The Abrupt Physics of Dying (32 page)

A Mass Grave of Stars

The wadi cut down through the plateau of softer rocks, shales and marls, down to the hard limestone that formed the base of the first scarp. He followed the drainage down, losing elevation, moving steadily into the past. The wadi sides steepened and he looked up at the stratified, fractured face of time where a hundred millennia, the whole of human history, lay compressed into a single layer – a hand span’s width of lithified sand grains, quartz and plagioclase from a beach on a lonely stretch of coastline that once basked under clear skies, the crystalline blue of the shallows teeming with freakish new life, all now extinct.

As he descended, the walking became more difficult. Where the canyon narrowed to a defile and water had eddied away the carbonate over millennia into a deep round bowl, he had to climb down, lowering the instrument case by rope, finding vug and fracture hand-holds, one move at a time, the rock burning, almost too hot to touch.

He moved on in the heat like some proto-hominid, barely upright, picking his way through the Palaeocene landscape of faulted surfaces bare in the sun, ruptured rock and bleached wadi gravel, blocks as big as houses sloughed from the cliffs above. High above, corrugated sheets of heat poured from the edges of the plateau like the silver distortions of turbine exhaust. He strained to hear the sounds that this turbulence told his ears to expect. But there was only the rock, deaf and mute, and the blind uncaring sky, and the sound of his own breathing. And then, on a shift of current, the grinding sound
of internal combustion, the big diesel generators at the CPF, but just as suddenly it was gone, and it was if the sun had burned away the atmosphere, and nothing lived.

He reached the confluence with the tributary wadi as the sky began to darken above the top of the canyon walls. The old well was exactly as the chief of Bawazir had described, at the intersection of the two wadis, in the lee of a huge wedge of limestone splayed off from the spur and slumped back against the canyon wall to form a deep-vaulted cave. Over the years, sporadic flash floods had drifted sand and rock up against the wedge so that a ridged chine of sediment now blocked the entrance to the cave and crested over the lip of the well. In a few more decades the well would be covered over and buried forever.

He opened the fieldbook and drew a quick pencil sketch of the well’s location and the key markers. Then he took a plastic bailer from the rucksack and lowered the device into the well, guiding the line down through one of the ancient grooves in the lip stone. He peered over into the well. An overpowering chemical odour knocked him back, nostrils stinging, eyes watering. The water level was within a couple of metres of surface – much too shallow. He stood back and pulled on the rope, retrieving the bailer. The water was foul, black, awash in oil. The readings confirmed it: the well was dead, poisoned.

Night came quickly and with it a measure of relief from the heat. He looked up at the strip of moonless sky cut from the dark shadows of the canyon walls. The sooner he got moving up the main wadi towards the CPF, the closer he would be to getting the last and most important samples, the ones that would lock down the truth, or at least part of the truth, and the nearer he would be to going … where? Home? Did that word even have a meaning? He looked up at the stars and the sheets of pale rock and down into the ancient well. He imagined the Bedouin here, long ago, looking up at this same sky, these same rocks. Like them, he was no more than an itinerant, his time short and without certainty.

He kept going.

Moving through the chaotic jumble of rock and stone had been difficult enough under the harsh illumination of the sun. But now the faint luminescence of starlight altered the topography utterly, so that even simple geometries became distorted and took on a looming ethereal aspect, the lithic architecture of planes and angles shot in a monochrome of black and grey, prisms of shadow and substance indistinguishable. He moved towards the glow of the facility’s floodlights, studying the ground as he went. He would have to come back this way soon.

Soon he came to the facility’s perimeter fence. The four-metre mesh and razor-wire line clattered its way from the edge of the plateau down to the wadi floor. He stopped, looked left and right. The steel posts had been drilled and cemented in place, anchored to rock bolts with heavy-gauge wire. The mesh was like chain-mail. There was no way though. He felt the energy drain from his body.

Clay set down the instrument case, dropped his pack, took a sip of water. He reached out, touched the thick wire meshing, looked up. There was no way over. He would have to go under, or through. He began tracing the line of the fence, step by step, examining every foot of mesh, every post, feeling his way in the dark. Soon he had reached the wadi flank. Here the rock was vertical, smooth, metres high. Perhaps the gap in the fence that the chief had described was further up, on the wadi sides. He looked up towards the plateau, still high above. That would mean scaling the rock. It could take hours, precious darkness slipping away. He turned back, retraced his steps along the wadi floor, checking the fence, considering options.

He was almost to the far cliff when his hand caught a fold in the mesh. He stopped, peered down to where the wire met the wadi bed. The mesh had been dug into the sediment and cemented in place. But here, a boulder the size of a small car had been driven into the fence on the up-wadi side. The posts had held, but the wire bowed out, like a trawler’s net filled with a big catch. A flash flood had done this. He had seen something similar once in Oman, a wall of brown boulder-laden water flattening everything in its path, over as soon as
it had begun. He moved to the far side of the boulder. Here the mesh had burst open. There was a gap.

He prised back the mesh and squeezed under the flap. His trouser leg caught on a barb, tore the canvas. He stopped, pulled himself free, kept moving towards the lights in the distance. Again he wondered about Rania. What had she been doing in Al Shams’ building that night? She said she had tried. Tried to do what? Kill him? Had she known about the attack, perhaps heard about it from one of her sources? Had she tried to warn Al Shams? And, if so, why would Hussein have gunned her down? Had it been a mistake? He had seen so many men blown to pieces by their own airstrikes, villagers maimed in crossfire. Once the monster was released, no one was safe from its blind slashing fury. He pushed it away, focussed on the ground under his feet, the lights ahead.

