“It’s my last one.” Saul’s voice was suspicious.
“You were the person complaining you were hungry.” Which was true enough. He’d complained louder than anyone. “Throw it into the middle,” Ka ordered.
“Wait.” That was Sarah.
Ka stared at her until she looked away, suddenly unsure. “I mean,” she said quietly, “perhaps you think he should throw it over there.” Sarah pointed to a gravel spit a hundred paces up river. “So we can catch the fish as they float towards us.”
Agree with her, said a voice in his head.
“You’re right,” said Ka. “That’s a much better idea.”
“Really?” Sarah suddenly looked more unsure than ever.
The explosion boiled the river and echoed off the cliff face, sending egrets skywards in a wheeling cloud. In total they collected fifty-three fish, with Ka just missing a loglike Nile catfish that came to the surface, then rolled over and sank. Most of the catch were fat perch sporting heavy lines like makeup around their eyes. And mixed in with the perch were a handful of deep blue talapia.
Sarah told the others that talapia collected a better price at market but, to Ka at least, both fish tasted equally good. In a flourish that surprised everyone, Bec ripped handfuls of leaves from a spindly bush and stuffed them inside the gutted perch before letting Sarah bake them on her smoking fire pit.
“Corporal Bec is in charge until I get back,” Ka announced when everyone had eaten more than they should. “Sarah comes with me. The rest of you remain here.”
“Says who?”
He could pretend not to hear Saul or he could answer. And for once the truth was a better reply. “Colonel Abad,” said Ka, “those are his direct orders…” He turned to where Sarah was washing her fingers in the river.
“Sergeant…”
Ka had led the way up a wadi, coarse gravel giving way to grit as rare grass scabs grew more spiky and vanished altogether. Walking in the heat of the afternoon was insane but that was what the Colonel had wanted. And the man had been sympathetic, his voice understanding but firm as it crackled through the radio.
“I only ever ask for the necessary,” he had said. “And you and Sergeant Sarah can do it. I’m certain you can.”
So Ka kept walking into the shimmering haze, with the low cliffs two hours behind him and miles of low slope ahead. Plus a dark line at the horizon that could have been mountains but was probably low cloud. And if not cloud, perhaps a trick of the heat haze. Whatever it was, that thin smudge of colour was further than either of them could walk.
“Give me the bottle…”
“No.” Ka shook his head and kept going. One foot in front of the other, his plastic rifle held firmly in front of him. They’d stopped twice already for water. If they finished their bottle now how could they manage the return?
“You don’t even know where you’re going…”
That was true.
“Colonel Abad will tell us,” said Ka. “When he’s ready.”
Sarah sucked at her teeth and pushed past Ka, forcing her aching legs to carry her over a crescent-shaped dune. Sweat had glued her vest to her back and drawn dark circles under her arms. Even her combats were sticky with perspiration and those were made from a special kind of cloth that breathed for itself. She knew that because it said so on the label.
Ka let her go on ahead. Sometimes when Sarah got angry it was best to leave her alone. But that wasn’t the real reason Ka was happy to let her walk on. Ka liked watching the way her thin hips swung as she walked. And he liked the changing gap of nakedness between the top of her loose combats and the bottom of her vest. Also…
Any further thoughts were cut off by the crackle of his radio.
“Lieutenant Ka here.”
Ka noticed Sarah turn back but he was already intent on new orders that were simple and precise. Walk half a klick straight ahead, climb to the top of a vast mound and wait until their target was too close to miss. No more than fifty paces max…
“Load your rifle,” he told Sarah.
She shifted her Martini Henry so that it was angled across her body. “It’s already loaded,” Sarah said, as if she couldn’t believe he’d say something that stupid.
“What about the sights?”
“What about them?”
“Set them for fifty…”
Obediently Sarah adjusted for distance. Then she licked her finger and tested for wind, even though she knew there wasn’t any. Satisfied that she was right, she made another slight adjustment and worked the bolt, pulling a bullet into the gun’s chamber.
