Our Hearts. Chapter Nine. The Camp

A juicy slice of buffalo meat, pinkish at the cut, responded to the pressure of the knife with an elastic, almost living resistance, as if the muscle fibers still remembered running across the savanna.

A fragrant, tangibly thick steam rose from the white earthenware plate, which was covered in a network of microscopic scratches. It was steeped in the primal essence of sizzling animal fat, the sharp, nose-hitting bitterness of scorched garlic, and the coniferous melancholy of rosemary. Scattered alongside were small, golden potatoes with crispy, charred skins that burst between the teeth, and dripping slices of grilled zucchini. The coffee—real coffee, not the dusty, cardboard-tasting instant surrogate from humanitarian rations, but a rich, oil-dark Ethiopian brew with a velvety bitterness that lingered at the root of the tongue—steamed in a thick ceramic mug, scalding his palms.

Leo sat at a metal table under a wide beige canvas canopy, which snapped taut with a dull thud under the gusts of hot wind. He ate slowly, meticulously, almost mechanically chewing every fibrous piece. In this camp, food was neither a display of hospitality nor a ritual of comfort. Food here served as a precise engineering calculation: a calibrated balance of calories, protein, and electrolytes required to keep the human body functioning flawlessly, like a well-oiled gun bolt, amidst the forty-degree, suffocating Congolese humidity. The mercenaries of the “Southbridge Security” PMC were supplied to the highest standard.

As his jaws worked, Leo’s eyes mapped the geometry of the space. It read like a strict text, devoid of metaphors.

The Kato-Tombe camp had been designed by someone who flawlessly mastered the dry language of fortification. Nothing superfluous, nothing accidental—pure, paranoid semiotics of security. The outer perimeter was formed by a taut chain-link fence, ringing with tension, topped with three rows of “Egoza” razor wire, its blades gleaming predatorily in the sun. Its lower edge was embedded in a monolithic concrete plinth—an absolute defense against tunneling and heavy vehicle breaches. At the corners, piercing the heat-bleached sky, stood four steel watchtowers. On two of them, heavy-caliber M2 Browning machine guns rested motionlessly on ball mounts, covered with faded canvas tarps. On each tower stood a sentry in camouflage and dark glasses. They resembled gargoyles: not a single unnecessary movement, not an attempt to wipe away the sweat, despite the blinding, mind-melting morning heat.

The inner zone consisted of two parallel lines of standard shipping containers, converted into living modules. Between them, over the slick red clay that looked like coagulated blood, wooden boardwalks were laid out neatly, as if drawn by a ruler. At the end of the left row loomed a two-story block with the dark, impenetrably mirrored windows of the command post, reflecting a distorted landscape. Opposite it gaped the maw of a covered hangar, from which echoed a hollow metallic clank and the smell of diesel: there, cooling in the shadows, sat four armor-reinforced Land Cruisers and a yellow Caterpillar excavator that looked like a sleeping praying mantis.

Leo counted automatically. Nine armed men in sight. Four whites, including that same stocky blond with the short beard who had struck him with a rifle butt in the village. The rest were Congolese in impeccably fitted uniforms that did not restrict their movements, carrying Israeli carbines on single-point slings. Their movements were sparse, economical, devoid of any street-level sloppiness.

Twenty meters from the dining area, cut directly into the face of a gray-orange clay hill, the entrance to a tunnel loomed black. It was blocked by a massive steel pressure door with a circular locking wheel, slick with condensation. Two guards stood motionless at the entrance. Nearby, beating evenly and dully like a massive iron heart, thrummed a powerful diesel generator; from it, a thick, writhing braid of black armored cables ran into the bunker. A separate power line. External security. A closed loop of secrecy.

Leo took a sip of the Arabica. The sharp, astringent bitterness on his tongue, washing over his palate, suddenly tore a breach in time, echoing with a deep, long-buried memory.

His father used to brew the exact same coffee in a small, dented aluminum turka with a long wooden handle. Every morning in their Boston apartment, while wet, gray snow fell silently outside the window, erasing the contours of the alien city, his father would stand at the stove, watching the dark foam rise to a boil, and stay silent. There was no sadness in that dense silence—only the ingrained habit of a man who had learned to leave no tracks, neither in the snow nor in documents.

Northern Argentina, Formosa Province, the early eighties. The humid Chaco. His father sometimes mentioned this place—sparsely, in casually dropped phrases that reeked of swamp fever. A closed military camp amidst impenetrable, rotting swamps and palm savannas. There, under a scorching, merciless sun, the young Lieutenant Gonzales served under the command of his own father—Leo’s grandfather, Colonel Hector Gonzales Herrera.

“There was absolute purity there, Leo,” his father would recount quietly, hypnotically stirring his coffee while the spoon clinked against the edges of the cup. “No politics. No noise. Only discipline and geometric order. We knew who the enemy was, and we knew what had to be done to make that enemy disappear, to dissolve into thin air.”

