The Abrupt Physics of Dying (8 page)

Zdravko beamed and passed the bottle, half-empty now. ‘You like? Look, dual completion,’ he laughed, an old oilfield joke. ‘Good Bulgarian girls. You come with me to Bulgaria, I introduce you to girls like this, yes? Good girls. Not American pussy-whippers.’

It had been a long time since he had been with a woman, but the skin-mag marionettes on the screen weren’t doing anything for him. ‘I’ll look you up next time I’m in Sofia,’ he said, raising the bottle to his lips.

‘This place is shit hole, yes? No women, no nothing. Just desert.’ Zdravko refilled his glass. ‘Only good thing is shooting. Everyone here is shooting.’ He reached to the floor and unzipped a small duffel bag at his feet. ‘This good weapon,’ he said, handing Clay a short-barrelled sub-machine gun with a huge curved banana-clip.

Clay put the bottle on the table, hefted the weapon in his hands. It was surprisingly light, compact. ‘AK74U,’ said Clay.

Zdravko raised his eyebrows. ‘You know.’

‘I’ve …’ Clay stopped, took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been on the receiving end.’

Another stare, longer this time. ‘We call her
Ksyuka
, Russian girl name. Small – 5.45 millimetre. She hot. Shoots hot.’ Zdravko looked over his shoulder and took back the weapon.

Weapons were ubiquitous in Yemen, but it was the first time he had seen a Petro-Tex contractor carrying anything quite so lethal here in Aden. Clay swallowed another mouthful of vodka, feeling it now, that familiar distance, like low cloud settling.

‘Close range, cuts man in two pieces.’ Zdravko drew his hand across his belly, left to right. ‘Even idiot Parnell can do.’

Clay said nothing, stared at the screen, the girl’s face dripping.

Zdravko tipped the bottle to his mouth, ‘Tonight I go shooting. Come.’

‘Sorry,’ Clay said, his insides lurching. ‘I have work tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow Friday, Straker. Day off.’

‘Maybe next time.’

Zdravko shrugged as if to say that it was his loss. ‘Not good, fucking terrorist assholes taking your driver.’

‘Not good at all.’ Terrorists. That’s what they had called SWAPO, too, back then:
fokken terrs.

‘You lucky,’ said Zdravko, pointing the
Ksyuka
at his own chest, then Clay’s. ‘I find them.’

Clay pushed the barrel away. He was pretty sure he wanted this guy nowhere near Abdulkader.

‘What you do here, my friend?’ said Zdravko.

‘I spend most of my time trying to get paid.’

Zdravko laughed. It was a big laugh, big like him. ‘Getting money from Petro-Tex is like getting blow job from Yemeni woman.’ He roared again, eyes dancing, slugged more vodka and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. He tapped the
Ksyuka
’s magazine. It sounded full. ‘Don’t worry, my friend. We find assholes who take your driver. I cut them in two.’ Zdravko pushed the bottle into Clay’s hands.

Clay tightened his jaw, took a gulp, another. ‘How much time have you spent in Yemen?’ Not a lot, he guessed.

‘Too much.’ Zdravko slid his business card across the table: Z. Todorov, BRS Supply, Sofia.

Clay flipped his own card onto the table. Capricorn Consulting, an impressive name for a struggling one-man enterprise. He had set up in Cyprus almost three years ago, as much for the favourable tax regime as for the obscurity, a place to disappear to for a while. But clients had been hard to come by, rates low, his expenses far too high. He’d landed a few small jobs in Egypt and Jordan, but Petro-Tex had been his first big break, on paper at least.

Clay twisted Zdravko’s card in his fingers, feeling the alcohol swim in his head. ‘What kind of supply?’ he slurred.

Zdravko grinned and poured out the last of the vodka. ‘Usual stuff. Good business here in Yemen. Very, very good. This trip, I make enough money, I never work again. Go home, get girlfriend like that. Two.’ He pointed at the pulsing screen.

Clay raised his eyes, finished the vodka. ‘Clearly I’m in the wrong line of work.’

The Bulgarian smiled. ‘You drink good, Aussie.’

If Zdravko wanted to think he was an Aussie, that was fine with him. For all he knew this guy could have been on the other side. There had been enough Cubans and Russians crawling around Angola in ’79 and ’80. Why not Bulgarians, too? He looked the right age – swallowed into the vortex with so many others, young, with ideals perhaps, dreams, thrown into the maelstrom and then excreted like
so much waste, dead and maimed together in one stinking turd. He had that look: the ranging stare, the furtive flicking hyper-awareness, the fuck-you sneer.

