The Abrupt Physics of Dying (2 page)

Clay sat back and watched the dry benchland rattle past,
limestone
rubble and shale plates strewn over the flat ground with not a living thing to grace any of it.

Soon they were descending a narrow defile in the rock, in places barely wide enough for the vehicle. As they cut down-wadi, the
air became cooler and they fell into shadow. Battlements of rock towered above them, vertical blocks of massive dolomite the colour of scored hide, sheer and featureless. Ahead, the canyon narrowed to nothing more than a crevasse, the width of a man’s shoulders. The elder tribesman stopped the vehicle in the lee of a huge limestone boulder, turned off the engine, and motioned with his head to get out. If they were going to do it, this was as good a place as any.

The gunmen herded Clay and Abdulkader towards the rock face, weapons levelled. Abdulkader was talking to them, pleading, but the men stood impassive, checking their magazines. Clay felt his stomach go cold. The elder tribesman shouted a command, levelled his weapon, flicked the AK to auto, and widened his stance. The kid, to his right and a few paces back, raised his weapon to his shoulder, sighted down the barrel at Abdulkader.

‘No,’ Clay shouted. ‘Stop.’ He stepped forward, put himself between Abdulkader and the gunmen.

The old guy narrowed his eyes, yelled out something.

Clay raised the palm of his right hand to his chest. ‘
Ana
,’ he said in Arabic. Me. ‘Leave him. It’s me you want.’

It wasn’t so bad, dying.

The Sun

The old tribesman was about ten paces away. He looked at Clay for a moment, then past him to Abdulkader. The kid stood staring down the sight of his weapon. Clay met his gaze, stared back. At this range, he knew his body would provide only minimal shielding for Abdulkader. He tensed, ready to charge. If he was going to be killed, he would die fighting, perhaps giving Abdulkader a chance. That’s how he’d been trained. Even though it was long ago, it was all there, so close to the surface, so readily exhumed and brought back to haunt.

The old man barked out a command. The kid blinked, stood unmoving, seemed not to understand. The old man shouted again, louder this time, and turned to his understudy. The kid lowered his weapon, stood staring at the old man, a look of confusion spreading over his face.

Clay coiled his muscles tight. This was the opportunity. ‘He can’t get us both,’ Clay whispered. ‘As soon as I move, go.’ He judged the distance, readied himself. The old guy was a second and a half away, maybe less, the kid just beyond him, close. Clay burst forward, a sprinter from the blocks.

But Abdulkader was already moving, cutting obliquely to position himself between Clay and the old man. He stopped and turned, faced Clay, opened his arms wide as if to catch him.

Clay pulled up, stood staring at his friend. ‘Get out of the way,’ he said.

Abdulkader did not move. ‘Do not fight them.’

Clay glared. ‘I know what you’re trying to do. Don’t.’ Clay moved right, then left, but Abdulkader followed, keeping himself between Clay and the gunmen.

‘There is no need, Mister Clay.’

‘
Yallah
,’ the old tribesman shouted, jerking his AK in the direction of the crevasse.

The kid started to move, backing away, weapon raised. His sandalled feet shuffled through the dust. He reached the canyon wall, pushed his back against the wall of rock, and stood there looking back at Clay and Abdulkader, that same perplexed look on his face. The old tribesman shouted at him again. He peered into the crevasse for a long moment, looked back at his kinsman, and disappeared into the wall of rock.

‘Now’s the time, Abdulkader,’ said Clay, grabbing his friend by the arm. ‘He’s alone.’

Abdulkader gripped Clay’s forearms, holding him fast. His eyes were wide, sky clear, insistent. ‘Please, Mister Clay. You must trust Allah.’

Clay looked down, back up at his friend. ‘Only about two people in this world I trust, Abdulkader. Allah isn’t one of them.’

Abdulkader frowned.

‘
Ah’ituts beyah’lahu
,’ shouted the old tribesman, now distinctly agitated. He had moved back, put more distance between them, and now stood poised with AK on hip, motioning towards the crevasse.

‘He wants us to follow the boy.’ Abdulkader pointed to the narrow opening in the rock, a black fault in the featureless grey dolomite. ‘In there.
Inshallah
, we must go in there.’

