The Abrupt Physics of Dying

by Paul E. Hardisty

  After the washing they filled water bottles and collected what food they could find in the kitchen, some stale flatbread, figs. ‘Let’s go, my friend,’ said Clay. ‘Two days from now we should be on our way to Oman, God willing.

  An hour and a half later they reached Wadi Idim and the main road up the escarpment to the highlands beyond. The narrow ribbon of crumbling tarmac scaled a thousand vertical metres from the plain to the top of the plateau in a series of eight switchbacks. There were no outside railings, only a narrow gravel verge and a sheer drop to the wadi floor. The Pajero’s diesel strained against the steepening grade, choking on an enriching fuel mixture. With altitude, the coastal plain soon disappeared under a shroud of haze and dust, and beyond, the Indian Ocean opened up before them until it filled the southern horizon.

  At the top of the climb, Abdulkader pulled the car off the paved road and navigated a short stony track back towards the cliff edge. He rolled the vehicle to a halt. They got out and walked until they were only a few steps from the edge of the precipice. The coastline stretched away until the horizon dissolved into a vapour, land, sea and sky somehow atomised, boiled into constituent elements, earth’s essential plasma disaggregating there at the farthest edges, as if the whole world could fray and gasify at the slightest impulse. There was God-like power here, a sun’s rapid expansion and consumption of its satellites, time become decaying orbits and grains of sand.

  Clay looked down at his boots, at the dark ironstone pebbles scattered in uniform confusion over the limestone upland. The smells of the desert came on the hot breeze, sun-baked rock, dust, minerals. Abdulkader stood beside him, hands clasped at midriff, swaying back and forth, eyes half-closed, as if distilling meaning from all of it: the rock and stone of the desert, the limitless ocean, the sun’s fierce fusion.

  They drove on in the direction of the production facility, still two hours away on the graded dirt road, across the polychrome plateau of fist-sized ironstones and shale plates the colour of bone.

  Clay reached for his water bottle and took a swig and offered it to Abdulkader.

  ‘What did he say to you, back at the farm, the one who was dying?’

  Abdulkder took the bottle, put it to his mouth and tipped it back, then passed it to Clay and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand but did not respond.

  ‘Who was he, Abdulkader?’

  Abdulkader spat out of the side window and then turned his eyes back to the road ahead. ‘Afghan. Ansar Al-Sharia.’ And after a few more kilometres: ‘He said Hussein was a traitor.’

  ‘Betrayal,’ said Clay after a while. ‘It doesn’t take much.’

  Abdulkader kept driving, staring out through the windscreen. The vehicle rattled along the road, sending an oblique scar of dust into the sky. So stark was the land that he thought he could discern the curvature of the earth’s surface moving closer. But as with so much here, this was an illusion – a sixty-mile horizon cannot reveal a discernible arc, even at the edge of the world.

  The checkpoint was so carefully hidden, nestled at the base of a blunt-layered upland, that they almost ran straight through it. Abdulkader pumped the brakes to keep the speeding vehicle from skidding out of control, wrestling it to a stop in a shower of gravel.

  The road was barred by a length of steel pipe balanced on a crudely welded cradle, weighted on one end with a can of ironstone chips and held in place by a noose of rope. Larger stones had been arranged across the road to force traffic towards the barrier. The sloping nose plate of an armoured personnel carrier jutted out from behind a shelter of piled stone and corrugated tin sheeting.

  A soldier appeared from beneath a canvas tent pitched among a cluster of boulders at the base of the mesa. He walked down towards them, rifle slung muzzle-down over his left shoulder. His boots were unlaced and he wore no socks. The tongues of his boots lolled like a dog’s on a January day on the Highveldt. He was young, no more than fifteen or sixteen. Another solider emerged from the shelter, an officer with epaulettes and a sidearm strapped over desert camouflage fatigues. Abdulkader tensed and rolled down the window.

