by Eric Brown
From where he was leaning against the wall, in a state of shock, the watching Arab said something.
Beside her, the crouching Somali shouted at Ali. He turned to Sally and said, “They are cowards. Typical Yemenis.” He spat something at them in Arabic.
Dazed, Ali backed from the chopping block until he fetched up against the wall, the sword dangling in his grip.
On the floor, Ben timorously looked up. He raised himself so that he was kneeling, and stared at his tormentors with nascent hope on his face.
The Somali swore, surged to his feet and crossed the floor in two strides. Before Sally could cry out in horror at what he was about to do, he raised the gun to Ben’s forehead and pulled the trigger.
Or attempted to pull the trigger.
He stood with the pistol connected to Ben’s sweat-beaded forehead, arm outstretched, an expression of ridiculous concentration on his thin face, like an infant attempting to perform a feat beyond his capabilities. He was convulsing, his whole body taken by a violent tremor.
No matter how hard he tried, the gun would not go off.
He cursed, flung the pistol aside, and grabbed Ali’s rifle from where it lay on the floor. He swung the gun, inserted his finger into the trigger guard, and aimed at Ben.
The doctor closed his eyes, his lips moving in silent prayer.
As if released from paralysis, acting without fully knowing what she was doing, Sally pushed herself across the floor, grabbed the Somali’s discarded pistol and stood quickly.
She held the weapon at arm’s length, hands trembling, and directed it at the Somali. “Drop the rifle,” she said in a voice that quavered maddeningly.
The Somali seemed to be caught in indecision. His eyes flicked towards the Arabs, as if seeking orders.
Ali moved towards her, reaching out.
Sally lifted the pistol, aimed above his head, and pulled the trigger. This time the weapon fired, deafeningly loud in the confines of the hut. The Arabs flinched and cowered back against the wall. The Somali dropped the rifle and stared at her.
The bullet had splintered the timbers in the ceiling, and a brilliant shaft of golden sunlight fell through like a spotlight, falling on Ben as he knelt in prayer in the centre of the room.
“If you move,” she said, aiming at the terrorists, “you die…” Her voice trembled. She said to Ben, “Go out to the truck. See if the keys are in the ignition.”
Ben rose to his feet and moved slowly, his arms still bound behind his back, and walked towards the door. “Sally…?”
“Just get out of here!”
“Sally, don’t shoot them, okay. Just don’t shoot them…”
He left the hut.
She said to Ali, “Where are the keys?”
He licked his lips. “In the…”
He was interrupted by Ben’s shout. “They’re here.”
Sally backed to the door, gripping the pistol in her outstretched hands.
Despite what the three had put her through, Ben’s abjuration to leniency was redundant. She had no desire to exact revenge.
“If you move,” she said, “I will shoot. Don’t move until we’ve driven away from here.”
She backed through the door, aiming at the cowering trio all the while, until she came to the truck.
She cursed Ben silently for not having the engine revving, then remembered that his hands were still tied. She reached behind her with one hand, found the door handle and pulled. Within the hut, the terrorists stood watching her, frozen.
She slipped into the driver’s seat, expecting them to rush her at any second. Ben was beside her, sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat, knotted hands behind his back. With a surge of adrenaline she lodged the pistol between the dashboard and the windscreen and gunned the engine. The truck bucked, jolted, and surged forward.
She glanced back at the hut as she turned the truck and accelerated away. There was no sign of Ali or the others.
Ben said something over the roar of the engine.
“What?” Sally yelled.
Ben said, “My prayers were answered, Sally.”
She looked up, through the windscreen. It was late afternoon, and the sun should have been bright above the distant tree line. All she saw was a diffuse blur where the fiery ball should have been.
She said, “Their guns jammed, Ben. We were lucky.”
“You saw them, saw what happened. It was the work of the Lord. Their guns did not jam, Sally. They just could not bring themselves to kill us.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what the hell happened. I’m just grateful…”
She brought the truck to a sudden stop, leaned through the window and vomited.
SHE FOLLOWED THE wadi to the road running north-south, and turned left.
She accelerated, residual fear pushing her to drive at speed. She knew the terrorists had no means of leaving the hut other than on foot, but it was as if what they had subjected her to was affecting her rationality. She half expected the men to leap out at them from behind the passing trees.
They came to a T-junction and Sally braked.
Ben said, “I know where we are. See, in the distance, the village of Moganda. We are perhaps one hour away from Kallani.”
“Turn around, Ben, and I’ll try to untie you.”
She picked at the tight knot until she had worked the twine loose and pulled the binds free. He smiled at her, rubbing his wrists.
She gunned the engine and turned right. She checked the fuel gauge, smiled when she saw that it indicated the tank was a little less than half full.
The decision came upon her unexpectedly. She knew, once she arrived back at the medical centre, that she would locate Dr Krasnic and resign then and there. Krasnic would demur, tell her to take a break and think through her decision. But she also knew that she was never going to work at Kallani again.
She had given the place five years of her life, and that was quite enough.