Inshallah
. God willing. Of course. It could only be thus. Here, Allah endured, clung still to an ancient and fearsome power in the minds of men. Clay bowed his head. ‘And what, my brother, if God wills it, will we find?’

Abdulkader dropped his hands to his sides, stood staring into Clay’s eyes for a long time. Then he turned and started towards the gap in the rock and followed the kid into the fault.

Clay looked over at the old gunman, at the AK47 aimed at his chest. ‘Nothing to it, is there?’ he said to the old guy.

The tribesman’s eyes flickered, hardened.

‘Trust.’

The old guy raised his weapon, wedged the stock into his shoulder. Clay knew that look. Last chance.

Clay shrugged, smiled at him and followed Abdulkader into the Earth.

After twenty minutes of walking they reached an impasse. The canyon had widened slightly, but the way was blocked by an ancient rockslide. Boulders the size of freight cars tilted on end formed a wall of rock thirty or more metres high. There was no way over. They moved closer and hugged the north wall of the canyon. The kid turned to face them, slung his weapon, and crouched facing a small opening at the base of the slide. Then he lay flat on his stomach and, with a quick flick of his legs, disappeared into the hole. The older tribesman stood a few paces back, weapon ready.

‘Go,’ said Abdulkader.

Clay crouched down and peered into the hole. A twisting labyrinth illuminated by a thousand dusty beams led away into the geometric chaos of the slide. He looked back over his shoulder at his friend.

‘
Allah akhbar
,’ said Clay.

It took the better part of half an hour to navigate the rock maze. He was much bigger than the Yemenis, and by the time he emerged down-wadi his clothes were torn and he was bleeding from cuts to his shoulders, forearms and knees. It was like arriving late and underdressed in paradise.

The softer layers of rock at the base of the cliffs had been cut away, leaving a series of broad overhangs. Beneath, gnarled acacias, ancient ironwood and camelthorn reached their branches out towards the
light in every shade of green. The sound of running water echoed from the canyon walls. The air swirled with the smells of charcoal, fresh dung, cardamom, chlorophyll. A thin column of wood smoke spun up towards the overhang and dispersed in the cool current of air that flowed towards the lowlands.

Clay looked up at the narrow rail of blue high above. The opening in the plateau was a few metres across at most. No wonder the satellite images had not revealed vegetation.

‘It is a good place, no?’

Clay snapped his head down in the direction of the voice. A small man dressed in a tan
thaub
and clean black-and-white
keffiyeh
stood before them. The left side of his face was over-sized and misshapen, almost pre-human, with a dark, heavily lidded eye buried in a deep well of bone, black as a moonless night in the Empty Quarter. He was unarmed. The two gunmen had disappeared.

Abdulkader bowed and greeted the man in Arabic, touching the tips of his fingers to his forehead and chest. The man responded in the same way.

‘Come,’ said the man. He led them through the trees and up a rock ledge into a small open cave cut into the side of the canyon wall. The oasis spread still and green beneath them. He crouched beside a hearth of stone and bid them sit. ‘You are with the oil company?’ he said in English.

Clay nodded. ‘My name is Clay Straker.’

‘Clay,’ said the man. ‘This is an unusual name. It is not from your Bible.’

‘It’s short for Claymore.’

The man narrowed his good eye. The other floated there, unresponsive. ‘You are named for a weapon. A sword.’

When he was young, he’d liked his name, liked its meaning. Now he hated it.

‘Not my choice.’

‘It is an honourable name.’

Clay said nothing.

The man shifted back on his heels, brought his knees up close to his chest, narrowed his good eye. ‘Do you know why you are here, Mister Claymore?’

Clay looked over at Abdulkader and back at the man. ‘Not for a
brai
and a beer, I’m guessing.’

A hint of a smile twitched in the Arab’s mouth, disappeared. ‘No.’

‘We have done you no harm, nor you us,’ said Clay. Not yet. ‘Please. Let us go. This can still be retrieved.’

‘Retrieved, Mister Claymore?’

‘Sent in another direction.’

