Rough Diamonds (A Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free PDF

could see. As he took in the green-tinged view through his NVGs, Shepherd gasped at the scale of the devastation. The thickly forested ridges gave way instantly, as if a line had been drawn across the landscape, to a moonscape of pulverised rock, bare, torn earth and poisoned watercourses dyed a lurid, sickly-looking orange. Whole forests had been razed to the ground and the earth stripped down to the bare bedrock.
    There was none of the usual noise of the African bush, no choruses of croaking frogs or the sonar of bats at the threshold of hearing. There wasn’t even the whine of mosquitoes. In this desolate, lunar landscape there appeared to be almost no living thing at all.  Except for men, of course. For miles around the mine the surface of the plain was pitted with small holes and mounds of excavated gravel each casting a small dense shadow in the moonlight and the darkness was lit by hundreds of pinpricks of light as if glowworms were flitting through the night.
    ‘Illegal miners,’ Jerzy said. ‘As fast as the mining companies expose the gravels, ready to process them, the illegal miners move in and start digging. They work at night by lantern-or candle-light, digging out the gravel and carrying it in baskets on their heads to the nearest stream. There they sieve it and jig it for any diamonds it may contain. It’s a race against time before the guards get to them. The mining companies and their mercenaries pursue them relentlessly but every night they return. They need the money, you see.’
    ‘I can understand that,’ said Shepherd.
    ‘If they strike it lucky, then can make a fortune and take care of their families forever,’ said Jerky. ‘But if they are unlucky…’  He shrugged. ‘Then they die. And a lot of them die, my friend.’
    ‘It’s a God-forsaken country, that’s for sure,’ said Shepherd.
    Jerzy nodded in agreement.  ‘There is no other work because the mining companies have destroyed the land. The miners used to farm during the wet season, growing enough food to last them the year, and fished the rivers for food. They would prospect for diamonds in the dry season. They grew so much food that Sierra Leone used to be self-sufficient in rice. Now almost everything is imported because there is virtually no farmland left. And even if there was farmable land, there aren’t enough able-bodied people to farm it. There are always clauses in the agreements with the mining companies requiring them to rehabilitate the land after they’ve worked it, but they’re never enforced and the companies never do.’ He nodded at the desolate landscape. ‘They leave it the way it is. Dead.’
    ‘And I don’t suppose the mercenaries will do any different,’ Shepherd said. ‘Speaking of which, it’s time to get airborne.’
    They took off and flew on again at low level, passing over and between huge man-made mountains, the tailings from the mine workings which rose hundreds of feet into the air. The mines worked around the clock and Shepherd could see huge dredges and draglines tearing at the diamond-bearing earth, rock and gravel, ripping out tens of tons with each bite. They fed lines of dumper trucks,  their tyres twice the size of a man, which dumped the gravel onto a conveyor belt as wide as a road, running endlessly into a huge crushing mill. Three tall chimneys belched black smoke into the air, visible as three blacker columns against the star-strewn night sky. The relentless, deafening noise of crushed rock and tortured metal was audible even above the beat of the helicopter rotors.  It was a vision of hell that chilled Shepherd to the bone.
    Shepherd knew the mining companies would pay whatever was necessary to keep the mines open. However much they had to pay in bribes and protection money, it would never put more than a modest dent in the huge profits they made and then extracted from the country as ruthlessly as they tore the diamonds from the Earth.
    From the intelligence that Parker