“What now?” she asked.
“We wait…”
The truck looked like a child’s toy. That might have been a side effect of a yellow Tonka-toy paint-job that was intended to make it blend in with the desert, or it might have been the balloon tyres, which bulged with each jolt across the broken ground.
“The Colonel knew this was coming?” A look that Ka recognized began to creep across her face, smoothing away all expression. She didn’t even glance over when she spoke. Instead, she wriggled her body down into the sand, shuffling one knee outwards until it gripped the ground like a rider’s leg locked tight to the side of a mount.
“Well?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Ka, “undoubtedly.” Right on cue Ka heard his radio crackle to life. They both guessed what the orders would be but Ka told her anyway. “Shoot the driver.”
Sarah wanted to suggest taking out a tyre instead. Only, so what if she killed the driver and the truck crashed? The hardest thing it could smack into was the side of a dune and besides, shooting people was her job. She never got the shakes, at least not in advance and she always held the moment.
Ice in the soul, her uncle had called it. The feeling had come after Kordofan, which was when she’d first been captured, towards the end of a battle with her brigade already retreating and the scrub full of bodies and abandoned weapons. One of Sarah’s own officers had unwittingly provided camouflage and she’d almost got away with hiding in a ditch beneath him. And then the stripping crews had come and yanked away his body, intending to strip it of everything valuable and found Sarah crouched beneath.
Faced with five men who had wrists heavy with Rolexes and Tag Hauers worn like bracelets, she’d stood up, straightened her shirt and recited the first verse of the Holy Quran.
She’d been learning the words for weeks. Everyone she knew had been learning them in secret, when the officers weren’t around; friends testing each other until their recitations were perfect.
The men still raped her, of course, but not that violently and when she crawled to her knees afterwards to find her clothes, she buttoned her shirt around a throat that was uncut and over a stomach that still had its guts where they should be, on the inside.
They’d taken nothing she couldn’t afford to lose. At least that’s what she told herself as she limped away towards her new camp. Equally it was nothing she’d wanted to give them either. And so the ice froze inside her and hardened around her like a shell, unnoticeable to everybody except those who got too close.
“Now,” Ka told her.
Close up it was possible to see blue lettering on the bonnet and a whip aerial that flew a blue pennant, which cracked and flicked in the afternoon air. Two white men sat together up front, both wearing shades and talking to each other rather than keeping watch on the rough track.
North European or American. Or that other continent that began with A. There were a lot of those. Pulling in a breath and holding it, Sarah aimed her rifle high, then slowly lowered the barrel and fired the moment she dropped through her target.
“Clean shot,” she said to no one.
Ka was already up and running. He rolled once at the bottom and came upright, then crashed forward, his doublePup already sighting itself in… Not that Ka needed hi-tech to cut down the uniforms scrambling from the back of the truck. Those he missed with his first magazine were too stunned to do anything but panic as
his next reduced them to noncombatant status.
Only one man, an elderly sergeant, hit the ground and racked back the slide on his own submachine gun. Which was as far as he got. Ka’s third magazine took off the top of the man’s skull in a single burst.
“Got it.” It was the man’s battered AK49 Ka wanted. A cookie-cutter buzz gun stamped out of cheap metal, idiotproof and unbreakable. Just getting that made his whole trip worthwhile.
“Lieutenant Ka,” he answered his radio without consciously realizing it had buzzed. The voice on the other end was quietly impressed. “I knew you could do it. Heap sand over the bodies and drive back to the river…”
“What about the cliffs?” Ka said.
“You can get to within three hundred paces. Walk the rest. Now open the passenger door and check the glove compartment…”
Ka pulled the door open and yanked out both bodies. He must have missed hearing Sarah’s second shot. The jelly splashes he wiped off everything with Kleenex taken from a pack on the dashboard. The blood puddles, urine and shit proved more difficult so Ka did what women used to do in his village and scrubbed handfuls of sand across the plastic seats and floor.
