The Gone-Away World (31 page)

Egon loads me into the RV and yells to Jim that we're going to have to get somewhere so he can treat people, and I realise that almost everyone is hurt in one way or another: Jim is sporting a gash along his side and Annie has her arm in a makeshift splint, and Egon Schlender himself has some hastily stitched holes on the left side of his face. It's not surprising; it seems as if the air itself has started shooting at us. I look at Leah, please God—but she is only scraped and bruised and extremely pissed off and afraid. She checks my thigh and zaps me with a local, then there is a bright flash as she removes the spike. I can't feel the pain, exactly, but I am very aware that something alien is being dragged out of my leg bone, and not all the nerves are entirely asleep. She touches one on the way out and I say something manly, like
ow
or
mother.
She superglues me together (this is what superglue is actually for) and wraps the whole thing up with a bit of someone's dress shirt. I love her even more.

Gonzo leads us out into the countryside, and the farther we get from the camp, the less severe the fighting is. We drive on, and it's misty and cool and the wheels thrum beneath us and the sound of the engine and the road is tranquil. We stop, and people change places to get some rest, and Leah collapses onto my shoulder and falls asleep like a child. I hand my looted compass to Annie the Ox and she stares at me as if I have done a magic trick, then grins. “Well, damn,” says Annie the Ox, nodding. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” And she ruffles my hair. We move on. Sooner or later, someone will have to say “What the fuck was that?” But that time is not yet; by mutual consent, we're just leaving it alone for a while. Gonzo doesn't take a break; he's too wired.

When we slow for the second time, it is because Annie has seen something at the side of the road, drawn our collective attention to it. We brake and stop, and watchful Jim Hepsobah stands by, but there is no one here. We all saw, from a distance, a family walking single file. From close to, we see only stunted trees and broken earth and fog. We heard them, even caught a whiff of sweat and bandages on the wind, but they are gone now, and perhaps they never existed.

The next time it is Jim Hepsobah who spots them, a column of our guys disconsolately trudging westwards. They are gone before he can slow down, tricks of the light.

A bit later, soldiers appear as we pause to assist a lone woman with a baby, who turns out to be a slender boy with a bundle of rags, swaying his hips in a ludicrous counterfeit. He scampers away into the forest, shouting abuse, and there are bullets. The whole thing is petty, a moment of shock and almost of irritation. Someone is shooting at us. It's so rude. We shoot back until they stop. We move on.

Then a jeep draws alongside, very fast. A slender figure in fatigues, shivering with cold, eyes fixed on the road ahead and the horizon, sits alone at the wheel. Annie looks at Jim and Jim makes a frantic gesture and Annie and (perforce) Gonzo pick up the pace. Sally Culpepper has blood on her elegant eyebrows and she obviously didn't manage to grab a coat before she lit out. She won't answer when Jim calls her and for the longest time she seems to think we're like the ghosts at the roadside, and finally Jim steps from the machine-gun platform into the jeep next to her and she all but kills him, razor bowie whipping round in a blur. Jim does the smart thing, puts the outside of his arm up and takes the hit there, and Sally wrenches back and jolts and comes back to us, and Jim puts his arms around her as she drives, ignoring the gash on his arm as if it were a mosquito bite. Maybe it is. Maybe Jim Hepsobah is wearing chain mail under there. On the other hand, he's bleeding. Maybe Ronnie Cheung's hot iron filings and rough concrete blocks have made Jim Hepsobah immune to minor injuries. Or maybe it's just Jim Hepsobah, because he's in love, and isn't this exactly what I would do for Leah? Sally slows to a more manageable pace and I clamber up into the gun nest and we head on, silent, down the long dark road. I get to be a hero for a while. Then it's someone else's turn, and I go back down into the car, and Leah uses me as a pillow.

We speed on through the gathering night. Leah wakes and doesn't speak. I know she's awake because her breathing has changed, but her eyes are closed and she doesn't draw away from my shoulder, which is about the only good thing going on. Later, she asks where we're going. Gonzo glances at me. “Copsen ordered withdrawal,” Gonzo says, and I look right back at him and say “Yes, he did,” and Gonzo knows that I am lying. I'm not sure if he loves me or hates me for saving us all from a heroic (pointless) last stand. He knows that it was a necessary lie, but it is not something he would have done. Leah gets her answer from Jim Hepsobah.

