The Abrupt Physics of Dying (14 page)

Clay stood frozen, transfixed, finger shaking on the shutter control, unable to breathe. Thirteen years vanished and he was there again, amidst the screams, the noise, the dirt, the rush. He was a witness. That’s what he would be now, for the rest of his life. He had photographed it all.

He watched as the fighters took out empty magazines and snapped new ones into place, as if unaware of the carnage they had unleashed. Clay stood with the camera glued to his face, his hands shaking. Zdravko was looking right at him. Clay could see every detail of his face, the golden stubble around his mouth, the creases in his forehead shining with sweat, his mouth moving, the meaty hands changing out the Markarov’s mag.

Clay caught a flash of movement to Zdravko’s left. One of the irregulars raised his rifle. Clay dropped to the ground just as the first rounds clattered into the rock above him, followed a fraction of a second later by the killing chant of the AK. He lay against the ancient seabed, the air above him filled with flying metal and pulverised rock, his insides tumbling, that familiar hollow sickness he’d always felt under fire, had prayed he’d never have to feel again. He hugged the rock, tried to push himself into its nullity, to become like it was, inanimate, uncaring, whole somehow, without friends or brothers or children who needed you, that you needed. The firing stopped. Target lost. Shouts of command echoed and fragmented among the rocks, across the years. He needed to move. Now.

Clay stuffed his camera into his pack and backed away towards the cover of a ridge of larger boulders that lined the slope. He set off in a low running crouch, contouring the edge of the splay fan, the
escarpment cliff to his right, the sounds of shouting falling behind. He looked back across the slope, saw no one. He had covered almost 200 metres, moving away from the Land Cruiser. He ducked behind a cross-banded block of sandstone the size of a bus and sank to the ground, sweat pouring from his temples, his shirt soaked. Somewhere back in the direction of the village, an engine started up, and then another. Vehicle doors slammed.

And now, in the background, rising like a desert storm, the wailing of women. A long shiver, the tiny feet of a black spider, crawled up his spine. He stood, all clarity now, the old habits kicking in, found a handhold and levered his way to the top of the block. Prone, he edged his way forward over the breakaway until he could see back down the wadi. The Yemeni troops who had fanned out into the village were streaming back to the trucks. Women moved like black ghosts among the bodies of the dead, ignored by the soldiers, crumpled to the ground beside loved ones, screaming their anguish to the sky. Zdravko stood in the open front of one of the vehicles, scanning the slope through binoculars, pointing, shouting.

Clay took a deep breath. What had he just witnessed? Vengeance dealt? Honour restored? Here, nothing could be judged by the action alone.

A flash of movement in the rock caught Clay’s eye. Two fighters were making their way up the slope towards the promontory where Clay had stood. They were now between him and the Land Cruiser, but it was clear from the way they were moving directly upslope that they hadn’t seen him. Clay eased his head down, pushed his way back to the edge of the block. Then he jumped to the ground, slung his pack, and set off at a sprint. Carried along on a cross-current of fear and anger, he darted between boulders, working with the terrain, his feet skimming over the stones, ricocheting off oblique slabs, knees bouncing like shocks, moving steadily up-wadi, contouring the slope where the boulders were thick and high. There was no road here. If they were going to follow him it would have to be on foot. They would have to chase him down.

But too soon the pain came, the indiscipline of the last years shooting like acid through his muscles, his heart fibrillating as his brain commanded the machine to do something for which it was no longer fit. He stopped, chest heaving, leant against a boulder, looked back. Still no one. He ran on, anger propelling him through the distress, stumbling rubber-legged over the rocks. After a while he fell into a rhythm, the sprint long since over, his body working into it now, breathing smoothing out, heart rate stabilising, muscles and tendons answering autonomous commands, and after a while as the endorphins raced through him and euphoria came he almost forgot the danger behind and even why he was running.

Moving the Ball

Clay ran until darkness fell, collapsed to the ground, hungry and exhausted. Convinced that he had not been followed, he crawled into a space between two boulders and curled up like a stray dog, the world incomprehensible, the universe swirling above him, pure chaos.

