The Abrupt Physics of Dying

by Paul E. Hardisty

  Clay found Atef in the kitchen.

  ‘Good, Mister Clay?’

  Clay nodded. ‘Tell your cousin thank you. Who knows about the second set of accounts, Atef?’

  ‘My cousin is not supposed to know. They think he is stupid.’

  ‘Dunkley?’

  ‘My cousin thinks yes. And Mister Parnell.’

  Clay showed Atef the accounts page, stabbed his finger onto the name Mansour for Import. ‘Can you check these guys out, Atef? It’s important.’

  ‘Trouble, Mister Clay?’

  ‘Just be careful, Atef. Please.’

  It was gone midday when Clay reached the Petro-Tex building. His head was still swimming, and the events of the last days now seemed confused and twisted. Any earlier clarity had vanished. Halfway up the stairs he stopped and sat on a step and rested his head in his hands. He had to think.

  Two days left. Four samples analysed, a clear upward trend in concentrations. Eleven murdered villagers. Mohammed dead. Al Urush water fifty times more saline than it should be. Hundreds of thousands of dollars syphoned from Petro-Tex operations to offshore accounts in Cyprus. Two million barrels of formation brine brought to surface in seven months. Thierry Champard blown to pieces in a car bomb. Too many unknowns and not nearly enough equations to solve them.

  One of the Yemeni office boys appeared at the bottom of the stairs and started up the steps, a tray of steaming tea glasses rattling in his hands, then stopped dead and stared at Clay with his mouth open. Clay tried to speak, to reassure the boy, but all that emerged was a strangled croak. The boy dropped his head and hurried up the stairs without looking back.

  ‘Tammam,’ Clay managed, pushing himself to his feet. ‘It’s OK,’ he said to the empty stairway. ‘It’s really OK.’

  He climbed to the landing and walked past Karila’s office, down the hall to accounting. Dunkley was at his desk, a harried expression on his face. He looked up when Clay stepped in, gave him the up and down a moment and then shook his head.

  ‘Just no? Care to know the question first?’

  Dunkley folded his arms. ‘Not really.’

  ‘That information about the 22nd April sample?’

  Dunkley shook his head, went back to his papers.

  ‘How about the cheque Karila promised me?’

  ‘Like I said, Straker. No.’

  Clay stood for a moment looking down at the top of the accountant’s head, the veins bulging under the skull-tight skin. ‘Be careful, Dunk. You’re not as good at this as you think.’

  Clay spun around and went straight to Karila’s office. The door was open.

  Karila was sitting behind his desk, face bathed in blue light from the computer monitor, the document mirrored digital in the lenses of his glasses. Parnell was slumped in a leather armchair facing the desk. Both men jerked their heads up as he entered, looked at him as if he had just emerged from an asylum.

  ‘Straker, what are you …’ blurted Karila.

  Clay sat down and faced the two men. ‘We’ve got a problem.’ There was something different about Karila’s office, but he couldn’t place it.

  ‘You look more like caveman shit than usual, Straker,’ said Parnell. ‘What the fuck happened?’

  ‘A day of reckoning,’ said Clay, dabbing blood from the cut on his jaw. He captured Parnell in his gaze, held him there. ‘Look, no bullshit, OK? Al Urush is dying. I was there yesterday.’

  Parnell blinked twice, lids darting over dark beads, and took a deep breath. He hadn’t applied his eye makeup today, and the grafts on his forehead bulged hideously. It reminded Clay of Al Shams.

  ‘The PSO told me you were being interrogated,’ said Karila.

  ‘I was. Listen, damn it. People are dying out there.’

  Karila tore his gaze away from the screen, plucked a smouldering Gitane from the ashtray with a bony thumb and forefinger, and inhaled deeply on the cigarette. ‘We have already discussed this. The matter is closed.’

  ‘It’s the water, Nils. But, of course, you know that already.’

  Parnell and Karila exchanged glances but did not answer.

  ‘Where is it going, Nils?’

  Same harried expressions.

  ‘All that formation water that started to come in a few months ago. Millions of barrels of brine. Where is it going, Nils? Tell me.’

