An incredible, almost fantastic story

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the mid-eighties, gold was found in completely remote places on the border of the Chinese Gobi with the Mongolian Altai. In a huge deposit, more than five hundred tons of metal.

The gold was not alluvial, which can be washed with trays and butars, but indigenous: dissolved in a giant granite massif protruding from the slope of the gently sloping South Altai ridge, like a boomerang of a god that cut into the ground and went deeper into the ground than the drilling rigs could reach. In each ton of this monolithic mass, ten grams of gold was smeared.

The geological party that found the deposit consisted of two kinds of people. Five leading geologists, who controlled the field geochemical laboratory and marked the grid of wells, came to Altai from the Soviet Union. The remaining ten had Mongolian citizenship, but they were not Mongols by blood, but were Kazakhs and their parents lived in the very west of the country, on the border with the USSR. The Mongol cattlemen did not like them, and once they almost killed one of the laboratory assistants, who was returning from Tseg in an UAZ. In fact, they would have killed if the party leader had not left to meet him and opened fire from "Stechkin", not wasting time on empty talk. Nine millimeter bullets have proven to be an excellent lifesaver.

The authorities of the aimag (administrative-territorial unit, region) built a small village of five houses, a laboratory and administrative building and several cabins on a rocky plateau next to a granite ridge. Geologists have equipped the premises with everything necessary for the exploration and analysis of ores. The leader of the party, having sworn to someone in something in Chita, received a satellite reception system at his disposal, which settled in a deaf box with a ball of a protective casing and made it possible to watch and listen to almost the whole world - if, of course, you know the coordinates of the corresponding satellites. The party drilled out, assessed and described the deposit.

In addition to gold, granite contained a mass of silver and copper, which tripled its value, and the surrounding rocks contained rich cassiterite and pyrite veins. The mountain was covered with numerous wells, and several tens of tons of core and surface samples accumulated in the field laboratory. After reading the preliminary report, written by the leader of the party on a typewriter for a carbon copy, it was quite possible to be damaged by the mind from the bright prospects.

It all took five years. Every year, the party leader with a deputy and boxes of papers and samples flew to Ulan Bator, the deputy and boxes remained there, and the leader and papers went to Moscow. Each time he returned from Moscow more and more gloomy. Finally, at the end of 1992, he arrived and ordered the work to be halted. Due to the liquidation of their own expedition. No one else in Moscow needed her. There was enough gold for those who ended up at the trough within Russia, and what is there - in the state gold and foreign exchange fund. The geologists packed up their belongings and thought about what to do with the village and equipment.

On the one hand, judging by the events seen on TV at home, this equipment, and the gold itself, could hardly be needed by anyone in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, to take an example from the best of newborn domestic businessmen and sell machines, a laboratory and a satellite system to the Chinese across the border, having given the Mongolian border guards drunk with Chinese vodka, the soul somehow did not turn. It would be too simple, and people who were looking for uranium, tungsten and gold in remote deserts avoided such simple solutions. The leader of the party came up with a plan. He ordered to put all the systems of the village on conservation.

Agreed with the somon (district) head on the creation of a local enterprise. Transferred to his balance all the property of the expedition and one set of documents for the field. He signed an order appointing the senior and most experienced Kazakh geologist as its director. And he ordered him to wait for the return of the leadership, keeping the confidant intact and strict secrecy. The field turned into a separate independent structure and it was managed by people who know how to obey orders and carry them out regardless of the circumstances.

The Russians left, and the Kazakhs remained to live at the foot of the golden ridge. Since the expedition stopped paying them a salary, they began to make a living by repairing equipment and made peace with the Mongols, who did not understand a damn thing about engines. Then the four youngest Kazakhs went home to Altai and returned with their wives and children.

The received order forbade the use of the property of the village, so they lived in yurts. There was not enough technical work for everyone, so the younger ones began to breed sheep bought from the Mongols and finally ceased to differ from the local population. Apparently, their little company was the only geological exploration enterprise in the world, equipped with equipment, highly qualified personnel - and mainly engaged in harvesting sheep skins and repairing trucks, and every day they patrolled the territory of the field, from the central site of the village to the last well.

