The Abrupt Physics of Dying Read online

  The old man barked out a command. The kid blinked, stood unmoving, seemed not to understand. The old man shouted again, louder this time, and turned to his understudy. The kid lowered his weapon, stood staring at the old man, a look of confusion spreading over his face.

  Clay coiled his muscles tight. This was the opportunity. ‘He can’t get us both,’ Clay whispered. ‘As soon as I move, go.’ He judged the distance, readied himself. The old guy was a second and a half away, maybe less, the kid just beyond him, close. Clay burst forward, a sprinter from the blocks.

  But Abdulkader was already moving, cutting obliquely to position himself between Clay and the old man. He stopped and turned, faced Clay, opened his arms wide as if to catch him.

  Clay pulled up, stood staring at his friend. ‘Get out of the way,’ he said.

  Abdulkader did not move. ‘Do not fight them.’

  Clay glared. ‘I know what you’re trying to do. Don’t.’ Clay moved right, then left, but Abdulkader followed, keeping himself between Clay and the gunmen.

  ‘There is no need, Mister Clay.’

  ‘Yallah,’ the old tribesman shouted, jerking his AK in the direction of the crevasse.

  The kid started to move, backing away, weapon raised. His sandalled feet shuffled through the dust. He reached the canyon wall, pushed his back against the wall of rock, and stood there looking back at Clay and Abdulkader, that same perplexed look on his face. The old tribesman shouted at him again. He peered into the crevasse for a long moment, looked back at his kinsman, and disappeared into the wall of rock.

  ‘Now’s the time, Abdulkader,’ said Clay, grabbing his friend by the arm. ‘He’s alone.’

  Abdulkader gripped Clay’s forearms, holding him fast. His eyes were wide, sky clear, insistent. ‘Please, Mister Clay. You must trust Allah.’

  Clay looked down, back up at his friend. ‘Only about two people in this world I trust, Abdulkader. Allah isn’t one of them.’

  Abdulkader frowned.

  ‘Ah’ituts beyah’lahu,’ shouted the old tribesman, now distinctly agitated. He had moved back, put more distance between them, and now stood poised with AK on hip, motioning towards the crevasse.

  ‘He wants us to follow the boy.’ Abdulkader pointed to the narrow opening in the rock, a black fault in the featureless grey dolomite. ‘In there. Inshallah, we must go in there.’

  Inshallah. God willing. Of course. It could only be thus. Here, Allah endured, clung still to an ancient and fearsome power in the minds of men. Clay bowed his head. ‘And what, my brother, if God wills it, will we find?’

  Abdulkader dropped his hands to his sides, stood staring into Clay’s eyes for a long time. Then he turned and started towards the gap in the rock and followed the kid into the fault.

  Clay looked over at the old gunman, at the AK47 aimed at his chest. ‘Nothing to it, is there?’ he said to the old guy.

  The tribesman’s eyes flickered, hardened.

  ‘Trust.’

  The old guy raised his weapon, wedged the stock into his shoulder. Clay knew that look. Last chance.

  Clay shrugged, smiled at him and followed Abdulkader into the Earth.

  After twenty minutes of walking they reached an impasse. The canyon had widened slightly, but the way was blocked by an ancient rockslide. Boulders the size of freight cars tilted on end formed a wall of rock thirty or more metres high. There was no way over. They moved closer and hugged the north wall of the canyon. The kid turned to face them, slung his weapon, and crouched facing a small opening at the base of the slide. Then he lay flat on his stomach and, with a quick flick of his legs, disappeared into the hole. The older tribesman stood a few paces back, weapon ready.

  ‘Go,’ said Abdulkader.

  Clay crouched down and peered into the hole. A twisting labyrinth illuminated by a thousand dusty beams led away into the geometric chaos of the slide. He looked back over his shoulder at his friend.

  ‘Allah akhbar,’ said Clay.

  It took the better part of half an hour to navigate the rock maze. He was much bigger than the Yemenis, and by the time he emerged down-wadi his clothes were torn and he was bleeding from cuts to his shoulders, forearms and knees. It was like arriving late and underdressed in paradise.

