Absolution

by Paul E. Hardisty

  By the time Clay had covered the fifty metres to the plane, the flames had reached the vehicles. Clay threw the Galil and his pack onto the back seat and jumped into the front next to Crowbar. The Perspex windscreen on the co-pilot’s side was shattered. Bullets had pierced the door in three places. There were more holes along Crowbar’s side, and at least two of the flight instruments had been smashed, the recesses in the panel spilling torn wiring and ruptured circuitry. Despite the damage, the engine seemed to be running smoothly.

  As Crowbar taxied the Cessna to the far end of the runway, the Hilux went up. A ball of orange flame burst skyward. Crowbar gunned the engine and rolled into the take-off run, ammunition detonating among the burning vehicles and scattered bodies as they lifted off.

  Soon they were heading north towards the border, the airfield just a column of black smoke receding in the distance.

  ‘You’re hit,’ said Crowbar, clutching his mid-section. Blood covered his hand, wicked from the hairs on his arm.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Just a clip,’ said Crowbar. Sweat beaded on his forehead, across his broad cheekbones.

  ‘Let me have a look,’ said Clay, reaching back for the aid kit in his pack.

  Crowbar waved this away. ‘Look after yourself first.’

  Clay pulled off his jacket, tossed it in the back, ripped open his shirt. The 9 mm bullets from Manheim’s Uzi had glanced off his third and fourth ribs, leaving two neat horizontal furrows about a centimetre apart. He’d been lucky.

  Clay doused the wound with disinfectant, opened a compress, held it in place with his stump. Then he handed Crowbar a length of gauze.

  ‘Fokken cripple,’ said Crowbar, steadying the wheel with his knees. He helped Clay make two quick turns with the gauze and tie the compress in place.

  ‘Let me look,’ said Clay, reaching for Crowbar’s midriff.

  ‘Manheim?’ asked Crowbar, pushing Clay’s hand away.

  ‘Dead. Headshot.’

  ‘Good.’

  But it didn’t feel good. It never did. The anticipation was always better than the act. The adrenaline was gone, the dopamine too. He felt empty, hollowed out. Ashamed. ‘Every cop and soldier on both sides of the border will be looking for us now.’

  Crowbar tried a smile. It emerged as a grimace. ‘No chance, seun. That was just another battle between rival factions. We were never there.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Just a normal day here.’

  Clay considered this, nodded. He’d seen just how commonplace brutality could be in civil war. ‘What was that you gave the Nubian?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter anymore, does it?’

  They continued north, the Blue Nile to their right, an unfurling thread of life in the otherwise barren and increasingly featureless desert. Finally, Crowbar relented and let Clay tend his wound.

  The bullet had entered Crowbar’s torso, just above the hip, and exited through his lower back. The bullet had missed the femoral artery, but the blood that oozed from the exit wound was dark and anoxic. Clay irrigated and disinfected the wounds, pressed compresses onto both and bound them in place as Crowbar continued to pilot the Cessna. By the time they reached the border and crossed over into Egyptian airspace, Crowbar was weakening.

  ‘We’ve got to get you to a hospital,’ said Clay. ‘I think the bullet might have hit your liver.’

  ‘Definitely, ja. I can fokken smell it.’ Crowbar’s voice was weak, far away.

  ‘Next town, we put her down.’

  ‘Ja, okay. How far?’

  Clay searched the chart, spread bloody fingerprints across the paper. ‘Aswan. A hundred and twenty miles. About an hour away. Luxor’s bigger, has a proper airport, but it’s another eighty miles or so. Steer 020.’

  Crowbar adjusted course, throttled up, added ten knots to the airspeed. After a time, he said: ‘Took your time giving me cover, Straker.’

  ‘Sorry, oom. Manheim surprised me.’

  ‘Sloppy.’

  ‘That’s what he said. He could have killed me right there. Wonder why he didn’t.’

  ‘Wanted me,’ said Crowbar.

  ‘He was about to ask me something, oom. Something about you.’

  Crowbar grunted, closed his eyes.

  ‘What was this all about, oom?’

  Crowbar reached into his breast pocket and handed Clay a wallet-sized folder.

  ‘Look inside.’