Kenzhegazi, a senior geologist who became a director, was very afraid that something would happen to the village - it would burn out from a lightning strike, for example - and the materials of the reports would perish. He was not afraid of the equipment - they brought it in once, and they brought it in again - but he was responsible for the information worth billions of dollars, written on vulnerable paper. If it were possible, he would have carved the text of reports and maps on the granite body of the layer itself, but, firstly, he did not have such an opportunity, and, secondly, this would not solve the problem of secrecy. Therefore, he drew up a second set of maps of the territory and carefully mapped all the changes to it - from the blown borehole pole to the new channel of the stream passing between the projections of the ore bodies.

I went to the aimag center, sold a gold nugget found in a quartz core at a cheap price to a Chinese reseller, and instead of a used jeep bought a monstrously expensive copier and a Chinese gasoline generator. I brought all this home, put it in a yurt, copied documents for three months, typed the inventory and eventually received a duplicate set of materials. He put the thick folders in a drawer and hid them securely. It was sheer idiocy, but he felt calmer this way.

Kenzhegazi had no idea that the Russian party leader and his deputy were accidentally killed in Novosibirsk by local bandits, with whom they quarreled in a restaurant, walking about returning to their homeland. The containers with exploration reports and rock samples stood for three years at the dead end of the Chita railway, until they were emptied to transport some things.

Documents marked "SS" went to the dump, and on top of them were covered with pieces of granite stuffed with gold. No one else possessed complete information about the deposit, and the scattered one still had to be found by institutes, systematized, and in Russia in 1995 no one was going to do this.

Then the ninja came. They moved along the cassiterite veins, knocking out the richest places with hammers and taking what they collected in two old trucks to the Chinese. Tin was mentioned in the reports and Kenzhegazi considered the rich tin ores to be promising for development from the territory of Russia. From his point of view, the veins were the same property of the enterprise as the kung with the antenna, the box with the copies of the reports and the diesel generator. In addition, he disliked the Chinese for personal reasons, and the ninja worked closely with them. The Kazakhs met the ninja in the steppe, laid their faces in the dust and explained that they could not go further. Because further on, tin will become very expensive. Unacceptably expensive.

The ninja are gone. And they returned a week later. With guns. And there were almost two dozen of them. Kenzhegazi, spitting out his front teeth, agreed that tin is still not very expensive. Then he stole a UAZ and went to the border guards. It was not far away, he returned much faster and also not alone. One ninja was shot, the rest stood in a deep, cramped hole for two days. Then the militiamen took them away and promised to shoot them for espionage in the border zone. The ninja gave all the money they earned from the Chinese, one of the trucks, left and never came back. Kenzhegazi cheaply inserted new teeth in the regional center and terrified the herders with a polished stainless grin.

In the summer of 1999, a search expedition of a large exploration company came to the somon. The company had already licensed nearly ten percent of the country's territory for exploration and was considering what else could be reserved. Kenzhegazi thought deeply. Unlike ninjas, Canadians could not be put in dust or put in a hole. Firstly, because they would have been immediately released from the pit and Kenzhegazi had been put in their place. And secondly, because Kenzhegazi respected professionals doing the same thing as he did. However, the deposit had to be preserved.

So far, the Canadians have been digging on the far eastern border of the somon, but sooner or later geochemical analyzes and satellite images will lead them to a granite massif. And when they see the village, the geological trenches and the borehole network, it will be impossible to drive them away. The area will be licensed in Ulaanbaatar for detailed exploration, equipment will be brought in, security will be installed, and when the Russians sort out their political turmoil and return, they will have a huge mill waiting for them, grinding granite into gold, silver and copper for export to Canada. And only he will be to blame for this.

Kenzhegazi recalled a twenty-year-old winter internship on the Taimyr Peninsula, imagined what it would be like to mine tungsten in a fifty-degree frost - without waiting for dawn at a breakneck speed he rushed to the regional center, in the morning he came to the administration library and began to methodically take notes on collections of documents.

Canadians have studied the imagery really well. Within a week, their packed Land Rovers were trudging west along the bumpy road. During the day they covered fifty kilometers, overloaded cars could not go faster over such terrain. About sixty kilometers remained to the ridge, when an unexpected obstacle was discovered on the way. The whole steppe, from edge to edge, was filled with a continuous mass of sheep. The herd slowly moved east, towards the cars. The driver of the front Land Rover beeped, then stopped letting go of the horn altogether, but the phlegmatic animals were not afraid of the subtle nasal signal. The column got stuck in the herd, like in a swamp.