The tissues he burned and the sand went back to join the other sand and the bodies Ka lost under the crusting edge of an overhang. It wasn’t hard. Ka just dragged the dead over one at a time, then crumbled away the overhang by stamping along the sharp edge of its crust.
All the while, Sarah sat and watched and Ka let her, even though he was senior. She got like that after a firefight. Most of the time everyone else pretended not to notice. It was safer.
“Open the glove compartment,” said the Colonel. Ka could hear from his voice that he was preparing to be patient. “It’s that grey handle… That’s right, on the dash…”
Inside was a map the Colonel obviously expected to be there, plus a big bar of chocolate and two cans of real Coke, both chilled.
“A map,” said Ka, “sweets and two cans of Coke, they’re still cold.”
“The compartment doubles as a chill cabinet,” the Colonel told him. “What else?”
“Nothing.”
“Lift out the base.” There was additional static to the voice this time. A bigger distance.
“Tiny glass bottles,” Ka announced as he pulled out a handful of ampoules. “With needles.” Each one was the length of his smallest finger, with a hollow needle the length of his thumbnail fixed at one end. The needles had plastic safety caps. Red lettering and a picture of two twisting snakes were printed on the side of each bottle.
“Well done,” said the Colonel. “Now break a line of squares off the chocolate for Sarah and eat another yourself, then put the rest back in the cool compartment along with the ampoules… You can have the Cokes,” he added as an afterthought.
CHAPTER 18
9th October
That Raf cried worried the cat not at all. Tears salty as blood ran into his neat beard and trickled across his chin. The cat would happily have dined on the puddle of fresh vomit between Raf’s knees, but the tiny bats the man plucked out of the air were richer and warmer. And besides, they were being offered, the almost-kitten didn’t even have to steal or beg. All it had to do was kill and eat.
Leaving Raf to his own memories…
“T-cells down fifteen percent again.”
“Will he die?”
One could almost hear the shrug. Well, Raf could from where he sat in a window, staring out at the crooked tip of the Matterhorn. It was late spring and the lower meadow was alive with dog violet, speedwell and ladies smock. If he pushed his sight until his eyes hurt, he could just see a dark hawk frozen on the edge of the upper slopes, waiting to hit its prey.
“You know, sir,” said the first voice, “I’d really be tempted…”
“Would you?” The answering laugh was sour.
“Well, suppose…”
“Don’t suppose,” the second voice was suddenly cross. “Think instead. We can either carry over the costs or close the project and put the costs against this quarter’s bottom line. Which one do you suggest?”
The other person thought about that.
“Fit one of the new synthetics,” said the cross voice. “Ditto on the bone marrow.”
“Sir, we’re already over budget.”
The senior man sighed, heavily. “Take it off R&D. Slap a couple of new patent numbers on the chart. The usual…”
Twelve weeks followed in a blur of morphine until reality finally drip-fed its way into the analgesic fog and ruined the next three months of Raf’s life. The three months when Raf didn’t have to remind himself to eat or worry about whether or not he could get to sleep, because the snakes did that for him. They wove themselves under his skin and up his nose, into his throat and up his pee-pee. A fat one even came out of the side of his stomach.
One time when Raf grew bored exploring the walls inside his own head, he woke himself up to find a girl he didn’t recognize sitting on the end of the bed, crying.
“What’s wrong?”
She jumped and squeaked at the same time, and Raf smiled.
“You’re awake…” The girl sounded shocked. She checked the readout from a grey box sitting on a bedside cabinet. “It says you’re asleep.” Her words were to herself.
“Look at this,” said Raf and jerked the dancing line so that it peaked right off the screen, then he levelled it out until it looked like the flat bit at a valley bottom. “See, you just make it do what you want.”
