The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Congo

The Congolese mine in Katanga had officially been closed for several years. The UN had seen to it. With that, the supply of uranium was cut off to the immediately adjacent nuclear research centre, which the country had once had the blessing of the United States to open as thanks for the delivery of uranium for the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, back in the forties.

No one but the United States had ever thought it was a good idea to have that type of capacity in a country where everything could be bought for the right money. But since the Americans had more of that particular commodity than anyone else, their interests came first. They had essentially bought the entire country. With money.

Eventually, however, even the USA got behind the rest of the UN’s demands for law and order in Congo. It followed that the Katanga mine and its laboratory no longer posed a threat to fragile world peace.

Or did it?

A local watchdog force, financed by none other than the UN, was tasked with making sure that no uranium prospecting activities occurred. The immediately adjacent laboratory was sealed.

At the end of each month, the head of this force, Goodluck Wilson, faxed a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. It always read the same: Everything is quiet, trust us. More or less.

Goodluck Wilson had hand-picked the entire rest of the force, which was made up of his three brothers and their seven most trustworthy cousins. They all had the same goal with their watchdog mission: to get filthy rich. There was no discussion of how the world would end up feeling as a result.

Each morning, four former laboratory assistants crawled up out of an underground tunnel, through the floor of the sealed centre for atomic research, to enrich whatever could be enriched. All in all fifteen people should theoretically have been sharing the profits, but in practice there were only eleven. The four assistants didn’t know that in fact an accident would befall them when they were no longer needed. The gross profits as budgeted were fifty million dollars for Goodluck and another five million each for the ten brothers and cousins. The non-existent miners received eight dollars per day, and were satisfied with this, until the western shaft collapsed on several of them six years after the mine was closed. This would likely have passed unnoticed if it hadn’t been that seventeen workers who shouldn’t have been there had demonstrably been there. And now they were dead. This was impossible to hush up. The IAEA wondered what the miners had been up to in the shaft, if everything was so quiet. Without listening to the answer, they sent observers down for a closer look.

Goodluck and his men had been planning to wait until the amount of enriched material was up to an even half-ton; that was what the North Koreans had ordered via the Russians. But now the first four hundred kilos had to be hastily encased in lead and hidden in a hut in a nearby village. There were plenty of empty huts after the latest landslide. The four laboratory assistants (including the one on the BND payroll) also managed to become victims, when the underground tunnel to the nuclear research centre collapsed, as planned, the morning before the observers from Vienna arrived.

The representatives from the IAEA found no irregularities. But they were cautious enough to exchange half the watchdog force for people who could be trusted. Or people who were not to be trusted, in Goodluck Wilson’s estimation.

Everything comes to an end sometime. The head of the watchdog force knew he couldn’t squeeze any more out of this operation. The profits topped out at eighty million dollars, more than half of which went to Goodluck. There wasn’t much to be done about it. You had to be content with the little you could get.