Asimov's SF, Sep 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The car was slowing. They were moving through dense forest. The replay on the auto map showed that they had passed along the northern frontiers of Iraq. Barriers protecting the pipeline road itself had gone down when they crossed the next national frontier. They were now about to enter Diyarbakir.

  Turkey had become a member country of the European Community some years ago, despite its murky reputation regarding human rights. The feeling was inescapable that they were now in more friendly territory. Turkey was a secular state, despite its numerous Muslim inhabitants. So it had been since the day of Kemal Attaturk.

  But at the feed road, when they slotted their biometricards into the gate computer, the gate did not open. Carl spoke over the phone.

  "Please be patient. Please remain where you are,” said a recorded message. “Your needs will be attended to as soon as possible."

  "Oh shit,” Carl exclaimed. “A certain lack of information there...."

  "There's a problem.... “Donna was increasingly nervous.

  Above them, the armor-encased pipe ran into the base of a towering metal structure as big as an aircraft carrier. Diyarbakir was the last and largest pumping station before Suoyue ended its monstrous length at the new Turkish terminus port of Mersin.

  Three police on armored motorbikes appeared, sirens screaming. They wore blue helmets. They halted on the other side of the gate and the lead police officer spoke over the barrier. Carl showed his identification.

  The officer apologized with more formality than warmth.

  "What's the problem?” Carl asked.

  "A strike twenty-five kilometers from here, sir. The road's out."

  "How's that?"

  "Shell or mortar fire. Maybe nuclear. One of these Islamic terrorist groups."

  "Bastards!"

  The officer ignored the remark. He had other problems. “You have to wait here for a while."

  "Take me to Chief of Suoyue Police, Tinkja Gabriel."

  The mention of the Police Chief produced smart action. Carl and Donna were escorted immediately into the fortress. The very name of Tinkja Gabriel was a passport. Carl said to Donna, “I'll be a while with Tinkja. Can you keep yourself amused?"

  "I'll try.” She gave him a sly contemplative smile. Carl had once had a brief but passionate affair with Tinkja. Donna, he knew, had a cousin in Diyarbakir, working in the Logistics Division. Under all the militaristic activity of the project lay human affection, human relationships, human need.

  They parted. Carl took an elevator to the police control tower. He was stopped and body-searched before getting into the express elevator and when leaving it on the ninety-first floor—as if he could have made himself a bomb on the way up.

  As he entered the great circular office, he saw Tinkja immediately, and drank in her appearance, her long dark hair swept back and knotted at the nape of her slender neck, her high-nosed hawkish profile. She was wearing a khaki uniform, looking severe, leaning slightly forward to speak into a microphone, despite the body mike dangling round her elegant neck. She saw him immediately. Her dark eyes flashed. She gestured toward her inner office. She went on talking.

  The room was crowded. People at desks spoke quietly to their screens, machines clattered. On one wall was an electronic map of the entire Suoyue with its sweep of roads, from Ashkabad to Mersin on the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. LCDs indicated the whereabouts of items of traffic, of the pilotless strike planes and of the BWA drifting above the pipeline.

  He waited in Tinkja's office. Tinkja was an Israeli of German-Romanian extraction, with royal blood on the Romanian side. Carl and she had met in France, when he was seconded to an EU architectural partnership. They had fallen in love and taken a brief—all too brief!—holiday in the Auverne. Never had conversation, never had love-making, been sweeter. A time of unbelievable empathy. Never had he been so close to another human being. Carl allowed himself to recall those times as he looked about the room. It was in apple pie order. On one wall hung two framed lines of verse from a poem called “Gates of Damascus":

  Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster's Cavern, Fort of Fear,

  The Portal of Baghdad am I, the Doorway of Diyarbekir

  He smiled to himself. He had once claimed that this was the only occasion Diyarbekir had been mentioned in English poetry. Evidently Tinkja had not forgotten.

