Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  “All that was once plentiful is now trouble, poverty and despair.” Thomas showed little outward emotion as he spoke, but there was something moving in his pragmatic tone.

  “I’ve often wondered,” said Fox, “how a nation with the biggest middle class in the world—it’s over 300 million, yeah?—can have such massive poverty. What, probably 800 million people living in desperate circumstances?”

  Thomas looked at Fox. Nothing. Then a nod. “We were in a dire situation in the sixties, but we overcame it due to the work of a great man,” Thomas said. “Now we need another man like Borlaug, a warrior saint, but I do not see one coming over the horizon.”

  They rode in silence for a while, Fox watching the world flash by.

  “Srinagar is the capital of the Jammu and Kashmir state,” Thomas said, his tone friendlier, if a little forced. “I rarely go there, maybe once a year. Too many tourists, although Amritsar has that too. Too many memories of a different, happier time and place here.”

  Fox wondered what was being offered: personal reflections beyond the small talk?

  “Amritsar,” Fox said. “That’s the cultural centre for your religion?”

  Thomas looked at Fox, who felt he was being judged, deemed worthy or unworthy of further information. Fox sensed that, even though Thomas Singh was affiliated with GSR, he didn’t quite know what to make of two out-of-town reporters who arrived at short notice and called for a high-security detail.

  “Yes,” said Thomas, looking back at the road. “Amritsar is home of the Harmandir Sahib—also known as the Golden Temple. It is the spiritual centre of Sikhism, a home for my brotherhood. One can still sense the wisdom of our gurus there—you should see it, feel it, if you have time.”

  “I’d like that,” Fox said, watching the expansive outer suburbs go by. The convoy was constantly speeding up and slowing down, weaving in and out and around traffic of every kind.

  “In about two hours we will meet my brother at the border,” Singh said. “He runs an aid agency. As an Indian reporter, I am not permitted to cross the Line of Control.”

  “Your brother,” Fox said. “He works solely in the Pakistani-controlled area?”

  Thomas was silent for a while. He gazed out his side window as if trying to find words to describe what it was his brother did. Finally: “Mainly he helps women and children, on both sides, but he is one of a few small operators who do work that stretches across the border—the NGOs do not do much because it is a relatively lawless land over the LOC, and the Pakistani government does not have enough money to treat their sick, nor to educate their children, nor to protect their women from violence, let alone police their frontiers—but then, you men know that.”

  Fox and Gammaldi nodded, each taking in the sights around them while listening to Thomas’s words.

  After ten minutes of silence, Thomas turned to Fox and said: “Lachlan, you started this global story about our water crisis. Are you still working this story for that purpose?”

  “What purpose is that, Thomas?”

  “Look around you,” he said. “All these dry fields—this is a wet area of India. It has the run-off from the mountains, the rain belt from the Himalayas—yet every year it gets drier. We got hand pumps—the water ran out. We got electric pumps—the water table kept falling. Now, it is out of reach to most farmers and communities; only the big industrial pumps can get down to the water. So, when I ask about your purpose, I ask because we are a people with little to no water, and what little we had is now being taken from us. It is theft of life.”

  “I know,” Fox replied. “I know about your suicide farmers. I know about the millions, the tens of millions you have in this country who are sick and starving for lack of water.”

  “A number growing every day.”

  “Yes,” said Fox. “If it continues—”

  “Hundreds of millions of my countrymen will die.”

  Fox could see that Thomas’s hands were tight on the wheel, and his jaw was clenched in rage.

  “And when do we stand up and say, enough? When does my country, its leaders, Pakistan’s leaders, the world—when do they realise it is enough? When it is too late? When our side of the Punjab is nothing more than blood and dust? When the Beas, Sutlej, Chenab, Ravi and Jhelum all go the way of the Sarasvati River—just a few lines of verse in our mythology? Do we take so much from them that those downstream miss out on the life that they provide?”

  Exasperation was etched on his face; the face that had held friendliness and warmth now shone with contempt and outrage.

