Devil’s Harvest

by Andrew Brown

  There were times when she looked quite regal, when the light struck her harsh angularity from just the right position, softening her features. The few times that the tension between them had eased, Gabriel had enjoyed their conversation, listening to her wistful stories. But in his heart there were doubts that would not be quelled. There was some tough self-interest motivating her, and an ageing European professor was not going to take precedence over whatever it was she was planning. They had not spoken of the route into Bahr el Ghazal and Safaha, where the Arabidopsis were to be located. She had shown no interest in his research since their initial meeting. He had only half-believed what he had told the military officer at the roadblock. He might be paying, but that gave him only the illusion of control.

  Gabriel stood up stiffly and said good night. Mercifully, the truck stop was almost empty and they each had a room to themselves. He collapsed onto a stretcher bed without washing, his feet painful and his body gritty with sweat and sand.

  He was woken by the cry of the morning call to mosque, a melodious rising and falling of intoned prayers from the adjacent building. He lay on his uncomfortable bed, already feeling the heat emanating from the door, listening to the muezzin. Eventually he roused himself, smearing ointment on his toes, and hobbled outside. In the light of morning, the strong Arabic influence on the town was clearer. Minarets and the parapets of mosques stood tall above the simple dwellings below. Arabic signage was everywhere, and the dress code appeared to be strictly traditional.

  He pointed this out to Alek, who was sitting at the cold embers of the night’s fire sipping tea.

  ‘This is dar al-Islam,’ she said. ‘Arabic was the language in all schools here right up until secession.’

  ‘More like the land of the United Nations,’ Gabriel joked as yet another convoy of UNHCR vehicles lumbered past the truck stop, spewing red dust behind them.

  Bentiu seemed populated with UN blue helmets, driving militarised Land Rovers. From where they stood, Gabriel could make out the damaged El Salaam Bridge, repeatedly bombed over the years by MiG-29 warplanes from Sudan. It was now permanently guarded by an antiaircraft gun mounted on the back of a truck. A squat UN military vehicle, with six wheels and a turret on the top, was parked nearby. The sudden increase in visible military personnel did nothing to ease his sense of disquiet.

  ‘Why’s there such a military presence here?’ Another truckload of blue helmets passed as if to emphasise the question.

  Alek shrugged. ‘The Heglig oil fields are north of here. They are a long way away, but this is the closest centre.’ She opened the back door of the Land Cruiser and threw her bag into the back. ‘Remember what I told you about the Kiir River yesterday? The dividing line between Baggara and Dinka?’

  Gabriel nodded.

  ‘Well, imagine that it wasn’t a river of water. Imagine that it was a river of oil. Imagine then how the people will fight and die over that.’

  Alek held out a pair of sandals, simple plastic flip-flops, a gaudy blue. ‘Stop wearing shoes,’ she said. ‘Your feet won’t get any better wrapped up in leather.’

  Gabriel thanked her, touched that she’d thought of him. She turned away and opened the driver’s door. He heard her utter a foreign expletive under her breath.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The keys are in the ignition. Kamal always keeps them on him.’

  It took Gabriel a moment to understand the significance of what she was saying. By then, she was striding across the gravel towards the grimy dormitories where they’d spent the night. Without bothering to knock on the door, Alek turned the handle and gave it a stout kick. Gabriel followed into the room. The bed had not been slept in.

  Alek sighed, then pushed past Gabriel. ‘We don’t need him anyway.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. Who will drive?’

  Alek shrugged and turned away. In truth, Gabriel’s worry lay elsewhere: the loss of their surly driver was less a concern than the fact that Kamal was sufficiently fearful to abandon his job and give up another advance on his money. Gabriel stood at the door of the vacant room, leaning against the frame, watching Alek kick the tyres of the Land Cruiser. He felt overcome with loneliness. He would die here, alone, with no one to know or even care. Alek would carry on without him. The military would ignore him. He would slip away, unrecorded and forgotten. There was something manic in the intensity of his fear. He felt unhinged by this new development. How did people bear to live with heightened states of emotion, he wondered. It would exhaust him within a day.

