A wide gate for vehicle access was chained and padlocked, and there was a small guard hut inside the fence. A man with a rifle stood by the gate, looking bored, smoking. Kiah guessed he would go into the hut after dark: desert nights were cold.
‘North Korean,’ Abdul said, more or less to himself.
‘Him?’ Kiah said, looking at the guard. ‘No.’
‘Not him. His rifle.’
‘Oh.’ Guns were among the many things Abdul knew about.
‘This might be an illegal mine, but it’s surprisingly well equipped,’ he said. ‘It must be making a lot of money.’
‘Of course,’ she said, laughing. ‘It’s a gold mine.’
He smiled. ‘True. The workers who dig up the gold don’t seem to be getting much of the profit, though.’
‘The workers never get much of the profit, anywhere, ever.’ She was surprised that the knowledgeable Abdul could be ignorant of this basic fact of life.
‘So what brings them here?’ he said.
That was a good question. From what Kiah had heard, the unofficial gold mines opening up in the desert were every-man-for-himself affairs, with individuals grabbing what they could get and managing their own food and water independently. Life was rough, but there might be big rewards. It looked as if the reward for working here was small.
They moved on, and Kiah heard the aggressive rasp of a jackhammer. She saw that the second compound was an enclosure of two or three acres. About a hundred men were working inside. Kiah and Abdul watched through the fence, studying the activity. In a shallow open pit, a man was breaking up the bedrock with a jackhammer. When he paused, a backhoe scooped up the lumps and moved them to a broad concrete apron. This was where most of the men were toiling, crushing the stones with huge hammers. It looked like back-breaking work under the brutal desert sun.
‘Where’s the gold?’ Kiah said.
‘In the rock. Sometimes it’s in nuggets, about the size of a man’s thumb, that can just be picked up by hand out of the debris of smashed rock. More often it’s in flakes that have to be extracted by some more complicated process. It’s called alluvial gold.’
Behind them a voice said: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
They turned. It was Mohammed. Kiah disliked him: he had a mean streak.
Abdul said: ‘I’m looking around. Is that forbidden, brother?’
‘Move along.’ Kiah saw that Mohammed had no front teeth.
Abdul said: ‘As you wish.’
They walked on, with the fence on their left. After a while, Kiah glanced back and saw that Mohammed had disappeared.
The third compound was different again. The fence enclosed several flat-roofed cinder-block buildings in neat rows, presumably barracks for the guards. On the far side were four objects shrouded in desert camouflage, each one the size of an articulated truck. Several men, presumably off duty, sat around drinking coffee or playing dice. To Kiah’s surprise, the Mercedes bus was inside the compound.
There was one more enigma: a building with no windows, its only door barred on the outside. It looked horribly like some kind of prison. It was painted light blue, to reflect heat, which would be necessary if people were spending all day inside.
They returned to their shelter. The others had done as Kiah had and cleaned the place up. Esma and her mother had got a tub of water and were doing laundry outside. The other passengers were chatting in their usual desultory way.
Three women arrived with large bowls of food and a stack of plastic dishes. Supper was the millet porridge Kiah had seen being cooked. It was mixed with salted fish and onions.
The sun went down as they were eating, and they finished by starlight. Kiah wrapped herself and Naji in blankets and stretched out on the ground to sleep.
Abdul lay down nearby.
*
Abdul was intrigued. Hakim clearly had a purpose in taking this diversion, but what was it? The presence of ISGS here would make it a natural place for Hakim to make an overnight stop – if it had been on his route. But it was not.
Unlike the other passengers, Abdul was in no hurry to get to Tripoli. His mission was to gather information, and he was deeply interested in this camp. In particular, he was curious about the truck-sized objects in the guards’ compound. The last ISGS hideout he had discovered, al-Bustan, had turned out to have three Chinese howitzers. These things looked bigger.
As he drifted off to sleep his mind kept repeating the word pit. The gold-bearing rocks were being extracted from a pit. What was the significance of that?
He woke with a start. It was dawn, and the word pit was still in his head.