‘Not like these American pussies,’ said Zdravko.

‘With their crap weapons,’ said Clay.

Zdravko boomed out a laugh, lifted the bottle, guzzled.

Clay looked at his watch. It was gone midnight and the movie was finished. He stood to leave, unsteady.

Zdravko grabbed his arm and pulled him back. ‘You fight, Aussie? You like to fight?’

Clay laughed, but a spike of adrenaline pierced the vodka haze. His fingertips tingled with the surge. His mind cleared. He squared up to the Bulgarian. ‘Depends.’

Zdravko smiled, put down the vodka bottle, and flicked out a quick left jab. The strike was hard, but aimed low, just under Clay’s collarbone. Clay caught it easily with his left forearm, down and across, sending Zdravko’s fist glancing harmlessly away. He shifted back, ready to counterpunch, stared the Bulgarian in the eyes.

Zdravko laughed, opened his right hand and clapped Clay on the shoulder. Clay let it land.

‘Good,’ said Zdravko.

‘No,’ said Clay. ‘Not very good.’

‘Shotokan?’

Johannesburg streets, he thought. Parachute Regiment training school, Bloemfontein. South African border war. But what he said was: ‘Renbukai.
Ikkyu
. Brown belt.’

Zdravko laughed. ‘Good enough.’ He reached into his bag, produced another bottle, slammed it down on the table. ‘Now, we start real drinking.’

Twisting by the Pool

He opened the fridge, pulled out a near-empty bottle of Smirnoff and a chilled glass tumbler and clunked them down on the papers scattered across his desk. His ears were still ringing from the shooting and the back of his skull felt like it was going to peel open and spill out his brains. Outside the second-floor room, the bank of air conditioners groaned at full power. Friday morning, and the streets were deserted, the faithful thronging the mosques and then off to chew the afternoon away. A holy day, a day of rest. He rolled the cold bottle over his forehead, poured a full glass and downed it in one go. The cold liquid burned his throat. He walked to the window and wound down the shutters against the sun, catching a glimpse of his face in the glass, his father’s nose, his mother’s eyes and teeth.

He had stayed for the second bottle. Halfway through, Zdravko had led him stumbling downstairs to his car, a big new black Land Rover, and driven him, lights spinning, to the outskirts of the city, talking non-stop, laughing that big laugh, until they reached an open piece of ground abutting the mountains. Zdravko had opened the back, lifted a panel, pulled out a
Ksyuka
and a couple of bandoliers of magazines and handed them to Clay. There must have been at least a dozen other weapons stashed in the hidden compartment, familiar-looking AK47s, a Russian-made Dragunov sniper rifle with an attached bipod and scope, at least two Uzis. Zdravko hauled out a muslin sack and threw it over his shoulder, grabbed two steel stakes and a sledgehammer, slammed the trunk closed. ‘Could only get goat,’ he muttered. ‘We pretend is small Yemeni fucker, yes?’ In
a few minutes he had pounded the stakes into the ground about twenty metres from the car and trussed up the goat’s carcass so it hung splayed and racked, white in the Mercedes’ headlights. Then he stepped back and handed Clay the bottle.

‘Watch this, Aussie.’ Zdravko stood, checked the
Ksyuka
’s magazine, chambered a round, and banged off the whole mag in one go. The almost bisected halves of the carcass hung ragged from the ropes. Zdravko boomed and slapped Clay on the back. He was jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas, yelling, ‘You see that Aussie? You see that? Like I say, yes? So fucking hot. You see that?’ He changed mags and then set about ripping off a couple hundred rounds, emptying clip after clip, spraying wildly, the tracers ricocheting like fireworks in the night. Then it was Clay’s turn. He picked a target, a cluster of stones at the limit of the Merc’s lights and squeezed off a short controlled burst, then another, feeling the hideous, wonderful power of the thing. By this time Zdravko was weaving dangerously, the empty vodka bottle still hanging from his hand, talking wildly in Bulgarian, waving at him, yelling, ‘Shoot, motherfucker, shoot’, exploding in laughter each time Clay let off a burst. It was gone four in the morning when they stumbled back to the guesthouse.

It had been two days since he’d left Abdulkader in the desert. He tried to focus on the computer screen, on the work, this report that he would soon deliver to the hapless Yemeni regulators, another box to be ticked in the meaningless dance that passed for an environmental approvals process. His fingers moved over the keyboard. ‘State of the art environmental controls applied to all stages of the production cycle.’ The pixels glowed in the shuttered gloom. The cursor blinked away the minutes at the full stop.

