South Sea Gold: Chapter Thirteen

Sleeping on a cot at the office, with his meals sent in, was not Tom's idea of the high life, especially with his family five hundred kilometers away. He phoned Kim and Morrie most evenings. The only exercise he got, those first days after his injuries, was walking the halls in the building, or out on the flat roof, in company with his guard. No going out on the street. When he complained, Jon merely shrugged. "We supply the men, but the police made the call. Ask your friend Kerro."

"How long do I have to have a nursemaid?" he then asked Jason when the inspector came to ask a few more questions.

"As long as we need to protect your back." advised Kerro. "The men all say they haven't seen any suspicious activity, so you'll probably be turned loose in another couple of days. We have some unidentified fingerprints from the letter the man gave your wife, but they don't match any in our files." Can you remember anything else about the attackers, now that your mind is clearer?"

"I remember some big guy sitting on my legs to pin me down while his friend kept kicking me hard in my chest and back. When they started working on my head I guess I passed out. No identities yet, huh?"

"Our usual informers say the street gangs don't know anything about these guys. That could either mean your attackers are from out of town, or that anyone who does know them is too scared to talk. For now, we'd better still keep your family where they are."

Matt and Sophia, just returned from the Owego Mine, paid him a visit that same afternoon. "You're looking good, for the shape you're in," observed Matt. "What did they do to you, anyway?"

"Gave me a week's vacation. I don't recommend it as an option, though. Where have you guys been?" Tom's grin was still a little lop-sided. "Hi, Sophia."

"Hi. You look like you've spent time in a cement-mixer."

"Thank the Lord they didn't add the cement," said Tom, "but yeah. That's about what it felt like at the time. What's new with you two?"

"You've missed all the fun, Tom," Sophia said. "Jon sent us down to the Owego Mine again, the day after you got beat up. It seems they've had another accident. Their slurry pipeline broke."

"I thought the pipeline was unbreakable plastic."

"So they said," answered Matt. "But they made some mistakes in construction. You remember that place where the hillside juts out, half way down from the mine to the village? They laid the pipe right next to the road there, where there's only two meters clearance between the hill and the road. Last week one night, heavy rains caused a landslide that pushed the pipeline out into the road. A bulldozer couldn't have done a neater job."

"And there's more," said Sophia, "a ten-tonne lorry came down the road in the dark, hit that thirty-centimeter pipe, flipped the loaded lorry on it's side and crushed the pipe. Didn't hurt the driver much. Maybe he'd had a couple of beers to relax him."

"Did you get pictures?" asked Tom.

"We did," said Sophia, "showing slurry still trickling out of the broken pipe after we got there hours later. Now if they had had a woman engineer design that pipeline, I bet she would have foreseen the problem and kept the pipe in the open field on the other side of the road."

"Just facts, Sophia," said Matt gently. "Leave out the speculation."

"Did you get a chance to take a sample of the pipe drainage?"

"Yup," Matt said. "While Sophia diverted the watchman, a local villager, with her conversation, I quietly emptied the water bottle I had been carrying, and held it under the trickle of slurry still coming out of the pipe." He produced a bottle half full of brownish mud and water.

Tom looked at it doubtfully. "Are you sure that's not a latte from the pub around the corner?"

"It has been in my possession since I filled it. Sophia is my witness. But you can taste it, if you want to."

"Thanks, but no. You could take it to the police lab, though. Jason can't tell you how much cyanide it contains, but he can tell whether or not it has any at all. What else did you learn at Owego?"

"We checked at the provincial land records office in Alotau. South Sea Gold Corp. does not control the whole island of Owego. Their lease covers about twenty hectares of land around the mine and the mill, plus the road to the dock. There are two other villages on the island, one is two kilometers along the coast, west of where the miners live, and another on the south coast, beyond the big mountain. You don't notice them from the air because of all the trees."

"The one to the west is quite pretty," said Sophia. "Palms hanging out over clear blue water. A woman there takes in tourists, and her son advertises scuba diving. We stayed there; didn't check out his scuba equipment, but the swimming was great. I don't think many people know about the place. I suppose all that will change, once the mine goes into full gear."

"Farsighted of you, to go there prepared for swimming," remarked Tom.

Sophia smiled shyly. "Tourism's just as important an industry as mining, along the coast. A good reporter is supposed to evaluate all the diverse options."

"She taught me how to use a sarong," explained Matt. Sophia smiled.

Tom didn't know how far he should pursue this topic. Somehow in his mind, Matt and Sophia were becoming a single item, Matt-and-Sophia, at a rapid pace.

Because Tom was still confined by his injuries he arranged for Matt to take the slurry sample to Inspector Kerro for the police lab that afternoon. Kerro was not encouraging. We'll test for cyanide, but it won't be dependable after standing this long. Traces of metals and other stuff in that mud you have there can change the free cyanide level. If you are concerned about the slurry's effect on the village fishing, I've heard that many kinds of fish are much more sensitive to cyanide poisoning than humans are."

"What should I look for in humans?" Matt asked.

"Other than living near a source of cyanide? Symptoms of chronic poisoning are not very specific. Weakness, confusion, difficulty breathing; things that can also be caused by a lot of other different problems that have nothing to do with cyanide. A person's skin can be unusually pink, for the same reason you saw in that miner who died of monoxide poisoning. Both cyanide and monoxide keep red blood cells from releasing the oxygen they carry. But that's a late sign, near death, and it's harder to see in us PNGeans, because of our darker complexion."

"But we can predict there will be trouble if there is still untreated cyanide in the slurry, right?" Matt said.

"If you have as much as a tenth of a milligram of cyanide per liter of sea water," said Kerro, "you are going to have trouble for most fish and a lot of other sea life, including the coral reefs. The best defense is regular chemical testing of water in the the waste pipe."

"So the responsibility for survival of the fishing industry lies with the DEC, then?"

"Right, unless the Department of Mines is willing and able to do it," said Kerro. "Trusting a mining company's word, or inspecting a site from a company helicopter, or getting paid to ignore the discharge, is definitely a conflict of interest."

"That's what the newspaper needs to know," said Matt. "Thanks, Inspector."