They came to the outskirts of Kallani just under an hour later. A crowd surged along the high street. An almost palpable sense of excitement filled the humid late afternoon air. The attack at the medical centre was big news, in a place where for month after month nothing ever happened.
They edged through the crowds, drove through the centre of town, and minutes later arrived at the medical centre. The gates were open, and within Sally made out two Ugandan army trucks, a police car and a Red Cross jeep.
Crowds milled outside and within the compound so that their return, edging through the citizens and into the medical centre, was hardly commented upon.
The charcoaled bodies of the dead soldiers had been covered in dark green military tarpaulins. The watchtower still burned feebly, a mere blackened timber skeleton against the hazy sky.
Army officers, fat Ugandan policemen, and Red Cross officials stood about in small groups, conferring and consulting softscreens and speaking into wrist-coms.
Sally killed the engine, the truck just another vehicle amongst many. The engine ticked, cooling. She stared out at the activity in the compound.
A tiny African girl moved from a prefab ward and crossed towards the truck. She paused to turn and call something, and a dozen faces appeared at the windows. Sally opened the door and climbed out. The little girl ran to her, repeating her name and saying in Swahili. “You come back! You come back! Kolli, she says bad men took you.”
“I’m back, Gallie. I’m back. Don’t worry.” Sally swept up the child, hugged her to her chest and carried her over to the prefab. Inside, twenty children were cowering in their beds, staring at her with wide eyes.
Mary, the nurse fresh out from England, hurried to her and said, “It’s Dr Krasnic. You must see him. He’s… he’s in his office. He has a pistol. I tried talking to him, but…”
Sally transferred Gallie to Mary’s custody, turned and hurried from the prefab. She almost collided with Ben on the way out.
“Sally?”
“Come with me!” she ordered.
“It’s Yan.”
She feared what she might find as she ran across to Krasnic’s office. His frequent depressions, allied to what had happened that afternoon at the complex, was a combination that did not bode well.
She came to the office and pushed open the fly-screen door.
Krasnic sat at his desk, looking like a statue carved from grey granite. He looked up when she entered. Ben stood behind her, a hand on her shoulder.
Krasnic said, incredulously, “Sally? Ben?” His eyes brimmed.
“We… got away, Yan.”
Only then did she see the pistol lying on the table between his outstretched hands.
“I saw the carnage…” Yan said. “Mary told me you’d been taken.” He shook his head. “I… I don’t know what happened. I’d suddenly had enough, all I could take. So I filled my pistol…” He gestured to the gun on the desk, “raised it to my head and tried to pull the trigger. And nothing happened. So I tried again, yes? And… again, nothing. Was it God, telling me something?”
Sally opened her mouth to speak, but the words would not come.
She stepped forward, reached out and took the pistol. It was far heavier than she had expected, and cold.
“Yan, we need to talk…”
She was interrupted. Someone barged into the room, shouting. “Dr Krasnic!” The Ugandan orderly stared at Sally and Ben, then went on. “Dr Krasnic, amazing events in the south! You must come and see. The road is blocked!”
Before anyone could question him, he ducked back through the door and sprinted across the compound.
Sally looked out. The police car, the Red Cross truck and the army vehicle were rumbling in convoy from the compound.
Sally turned to Krasnic. “Yan, come with me.”
She waited until he stood, like a tired old bear, and she took his arm. They crossed the compound to the terrorist’s truck and all three shuffled along the front seat. Sally stowed Krasnic’s pistol alongside the other above the dashboard.
Five minutes later they left the compound behind the slowly moving convoy and headed south.
Krasnic was the first to see it. He pointed, stirred from his suicidal fugue by what had appeared in the distance. Sally recalled the flash high in the sky earlier that afternoon and, later, the diffuse nature of the sun.
The convoy had halted in the road ahead, along with dozens of other vehicles, cars, motorbikes and bicycles. A crowd of perhaps two hundred citizens milled about at the end of the road — the end of the road because, spanning the patched tarmac that should have headed ruler-straight south without hindrance across the sun-parched desert, was what appeared to be a wall of glass.
Dazed, Sally climbed from the cab, eased her way through the crowd, and approached the silvery membrane. She could see through it, to the road on the other side, the dun African land stretching away to the horizon.
She looked up and stared in wonder at the concave expanse of diaphanous material that stretched high above their heads. It appeared that the town of Kallani was enclosed within the confines of a vast dome.
Krasnic was beside her. “What the hell…?”
Ben said, “It’s a sign, Sally. A sign…”
She reached out and touched the sun-warmed membrane.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BOARDING OF the Air Europe flight from Heathrow to Entebbe was delayed for two hours due to a bomb scare in terminal six. Geoff Allen bore the hold up with customary patience. His job entailed prolonged travel, and these days delays were an inevitable part of the process. He unrolled his softscreen and spent the time editing a file of shots taken on his last assignment, a freelance trip to cover the aftermath of the bombings in Ankara.
A rainstorm was lashing the tarmac, and when the time came to board the ancient Boeing 747 the passengers were informed that, because of ‘technical difficulties’, the umbilical corridor leading from the terminal building was out of commission. As he dashed through the rain, he looked ahead to the sun of Africa and the week he was due to spend with Sally.