Our destination is Corvid's Field, which is the name given by all the foreign forces in the Elective Theatre to the small flat strip of green grass and cracked runway which serves as the UN's gesture in the direction of Addeh Katir. The local name is long and musical and relates to a legend about monsters and magic and (probably somewhat later) Buddha. It has too many consonants and a precise intonation which of all of us—as far as I know, including Vasille's men—only Jim Hepsobah can get close to. He has an ear for melody.

“Twenty years ago, at least,” says Jim Hepsobah, after a kind of drawing-in-your-memory pause, “there was a guy flew a small plane out of Corvid's Field. Back then it was still called Bravo Strip by anyone who didn't call it by the Katiri name, and people just about still came here as tourists. Guy's name was Bob Castle, but he played a decent game of chess and everyone who knew him called him Rook, which is the other word for a castle in chess.” He glances back to make sure he's telling her something she already knows. Leah nods confirmation.

“So Castle—Rook—decided that was a pretty cool handle, and he painted a big black bird on his tail fin and changed his call sign, and he went right on flying his charters and taking backpackers on little pleasure hops and filling in the off-season with some more grey-area kind of stuff like medical supplies which may or may not have had a legitimate source. Those grey-area cargos he got from a local fixer called Harry Manjil, an Anglo-Chinese Katiri with messed-up legs. Maybe polio or something. Not sure. He was a little weasel geezer who could make you laugh in about a second and a half, and have your fillings out while you were doing it. And Harry had a gorgeous wife, about twenty years old, called Yvette, and Harry and Yvette and Rook used to spend every Friday night hanging out and playing mah-jongg with whatever girl Rook was dating, and drinking cheap hooch from Harry's still.” Jim Hepsobah turns halfway in his seat, and glances around to be sure everyone is paying attention. He frowns.

“Rook never made a move on Yvette, and Yvette never made a move on Rook. It just wasn't a thing. I say this because people immediately think there's a whole
loooove triangle
aspect to this story, and that pisses me off, because you can get three people in a room without someone screwing someone else's spouse, and because these were good people and honourable people and this isn't that kind of weak-ass story. Are we clear?”

“No triangle,” says Leah. “Gotcha.”

“So one night Yvette comes to Rook in a fluster and she says Harry's gone, just gone, and she doesn't know where he is, and she thinks maybe he got taken by bandits or maybe someone he was doing business with wasn't into the right kind of business. And she thinks she knows where Harry was going and will Rook fly her around there so she can look down from on high and see if she can see anything? Like his car. Or him. Or something. Please? So . . . Rook says no. He says absolutely no. He tells her, go home. Harry will be back. But we are not going flying low over some criminal sonsabitches who are doing criminal sonsabitches-type business with Harry, because they will get nervous and shoot him, and us. And Yvette goes home. And Rook gets himself in his plane and he goes up and he looks for Harry himself, because he thinks Yvette is absolutely right.

“He takes himself a big old automatic rifle for personal security, and a couple of grenades for added personal security, and he goes out towards the mountains, which is where criminal sonsabitches mostly do business in this region. He goes out and he flies over a camp and he sees Harry's jeep all shot up, and he drops one of his grenades on the tents down below, because his friend is dead down there. Now, he knows what will happen next, but he's an emotional guy, this Rook, and he does what he thinks is the right thing. And the leader of these folk down on the ground is a huge bastard, a man called Nand. He comes out and he shoots Rook through the floor of the plane. Just plain lucky, or unlucky, or he just puts so many shells in the air that one of 'em has to do something, because Rook is flying so low. Rook knows he's all done, and he brings the plane around one last time. On the ground Nand is cursing him and shooting at him and blowing bits off the wings. He shoots up the cockpit pretty good. Rook takes a few more, but he keeps that plane level and going in a straight line, right towards this evil sonuvabitch who killed his friend. Gets so close he's staring Nand right in the eye. And then he pulls the pin on the second grenade and the plane comes down on the camp in a hail of fire. So Rook kills the ogre.

