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  Times had indeed changed, Churcher thought. A frequent thought. His predecessor, Harold Meecham, was fortunate to have retired when he did in 1972. Churcher recalled how delighted he’d been with his appointment to director, the ultimate promotion. Proud as a prince of it. Africa hadn’t seemed like so much of a problem then. There’d been some boiling up here and there, in Namaqualand, Zaire, and elsewhere, but nothing that the System couldn’t cool down with well-placed and reasonable payoffs. Dash, as the natives so aptly called it.

  Who would have thought, until it was obvious and too late, that old, subservient Africa would take to presiding over itself so seriously? In some of the new African nations the System’s representatives, buyers, mine managers, and so on, had been lucky to get out with their hearts still in their chests. A few fellows stationed really deep in the bush had never again been heard from.

  The diamonds belong to the ground, the ground belongs to the country, the country belongs to the people, the diamonds belong to the people was the sort of empiric Marxist babble one was forced to hear. In the same breath the System was informed that the diamond-mining leases it held were invalid, since they’d been issued by officials no longer in power. As well, unwritten agreements, honorable understandings that had been kept and taken for granted since as far back as the early 1900s, suddenly stood for nothing. The slickly structured, neatly overseen way the System had extracted diamonds from Africa was in shambles.

  Could it be restored?

  The System believed so, Churcher particularly. He personally went back into Africa with homburg in hand, hoping to knot new, even tighter ties with the new leaders of the various African nations. With hardly a chew the System swallowed its pride and didn’t give one damn how transparent were its motives. Straight-facedly contrite, Churcher admitted regret for the System’s part in the inequities of the past and vowed there would be no such abuses in the future. An accumulation of things had simply gotten out of hand on the local level and would be rectified. Good that they’d been called to mind, Churcher said.

  Over the punishment of hundreds of horribly concocted cocktails and countless plates of inedible food, Churcher and other emissaries of the System never let go by a chance to express political empathy. And finally, in the privacy of those whom they believed to be the right company, they conveyed how eager the System was to make substantial amends, the emphasized word being, of course, “substantial.”

  The fat Swiss bank accounts that the System opened were intended to secure for it diamond-working arrangements in perpetuity. However, no sooner were millions deposited on behalf of the solidly perched leader of an African nation but there would be a coup, an overthrow, an unscheduled election, an assassination, or whatever, and, that quickly, an altogether different regime would have to be financially indulged. It occurred repeatedly. The outstretched palms multipled! Before long a frightful number of ingrate African exiles were way out of place, schussing the slopes of Gstaad, dipping in the waters of Marbella, signing for everything at the Carleton in Cannes, and otherwise living it up at the System’s expense.

  It was maddening.

  The financial drain mattered to the System, but what struck home harder was the prospect that Africa was helplessly out of hand and was likely to remain that way. Mind, diamonds would always be showing up from Zaire, Tanzania, and the like; however, they could not be reliably expected. Such an unpalatable realization! The System had dominated the world diamond market since the turn of the century. Ever devising, ever grabby, it had managed to increase its position to the extent that its hold was imposed over 90 percent of the diamonds that were pulled out of the earth each year. The methods it chose to market those diamonds could not have been more dictatorial.

  Ten times each year the System summoned some three hundred diamond dealers to its headquarters, located at 11 Harrowhouse Street, London EC 2. They were virtually the same most important three hundred dealers each time, as only rarely was a new name added to the list. To be so included by the System was a privilege and not merely a matter of prestige, for except in the worst of times, to a dealer it meant sure profit.

  In the trade these gatherings in London were called “sights.” The dealers who were notified to attend were called “sightholders.” Ostensibly, the reason for conducting a sight was to allow sightholders to examine the diamond rough that the System had decided to sell them. However, the dealers were not permitted to pick over their packets, take certain stones and leave others, and pay only for what they took. They had to accept the entire packet or none at all, the bad along with the better, exactly as the System had proportioned it. Nor could a sightholder quibble about price. He might wince, and once in a while even dare aloud some lighthearted comment pertaining to cost, but he made damn sure his tone was unmistakably lighthearted. A troublesome sightholder, one who failed to abide by the System’s criteria, would be excluded from the list. Set adrift, so to speak, put out on his own to scrounge up diamonds wherever he could, a time-consuming, quite often chancier alternative.

  The average price the System put on its packets was one million dollars. Three hundred sightholders paid a million each ten times every year.

  What it came to was three billion dollars.

  Little wonder the System went to so much bother and expense in its attempt to get things back to working order in Africa. Control was imperative. Control of supply enabled control of price.

  The System continued to hold its sights on schedule, drawing the diamonds it needed for them from its backup inventory. The sightholders had no idea that anything unusual was going on. The evident turmoil in Africa did not seem to mean a thing. The System was as implacable and efficient as ever. Any rumors that it was having difficulties were swiftly evaporated by its normal arrogance.

