Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  ~ * ~

  PART THREE

  “Saudi Arabia has oil. China has Rare Earth.”

  Deng Xioa-ping

  ~ * ~

  1

  “When’s the last time you saw a porn movie where a Chinese man with a giant dick is giving it to some li’l English lady?”

  It was a tough first question and not one Brough had prepared himself for in any interrogation he had ever imagined.

  “Okay,” the woman slapping his face had a Californian accent; “lemme put it another way. When was the last time you saw a porn movie where a Western guy is screwing some little Chinese girl?”

  “These exist,” Brough croaked.

  She looked angry, her face was strong and pure, her hair dyed chestnut brown. She had pulled up a chair so she could sit knee-to-knee with him and slap him back to consciousness.

  “First thing you need to get straight, Mister Brough is: show some respect!”

  “Yeah, due respect!’

  That was another woman, pacing around behind him, pronouncing “due” as in “do”, agitated.

  He was in a yurt furnished Kasbah-style with cushions and rugs, with a heavy emphasis on animal skin. They had dressed him in a white paper jumpsuit and speedcuffed his wrists behind his back. The USB stick was missing from his neck, together with his chain.

  “You prolly don’t realise,” the woman behind him leant close to his ear; “because you only been in China less than a week, that every Western guy that comes here comes - subliminally - to fuck Chinese women. This is hard-wired in your genes but totally forgotten by your culture.”

  “Ever seen Piccadilly?” said the woman in front of him. She had a NATO-style name-patch velcroed to her flying jacket, drawn in smudgy marker-pen: Chi.

  Brough stared at her, his brain struggling.

  The other woman strode around the tent, her shoulders giving off menace as she messed with the sticky chamber of an AK carbine. She had that fine, fragile bone structure and blue-veined skin that Brough - if he’d had any cultural reference points at all - would have recognised as the “Four Young Dan” film actress look.

  “It’s, like, a movie,” she chipped in, pronouncing the sentence like a question and in a midtown Manhattan accent. “Piccadilly. Nineteen twennynine. White man fucks Chinese lady?”

  Her name patch was stencilled with the word “Lai”. Miss Chi and Miss Lai.

  “Where’s my stuff?” Brough looked past them, through the tent doorway. It was pre-dawn and he could hear a generator growling, bike engines revving and the clink of spanners on spark plugs.

  “Relax honey.” Miss Chi had that full, knowing, so-many-gay-male-friends way of speaking that you can default to if you spend any time in California. Her voice ran up and down the Aeolian scale, one note for each word; “we’re not gonna kill you. We dripped you, dit’n we?”

  He looked down at his left hand; there was still a plastic cannula slotted into a vein there, but the saline drip had been removed.

  “What did you shoot me with?”

  “You got a lotta nerve mister.” Miss Lai had slung the AK over her shoulder and was flicking through his passport:

  “You arrive in China, three days later you tryin’ to drag our country’s reputation into the shit!”

  They were wearing identical gold embossed T-shirts under their leather bike-jackets, depicting a manga girl throwing a hand-grenade.

  “An’ stop lookin at my boobs, motherfucker!” said Miss Lai. “Stop objectifying us!”

  “Where am I?”

  He decided to go on being dazed.

  “Technically,” Miss Lai skimmed his passport through the air to hit him in the chest, “you are detained by us. But you should be grateful. There’s a freakin’ manhunt under way by law enforcement and you, Mister Brough - cool name by the way, same as the bike T.E. Lawrence rode-anyway, like I say, you’re better off detained by us right now. Off the radar.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Knocked you down with a zoo dart. It’d take out a big cat for a few hours,” said Miss Chi.

  Miss Lai interjected:

  “Getting back to the subject, you gotta respec’ the fact there will be no sex, no flirting, no freakin’ slimy compliments by you, no lookin’ at people’s boobs or nuttin’...”

  “Sounds ideal,” said Brough, “can I have some water?”

  “See this?”

  Miss Lai twirled the carbine around her finger like a gunslinger and did a Suzi Quatro pose with the stock against her knee: “It’s fuckin’ real!”

  “So no escape attempts!” Miss Chi seemed to lighten up marginally. “No Steve McQueen-style exploits.”

  Brough’s jaw hurt as he tried to smile.

  “I’m serious,” said Miss Chi, pulling a bayonet out of her boot and slicing the speedcuffs off him. “We seen the movies: you English guys spent the whole o’ World War Two constantly escaping. But not from here, buster.”

  Miss Lai dumped his sweat-stained clothes in a bundle at his feet. Both of them, despite their beauty, had the dry-calloused knuckles of the martial artist and their muscles seemed to contain a whip-like energy.

  “Can you take me to Ordos?”

  “Sure,” Miss Chi pulled a parkerized Colt pistol from her belt and thrust it into his face:

  “We can take you to Ordos where you can go fuck some teenage girl in a hotel room for twenny dollars and then carry on your slander campaign against the PRC!”

  Her hand was shaking.