  The officer placed his hands on the side of the vehicle, hunched forward and peered in at them. His eyes were moist, with dark irises, the whites shot through with angry red veins. Abdulkader handed him their documents. The officer leafed through Clay’s passport, looked up, glared at him, and then unfolded Abdulkader’s papers. The adolescent had unslung his weapon and now held it at high port as he circled towards the back of the Pajero. Clay could see him eyeing the tarpaulin that covered the extra cans of fuel.

  The officer barked something in Arabic and signalled Abdulkader to get out of the vehicle. Abdulkader opened his door and stepped to the ground, walked to the rear of the Pajero. The two soldiers followed him. Clay sat motionless in his seat and scanned the outpost. There were no other soldiers visible.

  Abdulkader was arguing with the officer. The pitch of their voices rose suddenly. Clay glanced down at the floor where the AK lay waiting under the seat and looked back at the three men. The officer was shouting at Abdulkader, pointing at the plastic sheeting in the back. Abdulkader opened the tailgate. In the side mirror, Clay watched the young soldier pull away the tarpaulin and unload one, two, and then the third and last jerry can and place them by the side of the road. The officer stood back, drew his pistol, and trained it on Abdulkader.

  The young soldier slung his weapon and removed the spare tyre from the rear door and rolled it off to the side of the road. Then he pulled up the cover of the back cargo space and rummaged through the compartment, tossing the jack and emergency tool kit to the ground. Abdulkader watched and said nothing.

  The officer shouted an instruction, waving his pistol at the open tailgate. The soldier clawed open the inside panel, pulling the plastic from its mounts. Something caught their attention. They both moved closer and peered into the newly exposed compartment. The officer reached in and pulled out a small package wrapped in clear plastic and grey tape. He unwrapped the tape and pulled what looked like a block of putty from its sheath. For a moment the officer seemed to puzzle over the strange material, unsure, sniffing it as if it were bread.

  Then the officer jumped back into a crouch and raised his weapon. Abdulkader clasped his hands behind his head, two weapons trained on his torso. The officer was screaming now, waving the package in the air, his tone higher and more hysterical by the moment. Clay reached behind his back and wrapped his hand around the butt of Hussein’s Beretta. The soldiers seemed to have forgotten about him, so intent were they on their find and Abdulkader. Both were now directly behind the vehicle, the younger one tearing out the rest of the material from the compartment, the officer standing next to him, pistol trained on Abdulkader.

  Clay knew he was staring over the edge, only a few decimal points from annihilation. The soldiers were apoplectic, and it was going to get Abdulkader killed. No margin remained. He glanced in the mirror. Both soldiers were directly behind the vehicle, busy with their find. Abdulkader was on his knees in the middle of the road. Clay slunk down in the seat so that his head was below the backrest, pushed himself along to the driver’s side and gripped the steering wheel.

  The engine was running. The wheel was centred. He grabbed the gearshift and found the accelerator pedal with his right foot. Then in one movement he jammed the Pajero into reverse and hammered down on the accelerator as hard as he could. The vehicle lurched backwards and cut down the soldiers with a quick double thud. There was a sickening jump as first the back and then the front suspension buckled over the bodies. He locked the brakes and looked out. The two soldiers lay crumpled in the dust.

  Abdulkader sprang up and slammed the tailgate shut and sprinted around to the passenger seat. ‘Go,’ he said.

  Clay backed the vehicle away, swerved around the bodies, and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The Pajero slammed through the barrier and careened off down the road trailing a spume of grey dust.

  Clay looked over at Abdulkader. If the
y weren’t screwed before they sure as hell were now. There was no way those poor bastards could have survived.

  ‘Yallah,’ yelled Abdulkader above the noise of the engine and the pelting road. Go.

  Clay looked over, searching Abdulkader’s face. Go where, my friend? For me there is no eternal salvation, no penance I can make. I will not be absolved, for I have broken my promise to myself. And, as he drove, the weight of his sin bore down into him and a hurt welled inside his chest and up to his throat – and his vision blurred so that he had to hit the brakes hard and try to keep the vehicle straight, although he could no longer see the road. He opened the door and fell to the ground, retching bile from deep within out into the dust.

