Free The Secret Chamber by Patrick Woodhead Page A

Shall I put him through?’
    ‘Yes, thanks, Sepo.’
    Bear sat forward in her chair, instinctively reaching for the pen tucked into her hair.
    ‘I got you working late, Coop?’ she asked, smiling slightly. Lieutenant Cooper had been a friend of her father’s in the early days, serving in the British army in Sierra Leone. He was one of the few English officers who had any time for mercenaries, and while Bear waited for her father to return from the bush, Cooper had been a regular at the Kimbima Hotel. In the old, vaulted dining room, he’d even spent some time helping her with her English. With three daughters of his own, Cooper had always had a soft spot for her.
    ‘Listen, Bear, I need to know exactly where this stuff came from,’ he said, dispensing with their usual chatter. Usually, Cooper was nothing but hi-jinks and gentle teasing. She had rarely heard him sound like this.
    ‘It’s like I told you. I got a sample of it, going through our coltan mine explosion. Why? What’s happened?’
    There was a long pause as Cooper hesitated.
    ‘Eh!
Dis-moi
!’ Bear protested. ‘Come on, what have you found?’
    ‘I’ve found something that definitely shouldn’t be in a South African mine,’ Cooper said slowly. ‘It took me a while to pin it down, but after looking through the aerial footage you sent, I thought you might be right. The compressors didn’t trigger the blast. They were part of a secondary explosion. So I started looking at a few different options.’
    ‘So, what caused it? Was it something to do with that residue?’
    ‘Yes, I am certain of it,’ he replied, his voice dropping low. ‘Its called diethylhexyl and I only picked it up after running it through some of the solvents. As far as I know, there’s only one use for the stuff. It’s the plasticiser in C-4.’
    Bear went to note down what he was saying, but her pen paused above the paper.
    ‘C-4?’ she said. ‘You mean, the explosive?’
    ‘That is exactly what I am saying and it’s not something you find that often in Africa. Too damn’ expensive for most people’s tastes.’ He paused, thinking out loud. ‘Listen, if you could find me a piece of the det cord or even a fragment of the actual trigger, I might be able tell you where it came from, otherwise it’s all just guesswork, I’m afraid. But one thing’s for certain, Bear, it’s very unlikely that anyone other than the military could have it.’
    ‘The military? You mean, the South African army?’
    ‘Not bloody likely!’ Cooper exclaimed, laughing slightly. ‘They can barely afford boots these days and certainly aren’t going to be using something as sophisticated as C-4 when some good old TNT would have done the trick.’
    There was a pause and Bear could hear a faint scratching sound as Cooper raked his stubble.
    ‘Off the top of my head, there are only a handful of countries that would use C-4 in this quantity: the Americans obviously, the British and French, and also the Israelis. Then, of course, there’s India, Pakistan and China.’
    ‘But why would any of those countries deliberately blow up a coltan mine?’
    ‘You tell me. Maybe there’s something specific about your particular mine?’ Cooper suggested.
    Bear’s gaze drifted down to the pile of accident reports in front of her.
    ‘
Putain
,’ she swore. ‘It’s not just that particular mine. I have eight accident reports from mines all over the world. The details aren’t the same for them all, but I think someone is trying to systematically take out coltan mines.’
    ‘But why?’
    Bear thought for a moment, her eyes panning through the cross-current of scrawled notes and figures on her A4 pad. They rested on the figure twenty-three per cent and the arrow pointing down from it.
    ‘The explosions are reducing the coltan supply globally, right?’ she said, her voice flat as she ran through the logic. ‘So, what happens if you reduce supply? The price goes up.’
    Cooper made a tutting noise as if