The Abrupt Physics of Dying (4 page)

Who You Might Have Been

Clay dropped his hand to his side, flicked the ignition key with his thumb so that the blade protruded between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, closed his fist around the bow. Al Shams was close, within striking distance. The kid was a couple of paces behind and to Al Shams’ right; he was left-handed, which meant he would have to swing the AK through almost ninety degrees to get a shot at Clay, and, even then, would risk hitting Al Shams. The older gunman was to Al Shams’ left, but right-handed. Same problem. OK for escorting someone when the danger was external, but no good when the threat was close in, front on. They had it backwards. Neither had slung their weapons. The closer Clay got to Al Shams, the harder it would be for them. Abdulkader was the only problem. He hadn’t moved, stood back by the fire, five paces away from the elder gunman, a clear straight-line shot.

Clay looked Al Shams in the good eye. ‘I’ll do what you ask. I’ll go to Al Urush. I’ll talk to the villagers, see what I can find. But I need Abdulkader. He knows the country, the people, the roads. We’re a team. I can’t do it without him.’

‘Do not be disingenuous, Mister Claymore. You can, and you will. And if you do not, your friend will die.’

‘Please, Mister Clay,’ rumbled Abdulkader’s voice from behind. ‘Do as he says.’

‘I’m not leaving without him.’

‘Then neither of you will leave.’

Clay was silent, stood his ground.

Al Shams spread his arms slightly, opened out his palms. ‘Please, Mister Claymore. Be reasonable. Go now. Do this great service for my people. If you do, your friend will be freed. You have my word.’

Clay took a step forward, tightened the angles. ‘He’s no good to you as a hostage. Petro-Tex is not going to bargain for a driver, a local. If you want leverage, you need me.’

‘No, Mister Claymore. The leverage I want is not with the company. It is with you.’

A cold tumour of realisation lumped in Clay’s chest. He had always hated irony.

The older gunman chambered a round.

‘Please believe me,’ said Al Shams. ‘I do not wish to kill you, or your friend. But I will if I must.’

Clay hesitated. ‘You think I’m lying. You think that if you let us go, I won’t help you.’

The edge of a smile formed at the corner of Al Shams’ mouth and was gone. ‘I
know
you will not help us, Mister Claymore. You do not want to be involved. I can see this in you very plainly. Well, now you are involved.’

Clay looked back at Abdulkader, but his friend stood mute, expressionless. And in that fragment of time compressed between his last utterance and the attack he was about to initiate, Clay wondered again at the power of events to obliterate the dim recollection of ‘who you might have been’, at how completely he’d been bludgeoned into the man he now was.

Clay bowed his head, opened his arms as if resigning himself to his fate. He could sense the men facing him relax as they anticipated his capitulation. He took a slow step towards Al Shams, paused a moment.

Half a second, no more.

Enough to hear the morning breeze hush across the lip of the canyon.

Enough to feel the new sun on his neck, watch it cast shadows across the ruins of Al Shams’ tortured face.

Clay burst to his right, pivoting towards the old man and putting Al Shams between himself and the kid. Before the old man could react, Clay brought his left knee up hard, smashing the old guy’s pelvis. The Arab’s mouth opened, the first note of a groan hanging in space, truncated an instant later as Clay’s right fist smashed into his face. Clay felt the key go in, the give as a membrane flexed, heard the slight pop as it broke, then the sucking sound as he pulled back his fist, the key with it. The old man fell back screaming, reaching instinctively for his face. Clay grabbed the AK as the old man let go, jerking the stock back hard. There was a crack as the rifle’s butt plate caught the old man in the jaw. He crashed to the ground, blood pouring from his mouth and left eye. As before, out on the road, the kid was slow to react. He stood blinking in the morning sun, a look of puzzlement spreading across his young-old face. But Al Shams was quick. He’d already shifted left, clearing the kid for a shot, and was moving towards the cave entrance. Clay found the AK’s pistol grip with his right hand, flicked the safety, already down and off, bringing the rifle up for a shot. The kid had recovered now, was swinging his weapon around. As he did, he fumbled momentarily, looked down. He’d forgotten to disengage the safety. The AK’s safety switch was on the weapon’s right side, forward of the trigger guard. Left-handed, the kid had to reach over the top of the gas block with his right hand to get at the lever. It was a clumsy manoeuvre and it took time. By the time the kid looked up, Clay had closed the distance. Side on, he let go a kick that caught the kid in the chest, just below the neck. The kid grunted with the impact, toppled backwards, and disappeared over the ledge, the AK clattering down over the rock after him.

Clay swung around and took aim at Al Shams. The kid’s body thudded into the wadi floor. The sound echoed from the canyon wall.

