by Gavin Chait
Khalil looks oddly at peace.
‘What is it?’ asks Duruji.
‘It is quiet here,’ says the young man. ‘I cannot hear the howling, and I have not seen Gaw Goŋ or the strange painted dog.’
Duruji feels relieved. The youth’s mania seems to be subsiding.
He leads them back outside and on to the road between the buildings. One of the men is up ahead, emerging from a long, low building. He waves at them and shouts.
‘Boss, I have found something.’
The remaining men gather in what seems to have been the mine canteen. There are metal tables and chairs scattered over a concrete floor. The building is in a pocket between the dunes and has suffered little damage. Some of the glass in the windows is still in place, and there is almost no sand.
‘Curtains,’ says the man who called them. ‘Look, boss.’ He is gleaming with pride.
‘Good. That is good. Let us hope they are not damaged.’
They pull the curtains roughly from their railings, piling them up in the centre of the room. Two of the men begin yanking on each length, testing its strength against their own weight. Some tear; most hold.
After a few hours’ work, they have a long length of thick, corded fabric. The knots are large and unwieldy, but it should hold. The sun is setting red and gold through the open windows of the canteen.
‘Quickly,’ says Duruji. ‘We must get to them while it is still light.’
They retrace their way through the buildings, following their footsteps left in the sand from earlier in the day. These are already fading under the steady wind blowing over the surface.
At the top of the pit, Duruji shouts to the waiting men, ‘We are here. Are you all there?’
‘Yes, boss,’ comes the relieved answering call.
‘We are going to throw down a rope. Only one can climb. The next must wait until I call.’
Duruji points and the bulky fabric is slowly pushed over the edge, down the slope and into the drop below. Three of the men loop the remaining length around their waists, dig their legs into the sand behind the edge. Once they are sure of their grip, they nod to Duruji.
‘The first may climb,’ he shouts.
They hear a gentle scrabble below, and the line goes taut.
A clanking and clambering as the man braces himself against the corrugated-iron walls of the headroom and hauls himself up and out. His head appears over the drop, and he drags himself up the remaining slope. Duruji grabs his hand and embraces him.
‘Mohamoud, it is good to see you,’ smiling for the first time.
One by one the men lever themselves up out of the pit. The last man moans as he drags himself.
‘It is my leg, Duruji. It is hurt.’
‘We will stay here tonight,’ says Duruji. ‘That building where we found the curtains is whole. I hope your leg is easier in the morning.’
It is dark by the time they return to the canteen.
Hidden from random passing drones, Duruji turns on his flashlight as the man with the injured leg rolls up his trousers. He runs his hand over the injury. It is swollen, but the flesh is otherwise unmarked.
‘It is not broken. You should be well in the morning.’
A celebratory shout from the kitchen.
‘Look, boss, canned peaches. And this one looks like beef,’ says a man carrying several catering-sized cans in his arms.
They right various tables and pile up the cans.
Then they stare at them for a bit.
‘Do you think they will be safe to eat, boss?’ asks one of the men, looking nervous.
Duruji shrugs and puts out his hand for the can opener that Khalil is holding like a shield. He opens a can of corned beef and sniffs it.
‘You will try it,’ handing it to Khalil.
All the men stare at him, their eyes glittering in the torchlight. Khalil looks at them apprehensively, then shoves one of his enormous fingers into the can and gingerly scoops a chunk into his mouth.
They watch as he chews.
‘How is it?’ asks one.
‘It is the best food I have tasted in weeks,’ he says, hurriedly scooping the rest into his mouth.
With a roar, the men set upon the remaining cans, and a feast of vegetables, beef and fruit is rapidly consumed. A night without having to eat their food bars is a treasure, and they have no intention of wasting it.
Afterwards, bloated and drowsy, they stretch out on the floor and prepare to sleep. One of the men digs inside his bag and produces a small console.
‘Where did you get that?’ asks another. The men gather around it in delight.
