by Gavin Chait
‘That seems suicidal of him,’ says Shakiso. ‘The armour’s good, but it won’t stop your head being blown off.’
‘Fortunately, the shooters decided to retreat before that happened,’ smiles Tiémoko. ‘Simon called in his personal protection drones. It seems these shooters managed to evade them, which is why we were attacked at all.’
Shakiso whistles. ‘I’ve heard of those. Usually only for presidents. And no ordinary assassins if they can mask themselves.’
‘We assume it was Rosneft.’ Tiémoko shrugs. ‘We heard later that our line printer had been sabotaged at sea, and that Morocco and Tunisia would no longer let us run our lines through.
‘I was in hospital in Bakel for a few days with concussion. Simon came to visit me, and we discussed what we could do. We cannot store the electricity for long, and the first of our farms are operating. We cannot officially distribute our electricity to Ballou,’ he shrugs. ‘Politics. The Senegalese government is not comfortable encouraging the arrival of more seekers, but they recognize that our people are exhausted with absorbing so many, so we decided to build a town over the border. Here.’
Moussa nods. ‘At first it was a few water pumps. People were trying to farm again. The difficulty is it is too hot and crops will not grow. This is a border zone, though, and thousands of people move back and forth between Mali, Gambia, Nigeria. Before we knew it, people were setting up shops here. The seekers began to settle. Three months ago, the Chinese woman arrived. She brought one of those sand vitrification printers. She needed cheap electricity and lots of sand. Overnight, thousands of people started arriving and building. The camp began to empty, and you have seen what is left.’
‘We became very worried about cholera,’ says Tiémoko. ‘We could not get food or supplies here fast enough for all the people arriving. I came to an arrangement with the camp. They would supply us with water purifiers, sanitation processors, food and tents, and we could send people to the clinic and school.’
Shakiso leans against the wall, enjoying its relative coolness.
‘Does Oktar know of this?’ she asks.
Moussa looks genuinely amused. ‘Of course not. Too busy chasing donors in Geneva, or trying to convince anyone who will listen that the solar farms are just exploiting us. He hasn’t been to Ballou in months.’
‘That sounds like Oktar,’ she says. ‘So, what would help?’
Tiémoko points out the window. ‘People arrive so quickly, we must avoid disease. Put your resources into development of the sanitation systems.’
Moussa nods and joins in. ‘We must also move the hospital and school here,’ he says. ‘If we move the school, I am sure we can convince Médecins Sans Frontières to bring the hospital.’
‘That’s good, yes,’ says Shakiso. ‘What else?’
Moussa and Tiémoko exchange a glance.
‘The farmers have need of heat-resistant seed. Break the embargo,’ says Tiémoko.
Shakiso grins. ‘You mean piss off our associates at Oxfam and Greenpeace and cause a media brain seizure back home?’
Africa and Europe are the only regions in the world where genetically modified agriculture is severely limited. Europe through their continuing superstition about the technology, and Africa as a result of trade boycotts and pressure from the Europeans who comprise their largest donors and export market. It is an informal embargo, but it holds nevertheless.
‘I’m not disagreeing,’ says Shakiso, grinning as she imagines the outrage. ‘I know nothing else will grow here. But we need to make it impossible to stop. I can’t take this risk for one small town, no matter how big it’s getting. If we can distribute seed to support millions of farmers, then I think I can unlock some funds. We’ll need to range far beyond Senegal, though.’
‘The rains will be here in two weeks. They must start planting. How will we buy and distribute so much seed, even if we could find a seller?’ asks Moussa.
Shakiso’s grin stretches even further. ‘I think Tiémoko may have some ideas.’
‘Please!’ Viviane, the young woman who was in the office earlier, is standing red-faced at the door, her eyes wide and terrified. ‘Come quickly. Something is happening.’
She turns and rushes down the stairs into the lobby followed by the others. Her terror is contagious.
Someone has set up a projector, and an image fills the entrance hall.