  Alek had her bossy expression fixed on him. ‘Get in the car and drive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he protested.

  ‘There’s no other way. You know it as well as I do.’

  He was too weary to fight her. He did not have his driver’s licence with him. He had never driven such a large vehicle before. He’d never driven on dirt before, let alone some appalling African back road, fresh from the rains. But she sat with her arms folded, daring him to argue.

  ‘Just as far as your mother’s grave. Then we stop and work out the route to Safaha. From then on, Arabidopsis has priority.’ That was the best he could do. It was weak, he knew, but short of running away like Kamal, he was as much a prisoner to whatever was burning inside her as she was.

  He scraped the back bumper on a pole as he tried to reverse out of the truck lot, misjudging the size of the four-by-four. His muttered apology was stonily ignored by his companion. His new sandals cut between his toes, though he had to admit that it felt better to have his feet uncovered. He battled with the gears, grinding them repeatedly until he found first, and they lurched out onto the main road through Bentiu. On the outskirts of the town, Gabriel noted a massive double pipeline tracking through the bush, all undergrowth hacked away for at least fifty metres on either side. He wondered just how far away the Heglig oil fields really were. He thought to consult his map and peered over his shoulder at the back seat where he had left it. The seat was empty.

  ‘Do you know where my map is?’

  Alek shook her head without looking at him. A motorcycle hooted at him as he realised he had drifted across the road while looking behind him.

  ‘Shit!’ he exclaimed, glancing at Alek in disbelief.

  Should he make the accusation, he wondered. If he did, he would have to disclose all his misgivings; he would have to confront her with all his doubts. He no longer believed the story about her mother’s grave. Nobody would go to these lengths to visit a graveside. Still he said nothing. Coward, he thought, as he settled back into the driver’s seat and tried to concentrate on the narrowing road in front of him.

  Two hours later they were still thumping along, only now the road had been reduced to little more than a track, the trees tall on either side. The red-brown strip snaking out in front of them was the only break in the bush. The atmosphere in the car was dire once more. His repeated questions as to their destination were met with hard-set silence. His pleas became increasingly desperate, her jaw progressively clenched. But there was nowhere to turn around without running the real risk of getting bogged down, and moving forward seemed simpler than trying to negotiate a retreat. Dark thoughts churned in his mind. He would never leave Bristol again, he thought bitterly. In fact, he would not venture beyond Clifton Village. Perhaps never leave the confines of his house. He would be reduced to a recluse who never left the comfort of his bed.

  He tried to ignore his anger by focusing on mastering the Land Cruiser. He aimed the front wheels at the side pitch of the gullies and felt the rear wheels grip and fall into line. There was something satisfying about this. His mind started to clear, fixed on the next churned-up portion of road, scanning for deceptive pools of water, keeping the revs at a reasonable rate. At one point, he started to pull over onto a flattened area at the side to relieve his straining bladder.

  ‘No, don’t drive there,’ Alek said in alarm, speaking for
the first time since they had left Bentiu.

  Gabriel turned back onto the rutted track, too afraid to ask. He drove for another few minutes in silence.

  Then she said: ‘Landmines.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Stop on the road, not off it. Go behind the car.’

  Gabriel did as he was told. He left the engine running and made his way to the back, keeping his footsteps as close to the side of the car as possible. It was utterly still, just the sound of the Land Cruiser idling, the pop-pop-pop of its exhaust. A colourful bird, all pinks and iridescent blues, swooped down and caught an insect in midflight. A large black-and-yellow wasp buzzed past, its wings making a clicking sound. There wasn’t a person to be seen in either direction. His urine collected in a hollow in the road, foaming at the edges. Somewhere in the bush an animal – a monkey or some large bird – screeched, moving across the canopy in a whirl of branches and falling leaves.

  He climbed back into the car and closed the door.

  ‘Where are we going, Alek?’ he asked again. ‘You owe it to me to tell me where we are going.’

  ‘I owe you something? I don’t owe anyone a thing.’