There was another delay, this time lasting thirty minutes, while the plane took its place in the take-off queue. He spent the time writing a short email to Sally and sending it as the plane climbed and banked over the dreary grey suburbs of south-west London.
See you in a little over ten hours. I can’t wait. Work has been hell, I’ll tell you all about it later. There I go again, complaining about my job, when yours… Anyway, things are just the same in England. Food-shortages and riots. Could be worse: look at France…
He went on in this rambling vein for another couple of pages, the epistolary logorrhoea a prelude to the oral: when he met Sally they’d talk non-stop, catching up on the mutual missed events of the past three months.
The plane flew west, out over the Atlantic and south over the Bay of Biscay, giving French airspace a wide berth. A nationalist terrorist group had brought down three planes in as many months over the south of France, in response to the number of foreigners flooding into the country. Airlines were taking no risks.
Allen lost himself in work, cropping images of bombed-out houses, the dazed victims in the streets of the Turkish capital. The country was paying the price for its acceptance of the West, its repudiation of ‘traditional’ values. Repression of dissidents, including Kurds and Islamists, had been severe and uncompromising, in the grand tradition of Turkish state heavy-handedness. The result was an anarchic free-for-all in which ideologically opposing terror groups, of every shade of political and religious persuasion, cut swathes through the country’s innocent population.
A little while later he felt a tap on his shoulder. A woman peered around the seat behind him. “Do you think that’s appropriate for children to view?”
“Excuse me?” Allen turned awkwardly to look at her.
The woman leaned to one side and indicated a small girl seated beside her. “My daughter saw what you were doing as she went to the toilet…”
His first reaction was to apologise — the typical English, deferential climb-down hardwired into every citizen of his class and age. His second, to tell the woman that her daughter should mind her own business.
He indicated the vacant window-seat beside him, “I’ll move,” he said, and did so.
In the aftermath, he wished he had said something caustic, along the lines of, “Perhaps you shouldn’t shield your precious daughter from the realities of the world…” but on reflection he was relieved he’d not had the gall to do so; that would have started him on his hobby-horse, the sanitised, advertisement-led vapidity of the British news media these days, which was happy to report atrocities with lip-smacking gusto, but was prudishly reluctant to show the effects of bombings and similar attacks. Even the internet, once the bastion of laissez faire content, had been hamstrung by recent government restrictions.
The website and sister magazine he freelanced for was based in Germany, where restrictions were a little less draconian.
He worked on the photography for another hour, by which time a hostess was processing down the aisle handing out shrink-wrapped trays of fodder the blandness of which was calculated to offend the least number of passengers. Allen chewed on a cheese roll — the cheese the latest milk-free version, cheap, rubbery and tasteless — while staring through the window at the ocean far below.
They overflew a vast hydraulic wave-farm, a series of great metal platelets connected by tubular pistons the width of the Channel Tunnel. He’d covered a story down there a few years ago. The Spanish government had flown him to Cadiz, then ferried him out by hydrofoil, to witness an amazing sight. A hundred boat-people, refugees fleeing the revolution in Morocco, had set up camp on the back of one of the farm’s great see-sawing plates, subsisting on fish and little else, until evacuated by the Spanish authorities.
The farm was free of inhabitants now, other than its skeleton crew of engineers, but he did see a tangle of wreckage and a sprawling scorch mark on one of the heaving pontoons: the result of a terrorist attack last year.
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The last he’d heard, the Spanish government was thinking of closing down the farm on grounds of inefficiency, and building nuclear reactors to supply the nation’s rapacious energy needs. Opposition voices pointed out the dangers of reactors prone to terrorism…
An elderly man hobbled down the aisle towards him, smiled and inclined his head, and walked on past. Allen responded with a vague smile of his own, wondering if he’d met the man somewhere recently. His memory for faces, as well as names, was appalling, which was odd as he thought of himself as a visual person. He was endlessly fascinated by the appearance of things, of how reality presented itself visually — his degree had been in art history, and he’d been a photo-journalist for the past ten years — and yet he was forever unconsciously snubbing people because he failed to recognise their faces.
A little later the old man paused in the aisle beside Allen, cleared his throat and, when he had his attention, murmured, “I hope you don’t think this impertinent of me, but I was wondering if you’re Geoffrey Allen?”
The man had the diffident, old-school manners of a much earlier generation. Allen guessed he was in his eighties.
He smiled, wondering if the man had recognised him from one of the ID mugshots that occasionally accompanied his pieces in British colour supplements. He felt at once obscurely pleased and embarrassed.
He smiled. “That’s right.”
The man extended a frail hand. “James Cleveland. I worked with your father many, many years ago, and I once met you when you were this high. I’ve followed your career over the years.” After they had shaken hands, Cleveland indicated the aisle seat. “You don’t mind…?”
“Not at all.” Though, truth be told, the last thing he wanted was to be pinned in situ by someone reminiscing at length about the greatness of his father — a situation he’d suffered on more than one occasion over the years.
“Your father was a wonderful politician, Geoffrey — I may call you Geoffrey, by the way?”