The Abrupt Physics of Dying Read online

  He stared out at the darkening city. ‘My contact in the environment ministry is a good man. He’s corrupt, he’s venal, but underneath I know he cares. With the regulators involved, Petro-Tex will at least be forced to acknowledge the issue, and Al Shams will know that I’m trying. It might make the difference for Abdulkader.’

  Rania bit her lip, said nothing.

  ‘Someone’s got to do something, Rania.’

  She was quiet a long while, sat twirling a cord of her hair between slender fingers. ‘What proof do you have?’

  ‘Right now, not much. A few samples, nothing definitive.’

  ‘You know what will happen if Petro-Tex finds out you’re trying to implicate them, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll never work in the oil industry again.’

  ‘Or worse.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of the bullshit, Rania.’

  ‘You could quit. Leave Yemen.’

  ‘I could. They’d just get some other bastard to take my place. Nothing would change.’

  ‘No shortage of bastards, then.’

  ‘Definitely not.’ Clay looked into her eyes, reached for her hands, took them in his. ‘Look, Rania, I’m not going to walk away from Abulkader. I have to find out what’s going on. The best chance I have is from inside Petro-Tex. I need your help.’

  She looked away, across the rooftops.

  ‘There’s a story here, Rania. A good one.’

  ‘Without proof, there is nothing.’

  ‘What about the massacre? The photos?’

  ‘Ten locals killed in a gun battle in Yemen is hardly news, Clay. You know that. Besides, how does it tie in with the sickness? Publishing those photos alone will just add weight to the government’s stance, that it was Al Shams’ doing. That is not going to change anything, assuming of course that he was not behind it.’

  The food came: unleavened bread, baba ganoush, olives, grilled chicken. They ate in silence. The waiter returned and cleared the plates, then brought tea.

  After a while, Clay said: ‘I’m going to tell you something.’

  She smiled. ‘I have all night.’

  ‘You asked me about the war.’

  She reached for his hand, sat watching him, waiting.

  ‘I …’ He stopped. He felt light-headed. He started to speak. It sounded like someone else, the voice somehow rough, unfamiliar, a recording of him. ‘My valk – platoon – had just choppered into a chana north of the border. There was contact off at the far end of the clearing, AKs, RPGs. Two men were hit before SWAPO withdrew. My squad was sent in pursuit. We came to a clearing. There was movement in the far trees, someone running. We opened up, all of us blazing away. When we got to the other side we found a small boy, a civilian, lying in the low grass.’ He choked on the words. ‘Shot through the stomach. Alive. Still breathing.’

  Rania gazed into his eyes. He looked away.

  ‘The old guys said he was as good as dead, that we should leave him. SWAPO was still out there. I could hear the Puma coming in for the casevac, low over the trees. Someone called in contact on the radio. We heard AKs opening up. The old okes were saying we should move. The kid was lying there, conscious, muttering in Portuguese. I told Eben to take the squad forward.’

  ‘Eben?’ she said.

  ‘Lance Corporal Eben Barstow, 1st Parachute Battalion. My friend.’ Now a permanent resident of the Rosedale Long-term Care Clinic in Johannesburg. Clay took a shallow breath. ‘I picked the kid up, ran him back to the chana. I got there just as the chopper was getting ready to leave. They had already loaded our wounded. We were taking fire. I put the kid on the deck. The crew looked at me as if I was crazy.’ He tracked back across the years, looked into her eyes. ‘The medic felt for a pulse, looked up at me. All he did was shake his head. I lifted the kid from the deck just as the Puma took off, stood there in the rotor wash, him in my arms. I laid him at the edge of the chana under a tree. He looked like a ghost lying there in the grass, covered in dust.’

  She was looking at him intently now. He could see her recording, analysing.

  He looked down at the floor, decided to continue. ‘That night, they told us over the battalion net that the space shuttle had just gone up. I looked for it in the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely.’ He felt the back of his throat tighten into something vile and tumescent. He tried to push it back down from where it had come. And then he said: ‘I so much wanted that little boy to live, Rania. But he didn’t. He just stopped breathing and that was it.’ He had never told that story to anyone.

  She squeezed his hand. ‘Why did you go?’

