Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  Fox enjoyed Manhattan, living in a brilliant, vibrant city; he had meaningful, challenging work; he had good friends—but none of that blocked out the memories. The nightmares. The time he had failed Kate, had been too slow, too blind to the situation around him. Then came the rare moments of clarity—like now, here with these people, when he felt he could still offer something, still be of use.

  A small boy came up—Fox had noticed he had been ostracised by the other children—and tried to speak, in quiet, deliberate, broken English. Fox handed him a few five-rupee coins. His face was scarred but his eyes were bright. An older child, perhaps the boy’s brother, ran up and explained the scar—a burn—and the boy hid his face in his hands, embarrassed.

  Fox removed his upper clothing and felt the cold air bristle against his goose-pimpled flesh. He showed the boy his scars—bullet entry and exit through his forearm, cut across his collarbone, angry pink pock marks from where three pistol rounds had managed to push through the back of his bulletproof vest a few months ago.

  He bent down and guided the boy’s hand away from his face—the scars weren’t so bad, but it tore Fox up to see such damage on a kid.

  “Listen,” Fox said to him. “Life—life is how you wear your scars. Can you say that?”

  The boy nodded.

  Fox held out another coin, expectant.

  “Life is how—” He looked at Fox.

  Fox pointed to his own scars. “… how you wear your scars,” he offered.

  The boy smiled a sweet smile. “Life is how … you wear your scars.”

  52

  GORI, GEORGIA (EASTERN EUROPE)

  “South Ossetia and Russia have many men over there, but no soldiers,” a Georgian officer was telling some American troops. Captain Garth Nix tried not to roll his eyes—it was just that kind of talk that led to more trouble, and underestimating the enemy wasn’t something he practised.

  Most of his men were helping with reconstruction work today, building semi-permanent housing for refugees on the sports oval of a former boarding school the UN peacekeepers had taken over as headquarters of the Blue Zone. He was overseeing the construction and awaiting the arrival of some embedded reporters who would spend time with the men on the ground, trying to get the ‘real’ story of what was happening here.

  Mac wasn’t here, though: he was off duty, confined to barracks pending an inquiry into the shooting. It turned out those two guys he’d taken out on Nix’s order were Russian, and the Russians were shouting to anyone who would listen, claiming that six civilians had also been killed in the exchange—although, conveniently, they refused to allow the UN specialists to inspect the bodies. Nix knew it was all typical Russian bullshit, his guys had selectively sprayed the Squad Automatic Weapon in a controlled burst, and Mac shot off just the two rounds. They engaged a deadly threat in the buffer zone, which was specifically designated off-limits to all civvies and military personnel, precisely to avoid this kind of exchange.

  Peace talks were going on somewhere: Sarkozy doing his thing again, Hillary Clinton too, and no doubt Putin puffing his chest out in reply. Mac was in barracks and Nix was on babysitting duty until his superior said otherwise. This wasn’t soldiering.

  53

  NORTHERN AREAS, PAKISTAN

  There were hardly any men left in the next speck of a town. The inhabitants—women and children, and a few old guys—lined up for handouts from Amar’s NGO staff, some looking spooked as a convoy of Pakistani soldiers rumbled west. Fox leaned against Amar’s SUV, and Gammaldi sat on the warm bonnet, eating an MRE.

  “Wazzup?” Gammaldi said, licking his spoon clean.

  “Was that lemon pound cake?” Fox asked.

  “Might have been,” Gammaldi said. “Ate it too fast to tell.”

  “Anyway,” said Fox, going over some pages of his Moleskine notebook, “they say most of the construction guys for the water project were recruited from here. They relocated to the construction place about fifty clicks northeast of here; shitty track, takes about an hour and a half by car.”

  “Hmm,” Gammaldi said, wiping his mouth on the arm of his charity T-shirt. “And we couldn’t take a chopper in from Srinagar because … ?”

