The Abrupt Physics of Dying (6 page)

Getting the Tone Just Right

He made the long journey back to Aden on autopilot, hundreds of kilometres of dusty, potholed road vanishing without a trace, mountains and bluffs, the black cinder cones of the Aden plain no more than a blur in the side window, the changeless sky as empty as a
non-believer’s
soul, as blank.

It was early evening when Clay arrived in the waiting room of Petro-Tex’s main Yemen operations office. He smiled at the busty blonde secretary. It came out more like a scowl. ‘Howzit, Greta?’

She looked up at him, eyes narrowing. ‘OK, Clay?’ she said in a distinct Scandinavian accent. ‘What happened to your face?’

Clay raised his hand to his jaw, the scrapes from when he’d hit the ground after being knocked unconscious. ‘I was run over by a beautiful woman in Land Rover.’

She smiled, waved this away. She had lovely blue-green eyes. ‘I never thanked you for the Kahlua.’ Clay brought her a duty-free bottle every time he came into Yemen. You couldn’t get it locally. ‘Go right in,’ she said.

Nils Karila sat behind a large desk strewn with papers, a shard of Indian Ocean blue just visible through the wood-framed window behind him. Production charts, reservoir maps, petro-physical logs and impenetrable seismic tracings covered the dingy walls. A rectangular picture frame hung on the bookcase, Karila and three blond children in red and blue winter jackets peering out from a polar snowscape. Slumped in his chair, he tapped with two fingers on a yellowing keyboard, the computer monitor looming above him like
a stern and remote superior. His thin white hair was combed back over his scalp, barely covering the pink, sunburned skin.

‘What do you want, Mister Straker?’ Karila said without looking up from the keyboard.

‘I …’ Clay stumbled, stopped, stared out the window. On the long drive back he’d rehearsed the message over and again, a hundred variants, playing out Karila’s response in his head. And each time he had reached the same conclusion: there was no way to deliver Al Shams’ message without endangering Abdulkader.

‘Your report, Straker?’

‘You’ll have it in two weeks.’

‘One week. You know the situation.’

If he told Nils now, they’d send in the Army. ‘My invoice for the Kamar project hasn’t been paid yet,’ he said. ‘It’s been three months, Nils. I’m
swak
. Dead broke.’

Karila stopped typing and looked up from the keyboard. Albino eyes blinked behind a pair of wire-framed glasses; a burning Gitane hung from his mouth. He looked like he had worked through the night. ‘Accounts assure me it will be paid this week.’

If he didn’t tell Karila, he’d have no reply for Al Shams. ‘That’s what you said last month.’

‘We are all very busy here, Mister Straker.’

Clay looked around the room. Would Petro-Tex try to get Abdulkader back? They’d never had a hostage situation before. ‘Someone’s getting paid, then.’

Karila glanced up at him, disapproval etched into every crease of his pursed pink lips. ‘I’ll speak to Dunkley today.’ Dunkley was the operation’s chief accountant.

Clay nodded, shuffled his feet. ‘Ever think it’s a curse, Nils?’

Karila hit the enter key, flicked his gaze across the screen for a moment, then looked up again. ‘Curse? What are you talking about, Straker?’

‘Oil.’ Clay pointed to the wintertime photo. ‘The cost.’

Karila glanced down at the picture frame, seemed to ponder this
a moment, directed a stream of blue smoke at the ceiling with a long sigh. ‘I’ve got a lot to do, Straker. Do you have something to report or not?’

Clay stood looking down at Karila, unsure where to start. ‘Are you hearing anything unusual from the Oil Ministry?’

Karila waved at the air with his burning cigarette. ‘I was in Sana’a the day before yesterday. The Minister mentioned nothing out of the ordinary. Why?’

He edged towards it. He had to try. ‘It’s getting tense out there, Nils. Rumours, threats.’

‘If you are concerned you should take an Army escort, as I have repeatedly advised. That’s what we pay them for. I don’t understand why you insist on going out there for weeks at a time, alone.’

‘I have Abdulkader.’ Had.

Karila scoffed. ‘One day you are going to get yourself into real trouble, Straker.’