He awoke cold, the sky grey, dawn still a few hours off. The wadi here was narrow, the texture of the opposite slope distinct, the caprock frayed into blocks at the escarpment’s edge and toppled down the slope. He set off in the gloom, stiff-legged and thirsty, back towards Al Bawazir.

He reached Abdulkader’s Land Cruiser by late morning. The vehicle was as he had left it, indistinct, one of thousands in this part of the world, dented panels, scraped paint, smashed light housings, twice re-treaded tyres. Either the soldiers hadn’t found it, or they hadn’t connected it to him. He walked down to the village, to where the men had died. The bodies were gone, the sand swept clean of blood. Even the tyre tracks of the vehicles had been raked away, the spent cartridge cases collected. In his head, he could still hear the screams, the clatter of the machine guns. ‘God is great,’ he said aloud, no one there to hear him. It was always the best ones who died. And the flawed, the undeserving, lived.

The drive to Al Mukalla was a blur. It was as if the world was collapsing in on him. Never had he felt so utterly alone, so lost. He hammered the steering wheel, screamed into the void.

A few hours later Clay walked into the front entrance of the hospital at Al Mukalla. The same soldier, one of the men he had bribed
before, slouched in the chair by the door, too strung out on
qat
to notice as he hurried past the admitting desk and through the double doors towards the doctor’s office. A diagnosis of Mohamed’s symptoms would answer some questions: were the illnesses he had seen caused by chemical poisoning as Al Shams and the villagers suspected? Or was it bacteriological, viral – a disease of some kind? Something else, perhaps. Was the whole thing really just about money and politics?

He came to the office, the same door on the left, the same frosted glass above the doorframe, the sign board. He knocked and turned the handle, pushed open the door. A grey-haired man in a white lab coat sat at a little desk piled with papers. He turned to look back over his shoulder at Clay through narrowed eyes. His face was thin, the skin sallow, almost jaundiced under a fallow grey beard.

‘May I help you?’ the man said in Arabic.

‘I … I am looking for the doctor,’ Clay stuttered. ‘This is his office.’

‘This is my office.’

Clay glanced at the window, the courtyard, the examination table where Mohamed had laid.

‘There must be some mistake. I was here just two days ago. I met with a doctor – I don’t know his name. He said this was his office. He examined a friend of mine.’

The man swivelled his chair, smoothed his coat, slid his pen into his breast pocket. ‘Ah, yes,’ the man said in English. ‘I am his replacement.’

Clay baulked. Jesus Christ. ‘Where did he go?’

‘He was gone by the time I arrived.’

Clay laced his fingers behind his head, looked to the ceiling. ‘Did he leave any records?’

The man raised his eyebrows. ‘You must know that I cannot …’

‘Look,’ Clay interrupted him. ‘My friend, the one he was examining, a little boy from one of the villages, was very ill. His mother is illiterate. I need to know the results of the examination.’

The man pulled the pen from his pocket, rolled it between his fingers, shook his head. ‘Even if I could show you, I assure you that this office was empty when I arrived.’

Clay stood staring past the doctor out into the parched courtyard. ‘Thank you,’ he said finally, and walked away.

That night Clay walked up the front steps of the company guesthouse in Aden and went straight to the dining room. Karila and Parnell were seated at the table, hunched over heaped dinner plates. They looked up at him as he entered.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Parnell, shucking the exoskeleton from a prawn. The skin of his face looked as if had just been salon peeled, moist and pale like wet glue.

‘This is the dining room. I thought I might eat.’

Karila raised his eyes to where heaven was supposed to be.

Clay approached the table. The smell of food sent pangs through him. He hadn’t eaten for more than a day. He pulled out a chair across from Karila, next to Parnell.

‘Go get yourself cleaned up, Straker,’ gobbed Parnell, mouth full of prawn meat. ‘This ain’t a sty.’