  “Because everyone around here’s got a gun or an RPG, and the only choppers in and out of this region are Indian military—prime targets for the aforementioned weapons.”

  “Fair enough,” said Gammaldi as he slid off the bonnet of the car and cleared away his meal packaging.

  Fox looked around and saw Amar heading their way. He was walking quickly, purposefully, and his people were hurriedly packing their supplies into their trucks.

  “What is it?” Fox asked as Amar reached the car.

  His face showed revulsion. He wouldn’t meet their eyes with his. He climbed into the car without speaking.

  Fox and Gammaldi exchanged a look.

  “Amar,” Fox said, getting into the passenger seat. “What is it?”

  He started the engine, his hands tight on the wheel, his mouth a hard line on his face. People were still in the street, only now they were walking slowly, aimlessly. Fox watched a woman stop in the middle of the road and bring her hands to her head, tears running down her cheeks as her children clung to her.

  Gammaldi climbed in and they drove off, heading the convoy, northeast. They rode in silence for the next hour and a half. Fox stared out the window, thought about the faces of those women in the town, thought about Kate.

  “Where is everybody?” Gammaldi asked.

  There was no noise but for the barking of a few wild dogs as the vehicles pulled up in a levelled-off gravel shoulder. They walked behind Amar, through a canyon of excavated earthworks to reveal the town stretched out before them. “Have they already left—”

  Gammaldi almost slipped when they rounded a corner into what used to be the main street of the town. Dozens of temporary structures had been burned to the ground. Some old mud and stone huts had survived the flames, but their roofs were smouldering. What Fox thought had been fog or cloud was smoke.

  “Oh shit…” Gammaldi said, stepping over a bloodied bone on the ground.

  Amar lurched forward and vomited on the road. He wiped his hand across his mouth angrily and spoke for the first time since leaving the last town. “There have been bandit attacks,” he said. “This is … this area…”

  He couldn’t go on. His NGO staff tentatively picked their way forward. Four of them were the protection, armed with old semi-automatic rifles; no match for whoever did this.

  Fox entered a hut. It smelled of burned bodies and charred bones. He picked up a few brass shell casings, 9 mm. He walked out to the car, took his camera out of his backpack and snapped away at everything. He stopped counting after tallying thirty separate human remains. He found Gammaldi sitting on the ground by the car, the colour chased from his face.

  “There’s no one left alive,” he said. “No one.”

  Amar made his way back. His people climbed into their vehicles, ready to leave this place. “We’re heading back into India to properly report this,” he said, getting into the Land Rover. He sounded determined, as if he had found some measure of resolve out there in the cold streets. He had not radioed the information, but had placed several calls on his satellite phone as he had walked around.

  Gammaldi pushed himself up off the ground and opened the back door of the SUV.

  “Good to go?” asked Fox.

  Gunfire sounded—semi-automatic rifle fire. In these kinds of mountains it could be around the corner, or it could be five kilometres away.

  “Yep,” Gammaldi said, climbing in and closing his door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  54

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  Babich’s office was in a corner of the new Norman Foster-designed Russia Tower, a monolithic piece of modernity clad in glass and steel rising up over Moscow. He looked down at Red Square, distant and minuscule from 118 floors up.
His office had special acoustic glass, and Umbra Corp’s offices were swept for bugs each day by a roving team, as much to combat industrial espionage as to stop prying ears becoming too familiar with his business dealings.

  “So Fox has strong feelings for this woman?” he asked Kolesnik.

  “Yes, and he thinks she’s dead. Seeing her alive will be—”

  “And when will he be taken care of?”

  “Soon, in Pakistan,” Kolesnik said with a big grin. Babich could see where some money had gone—his son’s teeth were blindingly white and perfectly straight. American teeth.

  “So we need this girl for what purpose?”

  “Well … Insurance,” Kolesnik replied. “I am going to see her tomorrow for myself, to get a feel for her, just in case.”