He’d heard the same advice a decade ago, hadn’t taken it then. ‘Do you know who makes up that Army, Nils? Northerners, Zaydis: highlanders from tribes loyal to President Saleh. They’re Shi’a, Nils. The people here hate them. They’ve been blood enemies for centuries.’

That same pucker of distaste. ‘I have no interest in the local politics. My job is to get oil out of the ground. And you have been hired to assist in that goal, Mister Straker.’

‘And to do it, I need the people’s confidence. That is not going to happen with the Army shadowing me. Do you want your approvals, or have you decided to skip that technicality?’

Karila peered at him over smudged glasses. ‘Not funny, Straker. Getting those permits as quickly as possible is a serious matter.’

‘Then let me do my job.’

‘As you like, Straker. I take no responsibility.’

‘No, you don’t.’

Karila frowned and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk. ‘Now is there anything else, Straker?’ He turned his wrist,
exposed the white veinless skin of his forearm, glanced at his watch. ‘If I don’t have this production report on Parnell’s desk within the hour, he is going to crucify me.’

Clay planted his feet. ‘The villagers are concerned.’

Karila dismissed this with a swipe of his Gitane.

‘I’m serious, Nils.’

Karila looked up. ‘The usual complaints about jobs and money?’

‘Always. But something’s changed. They’re talking about a sickness. They say it’s coming from the CPF. We should check it out.’

‘We are not in the social services business, Straker.’

‘They’re angry, Nils. They could make things difficult for us.’

‘We cannot afford needless distractions. I need not remind you that we have a drop-dead date that is rapidly approaching. Focus on that.’

Clay thrust his hand deep into his trouser pocket, jangled worthless Yemeni coins through his fingers. ‘OK, Nils. Understood.’ He said it out of habit. He said it so that his client would know that he was part of the team, dependable. If you wanted to survive as a contractor, you had to espouse the common objective. He was pretty good now at getting the tone just right.

‘Pay who you need to pay, Straker. We need the approvals in place within the next four weeks or we start cutting into the schedule. Every day we delay costs money. Did you tell them about the school we are going to build them?’

‘
Ja
, the school,’ Clay said under his breath.

‘What did you say?’

‘That you would build them a school.’

‘Good, Straker. Good.’

The warmth of client praise flowed through him. It felt a lot like the dull burn of cheap vodka.

A determinedly overweight man in a pink golf shirt and pleated khaki trousers staggered wheezing into the office and collapsed into one of the leather armchairs across from Karila’s desk. He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his forehead, tracked across the cratered folds and overhangs of his strangely pallid, humid face. He
looked like a burn victim stripped of his face bandages for the first time, pale, hairless, scarred, oiled and balmed. The man fumbled with his pockets, withdrew a plastic inhaler, put it to his mouth and thumbed the trigger. He sat a moment, chest heaving, eyes closed. After a while his breathing eased and he opened his eyes, blinked twice, glared at Clay.

‘Fuck me, I do so hate this place,’ he said in a constricted wheeze. He spoke exceedingly slowly, hovering on each word, drawling it into the next like a Baptist preacher gone rogue. ‘Nothin’ but dust here. Goddamn place is from dust
made
.’

‘Hello Vance,’ said Karila, brightening. ‘You know Clay Straker, our environmental and community contractor.’

Clay nodded. They’d met once, in Parnell’s office a year ago when Clay had first been contracted. Since then, he’d heard the rumours, of course. It was hard not to. But he’d ignored them, gone about his work, kept quiet. Time in the Battalion had taught him the percentage of bullshit that rumour usually contained.

Parnell stuffed his inhaler back into his trouser pocket and stared at Karila, dark-marble eyes twitching in shallow sockets. For a moment he looked as if he was going to speak, but then he just closed his eyes and slowly shook his head, left to right, back again, muttering something that Clay could not make out. Then he opened his eyes and ran his glare over Clay. ‘My friend Karila, on the other hand, he loves it here,’ Parnell said in his thick Southern accent. ‘Ain’t that right, Nils?’

Karila started to mumble a reply but Parnell cut him off, stared at Clay. ‘What the hell happened to
you
?’