  From the window, the great forward organizations of the revolutionary Suoyue project could be seen. Miles of barracks and stores and yards and linking roads contained moving vehicles and personnel. A nearby services restaurant flew the flags of many nations. More distantly, a newly built railway linked the center with distant Angora, the Turkish capital.

  Tinkja entered the room briskly. “Sometimes I could nuke Washington,” she said. She spoke as if she had only just left the room and Carl Roddard.

  By way of greeting, she went to Carl, shook his jacket roughly, clasped him, snapped a smile, and then turned away.

  She stalked over to a speaker system and said, “Hospital Emergency Service. Ron Habland, report to me please. Ron Habland.” Then she looked at Carl, arms folded across her chest, her tense expression relaxing only slightly.

  "I hear the road has been blown,” he said, in an equally no-nonsense way. “How did that happen?"

  "We want to know who blew it,” she said. “The strike occurred only at 13.05 hours. I have no time to stand here and chat, sorry. Washington is already bleating. Beijing will be next."

  He glanced at his watchputer. It was 15.15. “Can I help?"

  "Of course not.” She said again, as if to herself, “We must know who blew it. There's no Arab nation that doesn't hate the Suoyue. Or it could be a local group of disaffected Turks, displaced by the pipeline. Or the damned Kurd dissidents. We have to know what we're up against."

  Carl said, “We're up against most of the men in the Middle East. So, the road's already being rebuilt?"

  "Whoever they were, they had possession of field nuclear weapons. Yeah, they're fixing your precious road."

  An arbitrary tap at the door and a small man with well-greased hair, wearing green coveralls, came in. This was Ron Habland from the hospital emergency services. “Ron runs the morgue,” she said in a brusque aside to Carl. She did not make an introduction.

  Habland regarded Carl suspiciously. In fact, Carl had met Habland two years ago, in Ashkabad, but the man failed to recognize him, so tense was he. He bore the not unfamiliar air of those who thought that, in a region that had never known democracy, no one could be trusted.

  Tinkja addressed the grim-faced newcomer. “Ron, you probably know already that one of our pilotless planes immediately strafed the terrorists. They were up in the hills, not a kilometer away. It's too bad. We needed at least one of them alive for questioning."

  "Those planes are too damn efficient,” said Ron. “We need troops on the ground. Even Spanish troops would do."

  He pulled a face and turned a thumb down.

  "I need you to get a contingent to go and collect up anything you can find of their bodies or parts of bodies. Toes, even. Legs. Heads. Clothing. Weapons. Support gear. The route they came from. Anything they dropped on the way. Go with the contingent."

  "Glad to,” said Ron, with a slight bow.

  "Anything you can find. Back here soonest."

  He said, “Once the oil starts to flow, the Arabs can go back to their lousy camels."

  "My sentiments exactly.” Tinkja gave Ron a grin as he departed, before she turned to switch over a TV screen.

  "A bitter little man,” she commented. “Lost a leg three years back, though you wouldn't think so to look at him."

  "I'd think he was on the brink of a breakdown."

  "Let's hope not today...."

  Looking over Tinkja's shoulder, Carl saw the scene at the damaged road, filmed from one of the satellites. A missile crater was surrounded by rubble and twisted metal for a distance of perhaps two miles. Wrecking and repair vehicles were already at work, clearing
the site, re-laying foundations. The pipeline and its casing appeared to be unharmed.

  "At least they missed the pipeline."

  She said, “Yeah, that's what they would have aimed for. The shits probably believe that oil is already coming through.... Now I have to call Beijing. Sorry, Carl, I have no time for you. You better scram."

  "Okay.” He thought, She's glad to have an excuse. Of course she has another lover by now. She would never be without a man for long, not a woman like this. He sighed. At least she had once been his. And he hers.

  "Your road will be fixed soonest—open again maybe by eighteen hours. Not too much delay. ‘Bye.” She turned and began to make her Beijing call. Carl quit without saying good-bye.

  It was 15.50. As Carl approached his auto, Donna emerged from a nearby archway, accompanied by a dark slender man in a worn grey suit. Carl was immediately alert at the sight of a stranger. This stranger, though seemingly young, had a deeply lined face. He wore a thin black moustache over thin lips.

