The Abrupt Physics of Dying (19 page)

The waiter placed a bottle of Jack Daniels and two tumblers on the table. Hussein took his time pouring out two large measures. ‘I never said thank you, by the way.' He raised his glass, took a sip, smiled.

Clay raised his glass to his lips, swallowed a mouthful. ‘Don't know what you mean,' he said.

‘The very nice officer you bribed at the checkpoint outside Ibb. Poor guy, someone had suggested that he should take extra care searching my vehicle.'

Clay said nothing.

‘When he found out who I was, he was so worried that he offered me a bottle of Jack Daniels.'

‘And who exactly are you?' said Clay. At least it hadn't been Zdravko tailing him. Maybe that meant he hadn't recognised him that day on the slope, although Clay doubted it.

‘You were at Al Bawazir four days ago,' said Hussein, ignoring his question.

‘I was …' Clay looked down, up again. ‘I was taking water samples.'

‘Three samples. Yes, I know.'

Clay took a deep breath, decided to keep quiet.

Hussein pulled out a cigarette, made a whole production of lighting it, dragging out a deep lungful, blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Ansar Al-Sharia killed twelve villagers,' he said.

Clay swallowed a mouthful of bourbon. ‘They may have done the shooting, but the Army set it up.'

For a moment he thought he saw a look of surprise flicker across Hussein's face, but then it was gone. ‘Are you sure?'

‘They just stood by and watched. What kind of place is this where the Army goes around slaughtering its own people?' As soon as he'd said it he realised the irony, wished he could take it back.

Hussein's mouth twisted into a wry smile. ‘The question is, whose Army? Petro-Tex has been very clever.'

‘Explain.'

Hussein tilted his chin up in the direction of the entrance. ‘Do you see that man over there, the big Yemeni in the dark suit at the main table?'

Clay went to turn but Hussein reached for his arm and held him fast. ‘Slowly,' he said.

A grey-haired Arab in a dark double-breasted jacket and tie sat at the head of the table, surrounded by Western businessmen. On his immediate left sat Rex Medved.

Clay bit the inside of his cheek, turned back to face Hussein.

‘That is the Minister of Petroleum of the national government, one of the leaders of the Southern rebel cabal. The man with him is the President of Petro-Tex. He is here negotiating new exploration leases in the Southern oilfields.'

Clay sipped his drink. ‘Look,' he said to the stranger across the table, ‘if there is a point to all of this, get to it. I'm sure that you didn't bring me all this way to talk politics.' Clay drained his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm.

Hussein slid an envelope across the table towards him. He tapped the paper with the tips of two long fingers. ‘I believe these are yours.'

There was a burst of laughter from the Minister's table. Clay looked over. The Minister stood and embraced a heavyset crew-cut
man in a black suit. The two men touched cheeks on one side and then the other and stood shaking hands. The man beamed at the Minister, pumping his hand, booming a laugh across the room.

‘Jesus Christ,' said Clay. It was Zdravko.

Hussein looked at him and back at the Minister's table. ‘Do you know him?'

Clay swallowed a mouthful of whisky and then another, but did not answer.

He flipped open the envelope. There were three pages, the lab reports from the Al Urush and Bawazir samples, dated. He scanned the columns of figures, cross-checking the pages, annoyed that they could so easily end up in this man's hands. He was about to ask just how this had been accomplished when he saw Zdravko striding towards him, a big smile on his face, his double-breasted dark suit moving like reptile skin over his lithe bulk.

Zdravko was almost at the table now. Clay nodded to him, made to stand. All he could do was play it out, greet him as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't seen what he'd seen. Zdravko smiled that big smile of his. Clay relaxed, offered his hand.

But then Zdravko's expression changed. His mouth set hard, a flat line. He glanced at Hussein, eyes narrowed, and then fixed his pale gaze back on Clay, accelerating towards them. Five metres from the table he changed course towards the exit. Ignoring Clay's outstretched palm, he raised his hand in the shape of a pistol, aimed at Clay's head, and cracked off a round. Bang, he mouthed, you're dead. He winked and was gone.

Clay sat a moment blinking, unsure of what had just happened. Then he leaned back in his chair, finished his drink, folded the papers and slid them into his jacket pocket, trying not to look shaken.