‘The seekers,’ he says, waving his hand as if to belittle the effort involved.
The devices do not work in the karst cities, where living beneath tons of rock prevents any link to the connect. They are, in any case, illegal. The only news or entertainment permitted is tightly controlled by Ag Ghaly and the other ruling families of Ansar Dine.
Soldiers, though, are trusted to go to the surface, and many seekers do carry such communications devices. Khalil is soon introduced to the pleasures of self-promotion as the men pose for images. They are careful not to share any real information regarding their activities or location. There are too many legends of fools who posted their position only to end up broadcasting their final moments minutes later as drones turned them to glass.
Having reconfirmed their dominance of a tiny piece of the connect, the men turn to entertainment. A few moments of fiddling and they find a news broadcast. The men stare at the alien images of green forests and dense, glass-clad cities above ground. They are unable to understand the language spoken but are happy to watch the unfamiliar stream of people and places.
For them, Ansar Dine is their world and the Ag Ghaly family have always been their rulers. As hard as their lives as soldiers may be, they are amongst the elite and – back in the karst cities – they enjoy the privileges of their position. They have no reason to want for anything more, and the lives of these apostates are as remote and foreign as watching Saturday-morning children’s cartoons, and no more threatening.
Duruji has seen these things before, and they hold little interest for him. He is cleaning his rifle and emptying his boots of sand as he considers his map and the four days before they reach the city where they are to meet Ag Ghaly.
‘Boss, boss, come look,’ says one of the men in excitement.
On the screen, a flushed-looking news anchor is speaking far too quickly to be understood. The scene cuts to a sandy blur, and then the image of a naked man standing calmly surrounded by black-turbaned jihadis deep within the erg field.
‘It is us, boss, it is us!’
16
Light beams at the far end of the corridor, followed by grudging murmurs.
‘I am glad this is to be the last of it,’ says the man at the rear as he avoids a stalagmite rising from the floor.
A few days ago, they were made to set up a projector and then forced the prisoner to watch as Oktar was tortured. The man said nothing, his blue eyes glowing and inscrutable in the reflected light of the feed.
‘He is a shayāṭīn,’ the leading man shivering as he twists past a jutting baffle in the rock. ‘Our Janab should never have brought him here.’
The blue-eyed man stands at the bars, calmly waiting for them. The two guards wear the same expressions of mild discomfort at his silent strength.
‘Ma d’tolahat,’ says Simon, politely.
One of the men makes a sound as if he is about to reply, but the other thumps him. They motion with the flashlight. Move.
He obliges, walking between them: one in front, one behind.
The corridor winds for half a kilometre. In a few places, they must duck to get under stalactites or squeeze through narrow crevasses. Each of the guards breathes a silent request that this be the final occasion to make this clumsy journey.
The air gradually lightens, becoming less stiflingly humid. There is a faint blue refle
ction on the walls. The smell of sweat and ordure, of something rotten, gets worse.
Simon is expecting the cave, when they get there, to be vast. He imagines something the size of a football stadium, or even an aircraft carrier.
This is bigger.
He stops for a moment, absorbing its scale and orientating himself within it. The rear guard shoves him forwards.
There are magnificent caves. Caves filled with startling light reflecting in still crystal pools. Frozen waterfalls, speleothems forming pearls or rimstone dams. Shimmering lakes of water so clear that the blind white fish living there appear to be flying through the air.
This cave, though, is hideous.
Muted luminance comes from strings of low-energy fairy lights bolted to the walls and strung up on free-standing posts forming avenues along the cave floor. Tents huddle between clusters of timber houses, clay walls and thatch roofs. Despite the air rebreathers, like vaulted pillars dispersed throughout the cave, there is an overwhelming smell of cooking and rotting waste.
Shadows cast grotesque forms between the speleothems, creating a disjointed pattern that jars distance and induces vertigo and disorientation. The ragged cave ceiling, so far above, is thick with soot and cooking grease; everything else is covered in pasty brownish-white dust.