Leo learned the whole truth much later, during his third year at Harvard, when he accidentally stumbled upon the multi-volume report of the CONADEP commission—“Nunca Más,” “Never Again”—in a rare books department that smelled of old paper and dust. The pages chilled his fingers. In the lists of officers who ran the secret detention centers in the Chaco zone during the “Dirty War,” his grandfather’s name, printed in the soulless font of a typewriter, appeared on page fourteen. Seventeen secret prisons. Hundreds of people, brought in for interrogation with bags over their heads in canvas-covered trucks with no license plates. And zero survivors. The family fled to the US in eighty-seven—exactly a couple of months before a federal court in Buenos Aires issued an arrest warrant for Hector Gonzales.

Looking at the mathematically calibrated lines of the Kato-Tombe camp, at the machine-gun towers trembling in the heat haze, and at the sweat-slicked steel door of the bunker, Leo thought that his father would have felt at peace here, right at home. His grandfather—even more so. The architecture of violence is the same everywhere; only the colors of the flags on the flagpoles and the names of the transnational corporations change. From the viscous swamps of the Argentine Chaco to the parched, brick-colored earth of the Congolese Katanga—the logic of the closed perimeter remains immutable.

Movement began at the steel door of the bunker. A releasing pneumatic valve hissed drawn-out and long, the massive locking wheel turned with a clank, and the heavy panel swung inward slowly, almost reluctantly, exhaling the chill of the underground.

Two figures emerged from the dark opening.

Diana Petrașcu walked out first—in a blindingly white, starch-crisp shirt and dark trousers, carrying a small, worn leather briefcase in her hand. Behind her, squinting against the relentless sun, strode a man Leo had never seen before. Tall, bony, dried out by the years, around sixty-five, wearing a grayish, unseasonably thick jacket over a woolen shirt. He had a thick, meticulously trimmed white beard and round, thin gold-rimmed glasses that turned his eyes into two unblinking pools, giving him the appearance of a retired literature professor or the keeper of a secret monastic archive. Diana was speaking to him quickly, in clipped tones, as they walked. The elderly man nodded rhythmically, but his detached gaze behind the thick lenses remained fixed somewhere past the camp buildings, into the void, as if he were continuing to hold a fragile, multidimensional mathematical formula in his mind.

They walked along the boardwalk just five steps away from Leo, washing over him with the scent of expensive tobacco and air-conditioned air, without turning their heads, and disappeared behind the mirrored doors of the command module.

Dragoș appeared an hour later.

He approached from the direction of the hangar—massive, blocking out the sun, his skull shaved to a greasy shine, wearing a sweat-soaked camouflage tank top. On his left forearm, an old burn scar, looking like melted wax, bulged white. In his massive hands, the commando held a neat, tight bundle and a pair of imposing high-laced combat boots.

“Clothes,” Dragoș said, short as a gunshot, dropping the bundle on the edge of the metal table. “You were taken in a hurry. Change. Your jeans have rotted from sweat and dirt anyway.”

Leo unfolded the coarse fabric. A dark-olive uniform with no chevrons or insignia, stiff cotton smelling sharply of machine oil, gun lubricant, and that specific factory treatment that lingers in long-term storage warehouses.

“How do you know my size?” Leo asked, looking up.

“I can tell by eye,” Dragoș shifted his lips slightly beneath his thick mustache; it was supposed to signify a smirk. “Occupational hazard. Metrics are the foundation of survival. Come on, I’ll show you where your module is.”

The dwelling was a standard twenty-foot shipping container: a narrow metal-frame cot with unnaturally clean, stiff linens, a table bolted to the iron floor, a tiny sink, and a small air conditioner humming with a strained wheeze near the ceiling, spitting out streams of bone-dry air. Over the slit-like window was a solid steel grate, as thick as a finger. The bag, hastily packed by Sarah, already sat forlornly by the bed.

“Are there any other sick people at the mine?” Leo asked, looking around the cramped space that pressed heavily on his shoulders.

“No.”

“Not at all? No sudden fever, no skin rashes, no stomach issues?”

“I personally checked the medic’s log,” Dragoș cut him off in a tone of steel. “Thirty-two personnel. Temperature checks scheduled every six hours. Everyone is clean.”

“What about the guy found in the forest? Your employee, the one you took from the WHO morgue. Who is he?”

Horia held a pause. The air in the container seemed to grow even denser. The mercenary’s small, deep-set eyes bored into Leo’s face with a watchful, predatory tension, as if he were calculating the trajectory of a strike.

“Not my area of competence, Doctor. But if it’s so important for you to indulge your paranoia—you can take your stethoscope and examine any soldier in this camp. We have nothing to hide. We are healthy.”

“So, I am free to go?”

“Within the fence line. Don’t go beyond the wire—the boys in the towers have orders to shoot at anything that moves without the password.”

“I’d like to draw their blood for analysis, not just give them a generic listen.”

“You will…” Dragoș placed his palm on the door handle. “If it becomes necessary.”

