by Paul Mason
The chopper made a low pass parallel with the road. Clatter-clatter. It was turning.
He began to tremble. Why was life, which had been treating him so decently, and to which he had been starting to feel so attached again-after months of not being-getting ready to dump on him for one last timer He heard himself whimpering quietly that he did not want to die and that he would hand over the rushes if captured.
On the kidnap-survival course they teach you to look your executioner in the eye. They can’t shoot a human being, is the logic; they have to dehumanise you. The first time he’d done that course, Brough had been tripped into a zone of total panic: the pheromone-laden Zulu language of the South African mercenaries playing the kidnappers had freaked him out so badly he had started screaming once they put the bag over his head. Inwardly he was screaming now.
If the Chinese cops found Brough now he would plead with them, look them in the eye. But these people were inhuman. He had decided that in the police station: stone faces; no eye contact, not even over a cigarette.
The helicopter had turned and was making a slow hover back towards him. He would be hidden by the ravine if they’d only pass right over him.
With a deafening roar and a backdraft of dust that filled his nostrils, that’s what they did. He could feel the overpressure punching at the ground beneath him.
He watched the chopper fly away: fifty yards, one hundred. Now it had stopped and was turning on its rotor axle. He buried his head as it hovered, stationary, blasting sand straight at him.
He let one eye slant half-open. Did he see Chun-li’s face peering out of the porthole? Did she see him? He thought the answer to both questions was yes, but then, with a final blast of grit into his face, the chopper banked and veered and cackled off into the distance. Its noise subsided into a drone as it picked up height and speed.
Brough, not stopping to dust himself off or clear his hair of debris, was already running. If they’d seen him, they would be back in force. If they hadn’t, then this was his chance to escape and tell the world about these murdering bastards and their chlorine cloud.
~ * ~
7
He slept in an ancient clay watchtower, its walls two feet thick, until the sun dropped low enough to shine through the doorway and wake him up. He decided, while asleep, not to phone or text London. London would order him to contact the nearest police station. London would send private security contractors hired in the nearest city to come and “protect” him, gaining total control over his actions. London would tell him to ditch the report - “everything’s changed now David”, the quiet menace in the voices of people who pay your wages. He decided to get to Beijing with the footage, and pitch the story directly to his old mates in the newsroom, bypassing Twyla.
He could see from the map on his Blackberry that the nearest city with an airport was called Baotou. To get there he would have to get out of the desert and hire a driver. That meant getting to the nearest city without an airport, which was Ordos, 200 kilometres away.
He stood up, spat, raked dirt out of his hair with his fingers, checked the direction of the sun, positioned his face looking directly into it, held the Blackberry at arm’s length, pressed a button and began speaking:
“Shortly after those pictures were taken the police arrested us and seized our tape. Later, as we tried to leave the city, an official car rammed us off the road and a senior local police officer opened fire. Producer Georgina Wyndham and cameraman James Carstairs...”
His brain faltered, scrabbling for some final thought to end the piece-to-camera, but it was not there. He flipped the Blackberry around and took a couple of static panoramas of the desert. Whatever needed to be said could be said over those pictures.
He set off across the rolling scrub, knowing that if he followed his shadow as the sun set that should take him northeast.
What did he know about China? Not much. He had no Chinese contact numbers other than for Chun-li. He knew the basic facts about Tiananmen Square in 1989; he knew that Deng Xiao-ping had started the market reforms, that Jiang Zemin was a corrupt arsehole and Hu Jin Tao was supposed to be a bit better. What he knew about Chairman Mao he had learned from a brown-eyed female cadet of the Colombian EPL who’d used his hotel room as a place to hide from a death squad tailing her across Bogota, trading sex for safety. He had followed the rise of China’s economy with the same fascinated fatalism as most Westerners.
Brough had no reference points for China. His reference points began at Heathrow Terminal Five and extended mainly to places that offered conflict, alcohol and journalistic bonhomie. At the Lichfield Guardian they had put him third on the list of reporters volunteering to be “embedded” - it was a new word back in 1990 - with the Staffordshire Regiment deploying to Saudi Arabia. The first two guys on the list had dropped out when, to the astonishment of everybody, all requests for access were immediately granted.
He’d watched the start of Desert Storm, like everybody else in the world, on CNN: over the top of a can of Holsten Pils. He’d watched the end of it in a sweaty tent near Basra with a bunch of elated squaddies again drinking Holsten Pils. By then he’d got the bug: for war and television.
The Western Mail had given him a stringer’s job in Moscow because he could speak Russian (or so he’d told them) and in 1993 he’d been called up by ITN to do a live “phono” interview while an alliance of Communists and neo-Nazi nutters were trying to storm the Duma. And then by the BBC, CNN and ABC.
Somewhere between that and Srebrenica he had realised that the fall of the Berlin Wall, far from bringing about universal peace and global harmony, had unleashed a world where class and ideology would simply be replaced by ethnicity, crime and precision-guided firepower.