  It was a small photograph album, the kind with clear plastic sleeves. Clay thumbed through the pages, stared at each black-and-white face. Dozens of them, anonymous, staring blankly out into the day. Most of the photographs were scarred by a diagonal line drawn from top right to bottom left. Clay looked up at this man who for so long had been the nearest thing to a father he’d had, not wanting to believe what he was seeing.

  ‘Keep going,’ said Crowbar.

  Clay turned the pages. And there it was. A young face, clean shaven, pale, as yet free of scars. Hair cut military short. No diagonal line.

  ‘Jesus, Koevoet.’

  ‘Most of them were assholes anyway,’ Crowbar said, snatching a shallow breath. ‘Probably deserved it.’

  ‘All this time.’ Clay shook his head.

  Crowbar closed his eyes.

  ‘That’s how you found me in Maputo in eighty-two,’ said Clay.

  Crowbar grunted.

  ‘And again last year, before I went back to testify to the TRC. And on Zanzibar.’

  Crowbar coughed. ‘We’ve been tracking you, Straker.’

  We. Clay shivered. He felt naked, stripped, lashed by the wind. ‘And because you helped me, they started to realise they had a leak.’

  ‘Ja.’ Crowbar breathed. ‘So they…’

  ‘…Floated the order to take me out, and waited to see who would turn up to warn me. And Manheim took the job.’

  Crowbar nodded slowly.

  ‘But why, Koevoet? Why?’ Clay had known since 1982 that Crowbar was somehow linked to the Broederbond. But never in his darkest imaginings could he have conceived of this. Crowbar, all this time, an AB assassin.

  ‘Fok me.’ Crowbar closed his eyes, opened them again. And then he said: ‘I’m not going to make it, seun.’

  At first, Clay thought he’d misheard.

  ‘I’m bleeding inside.’ Crowbar’s face was ash. A tremor had started in his right leg, and the plane yawed back and forth as his foot pulsed on the rudder pedal.

  Clay felt something inside him go. Never in his life had he heard Crowbar admit defeat. Always he’d been there for them – the younger less experienced soldiers – guiding them through the maelstrom. So often they’d seen him injured, and each time he’d shrugged it off, kept going, recovered. After surviving so much, so many firefights, so many years, Clay had come to think of him as invulnerable, immortal even.

  ‘Look after Hope and Kip for me.’ Crowbar’s voice was barely audible.

  ‘You can do it yourself.’

  ‘My son, too. Promise me, Straker.’

  ‘Hold on, oom. I’m going to run you an IV.’ Clay reached behind his seat, started rifling through his pack for the giver set.

  ‘No time,’ whispered Crowbar. ‘I’m going to have to put her down.’ His eyelids were flickering. ‘I can’t…’ His voice tailed off. His eyes started to close. He slumped forwards against the steering column. The plane’s nose dropped and they started to dive.

  Clay grabbed Crowbar’s shoulder, tried to shake him awake. ‘Koevoet,’ he shouted into the headset. ‘Wake up, God damn it.’ The ground filled the windscreen.

  Crowbar jerked his head up, opened his eyes, pulled back on the stick. Slowly, the Cessna levelled out. They’d lost more than a thousand feet in those few seconds. Crowbar trimmed up for a slow descent. ‘You’ll have to do it,’ he whispered.

  ‘For fok’s sake, Koevoet, I’ve never touched an airplane’s controls before.’

  ‘Fokken pussy. Take the controls.’

  At least Crowbar was talking. Clay put
his hand on the grip of the co-pilot’s wheel, reached his feet to the rudder pedals. He scanned the instrument panel. Altitude: 3,200 feet. Vertical speed: descending at 200 feet per minute, about a metre per second. But they were still travelling at more than 110 knots, far too fast to land.

  Crowbar’s head slumped forward. Clay reached out with his stump and pushed Crowbar’s chest back into his seat. ‘What do I do, Koevoet? He shouted into the headset. ‘How do I slow us down for landing?’

  Crowbar grunted. ‘Trim up. Sixty-five knots.’ His eyes were closed.

  ‘How, oom? How do I do it?’ The desert loomed closer.

  ‘Throttle back,’ said Crowbar, his voice barely a whisper now above the din of the engine. ‘Black knob.’