  The softer layers of rock at the base of the cliffs had been cut away, leaving a series of broad overhangs. Beneath, gnarled acacias, ancient ironwood and camelthorn reached their branches out towards the light in every shade of green. The sound of running water echoed from the canyon walls. The air swirled with the smells of charcoal, fresh dung, cardamom, chlorophyll. A thin column of wood smoke spun up towards the overhang and dispersed in the cool current of air that flowed towards the lowlands.

  Clay looked up at the narrow rail of blue high above. The opening in the plateau was a few metres across at most. No wonder the satellite images had not revealed vegetation.

  ‘It is a good place, no?’

  Clay snapped his head down in the direction of the voice. A small man dressed in a tan thaub and clean black-and-white keffiyeh stood before them. The left side of his face was over-sized and misshapen, almost pre-human, with a dark, heavily lidded eye buried in a deep well of bone, black as a moonless night in the Empty Quarter. He was unarmed. The two gunmen had disappeared.

  Abdulkader bowed and greeted the man in Arabic, touching the tips of his fingers to his forehead and chest. The man responded in the same way.

  ‘Come,’ said the man. He led them through the trees and up a rock ledge into a small open cave cut into the side of the canyon wall. The oasis spread still and green beneath them. He crouched beside a hearth of stone and bid them sit. ‘You are with the oil company?’ he said in English.

  Clay nodded. ‘My name is Clay Straker.’

  ‘Clay,’ said the man. ‘This is an unusual name. It is not from your Bible.’

  ‘It’s short for Claymore.’

  The man narrowed his good eye. The other floated there, unresponsive. ‘You are named for a weapon. A sword.’

  When he was young, he’d liked his name, liked its meaning. Now he hated it.

  ‘Not my choice.’

  ‘It is an honourable name.’

  Clay said nothing.

  The man shifted back on his heels, brought his knees up close to his chest, narrowed his good eye. ‘Do you know why you are here, Mister Claymore?’

  Clay looked over at Abdulkader and back at the man. ‘Not for a brai and a beer, I’m guessing.’

  A hint of a smile twitched in the Arab’s mouth, disappeared. ‘No.’

  ‘We have done you no harm, nor you us,’ said Clay. Not yet. ‘Please. Let us go. This can still be retrieved.’

  ‘Retrieved, Mister Claymore?’

  ‘Sent in another direction.’

  The right side of the man’s face twisted into a smile. He picked up a stick and poked the embers. Without looking up he began to speak. His voice was soft, like the sound of the water bubbling from the spring below, his Arabic an ancient chanting melody. After some minutes he fell silent and sat staring into the coals.

  Clay had followed as best he could, gathering an occasional word, the fragment of a phrase. The language dripped violence; the mutant face was serene. He looked to Abdulkader.

  ‘This man is from an old and important Hadrami family,’ said Abdulkader. ‘Three years ago he went to Sana’a with his father to ask the President for a share of the oil that was discovered here. Promises were made, he says. We have all heard these stories. Instead, President Saleh sent his secret police, the PSO. They killed his father. Now they want him.’

  Abdulkader looked at the man a moment, paused, then turned to face Clay. ‘He is called Al Shams. The Sun.’

  Clay felt a cold spine of ice shiver through him, the coldest desert night. He knew that name. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered under his breath. Clay stared into the deep well of the man’s dead eye. And in that darkness he could see it all so clearly. It was a Friday, he remembered. He had decided to t
ake the afternoon off to look around old Aden. Thierry Champard, one of the engineers who ran the oil-processing facility, had offered him a ride into town, had been on his way home after an eight-week stint. He was off to the airport, happy, he told Clay, because he missed his two young daughters, happy because his wife would be waiting for him at the airport in Paris. He was planning on spending Christmas at the family’s country cottage in Brittany. He’d shown Clay photos: a beautiful blonde in a bikini posing holiday-style in a summer rose garden, one hand behind her head, the other on an out-thrust hip, her mouth partially open, as if caught in mid-sentence, mid-sigh, at the start of a whispered kiss; two smiling children on the beach, their doll-like faces peering out from under nests of thick sun-bleached curls, the sky-blue eyes, the pouty red-plum lips, the dimpled high-boned cheeks, girlish copies of the woman in the roses. Champard dropped Clay in the centre of town, near the qat market. The streets were packed after morning prayers. They shook hands, agreed to meet up for a beer the next time they were both in country. Clay closed the car door, walked about twenty steps, turned, made eye contact, and smiled. Thierry waved. Clay was halfway through mouthing the words thanks and good luck when the silver Land Rover disappeared in a nova of orange flame.

