The Abrupt Physics of Dying
Page 30
A man appeared in the door. He was squat and powerfully built. A small blunt-nosed submachine gun hung muzzle down from a strap over his shoulder, a Ksyuka. The man stood between Clay and the wadi beyond.
At first Zdravko appeared not to recognise him. The Bulgarian stood in the doorway, blinking in the harsh light. Clay bowed his head and backed away, mumbling in Arabic, hoping Zdravko would take him for just another bearded local worker. He knew now, instantly, what the crates contained, and why they were stored here.
‘Stop,’ Zdravko barked.
Clay froze, pushing his chin down into his chest.
‘What the fuck you doing here, Abu?’
‘Sorry, effendi,’ he mumbled.
‘Come here,’ Zdravko shouted. ‘This restricted area. Where is your badge?’
Clay fumbled with his pockets, pretending to look for his badge. Zdravko still hadn’t recognized him. He had to do something now, or it would be too late. The Bulgarian reached for the weapon hanging at his side and started to swing the muzzle up level. Clay charged.
The collision drove the Bulgarian back hard into the steel door and sent the Ksyuka clattering across the smooth concrete floor. Zdravko groaned as his body slammed into the unyielding metal plate. The force of the impact drove the air from his lungs and whipped his skull back into one of the door’s protruding steel ribs. Blood erupted from his head and sprayed over the door as if flung from a painter’s sweeping hand. Zdravko slumped to the ground, back against the door.
Clay jumped up and moved towards the open doorway. He was almost clear of the doors when Zdravko shot out a foot, sending him crashing to the ground. He slammed down hard face first into the gravel just outside the doorway. Dazed, he rolled over and looked back. Zdravko was up and crabbing on hands and knees across the concrete floor towards the AK74. Clay twisted onto his side and reached for the handgun in his belt. Zdravko had reached his weapon and was swinging it around towards him. Clay pulled the trigger just as a sickening clatter erupted from the Ksyuka.
Blinding pain tore through his arm. At first it felt as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to his hand – a sudden crunching impact followed by a scorching wave of pain. He looked down at his left hand. The bullet had torn through the outer knuckles, severing the ring and baby fingers, leaving a bloom of ragged pulp. He could see no trace of the missing digits.
Zdravko lay motionless inside the building in a spreading pool of blood. Voices rose in the distance, from the camp and from somewhere back towards the ponds, shouts of alarm. He raised the Beretta and fired at the big floodlight that glared at him from directly above. His hand was shaking so violently that he missed altogether. He steadied his hand on his left forearm, the knuckles seeping blood, and fired two more shots. The third round found its target with a crash and spark, and a semblance of darkness was restored to this small piece of the desert.
He staggered to his feet, fighting to stay conscious, cradling his damaged hand in the crook of his other elbow, the Beretta still clasped in his right hand. He could see figures running around the camp compound, opening the gate, coming towards him now across the few hundred metres of open ground. They hadn’t seen him yet, but there was no way to make it to the wadi now.
The control room was only a dozen paces ahead. He loped to the building and pushed open the door with his shoulder. A man sat at the control panel, one hand on a cradled telephone handset.
Clay closed the door behind him and levelled the pistol. ‘Put it down,’ he said, sliding down to his haunches with his back against the door.
The man removed his hand from the phone and swivelled in the chair to face him. Karila’s television-blue eyes stared out from wide-stretched sockets. Outside, a confusion of voices moved closer. Clay raised the Beretta and pointed it at Karila’s head. There was a loud rap at the door. Someone yelled in Arabic. Karila stood up and moved towards the door.
‘Don’t,’ said Clay.
‘Please,’ said Karila, ‘I’ll make him go.’
Clay gave a brief nod. Blood flowed from his hand down over his forearm and dripped from the point of his elbow, soaking into his trousers. He felt faint, vaguely elated. Karila moved to the door and pulled it open slightly. Clay leant forward, ready to snap the door shut.
‘I saw him,’ Karila said.
