Roskov, Book 16, page 23
Down at the promenade we found a mass of grey concrete, a few areas now having paving slabs put down, thousands of paving slabs stacked up ready.
We walked past grey shells of buildings that would someday be shops and cafes and beach clubs, past a large saltwater pond, and we made it to the sand, that sand now clean of debris.
The promenade walkway was having slabs put down as well, hardwearing and waterproof slabs to survive the winter swells here.
In a few locations, the metal railings for the promenade were already in place, and a few sun shelters with benches had been erected ready for our resident pensioners to sit in and to enjoy the ocean view.
Turning around, we could see the outlines of the first two nursing homes cut into the slopes, deep foundations being dug, concrete piles stretching upwards, the metal rods within the concrete also seen extending upwards.
Walking east thirty yards, we stopped to examine the bottom end of the long saltwater pool, a number of fish seen enjoying their new enclosure.
Along the length of the saltwater canal I could see bridges, both road bridges and many pedestrian bridges with railings, the saltwater canal stretching out forever towards the horizon.
‘A good feature,’ Rolf noted. ‘Cheap to construct yet it adds a quality to the place, an interesting feature for people to stop and to enjoy. Is that … a shark?’
‘It is, but people are not allowed to swim in there.’
‘How big will it grow?’ he worried.
‘Not sure, but I doubt that it would eat a pensioner that fell in.’
A small stingray swam past, and we could see a large crab moving sideways.
‘It is well stocked,’ Rolf noted.
I asked a man in a white hat, that looked officious, about the fish.
He answered, heavily accented, ‘Zee Ireland men, zay fish on beach and put fish in eer. Some to cook.’
‘Ah. Thanks.’
Walking along the canal, we spotted a turtle with one rear fin missing. We had to wonder if the Irish men here had caught that as well.
Further on, and we saw a group of fish swimming in unison, no idea what species they were, the fish a shiny blue-grey.
‘Plenty of fish in here,’ Rolf noted.
Driving back up the main road, we halted at the mini-hospital, and they had three men in beds; one broken arm, one smashed foot, and one deep cut.
The doctor present spoke English, so I asked about health and safety here, worried, Rolf more than just a bit worried.
‘For construction men this is normal, and zer is a thousand, so … not too bad.’
Back up at the main admin building I asked about accidents, they had a log, and Billy explained that our averages were below the average expected, and that he had seen a fair few nasty accidents in his time, men killed.
At the new metal-clad magnolia warehouse we met the new warehouse manager, and the place was already busy. They had no shop here, but they had several concrete offices outside the large shed, many forklift trucks in use.
Stacked up outside were metal frames, metal rods, paving slabs, plastic bags full of something. Inside sat cement bags, and tools of all sorts, as well as food and drink for the men, clothing and safety hats.
The manager explained, accented, ‘When the first nursing home is ready … we build another shed like this, beds and furniture. Then a place just for food, and when there is thirty nursing home … this will be ten times bigger with fifty staff.’
‘When there are thirty nursing homes … you’ll have thirty deputy managers!’ I told him.
‘The homes, they will have stores?’
‘Yes, large stores, enough for the residents to eat for a week at least.’
Back at the hotel, an overweight middle-aged man was sat waiting, and he had enjoyed a free meal as he sat waiting my return. Michelle introduced the man, an American mining expert.
Sat next to him, he placed down a lump of silver metal for me. ‘I got me a helo up to the site this morning, straight off the damn plane,’ came in a southern accent.
‘You flew from the States?’ I puzzled.
‘No, Marseille, I have a house over there, knew Ross Daniels back in the day, did some prospecting around here but never found the pay dirt.’
He tapped the silver lump. ‘Not platinum, it’s palladium.’
‘What the hell is that?’
‘They use it in cell phones, radio, military radios, satellites. And it’s worth more than platinum, more than gold.’
‘And the seam?’
‘Looks good, could be large, and I have men on the way, just the problem of …a lack of roads, a bridge, some electricity. But we’ve mined remote places before, can take kit in by helo, but we’ll need a few larger helos.’
‘They’ll make a road quickly. As for a bridge … that could take a while.’
‘Where the river narrows … a simple wooden bridge could be placed, made to measure, cheap enough. You won’t get a twenty tonne Cat across, but we can still mine the place.’
‘Cat?’
‘Caterpillar-made digger.’
I nodded. ‘If you’re going to mine it, mine it cheaply, don’t waste resources.’
‘Best way for that it is to blow a big hole in the hill.’
‘Fine by me, but the world might object to the Ice Age cave being destroyed.’
‘So … hack off a few hand paintings and play it down.’
‘That I can do, and we found a few other Ice Age caves that people can poke around in. I’ll have the experts remove anything interesting first, and it’s my land. But how would you do it?’
‘Drill a deep hole under the seam, blow it, then just pick up the ore.’
‘Would some end up in the river?’ I asked.
‘Some might, yeah, can fish it out in summer. They say you found gold…’
‘A thousand years ago … someone threw a dozen gold crucifix into the river, now all mangled. No gold ore.’