  Allah Knows

  Nightfall was still a few hours away. They sped along the high plateau, west into the sun, not far now from the CPF. The cost of doing something good had just escalated. He wondered what Rania would think if she knew what he had just done, that he had killed, as she had seemed prepared to do only a day ago. He wondered if she was even alive. The very thought that she was not was impossible to bear. He weighted it, sank it deep.

  After passing the turnoff to the Kamar-1 oil well, the road veered west. They continued through the stark landscape of stone-strewn flatlands and broad low-relief mesas, alone.

  An hour past the turnoff, a shadow flashed over the car and darted away across the slope of a mesa. He tapped Abdulkader on the shoulder and pointed to the dragon-like thing warping dark along the desolate ground.

  ‘Helicopter,’ said Abdulkader.

  Clay looked out and up. There it was, close enough, a bulb-nosed Russian-built Hind gunship tracking away from them, behind and off to the north. The machine’s underside bristled with rockets. It was impossible to tell whose it was.

  ‘It’s turning away,’ said Clay.

  ‘Inshallah. Watch it.’

  The helicopter was just a speck in the sky now. Perhaps it was just a patrol. He wondered if the soldiers from the checkpoint had somehow survived and managed to crawl back to their tent, call for help on the radio. He watched the black dot as it hovered in the distance for a moment and then slowly disappeared.

  They continued towards the CPF, keeping away from the main road, skirting the track that ran along the edge of the mesa, glancing up at the sky. Less than an hour later they stopped in the long shadow of a tabletop jebel of purple shale capped with weathered brown sandstone. To their right, the shallow bight of the tributary wadi head opened up like a wound in the planet’s crust.

  They scrambled to the top of the ridge and laid on the back slope, looking out along the graded dirt road. About half a kilometre away, a small cinderblock shack baked in the heat. A new South Yemen flag flew from a pole stuck in the ground out front. Just beyond was a sand-coloured four-wheel-drive truck with a recoilless rifle mounted on a fixed stand in the bed. Two soldiers squatted on the ground in front of the building. Beyond the guard post, stretching away from the road, a haphazard mosaic of evaporation ponds, their surfaces blue and cloudless, tiles of Masila sky spread over the plateau. At the far edge of the scarp, the squarish metal-clad buildings, rounded vessels and cylindrical towers of the processing facility glinted in the sunlight.

  ‘I’ll start from here,’ said Clay. ‘I should be at the old Bedou well before sunset.’

  Abdulkader pointed back from where they had just come. ‘Inshallah, I will drive to Wadi Azir. There, I will hide the Pajero.’

  Wadi Azir was about 150 kilometres back, half-way between where they now stood and the checkpoint. It wouldn’t be long before someone found the crushed bodies by the side of the road. By now the flies would be at them, covering over the eyes, moving like breath through gaping mouths, the final scream that electric motor whine of a hundred-thousand pairs of tiny wings. And then half the rebel army would be heading their way.

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ said Clay.

  Abdulaker nodded. ‘Inshallah, I will walk down the wadi to Hussein’s farm for the Land Cruiser.

  Yes, bloody inshallah. Maybe there was still a chance that he could do this and get to safety. Get out through Oman, find Rania somehow. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow morning at the Al Urush pools.’

  ‘If God wills it,’ Abdulkader murmured.

  And for a moment, as he lay prone on the rocky edge of the ridge surveying the bare lifeless expanse of the Empty Quarter, he considered that perhaps, as Abdulkader so fervently believed, Allah was merciful and all-seeing, and perhaps his destiny was indeed predetermined and locked in place for His everlasting scrutiny, and maybe, just maybe, his life was solely in the hands of God. And for just those briefest few seconds he wished that it would be so, and that he could ask Allah’s forgiveness for all he had done and his divine protection in what was to come. He looked up. But there was only the sky and the desert stretching away to the horizon with not a trace of any green or living thing.

  They backed away from the edge of the ridge and scrambled back down the slope. Clay slung his pack and wound the headscarf around his head. ‘Those soldiers,’ he said. ‘I hope they’re alright.’

  ‘If Allah wills it.’

