by Dawson, Mark
“You can talk to me,” Beatrix said.
“That right? And who are you?”
“Juliet Watson,” she said, using the false name that they had used for the permit. She spoke with authority.
“Take your glasses off, please, miss.”
“I will if you will.”
The man frowned, but did as she asked. She removed hers in return.
“That’s better,” she said.
“So? Where are you going?” He was American, a low drawl of an accent that she guessed was from the East Coast.
“Down to the oilfield.”
“No, you’re not.”
“We have a permit.”
“What for?”
“I work for the BBC. The news division. You’ve heard of the BBC, haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“We’re filming a piece about the oilfield.”
“What about it?”
She smiled at him as if he was simple. “You know this is the biggest reserve in the world, right?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re doing a piece about that. About the effect it’ll have on the local economy. About the opportunities for the Iraqis and the companies contracted to get the oil out of the ground.”
“It’s been cleared with the authorities.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Would you expect to have been told?”
He shrugged.
“Want to see the paperwork?”
She took the plastic folder and handed it to him. The man opened it and shuffled dubiously through the sheaf of papers inside. They were fake, but they were good fakes. How was he possibly going to be able to tell? He glanced at the papers, but she could see that he wasn’t really reading them. He was trying to work out what he should do next.
“Do you need to speak to your commanding officer?”
“No,” he said, defensively. “This is my road. I got authorisation. Don’t need to speak to no one else.”
“That’s great. Can we go, then? I’ve got to start filming this tonight, and I need to scout a location. I could really do without the hold-up.”
He looked across the cab of the jeep to his mate, who was still wearing his dark glasses. The man shrugged back at him.
“Ah, shit, why not. But stay on the road, alright? There are plenty of minefields on either side. You go the wrong way, you’re liable to get blown to kingdom come.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
Faulkner put the jeep into gear again, and they left the two soldiers standing on the side of the road.
“They’re well equipped,” she assessed, “at least when it comes to gear. Maybe not the smartest soldiers on the planet.”
“They get better,” Faulkner assured her.
Chapter Seventeen
The closer they got to the oilfield, the more Beatrix could smell the money. It oozed from deep under the featureless expanse of desert where oil derricks and natural gas wells sprouted among sand and scrub. Flames gushed high above them, and the air was thick with smoke and the acrid stench of burning.
They passed through makeshift villages of narrow metal-sided buildings that rose from the dunes, temporary housing to accommodate the workers who were needed to exploit the largest claim of crude oil in recent history. Shiftless children were gathered on the street corners, staring at them as they drove by. Beatrix would have expected the townships to be prosperous places, but they were not. They looked dirt poor.
Faulkner slowed as they approached a huge compound surrounded by two-metre-high walls. A sign next to the gates declared that it was Iraq Energy City and that trespassers would be shot. There was a tall observation tower on stilts, and a soldier with a sniper rifle watched from the accommodation at the top.
Below him, a large crowd had gathered by the gate. It was composed of men and women, all of them yelling abuse at the thirty or so Manage Risk guards facing them on the other side of the gate. The guards were armed with sidearms and batons that they wore through loops on their belts.
“What is this?” Beatrix asked.
“The facility? They just finished building it. It’s offices for the companies with a stake in the field. Accommodation for the foreign workers, too.”
The protesters were chanting loudly. There must have been four or five hundred of them, and the mood was fraught and tense.
“You know what that’s about?”
“There’s been a lot of protests like this. The locals say they’re not getting a fair shake when it comes to the new jobs. They’re probably right. They’re bringing senior management over from the west, and the workers are transferring from fields in Libya, Saudi, Qatar. They prefer people they know. They don’t trust the locals. But these fields used to be owned by the people around here. They say they’re being driven out.”
She took out the field glasses and put them to her eyes.
Her heart jolted. “Shit.”
She pressed the binoculars tight to her eyes and looked again.
“What is it?”
“Stop the engine.”
He did as she asked, and she opened the door and hopped down.
“What is it?”
She ignored him and went around to the back. She opened the bag and, as discreetly as she could, took out the Sig, pressed in a fresh magazine and then pushed it into the waistband of her trousers. She took the abaya and pulled it over her head.
“Rose,” Faulkner said. “Stop. What is it?”
She balled her fists, clenching and unclenching impatiently. “It’s Duffy,” she said. “Over there. Behind the gate.”
Faulkner turned to look. There was no reason why he would recognise Bryan Duffy, but similarly, there was no way she could ever forget him. He was standing behind a line of soldiers, directing them. He was obviously the most senior man present. He was in command. She stared at him, remembering the way his hair swept back from his temple, the sharp nose, even the way he moved. He had grown a wild beard since the last time she had seen him, but it couldn’t disguise his identity.
Faulkner suddenly looked very nervous. “Are you sure?”