  ‘I thought you said your mother’s grave was close by. There is no grave, is there?’

  ‘There is a grave. Oh yes. We will be there soon. Then you will see.’ She looked at him now and Gabriel thought he saw her eyes glisten with tears. She turned away, repeating, ‘Then you will see.’

  Gabriel put the car into gear and pulled off. It was madness, sheer madness. He shook his head, laughing out loud in frustration. Yet he’d reached a point when moving forward into apparent oblivion was easier than trying to trace the way back. But he refused to forego the purpose of his journey. He would confront her and force her to concede to the original plan.

  After another eternity of following the muddy track, they began to see the first signs of habitation once again. A small cluster of huts, abandoned, their roofs burnt, and then a destroyed truck, the front windscreen cracked into a jigsaw of shattered shards. Gabriel slowed down to push past the hulk. There seemed to be bullet holes punched through the metal of the driver’s door.

  Then, a few miles further along, they came to a set of poles sunk into the earth on the side of the road. A white cloth banner was strung up between them with the blue logo of the UNHCR splashed across it. The UN Refugee Agency, it announced. Below it was a smaller poster nailed between two cross-poles. It depicted an assault rifle with a red circle and line across it. ‘No Weapon,’ it said.

  ‘Jila Refugee Camp,’ Alek informed him.

  Chapter 16

  POTTERGATE CLOSE, LINCOLNSHIRE

  The cold fronts that had swept across Lincolnshire, with their gale-force winds and sleet, had abated. The gardeners were out in Pottergate Close, milling about their regulated patches of grass and flowerbeds surveying the storm damage. The cul-de-sac echoed with the snips of secateurs and the rustle of leaves being swept into piles. Dogs that had been cooped up for days, sleeping in front of anthracite fires and gas heaters, barked boisterously at one another and kicked up tufts of grass behind them. The wind was still cold, and those venturing out to enjoy the sun still wore high-necked jerseys and woollen hats, but the presence of blue sky and the crisp air gave the entire neighbourhood an invigorating sense of renewal.

  George Bartholomew shared none of his neighbours’ joie de vivre. He stood, stubby pruning shears in hand, staring at the wilting leaves of his Princess Anne roses while concentrating on the wheeze in his chest. The incident on Horse Guards Avenue had left him shaken and overly vigilant to every minor alteration in his bodily functioning, from a flutter of dizziness to a passing stomach cramp. He thought he could detect a slight irregularity in his heartbeat. It was just a matter of time before his ticker stopped in its tracks and he dropped stone dead to the ground. That would teach the medical profession to take his ailments seriously.

  The roses had been viciously pruned for the worst of winter, but the remaining leaves had developed nasty brown spots with yellow halos around them. They wilted from their sturdy stems and several had been blown off by the wind.

  Bartholomew heard the rustle of Lilly’s overcoat behind him and smelt her over-applied perfume as she joined him. She had seemed to both diminish in height and extend in girth with age, as if a lifetime of easy domesticity had pushed her down from above, forcing her body outwards to compensate. At times he marvelled at the unstressed simplicity of her existence, and at others he was appalled at her inability to see beyond the confines of the garden. A short journey into the city of Lincoln required both a sound reason and a high degree of advance planning. Sending a missile-laden drone over north-east Africa was a minor accomplishment by comparison.

  ‘George, do you see the roses have got some awful disease? I’m sure it comes from the Abujas down the road; I see that they planted some funny plant in the front garden. Mrs Abuja says they cook with it; I’ve no idea what you could use such a strange plant for, I mean it’s just sticks and seed pods, but, anyway, that’s not the point, the thing is probably full of foreign bugs. And now look at the roses, dear. We’ve never had that kind of problem before.’ Lilly was not one to pause for breath unnecessarily and her sentences came out in a single, unbroken stream. ‘I think you should take a cutting and send it to the botany department for an opinion. Just now it takes over the neighbourhood and there’s no cure. It could be a threat to agriculture, who knows? Anyway, it would be a shame to lose the Princess Anne. She’s the only Royal left who we can look up to, you know, from the old school. Not like that silly Kate. Would you like some tea, dear?’