  “Just in case? For insurance? I don’t like the sound of this. You should be more confident—you should not need such back-up plans.”

  “Father…” Kolesnik said. “The place that Fox and his friend are going to find themselves in is in the middle of nowhere, and—well, they won’t last long, I promise you. If the cold and hunger don’t get them, the inmates or guards will. It’s a matter of time, a very limited time.”

  Babich knew the look in his son’s eyes. He was enjoying this too much. It was a game for him, watching others suffer.

  “I remember the day your grandfather went to war, to fight for Stalin,” Babich said to him. “He took us to the zoo here in Moscow, and then we all said goodbye to him. We all cried that day, even him. He bought me ice-cream. It came in an aluminium cup. I still remember that ice-cream, as well as I remember how hungry we were for the next few years. Do you understand?”

  Kolesnik looked at him blankly.

  “Do not mess around with this any longer,” Babich said. “Suffering can do no good, not even for your enemy. So far you have done a good job for me on this—”

  “Petro failed us—”

  Babich held up his hand, and his son knew to stop.

  “This isn’t a movie,” Babich said. “This isn’t that Brother gangster-movie shit that you love so much, that glorified hit-man bullshit. If you’d fought in Chechnya like your brother did, you’d take no delight in what you do. You are an instrument to me, a well taken care of instrument, and I need you to be efficient, not emotional.”

  Kolesnik’s eyes did not leave his father’s, and he nodded that he understood.

  “You have a few last things to complete. Don’t make any final mistakes,” Babich said. “When you have Lachlan Fox and his partner in a place you can control, you must end it then, while it’s easy.”

  Babich leaned forward and signalled that their time was over. “I will see you again when this is all done,” he said, patting his son’s face. “Your mother wants you over for dinner soon. I want to feel proud of you that night, pride like she feels—only mine must be earned.”

  55

  NORTHERN AREAS, PAKISTAN

  Amar Singh stood on a ridge, talking quietly into his phone. He looked over at Fox and Gammaldi sitting in the car, then away. Fox did a double take and turned to Gammaldi in the back seat—something wasn’t right.

  “Was that Thomas?” Fox asked when Amar returned to the SUV.

  Amar looked at him blankly: “Oh, yes, he’ll meet us at the border.”

  “Your brother’s a good man,” Fox said, watching as Amar climbed into the car. “He took a while to warm to us, but he’s genuine.”

  Amar turned the ignition key and the diesel started up with a roar. He slammed his door shut and put his seatbelt on—he hadn’t bothered with that before. Perhaps they were going off road, so Fox followed suit and motioned for Gammaldi to do the same. The two supply trucks and the protection vehicle had carried on, but they would catch up with them quickly enough in the Land Rover.

  “All happy families resemble one another,” Amar said, pulling onto the tracks in the gravel road, “but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  Fox took a second to recall, then smiled. “Anna Karenina.”

  Amar nodded.

  “Huh?” said Gammaldi.

  “Tolstoy.”

  Gammaldi shook his head, vacant.

  “Don’t worry about it, Al.”

  Fox settled into the seat as they rumbled along the road, which, for the most part, consisted of no more than tyre tracks in the ground. The incinerated town of the Vritra Utilities employees disappeared behind them as clouds swept over the dim afternoon, running the road ahead out of view and forcing Amar to switch on the Land Rover’s fog lights.

  “We are taking an alternative route,” Amar said, turning south and hammering down a double-laned gravel track. “Easier to navigate, quicker to the border—more direct.”

  Fox didn’t think much more of it as they wound around to the left and drove through a small creek bed, meeting up with another corrugated dirt road on the other side. He could no longer see much ahead through the fog, and he was glad Amar knew the way so well.

  Something in his side mirror caught Fox’s attention. He looked behind—past Gammaldi playing with his satellite phone—there was something … Gammaldi noticed the look and turned around, too.

  Out of the rear window was the faint glow of headlights.