  That was six months ago.

  The day after Thierry’s death, Clay had been ordered home, as had many other contractors and non-essential personnel. The rest was a story he had heard only in fragments, mostly as rumour, third and fourth hand, since he’d returned to Yemen. The Yemen government had quickly blamed the murder on a group of suspected militants led by a shadowy figure calling himself ‘The Sun’. A manhunt was launched by the Army and the PSO, but Al Shams and his men had vanished. Not hard, in this part of the world. As time went by, things calmed down, and soon Clay was back in the country helping Petro-Tex with environmental permitting for the new Kamar oilfield, one of the biggest discoveries ever made in Southern Yemen.

  The Arab continued speaking, the tone harder now. Again he paused, allowing Abdulkader to translate. ‘He says this oil is a curse. The people of Hadramawt see nothing. There is no money, no jobs, only soldiers, deep wounds in the land, and death.’ Abdulkader scooped up a handful of sand from the ground and let it fall away between his fingers. ‘Did you hear of the ambush at Katima last year? That was this man. They killed six government soldiers and took many weapons.’

  He remembered reading about it. They had caught the soldiers in a pass in the mountains. They wouldn’t have had a chance. Thierry Champard hadn’t either. It was only luck – whatever luck was, the random collision of events, the probabilities of place and time and a thousand other variables – that had spared Clay that day.

  ‘He says they will kill more, until the government gives them what they want, or they close the oilfields.’

  ‘Retrieved, Mister Claymore?’ said Al Shams in English. ‘That time has long since passed. Too many have died. Still more, I am afraid, are destined to perish.’

  Clay looked down into the cold pitch of Al Shams’ dead eye. He could feel the turbulence close by, that incipient buffeting at the margin of chaos, a fall coming. He stood, tried to push away from the edge. ‘I cannot answer for the government,’ he said. ‘I am a hydrologist, an engineer. My job is to talk to the people and to listen to them. I study the land and the water. I report my findings to the company so that it can protect the people and the environment. The company wants to help the people, even if the government does not.’

  Before Abdulkader could start to translate, the man spoke in rapid terse English, looking straight at Clay. ‘If this is so,’ he said, ‘why does the company need the protection of soldiers?’

  Clay opened his hands and held them palms up. ‘We have no protection,’ he said, ‘as you can see.’

  ‘Ah, but you are an oddity, my friend,’ Al Shams replied. ‘The Army is everywhere. Your Petro-Tex has been here for almost three years, and things only become worse.’

  ‘I can assure you that the company is committed to complying fully with all appropriate regulations …’ said Clay, reciting from the company’s public engagement handbook. It was what he was paid to do.

  ‘Do not patronise me, Mister Claymore. You know as well as I do that the regulations in Yemen are weak, ineffective and readily by-passed.’

  Clay continued: ‘… and to comply with best industry practice wherever possible. Petro-Tex is committed to minimising the environmental and social impacts of its operations on the people of the Hadramawt.’

  Al Shams blinked. The good eye flashed. The other disappeared behind a veil of wrinkled skin, its opaque depth reappearing only slowly as the mangled tissue drew back. Then he smiled. ‘You do not believe what you say, Mister Claymore. I can see this.’

  Clay said nothing, sat listening to the empty echo of his own words.

  ‘The company,’ spat Al Shams. ‘Petro-Tex. You speak as if this thing were human, one of Allah’s creations. It is not. It is inanimate, soulless, not of this world. It exists for one purpose only, as we both know.’ He stamped the ground with his foot. ‘To get the oil that lies beneath this land. Our land. It will do anything to get it. It will pay people like you whatever it must to placate the villagers, to assuage the regulators. It will bribe, and kill. It exists only to enrich its shareholders. Such a thing as this is incapable of caring.’

  ‘I can assure you …’ Clay began, ‘… that the company …’

  Al Shams raised his hand. Clay fell silent.