‘Stop,’ Clay said.

Al Shams froze.

‘Turn around.’

Al Shams turned, reached out his hands, palms upraised, a preacher appealing to his congregation. He looked disappointed. ‘This changes nothing, Mister Claymore.’

‘Like I said before, this can still be retrieved.’

Al Shams glanced at the old man.

‘I think not.’

The old guy was on his knees now, his hand covering his left eye. Blood flowed out between his fingers, dripped to the ground.

‘I can get him to a doctor, if you help me.’

‘
Inshallah
,’ said Al Shams.

Clay called back over his shoulder. ‘Let’s go, my friend. Help the old guy. Our host is going to walk the three of us out of here.’

‘You do not understand, Mister Claymore. This is not for me to decide.’

Anger, at bay until now, rose inside him. ‘Just like Aden? Was that Allah’s will, too? Thierry Champard blown to pieces?’

‘As I told you, this was not our doing.’

‘You claimed responsibility.’

‘We did not.’

‘It was in the papers.’

‘And you believe this propaganda? Do not be so naïve.’

Clay took a breath, pulled back the AK’s bolt, checked the 7.62 millimetre round in the breech.
This
was death, this projectile nestled in its chamber, the firing pin millimetres away, ready. At 715 metres per second, the 7.9 gram bullet would cover the four metres and reach Al Shams in 0.0056 seconds, entering and exiting his body before he had a chance to blink. And it was men who decided this, not God. ‘Here we go,’ said Clay, wiping the unwanted calculation from his head. ‘You are going to lead us down to the rock slide. Go slow.’

Al Shams stood unmoving. His expression was serene, beatific, his one good eye piercing, alive, the other a black stone plucked from the sun-baked plateau. He looked up for a moment and then smoothed his robe with his hands. ‘No, Mister Claymore. You will
do as I have asked. It is God’s will. This you cannot deny. You cannot see it now, but you will. I pity you your emptiness, Mister Claymore.’

Clay heard a rush of air, like the sound of a bird swooping close, and then the crack as the back of his skull ruptured in a blinding flash. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Not Yet a Commodity

He awoke face down in the sand where they had left him. A river of heat shimmered on an empty vertical horizon, land and sky indistinguishable. It was as if he were looking through one of those thick, almost-liquid Cairo smogs that would descend in the hottest days of summer, locking the city in a coffin of car exhaust and smoke from the burning landfills and airborne lead from the smelters along the Nile. Sand crusted the corners of his mouth, frosted his eyelashes. He spat and turned his head. A dark shape loomed close. He raised his head and propped himself on one elbow. His skull felt as if it were about to implode. He lifted his hand to the back of his head, ran his fingers along the swollen matting of hair and blood. A thick warm liquid trickled over his top lip and into his mouth and out over his chin and neck. The taste was vaguely metallic, aluminium or stainless steel, like licking a knife.

He struggled to his knees, rubbed his eyes, looked around. Abdulkader’s Land Cruiser was there, a few metres away, ticking in the heat. Clay pushed himself to his feet, swayed on unsteady legs, took a few steps, slumped against the car’s side, and looked inside. He knew that it was empty, that his friend was back there, a prisoner, a hostage. He shuffled around to the driver’s side door, opened it, climbed out of the sun. The key was in the ignition, dried blood set into its grooves. The dashboard’s digital thermometer read
fifty-one
degrees. Clay looked out across the sameness of the plateau, the limitless empty blue of the sky. There were no landmarks, no roads. Overhead, the sun was near its zenith. He had no idea where he was.

Clay took stock. He had plenty of fuel, half a tank and two extra jerry cans in the back. They’d left him half a litre of water, his compass and notebook. They hadn’t touched the whisky. But Abdulkader’s Kalashnikov was gone, as was the handgun he kept in the glove box. It was nearly midday. That put him a maximum of 250 kilometres cross-country from the Kamar-1 well and the pipeline trunk road. By the look of the land, he guessed they’d taken him north, further towards Wadi Hadramawt, probably east, too. There was a second set of tyre tracks nearby that disappeared to the south-east. If he struck south, eventually he’d hit the trunk road that paralleled the escarpment and the coast. There was no question now of trying to go back for Abdulkader. Unarmed, alone, he had little chance of finding him, let alone getting him safely away. Destiny crystallised around him, inescapable, just as Al Shams had said it would.

Clay found the medical kit under the seat, took three painkillers, swilled them down with whisky, and cleaned out the wound on the back of his head as best he could. He pushed a compress bandage down hard onto it to stop the bleeding, secured it with his
headcloth
, and set out overland.