The end and the edge of this stream could not be seen, the sheep barely wandered, sometimes lowering their heads and plucking out dusty grass bushes. The Canadian spoke about the local animal husbandry and turned off the engine. Five hours later, when the geologists were tired of swearing and fell into a gloomy daze, from somewhere over the horizon, through the sheep battle formations, four horsemen came to them. One of the visitors explained to a translator-student accompanying the geologists that the Canadians had chosen the wrong route and ended up in the middle of the collection point of local livestock breeders. When asked how much longer these damn animals could gather, there was a clear, as of the day answer: the dick knows him, until a tenth of it came up.

Unfamiliar with the practice of raising sheep, Canadians imagined a flock ten times as large and were completely discouraged. The visitor advised us to turn the cars around and try our luck in a month. Then he made a fire and fed the geologists with an amazing shurpa with wild onions.

In the morning, the victims of animal husbandry deployed their jeeps and drove off to finish geochemistry at the same place. For some reason, the herd did not bother them at all. When the cars disappeared over the horizon, the first livestock breeder who met them thanked the other three, they went to feed the animals starving during the "siege" on their former pastures, and he himself with his small flock moved towards the village.

A month later, the Canadians returned. They did not meet any sheep on the way, but a dozen kilometers from the low mountains the column was blocked by a dusty rattling UAZ. A large man with a rifle on his shoulder climbed out of the UAZ and, clanging his steel teeth, in poor English, asked what they had forgotten in such an inhospitable place. I studied the presented documents and advised me to fail the further, the better. Because the license for geological exploration in this area belongs to a completely different company and the Canadians have already entered its territory for five kilometers. Then the "owner of the steppe" showed a copy of the license issued three days ago with exclusive rights. He listened to sour congratulations, adjusted his rifle and asked if he should call the police in order to comply with the rule of law and if all the guests are in order with the steering mechanisms in the cars.

Kenzhegazi was saved by wild Mongolian legislation and the complete confusion that reigned in the Bureau of Natural Resources. Arriving in Ulan Bator and getting into the BDP, he immediately discovered two pleasant surprises: firstly, no one there remembered or knew him, for ten years not a trace remained of the old cadres of the Ministry of Mining, and the new democratically minded administrators in the bowels of the earth knew less than pigs in costume jewelry. And secondly, the law on minerals, adopted three years ago and passed by in a desert exile, allowed him to license anything and anywhere very quickly and for mere pennies, without bothering himself with proof of reserves or any formalities whatsoever.

Ulaanbaatar was built up with neat red-brick cottages, brand new jeeps were rolling everywhere and the air smelled of easy money. In this invigorating atmosphere, Kenzhegazi issued an impressive allotment of territory for undivided use for his small company, just in case it included promising, from his master's point of view, areas on the flanks of the main field. Not a single living soul in the BPR even thought to ask why the gloomy peasant, who looked like a criminal, needed a piece of rocky Altai hills and what he intends to do there, and if it did, the officials were afraid to ask a person with such a stainless smile. They just took it on their paws for the urgency of registration.

The attack of world capitalism was repelled practically without loss, and as before, no one knew anything about gold. Kenzhegazi returned to the field, drove the Canadians out of there and thought hard.

What he saw in the capital led to gloomy thoughts. The Kazakh, in spite of Mongolian citizenship, always considered himself more of a citizen of the USSR, he considered Mongolia itself the sixteenth republic, and the invasion of the country by Western mining companies looked to him no less terrible and inconceivable than the entry into the Kharkov region of the NATO tank army. Judging by the map he saw in the BPR, the entire central part of Mongolia had already fallen to the onslaught of international corporations, the production enclaves of Darkhan, Erdenet and Choibalsan and even the largest one hundred-ton deposit of indigenous gold Boroo, in his memory inscribed in the production plan, stuck out as small islands in the sea of western licenses. "Glavvostokzolota", was now being developed by some Australian sharaga.