The right side of the man’s face twisted into a smile. He picked up a stick and poked the embers. Without looking up he began to speak. His voice was soft, like the sound of the water bubbling from the spring below, his Arabic an ancient chanting melody. After some minutes he fell silent and sat staring into the coals.

Clay had followed as best he could, gathering an occasional word, the fragment of a phrase. The language dripped violence; the mutant face was serene. He looked to Abdulkader.

‘This man is from an old and important Hadrami family,’ said Abdulkader. ‘Three years ago he went to Sana’a with his father to ask the President for a share of the oil that was discovered here. Promises were made, he says. We have all heard these stories. Instead, President Saleh sent his secret police, the PSO. They killed his father. Now they want him.’

Abdulkader looked at the man a moment, paused, then turned to face Clay. ‘He is called
Al Shams
. The Sun.’

Clay felt a cold spine of ice shiver through him, the coldest desert night. He knew that name. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered under his breath. Clay stared into the deep well of the man’s dead eye. And in that darkness he could see it all so clearly. It was a Friday, he remembered. He had decided to take the afternoon off to look around old Aden. Thierry Champard, one of the engineers who ran the oil-processing facility, had offered him a ride into town, had been on his way home after an eight-week stint. He was off to the airport, happy,
he told Clay, because he missed his two young daughters, happy because his wife would be waiting for him at the airport in Paris. He was planning on spending Christmas at the family’s country cottage in Brittany. He’d shown Clay photos: a beautiful blonde in a bikini posing holiday-style in a summer rose garden, one hand behind her head, the other on an out-thrust hip, her mouth partially open, as if caught in mid-sentence, mid-sigh, at the start of a whispered kiss; two smiling children on the beach, their doll-like faces peering out from under nests of thick sun-bleached curls, the sky-blue eyes, the pouty red-plum lips, the dimpled high-boned cheeks, girlish copies of the woman in the roses. Champard dropped Clay in the centre of town, near the
qat
market. The streets were packed after morning prayers. They shook hands, agreed to meet up for a beer the next time they were both in country. Clay closed the car door, walked about twenty steps, turned, made eye contact, and smiled. Thierry waved. Clay was halfway through mouthing the words thanks and good luck when the silver Land Rover disappeared in a nova of orange flame.

That was six months ago.

The day after Thierry’s death, Clay had been ordered home, as had many other contractors and non-essential personnel. The rest was a story he had heard only in fragments, mostly as rumour, third and fourth hand, since he’d returned to Yemen. The Yemen government had quickly blamed the murder on a group of suspected militants led by a shadowy figure calling himself ‘The Sun’. A manhunt was launched by the Army and the PSO, but Al Shams and his men had vanished. Not hard, in this part of the world. As time went by, things calmed down, and soon Clay was back in the country helping Petro-Tex with environmental permitting for the new Kamar oilfield, one of the biggest discoveries ever made in Southern Yemen.

The Arab continued speaking, the tone harder now. Again he paused, allowing Abdulkader to translate. ‘He says this oil is a curse. The people of Hadramawt see nothing. There is no money, no jobs, only soldiers, deep wounds in the land, and death.’ Abdulkader scooped up a handful of sand from the ground and let it fall away
between his fingers. ‘Did you hear of the ambush at Katima last year? That was this man. They killed six government soldiers and took many weapons.’

He remembered reading about it. They had caught the soldiers in a pass in the mountains. They wouldn’t have had a chance. Thierry Champard hadn’t either. It was only luck – whatever luck was, the random collision of events, the probabilities of place and time and a thousand other variables – that had spared Clay that day.

‘He says they will kill more, until the government gives them what they want, or they close the oilfields.’

‘Retrieved, Mister Claymore?’ said Al Shams in English. ‘That time has long since passed. Too many have died. Still more, I am afraid, are destined to perish.’

Clay looked down into the cold pitch of Al Shams’ dead eye. He could feel the turbulence close by, that incipient buffeting at the margin of chaos, a fall coming. He stood, tried to push away from the edge. ‘I cannot answer for the government,’ he said. ‘I am a hydrologist, an engineer. My job is to talk to the people and to listen to them. I study the land and the water. I report my findings to the company so that it can protect the people and the environment. The company wants to help the people, even if the government does not.’