  “This situation is not new, but this is a crisis of new proportions, biblical proportions if you will, and it must be stopped. This project is an obstacle that must be destroyed to liberate our rivers … and this story must get out, outside the borders of this country.”

  “I know,” Fox said. “I’m working on that, I really am.”

  Silence fell. Nothing but the noise of the engine and the tyres on the road.

  “This area coming up, famed for its wetlands by the lake,” Thomas said, “even here it is desperate. The birds, the geese and ducks alone used to block out the sun during migration; now the bigger birds are few, yet still we get record numbers of the smaller creatures because it is one of the last lonely places of water left.”

  Fox watched the marshlands flash by the window. A small shaft of sun broke through the cold and the water twinkled like gold. He wound down the window: there was a breeze, and it spoke many languages.

  44

  GORI, GEORGIA (EASTERN EUROPE)

  Excited voices crackled over their tactical radios. Nix and Top pulled the Humvee up four clicks northeast of their command position. A squad of their soldiers hugged the dirt behind an earthen berm, a few hundred metres ahead of the nearest Georgian military forward observation post. The troops were hard to pick out against the snow.

  All soldiers wore the latest Army combat uniform. The jacket used Velcro-backed attachments to secure items including name tapes, rank insignia, shoulder patches and unit tabs, as well as recognition devices such as the American flag patch and the infrared tab—the latter sewn to each shoulder to help identify friendly personnel when night-vision devices were employed. Still, when Nix’s boys were this far outside the Blue Zone—the protected bubble around Gori and Tbilisi—no camouflage or Kevlar would do what they needed. To survive, they needed to stay smart, and rely on their training—and luck.

  “Stevo, what have you boys been doing up here?” Top asked the buck sergeant of the squad, the team’s sniper spotter.

  “Heard gunfire, came to check it,” Sergeant Steve Kynoch replied. “Contact must have clocked us; took from taking pot shots at the water tower over there to keeping us hunkered down.”

  The sniper and spotter were on higher ground atop the berm, nestled among some shrubs. All faces looked to their commanding officer.

  Nix knew that the last Russian military formations left this area in late August 2008, and that Georgian law enforcement units moved back into the nearby city of Gori shortly thereafter—and right now FBI agents from the Tbilisi office were crawling through the rubble of the Town Hall after the US–EU diplomatic delegation was blown up. Georgian authorities were in control of the city and its outskirts but the town was a mess: most of everything was stolen and if not it was pretty well wrecked. The mayor of Tbilisi was arranging the return of tens of thousands of refugees to Gori, but until the Blue Zone was plugged against threats like the one presenting itself, those days were still a way off. Nix and his team were part of the current security attachment, officially there to train the Georgian Army. The closest Russian checkpoint remaining in the vicinity of Gori was located about a click to the north of here. Whatever this trouble was, it was in no-man’s-land.

  “So what’s the deal?” Nix said. No gunfire was sounding now, despite his guys feeling threatened enough to stay low. “I heard there was trouble.”

  Ping ping ping.
>
  The rifle fire zapped off Nix’s Humvee; the rear side window cracked but it held. He looked to his senior non-com, Top, who looked as pissed as Nix felt.

  “I know, you really like Humvees,” Top said to his Captain.

  “That was a brand new one, too,” Nix said. “Fucking commie bastards.” He looked through field glasses to scan for the shooter.

  “Are we shooting people or what?” the sniper asked without moving from his sighted weapon. Specialist Pete McAllister was new to the team; he was nicknamed Mac, although some senior guys called him Poor Choice Pete, after a disastrous night out on the town in China.

  Ping ping ping.

  “Are we shooting?” the Radio Telephone Operator asked.

  “That’s what I’m asking,” Mac said.

  Ping ping ping.

  “Well, what’s the answer?”

  All soldiers except Mac turned again to face Nix. He looked at his men, then towards the concealed gunman, then to his wrecked Humvee.

  Ping ping ping-zap. The last shot was close.

  “Top, what calibre’s he shooting at us?”

  “Five-five-six, sir,” Top replied, referring to the 5.56 mm-sized standard NATO assault rifle round.