An hour later he was still heading south, not a road or track in sight. He leaned forward in the seat, let the superheated air whipping through the open window vaporise the sweat from his shirt back, and looked out across the dead-flat loneliness to the shimmering heat of the horizon. This was the hottest place on Earth, and soon it would be summer. Even the Bedouin rued these months. It should have been a good place for forgetting. That’s why he’d come.

Now he knew that for him there would only ever be remembering.

He reached the Kamar-2 pipeline road just over three hours later. It took what remained of the day to reach Wadi Idim and the pass down the escarpment. As if rebelling against the loss of its owner, the old Land Cruiser blew out its right front tyre shortly after. Only one spare remained and the whisky was gone by the time he emerged onto the coastal plain. Al Shams’ men had taken what little food he had stashed in the vehicle, and the last of the water was long since gone.

He stopped by the roadside and unrolled his blanket under shuddering stars, but despite the codeine and the whisky, he could not sleep. The last moments at the canyon played themselves out again in his mind. He’d screwed up. The kid must have survived the fall – it wasn’t far, four metres at most – climbed back up to the ledge, got behind him. He’d been distracted by Al Shams, had allowed himself to be drawn in, to lose focus. Had Abdulkader tried to warn him? He hadn’t heard a thing.

After four restless hours he continued on his way, dread marshalling within. Al Shams had made it clear: go to the villages, deliver the message to Petro-Tex, or Abdulkader would die. Bring the Army, and Abdulkader would die. That Al Shams could track his movements, verify his actions, Clay had no doubt.

By mid-morning he was approaching the village of Um’alat along the broad flat wadi of the same name. Goats scattered as he passed, dust rising in puffs from their hooves. A lone camel, its front legs hobbled, foraged among the stunted acacia that snaked along the grey cobbles of the main channel. Here the wadi narrowed and turned north toward the escarpment. The village, a tight cluster of tall, mud-brick buildings set on the wadi bank, rose through the dust and heat like some pre-Islamic apparition. He rolled Abdulkader’s Land Cruiser to a stop just outside the main gate, turned off the engine and stepped to the ground.

Within seconds he was surrounded by children – miniatures of the men who’d taken his friend, dark-haired, dressed in rags. They laughed and smiled, followed him as he walked toward the main gate, tugged at his sleeves. An older boy approached, dressed like a man in a
thaub
and a tweed jacket, sandals fashioned from car-tyres and goat leather, a Kalashnikov slung over his right shoulder. The boy raised his hand to his forehead and said in English: ‘Follow.’

They were expecting him.

The boy led Clay to a low, whitewashed building on high ground overlooking the village. Inside, the single room was packed with tribesmen, all standing, all talking – the Bani Matar, Sunni Muslims
of the Shafa’i sect. This ancient clan had dominated this part of the Masila since the time of Persian rule and the dawn of Islam. They had endured the Caliphate, seen off the Ottoman occupation, fought the British, survived Egyptian chemical weapon attacks in the 1960s, and outlasted the Soviets. Tough didn’t even begin to describe them.

The boy led him through the maze of bodies to a small stool at the far end of the room. Opposite, waiting, sat the
mashayikh
, the sheikh. The room went quiet. Clay sat, opened his notebook to a blank page, glanced up at the tribesmen packed like judge, jury and mob into every corner of the mud-brick room, and listened.

The
mashayikh
reached for the Kalashnikov leaning against the wall, swung it level and balanced it across his knees. The trigger pointed out like an accusing finger, the whole of it beautiful, hateful, a work of calculated, merciless perfection. Clay stared at it, entranced, unable to break away.

‘Mister Straker,’ the
mashayikh
’s voice broke through, heavily accented, frayed.

Clay looked up, breathing hard.

The
mashayikh
fixed him with a long stare. ‘My people are worried,’ he said after a time. ‘The children are ill.’ Grumbled translations rippled out across the room. ‘It has begun in Al Urush, six months ago. A sickness. The children bring up food, their skin breaks open. Now it is worse.’

Of course it could have been anything, despite Al Shams’ assertions: gastrointestinal infection, an outbreak of measles, flu, who knew. There were always complaints manufactured to claw money from the operators: goats run down by pipe trucks, camels poisoned by fictitious gas clouds, crops ruined by oil-tainted water that sprung mysteriously from the ground. He had heard it all before, in villages and settlements just like this all over the region, with no claim too spurious.