Simon follows as his guards continue down through the shanty town. His nakedness is ignored. Just another slave amongst the many. There are women and children equally naked, their bodies covered in welts and scars, busy cleaning or carrying. They do not look up, staring rigidly at the ground.
Men in their black djellabas and turbans sit chattering loudly in groups around piles of stacked green leaves. Their laughter and conversation have the manic edge of the qat addict. It travels poorly, and they must be growing it somewhere down here.
There are weapons everywhere. Each man has at least an AK-47, and there are grenade launchers and a scattering of Igla-AD14s.
A group of men are playing pétanque in a rough sandy oblong alongside a wide trench, steel bars bolted across the serrated edges of the pit forming a cage. The men occasionally glance down into the trench as they play. A man standing on the metal bars, urinating through them, shouts as the guards walk past.
‘What is it?’ asks the leading guard.
‘Let the toubab choose for us,’ says the man, completing his ablutions and spitting down through the bars on to the prisoners hiding beneath the edges of the pit below. A thick rope is looped over one of the bars, and a man hangs loosely from it in the middle of the makeshift prison. His wrists and ankles are tied together behind his back and then knotted so that his chest and stomach rest lightly upon the floor, his arms and legs arched above him. He is drenched in urine and excrement. Simon cannot tell if he is still alive.
‘Our Janab wants him. We have no time to wait,’ says the guard.
‘He will be dead soon enough. Let him choose for us,’ says the man.
The other guard shrugs and prods Simon forwards to the pétanque terrain. With much shouting, all the men wanting to play come forward and each contributes a single item to create a pile of small, random objects: a bottle cap, a piece of wood, a bit of wire, a torn piece of paper.
One of the players, a man wearing a sweaty T-shirt improbably bearing the statement ‘Daddy’s girl’, holds up three fingers and jabs Simon in the shoulder. ‘Choose three,’ he says.
Simon picks three things: a bent metal fork, a key and a bottle cap. He continues, creating sets, each a randomly selected three-man team to compete in their never-ending league. Shouts and excitement as the men form up, until all are chosen.
One of the men, wearing a neatly pressed djellaba, picks up the orange jack and flings it towards the far end of the terrain. Each of the players collects two metal boules lying near the edge of the arena, and the game begins.
‘They are,’ thinks Simon, ‘extremely good.’
The shooters fling their boules with devastating accuracy, knocking others out of the terrain. One old man, his djellaba hanging like the remnants of a fire and his eyes straying in different directions, fingers the prayer beads of his misbaḥah before each shot and waves them above his head after every success.
With the camaraderie and cheers of support, the careful measurement of distance between the jack and boules using an ancient tape measure, it is almost as if the trench does not exist. Except Simon can still smell it, and imagines he can hear sobbing from below.
One of the guards pushes him, and they continue through the village and into a narrower tunnel at the far end. There is little movement of people until they reach a junction. Tunnels run off in different directions, some going up, others down. A sinkhole to their left is contained within a bracket of steel bars. Two men are waiting there, in front of a caged elevator.
The guards hand him over and wander back the way they came.
‘Ma d’tolahat,’ says Simon, politely.
The two new guards scowl and prod him into the elevator.
One presses and holds the up button. The elevator moves slowly.
They pass two levels, each filled with people incuriously going about their day.
A small delegation are waiting at the third.
It is difficult to tell, given the near-identical black garb, but these guards’ djellabas appear more opulent, of finer cloth. The air up here is cleaner, almost fresh. The lighting is brighter and more discreet. Effort has been made to grade the tunnels.
‘Ma d’tolahat,’ says Simon as he is handed on once more. Still ignored.
This section is a quiet residential area. The karst is a network of tunnels and cavities. Smaller chambers are sealed with elaborate doors. Larger ones have been subdivided into different homes.