  “Lotta evil mo-fos out here in the desert, Mister Brough,” said Miss Lai, behind her, sniggering.

  ~ * ~

  2

  “We’re basically a private military and security company,” Miss Chi led him through the camp under a chrome cloudscape. She’d calmed down now but was sullen: subcutaneously angry.

  The wind was snapping at the guy-ropes of several camo-patterned yurts. There were maybe two-dozen bike-and-sidecar combinations parked in a rank. At each bike women clad in a motley collection of vintage military gear were busy with wire wool, ratchet spanners or pouring icy quarts of mineral water into the battery. From each bike flapped a metre-wide Chinese flag.

  “Emphasis on military?” Brough’s mouth was too dry for humour.

  Not every woman was packing a firearm, but there were enough in evidence: the old, short Chinese AK carbines - as seen from the Niger Delta to Kabul - plus the odd RPG slung over a slender shoulder. They shouted college-kid jokes in Chinese at Chi as she led him past. He wasn’t sure if it was his altered consciousness but they all seemed tall and, if not exactly beautiful, fine looking; brimming with hope and righteousness.

  There was a lot of Nam-era paraphernalia on display too: 101st Airborne patches, graffiti-covered M1 helmets, embroidered Ranger tabs. One kid was, disarmingly, sporting a WW2 German helmet with a swastika spray-canned fuchsia pink against the grey.

  “Would it be impolite to ask what you guys actually do with all this hardware?”

  “We off the record?” said Miss Chi with eyes slit, a sideways glance, chin angled to the sky.

  “Deep background.”

  “Sign a non-disclosure agreement?”

  “I never sign NDAs.”

  “You’re gettin’ Grade A access here, mister, so I’d be obliged if you’d stick to the journalist’s code of conduct. For your information only, not to be quoted, even without attribution, and purely on background, the Ordos Snow Leopards Motorcycle Club provides, basically, mobile security for various mining operations out here in the desert.”

  “What kind of mining?”

  “Rare Earth mostly. Some iron ore to keep an eye on.”

  “I keep hearing about this Rare Earth,” Brough said. “What is it?”

  “Oh boy! You’re in a Rare Earth hypermarket and you don’t know what it is?”

  She stared at him and kicked the sand.

  “This here is the Walmart of Rare Earth. It’s like turning up in Saudi Arabia and saying er, like, what i
s this stuff, o-yi-lll?”

  Brough could only think of the medicinal clay called Fuller’s Earth.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Okay,” Chi pulled a glass vial full of silver powder out of her combat trousers, which she held up to his gaze.

  “Like, Rare Earth 101 would take, maybe, an hour which we don’t really have time for but the for-dummies version is: this here is Neodymium. Feel.”

  She snapped the vial and poured a tiny speck of the powder into Brough’s outstretched hand, which began to tingle.

  “It’s only mildly toxic,” she grinned. “And only radioactive for about seventy seconds. It’s oxidising right now.”

  He peered at the crystals, which were turning white and beginning to stick together.

  “Try not to breathe it in,” she added. “There’s seventeen rare earth elements, know what an element is?”

  A lightbulb lit dimly in Brough’s brain. She continued:

  “Scandium, yttrium and the fifteen different lanthanoids. This is one of the lanthanoids. Neo-dym-ium. Nd. Number 60 on the Periodic Table.”

  Last time he’d encountered the Periodic Table he’d been throwing darts at it in the common room at university, the other side of an entire adult life lived in fear and ignorance of science except where it could combat liver failure or sexually transmitted disease.

  “So this is a kind of metal?”

  “Found - in - the - Chi-nese - des - yourt,” Chi mocked him.

  “And is it precious?”

  She scattered the contents of the vial into the wind for an answer, flapping the speck off his hand with her Air-Cav scarf.

  “Is it, by any chance then, actually rare?”

  “Not even that,” she snorted. “There’s, like, eight million tonnes of Neodymium on the planet. Problem is you gotta dig up huge chunks of ore to find a tiny speck of it. Then process it. Then avoid oxidation. Global production is about seven thousand tons a year. There’s plenty left.”

  They’d reached the edge of an escarpment and Brough realised that he’d been hearing, but not exactly comprehending, the sound of a backhoe loader at work. The hydraulic howl and the scrape of metal claw against hard surface, familiar from every building site on earth, came to him from somewhere below them.

  “This is the mine here,” Chi gestured with her boot. “Hey!”

  A couple of scrawny guys in hard hats came scurrying, half bent, from a man-made cave in the side of the ravine below them; they flashed teeth the colour of corroded brass out of sun-dried faces and gave a friendly wave. There were a couple of grimy tents for sleeping quarters, a tea-kettle steaming on a wood fire and a bright yellow tipper truck with massive tyres and a stone-crusher attachment.

  Brough watched as the miners, cigarettes trailing from dry lips, coaxed the digger backwards out of a tunnel shored up with timber, guiding it with a cacophony of whistles, shouts and handslaps. It dumped a shovel full of rock into the crusher, which shot it out as gravel into the truck, creating a spume of red dust.