‘Friend?' said Hussein.

‘I wouldn't say that, no.'

Hussein pushed back his chair and stood. ‘And now,' he said, butting out his cigarette in the ashtray, ‘we are going to take a little journey together.'

Why You Do Nothing

It was the grey hour before dawn. Overnight, the city had been turned into a bastion. They passed through three Army road blocks in as many miles, the guards waving Hussein through by sight. Free of the city now, the Land Cruiser rattled along the crumbling
two-lane
coast road into the ancient heart of Arabia Felix. Pastel beaches and Aeolian dunes sprinkled with burnt scrub stretched away before them.

Clay pulled the envelope from his pocket and unfolded the three lab reports. He scanned the columns of figures, concentrations in milligrams per litre. The Al Urush sample showed elevated salinity, as he had measured before at the cistern, but there were more dangerous signs: significant concentrations of heavy metals, cadmium and lead, elevated organics, traces of barium. The numbers burned themselves into his brain. None of these things belonged. This water should be as pure as Evian. The Bawazir sample, taken just before the massacre, showed the same effects but at lower concentrations.

Hussein pulled over to the shoulder and switched off the engine. They walked to the top of a dune and looked out across the ocean. The water here was blue and clear, the beach alive with thousands of crabs that scuttled back and forth as the waves surged and retreated across the white sand. Sea birds wheeled and flicked in the breeze.

Hussein lit a cigarette, fuelled its embers and exhaled into the wind. ‘Have you been up to the CPF before?’ he asked.

‘Only once. Last year, working on another project, I bunked in the camp for a few nights. Since then it’s been locked down.’

‘How many people work there, at any given time?’

‘A hundred, maybe less. I’m not sure.’ He looked at Hussein. ‘What is it that you do, exactly?’ He tried to sound casual.

‘I am with the government.’

‘What do you do for the government, other than take foreigners sightseeing?’

Hussein flicked the cigarette end into the dune. ‘We should go, hit the road as the Americans say.’ He turned away and walked back to the car.

Fifty kilometres west of Al Mukalla they stopped at a roadside teahouse. They left the vehicle and climbed the steps to a covered terrace overlooking the sea. A dozen wood plank tables were arranged under a wire-mesh and palm-frond roof that fluttered and crackled in the sea breeze. In one corner a group of tribesmen sat on a straw mat drinking tea. They looked up as Clay and Hussein entered. A loud conversation ensued. Clay and Hussein installed themselves at a table in the far corner. Hussein called for tea. After a while three of the men stood and wiped their hands across their sleeves, reached for their weapons and walked across the terrace to where Hussein and Clay sat.

Hussein greeted the men and offered them each a cigarette. They declined. Clay recognised one of the men from the first meeting with the sheikh. His face was like pitted andesite, weathered by who knew how many years of sun and labour. But it was his eyes that were unforgettable: blue as the sea, they glared out at Clay as the man spoke in rapid-fire Arabic, his tone rising, his hands tightening around the pistol grip of the rifle slung about his neck. Never once did his gaze waver – he was addressing Clay personally. Hussein listened, finishing one cigarette and lighting another, cool as a Highveldt winter’s night. The man was shouting now, spitting out hard consonants. Clay stared back into the depth of his eyes, not daring to break contact. Finally the man slammed the butt of his Kalashnikov down on the tabletop and was silent. The other tribesmen murmured in agreement. Hussein stood and gestured to the men to
please sit. They hesitated, looked back at their comrades at the other table, and sat. Hussein called for food and more tea.

Soon the men were helping themselves from a steaming platter of rice and goat meat. Hussein leaned towards Clay and said: ‘They know you are from the company. He asks why you do nothing while their children and old people become sick. He says you gave money to the
mashayikh
. Is this true?’

Clay tried to push down the bile rising in his chest.

‘He says the
mashayikh
should not have taken your unclean money.’

Clay said nothing.

‘We must be careful,’ said Hussein.

The meal finished, the tribesmen stood and left. Clay followed Hussein back to the car. Any vestige of control he might have had was slipping away.

They arrived in the hamlet just before noon, rolled into the clearing and stopped by the cistern. Dust thrown up by the tyres enveloped the vehicles. For a moment they sat blind as the dust settled. Then the picture was revealed: crops bent withered and brown in the fields, ancient trees hanging lifeless, stripped of green. By the side of the road a donkey lay dead and bloated beneath a writhing blanket of flies. The churning smell of death filled the air.