  The throttle was in the centre of the console. Clay steadied the wheel with his stump, reached across his body with his right hand and eased out the throttle. The Cessna started slowing, losing altitude.

  ‘Now ease back on the column, nose up, bleed off more speed, keep descending. Easy.’

  Clay did as he was told. The plane’s nose lurched up. The little plane shuddered.

  ‘Too much,’ said Crowbar, eyes wide open now. He reached between the seats, spun the trim wheel. The Cessna settled into a gentle descent, airspeed now seventy-five knots. The ground was coming up fast.

  ‘I can’t see anywhere to land,’ said Clay. ‘No roads, nothing.’ Desert stretched away as far as he could see in every direction.

  ‘Just … put her down.’ Crowbar’s voice was very far off now, barely audible.

  Clay tightened up on Crowbar’s harness, made sure the shoulder straps were secure, then tightened himself in.

  ‘Flaps,’ said Crowbar. ‘Too fast.’ He reached for the red toggle, pushed down with a bloody hand. ‘Push,’ he gasped.

  As the flaps came down, the aircraft’s nose pitched up. Speed bled off. Clay pushed down on the column, forcing the Cessna’s nose down, counteracting the flaps. Crowbar added power. ‘Again,’ he said, lowering the flaps.

  Clay pushed the nose down. They were now descending steeply, nose down, slowed by the flaps. The ground filled the windscreen. They were very close, a few hundred feet, but settling slowly, airspeed down to just over sixty knots.

  ‘Just before … level off, keep the nose straight, kill the power…’ Crowbar tailed off, slumped over against the door.

  Clay gripped the wheel, pushed the rudders left and right, felt the Cessna yaw. The ground loomed. Rocks, sheets of sand, pebble rivulets. Clay started pulling back on the column, raising the nose. They were going too fast. One-handed, he couldn’t reach the throttle without letting go of the wheel. The plane ballooned above the surface, settled. Crowbar reached out and pulled back on the throttle. They hit the ground.

  When Clay came to, he was hanging head to ground in his harness. A dull ache spread from his right side into his shoulders and neck. His right knee was jammed up under the lip of the instrument panel. His head felt as if it was about to explode. The smell of aviation fuel filled the air. Crowbar was hanging there beside him, covered over in dust. His head hung limp in the harness. Blood ran in rivulets along his neck and across the fractured contours of his face, dripped to the cabin roof.

  Clay reached over, put index and second fingers to Crowbar’s neck, felt a pulse. Faint, but there.

  Avgas bubbled from a hole in the wing tank, flowed over the crumpled aluminium skin of the wing’s underside and pooled in the crushed bowl of the cabin’s roof, inches from Clay’s head. He could feel the fumes taking hold of him, collapsing his vision. He braced himself against the roof with his stump, unclasped his harness and eased himself down into the pool of fuel. The semi-volatile liquid soaked into his shirt and the back of his trousers, wicked into his hair. He gagged, rolled onto his back and kicked open what was left of the right-hand door.

  He crawled from the wreckage, slid across the fuel-streaked wing to the ground, staggered away from the wreck. A gust of hot wind flashed fuel from his arms and face and neck. He shivered from the cooling, gulped in clean air.

  The Cessna was on its back, wings folded up around the cabin in a crooked embrace. The left-hand wing was blocking Crowbar’s door. The undercarriage was gone, shorn away. The tail section had broken off and lay a few metres away, monocoque ribs showing through peeled-back skin. Small dark stones ridged up against the torn mouth of the fuselage.

  Clay stripped off his shirt and flung it to the sand, bladed fuel from his torso with the edge of his hand. He stood staring at the wreck, at Crowbar hanging there in his harness, blood streaming across his face, all of it transduced by a shimmering haze of evaporating fuel, as if the whole of it were nothing but an apparition, born of desert sun and the warped imaginings of his own mind, set to explode with the slightest spark.

  Clay took a deep breath of clean air and started back toward the plane.

  The cabin was less than half its normal size. He pushed himself through the mangled doorway and twisted onto his side so he could reach Crowbar’s harness with his right hand. Fuel soaked into his bandage, seared the raw flesh of his gun wound. The pain was there, but he didn’t feel it. Not really. It was as an echo, some distant and incomplete message come from another life.