“But the thing is, Harry wasn't dead at all. He'd had his car stolen right out from under him, and a bunch of arseholes had ripped him off and tried to kill him, but he was fast and smart and he ducked away into the jungle. Maybe they would have gone after him, but Rook arrived about that time, and they got busy.

“So Harry was footsore, but he was alive. He came home to Yvette just like Rook had said he would. So when Harry made it rich, he bought up the strip and got people around to calling it Corvid's Field, because a rook is a kind of corvid, maybe the only good kind. Little headstone for a friend. And then Harry and Yvette packed up and went away and no one ever saw them again.” Jim Hepsobah smiles a sad little smile. Leah sniffs.

“But . . . the local people, the Katiri farmers and traders and the pirates from Lake Addeh, they liked Rook too. And they say the birds of Corvid's Field fly around the strip each dusk, and they fly in formation like a little single-engine plane, and that's the spirit of Bob Castle, the Rook, watching over Corvid's Field and enjoying the sunset. And woe betide the man who steps out of line there, because Rook may not have any grenades left, but he still has a rifle and he's a mean shot.” Jim Hepsobah grins like a Viking, and you can pretty much smell the aviation fuel and the cheap flyboy cigars, and you can hear Nand the bandit screaming as he sees those burning fragments coming down on him from the sky.

Leah asks if that's a true story, meaning “How much of it is a true story?” which makes me think of the Evangelist, and that, in turn, reminds me that Corvid's Field is the UN airfield Elisabeth was writing about for her newspaper, and is she still there? Did she go home? Is she alive? And I realise that Elisabeth does not know about Leah, and that Leah does not know about Elisabeth, and then that there is no reason why they should, because Elisabeth and I have never been other than friends and training partners.

Jim Hepsobah is about to answer Leah's question when the road in front of us explodes and the windscreen stars and shatters, and we are hurled not forward, but back, as Gonzo stamps on the accelerator and takes us around and alongside the crater, gunning the engine to make it over the rubble by the side of the road, and controlling the slewing and skidding as we leave the asphalt or tarmac or clay or whatever it is they use here. Ronnie Cheung's tactical driving course takes over, and everyone tries to throw the enemy, weaving in and out like a school of fish confusing a tuna. (It's hard to think of tuna as predators, because we eat them as sushi, but if you're on Mr. Bluefin's dinner list, he's as mean a sucker as you could ever know, and he is fast and damn hungry.) There are only four vehicles and one of them's a tank, so the effect is muted, but Mr. Bluefin in this case is a lousy shot, or more likely he's never seen coordinated tactical driving before. He shoots at where we are and he needs to be shooting at where we're going to be. He misses. We leave him behind.

Twenty minutes later: three figures beside a barricade of wood and rubble. Gonzo barely slows. He flicks his headlights to full, and I catch a glimpse of a couple of guys with an RPG (they are not
aiming
it at us, they just
have
one, like they're having tea and grenades) and a third figure in shredded coveralls. This third person, apart from the others, is tall and too thin, and wears an orange prisoner-suit and a gasmask. The gasmask is very strange because it makes the person in it look as if they have no head. The person waves, arms crossing and uncrossing. “Stop” the orange person is saying, or “Help” or possibly “Slow down so we can kill you and steal your car.” And then they're gone—Gonzo has taken us over the middle of the barricade, and they haven't shot at us. Does that mean they weren't part of the outfit who blew up the road? Or does it mean that they were, but they don't fancy a real fight? I have no idea. I ask Gonzo, but he's fighting to control the car. He's had enough of this crap, and he's got the thing up to about sixty, which isn't bad on a road made of clay and asphalt patched with sheep shit. We leave the waving creepy person behind, and Gonzo keeps that speed up until we arrive at Corvid's Field.

T
HE
UN
FLAG
is still flying over the control tower, sad and bleached. A couple of guys in blue helmets stand at the gates, covering us with their sidearms. The walls have been shot up some, and there's a dirty smear along one side of the tower where some kind of explosive has gone off and the tower has been patched but not repainted. Otherwise, they seem to have got lucky, although from this angle it's not possible to see the whole field. And on the runway
(Sing hosanna!)
there is a pair of elderly but serviceable cargo planes. They have no windows and the seating will not be comfortable, but between them, if we are permitted to use them, we can evacuate everyone.