The nurse looked at the small boy wired into the surgical slab. Her name was Anne Rigler and she was Scottish. The medical brokers were paying her less than nurses usually earned in Switzerland but much more than she could earn in Aberdeen now that the oil was gone.
“It’s a disgrace,” she said, sounding furious.
Raf stopped playing. “I’m sorry. Does it break the machine?”
“No, no…” Pink fingers folded over his own, swallowing them. Her grip was so tight that it hurt. “I don’t mean what you’re doing to their machine.” Anna’s voice had a sob in it. “This.” She jerked her chin towards the electronic bed, then round the small room. “All of this.”
“They’re mending me,” Raf explained patiently.
“Mending you?”
The boy nodded. “New kidneys,” he said, “improved breastbone and something to make my body mend faster when I get hurt. I don’t mind, it’s better than lessons.”
“Lessons?”
“I have to do lessons…”
She smiled. “I wasn’t mad about school either. Why don’t you like yours?”
“Boring,” said Raf. “Boring, boring, boring… No one ever says anything new. It’s just what’s already in the textbooks.”
“You can read?”
He looked at Anne as if she was mad. “Of course I can read,” he said. “I’m five.”
The nurse thought about that for a while. As she did so, she jotted notes on a chart and swung her foot, so her sole scuffed the floor with each swing. Wherever the thoughts went, they didn’t lead her anywhere she wanted to go.
“Do you like it here?”
Raf shrugged. “It’s okay. Better than the Tigris…”
Her look was a question.
“My mother’s ship. It smells dirty and I get sick. All that static…”
“She’s a sailor?”
“No,” Raf laughed. “She saves whales…”
She did too. And cut together award-winning films from hours of footage taken with a tiny camera taped to the side of her mask. The whales were killers and ate seals like Scooby snacks. Raf often wondered why she didn’t save the Scooby snacks instead.
CHAPTER 19
9th October
“Enough,” Raf told the cat, wiping vomit from his shoes with a handkerchief taken from his jacket. Somehow a fresh one materialized in his top pocket every morning. Like eating lunch in the kitchen, it seemed ordinary tissues weren’t for people like him.
Raf shrugged
and screwed the soiled linen into a ball, pushing it deep into a trouser pocket. He was alone on the roof, Avatar having agreed to take the dusty hire car only after Raf marched him to the front door.
Av had been too weak to go, even after Raf had put back the lights, wiped down the door handles and carefully explained exactly why he should. So, to save time, Raf had cheated, ramping the kid up on a foil twist of speedballs taken from the driver’s wallet.
“This will help you walk,” Raf told him. “You want that, don’t you?”
Avatar nodded, eyes huge.
“Yeah, figured.” Raf had dropped to a crouch beside Avatar’s soiled mattress, with the driver’s dropped lighter in one hand and the foil twist in his other. “Suck the smoke,” said Raf and put a flame to the foil.
Avatar gagged.
“Slowly.” Raf’s voice was soft, its tone soothing. He needed the boy out of the house and soon. Which bizarrely meant stopping Avatar from taking in too much smoke at once.
“Who are you?”
Raf stared at the boy, whose skin was as smooth as Italian leather in the overhead light. High cheekbones had become visible where there’d been adolescent softness only months before. The kid was Renaissance beautiful and part of that beauty was that Avatar didn’t yet know it. To make matters more complicated, Avatar had his sister’s eyes. Hurt and all.
Raf sighed. “I’m your boss, remember…”
“You fired me!”
“You kind of fired yourself.”
“Well.” Avatar’s smile was sad. “Maybe.” He rolled sideways off his mattress and stood unsteadily. Around him the cellar seemed to rock and then settle. “I could work for you again,” Avatar suggested.
“As of now, you do,” said Raf and turned the kid towards the door, watching him walk away, weak from hunger and dizzy with smoke.
“About Zara…” Avatar said over his shoulder.
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