  He looked into her eyes, searching. Her pupils were dilated, eclipsed planets spinning in coronae of gold. Just looking made him unsteady.

  ‘I was eighteen, Rania.’ He looked away. How could he tell her what no one understood, what no one wanted to know. That he had wanted to fight. That he couldn’t wait to go, test himself, face death and dispense it. And since then, God help him, nothing had even come close, whatever the strength, whatever the dosage or frequency. Not sex, not drugs, not science or determinism, certainly not booze, nothing. It hadn’t been for lack of trying.

  ‘Some things are worth fighting for,’ she whispered.

  ‘Not that, it turned out.’

  ‘You were young.’

  ‘There will be a yawm’idin for us all,’ he said.

  ‘A day of reckoning.’

  ‘He who is hard in wrong will turn away, he will be put to the fire, neither dying in it nor living, with us will be their accounting.’

  ‘The Koran,’ she said. ‘You have been studying.’

  ‘Abdulkader is trying to convert me.’ He looked down at his hands and back up at her face. The terrace was dark now, the ancient city awakening to night. Lights flickered through the trees, the smells of wood smoke and spices drifted up from the garden. ‘I’m going to find out what is hurting those people, Rania, and I’m going to prove it. And I’m going to get Abdulkader out of there. Petro-Tex can go screw themselves.’

  She reached out and touched his hand.

  ‘But I don’t have long, and my contact with Al Shams is dead. Getting the truth about Al Urush into the papers is the quickest, surest way to tell Al Shams what he wants to know and save Abdulkader.’

  ‘Get the proof, and I will write the story.’

  He leaned close. He could feel her breath on his neck. She smelt of jasmine and honey, sweet black tea. He slid his arm around her waist and drew her to him. She didn’t resist, looked up at him and closed her eyes. He kissed her. She responded, her mouth opening, warm, her tongue sweet. They kissed for a long time and she moved closer, running her hands through his Velcro-short hair. When he touched her leg just above the knee he found that the hem of her robe had been hiked up. She let out a sigh and pushed her mouth hard into his. He knew he should stop, that it was too soon. But her gravity was strong. He ran his hand up the silky distance of her thigh. She moaned and parted her legs. Under the robe she was naked. When he touched her she gasped and writhed against his hand. She was as slick as a tidal flat in a flood tide. Her chemicals were everywhere, deep in his throat, his nostrils, his head. He was lost.

  ‘Come with me,’ she whispered.

  Part II

  First Kill

  26th April 1994: Lat 15° 21’ N; Long 44° 12’ E., Sana’a, Yemen

  He left her standing outside the hotel entrance under a grey dawn sky. She had said nothing, avoided his kiss, and now he watched her in the rear-view mirror as she stood with her arms crossed over her chest. He slowed as he reached the end of the gravel drive, stuck his arm out of the window, waved, watched in the mirror for some response, but she stood unmoving, shrouded. Clay guided Abdulkader’s Land Cruiser through the open gate and onto the road and began the long drive back to Aden.

  Twenty-six hours later he walked along the washed-down early-morning street toward the row of crumbling Communist-era government buildings that loomed over the port. Gulls twisted and
cried overhead. A thin sea haze hung like a greying negligee around the point and barb of the Crater, the extinct volcano that guards Aden’s fishhook harbour from the Indian Ocean.

  Three copies of the environmental and social impact report for the Petro-Tex CPF expansion – approved and signed by Karila and Parnell earlier that morning – lay heavy in his bag. With little new data other than the recent community consultations, he had relied heavily on the phase-one facility construction report completed three years earlier. He shifted the strap to the other shoulder to better conceal the obvious bulk of the envelope in his breast pocket, climbed the front steps of the Ministry building, ran up the three flights of stairs to the Environment Directorate, and followed the dusty tile corridor to Ali Al Jabr’s office, thoughts of Rania haunting him still, Abdulkader’s ring a dead weight on his finger.

  ‘Doctor, welcome.’ Ali grinned with broken yellow teeth and clapped for tea. Since their first meeting almost a year and a half ago, Ali had insisted on the honorific, despite Clay’s protestations that, in fact, he did not have a PhD, only a Master’s degree – and more importantly they were friends, and so Ali should use his given name, just Clay, no more. But Ali would just wave his hand in the general direction of his colleagues and say: ‘They must respect.’