  “Is that the convoy behind us?” Fox asked Amar.

  Before he could answer, a vehicle’s horn beeped and Amar stopped the car in the middle of the road.

  Fox watched Amar. His face was pointed forward, avoiding eye contact, his hands tight on the wheel.

  Suddenly there was a hard rap on the glass of Fox’s window and he flinched. A Pakistani soldier.

  He wound the window down and saw a few uniformed men surrounding the car.

  “You will both come with me,” the soldier ordered, pointing to Fox and Gammaldi. His eighties-model M16 was held in a quick-action grip.

  Fox looked across at Amar, who was still staring dead ahead into the few metres of glowing space that his headlights illuminated in the fog.

  “Amar?”

  Nothing.

  “You will come with me now!” the soldier ordered, knocking the barrel of his assault rifle hard against the side of Fox’s head.

  Fox clenched his teeth through the pain, raised his hands and motioned that he was opening the door. As Gammaldi got out, Fox saw that he’d managed to press SEND on his phone.

  56

  WASHINGTON DC

  “They sent a distress message?” Faith Williams said over the speakerphone.

  “Yes. And we’ve confirmed the GPS location on Gammaldi’s phone, but we can’t raise them,” Hutchinson replied.

  “Could it be an accident?”

  “No way.”

  “Maybe they stayed in the town they were going to investigate, and they’re out of range.”

  “We just had a DoD Predator fly over it—it’s a ghost town,” Hutchinson said. “Visibility wasn’t good—clouded over and fogged in—but infrared picked up no life at all.”

  “Jesus…” Tas Wallace said.

  “The GPS location came up empty, but there’s plenty of cloud cover; they might be close by,” Hutchinson said. “My guys will be on the ground in India momentarily, and I’ve got the FBI field offices in Pakistan and India working with all local assets.”

  “All right, keep me posted, and let me know if we can help,” Wallace said. Their connection went dead.

  Hutchinson immediately placed another call. He had an American spy to catch.

  57

  JAIL, PAKISTAN

  “You are American spies?”

  Fox shook his head. After fifteen minutes of going around in the same circles, he was getting frustrated.

  “Do we sound like Americans?”

  “We’re Aussies,” Gammaldi said. “You know, cricket?”

  “You have official American passports,” the Pakistani Army guy said. He was a senior officer of some sort, and this was eith
er a very poor military base or some kind of prison. He had their brand new official US passports which were empty but for their stamps for Spain and India. “These have US State Department credentials … and you wear American Army pants.”

  Fox had forgotten about the pants, and briefly considered arguing the point that they were actually Air Force pants. He figured this guy got his line of questioning out of a book, or probably a bad movie. Fox and Gammaldi watched helplessly as he picked through the contents of their bags, now scattered over his desk. The room was smoky and smelled like dope. The guy’s assistants, or whoever they were, were clearly pretty whacked. They may not drink booze around here, Fox thought, but they get their kicks in other ways.

  “And here you have American military ration packs,” he said.

  “You can buy those in any—”

  He held up his hand—probably out of a movie, too—and Fox didn’t push it.

  “I’ll look into all this, make some calls,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You will be guests here until I find out more. You will tell me more.” Then he waved them away.

  They were led out through a small gated area into a large walled yard, an expanse of cold, hard gravel with a water trough in the middle.

  “Clothes.”

  “What?” Fox asked.

  A guard tugged at his jacket.

  “You’re—” Fox stopped himself when he saw the rifle barrel aimed at his forehead. He and Gammaldi took off their jackets, belts and shoes as directed. They left their gear on the ground and were pushed along, Gammaldi’s teeth chattering like morse code.

  “Why not just let us go?” Gammaldi said to the armed guard walking beside him. The guard remained silent as he led them towards an ancient-looking squat building with a domed roof, and a heavy-gauge steel-plate door. The guard passed his cigarette to his colleague and slung his rifle over his shoulder as he unlocked the door.