Clay jabbed the Beretta hard into Karila’s knee.
‘He ran that way,’ Karila blurted. ‘Towards the tank farms.’ Karila stepped back inside and Clay slumped against the door, slamming it shut. Outside he could hear the muffled footfall and excited voices of a dozen or more men as they ran past in the direction Karila had indicated.
‘Now get back,’ said Clay.
Karila retreated to the console. ‘You’re badly injured. You need a doctor.’
He waived the Beretta at Karila. ‘You think so? Fuck you.’
‘Please, let me help you, Clay.’
Clay laughed. It surprised him. ‘It doesn’t suit you, Karila.’
Confusion joined fear in Karila’s eyes. ‘What?’
‘Compassion.’ Clay pulled himself to his feet, cracked open the door a few inches and peered outside. The way was clear.
‘Wait,’ said Karila. He reached into a cabinet and pulled out a medical aid kit. ‘Please take this.’
Clay slid off his backpack, dropped it to the floor, and kicked it toward Karila. ‘In there,’ he said. A swell of pain surged up through his arm and slammed into his brain. The periphery of his vision started to go dark, like curtains closing. He staggered and bent his head low, trying to swim back towards consciousness. Slowly he fought back the darkness. Clay leant his shoulder against the door, steadying himself. Blood dripped from his hand to the steel plate deck.
Karila put the white box into the pack.
‘Throw it to me.’
Karila tossed the pack at his feet.
Clay raised the Beretta. ‘Now move back.’
Karila retreated to the control panel, holding his hands up in front of his body as if they might somehow shield him from the bullets.
‘Please,’ he begged. ‘I have children, a wife.’ Face-down in the desk drawer.
‘Everyone has someone,’ Clay croaked.
‘I saw the damage, I …’ Karila stumbled. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What happened at Bawazir, Nils? I saw Zdravko there.’
‘I don’t know. Please believe me, Clay,’ Karila blubbered. ‘We just wanted the chief arrested. He was making trouble, turning the villagers against us. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.’
Clay stood glaring at the man who only a few weeks ago had signed little Mohamed’s death warrant. He raised the Beretta to Karila’s face, his hand shaking, and said: ‘Tell me one thing, before I … What are you doing with all that fresh water from the new well?’
Karila looked down at the floor and dropped his hands as if resigned to his fate. ‘We’re injecting it into the oil reservoir, to keep the pressure up.’
‘So you can produce more oil.’
Karila nodded.
‘Why not use the formation brine, Nils? Why not just put all that crap back where it came from? I saw the discharge pipe in the wadi, you lying bastard. You’re killing these people.’
‘Please, Clay. It wasn’t my decision.’
Clay pushed his injured hand hard into his side. ‘Do you know sharia law?’
Karila shook his head.
‘Well, you better start studying.’
Karila mumbled something he could not understand. The words were garbled. Clay felt faint. He doubled over and steadied himself against the edge of the console. Karila took a step forward.
Clay raised the weapon. ‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Now tell me.’
Karila backed away. ‘We have no choice, Clay. Please believe me. Once the brine comes out of the ground and contacts air, its chemistry changes completely. Treating it so that it can be re-injected is too expensive. The groundwater is so pure it can go straight in. And we don’t pay an
ything for it. It’s just economics, Clay, that’s all. Please understand.’
‘Just economics. Beautiful.’
Clay raised the handgun and aimed at Karila’s chest. ‘And all those weapons you have stored here. That’s just economics, too, isn’t it?’
Karila fell to his knees, hands clasped before him as if in prayer. He was crying, heavy tears rolling down his face. ‘Please, Clay,’ he mumbled through his sobs, ‘I’m just an engineer. I’m only doing my job.’
Clay tightened his finger on the trigger, felt it move. ‘Does your job include killing people?’
‘I don’t make these decisions. Oh God, please, Clay.’ Karila crumpled to the floor in a heap.
Clay stood looking down at his boss, his client, the Beretta shaking in his hand, the trigger partially depressed. Karila’s words tore through his pain-shattered brain. He could feel himself shunting towards the far edge of clarity. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We all do.’