  ‘Sit, please, Doctor. It has been some time, yes?’

  He agreed it had. The customary pleasantries were exchanged, the same jokes.

  ‘Still no Mrs Doctor, yet?’ Ali laughed.

  ‘Still no.’

  ‘I have three wives. All very good, very obedient. I find you Yemeni woman, yes?’

  ‘I’ll let you know, Ali.’

  ‘You need sons.’

  Sons. A picture flashed in the space between them and was gone. Clay swallowed, pulled the reports from his bag and pushed them across the desk without replying.

  Ali eyed the bulge in his jacket. ‘You need approval fast, yes? Like before?’

  ‘Like before.’

  Ali riffled through a report and put it back on the desk. ‘Like before,’ he said. ‘Mafi mushkilla. No problem.’

  ‘Yes, there is a problem.’

  Ali looked up, surprised.

  ‘There is something I need you to do for me, Ali.’

  The Arab looked up at him, straight-faced for a moment, and then broke into another filed-tooth smile. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘No problem, my friend. I understand. You need it fast. Approval next week, yes?’

  ‘No, Ali. I mean there is a problem at one of the villages. I am not sure what is causing it. I want you to help me look into it.’

  Ali picked up the report again and leafed through the pages. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Good. No problem. No problem.’

  Clay leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the desk. ‘Ali, listen to me. I am telling you that this time, there is a problem. Tammam?’

  Ali closed the report and replaced it on the desk. His expression was neutral. ‘We go shooting now, yes? We celebrate more business together.’

  Two hours later they arrived at Ali’s farm, set around a broad steep wadi a hundred kilometres north of Aden. Clay stood with Ali in the fine hard-packed mud of the bankside. Behind them, rows of date palms trembled in the breeze. Ali tossed three empty Lucky Strike packets to his son and waved him off across the wadi. They watched the boy skip out over the smooth white cobbles towards the far bank.

  Ali’s son set the packets upright line abreast on a square-cut boulder and ran back to the near bank to stand beside his father. The eleven-year-old pulled the AK47 from his back, unfolded the stock and locked it in place. Fully deployed, the weapon was almost as long as he was tall. The boy pulled back the firing mechanism and levelled the rifle. At 150 metres the packets were no more than white specks.

  ‘My son will shoot first,’ said Ali.

  The crack of a single shot echoed down the wadi. One of the packets leapt into the air and spun back across the stones. Ali laughed, clapped his son on the back and said something to him in Arabic that Clay couldn’t catch. The boy folded the stock, shouldered his weapon, and sprinted across the sun-bleached wadi bed. A few moments later he returned and handed his father the cigarette pack. There was a perfect 7.62 millimetre hole drilled dead centre through the red of the Lucky Strike bullseye. He handed the pack to Clay.

  ‘Mumtaz,’ said Clay. Excellent.

  The boy smiled.

  ‘This is why no one has ever conquered Yemen,’ Ali said.

  Clay reached into his breast pocket and withdrew the envelope. Ali grinned.

  ‘Look Ali, I was serious back at the office. I want to look into this issue in Al Urush. People are getting sick. It might be connected to the Petro-Tex processing facility. I have three water samples at the lab now that should be ready tomorrow morning. But I’ll need more. Help me. I can get equipment, collect the samples, but I need you to look at the results, make a judgement. We need to move fast.’

  Ali took the envelope, opened it up and eyed the thick stack of American fifty-dollar bills, very nearly the last of Clay’s cash.

  ‘The same amount as before, Ali,’ Clay said. ‘As we agreed.’

  Ali looked up. ‘This is not usual,’ he said. ‘The companies investigate. We approve.’

  ‘There’s more if you help me.’

  The Arab looked at him for a moment, as if considering this.

  ‘Read the report, Ali. It’s all in there.’