‘What kind of nutcase would throw away gold?’ he puzzled.
‘A religious nutcase probably.’
‘Could have melted them down…’
‘It’s a work in progress, to figure out how the crucifix got there and if there are more. So what kind of budget do you think we need, to dig up the ore?’
‘If we blast it, a few thousand Euro, then the time of the men, then we ship it out unrefined. If it’s deep and doesn’t want to come up … then it would be like a regular mine, but there would still be a good profit on it.’
‘Hold on.’ I called the Prefect. ‘Listen, the cheapest way to get up the palladium is to blast it.’
‘The what?’
‘It’s not platinum, it’s palladium, which is worth more. I want to blow up the cave but there are ancient hand paintings inside.’
‘No one cares, blow it up.’
I cut the call and faced my guest. ‘Blow the damn thing, straight away, we can worry about the archaeologists of the world afterwards.’
‘I can get the dynamite here tomorrow and drill today and in the morning, then we’ll see what the ground reveals.’
‘Cover the damn mess up afterwards, I’m going to build a hotel across the river from it.’
‘Just dump dirt on it and a few grass seeds, six months and it will be hidden.’
I nodded at that. ‘Need anything from me?’
‘Just tell them to let us work, and to stay well back.’
After he had gone I informed Michelle, and she would call the climbers and then the police.
Pascal turned up half an hour later and I fetched him a coffee. ‘Twelve boxes of coins, all silver coins,’ he keenly informed me.
‘Good. The Prefect will now have plenty of money to play with.’
‘We also bring up wood, and pottery, some items for the museum, and we have camera film and ROV film, we make documentary.’
‘Good, more interest in the island. But make sure that the sales of the coins covers the diving bell costs and the divers, first, then the Prefect gets his cut.’
Pascal nodded. ‘He will send them to many countries, and the price goes down, so many coins on sale.’
‘Yes, of course, no longer so rare and precious. Maybe he can keep them in a safe for ten years. Suggest that to him, we can sell them later.’
‘I tell him, yes.’
The big blast
At 2pm we were stood ready with a large crowd, four hundred yards down from the palladium cave and the blast site, local TV crews here. A hole had been drilled down, it had been stuffed with dynamite, and a wire had been run to a timer.
I could see the mining expert I had met, as well as others in his team, come up the riverbank on this side and then wait, cigarettes lit.
Rolf was with me, he had seen enough shops for a while, the ladies in his life off north to a new shopping area, a day out for them, some lengthy lunch time taken no doubt.
A whistle blew, then a second time, and as I observed the ridge across the river it lifted up and broke apart, dust bellowed outwards, and the blast registered with us a few seconds later.
When the dust cloud cleared, the ground was dark brown now and not the usual beige colour fof the rocks here, and I led Rolf forwards.
Across the river, via a narrow new man-at-a-time wooden bridge held tight by ropes, I walked up the ridge past large silvery lumps, the palladium now exposed.
At the top, I met again the mine expert as he looked around. ‘Well?’ I asked.
‘Did the job, and what’s just on the surface here is worth … sixty, seventy million at least. We’ll move that, value it, then drill down and see what’s there – when the roads are better that is.’
‘No hurry, but next winter we’ll flood the valley.’
‘And if the seam is good?’ he posed.
‘We’ll still flood the valley but try and drill down and get it.’
‘You’re not a man worried about money, are you?’
‘Fuck no, got a few billion under my mattress.’
‘What was it like to find The Ark?’ he asked as I took in the upturned rocks around me.
‘Great, but I’m more interested in people and politics than old relics. I love the history, but lives to save this year is more important to me than something buried two thousand years ago.’
A shout, and we walked toward the man. He was knelt down in the deep hole left behind by the blast, and he had found a seam, a wide seam.
My expert hit the silver seam with a hammer several times, consulted with the man that found it, then turned to me. ‘Don’t flood the fucking place just yet, this seam is good.’
‘You have nine months at least, maybe a year.’
‘Long enough,’ he conceded.
A policeman was with us now, sat phone on his belt. I told him, ‘Eight police here at all times, this silver metal is worth more than gold.’
‘More than gold? Fuck me…’ He picked up a lump and examined it.
‘But local people can’t sell it, they use it to make satellites.’
‘But they may try and take some anyhow,’ he warned as he examined the lump in his hand.
Another shout, and I was waved over, Bonza following, and a mine engineer had a silver box covered in dirt. It was locked, the lock rusted, so we used a hammer to smash it open. Inside were faded old parchments, the writing being Latin.
‘I have a religious archaeology team with me, they can translate it,’ I told the mine engineer and his men, and I led Bonza off, collecting Bill and Ted as more police came over the narrow bridge, and we headed down to the large caverns.
I found Donno outside the caverns and I handed over the parchments. Knelt, he carefully opened them on a flat rock.
‘Here, the same symbol. And here it says … that this is the account of … God’s servant Leopold.’ He glanced up at me.