He poured another vodka and picked up the letter from Eben’s parents. The usual stuff: widespread damage, coma. Worse now, it sounded, than when he had last seen him, lying in bed, all the muscle gone, pale skin stretched over cheekbones, the eyes staring out at him, damning him. He had stayed half an hour, sitting next to his friend’s bed under fluorescent light, staring at the puke-green
linoleum floor tiles, watching the occasional passing of an orderly under the drawn dividing curtain, the flowers he had bought from the corner vendor on the street outside the hospital hanging in his hands, wondering why he had even bothered coming. He had taken a last look, pushed himself to his feet, crammed the flowers into the bin by the door, and walked out. That was twelve years ago.

Please, they wrote, could he send more money. They had moved Eben from the military hospital four years ago, horrified at the level of care, at the way everyone just wanted to forget. They found him a place in a private clinic they couldn’t afford. Twelve years now he’d been like that. It didn’t seem possible. Some days Clay wished they would just pull the plug. He had actually written them a letter a couple of months ago pleading with them to do just that, but had binned it. He should never have brought him out. He should have let him die there, staring up into the blue Ovamboland sky. If he had been stronger, a better friend, he would have.

Clay pushed back his chair and picked up the phone. ‘Nils, it’s Clay Straker.’ He knew Karila would be there, even on a Friday. ‘I left that tender on your desk yesterday. Did you get a chance to look at it?’

Clay looked down at his copy of the estimate. The margins were scribbled with red, numbers crossed out and recalculated two, three times. He had even lowered his rate slightly over the current phase.

The line was open, static only.

‘Nils? Are you there?’

‘That will not be acceptable, I am afraid,’ came the voice on the line. ‘We would like to extend your contract, Straker – the quality of your work has been good – but we have a lower bidder. I am sure you can understand our position.’

‘Look, I can come down to seventy-five thousand. I can’t go any lower, considering all that needs to be done.’

‘Is that the best price you can give us, Straker?’

He was pretty sure that none of his competitors, the larger consulting firms, could go that low. He clenched his jaw. ‘Bargain of the year, Nils.’

‘And you guarantee we’ll get our approval from the agency?’

‘You’ll have your permit. Just like last time.’

‘Please send me a letter confirming your new offer, and we’ll get back to you with our decision.’

‘You’ll have it today,’ he said.

‘There is one more thing, Straker,’ came Karila’s voice. ‘There has been another attack. Two gathering stations were hit last night, generators destroyed, production off-line for twenty-four hours.’

‘Jesus. Was anyone hurt?’

‘Only a couple of Yemeni labourers. Cuts and bruises. They are in hospital now. It could have been much worse.’

‘You really think this guy is Al Qaeda?’

‘It is not my concern, Mister Straker. Vance Parnell is dealing with the government on this matter. Speaking of which, the PSO called this morning.’

Clay waited, let the line burn.

‘They are expecting you this afternoon. They want to “confirm some details”, as they put it.’

Clay’s stomach contracted. Why hadn’t Al Shams protected his location? His flunkeys, the two gunmen who had stopped them by the side of the road, had screwed up. It was pretty clear. Al Shams had had two choices that day – let him go, or kill him.

‘I don’t have time to loiter around in Aden all day, Nils. Not if you want those permits quickly.’ He needed to get back out there, find Al Shams, and get Abdulkader back.

The line was quiet as Karila mulled it over.

‘Today, Straker. PSO. Be at the Interior Ministry building in town, near the docks, at two o’clock, without fail. You can leave for the field tomorrow. Then get out there and get these people under control, Straker. Do what you have to do.’

‘Jesus,’ he breathed, palm clasped over the handset’s pickup. ‘OK, Nils. OK. By the way, still no cheque.’ He waited for a reply, but the line had gone dead. He put the phone back in its cradle, and poured himself another vodka.

Two hours later he pulled into the palm-lined parking lot of the Mövenpick, the only half-decent modern hotel in Southern Arabia. He locked Abdulkader’s Land Cruiser and walked across sun-softened tarmac to the front entrance, a noon buzz on. The pool was small, but it was filled with water, clean, and surrounded by towering eucalypts – imports, like him.

He spread his towel on one of a dozen or so vacant reclining chairs, pulled off his T-shirt, and ordered a large vodka and soda on the rocks from a uniformed attendant. A couple of hairy, burly, tattooed oilies were the only other poolside patrons. They wallowed on sunbeds in shorts and baseball caps, drinking imported beer.

