Glass House by Patrick Reinken

that anything of possible value was gone – any
removable metal or glass, rubber or plastic, furniture or papers.
All of it was taken away, bit by bit. Only the buildings themselves
were left behind.
    When the potential buyer made an option
offer for Laurentian, the option allowed for exploration with a
purchase right to follow, but that right really only specified the
land and minerals. Everything else that was meaningful or valuable
was already gone.
    The option holders didn’t care, though, and
they didn’t waste any time.
    New analyses and approaches to pipe location
and confirmation were put to full use. Geologists, gemologists, and
diggers were brought in, and the collective mass of them combed
over the grounds, every inch of them. From fence to fence, near the
original mine sites or away from them, they measured and mapped,
and they drilled cores and plucked samples of soil every few feet.
They sent them to labs to be pulled apart in every sensible
manner.
    The crew at work at Laurentian wasn’t
looking directly for diamonds when they did that. They were looking
for other minerals.
    In Botswana, east and north of Laurentian,
the experiences of new technology diamond mining had confirmed
remarkably valuable theories of kimberlite pipe geology. Ants
building their hills had brought subsurface soils up from under the
Kalahari Desert there. They’d carried the sands and other materials
to the surface and deposited them at the ready for anyone who
wanted to know what might lay under the ground. And when those
people looked, what they found were green minerals called
diopsides. More important, they picked out garnets that were marked
by high-chrome and low-calcium content. Purple G10s or other
pyropes.
    Those stones were diamond tracers.
Historically found near diamond lodes, the diopsides and garnets
were markers for kimberlite pipes that held diamonds themselves.
The ants in Botswana, through nothing more than the exercise of
their own nature, had led geologists to one of the largest diamond
deposits in the world.
    The lead representative in the move to buy
Laurentian, Dennis Sullivan, read every mineral report produced in
his new studies until he came across the one he needed to see. It
was from a corner of the grounds, and the rate of garnet findings
was unusually high.
    Sullivan ordered the crew to concentrate on
that area, and the borings and samplings they pulled out over the
next twenty-four hours diagrammed a huge pipe head, almost 250
acres in size. A clamp-down was put in place.
    Sullivan exercised the purchase option in
the Laurentian contract that day. A third perimeter fence started
up. Inside the original fence and the one put in place by the South
Africans, this latest addition marked a clear delineation around
the pipe that would form the future of the company.
    A security force was in place even before
the fence was completed. It was the first step in a particular
course for the Laurentian partners and the mining company they were
creating. From that day forward, Laurentian security forces were at
the front of everything the company did.
    They protected the pipe at first, then the
massive mine and the facilities that followed. The coastal shore
was patrolled. A security cordon was established just outside the
fences, and Laurentian forces accompanied every shipment the new
mine made, first by ground and later by air.
    Security watched the miners and surveilled
their families. The dormitories were studied around the clock, and
the nearby shanty town became known for the way news always managed
to reach mining administration even before the people affected had
heard it.
    In many ways, Sullivan and the other buyers
didn’t have a clue what they’d helped create. Their loss of control
over Laurentian was still a year or so away, and they had plenty to
occupy them in the meantime.
    The pipe at Laurentian was a rich one, with
a varied content that ultimately was found to extend from white
diamonds to