  Parnell leaned forward in his chair and shot him a prosecutor’s stare. ‘That’s confidential, Straker. How in the hell do you …’

  Clay cut him off. ‘What are you doing with it all? It has to go somewhere.’

  ‘That is a production matter,’ said Karila. ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with your task – which may I remind you is to secure those approvals as quickly as possible.’

  Parnell wheeled on his adjutant. ‘Goddammit, Karila.’

  Karila fumbled with a dossier on his desk. ‘I don’t understand, Vance. I took the strictest precautions …’

  Clay locked his gaze on Karila. ‘There’s a connection, Nils, between what is happening at Al Urush and all that formation water. The chemistry is similar.’

  Karila looked over at his boss, then back at Clay. ‘I don’t know what you heard, Mister Straker, or how. But the fact is that we have expanded and upgraded the evaporation ponds. The system is performing according to spec. The water is not going anywhere. It is evaporating. Al Urush is more than five kilometres from the facility. There is no possibility that we are affecting them.’

  Clay traced his finger across the map on Karila’s desk, from the facility down to a little green dot that marked the oasis. The colour of paradise. ‘What if the ponds are leaking? The rocks there are highly fractured. Contaminants move fast in a system like that. There could be all kinds of stuff in that produced water. Have you done any chemical analysis?’

  ‘Only the routine, just what our production engineers need for their designs.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. Just plain old formation water.’ Karila adjusted his glasses. ‘The ponds are lined, new. They’re not leaking.’

  ‘It can’t be coincidence,’ said Clay. ‘The water in the ghayl at Al Bawazir is also showing signs of impact. Salinity has increased.’

  Karila’s eyes widened. ‘Bawazir? What were you doing there?’

  Clay looked into the Finn’s pale eyes. ‘Taking samples. Something is happening, Nils.’

  ‘The water is being e-va-po-rated, Straker,’ said Parnell. ‘Spelled like it sounds.’

  Karila looked at his boss. ‘Besides, a small increase in salinity is not going to make people sick. You know that. It is a disease of some kind.’

  ‘How sure are you that it’s all evaporating?’ Calculations flashed in his head: daily flow rate, average temperatures, wind speed, pond dimensions. ‘That’s a lot of water. There isn’t enough surface area. Some of it could be percolating into the ground, finding fractures in the rock, migrating down to the oasis.’

  ‘You ain’t listening, Straker,’ said Parnell. ‘You had better start, now.’

  Clay ignored the remark. ‘Why don’t you deep well it? Put it back in the formation where it came from. That’s best practice.’

  ‘Don’t fucking well tell me how to do my job, Straker,’ barked Parnell. ‘I’ve been pumping oil out of the ground longer than your mother’s been whoring.’

  Clay glared at the American. ‘Fok jou, Parnell.’

  Parnell jerked to his feet with surprising speed, stood quivering, fists clenched. Veins long submerged rose up and bulged in his neck. He took a step towards Clay.

  Clay swivelled and faced the American, started setting a coil in his legs, bending his knees through a couple of outwardly imperceptible degrees. ‘Come on, baas,’ he said, flat. ‘Have a go. No bat this time.’

  Parnell stopped dead, glaring up at Clay. For a long moment he stood locked to the tile floor, chest heaving, eyes darting back and forth between Clay and Karila and the open doorway as if he expected someone to come bursting into the room to back h
im up. Karila just sat there, smoke drifting up from the cigarette between his fingers. And then Parnell backed away. Just dropped his eyes, took three steps back, bumped into the arm of his chair, stumbled. He muttered something Clay couldn’t make out and reached for his inhaler.

  ‘Please, gentlemen,’ said Karila, intervening. ‘Mister Straker, we have approval from the Ministry of Oil. There is no other economic way to dispose of the produced water.’ The Finn sat impassive on the other side of the desk, the computer screen’s data flickering across the surface of his glasses, the smoke rising from the cigarette burning in the drill-pipe ashtray on his desk.

  ‘There is real potential liability here for Petro-Tex,’ said Clay, trying to calm the hurricane swirling in his chest. ‘If for no other reason, we need to figure out what the hell is going on.’ Something inside him, he could feel it there, still clung to the hope that he could reason with these men, that somehow he could emerge from this unscathed, get the money he needed, save his friend. But it was fading like an equatorial sunset – fast.

