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Autonomous Region of Tibet, China
Five months earlier
The man stood at the top of the rise and gazed around him in an arc thousands of miles wide. The bleak, windswept wilderness that stretched almost to infinity could have been part of the Martian landscape, if not for the vast dome of blue sky above it and the white-capped peaks in the far distance. On clear days like this, the man imagined that he could see as far as the Trans-Himalayas that bordered the Tibetan plateau to the south and west, and the top of holy Mount Kailash: in the Tibetan language, ‘Kangri Rinpoche’, meaning ‘Precious Snow Mountain’. For Buddhists, the sacred Navel of the Universe; for Hindus, the perpetual abode of Lord Shiva, the destroyer of ignorance and illusion.
What total, utter bollocks. The man did not believe in such things, and felt only contempt for the poor benighted suckers who did.
The man’s name was Maxwell Grant. He turned to face north, the wind slapping him in the face and clawing at his suit. It was an Ermenegildo Zegna three-piece, and far too good for sitting around in helicopters and getting covered in dust, but it was tailored to hide his bulk well and made him look every bit as important as, in fact, he was.
He smiled as he surveyed the industrious scene in the giant, desolate bowl of rock and earth below. After twenty years in the business, the sight still impressed him. From up here on the rise, it looked like an ants’ nest of fantastic proportions as a battalion of labourers in khaki uniform swarmed and toiled around the edges of what looked like a monstrous volcanic crater, or the remnants of a cataclysmic asteroid impact. The hole was hundreds of metres across and went down at least as deep, waiting to swallow up the container loads of drums that were Grant’s responsibility to make disappear. The dust from the diggers rose up in huge clouds that were whipped away by the wind and caked the clothes, faces and hair of the workers. What the heavy plant didn’t dig out of the hole was hacked and shovelled and dragged out of there by hand by the mass of men, working like slaves in a scene from ancient history. Others scurried back and forth from the trucks, rolling out the cargo and placing it on wooden pallets ready to be lowered into the pit. They were Chinese prisoners brought here aboard the same military train as the cargo itself, and the eighty or more People’s Army soldiers standing guard with assault rifles to ensure the job was done. Grant’s own private army, mostly ex-military themselves, were there to supervise the soldiers. It was a slick operation that Grant had witnessed many times before, in many parts of the world.
This, Grant believed in. And for good reason. It had made him a very rich man. With a personal net profit close to nine figures over the last year, he was doing even better out of this enterprise than from his other main business interest, the one he could talk about, Grantec Global.
The cargo had been shipped from a location in western Europe aboard a superfreighter called the MV Charybdis, under false papers that in no way could be traced either to Grant himself or his anonymous company name, Kester Holdings. On docking at the Chinese port of Shenzhen after its month-long voyage, the containers had been unloaded by crane and placed on military trailer trucks originally designed for transporting tanks. From there, the convoy of trucks had taken it to an army rail depot, where the huge vehicles had rolled up onto the even more massive military train already loaded with troops and prison labourers.
The purpose-built railway stretched many hundreds of miles northwards through China and deep into the mountains of Tibet, the line itself mostly carved out by chain-gangs of convicts. Threat of execution made them the most effective workers, and by definition they were the cheapest. However many dropped dead of exhaustion, were crushed by heavy machinery or shot while trying to escape, fresh reserves were always readily available.
The cargo consisted of 892 drums of high-level nuclear waste. Each drum contained 55 US gallons or 208 litres, and measured 35 inches in height by 24 inches in diameter. Their yellow paint was scored and scuffed from rubbing together in transit, and many of them were already showing signs of corrosion after their long sea voyage. They’d eventually rust through, but by then it wouldn’t matter, at least not to Grant. The occasional drum might rupture as it degraded, and if it wasn’t buried deeply enough the small explosion could sometimes break the surface, spewing radioactive white foam that resembled whipped cream and would remain lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Grant didn’t care much about that, either. They had unlimited space out here. Every time they excavated a new site, it was far enough away from the last one to avoid contaminating too many of the convicts. They were routinely checked for radiation after handling the merchandise. If one of them made the Geigers crackle, the soldiers would just put a bullet in the bugger and toss his body in the pit. It was the cheapest solution to the problem. These communists understood free enterprise better than most nations.
The nuclear waste dumping facilities came courtesy of the Ninth Academy, the most secretive organisation within the whole of China’s extensive nuclear programme. It was largely thanks to the Ninth Academy that, in the years since its annexation to the People’s Republic in 1951, Tibet had steadily developed into China’s Nuclear Central. First they’d ravaged the unspoilt wilds for their plentiful uranium resources, then they’d used the country for conducting nuclear weapons tests, and now it was used as a convenient dumping ground for nuclear waste – not just from the vast territory of China itself, but from all over the planet.
Hey, it all had to go somewhere. Grant had wide experience of offloading nuclear waste in a number of countries. Simply tipping it into the sea was a cost-effective no-brainer, common dumping grounds being the coasts of Italy and Africa. If you couldn’t get away with that, burying it was your next best option, though transportation became more of a problem in the kinds of wilderness areas essential to escaping the watchful eye of the environmentalists. Kester Holdings had established nice little niches in Somalia, Kenya and Zaire, but China (despite being so much damned further to travel) was his favourite. The Chinese were excellent to deal with, even if the presence of so many armed troops made Grant edgy at times. While stringently denying any such practice, in reality the Chinese government were more than happy to accept deals from western corporations with large quantities of so-called ‘black list’ materials to dispose of, as quietly as possible, and equally large quantities of cash to offer in return.
It worked out beautifully for all concerned. The environmentalist NGOs found it difficult to penetrate the country, which meant the little creeps couldn’t spy on what he was doing, and he could operate freely. A few years back, a group of Green campaigners from Lhasa had tried to infiltrate the operation but the silly bastards had been caught, imprisoned, tortured and disposed of before they could blow the whistle to the world media.
The Chinese authorities were also highly accommodating when it came to their total non-investigation of the sharp increase in disease rates and birth defects affecting wide areas around the dumping zones. Reports of two-headed babies being born in Tibetan villages, you could generally ignore in the safe knowledge that nobody knew, nobody cared and nothing would ever come of it.
Anyway – as Grant had been known to joke in private to his colleagues – two heads are better than one.
Grant peeled back the sleeve of the Zegna and looked at his Breguet Classique. The watch had cost almost as much as the suit. He nodded to himself. The last of the drums would soon be in the ground and the giant hole filled up with a thousand tons of earth and stone. He was getting cold and bored out here, and decided he didn’t need to hang around any longer.
But he’d be back, soon enough. There was always another cargo to deliver, another operation to oversee. Another gigantic pile of money to make.
Free enterprise. Where would we be without it?
He started walking back towards the helicopter.
Raul Fuentes emptied a third sachet of sugar into the paper cup of coffee, stirred it in with the little plastic stick, took a sip and screwed up his face, muttering, ‘Sabe a mierda.’ He turned to Ben. ‘How can you drink it?’
Ben