  “Correct, and that ain’t Russian.”

  “He could be using a captured Georgian M4 or Tavor 21; they lost quite a few in the conflict.”

  Nix nodded. Great. He really didn’t want to shoot Russian soldiers—well, he didn’t want the consequences of shooting Russian soldiers.

  “What uniform’s he wearing?”

  “Could be Russian, sir,” Kynoch replied.

  “Could be Russian? Like, could be Georgian even?”

  “Sir,” Kynoch said, “we can only see his head. No helmet, no hat, nothing but hair.”

  “That’s all I need. Call the shot, sir,” the sniper said down his scope. He was lying prone, the most accurate field position for sniping: on his stomach with legs spread out, feet arched down and partly embedded in the ground, his rifle tight in his shoulder. As ready as he’d be.

  A single shot rang out. The US soldiers kept low. Nix looked at the guy he most trusted in life, Top, who triple-checked his GPS against the latest NATO map that had the control areas clearly marked. He knew Top’s advice would be to set a precedent and example for all concerned. There was no dispute that they were in friendly territory, only a question of how far this situation might escalate.

  45

  ON THE ROAD, NORTHERN INDIA

  “What will it take to change the Kashmir problem?” Fox asked. “I mean beyond this current situation, beyond this water dispute?”

  Thomas Singh sighed. He had been talking about this and writing about this for years, but Fox knew that this local reporter’s voice wasn’t nearly loud enough to make the difference.

  “We need more good people doing good things,” he said. “We need politicians to lead. We need to educate our children and equip them to change things—India will soon have fifteen per cent of the world’s teenage population. Fifteen per cent! Think what they could do! Soon we will overtake China. We are a people and a culture exploding onto the world stage, yet we cannot even provide adequate drinking water to half our population.”

  Fox waited a bit before asking the question he knew did not have a simple answer: “Can you have long-term peace with your neighbour?”

  “We need peace and reconciliation with Pakistan; the future of the Kashmiri people depends upon the two nations coming to terms,” Thomas said. “Will that happen soon? No. In my lifetime? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there needs to be an independent Kashmir, who knows? The kids there do not get the chance to grow because of violence or fear. We need politicians who know that they are judged on what they build, not what they destroy—and it has to be more than dams and pipelines. We need schools, we need … so much.

  “There will never be a solution in Kashmir if there is no forgiveness. Like the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa, India and Pakistan must come to terms with each other, accept the current situation and move forward.” He looked out the windscreen, his gaze unflinching. “It is time to bring peace back to Kashmir. It is time my country stood up and shouldered the responsibility of peace. It is past desperate here. We are a billion people who have sent a spacecraft to the moon but allow starvation and thirst.”

  “You need help,” Fox said. “People need to know about all this. Those outside your borders—your friends—need to help.”

  “We need help from more than men,” Thomas replied. “We need water.”

  46

  GORI, GEORGIA (EASTERN EUROPE)

  “We’re right on the buffer zone, yeah?”

  Top nodded to his commander and said: “That guy shouldn’t be in there.”

  “Shouldn’t be shooting at us, that’s what he shouldn’t be doing,” Nix replied. He looked around them: there was nothing but a dirt road that snaked through the woods along the southern bank of the Greater Liakhvi River. Most of it had an earthen berm pushed up, like this one; perhaps originally as a precaution or perhaps simply from the road grading, but now there were also some sandbags and concrete rubble scattered along its top in an effort to create a safer zone for whoever had occupied this area as a shooting alley in the 2008 conflict. In the nearby town—Tskhinvali, as it was labelled on Nix’s map, the capital of South Ossetia—civilians were still few on the ground, compared with a couple of thousand Russian troops. Nix hoped none of the latter was dumb enough to be using false-flag techniques by firing a non-standard weapon at US personnel—in no-man’s-land, outside the Russian-controlled territory.

  Ping ping ping.

  “He’s reloaded!” Mac said, the highly-tuned shooter no doubt feeling naked with nothing more than a low-calibre carbine in his hands.