  ‘Did you submit your report to the regulators?’ Karila asked. Clay nodded. ‘Approval?’

  ‘Within the week.’

  ‘Well then, let’s move on,’ said Karila. ‘Please wrap up your work as planned.’ Karila slid the keyboard back into position. ‘Thank you, Mister Straker. I am afraid we have another meeting now. You may go. And no more unauthorised trips to the field.’

  Parnell slumped back into his chair and wrapped his mouth around the inhaler’s orifice, breathed in the atomised steroid. Karila blinked at him through the haze of cigarette smoke, his expression fixed, vacant.

  Clay’s head pounded out the final agonies of an amphetamine and vodka hangover. He needed a drink desperately. An image of Mohamed’s face, skin like photo-degraded plastic, grey and losing cohesion, pushed into his head and would not be denied. ‘Listen,’ he said, unable to control the emotion in his voice. ‘People are dying, because of us. They barely survive on what they grow. If we foul their water, we destroy everything they have, don’t you understand? Do either of you actually have any idea of what is going on out there?’

  Parnell stared at him wide-eyed, as if he were some kind of religious zealot come to proselytise. ‘We is in the oil business, boy,’ he said, breathless, clutching his inhaler. ‘Ya’ll is in the wrong place if you want to be a do-gooder. Fucking liberal shit,’ he coughed. ‘Go an’ join those cunts at the Nations Un-united.’

  Clay paused, reset. He ignored the American and addressed Karila directly, balancing on tottering stones of patience. ‘Let me go out there and take some samples, Nils, do some proper analysis. Then we can know for sure what’s going on. If you’re right and it’s not us, then we’re in the clear and we don’t need to worry. If not, we can protect these people, and ourselves.’

  ‘Mister Straker, I am not going to repeat myself. Our position on this is clear and consistent. What you speak of has nothing to do with our operations. We are not going to do anything, do you understand? We are not spending any more money. This discussion is terminated.’

  ‘At least get those kids to a hospital and have them diagnosed.’

  Parnell looked as if he was going to have a seizure. ‘As if you give a shit, asshole. We know how ya’ll treat the niggers in South Africa.’

  Clay wheeled on Parnell, set up for a straight right, stopped himself, stood quivering, frustration burning inside like a virous ulcer.

  Karila looked back down at his computer screen. ‘That will be all, Straker.’

  Every other time he had backed down, played by the rules, collected his money and gone home, never around to see the effect. It had always been so easy to do. He had discharged his professional duty and alerted the higher-ups of the risks and possible consequences, performed a ritual of absolution so mechanical and commonplace that each time he felt cleansed and almost purified as he walked away. Everyone was satisfied, the truth concealed conveniently behind graphs and tables and statistics compiled in lengthy impressive reports, technical jargon camouflaging the reality of destroyed villages and murdered children. But each time he left something behind, and in this creeping hysteresis what could not be retrieved grew and grew.

  And then he realised what had changed, and why. The framed picture of Karila with his fair-haired family huddled in the snow was gone from the desk. Clay scanned the shelves and the walls but could see it nowhere, and he imagined it locked away in one of Karila’s desk drawers, face-down, covered over with a protective blanket of production forecasts and revenue reports. The coward didn’t even have the guts to face his own kids.

  He planted his fists on the desk and leaned over towards Karila. His arms trembled as he glared at the man. ‘You callous bastard. You know exactly what’s going on. Otherwise why would you have intercepted that sample I took? You know what it shows. You just don’t give a damn, do you?’ The words emerged from his throat as a groan. He imagined his fist shattering the man’s jaw with a satisfying crunch, the bone flexing slightly before giving way under the force of the blow. ‘If you don’t do something about this, I’ll take it to the authorities.’

  Karila shifted in his seat. ‘Mister Straker, I think you will find that the authorities have quite the same opinion we do.’ Karila lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, cool as ever. ‘We have no further need for your services. Be on the first flight out of Yemen this afternoon.’

  Clay looked down at the two men. Karila picked up the phone and pressed a button.

  ‘Todorov, yes. This is Mister Karila. Report to my office immediately.’

