The Samurai Inheritance

XXXVII

‘Can I use my iPad on this thing?’

‘No problem,’ Jerry, the co-pilot, told Magda. ‘There’s a socket beside every seat if you need to plug it in.’

As they prepared for take-off he explained that Devlin Metal Resources’ Gulfstream G650 was basically a flying boardroom. ‘But there are a couple of full-size beds beyond the bulkhead if you feel like taking a nap. If you don’t mind me saying so, you guys certainly look like you could do with one.’

They thanked him and he told them to help themselves to food and drink from the galley during the flight. ‘Just treat it like your own home,’ he said. ‘We’ll be landing in Brisbane in about five hours depending on the wind strength. Conditions are good and it’s a damn sight warmer over there than it is in Tokyo.’ He went off to join the pilot for the pre-flight checks.

Jamie exchanged a tired smile with Magda. ‘I don’t know about you but sleep seems like a good idea. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.’

‘Maybe later,’ she said, strapping herself into one of four deep cushioned leather seats at a mahogany table. ‘First of all I think you should come and sit here.’ She patted the seat beside her. ‘There are things you should know.’

‘That sounds mysterious. Or perhaps the word is ominous?’

‘I’ll let you decide.’ She placed her hand on top of the computer tablet as the plane taxied out towards the end of the runway. ‘It didn’t seem all that relevant until last night, but I think it’s time you knew a little more about Bougainville, Jamie. When people say “You don’t know what you’re getting into” it’s usually an exaggeration, but in this case …’ She paused as the Gulfstream’s engine pitch rose in a few seconds from a soft roar to a shriek and the plane gathered momentum, tyres bumping and fuselage swaying, until with almost miraculous ease it left the earth and climbed at an almost impossible angle. Jamie looked past Magda’s shoulder and saw the bulk of Mount Fuji dominating the horizon through the oval window. ‘Well, I think the statement is probably accurate.’

‘Then perhaps it’s time I found out,’ he said and smiled.

Magda studied him gravely. ‘Where do I start?’

The plane levelled out and a few seconds later the seat belt sign above the cockpit door turned green. Jamie unstrapped himself and went to the kitchen, removed a bottle of remarkably fine white wine from the refrigerator, gathered up two crystal glasses and an ice bucket and returned to the table. ‘It’s traditional to start at the beginning.’ He poured the wine and put the bottle into the ice bucket. ‘That seems as good a place as any.’

‘Okay.’ She ran her fingers across the face of the tablet, scrolling down a list of subjects. ‘Let’s begin with a geography lesson. Bougainville is actually not one principal island, but two: Bougainville, the larger, to the south, and Buka, to the north, separated by the eight-hundred-metre-wide Buka Passage. The main island is about a hundred and fifty miles long by forty wide. Mountains run down the spine, including one active volcano and two dormant ones. They’re covered by thick jungle, and the warm, wet climate means they’re cut with streams and rivers. The centres of population, generally quite small villages, are all in the coastal areas where their main employment is — was — tending the coconut plantations or fishing. You with me so far?’

‘Yes, miss.’ Jamie grinned. ‘Somewhere to avoid at all costs. I take it the wildlife is just as welcoming.’

‘Go to the top of the class. No bears or wolves. Just bats and wild pigs. Oh, and snakes, spiders and man-eating salt-water crocodiles.’

‘That’s very reassuring.’ His face told a different story. ‘I wish I’d packed my swimming trunks.’

‘All right. Let’s get to the population.’ She brought up a new page and pointed to a picture of four or five almost naked wire-haired islanders glaring at the camera. ‘Bougainville has been inhabited for something like thirty thousand years. As you can see, the native Bougainvilleans are unique to this region, being extremely black skinned — the difference is so distinctive they call the other Melanesian races Redskins — and of a very ancient and unknown origin. A French navigator called Louis Antoine de Bougainville gave the islands their name in the eighteenth century.’

‘And introduced them to civilization, I’m sure.’

She nodded solemnly. ‘If by civilization you mean slavery, disease, poverty and material exploitation. Oh, and religion, which is worse than any of the above. The French were followed by the Germans, who developed the copra industry — you know what copra is?’

Jamie thought back to his less than comprehensive briefing in Keith Devlin’s office. ‘Coconut fibre?’

‘That’s right. It meant that huge amounts of land that could have been used for food production became coconut plantations, and the people who had worked that land now depended on the plantation owners for a living.’ She paused as the co-pilot appeared from the cockpit and walked to the galley, returning a few minutes later with two bottles of water.

‘We’re making good time,’ he announced as he passed. When he’d gone Magda continued with her briefing.

‘The Germans also joined the islands politically to Papua New Guinea, six hundred miles to the west, although their traditional affinity and trading links lay with the Solomon Islands, the nearest of which is six miles to the south. As you will see, this stored up a great deal of trouble for the future.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘Any questions so far?’

‘You haven’t mentioned headhunting.’

Small white teeth nibbled her lip as she considered her answer. ‘Traditionally, the practice was limited and mainly confined to the defeated enemy chief. It only became widespread after the Europeans arrived …’ She preempted his question before he’d even decided to ask it. ‘Once it became clear the newcomers were prepared to pay for a shrunken head it created a market, so instead of a trophy of war it became the reason for it. Every fight created a new blood feud and eventually the Germans had to ban the taking of heads. It still went on, of course, our Bougainville head is from this period, but it was illegal.’

Jamie nodded. It made economic sense. There was no point in letting your workforce slaughter each other before you’d had the chance to work them into the ground. All this had nothing to do with Keith Devlin, of course, but he knew Magda would get to that part of the story in her own time.