Clay looked down at his silt-covered shirt and trousers, his plaster dust hands, and sat. He poured himself a glass of water from the jug on the table, drank it down.

‘Did you hear what I said, Straker?’ said Parnell. If anything he looked more bloated than Clay remembered, softer, the eyes darker, smaller.

‘I heard you,’ said Clay, and turning to Karila: ‘I need to talk to you, Nils.’

Karila put down his knife and fork, swallowed his food.

‘It’s about Al Urush.’

‘What about it?’

‘Something bad is happening. Some sort of epidemic. I think the sheikh was telling the truth.’ Why else would Al Shams be pushing so hard for answers, be willing to maim his own countryman? The young chief, who Clay had immediately trusted, had been
convinced that this was no ordinary bout of sickness. And now he was dead, murdered by Zdravko. Clay swallowed hard, a dry stone in his throat.

Parnell shifted his bulk and grunted something Clay could not make out.

‘We have already spoken about this,’ Karila said in his usual businesslike tone. ‘Al Urush is not our concern. If there is an illness, as you say, then it is something for the authorities, the Health Department.’

‘I took one of the kids to the hospital.’

Karila and Parnell sat open-mouthed.

‘But when I went back today, the doctor had been replaced. There was no record of the examination. It was as if it had never happened.’ After another fifty dollars spent bribing the administrative clerk and two fruitless hours poring over hospital records, the clerk translating dates and names, Clay had driven to Al Urush. Mohamed and his mother were back in their house, the little guy even worse, limp on the creaky cot, barely able to open his eyes.

She knew nothing, or hadn’t understood what the doctor had told her, if indeed he had told her anything at all. He’d spent over an hour trying to convince her to let him take Mohamed to Aden, put him in a real hospital, but she’d resisted every attempt, each of his clumsy arguments. Finally, in tears, screaming, she’d pushed him out of her house, slammed the door behind him, left him standing in the dust, the target of a dozen suspicious gazes shot through cracked shutters and shifted veils.

Parnell leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head.

‘I appreciate your sense of public duty, Mister Straker,’ said Karila. ‘But you represent Petro-Tex out there. I am sure our lawyers would tell you that such actions could be misconstrued by some as an admission of responsibility. Please do not do it again.’

‘You have got to be joking.’

‘I am quite serious. We have to keep our eyes on the ball here, Mister Straker. And the ball is getting this expansion underway as
soon as possible.’ Karila looked over at his boss like a child at a doting parent.

Clay could see the tightrope under his feet, the chasm of his friend’s fate opening up beneath. He took a deep breath, steadied himself. ‘The sheikh said that the illness started about six months ago. Is there anything, anything at all, that has changed up at the CPF? Leaks, spills, gas venting, anything that might trigger a problem?’

Parnell rocked forward in his chair. ‘There ain’t nothin’ up there but a few oil-water separators and a tank farm, Straker. It’s not like it’s a fucking refinery or something. This is a basic operation.’

Clay ignored Parnell and addressed Karila directly. ‘The water is a lot saltier,’ said Clay. ‘Nearly 4000 milligrams per litre. Normally it’s less than 500.’

‘You know as well as I do that water quality there is highly variable, especially in the wadis,’ said Karila. ‘It is perfectly natural.’

‘Whatever it is, they think it’s us. It’s ugly: sick kids, miscarriages. The payments aren’t going to keep them quiet for long.’

‘Get real, Straker. Look at the way these people live,’ said Parnell, forking a slice of beef into his mouth. ‘Raw sewage and trash everywhere. Are you surprised that they’re all getting sick? For fuck’s sake, Straker, you’re acting like a rookie. You’ve seen this stuff before. That’s why we pay you.’

Atef leaned his belly over the table to put a plate of roast beef with all the trimmings in front of Clay.

‘
Shukran
, Atef,’ Clay said, his appetite suddenly gone.

The cook smiled. ‘How is it, Mister Clay?’

‘About as well as Zamalek, to tell you the truth.’ Zamalek was Atef’s beloved Cairo football team.