Clay lowered the weapon, turned, pulled open the door with three bloodied fingers and staggered outside. He glanced over to the shed. Zdravko was gone. Without looking back he ran as fast as he could through the main entrance and towards the wadi and the safety of darkness.
Flailing in the Void
He covered the distance to the edge of the wadi so quickly that his eyes had not adjusted to the enveloping darkness by the time he launched himself into the void. He knew the cap-rock layer was only about a metre thick all along this part of the wadi and that the slope of loose shale fell away from its base at about a 45-degree angle. But as he fell through the cool night air, both time and space seemed to stretch out, and he hovered as if suspended on some current, so that the solid ground his feet expected did not come, and still did not come.
He hit the slope with a crunch. Such was his speed that he catapulted forward, somersaulting down the slope in a shower of clanking ironstone plates. After a few rotations his angular momentum slowed and he pushed his legs out hard, down into the loose rock to break the spin. On the second attempt his boots dug in, preventing the forward motion of his head, and his body snapped back to the slope. And then he was ploughing through the rock on his back with feet facing the wadi floor.
He slid to a stop and lay on his back breathing heavily, shaking from the cold or from shock or both. The mangled appendage clutched in his right hand was spiky and raw, a throbbing alien mass that he could not look at, and he was glad for the darkness. He lay very still and looked up into the stars, listening for any sound behind him. There was the whisper of a breeze flowing along the wadi floor, and then, over the efficient hum of the generators, farther away to the north, the distant crack-crack of AK47 fire.
Karila had seen him go. Soon they would be coming after him. He lurched to his feet and tried to focus on the terrain ahead, but a tide of nausea and dizziness flowed over him, and he fell back onto the shale. He sat on the slope and looked down into the depths of the wadi. His hand throbbed and the pain was a presence within him, indifferent and uncaring as the ocean.
He put his head between his knees and tried to regulate his breathing, calm himself. He pulled off his canvas vest and his T-shirt and then using his teeth and his good hand he covered the wound and tied the shirt down as hard as he could on the hand, grunting involuntarily as the knot pushed down onto the flesh and protrusions of bone. He sat hunched over, breathing hard, fighting back the pain and the fear that squeezed up from his diaphragm and into the back of his throat like vomit.
More gunfire crackled in the distance. If they followed him down, if they were coming right now, he would surely hear them scrabbling over the loose slates. He reached for the Beretta, as much for comfort as for any reasonable likelihood of defence. It was not in his belt. He searched his pockets and felt out across the stones like a blind man groping for a light switch, but he knew that it was gone, somewhere behind on the slope, irretrievable.
He pushed himself on, sliding towards the wadi floor, stumbling in the darkness. When he reached the old Bedouin well, the moon was gone and the steep sides of the canyon had collapsed the night sky into a narrow ribbon of time above him. He was shivering uncontrollably. His mouth felt as if it was full of sand and his throat ached. Dehydration and shock were taking over. He knew he needed to rest and drink and get warm soon. He sat on the ground by the lip of the well and breathed in the heady benzene vapours flowing up from the depths. And though the rock walls and the sand under his feet and the stars above and everything insensate stood deaf and uncaring, he cursed them all and then he cursed himself.
Then he remembered the wedge of rock and the ridge of sand and wadi stone – and the cave beneath. He felt his way along the chine of sand towards the wedge and then past the inner plane where the huge slab had cleaved away from the cliff. In the dim starlight he could see that the wedge had toppled inwards, pinning a smaller lozenge of rock beneath it, leaving two gaps, a smaller one below, the opening no larger than a television screen, and a larger one higher up which reached its apex halfway up the canyon wall. Like a wounded animal, he wriggled over the top of the chine and skulked down into the lower opening.
