A Killing Air

by Nigel Price

  Brannigan even saw fit to slap him on the back. Heartily, as if following a well-worn trope that he felt was a requirement of the moment. David and Neville grinned all the broader until it seemed their faces would split open like genial sharks. They were all mates.

  The call from behind went unnoticed by the other three. They were exiting the underpass, heading back towards the hotel. Harry caught it though. He had been half expecting something like this. When it was repeated the others heard it too. Without stopping they turned. At the far end of the underpass the scrawny street sweeper leaned on his broom.

  “What was that?” David puzzled. “Anyone speak Mandarin?”

  None of the three Munchkins did, and Harry wasn’t owning up.

  The call came again. A long arm was raised and waved vaguely at them. To Harry it seemed that the finger singled him out like the Grim Reaper making his selection. The others didn’t appear to notice the distinction. Neville sniggered. “Silly sod. Ignore him.”

  “Come on,” Harry cut in. “Let’s get back.” The hairs on the back of his neck were alerting him to danger. His sixth sense kicking in.

  “Shouldn’t we see what the poor old bugger wants?” David said.

  Brannigan snorted. “Fuck him. Probably just wants money.”

  “Come on,” Harry repeated, starting away. The others followed. Quickening his step, Harry accelerated the group away from the underpass. “Some beggar tried to touch me for a few Yuan the other day,” he lied. “They all do it.” A bolt of shame ran through him. Something screamed at him that money was the last thing the sweeper wanted.

  Still, his Mandarin was classroom. Desks in rows, whiteboard and tirelessly patient instructor. Most likely the sweeper’s dialect would be as inconsiderately alien as the old woman’s. And he was damned sure the sweeper wouldn’t have any English, so what was the point?

  During their short excursion the air had thickened even more. Their lungs were hurting. This was ridiculous. “That’s the last walk I’m taking here,” Brannigan choked.

  “Let’s get inside,” Harry said, making a bee-line for the hotel entrance. It was fifty yards off. He could see it now. A glance over his shoulder showed the street sweeper following. The man was keeping his distance. He was like a runt expelled from the pack, keeping pace in the hope of scraps. Last to the carrion, but there might be a bone to chew when the rest had fed. Harry was filled with revulsion. The unfairness of life. He hated it. Here in the world’s most populous country, the divisions between rich and poor were already stark, becoming more so with every year. He saw it throughout the Indian sub-continent as well. Individuals struggling to rise out of the great mass of humanity, to snatch at their own humanity. The task was hopeless. For the vast majority only failure and despair awaited. He remembered a drive out of Mumbai. His car had driven for hour after hour through the belt of slums ringing the city. He had been struck dumb by the impossibility of anyone ever being able to solve a problem of such dimensions.

  He felt the old familiar blackness start to envelop him. They had reached the entrance of the hotel foyer. Brannigan and the others stepped inside. They were stamping the dust from their feet and sucking in great lungfuls of filtered air.

  Harry turned back to the street sweeper. He felt in his pocket. There were some notes.

  “You coming?” Brannigan was holding the door open for him.

  “You go ahead. I’ll be right there.”

  Brannigan chortled, seeing what Harry intended. “You great softie.”

  Harry re-crossed the car park making for the exit where the lone figure waited, leaning on the tall broom handle like Van Gogh’s Old Peasant of Provence translated into Chinese. The face was masked against the rotten air. While Harry dug out some notes, a doubt slunk at the back of his mind. Something nagged.

  His suspicion was confirmed when he held out the notes. The street sweeper ignored them. It wasn’t money he wanted. Instead he reached to his face mask, fiddled with the knot that secured it, and pulled it aside to speak.

  “You are in danger.”

  Harry gaped.

  “They are hunting for you.”

  Harry continued to gape. Not because of the words spoken in perfect English, but because the face was that of a woman. And beautiful.

  Six

  Harry stared. The woman stared back.

  Eventually Harry felt he should say something. “Who are you?” It seemed a reasonable question. Then, “Why are you dressed as a man?” Less so.