Clay glanced at Karila, back at Parnell. ‘I’ve been halfway converted, if that’s what you mean. Still an infidel though.’

Disdain flashed in Parnell’s eyes. ‘No, that ain’t what I mean, Straker. I don’t give a goddamn about your journey spiritual.’ He shook his head, jowls swaying. ‘Stone-age religion for fucking Neanderthals, in my opinion.’ He pointed at Clay’s neck. ‘You’re bleeding.
That’s
what I mean.’

Clay reached up and touched his neck. His fingers came away wet with blood. He looked at Parnell. ‘Cut my head.’

‘I can see that.’

‘With a flint hand tool.’

Parnell glanced at Karila and raised his eyebrows. Or rather he raised the hairless flesh on the ridge above his eye sockets, where two arched brows, pencil thin, had been clumsily drawn in with some kind of makeup, like something a young girl might do using her mother’s compact. ‘I don’t really give a shit how you did it, Straker,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it showing up on our health and safety figures. You
got
me?’

Clay said nothing, just stood staring at Parnell, thinking about Abdulkader.

‘Mister Straker has been visiting the villages in the expansion area,’ said Karila, quickly interjecting, the peacemaker.

Parnell ran his index finger along the edge of Karila’s desk, streaked a line in the thin layer of brown silt that covered the wood, examined his fingertip, sniffed at it like a cur. ‘Well? Whatcha gotta report, Straker?’

Clay swallowed and looked out at the ocean. ‘The villagers in Al Urush are complaining that their kids are getting sick.’

‘That’s all we goddamn need,’ Parnell said to Karila. He turned to Clay. ‘Well?’

‘There’s nothing obvious. But I did see a young boy …’ Clay trailed off, realising his error.

‘Go on,’ said Karila.

‘He looked bad. Ill, I mean. Ulcerous mouth, pallid face. He threw up.’

The American laughed out loud, a deep, belly-shaking chortle that seemed to go on and on. He laughed until tears were streaming over his cheeks, finally erupting in a coughing wheeze that had to be doused with a shot from his inhaler. Parnell straightened in his chair, wiped his face on his sleeve, and took a deep breath. ‘Now
that’s
good, Straker,’ he said. ‘Fucking hilarious. Have you ever seen a Yemeni who wasn’t sick? Good one.’

Clay ignored the American and reached into his backpack. ‘I took a water sample. It may tell us something.’ He put the bottle on Karila’s desk, imagining Parnell with a broken nose and a couple of missing teeth, then realising it might actually improve his appearance. ‘I’m going to have the lab run an ICP metals scan, PAH’s, total organic carbon, volatiles and main ions. It won’t cost you more than two hundred dollars.’

Karila looked over at his boss and frowned.

‘Oh, and I met someone,’ said Clay, trying to keep his voice flat. He had no choice. He had to deliver the message. ‘Calls himself Al Shams, “The Sun”.’

Both men looked as if they were going to fall out of their chairs.

Clay continued. ‘He said Allah is going to sweep us away if we don’t give the people a fair share. He said war is coming.’ The hideous face was there now, the good eye raking its gaze over him. Clay blinked hard, tried to push it away, kill the words that had been swirling around inside his skull for the last two days. An opportunity, Al Shams had said.
I am giving you an opportunity.

Karila was staring at him. ‘Are you alright, Mister Straker?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I asked you a question.’ Karila looked over at Parnell, back at Clay.

He hadn’t heard a thing. His tune-outs had become more frequent lately, more vivid, just like the dreams. A split skull wasn’t helping.

‘Say again?’

Karila took in a lungful of smoke, rolled his eyes. ‘I said …’ he paused, smoke pouring from his nostrils, ‘… where did you see him?’

‘That son of a bitch,’ barked Parnell. ‘Vandalising wellheads, torching gen sets, siphoning oil from gathering lines.’ Parnell frowned, stared into Clay’s eyes. ‘He’s costing us a lot of money.’

‘And people have been hurt,’ said Karila.

Parnell closed his eyes a moment, caught his breath, looked at Karila. ‘Get that lunatic Todorov in here,’ he said. ‘He needs to hear
this. Get the Army on to this prick Mohammedan. Fry his Koran for breakfast.’