  He unbuckled Crowbar, eased him to the cabin roof. He was still unconscious, still breathing. His torso was slick with blood. Clay hooked his arms under Crowbar’s shoulders and started pulling him free of the wreck. He strained against the big man’s bulk, wedged him through the mangled doorway, lowered him to the sand. His side looked bad, the compresses saturated with blood, frosted over with sand and dust. Clay needed to get an IV into him, replace some of the blood he’d lost.

  He dragged Crowbar away from the wreck, lay him on his back at a safe distance then stumbled back towards the plane. He ripped open the rear door, pulled out his pack and the medical kit.

  By the time he’d pushed the catheter into Crowbar’s forearm and started the flow of saline, his friend’s pulse was nothing more than a distant and erratic echo. He cleaned and disinfected the wounds, changed the dressings, tried to make him comfortable. There was no way to get him to a hospital.

  Clay went back to the wreck, pulled out the Galil and the rest of Crowbar’s stuff.

  Then he sat next to his friend and watched him die.

  Part III

  8th November 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 04:50 hrs

  Chéri:

  I lie here in my shelter and watch the sky slowly shade from black to grey. Four days it has been since you called me from Mombasa. God knows where you are, what has become of you. When I spoke to him briefly yesterday, the Kemetic did not mention a message for me. Have you tried to call me, mon amour, using the number I gave you? Is the Kemetic hiding it from me?

  What I can only describe as a void is opening inside me, a deep emptiness. With each day that passes, this feeling of desolation, of futility, grows within me. I try to fight against it, to stay positive, but it is like swimming against a strong current. I am exhausting myself, being pulled out into deep water.

  I pray now, four and sometimes five times a day – something I have not done since I was a young girl. My mother always insisted that I observe prayer as strictly as she did, and until my father died, I complied, enjoyed it even. It made me feel grown-up, going to the mosque with my mother, praying with her and the other women. I was never closer to her than when we prayed together.

  I have been now a few times to the Mustafa Mahmoud mosque here in Giza, to listen to the imam, or just to pray in the quiet coolness. I sit at the back, behind the screens with the other women, faceless and invisible, just as I wish to be. The feeling of being erased, of being consumed from inside and out, is palpable, and it frightens me more than I can admit.

  Yesterday I went into the market and bought bread and fruit, beans and eggplant, a piece of fish, a small jar of honey, a few other delicacies. In the evening I invited Samira and her younger daughter to eat with me. Eleana, poor thing, is still too ill to le
ave her little bed. Samira was amazed at what I had managed to obtain. This kind of bounty is unusual among the abandoned. I told her that I had had a good day, as she had recently. I did not elaborate, and she did not press me.

  As we ate we spoke of the man everyone is calling The Lion. He had been in the newspapers again. Samira showed me a copy of Al-Ahram she found on the street. The Lion had announced that all tourists coming to Egypt were henceforth considered by his organisation as legitimate targets. Tourism now accounts for over half of Egypt’s foreign currency revenues, and without it, the country would be crippled economically. The terrorist claims that tourists who choose to spend their money in Egypt are directly supporting a corrupt system, which enriches a powerful few and exploits millions. A group representing the tourism sector has demanded that the government and the security forces take immediate action to eliminate the terrorists by any means necessary.

  As I read, I was aware of Samira watching me. She was very quiet, and I could hear the laboured rasp of her breathing. The smog from the vehicles that choke the highway and smoke from the fires that smoulder continuously in the garbage fields irritates her lungs, and even in the last few days I have noticed she has become worse. Her children, too, seem to cough continuously. It is starting to affect me now, also, although I have been here among them only a short time.

  I finished reading the article and gave her back the paper. She folded it over carefully and placed it in a small carboard shoebox that she keeps on the ground by the side of her bed.

  This man is a hero to me, she said, her face lit by the wavering candlelight.

  I was surprised by the emotion in her voice. Surely not, I said. He kills innocent people, while claiming to be acting in the name of Islam.

  He is very brave, to fight these people, said Samira, surprised, I think, by my outburst.

  The tourism operators? I said. I had never thought of these people as anything but benign.

  The ones who own the hotels also own everything else, she said.