  For nearly two years, from late 1976 to well into 1978, the System deliberated what move it should make. It couldn’t keep up the front much longer; its reserves were close to depletion. Soon it would be forced to cancel sights and let the diamond market, not so figuratively speaking, stone itself to death. The only other alternative was something the System had been putting off like a maiden keeping her legs crossed, and that was to seek rescue from the only possible direction.

  The Soviet Union.

  After World War II the Soviets were in desperate need of diamonds. They could not rebuild industrially nor hope to keep up technologically without them. Diamonds were essential to drilling oil, making steel, building rockets. With practically no diamond production of their own the Soviets were forced to buy from the West, from the System.

  Politically, the men at the top of the System were congenital conservatives. In their view anyone who was even left-handed did not deserve sympathy or trust. They made the Soviets pay dearly for the diamonds they needed. And whenever the Soviets complained, they upped the price. The Soviets resented being gouged but had no recourse. For the time being they could only grit and pay. The long run would be a different matter.

  Soviet geologists went hunting. In, of all places, Siberia. They had noticed the geological similarities between certain areas of Yakut Siberia and the diamond-rich regions of South Africa. Hundreds of geologists tromped back and forth across the frozen Siberian wastes, but it was not until 1954 that a woman geologist named Larissa Popugaieva made the find. In the basin of the Vilyui River she came upon a kimberlite pipe, the sort of extinct volcanic outlet that contains the kind of rock in which diamonds are found. Soon after that initial discovery, numerous other diamond-bearing pipes were found in that Yakut area.

  Larissa Popugaieva was declared a Hero of Socialist Labor and awarded the Order of Lenin.

  However, finding diamonds was one thing, getting them out of the ground another. Particularly this Siberian ground. It was permafrost, constantly frozen as much as a mile deep, a result of the fierce climate that went to 80 below zero Fahrenheit. Summers there were as brief as a month and, as if overcompensating, presented sweltering temperatures that often exceeded 100 degrees.
Such heat transformed the skin of the land into mushy green bogs above which mosquitoes clouded like thick, black, buzzing mists.

  Mining had never been attempted under such adverse conditions. The extreme cold changed the molecular behavior of substances, turned lubricants into glue, caused rubber to become brittle as dry bone, and made many metals fracture into fragments when asked to take the merest strain. Machinery was paralyzed. The human machinery as well. Parts balked, muscles lost their elasticity, nostrils clogged with ice.

  For eleven years, from 1955 to 1966, the Soviets hacked at the frozen ground, grubbed for their diamonds. Many who worked the open-cut mines died from hypothermia. Pneumonia was almost as common as head colds. Frostbite caused casualty after casualty. There were summer instances when men or women or couples strayed too far from camp. Seduced by the sun to remove their clothes, they were literally driven mad by mosquitoes.

  Those who fared best in the frigid climate were the Chukchis. Genetically connected to the Alaskan Inuit and in appearance greatly resembling them, the Chukchis came from the easternmost, northernmost corner of the Soviet Union: the Bering Sea coast and Pegiyemel. They were the last natives of Siberia to submit to Russian rule. Fierce fighters, they held off the Russian army for over a century. While other workers at the mines wore fur-lined hats and gloves, the Chukchis went about with their heads and hands bare. It wasn’t that their skins were thicker or possessed an extra, anomalous thermal layer. They just thought of the cold differently. It was to them an old familiar enemy they would never totally give in to. The Russians enlisted as many Chukchis as they could to work the diamond mines, and paid them well. The difficulty was keeping them on the job. As soon as a Chukchi had earned enough to buy the number of reindeer or harpoon points he had in mind, he’d head for home, just walk off across the frozen waste as though he had no doubt of getting there.

  Despite the many obstacles, the Soviets managed to dig up more than enough diamonds to meet their industrial and technological needs. In 1965, for example, Soviet production was a million carats. But it was, unquestionably, the hard way to go, and there were those high in the government who thought it a shame that fine, gem-quality diamonds were being used on the studded ends of oil-drilling bits.

  It was proposed that an expenditure be made in rubles and manpower to improve the mining methods of the Siberian diamond fields. That the country should take full financial advantage of its diamond resources was the contention. The proposal caused some members of the Central Committee to set their jaws and shore up their minds. They were against having anything at all to do with diamonds. Staunch party hard-liners, they argued that diamonds by their very nature smacked of capitalism, that diamonds and exploitation of workers had always gone hand in hand. It would be hypocritical for Russia, in its role of model Marxist state, to be involved in such business. Instead, to meet its needs, could not Russia manufacture synthetic diamonds at a more reasonable cost?

  The debate was bitter and drawn-out. The diehards were eventually thwarted. The Secretariat of the Central Committee approved. Next it was up to Soviet engineers.

  What the engineers came up with was a solution that could not have been more simple nor more audacious. Inasmuch as the outside cold was such a physical drawback, then mine the diamonds from the inside. Enclose the mine and erect an installation directly above it, one that could house all the various phases of the diamond-mining process, from the excavation and crushing of the ore to the extracting and separating of the precious stones. The installation would also provide housing for the workers and administrative personnel, complete facilities.