  “Yeah, we got that,” Top said and turned to Nix. “Captain, we bugging out or taking care of this bad guy?”

  “Double-check there’s no friendlies over there,” Nix said to his RTO. The Georgian Armed Forces numbered around 45 000, with about a quarter trained in advanced techniques by US military instructors. Nix had fought beside some of these troops in Iraq—they were pretty good, and he was happy to be here returning the favour. He’d even been made an honorary member of the 13th ‘Shavnabada’ Light Infantry Battalion; they were his brothers-in-arms, and he wanted to avoid blue-on-blue engagement even more than killing a Russian soldier.

  “We’re in the peacekeeping zone,” Top said to his Captain. “He’s firing at us from no-man’s-land.”

  “The Georgians confirm they’ve got no one in that sector,” the RTO soldier said. “And the Russians aren’t supposed to be there.”

  Nix’s wheels were turning. His briefing was still ringing in his ears. Their rules of engagement stated they could return hostile fire. This guy could be a militant, a Russian-backed South Ossetian gun slinger. Could be a kid with a .22. Could be anyone.

  Pang pang pang.

  A louder report; a heavy calibre, semi-auto with a slow rate of fire. Definitely not a .22.

  “He’s got a buddy joining in,” the spotter said. “Make it a 12.7 mil, DShK-type heavy machine gun—”

  Phraaaaaaaaang!

  The front half of the Humvee tore apart like confetti as the heavier rounds raked in at full auto. Seconds later a tracer round flashed between Nix and Top; they dropped to cover and the Humvee’s roof peeled back as if a wrecking crane had taken to it.

  “Want to call in CAS, Cap?” Top asked as Nix shook his head clear of debris. The RTO was ready to make the call with their coordinates to the Close Air Support command centre back near Tbilisi. There was no carrier group in the Black Sea yet—a standing treaty limited NATO tonnage—but that had become a top priority back in Belgium since the attack on the diplomatic delegation here in Gori had pissed off most of Europe.

  “Where’s it at?”

  Top listened in to the RTO’s spare headset and replied
to his company commander: “Georgian fixed wing, about twenty minutes out.”

  Nix knew the lag—once a request for CAS was passed to a jet by an Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft, it took the Air Force about that long to calculate the desired mean point of impact, which was required to ensure the bomb hit its target. Back in Operation Anaconda, his division had learned the hard way how to make the best of their own tools.

  Ping ping ping.

  “How about the 120?” he asked.

  As a Reconnaissance and Surveillance Target Acquisition company, whenever deployed in a hot zone they had the RSTA company’s 120 mm mortar section set up ready to rock. Sure, there were also Georgian fixed-wing fighter bombers in the air above—the only NATO aircraft authorised for use in the area were Black Hawks for medevac—and he knew that a French artillery battalion was within firing range of the shooters, but none of that was attractive to Nix right now. The fire was ready, and rumour was there were further fixed-wing NATO aircraft and helicopter gunships ready to roll out of Turkey, but that wasn’t an option here today … Nix’s boys weren’t here as part of a beauty contest—they were here as part of a broader mission to keep the peace since the bombing of the City Hall building, and make no mistake, these 10th Mountain boys were ready to be used.

  “I can take the shot,” the sniper said again. He had an M4, the standard rifle of light infantry; a smaller, lighter version of the M16. The shooters were a good four-fifty, maybe five hundred metres away, across the Kura River.

  “Hold it, Mac,” Nix said, weighing it up as a few more rounds zipped into his Humvee.

  “I can see both targets,” Mac said. “The heavy is an NSV or Kord type.”

  If Mac had been armed with his US Army standard issue M110 sniper rifle—with an effective range of double this distance—Nix would have ordered the shot. It would have been designated by the spotter as a true target, and engaged. But Specialist McAllister had something unique in his corner, something that evened the odds, even at this distance—a full-colour embroidered yellow tab, with the words ‘President’s Hundred’ centred in green letters. This badge was awarded by the National Rifle Association to the 100 top-scoring military and civilian shooters in the President’s Pistol and President’s Rifle Matches.