They reach a door guarded by two immense figures. Simon looks up at them admiringly. Ancient societies would simply have made them gods. Here they serve as door ornaments.
One of them knocks on the carved wooden door.
It is opened by a small, naked boy. His eyes are flat, dead, and a fresh red hand-shaped weal crosses his face. He walks stiffly past them and on down the passage, a thin trickle of blood trailing down the backs of his legs.
A thin, tall, greying man is standing behind a desk, adjusting his white djellaba. Abdallah Ag Ghaly ignores Simon and his two enormous guards. He starts speaking, as if continuing a conversation he was already having in his head.
‘The great failure of your crusader culture is that it does not recognize the power of faith. We have brought a billion people into the ummah, and have conquered territory greater than any empire in the last four thousand years. All you are left with is your apostasy, your brutality and your decadence.’
‘While you live a life of grandeur in a hole in the ground, selling drugs, raping children and living in your own effluent? I must say, I do like what you’ve done with the place. Quite gothic. Originally I thought the grotesques were excellent, but then I realized that’s just your head—’
As Simon is speaking, Ag Ghaly walks calmly around his desk and strikes him across the face.
Simon does not move, continuing to smile, his eyes bright and alert.
‘This act may impress the guards on the lower levels, but they are superstitious peasants. I know better. I can smell your fear,’ says Ag Ghaly.
‘Really?’ says Simon, looking around. ‘Are you sure it isn’t you guys? Between us, you all smell a little rank. The lack of water—’
Ag Ghaly strikes him again, splitting his lower lip.
Simon’s smile becomes even more beatific.
‘You know, when you’re this close, I can’t tell which is worse, your face or your breath. You—’
Ag Ghaly screams in fury and slaps. First his right hand, then his left, back and forth, even as Simon ducks slightly so that most of the blows land painlessly on the top of his head.
The two giants stand impassively on either side throughout Ag Ghaly’s wholly ineffective flailing. Simon gets the feeling they must be deaf a
nd mute.
‘You will fear me. Before you die. You will fear me,’ says Ag Ghaly, panting. ‘Your friend learned this, even if he knew nothing else.’ His face has turned slightly grey. ‘You will fear me.’ Sweat gleams on his dark, custard-like skin. He longs to torture this man, to hear him scream, to watch his flesh boil.
‘No,’ says Simon. ‘I will not. That performance of yours with Oktar. Whatever I do, you think to repeat that with me. The outcome is already decided.’
Ag Ghaly grins. His teeth are stained chestnut-dark. ‘Yes, you will tell me where the planes are. Then you will meet the same fate as your friend.’
‘Why don’t you ask your friends in the State Department? Everyone knows. The French, the Chinese, even the Israelis. Oh, wait, that’s right, you don’t have any friends. Only slaves and lackeys—’
Screaming and slapping at him again. And then, the moment Simon has been anticipating, pushing for, the reason for the risk he has taken.
‘Outside! Outside!’ shouting and waving at the guards.
This time Simon is dragged until they get back to the elevator. A guard change, and the elevator is filled with people. The two mute giants remain behind.
‘Obviously,’ thinks Simon, ‘they’re impressive, but a deaf guard is useless for any actual defence.’
It becomes unpleasantly hot as they rise. The elevator stops in a shallow chamber filled with the machinery that runs the elevator. It looks as if it has been adapted from an old mine shaft. Here the heat imposes as a throbbing pulse.
A ramp runs up to a trapdoor.
Simon is surrounded by armed men wrapped in invisibility cloaks over their black djellabas and pushed up the ramp. Two of the men unhitch the door and raise it up and out. The light is bleach, the sand scorching.
Simon squeezes his eyes shut, seeing the red of his eyelids and gradually opening them. It takes almost a minute for the colours to resolve, and he notes that the others seem to be recovering more slowly than he. Many of the guards tremble, seeing demons in the shapes and blur as their eyes adapt.