Inside, the darkness was complete. He shuffled on his flanks deeper into the shelter, pushing himself along with his legs and his good hand until he reached a spot where the ground felt soft and he could lean up against the rock. Then he pulled off his pack, placed it between his legs, pulled out Karila’s medical kit, the jacket Hussein had given him, and the water bottle. He held the plastic cylinder between his knees and unscrewed the top. He drank deeply, gulping down more than half a litre, more than he had intended, his throat muscles contracting hungrily even as he willed himself to stop. He would need it even more later. When he finally tore the bottle away from his mouth, there was less than a quarter of a litre left, enough for two or three good gulps at most. He swirled the meagre remnants around in the bottle. Water everywhere.
Shivering from the cold, he replaced the lid and stood the bottle upright on the sand to one side and felt for the jacket. He found the collar and the arms and threaded in his good arm and reached behind him to gather the jacket around his shoulders. The other arm dangled uselessly. He was warmer immediately, and soon the shivering stopped. He took a deep breath and reached into the pack and pulled out the torch and turned it on. The light dazzled his night eyes as the beam split and then split again. The whole surface of his rocky crypt was encrusted in a thick vein of crystal gypsum so pure and translucent that the light penetrated deep into the mineral layer before refracting back out from a million crystal faces. He played the torch over the worthless jewels for a moment, and then opened the medical kit.
First he flipped open the lid of the codeine package and jerked out the formed foil panel of painkillers. In succession he punched four pills through the covering and pushed them into his mouth, swallowing each one hard to force them down his already dry throat. Next he untied the T-shirt, releasing the pressure on the wound. A torrent of pain flooded over him. He sunk his head to his knees as the turbulence roiled through him, brutal and strangely sinister, like a gale at night, until finally it ebbed away and smoothed into something more laminar.
He tore open a phial and poured saline over the wound, washing away sand and partially coagulated blood, the lumpy red liquid dripping from claws of bone. He repeated the procedure, cleaning away grit and more blood, thinner now, and what appeared to be fragments of shattered bone. Then he doused the whole offending thing in antiseptic, turning his face away, eyes shut hard as the chemical seared into his raw flesh. Tears filled his eyes and streamed down his face and he had to wipe them away before he could focus again to apply the sutures across the open edge of his hand. As quickly as he could, he ripped open a compress and folded it over the sutures. He held the compress in place against his chest and unravelled a bandage. He wound it around the compress, across his palm and over the remaining knuckles, alternating over and under the thumb, pulling the gauze in tighter with each turn.
He had st
arted to tape the bandages in place when he heard the echo of voices. He flicked off the torch and waited, ears straining. A beam of light sliced past and for the briefest moment his crystal vault lit up like day. He was sure he had been seen. He sat blinded in the darkness with the sound of voices rising, echoing from the rock walls, cancelling, amplifying, until they were upon him, and he could see lights flashing all around outside his hide.
He stayed perfectly still.
Outside, soldiers with guns stood near the well, talking, shining their torches on the ground. They had seen his footprints. They seemed to be arguing. Torches flashed up-wadi, some down-wadi, some directly past him in the direction of the jebel where Abdulkader had left him so long ago now. Four men broke off from the group and started towards the entrance of his cave. They had seen him. He closed his eyes.
And she was out there somewhere, he hoped, he prayed, in a fine European hospital, at home even, curled up safe asleep, and he wondered if he would ever see her again.
The voices rose and then passed, moving up the tributary wadi, others receding back towards the facility. He opened his eyes. Darkness again. They were gone.
More than an hour had passed, by his reckoning, and the soldiers had not returned. He wondered how Abdulkader had fared, if he had reached the farm safely, managed to find enough fuel for the Land Cruiser, or if he too had been apprehended, shot, killed, or if he had simply abandoned him altogether. He pushed the doubts away and scrabbled to the opening and out into the starlight. Water and warmth and the bandaging of his hand had stabilised him. The bleeding had stopped. He moved steadily along the wadi floor, working with gravity, quickening his pace as he descended towards the coastal plain and the Indian Ocean, still so far out of sight. Soon the sun would rise again and pronounce its death sentence on the Masila, and there would be nowhere to hide.