“Completely.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Just get a little closer.”
“Don’t forget about . . .”
“Don’t forget about Mackenzie West,” she finished for him, “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
She walked to the back of the crowd. Her Arabic was excellent, and she understood the chants. They were loud and angry, declaiming the Americans for their imperialism and demanding jobs for local workers. The men and women thrust out their fists and stabbed upwards with the placards that bore their slogans. A cheer sounded to Beatrix’s left, and she saw a flash of flame as a barrel-chested man set fire to the Stars and Stripes, inky smoke curling into the scorched air. The cheer was taken up by the others until it became a bellow of rage.
She stared through the forest of limbs and the bars of the gate at Duffy, and the flame of her hatred flickered and caught hold.
Another group of workers joined behind her. The atmosphere was febrile and capricious, and seemingly at the flick of a switch, it curdled from rowdy to ugly. The newcomers surged at the gate, and Beatrix was pressed deeper into the throng. She was heaved right into the middle, the eddies and currents of the crowd drawing her ahead against her will. She found the man with the burning flag to her right and a girl, incongruously young, small and fresh faced, to her left.
She turned her head. She couldn’t see Faulkner anywhere.
The crowd pressed up against the gates, hands laced around the bars, and started to yank at them.
The chanting became angrier.
Beatrix tried to force her way back again, but the men and women behind her were pressed too tight, and there was nowhere for
her to go.
She was less than twenty feet away from Duffy now. She was the only Westerner in the crowd.
A man in front of her tripped and fell, and she was pushed into him, stumbling, and reached out for support against the shoulder of the protester to her left. The fallen man reached up himself, his fist closing around the abaya and, tearing at it, yanked it down so that it fell away from her face.
She tried to rearrange it, but the crowd was constricting, and her arms were pressed against her sides.
If Duffy turned in her direction, if he saw her . . .
There was a screech of metal as one of the gates was pulled away from a hinge. The crowd yelled in jubilation, and the men at the front redoubled their efforts. The second hinge popped out, and the gate was thrown into the yard, forcing the guards to retreat.
Beatrix looked over at Duffy. He fell back, yelling something that she couldn’t hear. The guards drew the batons from their belts and surged forward, meeting the crowd on top of the wrecked gate. The tenor of the protests became angrier as the shouting was punctuated by the deadened thwack of the batons crashing against skull and bone.
The man with the burning Stars and Stripes threw his smouldering pole like a javelin and rushed at the guards, bellowing in fury. Beatrix was jostled again, bumping into the little girl and knocking her over. She saw her face, looking up in terror as the stampede swarmed around her, and she realised that if she didn’t do something, the child would be trampled underfoot.
She was pushed into the crowd again, but she pivoted, narrowing her profile, and shot out a hand. Her fingers fastened around the girl’s wrist, and she wrenched her up into her arms and edged into a gap in the scrum, forcing a passage out to the side of the crowd. The first few yards were treacherous, and a guard’s baton pummelled her arm as she shielded the girl’s head. A second blow clattered against her forehead, dizzying her. The guard drew his arm back again, but Beatrix was faster, straightening her fingers and supporting them underneath with her thumb, driving her hand like a dagger into his larynx. He dropped to his knees, unable to breathe, his hands fluttering at his throat.
She kept moving, clutching the girl to her breast.
Once she was out of the mêlée, it was easier to move. She broke free of the crowd below the gatepost. A fully fledged battle was underway inside the gates until, as Beatrix picked the girl up and carried her out of the way, a single rifle shot rang out from the observation tower. The brawling paused, and then there were screams of terror as the protesters staggered back away from the gate, leaving a wide circle around the body of the man who had burned the flag in its centre. Beatrix saw a flash of red on his scalp but did not wait.
A second shot echoed back.
Two Grizzly APCs had pulled up at the gates, and men with automatic rifles were disembarking.
She needed to get away from here right now.
She looked for the jeep.
It was gone.
Faulkner must have been moved on by the security detail.
The short battle was over now, and the Manage Risk men were beginning to round up the protesters.
A meat wagon drew up.
More armed men disembarked.
Beatrix couldn’t afford to be arrested.
The girl slipped her small hand into hers and pulled her away from the gates.
“We must get away from here,” she said, as if reading Beatrix’s mind.
“Where?”
“Come with me.”
Chapter Eighteen
Beatrix followed the girl. She walked quickly, with a determined stride, and led her a quarter mile away from the facility, heading south. She didn’t speak. Beatrix fixed the ripped abaya as best she could, managing to obscure the fact that she wasn’t local. A couple of extra Grizzlies rumbled past, but the girl reached up and took Beatrix’s hand again, and they paid them no heed. Beatrix’s face was obscured by the shawl, and they would have looked like a mother and her child.
“Who are you?” the girl asked her as they walked.
“My name is Beatrix.”
