‘How should I know?’
‘But he has our money! We paid him to take us to Europe.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Mohammed said with an air of exasperation. ‘You didn’t pay me.’
Abdul was intrigued. Where was this going?
Wahed said: ‘What are we supposed to do?’
Mohammed grinned, showing his lack of front teeth. ‘You can leave.’
‘But we have no means of transport.’
‘There is an oasis eighty miles north of here. You could walk there in a few days, if you could find it.’
That was impossible. There was no road, just a track vanishing and reappearing between the dunes. Tuareg tribesmen who lived in the desert could find their way, but the migrants had no chance. They would wander around in the sand until they died of thirst.
This was a disaster. Abdul wondered how he was going to contact Tamara and make his report.
Wahed said: ‘Couldn’t you take us to the oasis?’
‘No. We operate a gold mine here, not a bus service.’ He was enjoying this.
A light dawned on Abdul, and he spoke up. ‘This has happened before, hasn’t it?’ he said to Mohammed.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes, you do. You’re not troubled or even surprised about Hakim running off. You have your speech ready. You’re even bored, because you’ve said the same words so many times before.’
‘Shut your mouth.’
Hakim was running a scam, Abdul saw. He brought migrants here, took the last of their money, then abandoned them. But what happened to them next? Perhaps Mohammed contacted their families and demanded more money for helping them travel on.
Wahed said: ‘So we just have to stay here until someone appears who is willing to take us away?’
It will be worse than that, Abdul thought.
Mohammed said: ‘Your driver paid us to put you up for one night. Today’s breakfast was your last free meal. We will not give you any more food.’
‘You will starve us to death!’
‘If you want to eat, you’ll have to work.’
So that was it.
Wahed said: ‘Work, how?’
‘The men will work in the pit. The women can help Rahima. She’s the one in the black hijab who runs the kitchen. We’re short of women; this place needs to be cleaned up.’
‘What’s the pay?’
‘Who said anything about money? If you work, you eat. If not, not.’ Mohammed grinned again. ‘Everyone is free to choose. There’s no pay.’
Wahed was outraged. ‘But that’s slave labour!’
‘There are no slaves here. Look around you. No walls, no locks. You can walk out of here any time.’
It was slave labour all the same, Abdul thought. The desert was more effective than a wall.
And that was the final piece of the puzzle. He had wondered what drew people here, and now he understood. They were not drawn, they were captured.
Abdul wondered how much Hakim had been paid. Perhaps a couple of hundred dollars for a slave? If so, he had left here with $7,200. This was nothing compared with the profits from the cocaine, but Abdul suspected that most of those profits went to the jihadis, and Hakim was paid a driver’s fee. That would also explain why Hakim worked so hard to chisel a few extra bucks out of the migrants en route.
Mohammed said: ‘There are rules. The most important are no alcohol, no gambling and no filthy homosexual behaviour.’
Abdul would have liked to ask what the punishment was, but he did not want to call further attention to himself. He feared that Mohammed already had him in his sights.
‘Those of you who want to be given supper tonight need to start work now,’ Mohammed went on. ‘The women should go to the kitchen and speak to Rahima. The men, come with me.’ He stood up and walked out.
Abdul followed, and so did all the other men.
They trudged along the littered path, hearing the din of the jackhammer grow louder. Most of them were in their twenties or thereabouts; they might struggle but they could probably do the work. Wahed certainly could not.
An armed guard unchained the gate of the pit enclosure, and they all walked in.
The men working inside had the dead-eyed look of those for whom both hope and despair are things of the past. They did not speak or show any animation, they just hammered a rock until it was crushed, then moved on to the next rock. They all had traditional robes and headdresses, but the clothes were falling apart. Their beards were full of dust. They stopped work periodically to go to an oil drum full of water and rinse out their mouths.