  The Arab was quiet for a long time. Then he looked up and brought his good eye to bear on Clay. ‘My people are dying. Your oil is killing them. What you must ask yourself, Mister Claymore, is if you care.’

  And in those few moments, as he looked around at the riot of trees shot from naked rock, he asked himself just this question, and determined that yes, he should care – and even vaguely remembered doing so once – but that, in fact, right now, and for a long time now, he felt nothing at all.

  Clay shivered and closed his eyes. Then he pulled himself back and looked into the Arab’s eyes and said: ‘I don’t make the decisions.’

  ‘Ah yes, only following orders. So much of your history is like this, is it not? Your people have lost their way, my friend. They worship things other than God.’ Al Shams looked away for a moment as if contemplating some deeper meaning. ‘But my question was not about power, Mister Claymore. I asked if you cared.’

  Clay looked up. ‘What I think doesn’t matter,’ he said. That illusion had been dead a long time, buried somewhere in the Angolan bush.

  Al Shams narrowed his good eye. The other remained fixed, staring out at some distant point beyond the canyon wall. ‘That is where you are wrong, Mister Claymore,’ he said. ‘And you are too young to be so wrong.’

  Clay Straker took a deep breath. He didn’t feel young. ‘Look, Al Shams,’ he began, his voice tight. He cleared his throat, sought a deeper octave. ‘I may well be wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. But I can’t help you. You’ve got the wrong people.’

  Al Shams pointed the stick at Clay’s chest, moved its charred tip slowly towards him, pushed it into the place where his heart was. ‘No, Mister Claymore, we have exactly the right people. And with you, both of you, we are going to send a message to Petro-Tex. One they cannot ignore.’ By now the gunmen had reappeared at the end of the ledge. Al Shams waved and they moved closer, levelling their weapons.

  Clay pushed the stick away with his hand. ‘Whatever your issue with Petro-Tex, it’s got nothing to do with my driver. He has a family, sons. Let him go.’

  Al Shams looked up at the thin blade of sky. He seemed to be searching the length of the precipice. ‘War is coming,’ he said. ‘Much will change, inshallah. The sky will tear, the tombs will bust open. Then you will know yourself. These are the words of God.’

  Clay considered this for a moment. ‘I’ve seen those tombs, broer.’ He glanced up at ramparts of broken rock, back at the deformed face. ‘It’s not knowledge you find.’<
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  Al Shams rose, wiped his hands one upon the other. ‘Without Allah’s wisdom, Mister Claymore, there is no knowledge. Now you will excuse me. Do not attempt to leave.’ Then he turned and strode towards the path that led down to the wadi floor.

  The two gunmen moved aside to let Al Shams pass.

  Clay scrambled to his feet. ‘You asked me if I cared,’ he called out. ‘Do you?’

  Al Shams stopped.

  ‘Do you?’ Clay repeated, louder this time.

  Al Shams turned and faced him.

  ‘What do you think, Mister Claymore?’

  ‘I think you speak well.’

  The muscles on one side of Al Shams’ face contracted, forcing up one corner of his mouth, narrowing the good eye, brightening the skin of one cheek. But the mirror was flawed. Whether by birth or some horrible accident, the flesh of the other side remained slack and grey, unaffected by the brief spasm. The effect was hideous, destabilising. Al Shams looked down, up again. ‘I speak, Mister Claymore, for the innocent.’

  ‘Words.’

  ‘More than words, Mister Claymore. Truth.’

  ‘Truth, then: Abdulkader is innocent. Free him.’

  Al Shams looked up to the sky. ‘It is in the hands of Allah,’ he said. And then he turned and disappeared into the green depths of the chasm.

  You Should Pray

  Night fell hard in the Empty Quarter. Clay shivered in his T-shirt and moved closer to the fire, trying not to think about the fleece jacket rolled up in his pack in the back of the Land Cruiser, and the bottle of whisky stashed under the front seat. It wasn’t that far away, beyond the rockslide, perhaps a kilometre up the canyon. He peered into the darkness. There was no sign of Al Shams’ men, just the first stars flickering in the deep blue trench of sky above.

  Clay leaned in close to his friend, kept his voice to a whisper. ‘This is the man who killed Thierry Champard.’

  Abdulkader shifted in his crouch, poked the fire, said nothing.