Odin now pointed to the red-bearded man she hadn’t seen on the plane. “And this is Tin Man. Human intel.”
Odin turned to McKinney. “We’ll hook up Stateside with the last two team members, Troll and Smokey. They handle signals and human intel.” He grabbed the television remote and killed the TV. “All right, listen up. I want you all ready to ship out the moment the tail numbers on the C-37 have been repainted.” He looked at his watch. “Make good use of the time en route to examine every bit of intel we got from last night’s operation. I want detailed reports and recommendations when I get back.”
McKinney glanced at the others, then at Odin. “You’re not heading back to the U.S.?”
Odin shook his head. “Hoov and I will catch up with you all later. There’s somewhere I need to go first.”
CHAPTER 11
Eye in the Sky
Kinshasa and Brazzaville were the quintessential Third World cities of the twenty-first century. Large—with a combined population around thirteen million—and growing rapidly, they teemed with young men and guns. As the capitals of neighboring nations, they occupied opposite banks of the Congo River but nonetheless formed a single metropolitan area. They were essentially Africa’s liver—circulating the population of the riverine interior through a pitiless Darwinian filter.
Without an urban plan sprawling shantytowns accreted around the colonial and corporate buildings in the heart of downtown. These shantytowns were some of the most crime-ridden and dangerous places in all of Africa.
The common refrain from the West was that only economic development and modernization could address such problems, but Odin knew that the modern world itself was what made this region of Africa so violent. That was because the Democratic Republic of the Congo contained nearly eighty percent of the world’s supply of coltan—the mineral of the information age. Coltan was the industrial name for columbite–tantalite, a dull black metallic mineral from which the elements niobium and tantalum were extracted. The tantalum from coltan was used to manufacture electronic capacitors, which were needed to make cell phones, DVD players, video game systems, and computers. And at one hundred U.S. dollars per pound on the street, coltan had financed a civil war that since 1998 had killed an estimated five and a half million people. These were World War II–level casualties.
But the information age was selective about its information, and the same industrial world that fueled the conflict barely registered this war’s existence. The U.S. and British only grew interested when the Congolese government attempted to nationalize the coltan mines—at which point the war became an intolerable human crisis. It now simmered in dozens of local embers, ready to flare up the moment the opportunity arose. Alternately stoking and dousing those embers was what would keep local governments disorganized and the cheap coltan flowing.
There were Westerners who looked with concern at the suffering of burgeoning Third World populations, but Odin knew that Mother Nature wasn’t the nurturing type. In fact, she might view the stable populations of the West as a failure—a rebellion against primordial order. Nature wanted only one thing: for creatures to produce viable offspring. After that, you were genetically dead. Nature had no more use for you. Your extended lifespan, your biography, your Hummel figurine collection, were all just taking up space. By some cosmic joke, nearly the entire scope of human experience was at odds with the biological world.
So by Nature’s measure both Kinshasa and Brazzaville were a resounding success. Happiness and contentment weren’t in great supply, but there were lots of young people, eager to lay the groundwork for another generation. The rage here was of a type Odin had seen in all the shantytowns and slums of the world: Young men without prospects were not happy about their situation. In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat—and some smartass had sold them guns.
This was the root of most conflict in the world—people asserting their will to survive, to flourish, and to procreate. Evil had nothing to do with it. And although he’d worked these hidden conflicts for years, Odin knew that most fighting was just a symptom of another problem: too many people competing for limited resources. And yet fighting wouldn’t resolve this either. Rwanda, for example, was still the most densely populated country in sub-Saharan Africa even after the genocide. No, the best way he knew of to defuse these conflicts was to provide opportunities and education to women. Independence. Once that took, population growth would ebb, and actual plans could be made for the future.