It took the best part of an hour to navigate up the wadi floor to a point immediately below the CPF. He was about to start the climb up towards the edge of the plateau when his foot fell through a crust in the soil. He lurched forward and steadied himself against a boulder. His foot came away with a sucking sound, covered in mud.

He bent down and scrabbled at the loose sand with his hands. There was water within inches of the surface. He touched his finger to the water, let a drop fall onto his tongue. It was brine, saltier than the sea. He continued up-wadi, through a graveyard of dead, stunted bushes. Fifty metres along, he found the first pool, no more than a metre across, a mirror of stars. He kept walking. Soon there was water everywhere, rivulets of brine trickling from pool to glassy pool. He squelched along in the deepening water, boots soaked.

He heard it before he saw it. As he approached, the air thickened with aerosols of barium and chloride and a hundred other compounds unknown until the stench was unbearable. He wrapped the tail of his
keffiyeh
over his mouth and nose and sloshed ahead in the darkness towards the sound. He was knee-deep in it now, the water warm, malevolent. The steel pipe, standard twelve-inch drill casing,
was warm to the touch. Industrial sewage spewed from its mouth in a continuous arc, thundering down into a deep wide pool.

For weeks he had imagined a leaking membrane or vessel, some accident of poor maintenance or bad design left unexamined, brine leaking unknown into the ground. Ignorance and stupidity, yes, wilful neglect, perhaps, but not this, this deliberate evil. His diaphragm contracted violently. He doubled over, spewing vomit into the cesspool around his legs. Unsteady, he staggered to the bank, the night sky oscillating crazily at his feet. Vertigo loomed as he scrambled up away from the fumes and collapsed onto dry ground.

After a while his head cleared and he pulled himself up, still woozy; he scrambled back down to the pipe, collected a sample, made the required measurements, stowed the instruments and started back along the wadi floor towards the CPF.

When the glow of the lights was directly above, he started up towards the plateau, scaling three terraced slopes of loose ironstone and shale tiles, each separated by a bench of flat-lying carbonate. The last slope was the longest and steepest. His feet ploughed into the loose rock, the tiles sliding away beneath his feet, and the sound they made, like the empty ring of a submerged bell, seemed to grow with each step, despite the din of the generators. Several times he stopped and looked along the crest line above and tried to slow his breathing and open his ears, but all he could hear was the punching of his heart and the uninterested grind of the diesels.

Finally, he reached the hardpan layer that formed the crust of the plateau. He hunched down behind the low wall of rock and peered out across the no-man’s land of the plateau towards the arc lights of the facility. No war-time blackouts here. Neither side was about to destroy the prize for which men were being sacrificed. Had this been Hussein’s target after all, a scorched-earth plan of last resort?

The main process compound stood bathed in light, surrounded by a three-metre chain-link fence topped with an angry barbed-wire lip. Just within the enclosure were the generator skids, separators and storage tanks, and, further along, the control building,
workshops and the main entrance leading to the access road. Somewhere beyond the compound were the evaporation ponds – a series of football-field-sized depressions scraped into the ground. According to the chief, the new well had been drilled just outside the facility, near the head of the main wadi.

He scanned the facility from one end of the darkness to the other. Other than the night-orange glow of the flare that danced across the sand and warped the Euclidian geometries of the buildings, nothing moved. He slumped down on his haunches with his back to the hardpan layer and gathered his knees to his chest.

The night shift would be on now, if they hadn’t changed their routine. Everyone else, managers, engineers, labourers, would be in the camp compound just beyond the main complex. Normally a night watchman was posted at the entrance to the camp. They would have added more guards now.

He looked up at the black sky, the stars, so many of them here. He breathed deep, held it a long time. His pulse slowed. He imagined her that night, waking and slipping from the bed as he slept, moving off into the night, alone, a weapon in her hand. What had she been thinking, what had driven her? Why had she given him that story? And why had she given herself that night, only to … to do what, short hours later? Attempt murder? Give warning? He shivered. Don’t think about it, any of it. Just get it done. Then find her.

He picked up the instrument case and clambered up and over the limestone parapet, then set out in search of the well, the lights of the facility spectral and forbidding on the darkened plain ahead.

He moved over the extinct Cenozoic landscape like a ghost, sliding across the black tableland, keeping the glow of the CPF lights to his left, moving indiscernible over the open ground. He located the well easily enough. The wellhead was fitted to a stem valve connected into a three-inch steel pipeline that ran away over the ground in the direction of the facility. A totaliser was fitted between the stem valve and the pipe weld, and a small diameter sampling port was tapped into the main line. The configuration was unlike any oil well he had ever seen.

He crouched low over the sample port and cracked the valve. A steady stream of clear liquid poured to the ground, splattering his boots. He scooped a handful and brought it to his lips. It was sweet and pure. He dropped his mouth to the stream and gulped down the cool, delicious water. Then he pulled out his water bottle and filled it to overflowing.

He swung the pack off his shoulders and fished the torch from one of the outside pockets and grabbed his fleece jacket from the main pouch. He flipped open the totaliser’s plastic cover, pulled the jacket over his head like a hood, and flicked on the light. The curved number plates ticked away as the water rushed through the pipe. He recorded a number, counted out a minute, read the dial again, subtracted the two values, multiplied by sixty, then by twenty-four. The figure he calculated was far too large. He must have made an error. He timed it out again. Same result. No mistake. They were pumping the aquifer for all it could give, changing the natural gradient, taking so much water that flow down to the base of the escarpment had stopped. That was why the spring had dried up at Al Urush. It also explained the falling water level in the
ghayl
at Bawazir. But what could they be doing with so much fresh water? There was only one possibility he could divine, but it was too perverse to contemplate.