And so, as the Arab spoke of the inadequate compensation, of the lack of jobs for the young men, of the corrupting influence of the oil workers, Clay Straker’s thoughts were elsewhere. He watched the
mashayikh
’s mouth move behind the short-cropped grey beard, heard the words arch out over the dozens of armed tribesmen, registered the murmurs of translation and the spreading echoes of agreement. He could even pick out the occasional word or phrase:
khawga
, foreigner;
molhed
, godless one; even once a hissed
shatan
– hard to miss, the origin of the English word of the same enunciation. Would this Al Shams, who seemed to believe so fervently in the power of God, actually murder Abdulkader, one of his own, one of the very people he purported to be fighting for? The events of the last day began to dissolve away and lose substance as fatigue and pain and hunger took hold, and he knew that no matter what he said back at the office in Aden, all that would remain would be another paragraph in a report, another message for the bosses to ignore.
Naafi
, as they used to say in the Battalion. No ambition and fuck-all interest. Enough for Al Shams? He doubted it.

‘Mister Straker?’ The
mashayikh
was leaning close, looking into his eyes. ‘You bleed.’

Clay ran his hand across the back of his neck, closed his eyes a moment. His hand came away wet with blood. He looked up, wiped his hand on his trouser leg. ‘It’s nothing.’ He took a sip of tea and put the glass on the small wooden table between them. ‘Please continue, Excellency.’

The
mashayikh
closed his eyes a moment, opened them. ‘We see many trucks, many men coming. What is the plan of your company, Mister Straker?’

‘I am a contractor, Excellency. Petro-Tex is not my company.’

‘But you are here. You speak for them.’ More murmurs from the crowd.

‘I am doing community consultation and environmental impact studies only. I listen and report back.’

The
mashayikh
motioned with his head towards the notebook spread open on Clay’s knee. ‘Now you can report.’

‘The illness. Yes.’ He started to scribble in his notebook, but the pencil lead gritted over the silt that dusted the empty page, fracturing
the words. He wiped the paper with the side of his hand and started again.

‘It is said that Petro-Tex is making the oil factory on the
jol
bigger. They do this to take more oil from our land. Is this true, Mister Straker?’

The room erupted again, everyone speaking at once. Some were shouting now, spitting out their accusations in the harsh Arabic dialect that he was only just beginning to understand. The
mashayikh
raised his hand to restore a degree of calm.

Clay wiped the sweat from his eyes. The back of his hand came away streaked with mud. ‘The oil-processing facility on the plateau is being expanded. As part of the expansion programme, the company will build a school for your children, and they will drill a new water well for you.’ The standard line. By now he could recite it without thinking.

The
mashayikh
wrapped both hands around the barrel of his rifle. ‘We have no need of your well. The
ghayls
– our springs – have provided for our people for all time, thanks God.’ Another chorus of murmured agreement:
Al hamdillulah
– thanks be to Allah.

The
mashayikh
smoothed out the folds of his crisply laundered
thaub
, pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped the dust from his polished leather brogues. ‘Your company will take no more oil until the sickness is stopped, Mister Straker.’

‘Respectfully, Excellency, it is not possible that our operations could cause the type of illness you have described.’

Again the plaintive murmurs, accompanied by the sounds of feet shuffling on sand and the metallic clink of sling-strap buckles on curved magazines and folding stocks. Above the din, a voice rose from the back of the room. Heads twisted to listen; the men quietened. A young man dressed Saudi-style in a flowing white robe stood against the back wall, one hand resting on a young boy’s shoulder. He was tall, clean-shaven, light-skinned, almost European-looking. He was Clay’s age, maybe younger. He spoke slowly, his voice like wind sculpting rock, deep and resonant.

‘The poison that afflicts our children comes from the facility. It comes in the air, down the wadi, when the cool winds blow from the plateau. We can smell it, foul like the vapours of hell. This is done by the government and the company to push us from our land. It is intentional.’

When the young man had finished speaking, the
mashayikh
inclined his head and turned towards Clay. ‘This is my son, the chief of Al-Bawazir. Are his words true, Mister Straker?’

Clay shifted his weight on the handmade wood and woven reed stool. The thing was unsteady, too close to the ground, and he had to rest one knee on the packed earth floor just to stay upright. He wanted to stand. He wanted to straighten his aching legs and walk across the room to the door and out to the waiting vehicle. But here, he knew, convention must be honoured. He was expected to answer.

He looked around the room at the tribesmen, their sun-worn faces as open and uncompromising as the rocky ground of their birth. They seemed to be studying him, his curious flaxen hair, his pale eyes. No one spoke. He looked down at the ground, at the clay and silt covering his boots. Something trickled down his back, along the gutter of his spine, sweat or blood or both. Someone coughed. He glanced at his watch. Time had a different meaning here. Not yet a commodity, it was reckoned still by the rhythm of the seasons, the comings of the winds and rains, the movement of planets and stars. In this place there was no fear of silence, no need to fill time and space with meaningless words.