The best thing to do (once his dad had died and his last live-in girlfriend packed her Virago novels into a big plastic crate and said goodbye) was to stand at the edge of the spectacle and watch-always near enough to the action to work up a thirst, always far enough away from moral commitment that it was no great wrench to leave the victims bleeding in the street and head for the hotel bar.
And suddenly he had a family again. In the soul-draining softlights of the Abuja Hilton, the Nairobi Norfolk, the Hotel Tequendama Bogota there were always to be found, clustered around the reception desk and demanding by the middle of the 1990s something called Internet Access, people just like David Brough. Only ten percent more.
There’d been a brief moment of doubt at the end of the 1990s when kids all over the place started to hurl stones through the windows of Gap and Nike. But then, sure enough, it turned out the new century would not bring a return to class warfare: the small wars of the nineties would turn out be just the warm-up act for something bigger.
He had watched 9/11 happen live on a CNN feed in the Reuters office in Mexico City (“Fuck, was that a second plane?”) He had been deployed to Afghanistan early, when the Taliban were still giving press conferences; then to Iraq at a time the Americans were not giving press conferences. Then the West Bank, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Katrina, the tsunami - and in-between all those low level conflict zones they send you to when things are quiet, in the hope that something will kick off just as you pass through customs.
A technology journalist had once told him, waving a brick-sized mobile phone over the bar at Sheremetyevo airport: “I will write about these things ‘til I retire. They will not change; they will only get more complicated.” After 9/11, Brough knew it would be the same with wars: power-crazed assholery, like mobile handsets, would conquer the world, offering-live or pre-rec, take your choice-graphic footage of blood, police tape and starvation all the way through to oblivion.
“You should never have let that Elaine lass go,” a voice from within began to chide him.
Weird what the desert could do, because normally these guilt trips would happen to Brough when he was drunk and alone. Now he was sober and alone, although maybe getting high off the liquorice aroma of the foliage.
He knew, beca
use it was part of the pattern, that he would soon start having an imaginary conversation with his dad.
“I know,” he muttered.
He was already shedding tears. Thinking about his father made him cry instantly when not in public.
“You’ve got yourself into a right mess,” said the voice. He trudged along, mentally agreeing.
“You’ve caused all this malarkey ... and now you’re trying to get yourself lost in the desert!”
He stamped up a slope, head down and the world closing in on him. It was getting towards twilight. There was an electric energy to the sky; the shrubs were becoming skeletal, projecting their shadows like a crackle-glaze across the dirt. Clouds were boiling up, tall cumulus, their lighted undersides stretching across the sky forever.
“You’re acting like a bloody idiot.” It was a bit sharp sounding, even for his dad and his subconscious. At the very edge of his vision Brough thought he actually saw somebody.
He shook his head like a puddled boxer and swigged the last inch of water. There was just one more Coke can left, and that made him shiver a bit. A firefighter had once told him that the colour of your urine and the capabilities of your brain are precisely correlated - on a scale from clear to stenching ochre.
Now, on the brow of the next slope, he could see the silhouette of his father, arms outstretched just like they’d been one Christmas Eve, sometime during the seventies, with the snow falling, when Brough had run to meet him walking home from work.
“I would sling that gadget away if I were you,” said his dad.
Brough, remembering how badly he had failed his father, and how many beer-stale nights he had wept over all the unsaid things between them, said simply:
“I’m sorry.”
“Sling the gadget. Get yourself to a hospital. Look at you!”
Imaginary conversations with his dad were not usually so abrasive or visual.
“This is my chance. I’ve got myself a scoop,” Brough began; “I can’t just give it up now.”
There was a long silence as they stumbled through the desert together, side by side.
“No story is worth it, son,” said his father’s spirit.
It was only the continuation of the debate he’d been having with himself for the past hour, knowing how little liquid he had left and how far he had to go, so he was not surprised that his dad had started to persuade him.
“Alright,” he said, “I’ll probably just give it to them. I’ll have to call London and get myself evac-ed out of here first. I’ll just see how far I can get with this,” and he held a Coke can up against the last of the sunlight.
“No, lad! Do it now! Sling the sodding thing away right now!”
His father’s tone shocked him. It seemed real and insistent, somehow malevolent.
“Hold on,” Brough said, squinting at the figure, which was trying to hover just beyond his peripheral vision. He put a hand up to shade his eyes:
“Dad. I don’t want to sound funny or anything, but how long have you been Chinese?”
~ * ~
8
The ground surveillance radar was Vietnam-era, or not much later. The entire sidecar of her motorbike was filled by the radar and its related gizmos: banana-shaped dish, clunky tripod and then the electronics, all reassuringly analog.
The rider pulled her combat jacket tight against the desert cold and twiddled the dials. She’d rewired the monitor screen to sit just above the mirror on her handlebars so that - although it was pointless operating a PPS-5 radar in anything but static mode-she could run the Chiang-Jiang’s engine, sit on the bike gaining warmth from it as she ran the search patterns.