  “If it’s not rare or precious, why the security?”

  A radio at Chi’s collar-bone crackled. She spoke back to it in dead-face military Mandarin.

  “We’ve gotta ship out in the next hour. There could be trouble soon but I think, given all that shit you were saying under the Haloperidol, you’re probably safer with us.”

  She shouted something at the miners, who started running around and spitting up dust. Then she pushed Brough back down towards the camp, whose tents were being collapsed and compressed into sidecar-portable lots, while a small team deregularised the sand with twig brooms and moved bits of scrub back into place to foil aerial surveillance.

  “The security is needed, Mister Brough, because these mining operations exist in-what you call in the West-the informal sector.”

  “They’re illegal?”

  “The grey economy is quite large in this country,” Miss Chi shrugged:

  “They’ll seal the entrance in a minute: half a stick of dynamite does it. Leave only footprints, take only three tonnes of Rare Earth ore, as the saying goes. Find it again on GPS.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Brough stared at the fading red weal on his palm. “If that stuff is not rare or precious, and presuming it’s not some kind of high explosive, and bearing in mind the fact that I have never heard of it...”

  But they were already at the line of motorbikes, engines idling. Miss Lai, insect-faced behind a pair of mirrored Ray-Bans, beckoned him over to her machine, which dwarfed her.

  “Ever ride a motorbike?”

  “Had a trials bike when I was...”

  “Never,” she cut off his wind by hitting him in the gut with a spare helmet, “have you ridden a motorcycle, Mister Brough, until you have ridden the Chiang-Jiang 750.”

  ~ * ~

  3

  “Stop throwin’ these Anglo-Saxon preconceptions in my ear, will ya! And keep them hands around my waist, not on my ass!”

  They were bumping through the dust at a steady 40mph. Brough, riding pillion-the sidecar was cluttered with Miss Lai’s radar gear - had made the mistake of questioning the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy. Now she, gabby with biker adrenaline, was delivering a monologue into his helmet’s intercom at the speed of a Charlie Parker solo.

  “When I turned up at the Stern School it was, like, you know: typical Chinese girl. Joined the Chinese Student Society, goin’ on demonstrations against the Dalai Lama and freakin’ Falun Gong. My dad’s a general in the PLA and we got this, kinda, property thing goin’ on, and so there’s a whole bunch o’ places on the Upper East Side to pick from but I think, No, live the life, dream the dream, do the right thing, so I move into a very nice duplex on Bleecker, facing south, lotsa sunshine and meanwhile my English is, you know, pretty good, and I got a good sense for the body language and the nuances and after a while I’m thinking - shit! these people are just seein’ straight through me. Straight through. Even un-Americans, Even Africans. It’s hey Joe ya comin’ to the Mets game - just like in Friends, the Mets - or hey Idris you wanna come to a hip-hop event ay-at the Brecht Forum... and always the conversation is goin’ on... here!”

  She waved her hand to indicate the space above her head.

  “White guy, African guy, Somali lesbian girl, Eye-talian chick who turns out to have a dick; one thing unites ‘em: No See Chinese Lady. And I check it out with the others and it’s the same. You put on a pair o’ jeans from Gap they don’t see you. You put on a pair o’ jeans from Escada plastered with Swarovski crystal and they still don’t see you. You put on a tartan skirt, pastel headband and a pair o’ knee-length socks and, yeah, then they see you: Chinese student girl. Typical ugly Chinese girl. You think I’m ugly?“

  Brough had already imagined Miss Lai draped across the saddle of the bike in poses subliminally recalled from the March 1978 issue of Fiesta magazine.

  “Point is, one day, we’re in class and the professor is explaining the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and suddenly these smartass kids start, like, questioning it? I mean really ripping it apart. And, like, at Tsinghua University you do that you get marched out of the door but this prof he just laughs and rips into them back, calling ‘em anarchists, neo-freakin-Ricardians? And afterwards this kind of frisson as if they’ve all achieved something.”

  “So I go to the laundromat and there’s some guy bitching with his girlfriend, right after I mean they have obviously just fucked each other OK, but there is this black cloud hanging between their faces and they are, you know, enjoying the whole thing. Then I realise what they’re all getting off-of on is conflict. You guys just think conflict is good!”

  She drew breath. They were in a flying V, twelve bikes each side, throwing up dirt and stones. The Chiang-Jiang was hot: Brough’s calves were burning. Lai had loaned him a leather flight jacket, which despite the heat he was glad to have between himself and the gritstorm they were throwing up.

  “You go out with a guy,” Lai picked up, �
��what you’re lookin’ forward to is breaking up with him. You elect a President what you’re majorly lookin’ forward to is that moment they come on Good Morning America and say the guy’s a fuckin’ war criminal. There is,” she squeezed the clutch and flared the throttle open to vent her anger, “just this unfathomable desire for conflict and abrasion and I’m suppose to relate to it? And because I can’t I’m spose to feel like, autistic?”