The little hut in the shadow of the big rock was unchanged: the wooden footstool tilted up against the wall, the varnish on the door long since peeled away, the wood cracked and grey, the bit of frayed cord knotted to a stake in the trampled ground in front of the window, once the dumb circular prison of a dog perhaps, or a donkey. He rapped on the door. It was then that he saw the boy’s bicycle wheel lying in the dust at the base of a dead palm, propped up against a small mound of soil.

The door of the hut was ajar. They pushed it open and penetrated the gloom. Clay called out in Arabic: ‘
Merhaba
, salaam aleikum.’
Hello.

A foul sulphurous odour overwhelmed him and he had to swallow back the urge to gag. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could
see the makeshift kitchen with the gas burner, the dirt floor and the little chair, the steel-framed bed on the far wall. The woman stood before him speaking rapidly in high-pitched Arabic that he couldn’t even begin to follow.

‘
Whayn
el walid
?’ he asked. Where is the boy? He pointed to the empty bed.

The woman’s eyes widened and then crumpled shut. She wrapped her arms around herself and started to rock violently back and forth, wailing some prayer or invocation, tears streaming down her withered face.

After a while the woman looked up, stared at Hussein, and then jumped forward and clasped his hands in hers and pulled him inside. Hussein kicked the door closed with his heel and wrenched himself free. The woman was shrieking at him, waving her arms above her head, hysterical. He held her by the shoulders, looked her straight in the eyes and spoke to her in a slow baritone. Something he said had an almost immediate effect. The woman stopped screaming and crumpled into a heap on the floor. She sobbed quietly in the dirt.

‘Her son Mohamed died two days ago,’ Hussein said.

Clay stood unmoving, transported back to another time, to another dead boy he had been powerless to save, life looping back on him, iterating, the tribesman’s question now an explanatory proposition: why you do nothing. You do nothing because you are scared, because you are wilfully ignorant, because in the end you have less to lose by standing by and letting it happen. Or in Clay’s case, helping it happen.

They left the woman curled there in the dirt and walked back to the vehicle. Hussein sat in the Pajero’s driver’s seat, the door open, lit a cigarette.

Clay stood in the dust of the square and tried to catch his breath. After a while he said: ‘Are there others?’

‘Many.’

Clay looked up into the monotonous depths of the sky. ‘Why are you doing this?’

Hussein reached behind his back and withdrew a black automatic pistol, a nine-millimetre Beretta. He weighed it in his hand, examined it carefully as if looking for defects, and placed it on the dashboard. It gleamed in the sun. ‘Let’s just say I am interested in the truth.’

Clay looked back at the mound of earth under the dead palm, the harp.

‘Is it the water?’ said Hussein. ‘Can the things on those laboratory reports do this?’

Clay looked at the gun and around the ruined village. ‘It will kill crops and trees, but people, no. Not directly anyway. It’s undrinkable.’

‘Is it the facility?’

Clay stepped back, putting the Land Cruiser’s open door between him and Hussein.

Hussein tossed his unfinished cigarette to the ground, picked up the handgun, got out of the vehicle, closed the door. ‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t know.’ Clay took a step towards Hussein. ‘Look, maybe. The chemical signature suggests deep brine, a leak perhaps up at the facility. But it could be a lot of things, saline intrusion from the ocean.’

‘Best guess.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you are a murderer.’ Hussein stood looking down at his feet, the handgun hanging loose in one hand, as if he was unsure whether he wanted it or not.

Clay tensed, ready to fight. Hussein was only two hard steps away. ‘Murderer?’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get someone to do something about it, for Christ’s sake. But no one seems to gives a shit.’

‘Is that so? Since when, Straker, this newfound caring?’

Clay looked at the ground, did not answer. Hussein was right. Every step he’d taken over the last year, every bribe, every twisted interpretation, every carefully crafted report, had dragged him deeper. This newfound caring: it could be Al Shams talking. He choked back the urge to gag.

Hussein lit another cigarette, blinked the smoke from his eyes. Then he raised the handgun and tucked it into his waistband. ‘Get in the car.’