Atef smiled. ‘Yes, they lose again this week. No midfield, no attack. But we never give up hope.’

Clay forced a smile.

‘Thank you, Atef,’ said Karila. ‘You can go.’ He waited until the cook had left the room, and then turned to Clay. ‘Did you make the necessary payments, Mister Straker?’

Clay took a deep breath. ‘All done,’ he said, holding his tone neutral. ‘But Abdulkader is still out there, still a prisoner. We should offer a payment for his return.’

‘We don’t pay ransom to terrorists,’ said Parnell.

‘But we’re happy to bribe communities.’

Parnell’s cheeks flushed. ‘It’s not the same thing, goddammit, Straker, and you know it.’

‘They are facilitation payments,’ said Karila. ‘Not bribes.’

‘This is not going to go away,’ said Clay.

‘Straker, you’re here to keep these people sweet. Not stir ’em up. The expansion is top priority. We expect our contractors to help move the ball down the field.’

Clay looked at the American and then over at Karila. That was where he should have stopped. That was where he had stopped every other time, his client happy, with a bit of luck the money in his account, his conscience – what little of it he had managed to salvage over the last years – absolved. But the words came anyway. ‘Is that what Todorov is doing? Keeping people sweet?’

Parnell and Karila looked at him with blank expressions.

‘What are you talking about, Straker?’ said Karila.

They didn’t know.

‘Nothing. Look, we need to figure out what is going on. Let me go to the CPF, have a look.’

The other two men sat chewing their food. Clay picked up his water glass, looked through its distorting meniscus at Parnell.

‘I thought you had taken a water sample,’ said Karila.

Clay tipped his glass and let a drop of water fall to his napkin. ‘Bloody lab screwed up – spilled it.’

Parnell coughed and fidgeted in his chair.

‘I could take some proper air and water samples,’ Clay continued. ‘That would tell us for sure. It won’t take long. I can do it right away.’

‘Thank you for the suggestion, Straker. But that is not in the programme or the budget at this time. We do not have time or money to waste.’

‘We’re talking about less than five thousand dollars, Nils. No impact on schedule.’ Before coming back to the guesthouse he had lodged the new samples from Al Urush and Bawazir with the laboratory, under his own name this time. If necessary he would pay for the analysis himself. Not that he could afford it. He was rapidly burning through the last of his cash.

Karila wiped his lips with his napkin, draped it over his unfinished meal, and lit a cigarette. ‘The CPF is locked down. You know that. And even if it wasn’t, it would make no difference. We are not the cause.’

‘OK. We’re not the cause. Let’s prove it. To ourselves, to everyone, to Al Shams.’

Parnell spat. ‘I don’t have to prove nothin’ to a goddamned murderer.’

‘Don’t be hysterical, Mister Straker,’ said Karila, smoke pouring from his mouth and nostrils. ‘It is ludicrous even to suggest that air pollution from our facility is causing this.’

‘It’s even more ludicrous not to protect yourself against the suggestion.’

Parnell pushed his chair back with a loud scrape of wood on tile and levered himself to his feet. ‘Goddammit, Straker,’ he barked, eyes bulging. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your bullshit. You got me? This is over. Now get on side and do your fucking job, or I’ll get someone who will.’

Parnell and Karila strode from the room leaving Clay alone at the table.

After dinner Clay showered and locked himself in his room. He pulled a bottle of CC from his bag and opened the big window and looked out over the lights of Little Aden blinking in the distance. A warm breeze blew through the room. The sea air smelt of iodine and faintly of sewage. He unscrewed the bottle and took two big gulps of the whisky. He was still not sure about the illnesses. A sick boy was not unusual. He had seen a lot worse – polio cripples walking bent double with wooden blocks strapped to their palms, diseased
urchins picking through steaming landfills, their eyes thick with flies. He had not seen or smelt anything in the way of air pollution, and a bit of salt in the water was not going to make anyone sick. These kids were malnourished and open to all kinds of disease and infection. Their little bodies were just too weak to cope.