Moreover, something completely unimaginable happened: the top secret strategic uranium tar in the sands of the southeastern Gobi was not searched for by Atomredmet's search groups, but by Canadians and the same Australians with the International Uranium logos on their jackets. In addition to the misfortunes, from nature and society, apparently, not only his little expedition with his precious mountain disappeared, but even the almighty Mingeo of the USSR itself. All this indicated one thing: the USSR in general and Russia in particular left all positions in Central Asia and it is not clear when they will be returned back.

How the order should be carried out in such strange circumstances, Kenzhegazi found it difficult to say, but it was quite clear to him that this adventure could not continue for a long time now. It was unrealistic to stop the expansion of huge corporations with the help of his ten Kazakhs. Sooner or later, someone will inquire about the composition and amount of ore in his area, in extreme cases, he will determine the presence of a large deposit from a satellite, and then the fate of his expedition and the deposit will be decided quickly and radically. The license will be taken away in any legal or illegal way, they will all be kicked in the ass and the fact that now there is no one to use the riches of the golden mountain, Kenzhegazi did not console at all. Because now there is no one, but another ten years will pass and the Russians will return. They always come back. In any case, while it was necessary, if not to stop, then if possible to slow down the advance of the Western expeditions into the depths of the somon, as well as, if possible, to find the successors of Mingeo and finally transfer one and a half thousand tons of gold equivalent to the legal owners.

In subsequent years, he became very interested in political activities. Rushing through the camps of shepherds with an "educational program", the geologist was talking in full swing about the horrors of "imperialist mining" - about clouds of poisonous dust covering herds, about rivers flowing with acid, about wells, the water from which dissolves the intestines, about ravines spreading from open pits - and had great success with these sermons of the bucolic way of life. Demonstrations of Mongol cattle breeders proved to be a very effective means in the fight against "imperialist colonialists", herds of sheep, according to a once tested scenario, blocked any attempts by Canadians and Australians to conduct geological exploration within a radius of the next hundred kilometers.

An employee of the PR department of Asia Gold, who had come to strengthen relations with the public, was dragged out of the car right on the square in front of the administration building and almost strangled with a lasso. The police took him away from the "environmental party activists" at the last moment, the activists spent a month under lock and key, but the Australian lost all desire to improve relations with the local population once and for all.

The Russians returned earlier than Kenzhegazi had expected. Four years later, a call rang in the office, and his assistant answered the phone. The caller spoke a language that the Kazakh had not heard for over ten years. A man called from Moscow, asked to put him in touch with the director of the field, and could not understand why his interlocutor's voice broke.

Kenzhegazi was at a rally in the regional center. Having learned that his twelve-year odyssey had come to an end, he stopped short in the middle of a fiery speech in mid-sentence, sat in a UAZ and left for the steppe for half a day. Then I came back and reread my copy of the old report for the rest of the day. He wanted to meet Russians in good shape and not get confused in numbers when talking.

How was he found? By pure chance. A large Russian corporation has acquired the Siberian Branch Geological Institute. During the inventory of documents, an elderly expert Mingeo came across a report on the analysis of pieces of granite with an abnormally high content of literally "all the best", with the exception of platinum. Neither the organization that ordered the analysis, nor the people who worked with it, were no longer within reach, or even alive, but the deputy director of the institute said that his predecessor had mentioned some incredible gold mine discovered just before the collapse of the country in a hard-to-reach region of Mongolia and that this granite is from there.

Another year passed in search of scattered materials preserved in other sources and living eyewitnesses from the Chita and Irkutsk expeditions, who remembered the equipment of parties to Mongolia. Information about the areas of activity of these parties was obtained from the archives of the SVR, in which old KGB reports on the search for strategically important minerals settled. Finally, it took a certain amount of time to compare the violent activity of the Green Party, which had come from nowhere in the wilderness, with the area of the probable work of Soviet geologists and to correlate the personality of the leadership of the newly-minted party with the names that remained on the forms of old Irkutsk applications for sample research.

Most of all the specialists who came from Russia were shocked by two things. Oil-fired, shiny diesels under storage - in a country where any orphaned unit is dismantled for parts in a day. And the sampling procedure - when the smoky and blackened shepherds who jumped off the horses, without a single unnecessary movement, coped with the pneumatic drill, neatly put the core in bags and filled out the accompanying documents. Because it is, as in the well-known anecdote, "there were, stsuko, very good geologists."