  Donna was neatly dressed and composed, although there was something about her body language Carl mistrusted.

  He said as she approached, “You've heard about the strike on the road. Why do they hate us so much?” She made no answer to his remark.

  "You look like shit. What's up, apart from the road?"

  It was not the sort of comment she usually dared to make.

  "Oh, the past—the past remains. Who's this with you?"

  They were having one of their conversations....

  As she gave a half-smile, her teeth very white in her black face. “He doesn't have a name, Carl."

  The thin man came close and stuck a gun in Carl's ribs.

  Subdued Chinese music played somewhere in the background.

  Carl delivered a swift knee to the man's testicles, but the man was alert, chopping the knee down. He gave a hard jab with his free hand to Carl's midriff, which winded him with pain. It was hard to credit that this was happening in the police precinct. A previous thought came back to him: in a region that had never known democracy, no one could be trusted. At some level there was police connivance involved here.

  "Walk!” the thin man commanded.

  As they went toward the side of the building, Carl looked about for CCTV. The nearest camera was plastered over with spray paint, still dripping. Then they were round the corner.

  Still breathless, he asked Donna, “This is your cousin? What do you hope to get out of this?"

  "Shut up and walk,” she said.

  The thin man punched Carl again. “You, fucker, you give Ziviad Haydor to the enemy, to your fucking friend Firadzov. Now you pay."

  They were walking fast. It was hard to believe that this had happened in the police precinct.

  Cops were everywhere, mainly men hurrying to get into wheeled cars. There was a crisis on the pipeline road. So the thin man and his prisoner slipped away. No one took any notice of them.

  They reached a fast road crossing. On the other side, Carl was pushed into a tall building with an ancient crumbling façade. Sweet smell, not pleasant, greeted them inside. They started down a flight of steps, some rather broken. Carl turned suddenly, striking the thin man across the face with a violent blow.

  The gun went off. The bullet whistled past Carl's ear. Donna chopped him across the neck with a sharp blow from the edge of her hand. He fell, and went tumbling down the remaining steps.

  They were after him and on him. They hit and kicked him, cursing in their own language.

  He was then frogmarched down a stone corridor. A side door was unlocked and he was kicked into darkness, so savagely that he sprawled on a damp and filthy floor. The door slammed behind him.

  Carl lay there, groaning and breathing hard. After a while, he pulled himself up and leaned against a wall.

  As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, he saw there was a choked grey light filtering from a grating in the corner of the cell. Calming his breathing, he listened. Someone or something was breathing nearby.

  He moved. The cell was larger than he had at first assumed. In the far corner, away from the light, a man was hanging.

  Cautiously, Carl stepped nearer.

  "Hello!"

  There was no reply, but the man raised his head slightly.

  Carl now saw that he was suspended by his wrists by ropes attached to steel rings set in the stone ceiling.

  "How long have you been here like this?"

  The answer came faintly in a foreign tongue.

  "You poor bugger, hang on and I'll get you down."

  In their rage and anxiety, Donna and her cousin had not searched him. He drew the knife from the sheath strapped to his lower leg and, reaching upward, sliced through the ropes.

  He caught the body as it fell, to lower it gently to the floor. He knelt by it. He gently massaged the injured wrists.

  Again the man muttered something.

  As Carl sheathed his knife, he reassured the man as best he could. The poor fellow had been forced to relieve himself and stank.

  An idea struck him. He peeled off his outer jacket and forced the injured man into it. Taking the man by his shoulders, he dragged him into the darkest corner and propped him sitting against the wall. He then stood waiting alertly by the two severed ropes.

  The minutes crawled by. His resolution did not fail. When he heard footsteps in the corridor outside, he leapt up and seized the ropes in his two hands. As the cell door was opened, he hung his head as if unconscious.

  It was the thin man, Donna's cousin, who had entered. He grunted as he took in the recumbent figure, before turning his attention to the hanging man. He came closer.