‘The Germans were thrown out by the Australians during the First World War.’ Magda wrapped up the first half of the twentieth century in a sentence. ‘The Australians by the Japanese in nineteen forty-two, and the Japanese by the Australians and the Americans in nineteen forty-four and ’forty-five. The age of colonialism was over — for the moment — and the islanders, much to their dismay, reverted to the administrative rule of what became Papua New Guinea.’

He picked up on her hint that colonialism hadn’t ended for good. ‘For the moment? You mean the mine?’

‘The Panguna Mine,’ she confirmed, and now her voice took on a new intensity. ‘What none of Bougainville’s past exploiters knew was that they were sitting on one of the most lucrative pieces of real estate on the planet. Enormous deposits of silver, copper and zinc were hidden beneath those jungle-covered mountains, but they would never have been found but for one thing: gold. The gold rushes of the late nineteenth century caused a revolution in mining, and in the early twentieth that revolution finally reached the island. The islanders sincerely believe Bougainville is the land known in the Bible as Ophir. They will tell you that King Solomon was led to the island by the Angel Gabriel and that gold from his mine here was used to build the Temple of Jerusalem. It’s no joke, Jamie,’ she reacted to his smile of disbelief, ‘this is where Keith Devlin is leading you, so you’d better listen and learn, because not all that long ago Bougainville was a war zone. Think Vietnam fought out on a tiny island, but with all the viciousness, slaughter, destruction and cruelty; up to twenty thousand dead out of a population of less than two hundred thousand. The tensions that created that war still existed when I visited a few years ago and it seems your Mr Devlin is intent on stirring the pot.’

Now she had his attention. ‘When did all this happen?’ He was thinking Sixties, Seventies, when it would have been overshadowed by the greater conflicts in South East Asia.

‘The insurgency started in the mid-Seventies. It was effective enough to close the mine in ’eighty-eight but it didn’t turn into a full-scale shooting match until a year later. The last Papua New Guinea troops didn’t leave the island until nineteen ninety-eight.’

‘Twenty thousand casualties?’ Jamie shook his head incredulously. ‘I was still at university in nineteen ninety-eight. I wanted to be a soldier and I was interested in wars. How come I never heard about this one?’

‘Because the Australians, who had a major investment in the government side, didn’t want you to. You and the rest of the world. The Bougainville Conflict was a small war on an island in the middle of nowhere. The only people interested were the people fighting and dying, and shareholders in the mining companies that had a stake in the Panguna Mine. It only came to international attention in nineteen ninety-seven when a company called Sandline International became involved. For thirty-six million dollars they offered to wipe out the Bougainville Revolutionary Army for the Papua New Guinea government, with a mercenary force using helicopter gunships, planes converted to bombers and the latest in military technology. The plan was only abandoned when the media found out and it almost brought down the PNG government.’

‘Christ, so much for Devlin’s few labour problems and some local difficulties with community leaders,’ Jamie exploded. ‘So the mine has never reopened?’

Magda shook her head and tapped the screen, bringing up a row of figures. ‘Between nineteen seventy-two and its closure in nineteen eighty-eight, the Panguna Mine produced twelve hundred million tonnes of material, of which some four hundred and fifty million tonnes went through the treatment process. It produced and shipped three million tonnes of copper, three hundred tonnes of gold and just short of eight hundred tonnes of silver. All of that meant billions in profits. Half went to the mine owners, a fifth to the government of Papua New Guinea — it accounted for seventeen per cent of the country’s internal revenue — and less than one per cent to the people of Bougainville …’

‘Well, that would certainly account for the locals being a little upset and why the PNG government were so keen to keep the mine going.’

‘It also caused incalculable environmental damage,’ Magda continued relentlessly, hammering out statistics like a poker player slapping down a full house. ‘It takes three and a half tonnes of water to process one tonne of copper. The Panguna Mine was processing a hundred and twenty thousand tonnes a day, which required about half a million tonnes of water. It was polluted with heavy metals and other chemicals and it had to go somewhere. The contaminated water destroyed the entire Jaba River system in the island’s central region. Animal and fish species were wiped out. Forests were stripped bare for miles around. Spoil from the mine has made seven thousand acres unusable for agriculture or any other purpose in perpetuity. Fifteen years on there are an increasing number of unexplained birth defects and health problems that are likely to be linked to the pollution.’

‘No wonder the islanders haven’t let them back. I assume they’re demanding an eye-watering sum in compensation before the mine reopens.’

She nodded. ‘But many of the islanders don’t want it to reopen — ever. They want proper independence and a return to their old way of life. That’s why the conflict continues to rumble on, at a lower level and as an internal battle, because there’s a faction who made money from the mine and they see no reason why they shouldn’t again.’

Jamie understood it all now in a revelation as vivid as any saint’s. ‘Along comes Keith Devlin with his billions, his promises and his smooth talk of sustainable development. And of course his company on the brink. Give the man his due, he’s an operator. He probably already has an option to buy shares in Bougainville Copper Ltd at rock-bottom prices. If he can somehow persuade the majority of the natives that Devlin Metal Resources will pay them a fair price, mine it in a way that will do no further damage — at the very least — and provide the kind of infrastructure the island doesn’t have: modern schools, hospitals, well-paid jobs for their children …’

‘But the islanders have heard all this before,’ Magda pointed out.

‘So he needs an edge.’

‘The Bougainville head …’

‘Or whatever is in these mysterious documents he plans to exchange it for, if they even exist.’