  It was asked: What about the permafrozen ground? How would that be dealt with?

  With the exhaust heat of jet engines. The temperature and texture of the ground could be brought to a point where it would be normally workable.

  In the process of recovering diamonds was it not necessary to wash the crushed ore? Where would such a huge quantity of water, a veritable lake of it, be kept without it freezing?

  To answer that problem a new recovery method had been developed, one that used X-rays. As the mixture of crushed ore and diamonds was conveyed along a belt, it would be scrutinized under fluoroscopic light. The diamonds, because of their elemental makeup, would be easily distinguishable. They would show up in various bright shades of blue, green, yellow-orange, or icy white and could, therefore, easily be picked out.

  A scale model of the proposed installation was shown to the members of the Central Committee Secretariat, so that they understood how extensive a project this would be. Its structures would cover an area of nearly thirty acres.

  So everything would be under one roof, even whatever was needed for cutting and polishing the diamonds?

  No. There’d been no allowance for those finishing phases. Why shouldn’t the cutting and polishing be done someplace with a more compatible climate, in Kiev or Minsk or possibly even some place as far south as Tbilisi?

  Tbilisi? The Secretariat scoffed at the suggestion of mixing Georgians and diamonds, the Georgians with their well-founded reputation for, to put it tactfully, sleight of hand. The unanimous decision of the Secretariat was that the finishing of the diamonds should be done on the spot. The Siberian remoteness would in itself serve as a security measure. Employees would not be going in and out every day the way they did at other workplaces. Mind, at some regular factories in Moscow and Leningrad the pilfering rate ran as high as 10 percent. Such wrongdoing, though not sanctioned, was tolerated, since it increased the workers’ satisfaction with their jobs. However, to tempt them with diamonds would be a different matter altogether, actually unfair.

  Agreed.

  Approved.

  The installation at Aikhal got off the ground.

  Literally off the ground. The entire thing, except for the mine-shaft enclosure, had to be constructed on pilings that extended twelve feet above the surface. Enormous steel beams were sunk twenty feet deep into the permafrost and held in place by the almost instantaneous freezing of the slush that was filled in around them. More solid than concrete. The pilings were essential to keep human-generated heat from melting the ground and making the installation sink. It was not uncommon in northern Siberia to see wooden houses sunk down into the tundra to their windowsills.

  The enormous energy and millions of rubles the Soviets invested in the Aikhal installation were well spent. In 1971, its first year of operation, it came up with two million carats of diamonds, of which 37 percent were gem-quality stones. Soon thereafter, other installations similar to Aikhal were built in and around the Vilyui River Basin. However, Aikhal continued to be the richest deposit. By 1975 Aikhal was producing five million carats a year and showing no signs of depletion. Unlike most diamond-bearing pipes, those at Aikhal seemed to yield more as they were dug deeper.

  Typically, the Soviets kept their production figures secret. Why should they let anyone know they were stockpiling? In 1977, the United States Bureau of Mines estimated diamond production of the entire world at just under forty million carats, or almost nine tons. Only slightly more than 25 percent of this production was said to be of gem quality. Little did the bureau know. The Soviets could have tacked on another fifteen million carats. Three and a half tons. The Russians were up to their beards in diamonds.

  The old axiom that says timing can be everything was never more fitting.

  The period during which the Russians were enjoying such success with their Siberian mines coincided almost to the very year with the time when the System lost its control over its diamond holdings in Africa. By then, 1978, Rupert Churcher had been at the head of the System for six years. While coping with Africa he’d kept an eye on the Russians and was aware of the small amounts of high-quality diamond rough they were bringing to the market every once in a while. Churcher did not know for certain what quantity of such rough the Russians were capable of producing, but he put stock in the formidable figures that the System’s security people came up with through its informa
nts. At first the System had viewed the Russian diamonds as merely a potential threat, one that the System with its stranglehold on the marketing aspect of the trade could easily cope with. There had even been some talk early on about profiting from the situation by allowing the Russians to market some of its goods through the System. That met with graven resistance from the board of directors. The very idea! it had huffed.

  Then came the African problems and a change of heart.

  If the System was to survive, an affiliation between it and the Russians would have to be. Churcher, however, wasn’t about to expose his wounds and beg mercy. He tried some finagling.

  He promoted the rumor that an important diamond find had been made in northern Australia. It was reported to be a huge field that could be easily and quite inexpensively mined. What was more, the gem yield percentage was phenomenally high, higher than had ever been gotten out of South Africa or even out of Namibia.

  This blessed, bountiful Australian find was, of course, a feint. There was some truth to it. There were diamonds in northern Australia. The System had known that for ages. However, it had also known that the diamonds found there were mainly small and of inferior quality. What Churcher hoped was that all the to-do over the Australian find would flush the Russians, get them to come out and ask the System if it would be so kind as to help market their diamonds. The System would, with perfectly measured reluctance, condescend.