Eight men, all in black, their faces obscured beneath black turbans, are walking across an erg field. Red-burned sand dunes stretch into memory behind them. They carry black flags bearing a white slogan: أنصار الدين.
Ansar Dine.
There is nothing but the sound of the desert: sand, hissing like steam from a kettle, shifting endlessly. A plainchant choir begins to sing, at once chilling and beautiful.
The camera shifts to where another group of black-clad figures are arriving, dragging a white man. He is naked, and his body is beaten and bleeding. They can see him screaming and sobbing and fighting them, sand shrouding him as he pounds the earth.
A man begins to speak.
14
His ear buzzes, waking him. Hollis drags himself from slumber.
It is three a.m.
He squeezes Adrià’s thigh and pulls himself upright. He massages his legs, returning circulation to them, checking his toes for warmth. The chair rolls into position, and he lifts his legs over and slides himself in.
A few moments of tugging and manoeuvring, and he is dressed in a robe and loose-fitting track pants.
Adrià groggily surfaces from beneath the covers, shakes his head and smiles.
‘You should have woken me, darling. I would have helped,’ he says, his voice crackly with sleep.
Hollis smiles. ‘Nonsense. You have surgery later. Stay there. It’s Sam. I’ll make you tea when I’m done.’
‘Not until noon. I’m awake. You go speak to him. I’ll bring you tea,’ says Adrià.
Shaking his head, Hollis rolls silently to the media room. He keeps the lighting subdued as he answers the call.
Sam materializes standing in the centre of the room. He looks exhausted. His eyes bloodshot.
Hollis prepares himself for the usual frustrations of direct communication with the Martian colony. He pulls up a console so he can take notes during the inevitable delays between each of them saying anything.
‘Hi,’ says Sam. ‘Sorry to wake you. Obviously . . . that poor bastard. What a terrible way to . . .’ Sam rubs his eyes. Someone behind him brings in a cup of coffee, and Hollis recognizes Nizena, one of the young agronomists.
‘Some good news. Our shuttle reached Earth orbit a few hours ago, and we have the new direct relay in place to boost our bandwidth. With that and the current orbital distance, our delay should be down to about twelve minutes. That’s almost real-time for us. I think we were pushing forty-five minutes last time we spoke? Thanks, Nizena,’ he says, accepting the mug.
Hollis sighs in relief. The delay in each direction has meant that a simple conversation could take hours to complete.
‘General news on our side. We will have a planned five hundred new colonists coming back on the shuttle. Not all of them will make it through training, so we’ll see where we are in a year. We’re able to absorb them, but it makes us aware of how careful our calculations have to be. Nizena is busy sorting out some problems we had in one of the grow tubes. It’s not serious, and we should be on track to feed all our new arrivals once that is in place.
‘We’re building as fast as we can, but obviously there’s a huge waiting list. A lot of those people expect to die on Mars, just not of starvation.’ He laughs softly.
‘I’m glad to get the telemetry from the solar farms. You’re getting tremendous yields there. I’m very pleased, and it looks as if the effective work-life of the roses will be about forty years.’
Sam looks up from his notes. Even across 225 million kilometres, he looks devastated.
‘I know Si’s reasoning, but . . . was this ri
sk necessary? Are you sure you can get him out? Alive?’
He pauses and stares at where he knows Hollis will be.
‘Over.’
Transmission passes to Hollis. Behind him, Adrià sneaks in, kisses him on the shoulder and leaves a mug of tea on the table.
Hollis runs his fingers across his face, pinching his jaw. The images yesterday were distressing.
Ansar Dine are experts at this. Too few people for the satellites to pick up and gone too soon for them to find. As much of a nightmare enigma as before.
‘Thus do we take the lives of all apostates. We are true defenders of the faith, and all should fear the whisper of our blades on the wind.’
The voice was instantly identified as Abdallah Ag Ghaly, although it is unclear whether he was amongst the group, causing serious people in letter agencies across the world to spill the sour travesty they drink instead of coffee and shout for analysis.