  Carl threw himself on his captor. They fell together, the cousin striking his head on the floor. Carl slammed it again against the stone slabs. The cousin did not move.

  With a quick look into the corridor, where a guard of some kind stood distantly, Carl dragged the unconscious man to a position under the grill in the wall. By standing on his chest, he could now gain leverage on the grill. Fragments of rust came away in his hands. He heaved and felt a slight movement.

  "Rotten—like everything else in this damned place,” he said to himself.

  He pushed hard, and pushed again. One of the bars crumbled away. He rattled the grating. It gave. He heaved it to one side. Clasping the sides of the hole, he made a mighty effort and heaved himself up into daylight. Once he had an elbow on the ground, he knew he had made it.

  Another struggle, kicks against the inner wall, and he was free.

  Breathing heavily, he stood up, having to lean for a moment against an ivy-clad wall to look about him.

  He was in a neglected courtyard. Brambles and other weeds sprouted from among flagstones. At one end of the courtyard was a wrought iron gate, through which uniformed men could be seen. Ducking low, Carl sprinted to the opposite wall. He clutched at a thick woody stem of ivy and hauled himself up. Beyond the wall was a busy street with shops, restaurants, and a cinema. Many men, the majority wearing robes, strolled about, indolent in the heat.

  Carl dropped down onto the road, picked himself up and walked rapidly away. His plan was to enter a restaurant and there call Tinkja—until he realized he was covered in filth, picked up from the floor of the prison cell.

  As he was walking rapidly to the end of the street, a taxi eased slowly beside him, a decrepit old vehicle with a turbaned Sikh at the wheel.

  "Taxi, sah?"

  He trusted no one in Dyarbekir, but there seemed nothing for it but to get in. Besides which, he liked and trusted Sikhs and their religion. He climbed into the back of the vehicle and told the man to take him to police H.Q.

  "I will leave you by the gate, sah."

  As he paid off the taxi driver in dollars, two black police cars came roaring from the yard and drove away down the road the taxi had taken.

  He called Tinkja from reception. “I need a wash and some clothes."

  She sounded surprised. “You are still in the disside
nt prison."

  "No I'm not."

  "I sent cars for you."

  "I'm here in your reception area. How did you know about the prison anyway?"

  She explained that she had planted a bug on him earlier, afraid he might meet with trouble. It was on his jacket, sticking like a burr. The jacket remained in the cell.

  "I don't do this for everyone,” she said. “But come on up."

  Now the crisis on the wrecked highway was under control, the elegant Tinkja actually escorted him in his new clothes down to where his auto was parked. She blew him a kiss with her neat, leathery hand.

  "Don't come back, Carl, okay?"

  "You could say life is rather like a long long road,” he said lightly, as he climbed into the car.

  "Except you can repair a long long road,” she said. Carl let her have the last word.

  There were indications that the architect's car had been searched. A rear-view mirror had been deflected, a seat had been reoriented. The revolver was still in place. There was also an elusive scent, which Carl recognized as coming from a fingerprint spray.

  It was all a safety precaution, part of the life they led. He thought nothing of it. Trust was not in it. Once he had fed in his biometricard, the car moved slowly along the feed road to the pipeline highway. Still it ran slowly. Power had been reduced. He was traveling at fifty m.p.h.

  At about Denghuo (or Station) Thirty—lights blazing because there was a drab overcast—the helicopters started hovering. They were painted wasp-colored: Chinese Suoyue Military. The auto moved still more slowly. Intense activity ahead. Gathered around a fair-sized crater demolishing the stretch of the road were huge BCW excavators, construction units, cranes, concrete-sprouters, and other vehicles, among which wheeled cars moved like beetles. Emergency cabins had been erected. On a mountain to the south of this activity there was also movement. Tanks had been called in, plus a large number of military personnel in a variety of colored helmets.

  Carl stopped the vehicle. He took binoculars from the front locker and was about to get out when the machine said, “Do not leave your vehicle, Carl Roddard!"