Reading on, he began, ‘God’s servant was born six times before he finally died, out of favour with God.’ He carefully turned a page. ‘He was born first in Italy, assistant to a Roman senator, 97BC -’
I cut him off. ‘Take it back, be careful, and read it all in a locked room, photograph key pages, check with Armani the dates and authenticity, and … why someone would write such an account and then bury it where no one was likely to ever find it.’
Donno stood. ‘Someone … knew that this day would come and that you would be stood right there.’ He waited.
I nodded at him. ‘Quite likely, yes, a move on the “chessboard of life” planned out ahead. So we need to know what role Leopold played and how it affects us.’
Donno and his friend picked up their backpacks and set off with us down to the jeeps, some light reading for them to tackle tonight. Still, they would not miss the local nightlife any.
Near the jeeps, and a climber informed me that the river flow was lessening.
‘We blasted rocks, and many fell into the water. If the water level drops some here, have them search it for gold.’
A surveyor came up to me and shook my hand. ‘We make progress, sir.’
‘What I want … is five hundred small red flags, and someone to work out how high the water will go, and they plant the red flags, on this side of the river, all the way up to the main road.’
‘There is a GPS device we can use, and I get some apprentice to place the red flags, sir.’
‘Thanks, and add it to your costs of course.’
At the jeeps, we found a old truck with large tyres and a group of men with jackhammers and a generator. They had already started on making a road and were now noisily smashing any soft rocks that got in their way.
And I smiled when they informed me that they were council men, and that they got extra from me for this work, because this was officially their off day.
The men had small tents to raise in the back of their truck, and they would start early in the morning with some loud noises, no residents to wake-up. I pointed at the climbers’ tents.
‘They can wake early, no,’ the man said with an evil grin.
Back at the hotel, and I called my dam business partner. ‘It’s Roskov.’
‘They found rare metals at the dam site?’
‘We did, and we just blew up a cave so that the rare metal, palladium, can be collected and sold. But the mining will be funded by our new business, some of the profits retained of course.’
‘There is much, of these metals?’
‘In one place, one seam only so far, and it will take months to dig it all up. And if we find more ore we can use the same company to dig it up, the Prefect is happy with that.’
‘He is?’
‘He doesn’t want to pay for the mining, or the road extensions.’
‘Sounds just like him, yes. I have found an office near the airport and will hire some staff, and we start work soon.’
‘Good. And I met the surveyors up at the dam site.’
‘The Kudulov Estate arranged them and will bill us later, but they are the company of surveyors that I would have used.’
Ross Daniels called me after I had a shower and a cup of tea. ‘The Corsican investors want in - to the dam and valley and the mining.’
‘The dam is being built by myself and the man that gave me the idea, and it’s a small concern at the moment. I would have sold land to the investors and got the investors in there, so tell them that they can be a part of the hotels and villas project.
‘As for the mining, there may only be the one small seam, so explain that, and half of that seam just got blown sky high, men picking up the ore lumps by hand as we speak.’
‘They might start moaning,’ he warned.
‘Let them come moan to me over a nice cup of tea. And tell them that I have spare plots to build in Mandoch Valley.’
‘That will shut them up, yes.’
Sat with a cup of tea chatting to Bill and Ted about Leopold, I had an idea, a sneaky idea, but I was not sure if it would work. Not explaining the plan to them, we went for a walk up towards the Gun Room, which was still fully booked each week and still popular.
Near the Gun Room, and with no one observing us, I placed a hand on an exposed rock, told them to stay quiet, and I closed my eyes - having handed a map of the island and a marker pen to a puzzled Bill and Ted.
With my eyes closed, I imagined seeing through the rock, into the heart of the island, and I could soon see the underwater diving caves, one leading out to the ocean, one snaking north into the caverns.
I imagined zooming-out in my mind, and I could soon see the holiday village, then the ground under Frances House, the rock formations, the different types of rocks, even a few fossils noted.
Concentrating, I imagined the dam valley, then there it was, the water flowing, the various types of rock, the palladium seen both on the surface and underground, and I zoomed out in my mind, a bit too far, because now I could see most of the southern part of the island.
But something caught my attention, and area of water under the rocks, a large area of water that looked like the roots of a tree.
Zooming in, I moved north in my mind, finding that a large blob got bigger and bigger till I realised that the blob was an aquifer, water held in porous rocks, and that it was twenty miles wide.
It also appeared to be a mile deep in places, starting up in the high mountains and ending at sea level. In fact, it dipped below sea level.
Following a branch of the water, which seemed to be flowing west, I soon recognised a part of the coast north of Scorfo Valley.
Closing in, I could see the water flowing under the rocks, and in one place it bubbled up to the surface under pressure, an old abandoned church sat next to it.
I realised that it was a spring.
Focusing on the water, I imagined seeing the land from the side, and then there it was as a cutaway diagram and - judging by the size of the church in comparison, the spring was a thousand feet above sea level, above the coast road that I could see.
The large subterranean river that fed the spring dropped down towards the coast, split apart, and finally disappeared around sea level. It just seemed to go nowhere and disappear.
Focused on the church, I imagined being stood next to it, and the coast came into view. Scorfo Valley was a few miles south of where I now stood in my mind, maybe even ten miles away.