Many of those calls came to Hollis.
Adrià had tried to pull him away, but he felt he owed the man being tortured the recognition of his suffering.
On the video footage, Oktar Samboa was beaten, his arms and legs broken with metal clubs. The cracking and tearing of bone and flesh heard even over his wailing. He was held still as his testicles were hacked off. They raised him up, baring his neck, as someone who may have been Ag Ghaly punched a hole into his throat.
The men holding Oktar’s head arched his neck further, opening up his gasping, bubbling trachea. They roughly shoved a glass funnel into the hole.
A brown bottle was handed to Ag Ghaly. He pulled out the glass stopper and poured the contents into Oktar’s torn throat.
The acid began to bubble and burn immediately, and Oktar was flung to the ground.
He thrashed in the sand, trying to reach for his chest, gasping and sucking, his broken arms and legs flailing.
He took an interminable time to die.
Only then did the broadcast end.
Hollis takes a deep breath, pushing the memory aside, takes another breath, calming himself.
He nods his head and begins recording.
‘Sam, I’m pleased to hear from you,’ he says. ‘Very pleased about the delivery, and cutting transmission time will make this a lot easier. I’ll begin liaising with your team and, all going well, we’ll be ready next year to lift everything up the elevator.’
He hesitates before continuing. ‘I agree. What happened yesterday was horrific. I have no idea how that poor man got himself involved with this. Simon knew the risk he was taking and he felt it was the only way to . . .’
Hollis scratches his head and takes a sip of his cooling tea.
‘I’m sorry. We’re as close on this as we can be – Tiémoko is working with the Senegalese military for us – but you understand the difficulties as well as I do. Ansar Dine live by spectacle. They’re impossible to find and deadly accordingly. Simon believed this was the only chance we would have.
‘I’ve made the arrangements with Bradley over at Ziggurat. I had to remind him who pays his salary.’
It had been a strained conversation. As editor-in-chief of the connect’s most popular news and entertainment feed, Bradley guards his privacy behind expensive pay-walls. Hollis had to pay £1,000 to cover a phone privacy block before Bradley would even answer his call. He had screamed ‘editorial interference’, but Hollis simply pointed out that it was an important story, surely worth interrupting all their subscribers’ feeds to broadcast. Bradley threatened to resign. Hollis encouraged him to do so. ‘After all,’ he thinks, ‘what’s the point of being majority shareholder if one can’t throw around a little authority every now and then?’
‘I have a call with Zhi straight after this,’ he continues, ‘and we’ll complete the arrangements. I should be catching him before he goes on one of those long lunches of his.
‘I know Zhi still wants to join you there. As soon as you get a proper bar and dancing girls,’ he smiles.
‘I’ve had calls from the Chinese, the French. They’re waking up to our efforts to change a situation they’ve expediently frozen in place for half a century. Ag Ghaly enforces a semblance of order out there, and they’re not happy with us. Fortunately, the Chinese are more interested in our printer, and France has spent all their money in the Med.
‘We’re dependent on Simon, but we should have resolution in the next day or so. Everything comes down to whether Ag Ghaly takes the bait.
‘Sam, we’re watching over him. You know I love him as much as you do.
‘Over.’
He has almost half an hour to wait for Sam to receive his message, respond, and transmit his reply back. Written mail would be easier, but there is solace in being able to see and hear each other.
He checks whether Zhi is still available and rolls back into the bedroom. Adrià has fallen asleep again. Hollis stares at him, smiling, gently strokes his head.
His ear buzzes, and he heads back to the media room.
‘Thank you, Hollis. I’m grateful for all you do. I know Si has said he’ll come here when he’s dead –’ smiling ‘– and you’re not too keen either, but, should you change your mind, you know we have space for you and Adrià. Give him a big hug from me. Good luck, and speak to you in a few days.
‘Out.’
It is not the most efficient way for either of them to communicate, but Hollis feels better for the contact.
He calls Zhi and a phantom of his office blends into the media desk.