  Clay turned to Abdulkader, guilt welling up inside him. ‘What was Hussein doing with all that plastic explosive, Abdulkader?’ Abdulkader shrugged.

  Clay thought about it for a moment. ‘Is it the CPF? Is that what this is about? Was Hussein planning to blow up the CPF, with our help?’

  Abdulkader looked at him, expressionless. ‘Allah knows.’

  ‘Not good enough, Abdulkader. Allah bloody well knows, but so do you. Tell me.’ He thought he knew this man, trusted him, but now doubt forced its way into his mind like an unwanted dream, dangerous and intimidating. He had been foolish, trusting. And then it dawned on him, a crushing reality. He was alone, and he was not going to make it out of here. This was where he was going to die.

  The Arab looked into his eyes. ‘There is no time for talk. You must finish this. It is the only way. Go with God, hanif.’

  Abdulkader got into the Pajero and sped away, back in the direction of the checkpoint with the dead soldiers and the next wadi and the way to the coast, and left him standing under the sun, reluctant monotheist, alone.

  A Mass Grave of Stars

  The wadi cut down through the plateau of softer rocks, shales and marls, down to the hard limestone that formed the base of the first scarp. He followed the drainage down, losing elevation, moving steadily into the past. The wadi sides steepened and he looked up at the stratified, fractured face of time where a hundred millennia, the whole of human history, lay compressed into a single layer – a hand span’s width of lithified sand grains, quartz and plagioclase from a beach on a lonely stretch of coastline that once basked under clear skies, the crystalline blue of the shallows teeming with freakish new life, all now extinct.

  As he descended, the walking became more difficult. Where the canyon narrowed to a defile and water had eddied away the carbonate over millennia into a deep round bowl, he had to climb down, lowering the instrument case by rope, finding vug and fracture hand-holds, one move at a time, the rock burning, almost too hot to touch.

  He moved on in the heat like some proto-hominid, barely upright, picking his way through the Palaeocene landscape of faulted surfaces bare in the sun, ruptured rock and bleached wadi gravel, blocks as big as houses sloughed from the cliffs above. High above, corrugated sheets of heat poured from the edges of the plateau like the silver distortions of turbine exhaust. He strained to hear the sounds that this turbulence told his ears to expect. But there was only the rock, deaf and mute, and the blind uncaring sky, and the sound of his own breathing. And then, on a shift of current, the grinding sound of internal combustion, the big diesel generators at the CPF, but just as suddenly it was gone, and it was if the sun had burned away the atmosphere, and nothing lived.

  He reached the confluence with the tributary wadi as the sky began to darken above the top of the canyon walls. The old well was exactly as the chief o
f Bawazir had described, at the intersection of the two wadis, in the lee of a huge wedge of limestone splayed off from the spur and slumped back against the canyon wall to form a deep-vaulted cave. Over the years, sporadic flash floods had drifted sand and rock up against the wedge so that a ridged chine of sediment now blocked the entrance to the cave and crested over the lip of the well. In a few more decades the well would be covered over and buried forever.

  He opened the fieldbook and drew a quick pencil sketch of the well’s location and the key markers. Then he took a plastic bailer from the rucksack and lowered the device into the well, guiding the line down through one of the ancient grooves in the lip stone. He peered over into the well. An overpowering chemical odour knocked him back, nostrils stinging, eyes watering. The water level was within a couple of metres of surface – much too shallow. He stood back and pulled on the rope, retrieving the bailer. The water was foul, black, awash in oil. The readings confirmed it: the well was dead, poisoned.

  Night came quickly and with it a measure of relief from the heat. He looked up at the strip of moonless sky cut from the dark shadows of the canyon walls. The sooner he got moving up the main wadi towards the CPF, the closer he would be to getting the last and most important samples, the ones that would lock down the truth, or at least part of the truth, and the nearer he would be to going … where? Home? Did that word even have a meaning? He looked up at the stars and the sheets of pale rock and down into the ancient well. He imagined the Bedouin here, long ago, looking up at this same sky, these same rocks. Like them, he was no more than an itinerant, his time short and without certainty.