“You are not Iraqi.”
“No.”
“American?”
“English.”
“You speak excellent Arabic.”
“Thank you. I’ve had a lot of practice. What’s your name?”
She looked across at her doubtfully, as if her name was something to be guarded. “It is Mysha,” she said at last.
“Hello, Mysha. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For helping me. That was getting very unpleasant.”
“No. I must thank you. I was going to be trampled.”
“You shouldn’t have been there. How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“Then you definitely shouldn’t have been there.”
She ignored that. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Why were you there?”
“I’m a journalist.”
“The television?”
“Yes.”
“You were there to report on it?”
“That’s right.”
She was quiet, as if musing on Beatrix’s answer.
Another Grizzly went by, and then a series of police cars, lights flashing and sirens howling. Beatrix knew she had to get off the street. If Duffy had seen her, and that was more than possible, then he would put men into the area to look for her. Her disguise was rudimentary, at best. It wouldn’t hold up. She had to get into cover.
They walked on and reached one of the small shantytowns that Beatrix and Faulkner had driven through earlier. It was comprised of sun-baked mud huts and lean-tos that looked like they would collapse with the faintest breath of wind. Some had corrugated metal roofs; others were wrapped over with mismatched tarpaulins. The houses were penned in by piles of scrap metal and bright green lakes of raw sewage. The streets were thick with rubbish, sickly sweet as it rotted in the heat. There would occasionally be a break in the line of huts, and the gap would be stacked high with trash, black plastic bags that had been ripped open by hungry animals, spilling their fetid contents into a thick, cloying soup. A mangy dog slunk across the road, his belly on the dirt. Two rats followed him. They passed a girl drinking from a broken water pipe. There was a woman perched on the piles of trash, picking out and emptying plastic bags. The other women wore hijabs, many in colours other than the usual black, perhaps in an attempt to inject a little vibrancy into what must have been a monotonous, difficult existence.
“Where are we?”
“We call it Kassra,” the girl said.
Beatrix translated. “Broken?”
“Yes. The village next to it is Attashis.”
“Thirsty. Broken and Thirsty.”
“Yes.”
The child led her through a maze of jumbled streets to a medium-sized hut with an orange tarp hauled over the frame to serve as a roof. The place was in poor condition. The ditch that ran at the back of the property was littered with packing crates and plastic bottles. Sewage ran along a trench in the middle of the road. The walls were constructed from wooden panels and sheets of corrugated metal. The windows had been smashed, and the apertures were covered with plastic bags. Part of the tarpaulin roof was missing, and the front door had been separated from the hinges. Mysha pulled it aside so that they could enter, and once they were inside, she pulled it back into place.
Beatrix looked around the shack. It had been built right onto the ground, with no floor, and the sand was cold and yielding underfoot. Blankets and rugs were spread out to try and make things look more homely, but they only emphasised the spaces that were left uncovered. Blankets that had been hung from the ceiling broke the space into two distinct areas: one for sleeping and the other for cooking and eating. The walls were made of ill-fitted planks of wood, t
he gaps between them letting in shafts of light. There was a jerrycan of fresh water that must have been collected from a well, a small gas stove, a paraffin lamp, some sticks of furniture and a line that had been strung from one corner of the room to the other, bowing with the weight of damp clothing. There was a bucket in the corner. Beatrix guessed that was the toilet.
“Is this your home?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “Your head,” she added, as if keen to change the subject, embarrassed perhaps. She reached a cautious hand in the direction of the bloody wound on Beatrix’s temple.
Beatrix caught her hand and smiled. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll just have a nice bruise to remind me what happened.”
“You are bleeding. Here.” She went to the sink, took a dishcloth and soaked it in water. Beatrix lowered herself to her haunches so that Mysha could dab the blood away. “Are you sure you are alright?”
“It’s just a scratch. Thank you.”
The girl rinsed the blood from the cloth and hung it out to dry. “Would you like something to drink?”
“That would be nice.”
The girl went to a cupboard and filled a saucepan with cold water. She placed it on the small stove and set it to boil while she prepared the tea leaves and cardamom. Beatrix sensed that something was unsaid. The girl was putting on a brave face, but there was something that she wanted to talk about.
Beatrix would normally have thanked her and left. She should have done just that. There were things to do, and the world wasn’t standing still. Duffy wasn’t indulging himself with a hard luck story, she could be certain of that. He must have seen her, and now every second that passed meant that he was eroding the advantage that she had over him. There was nothing that could be done about that. There was no profit in her being found all the way out here, unprepared, unready. It made sense for her to hide out for an hour or two until she had found a way to get a message to Faulkner. Then she would bring the fight to him.
“Where are your parents?”
“I don’t have any,” she said as she worked.
“What do you mean?”
Beatrix heard the faintest quiver in her voice. “They are dead.”