!”
“Why doesn’t the Congo build a refinery?”
Ikolo laughed. “We did, down south in Lubumbashi! But if you’re not careful, refining cobalt releases the uranium that’s in the cobalt rocks, too. The refinery poisoned the rivers and the land down there.”
We are used to dismay in Africa, Ikolo had told him that morning. But why? Why was it that way? Why were refineries in America and Europe and Australia safe, but ones in the Congo poisoned its people with uranium? Why did Africa suffer?
He was lost in his thoughts as they sped out of Lubutu, going from the hard-packed, wide roads of the town to the rough and rugged tracks, overhung with the creeping liana vines and the dream root that stitched the forest together. Moss dangled from the dream root almost to their faces. He clung to Ikolo as their engine droned on, and the forest turned to a green blur, everything fading away except for the beat of his heart and the warmth of the man he held.
In that moment, in the whole world, it seemed this was all he could trust. This heartbeat. This man. The heat he sparked inside Elliot.
His life was changing, parts of himself stripped away and laying bare a rawness he’d hidden deep within. His soul was shifting, stretching in new ways.
The world was changing too, or at least his place in the world and how he fit inside it was changing. The world had always been this way. Africa had always had a broken heart, carried down through the centuries.
Part of her pain he recognized. There were echoes of it in his own life and in the country he called home. As a black man, he’d always been less than in people’s eyes. He’d been worth less. He meant less. His life was less, at one glance, than another man’s because of the color of his skin.
At nineteen, he was thrown to the ground and beaten by a white police officer, the culmination of nineteen years of disregard, dismissal, disqualification. He’d been disenfranchised of his meaning to the world, robbed of the right to equal existence, and instead, was forced to swallow a bitterness the world said was truth:you will never amount to anything beyond what the world sees you as, black boy.
Did the world treat Africa the same? Disregarded, dismissed, disqualified. She’d been robbed of her countries’ power to chart their own course or map out their own destiny. Used and abused by colonial powers. Dictators propped up and ripped down by foreign powers with no regard for the citizens whose lives were ruined by those madmen. What did the world see when it looked at Africa?You will never amount to anything beyond savages. We will never see you as anything other than this.
Thirteen years after being thrown down and beaten, with thirteen years of serving his nation as a SEAL, he’d been awarded, commended, told the Navy was color blind and that everyone was the product of what he or she could do, that the actions they made and the path they carved for themselves dictated their future.
But here he was, right back where he started: thrown down and judged. Looked at differently, judged differently. For what? Wanting to save lives? Refusing to accept the calculus that said African lives meant less and were less than others?
Kline would never understand, nor would the Task Force command staff. They couldn’t. They’d never lived with the world’s denial of their right to live, their right to exist as a human worthy and equal to any other. They’d never had that knowledge sit in their souls and fester, rot them slowly from the inside out.
But they didn’t even see what was happening, right under their noses. Or they saw, and they did not care. Was it simply apathy?
Never again. He wouldn’t ever be thrown down again, or stand by while anyone else was dismissed, disregarded, denied. Sacrificed. He couldn’t live in a world that dismissed African lives and told him to accept they were disposable as fact. He’d lose his soul if he did, and more than that, he’d be complicit in their destruction, in the dismissal of African lives, African worth. He was one man, but he was hisownman, and he would not be complicit in the world’s hate.
Flying face-first through the forest in the center of Africa’s broken heart, his arms around the man whose heartbeat he was learning to set his compass to, he finally—finally—was free.
He buried his face in Ikolo’s neck as his soul caught fire.
* * *
An hour outside Lubutu,the light started to fade, the sun dipping beneath the horizon beyond the forest. Twilight lured lilac and persimmon into the forest, painted the tree trunks in amber and gold and sent spirals of indigo down the vines above. Then dusk turned to dark like a wave breaking over the shore, suddenly and all at once. Ikolo pulled off the road into a low field of shivering lemongrass.
Elliot checked the LRA fighter’s phone. No signal.
Perfect.
He worked quickly, guiding Ikolo to help him set up the laptop-sized black box and pop-up satellite receiver he’d shoved in his pack before leaving his team. The satellite unfolded like an upside-down toy umbrella, wafer thin with a long antenna extending from the center of the dish. He attached his tablet to a port in the black box. The screen flickered as it booted up, humming to life.
“Check the guy’s phone. It should have cell reception now.”
Ikolo flipped the phone open. “It has full bars.”
“I’d be upset if there weren’t full bars. You’re right next to a cell tower.”
Ikolo stared at him, then at the box. “Thatis not a tower.”
“It’s a Cell-Kit. A portable cellular network. I’m connected to a satellite and broadcasting as if I’m a cell tower. Every cell phone in the area will connect to my little tower and register in. This then tells each of those phones to go to max amplification on their signal, which boosts my range and draws more phones in. In a few minutes, I will have cellular coverage over the next fifty miles.”
“What’s the point in that? If he’s here, you’re giving Majambu the means to make a phone call.”