  “I’m not dressed as a man,” the woman replied. “This is how street sweepers dress in China. Men and women.” There was an edge of contempt in her voice. Harry felt this wasn’t good if there was to be any sort of relationship between the two of them. The next instant he wondered why on earth he was imagining a relationship with a street sweeper. He wasn’t. But with the woman in front of him?

  “You’re not a street sweeper, are you?” he said slowly.

  The woman sighed. “Did you hear what I said? You’re in danger.”

  “It won’t be the first time,” Harry replied, trying for ‘enigmatic’. The woman’s answering expression told him he had only managed ‘boorish lead-brained dullard’.

  “This isn’t a game,” she tried again. “Don’t think your foreign passport will protect you.”

  “What from?”

  The woman glanced over her shoulder, checking her arcs. “We can’t talk here.” She looked back at him. “But we have to talk.”

  Harry wondered if it was time to stop playing. “About?”

  “You know full well.”

  “About?”

  “Last night,” she said. There was emotion in her voice now. “The woman.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Someone who fought back.”

  “Fought back? Against what?”

  “Not what. Who.”

  “Whom,” Harry said, unable to stop himself being a smart-arse. Even at a time like this. “It follows a preposition, see?”

  The woman’s contempt intensified. This wasn’t going well. “But then at least you speak English,” Harry quickly conceded. “I don’t speak a word of Mandarin.”

  “Good,” she said, and let loose a burst of something Harry assumed to be the sort of invective his classroom tutor had neglected to cover. A hand gesture accompanied it. Obscure, but he was able to imagine the intent behind it.

  There was the sound of car brakes some way off. She started, eyes hunting into the fog. “Meet me here,” she said rapidly, producing a card and thrusting it at his chest. “Tonight. Eight o’clock.”

  “Why?” Harry asked. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”

  She had turned and was heading away. Not towards the expressway or underpass, but towards the shops on the far side of the hotel. Harry noticed that she had discarded the broom, dropping it beside the car park wall. The face mask was back in place though, like a fortress wall to keep out marauders. The hat too had gone, tossed aside. Her hair hung down over her shoulders. In those few steps she had transformed from menial labourer into girl-about-town. While the jacket and trousers remained those of the sweeper, her bearing suited one for a catwalk.

  Harry stared into the smog after her until her outline dissolved like gold in acid. Pure gold, Harry thought.

  The hotel door banged, bringing him back to the moment. “What the hell are you doing?” Brannigan shouted at him. “Where’d the old beggar go? Take all your money?”

  “Every last kuai.”

  “More fool you.” He came across to stand at Harry’s side. While he looked in the same direction, for him there was nothing to see. For Harry the memory of the retreating girl remained imprinted on the wall of gas. Brownian motion. She filled the space available.

  Brannigan tugged at Harry’s sleeve. “The old man wants to speak to you.” He said it with the air of someone announcing the Second Coming.

  “I thought you said I had till the end of the conference?”

  �
�You do. But I was on the phone to the office. Old Man Alderton asked me if I’d had a word with you. I said that I had. Told him you were favourable to the idea and he said he’d like to speak to you.”

  Harry half expected Brannigan to hop from foot to foot with the thrill of it all. He had encountered Old Man Alderton on several occasions and knew him to be a ruthless old bastard who hid his cut-throat guile behind an oily, triple-chinned smile. Brannigan himself had openly referred to the man as a control freak. Like all such, Alderton’s need to know was driven by an all-consuming insecurity. A monumental terror of inferiority turned itself inside-out and went at the world with all guns blazing, regardless of the human cost. So long as he and his immediate spawn were in clover, everyone else could either serve their narrow interests, or be destroyed. As such, he was the ideal person to run the company he had built. It was that kind of outfit.