There’d been some crackle over the network about an incident. High-pitched bullshit on the CB radios of the truckers, chopper sightings by jumpy miners that turned out to be just the sparkle of lightning from a far-off storm. Still, she’d pulled the recce shift tonight and had cranked up the PPS-5 as ordered: its tripod slick with Valvoline, its surfaces lovingly re-painted with the unit’s regulation tiger-stripe camo.
She’d got the valves warm on the monitor and set the dish on an arc to spot anything moving to or from the road. Ten kilometres was the maximum range for vehicles, six for human beings. But at the end of the day you will struggle to hit anything beyond 500 metres with a Type 56 - the raw Chinese copy of the AK-and in the strictly retro culture of the Ordos Snow Leopards Motorcycle Club nothing with better accuracy was allowed.
The radar was just a giant microphone, and its brain an analog computer. It could filter out the rustling of wind and the clatter of falling stones. When it heard a pair of size 42 Lucchese cowboy boots crunching through the dirtstone at about 4750 metres it gave a brief “ping” of recognition. It had once been a perimeter sensor at Aviano airbase and there was a whole collection of cowboy boot sounds stored in its memory on account of the Texas Air Guard, stationed there with their A-10s.
She was onto the trace already, tweaking the knobs to tighten the signal, nudging the dish ten degrees to centre it on the contact. She would not engage without support. There was an SOP to follow - plus the fact that sending a Chiang-Jiang out into the desert on its own, given the age and provenance of most of the unit’s bikes, was not a good idea...
Brough, traipsing along, oblivious to the racket he was making, was exhausted. The moon had risen, silver white. The cold enveloped him with a numb, ascetic clarity. He had got rid of the hallucination by telling it to fuck off, several hours ago. He had drunk the last of the Coke but was insisting to himself that he could make it to the road by morning.
He flicked the Blackberry on again to check direction. For the third time since midnight a whole bunch of text messages dropped, the notification ping echoing across the sand. The texts were mainly about a crisis in the British government: his mates in London were swapping cruel and sexist jokes about this; the departing ministers were mainly female and had mainly messed up the simplest of tasks. One had to apologise because her husband had claimed porn films on her government expense account. That was the gist of Brough’s text messages, and their casual profanity renewed his feeling of confidence.
Plus there was a message from Chun-li: “David RU OK? Pls get in touch!” This meant she wasn’t dead.
He scanned the subject lines of his emails, still dropping relentlessly into his inbox, here in the middle of nowhere: Viagra, Cialis; press releases from moderate Muslim groups slagging off others allegedly infiltrated by terrorists; hassle from the HR department at Channel Ninety-Nine; more British deaths in Afghanistan; some black kid stabbed in Newham; the usual expense queries from his last trip haunting him deep into the desert.
Presently he sensed a throb coming from somewhere out in the dark. A deep throb: not a helicopter. Maybe a light plane? The question was: run or stop? He stopped.
“He’s stopped,” the motorcyclist barked into her radio. She could now see the rest of the unit’s bikes as a thick red trail of contacts on the radar screen and Brough as a small red dotted line.
“Forty two degrees, about five clicks East of your location,” she said.
“You certain?” came the response.
Pling, A text message. Brough hit the “Quiet” key but too late.
“Certain,” said the motorcycle radar operator.
The unit now closed in: the bikes broke into an arc formation about two clicks from the target, the flankers forging ahead to make a semicircle they could easily close around him if he tried to make a break for it. Headlights off: every rider and sidecar passenger was wearing night vision goggles: Soviet era, naturally. As they closed in, they could see the target frantically thumbing something into his mobile phone.
“Halt!” said a voice from the tannoy rigged to one of the sidecars. “Drop the phone!”
Brough saw the red dot of a laser gunsight juddering around on his sternum. He skimmed the Blackberry to the floor and it broke into its constituent parts on impact. Now everything happened fast.
Two motorbik
es throbbed out of the darkness towards him, each with a sidecar passenger, each passenger training a light carbine in his direction. They were giant bikes out of another era, the sidecars and fuel tanks bearing the sabre-toothed face of a big cat stencilled in day-glo white against a tiger-stripe paint job; each bike flying a large red Chinese flag from its radio antenna.
As they circled him, tightening the trap, staring at him through their NV goggles, one of the riders pulled out some kind of pistol and levelled it at his chest.
Brough saw, for a moment, straight through to the other side of death. He pictured himself joining a restless queue of teenage squaddies from Afghanistan, their trauma wounds packed and wrapped; stabbed young black guys from East London with diamond earrings and gold teeth, each with an embarrassed smile on his face asking: “why me?”
Weirdly, amid the odour of the desert, the smell of gasoline and fear, Brough caught the sickly top notes of a perfume, something like Kenzo Amour Florale, just as a projectile punched him in the chest.