In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  Carl took Donna to the Pipeline Consortium H.Q. in A-B Square, to say hello to his friend and colleague, Wang Feng Ling. Ling embraced Carl, kissed Donna’s hand, and ordered tea to be brought. Ling as ever was neatly dressed in a well-tailored suit. His hair was immaculate. He wore a gold ring on one of his long artistic fingers. His smile was warm and sincere.

  “How is life in Ashkabad, Carl, dear chap?” he asked. “Dear chap” was his favourite form of address.

  “Dull as ever. Even the camels are bored.”

  “With that particular time-expired Central Asian dullness?” Ling smiled at the recollection.

  “The new dictator is slightly better than the old dictator. Firadzov accepts bribes with a better grace . . .”

  Ling nodded his sympathy. “Unfortunately the new dictator in Uzbekistan is not slightly better than the old dictator, dear chap. However, we maintain long and tedious talks.”

  Carl gave a short laugh. “You still have hopes, then.” He had learnt to talk obliquely to Ling.

  Ling raised his cup and smiled at his friend. “Hopes? You mean plans? Certainly the Suoyue can be key to both East and West.”

  Indeed, even the Westerners on the pipeline road referred to it as the “Suoyue,” the Chinese word for “key.” Westerners were interested only in piping the oil of Central Asia to the West, bypassing the Arab states; but the Chinese were major players here, and the Chinese had plans to extend the Suoyue eastwards, beyond Turkmenistan to China itself.

  As had always been the case, Chinese intentions were not clearly understood in the West.

  “Any problems on your stretch of the pipe, Ling?”

  “Your president, Julian Caesare, may cause problems, dear chap, if he continues to exacerbate Islamic problems in Iran.”

  “Well, the Consortium has a century’s concession on this coastal strip.”

  “Religion always has contempt for any concession.”

  “You’re right there.”

  As—thought Carl, shaking hands on leaving—Ling was so frequently right. Staunch nationalist though he was, he had begun to believe that the Chinese were actually a superior race. The superior race.

  He did not say as much to Donna when they reentered the bazaar. Or when they climbed into their auto. Or when they were once again travelling on their way westward on the Suoyue. The great pipeline in its protective casing appeared to go on for ever. Every so often, a pumping station straddled the pipe. Dominating the stations were small strongholds, bristling with masts and fully manned, fortified against those enemies of the West who would seek to block the flow of oil.

  Carl remembered he had visited Hadrian’s Wall in the North of England, stretching from east coast to west coast, where he studied how the Romans had attempted to keep out the barbarians. The Suoyue might bear a Chinese name, but the essential elements of its design lay in the West, and had its links with ancient Rome.

  The Caspian fell away, leaving its lassitudes behind them. Climbing, they crossed the forty-ninth line of latitude. Kurd patrols were in evidence here, driving US army vehicles with Kurdish flags attached to their aerials. The aerials whipped in the wind. The Kurds had been paid off; the patrol now fired their Kalashnikovs into the air by way of greeting to the speeding car.

  The weather became colder and an inclement wind blew. Clouds were torn to shreds. The climate remained mild inside the auto. Carl and Donna sat close, elbows all but touching.

  Pilotless planes, controlled from Diyarbakir, screamed overhead, low to the ground. Higher overhead, they occasionally saw the heavyweight BWA, the Broad Wing Aircraft that also kept up a continuous patrol.

  “It’s like living in a sci-fi dream,” Carl remarked to Donna.

  They passed the ruins of a village that had been demolished to make way for the pipeline. Only a minaret remained standing, a solitary sentinel to a vanished way of life.

  As the landscape grew wilder, dusk became thicker. When night encompassed the solitary vehicle, Carl followed an old life-saving habit, lowered his seat, opaqued the windows and went to sleep.

  Once he was soundly asleep, Donna depaqued the windows again to watch an electric storm over the mountains ahead. No thunder accompanied the flashes. Great sheets of lightning appeared and disappeared silently, ghosts of the stratosphere. Their reflected light ran off the sides of the pipeline armour like water spray.

  She too slept, waking when the hitherto unnoticed tone of the auto changed. The car travelled on electromagnetic force; although it was without wheels, a new resonance suggested new conditions.

  From the windows, Donna saw a glitter of water on both sides far below them. The sky had cleared. The night was now comparatively cloudless, and a crescent moon shone on the water. She woke Carl.

  “Where are we? What’s this?”

  He glanced at the auto map to confirm his understanding.

  “We’re crossing Lake Urmia. It’s a lovely spot, about forty miles wide in places. Lots of geese and water birds here.”

  “We’re crossing on a bridge, are we?”

  He heard the nervousness in her voice, and was surprised.

  “Yes, we’ve just avoided a high mountain. I forget its name. Some people would say we were in the middle of nowhere.”

  “But I can see lights down below. A long way down there!” She was half-standing, to peer below the bridge.

  “The people down there are also in the middle of nowhere, even if they don’t realise it. There are quite a few islands in the lake. Relax, Donna!”

  To calm her, he said, “I went fishing with Ling off one of the islands, once, in the early stages of construction. The supports of this bridge are founded on some of those islands. The people got paid for the disruption to their lives. They went and built a new mosque with the money, instead of a new hospital. They think like that.”

  “So we are still in Iran, or where?”

  He was looking down at the village lights, small below, remembering the immense pike he and Ling had caught. They had spitted it, cooked it over their fire, and ate it. He remembered the taste of it.

  “We’re travelling a dramatic stretch of northern Iran. Some way to our north there’s Azerbijan and Armenia. It’s earthquake country. The Suoyue runs on shock absorbers over this stretch.”

  Donna remarked that for once she could see the ribbon of the parallel road running eastwards.

  He said that the roads here were built on separate bridges for safety reasons.

  She fell silent, perhaps awed by the magnitude of the engineering feat that had built Suoyue. Nor was she unaware of the years of political discussion, contrivance and bribery that had gone into the groundwork before building started. The pipeline project had ruined her life and her family’s. Only when China had signed on to play a major role in the construction had the consortium Butterfield-Chuu-Wolff gained the financial incentive in which to function.

  Her family had been one of those that lost out in the wheeler-dealing. Donna’s father, Awal al-Khaddari, had lost his home and his business and had committed suicide. Donna had had to work for the negotiators throughout the desperate years, and had gone to bed with some of them, in order to keep her family in bread.

  The structure, despite furious Arab protests, was hailed as a great advance in world trade. It was touted as a unifying force, whatever had happened to Donna’s and other families. Still the West remained worried about Chinese motives. Some things never changed.

  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 Ataturk.

  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 armour-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 amoured 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 apologised with more formality than warmth.

  “What’s the problem?” Carl asked.

  “A strike twenty-five kilometres 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 towards 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 north-eastern 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 he had 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 organisations 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 centre 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 occured 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 which doesn’t hate the Suoyoe. 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 overalls, 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 recognise him, so tense was he. He bore the not-unfamiliar air of those who thought that, in a region which 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 kilometre 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 fucking 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, relaying 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 towards 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.