  He had peopled the highest echelon of Alderton’s with oafs and sycophants. Oaf-in-Chief was the Operations Director, a flannelled fool with the subtlety and emotional intelligence of a cartoon caricature. Evelyn Law had once been described to Harry as a pig in muck whose sty was daily replenished with further shovel-loads. Old Man Alderton had shielded him from the failure that his own obtuseness would otherwise have earned him. It was hard to understand the connection between the two. As different as rat and chimp, they yet shared a small handful of defining traits: greed; arrogance; ruthlessness. Alderton had a habit of celebrating new business by pretending to wipe his mouth and uppermost chin as if mopping gravy. Law would chortle obediently. The industry mocked and despised them. Some feared them. With a painful inevitability, they would triumph all the way to the crematorium. Many prayed that would be soon.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather sleep on it first,” Harry answered.

  He would enjoy leading him on. He didn’t doubt for a second that they would come after him, attacking his market share with full force. Brannigan had said as much. It was the nature of the beast. Harry didn’t care. He had seen things and done things that Old Man Alderton could barely imagine, let alone his emotionally crippled shadow Evelyn Law. DH Lawrence had called their kind ‘mortal furniture’. Time would consign them to its flame in due course. As with all who breathed and called themselves ‘alive’. Right now, Harry had other things on his mind. Alderton and his games could go hang.

  Seven

  It was a long drag into evening. The afternoon’s last hours pulled themselves by like booze-addled diners in search of the exit. Harry spent much of it in his room avoiding Brannigan. His phone rang twice. He ignored it. Brannigan. The man didn’t give up. It rang a third time. An overseas number. Alderton? Probably. Harry switched it off. He could imagine the Old Man getting hot under his stained collar. Unused to being kept waiting. He was probably already working on his plan to destroy Harry and the whole of Delaney’s. Envisaging scenarios of destruction wrought upon all who refused to sell him their soul.

  Harry stretched out on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, hands behind his head. A tiny red dot flashed intermittently from the smoke detector. He started to count the intervals between flashes. The next moment he was surrounded by a cold, bare mountainscape. A vista of unbroken beige rock lay before him. His position behind the sandbag wall they had inherited from the previous unit to occupy the lone outpost, isolated at the head of the valley, its fields of observation and fire covering the main route in and out.

  Their task: to dominate the ground. Spread the word that democracy had arrived. Was here to stay. Sort of. Who really believed that? Certainly not Harry. Nor his men. Nor even the hierarchy, if truth be told. Which it never was. It was simply the tale that gave temporary meaning to their existence in this God-forsaken patch of waterless dirt. A hundred and thirty years before, his predecessors had fought on pretty much the same spot. They were more honest in those days. No pretence about democracy. Just influence. All with the same result though. Death and a wholesale waste of effort. Afghanistan was a dry sponge in the sun. It would soak up any amount of blood and treasure, and soon enough would gorge still more. On it would go until the political will ran dry, whereupon the country would be left to its own primitive devices for further decades. Until the next time someone was rash enough to venture into its cauldron of corrupt superstition.

  The automatic fire came without warning. One moment they were making a brew: a blue flame hovered like a lost spirit enshrouding the hexamine block. In the mess tin above, the eruption of bubbles had just begun. The next second the crack and thump of high velocity rounds incoming.

  “Take cover!” someone shouted unnecessarily. Everyone already had. All eyes were straining into the hazy distance, seeking out the firer. Looking for muzzle flash or smoke. They knew they’d fail. The Taliban dry-cleaned their barrels before firing as any professional did. No gun oil, no smoke. It was that simple.

  More fire. Harry knew that the rounds might be nowhere near him, but the snap of them in the air always conjured the same instinctive terror. That they were framing you. Clipping past on either side a hair’s breadth away. And if one hit? He had seen the effect. Shattered bone. Severed arteries. Torn gut. High velocity rounds didn’t muck about. They did the business. Especially the higher calibre ones from a Kalashnikov, the enemy’s weapon of choice.

  Then it happened. One of his men had tried just that bit too hard to locate the enemy. His head jarred backwards on his shoulders, the round exiting through the back of the skull high in the hairline. Instant death.

  “Got him!” someone shouted, pointing.