When the metal door slammed shut behind him with the clank of a prison bolt, Leo stripped off his sticky clothes and changed. The uniform fit almost perfectly; the dense cotton fabric pleasantly cooled his overheated skin, helping him to focus. He put on the high boots, pulled the laces tight, and walked over to the small mirror, coated in a cloudy film, above the sink. From the depths of the distorting glass, a stranger in olive-drab camouflage looked back at him—with a haggard, sharpened face, overgrown with stubble, and eyes that were feverishly sunken from today’s lack of sleep. On his right wrist, Imani’s copper bracelet stood out like a dark, foreign blemish. “Spirals. Dots. Quarries and people.” The metal felt surprisingly cool, as if drawing its chill from some subterranean river. Inside his chest, just as quietly, running in the background at the very periphery of his hearing, an invisible Geiger counter clicked its ragged, inescapable rhythm.

Until noon, Leo walked aimlessly around the camp, feigning the unhurried stroll of a convalescent. The soles of his boots sank into the brown clay. The mercenaries paid him absolutely no attention. To them, he was not a living human being—he was a temporary element of the tactical landscape, like an imported generator or a sealed crate of medical supplies.

Around one o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun reached its zenith, the steel door of the bunker groaned drawn-out once more.

Diana Petrașcu emerged from the viscous darkness of the tunnel. This time, alone—without the elderly companion in glasses and without the briefcase. She walked quickly, straight as a taut guitar string, but through this bearing, a strange, barely perceptible physical tightness showed through, an almost trembling overstrain. A patch of fabric on the back of her dazzling blouse had darkened with moisture, clinging to her shoulder blades. Without looking at any of the guards, she clicked her heels up the metal staircase and vanished into the cool interior of the two-story module.

Just after two o’clock, when the merciless sun had baked the corrugated roofs of the containers into a humming brazier, Leo sat in the dining area again—under the open canopy with the metal tables—in absolute solitude. The air shimmered and melted. Lunch was just as flawless as breakfast: spiced stewed lamb with fluffy rice, juice-dripping fresh vegetables, hot bread, and moist fruit.

The PMC operatives arrived in twos and threes, silently took their portions, and retreated into the shade. No one spoke to him. No one met his eyes. He remained a piece of furniture—functional, necessary, but deprived of a voice.

Quiet, measured steps on the wooden boardwalk made him turn around.

Diana sat down on the wooden bench opposite him, bringing with her a faint scent of menthol and ozone. She had already managed to change into a fresh blouse; her thick hair was combed back tightly and smoothly, revealing a high forehead, but the aristocratic pallor on her chiseled cheekbones had become even more pronounced, taking on a waxy hue.

“Have you had a look around, Doctor?” she asked quietly, lacing her long, slender fingers together.

“I have.”

“Did you find any infected?”

“No,” Leo carefully sipped his scalding coffee. “Your people are healthy. At any rate, I didn’t see any outward clinical signs of infection.”

“Of course,” Diana gave a barely perceptible, satisfied nod.

Leo set his mug on the table. The earthenware base touched the surface with a dull, stony thud that echoed through the tabletop.

“Uranium. In there?” he asked directly, without pausing to prepare, striking a glance toward the concrete bunker.

Diana didn’t even flinch. Not a single muscle on her face twitched. Only a brief, dry, almost condescending smile appeared on her lips—the kind of smile an experienced lecturer gives when hearing a correct but incredibly predictable question from an inquisitive student.

“Gonzales, you are strikingly blunt. Is that the American style?… Back in the forties, your geologists did indeed dig up these hills. They were looking for raw materials for the Manhattan Project. They made a dozen deep exploratory shafts, gnawing into the rock, but then the work was abruptly shut down, and all the geological reports went under the highest ‘top secret’ classification. All infrastructure and logistics were relocated further south—to Shinkolobwe. Have you heard of the place?”

“I’ve read about it,” Leo replied in an even voice. “Shinkolobwe, right here, in Upper Katanga. The richest uranium deposit in history. Eighty percent of the raw material for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mined right here, in Congolese soil.”

“Correct,” Diana nodded slowly. “At Shinkolobwe, the ore lay practically on the surface; the pitchblende had an incredible, devilishly pure concentration. The Americans and the Belgians likely just calculated that investing in deep shaft mining here, in Kato-Tombe, was economically unviable. The project was abandoned and wiped off the maps.”

She fell silent. Her dark, cold eyes watched him attentively, without a single blink. Diana was tracking his reaction—professionally, coldly, with that specific, microsurgical attention found in people accustomed to reading facial expressions the way one reads oscilloscope readouts.

“But there is uranium in these seams, Gonzales,” she said after a prolonged pause that rang with tension, and a harsh, commanding note suddenly cut through her soft voice. “And its concentration here is such that we can confidently throw all our academic geology textbooks into the landfill.”

Leo remained silent, not breaking eye contact, feeling the suffocating heat of the tropics pressing against his eardrums.

Diana waited a few more seconds, as if reading his heart rate by the faint beating of the vein in his neck, then smoothly stood up from the bench without using her hands for support.

“Come with me, Doctor,” she said, adjusting her snow-white cuff. “Enough theories. I’m going to show you something.”

Chapter Ten. The Alchemy of Blood →
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