The sun was hot. He laid back, closed his eyes, felt the sweat bead in his pores, track across his skin. He had done what Al Shams had asked. And in a few hours he had to face the PSO, the Political Security Organisation, Saleh’s shadowy personal paramilitary security apparatus, partial, from what he had heard, to extrajudicial detention, harassment of political opponents, infiltration, beatings and torture. Surely Al Shams would have known that his message would have triggered Army and PSO interest. He was not stupid. Just the way he spoke suggested education and intelligence. And those flashes of violence, like a veil drawing back. Jesus Christ.

His drink came. He cracked open his book and tried to read. He ordered another drink. The two oilies finished beers and had just called for more when they went quiet and turned their heads in unison towards the patio entrance.

The bikini she was wearing would have turned heads on Bondi beach, but here, it was positively, wonderfully scandalous. She was petite, sculpted, a gymnast, thought Clay, or a runner, but for the considerable swell of chest that the string top struggled to contain as she walked. It was the woman in the Land Rover on the road to Al Urush.

The oilies were sitting up now and they called out to her to join them, beaming from behind reflective Oakleys. She smiled and moved to the opposite side of the pool, his side, dropping her towel, bag, and a couple of newspapers onto the chair next to his. He
looked up at her, but she turned away, twitched to the pool’s edge and dove in. The oilies glared at him. He shrugged his shoulders, grinned, raised his glass to them and went back to his novel: at night, when the other nurses were asleep, Catherine came to the wounded soldier and made love to him, straddling his shrapnelled legs. It was summer, the war raged, millions were dead, and the world was changing forever around them. They were in love.

‘I have never believed he was a misogynist.’

Clay looked up from the pages. She was perched at the edge of the pool, looking up at him, elbows hooked on the tiled rim. Water dripped from her dark shoulder-length hair onto her bunched shoulders and beaded on her cheeks and nose.

He flicked his wrist, looked at the book’s cover.
A Farewell to Arms
, an old Scribner’s edition, one of his father’s, one of the few of his things he’d kept. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Again.’

She smiled. ‘It’s only people who have never read him who say that. They get it in their criticism courses and treat it as fact. Hemingway loved women. Achingly. He was awed by them, but he didn’t hate them. He married four times, after all.’ The accent was European, French, Italian perhaps.

‘I can relate.’ He tried a smile, was pretty sure it came out stupid-looking.

‘Marriages?’

‘Awe.’

She smiled, pulled herself up and sat side-saddle at the pool’s edge, one knee up, foot on the tile, the other leg dangling in the water. It was quite a pretty pose.

‘Fancy a drink?’ he managed.

‘A fresh lime, please.’ She stood and walked to her sunbed, adjusted the parasol. The oilies gaped. She sat down and ran her hands through her hair. As she did, her bag fell to the tile between them. A few things spilled out: a book, Rimbaud, a hairbrush, a French driver’s licence. Clay reached to help but she scooped everything up before he got a chance.

She smiled at him. ‘My name is Rania.’

‘Clay.’

‘
Enchantée
.’ They shook hands. She wore no rings.

‘You work for Petro-Tex,’ she said. It was a statement.

‘Around here that’s a pretty good guess.’

‘I suppose it is.’ She smiled, ran her hand through her hair.

‘And I suppose you aren’t a petroleum engineer’s bored expatriate wife.’

She laughed and opened up one of her papers, the
International Herald Tribune
. ‘Here,’ she said, handing him the paper. She pointed to a short piece on page five: ‘Islamic Terrorism on Rise in Yemen’. ‘That’s me.’

He scanned the article. Radical Islamist militants, planned attacks on American military personnel, the failed bombing at this very hotel two years ago, an emerging and as yet little-known group called Ansar Al-Sharia, an Al Qaeda off-shoot with links to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Her name was Rania LaTour, Agence France Presse. He couldn’t help being impressed. He handed back the paper and took a long drink.

‘I am doing a story on unrest in the South, the emergence of a new rebellion.’ Her voice was oddly childlike, a boy’s.

‘War?’

‘It is a distinct possibility.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Have you not heard? Jets from the South knocked out Sana’a’s two power stations yesterday. It is a serious escalation.’

‘Jesus, no. I’ve been in the field.’

‘Yes, I saw you.’ She smiled.

‘And you didn’t even wave,’ he said, signalling the waiter for another round. He remembered seeing other articles by this same Rania LaTour, now that he thought about it. She seemed very young to be doing this job in such a harshly male part of the world. She was very pretty.