‘Hollis,’ he says, beaming. He stands, a tall, elegantly suited man beside an enormous desk, and performs a little jig. His way of saying hello.
‘Nǐ zěnme yàng?’ says Hollis.
‘Your diction is terrible. Please give up. My Engrish is mush berrer,’ he says, laughing and playing up his accent.
‘Zhi—’
Zhi nods. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘We must get Simon home first.’
‘I’m . . . forgive me. I know you take this seriously.’
Zhi smiles again. ‘Everything is ready. We have a team available on shift, and I have booked time on Tienhe-54 for the processing.’
‘Does your government know what you’re up to? I don’t want you suddenly blocked.’
‘The most glorious Standing Committee of the Central Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China is desirous of deepening its most auspicious ties with the Maghreb and Sahel,’ he says, his tone mocking. ‘They understand the value of the opportunity being opened up, and they’re being very supportive. There will be no problem.’
‘Thank you. And you? How are you doing?’
Zhi’s face hardens. ‘I saw those butchers yesterday. I owe Simon a great debt. It will be paid.’
15
‘What is this place, Duruji?’ asks Khalil, feeling safer if he stays close to the older man.
Duruji is as much a product of Ansar Dine’s schools as Khalil. He knows only what he was told when he first saw these ghostly towns during his earliest excursions above ground.
‘They were places of the kuffār where they dug in the rock for valuable metals.’
Below them, visible in valleys and channels amongst the dunes, are rooftops and buildings, gaps where doors and windows once kept the sand out. What was once a small mining town is now an abandoned collection of abstract walls and buckled machinery protruding from the sand.
‘Where did they go, Duruji?’
‘Ansar Dine came, and we took back the desert for our people. We must be careful here. There are machines within the sand as well as hidden pits. The land can be unstable.’
They walk down the bank of a dune and over a short stretch of asphalt appearing like an island on the rocky ground, climbing again on the other side.
The men are spread out in a long line with Duruji leading, checking their direction occasionally from a small map at his waist.
As he reaches the summit of a dune, he hears a shouted gasp behind him.
‘Boss!’
A shriek
ing, tearing whine and then a roar as the sand gives way and six men vanish into a sinkhole opening beneath them. He sees Khalil reach out instinctively and grab the man behind him as he teeters on the edge of the pit.
There is a thud as the falling men hit a solid floor.
Silence as each remains still.
Is that the end of it?
Wood splinters somewhere in the shadows below.
A scream which rapidly dwindles.
The sand was obscuring the fragile roof of the headroom covering the machinery over the main elevator shaft down into the mine. They have fallen on to wooden beams left as a short-term and rudimentary means to secure the hole when the mine was evacuated. One cracked and has given way.
Duruji looks quickly across the pit, counting. Six men above, at least five in the pit.
‘Do not move,’ he shouts to the men in the shadows below him. Then, ‘Who has the rope?’
They look for the man who carries it.
Faint whispers, a shout from beneath, ‘He fell, Duruji.’
Duruji curses. He gestures for his remaining men to move back carefully from the edge.
‘We will go to the town and see if there is anything we may use there. Move away from the hole if you can,’ he shouts to the trapped men.
Duruji leads the way back over the dunes and into the submerged town.
‘Search everywhere,’ he says. ‘It does not need to be a rope. We can use old clothes, pipes, anything that will hold the weight of the others.’
Each of the men heads in different directions, digging their way through sand-filled doorways.
Khalil follows behind Duruji like a lost pup.
The town looks to have been abandoned forty years ago, when Abdallah Ag Ghaly’s father first took the desert for Ansar Dine and made of it his empire. The miners who fled these isolated dormitory villages were not expecting to be gone for long and left most of their belongings behind.
Not all the towns were looted. Duruji is hoping that this one escaped notice.
There are offices, yellowed and blank papers flickering out of drawers in overturned tables. Bedrooms, mattresses but no bedding. A bowling and games hall. Everything buried in drifts of sand.