  Parnell heaved his bulk around to face Clay. ‘Fuck you, Straker,’ he growled. ‘I’ll make damn sure you never work in the oil patch again.’ He pronounced it ahl.

  Zdravko appeared at the door, pumped, holstered.

  Karila jabbed his cigarette in the air. ‘Make sure that Mister Straker is on the KLM flight to Amsterdam this afternoon. Attend to it personally, Todorov.’ Then he turned back to his computer screen, his face bathed once more in Microsoft blue as he tapped a message into the keyboard.

  Zdravko smiled, wedged his hand onto the butt of his sheathed pistol. ‘My great pleasure,’ he said.

  Clay glared wildly at Parnell then spun around and marched towards the door. Zdravko moved to block his way. Clay took a shuffle step to compensate and shot out a straight right. His fist slammed into the Bulgarian’s solar plexus. It wasn’t planned. He didn’t visualise it or think it through. The dam of his frustration simply burst and the Bulgarian had put himself in the way.

  Zdravko doubled over, slumped gasping to the floor. Clay strode past him and out across the marble foyer.

  ‘Stop,’ came a voice from behind.

  Clay spun around. Zdravko was crouching with his back against the doorframe, a Makarov drawn and aimed at Clay’s guts.

  Parnell appeared at the door, slapped down Zdravko’s arm. ‘Put that away, you fucking idiot,’ he snapped. ‘This has gone far enough. Make sure you’re on that plane, Straker, or this will get a lot worse real fast.’

  Clay turned and took the wide staircase three steps at a time down to the main floor, ran to the parking area. He drove to the guesthouse in silence, parked, and climbed the stairs to his room. Clay was pretty sure that Zdravko had no intention whatsoever of seeing him safely on a flight out of Yemen. He had to get out and away, and he had to do it fast. Within a few minutes he had packed his instruments, the last bottle of vodka and his camera in his duffel bag. He ran down the stairs, found Atef in the kitchen. The big Egyptian turned as Clay came in, stood in front of his chopping block, cleaver in hand, white apron smeared in blood.

  Clay put an envelope on the counter, placed a fifty-dollar bill on top. ‘Courier this for me, would you Atef? Go into town to do it. Don’t tell anyone. The address is on the front.’

  Atef nodded, slid the envelope under his apron. ‘We are sorry you are leaving, Mister Clay.’ News travelled fast.

  ‘Maybe I’ll see you on
e day at a Zamalek game.’

  Atef smiled, took his hand. ‘Perhaps we shall win.’

  Clay shouldered his bag. ‘Maybe we will.’

  Atef touched Clay’s forearm, smeared blood there. ‘One more thing, Mister Clay. I found Mansour. I went to their office.’ Atef wiped his hands across his apron.

  Outside, the noise of a vehicle approaching at high speed, slowing.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They are doing import-export. Oil equipment.’

  ‘Legitimate, then.’

  Atef nodded. ‘I saw Mister Todorov there, speaking to one of the owners.’

  Clay’s heart lurched. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, Mister Clay.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘I think no. I was across the street, having tea.’

  Clay shook the Egyptian’s hand. ‘Stay out of his way. And look after yourself, my broer.’ And then he was gone, out the back fire door, across the compound, through the back gate and into the backstreet Aden noon.

  Swimming in the Disorder

  Clay made his way through the maze of alleyways to the Tihama Road, where he hailed a taxi. He arrived at the Ministry building just after noon, made his way to Ali’s office, and was told to wait. He sat in the Environmental Directorate waiting room, the pain behind his eyes barely dulled by six extra-strength ibuprofen, his mouth dry as a summer wadi.

  Over the next hour he worked steadily, mostly from memory, compiling all of the data he’d acquired, copying it carefully in duplicate onto four notebook pages, then prepared two signed statements describing what he’d seen at Bawazir, what he’d photographed. He tore the pages from the notebook, folded each set in half, addressed one to Ali, the other to Rania. He looked at his watch. It was already two. No one had come in or out of the office. Zdravko would be going apeshit by now, screaming around town in that new black Land Rover of his. The Amsterdam flight had gone half an hour ago, him not on it.