  “Target indication,” Harry prompted. “Come on. You know the drill.”

  Opting for the lazy method, the soldier shouted back, “Watch my tracer.” A line of scarlet hosed out from his Minimi light machine gun. Three hundred yards away, the rounds danced in the sand and rock, setting up a small mist of destruction.

  “Rapid fire,” Harry shouted. The section obeyed, bullets tearing back at the Taliban sniper. The body of the dead soldier was hauled aside, the ruptured face covered with a spare shirt from the man’s own pack. Blood quickly soaked through it, spreading in all directions, marking the cloth a deep crimson.

  If they couldn’t winkle out the sniper themselves, or if the lone rifleman developed into a full scale assault, Harry would call in a Tornado GR4 from Kandahar. The Taliban hated close air support. The sound of the Tornado making a ground-level pass was enough to give anyone the shits all by itself. If that failed to make the buggers run, a Paveway bomb would give them further reason to sod off. Either that or blow them into the next world. In pieces.

  Harry’s particular favourite was the American A10 Warthog, with its nose-mounted 30mm rotary cannon. The rate of fire was a treat to behold for infantry under attack. The recoil seemed to stop the plane in mid-air, emitting a ground-rumbling growl. Anything at the point of impact would be eviscerated by sheer weight of lead. You could feel your men’s morale ascend the moment one of those arrived on target. The Taliban rarely hung around.

  Then everything started to go wrong. That was the trouble with dreams. They never faithfully record what actually happens. They muddle and mix events. The attack on the outpost had ended with the one fatality. One of Harry’s snipers had got the Taliban. So it ended in a draw. But now, all of a sudden, Harry was somewhere else altogether. There was a rioting crowd. He was cornered, the mob closing in. It was a dusty shit of a town. Up some blind alley. His men had their backs to the wall and the mob was on all sides, lunging at them. In came the petrol bomb. Two of his men were sprayed with the stuff and danced in flames to the crowd’s delight like goaded, toothless bears on market days, tortured into madness and subjugation by their owners.

  Then a sniper caught another. They were in big trouble now. Basra? Harry couldn’t be sure. But dreams are like that. He was the same age as in all his dreams, somewhere a dozen years earlier. At his prime. Gone now.

  He had called for back-up but the radios were shit and in any case the signal in the
tight huddle of buildings was even more shit. They were on their own.

  Enough of this. He put a round over the heads of the nearest attackers. Bugger the consequences. He’d had enough. The crowd pulled back. Until they realised he didn’t have the balls actually to kill any of them. So they closed in again. And that was when Private Cotton started shooting. Right into them. Bang, bang, bang. Down they went. One after another. The platoon sergeant got a grip of him but not before the mob had begun to howl with outrage, the sight of their fallen stark in their savage faces.

  Bug out. Making use of the lull from their consternation, Harry led the way out. A frontal charge, pretty much. Lashing out with boot, fist and rifle butt. The patrol crashed its way out of the alley and into the open square. The sniper fired again. This time they spotted the bugger. Hosed him down with fire. The crowd tore away on all sides, fleeing helter skelter in a furious panic. Screaming for fuck knows what to kill the hated British.

  Harry woke with a start. His silenced mobile was skittering across the bedside table, something tiny but maniacal hammering to get out. Harry’s shirt was soaked. His face wet too. His breathing heavy and hard, banging on his ribs. Overhead the silly red light winked at him. Good one, mate. He reached across and captured the phone on only the second fumbling grab. A small queue of messages berated him. Fuck them. They could wait. But the screen was lit with a name that brought a smile even to Harry’s bleary miserable face. David Lin. His mate down in Shanghai.

  “David, don’t tell me you’re still in the office?”

  The reply came from the same planet but a different world. One without old beaten dead women. “Been a long day. Sorry to bother you at this hour, Harry.” Then with tender deliberation: “There’s some shit going down.”

  That was just one reason why Harry liked David Lin; his speech was occasionally seasoned with phrases from the Hollywood glossary of B-movie cliché. “You don’t say?”