  The monologue would meander on for hours, he knew, and so he gathered as much enthusiasm as he could for her offer of tea. ‘That would be lovely,’ he told her, still trying to concentrate on the patter of his heartbeat.

  Lilly turned towards the house and then stopped, staring past her husband into the lane. Their garden wall was low and the shrubbery kept closely cropped. ‘Good neighbours don’t need to hide’ was one of Lilly’s more pointless statements in this regard, as if Al-Qaeda operatives lived in similar village lanes behind unrestrained shrubbery. In Lilly’s book, unclipped hedgerows were indicative of all manner of moral deviancy.

  A gleaming navy-blue Mercedes-Benz had pulled up outside the house, and a black chauffeur, complete with peaked hat and gloves, stepped out to open the rear passenger door. A suavely dressed man emerged from the leather seats and surveyed the residential lane with apparent disdain. He saw Lilly staring at him and made a little bow towards her. She remained motionless.

  ‘George, good to see you relaxing for once.’

  Khalid Hussein advanced towards the garden gate, mastering the catch that had fooled many a postman. He swept into their small garden, utterly incongruous as he made his way along their cobbled path onto the grass in his gleaming black shoes. He put out his hand towards Lilly, who gave a worried glance towards her sickening roses before greeting him.

  ‘Lovely to meet the woman behind the air marshal, Mrs Bartholomew. Lovely to meet you. And so sorry for intruding on your husband’s much needed rest, but unfortunately it is unavoidable.’

  ‘Unavoidable’ had a sinister ring to it. Maurice had described some unpleasant examinations as ‘unavoidable’. Lilly gave a disapproving little ‘hmph’ and waddled at speed back into the house. Bartholomew eyed Hussein with distrust. The Saudi’s eyes were dark and his mood was indiscernible.

  ‘What, George? Do you think that we don’t know where you live? Come now.’

  Bartholomew pointedly declined to shake his offered hand. He could feel that his pulse had already increased, and the whooshing sound had returned to his eardrums.

  ‘What do you want, Khalid? I’m on medical leave.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. Unfortunate incident in the Avenue. Just after being snubbed by the undersecretary. I do hope that you’re recovering, George. We don’t want you going belly-up on us, as they say.’ Hussein laughed
freely, before adding: ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  Bartholomew’s pulse peaked and troughed, as if Hussein had direct control over his state of health. He felt sure that with a single word, or perhaps a snap of his fingers, the Saudi could cause his heart to stop.

  ‘Can we go inside?’ Hussein said. ‘It’s very chilly out here and your English weather does not agree with me at all.’

  He put his arm around Bartholomew, guiding him like a reluctant psychiatric patient along the path and through the front door. The entranceway was cluttered with mackintoshes and other paraphernalia to cope with the unrelenting winters. Bartholomew was suddenly ashamed of the dingy and parochial status of his home. He imagined Hussein lived in some grand mansion overlooking a desertscape, or perhaps a gold-rimmed apartment with a plunge pool and glistening white tiles.

  Seated at Bartholomew’s scratched dining-room table, the arms dealer was even more out of place than in the garden. Bartholomew watched as the man took in the dinner plates attached to the wall, and the old food warmer parked in the corner next to a heavy wooden sideboard.

  Lilly bumbled in with a tray of tea and crumbling ginger biscuits, still eyeing the visitor with suspicion, and left with a muttered ‘I’ll leave you to it then’.

  When he was a younger man, Bartholomew’s work had often kept him away for lengthy periods, but it had never intruded into their home. Lilly had certainly never had a Muslim foreign national make himself comfortable in her dining room.

  Bartholomew poured the tea, trying to steady his shaking hand. He hoped Hussein would ascribe it to his unnamed medical condition, but knew that his anxiety must be etched all over his face. Hussein declined a biscuit and sipped at his tea, letting his eyes cast about the room. It was as if he was assessing the true desperation of the military man in front of him.