  Ali thrust the envelope into his pocket and unshouldered his own rifle. His son was by his side. He peered along the length of the barrel and handed Clay the rifle. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

  Clay flicked off the safety, checked the magazine, chambered a round, raised the weapon and pushed the wooden stock back into the muscle of his right shoulder. He took a deep breath and aimed down the sight, exhaled. He breathed in again, and then out slowly, started to squeeze the trigger gently at the bottom of the exhalation.

  And how easy it had become, back then, how without qualm or conscience. In the lawless asylum of war, civilising conventions stripped away, killing was good. He could still feel his platoon commander’s hand on his shoulder after his first kill, a SWAPO terr who had broken cover about a hundred metres ahead of the patrol, turned and ran. Clay had been on point, seen him first. It was still so clear, after all this time. The way the early morning sun slanted long through the trees, the way the leaves danced in the breeze, haloed with gold, the long, dry grass bladed and dewed, the air sweet and prism clean. He’d knelt, steadied his R4, sighted, breathed, taken his time. The round passed through the man’s neck at the base of his skull. He’d fallen face first, the bullet’s momentum throwing him forward like a rag doll. There was a puff of dust as he hit the ground, Clay remembered, and then shouting along the line as Crowbar strode up and stood beside Clay, looking down with that big farmer’s grin on his face. Fokken, excellent, Straker. Excellent, his platoon commander had said.

  Clay’s chest tightened. He gasped for air. The target blurred and dissolved away. He lowered the weapon, dropped to one knee, jammed the butt of the AK into the hardened mud to steady himself, willing himself to breathe. Slowly, it passed. He looked up.

  ‘Tammam, Doctor?’ said Ali, looking down at him with an expression of concern. OK?

  Clay took a long breath, stood, brushed the sand from the stock, raised the weapon, sighted and squeezed the trigger. A puff of dust rose a metre above and to the left of the target. He adjusted his stance, compensated for the Kalashnikov’s kick, and fired again. This time the bullet struck inches to left of the package, sending chips of stone whirring through the air.

  Clay lowered the AK’s barrel, stock still lodged in his shoulder, and glanced over at Ali and his son. ‘Tammam,’ he said. OK. ‘But the people of Al Urush are not. They need your help. What’s happening out there, it’s conquest too, Ali.’

  Clay raised the AK, sighted, and fired. The cigarette package spun away.

  ‘Good aim,’ said Ali.

  Clay lowered the weapon, han
ded it back to Ali. ‘So, you’ll help?’

  ‘Inshallah, you will have your approvals, Doctor,’ said Ali. ‘More, I cannot do.’

  Bang, You’re Dead

  Later that afternoon, Clay hurried down the hall towards Karila’s office, half-expecting the Finn to call him in, stab at the back pages of the report with a nicotine-stained finger, demand to know what the hell he had signed just that morning – what had now gone to the authorities. Clay had seen no sign of Zdravko since returning to Aden. His Land Rover wasn’t in the office parking area.

  Through the open door Clay could see Karila and Parnell sitting at the meeting table with two other men he didn’t recognise. They were smiling, laughing. Parnell clapped one of the men on the back and shook his hand. They paid no attention as Clay passed on his way to the accounting department at the end of the corridor.

  A dark-skinned Arab in a white shirt and tie looked up as Clay entered. He was seated behind a small desk in one corner of the room, surrounded by filing cabinets. He looked young, desk soft. There were dark circles under his eyes. Clay smiled at him, but he quickly went back to his ledger. Dunkley, the operation’s chief accountant, sat behind a huge desk planted in the middle of the room. He let a pair of smudged spectacles fall onto its tether around his neck and looked up at Clay from across a cordillera of paperwork, stacks of hinged computer printouts, mountains of invoices. ‘Heard the news, Straker?’

  Clay shrugged no.

  ‘The well test results for Kamar-4 have just come through. Forty metres of pay, reserves in the millions of barrels, the engineers figure.’

  ‘I guess you get to keep your job, then.’

  The accountant frowned. ‘What do you want, Straker?’

  ‘Karila said you’d have a cheque for me.’ If he had any hope of finding out what was going on at Al Urush, he needed money to pay for samples, lab work, equipment, and he needed it fast. He’d already burned four days since Al Shams’ ultimatum, with little to show for it. Even if he paid for rush analysis at twice the normal price, the lab would still need at least a day to complete the work.