Devil’s Harvest Page 26

  ‘Air Marshal, the Saudi connection is severed. Permanently. You wait for a dignified period of time. Then you both hand in your resignations.’

  ‘And the Bristol professor? Deng’s daughter?’ Bartholomew’s voice was rasping. The ache in his abdomen had spread into his chest, as if his bloated stomach could leave no space for him to breathe.

  ‘Don’t worry about them. We’re working on that. In our own way.’

  ‘I’m afraid I heard someone else say that. It may be too late.’

  For the first time, Todd’s impassive demeanour cracked. His eyes widened and a red flush of anger appeared about his neck. ‘What the hell have you gone and done now, Bartholomew? You’d better not have let that bloody Saudi idiot off his leash.’

  Chapter 19

  MALUAL KON VILLAGE, NORTHERN BAHR EL GHAZAL, SOUTH SUDAN

  Margie was up early to see them off. She looked freshly scrubbed and her entire frame gleamed, if rather pucely, in the morning heat. Gabriel expected to see steam rising off her as she stepped out from the shade to give them a farewell embrace. The parting was harder than he had anticipated. Alek had tears in her eyes as she turned away, leaving Gabriel alone with Margie while she went to say goodbye to some of the other staff members. Gabriel felt anxious about leaving. The camp had somehow been a safe haven. Margie wrapped him in a maternal embrace from which he did not recoil.

  ‘I’m so lost out here,’ he found himself saying to her, ‘buffeted from one place to another. I can’t read people, I don’t understand the conversations that happen around me. I felt a strange kind of grounding here at the camp.’

  It was a breathy rush of honesty that surprised him. There seemed to be no time for pretence. This was it, he realised. He could sense that time was running out. His life was slipping through his fingers like powdery sand, and his cupped palms were almost empty.

  ‘Ah, love, I knew you’d fall for me Islay charms in the end,’ Margie joked, but she was watching him with large, sympathetic eyes. It only made his emotions more unmanageable. He felt he had only minutes to grasp the remainder of his life, only seconds in which to explain himself.

  ‘Should I be scared? Am I in danger?’

  The questions sounded ridiculous, and also profound. How was it that his life had changed so entirely that he could be asking them, early in the morning, the sun coming up over the rising smoke of a UNHCR refugee camp?

  ‘Honey, out here, you’re always in the path of danger. But the truth is, you walk across a street in Manchester or London, you’re in danger too. Some kid could run you down in his unlicensed street racer.’

  For a moment, Gabriel was confused as to whether he had told Margie the mundane story of his morning slap outside the university. It was the strangest continuum, from that insult to this place now, as if the one had somehow led to the other.

  ‘Just a different kind of danger, I suppose,’ Margie continued. ‘And I prefer this. None of it makes any sense. But this feels more real. And generally I know my enemy out here. I feel less confused here than in a big city where no one stops to care. Always on the move, but with no reason to go. While here everyone stays still, though they have all the reason to keep going.’

  Gabriel considered the wisdom and irony in this. Perhaps adversity could enhance a life. Though he doubted the refugees around him would consider this particularly wise.

  ‘You may be right, Margie. I can’t tell yet. My problem is that I don’t have any kind of grasp of what the danger is out here.’

  ‘Well, just be careful, Gabriel my dear.’ Margie frowned with concern, her brow crinkling into small rolls of fat. ‘And please look after her.’ She gestured to Alek who was striding back up towards them. ‘She deserves better than she has received so far.’

  Margie gave them both a last hug before handing Gabriel a parcel of fruit and bread. He half-hoped that they could delay their departure further, but Alek had clambered into the passenger seat and was looking away from them both, staring out across the horizon of shelters. Margie held his door open for him.

  ‘You come back and marry me, lad. Or there’ll be real danger in your life,’ she chuckled to herself.

  He put his hand into his pocket for the keys and instead pulled out the AK-47 bullet he’d picked up in the graveyard, hard and cold. There would be no reprieve.

  The journey, heading west from the camp, was slow going. Alek seemed distant, her head resting on the side pane, her thoughts with others. They hardly spoke for hours, battered by endless kilometres of treacherous road. The landscape was depleted of people. Boredom seemed to be the only kind of threat. They stopped at a roadside clearing to eat the fruit and bread from Margie in the shade. The air was sticky and midges tickled Gabriel’s cheeks and lips as he ate. The combination of starch and fruit gave him indigestion, but he’d learnt to eat whenever the opportunity presented itself. Alek didn’t seem hungry and picked at the bread with spindly fingers, letting half of it fall as crumbs to the ants and beetles below. A small sparrow tweeted with interest and, unable to resist the temptation, flew down, landing near her feet.

  A strong stream, the water brown and silty, passed close by, gurgling as it pushed through matted layers of grass and shrubs. It paused in a wide, slowly turning pool, a thin, foamy layer in the middle, before diving through the mouth of a pipe leading underneath the road. On the other side, it continued, filtering off again through the undergrowth.

  Gabriel slid down the embankment, leaving his sandals behind and letting his feet crush into the matted grasses. The water lapped over his feet as he washed his hands, sticky from the mango he had just eaten. He stripped off down to his underpants – no longer self-conscious – and waded into the stream, until the water rose above his knees. He splashed it up onto his chest and under his arms. It was cooling and, though filled with grit, cleaner than the sweat and dirt that covered him. He rubbed his chest and legs with his palms, watching the brown rivulets trickle back into the water. There was probably some good reason not to wash in such a stream, he thought, and Alek would no doubt point this out to him in due course. Some terrible river parasite that would enter his body and devour him from the inside out, or a waterborne disease that would kill him in hours. He wondered if he cared any more.

  Then he heard the squelch of bare feet in the mud behind him. He half-turned to see the willowy figure of Alek, crouching down in the shallows and also washing her hands and feet. Her scarf was draped over her shoulders and upper arms. Gabriel wondered again about the strange mark he had glimpsed at the swimming pool in Wau. She caught him looking at her and turned away, patting her cheeks with her hands. Stretching one arm upwards, she hooked the back of her top and pulled it off her body, together with the scarf, in one easy, fluid motion. The sight of her half-naked was dramatic and Gabriel couldn’t look away. But it wasn’t the vision of her painfully thin body, her almost absent breasts, or the sweep of her dark torso that captured him. The bicep of her arm had been burnt with a deep injury that still seemed to glow with pain, the skin folded in welts like waves retreating on a fierce tide.

  Gabriel realised he was staring at the crude, deliberate shape of an open eye branded into her skin. The scar looked recent, alive somehow, but may have been old; it was hard to tell.

  Alek saw his mouth part in horror, but she said nothing. Instead, she leant forward and scooped water up, splashing it over her chest, the streams flowing off the tips of her nipples.

  ‘It’s the scar of one who’s been abused,’ she said eventually. ‘Like the mark on the outside of spoiled fruit.’

  She was talking to the water, but as Gabriel started to formulate a question, she turned to look at him. ‘Like memories, it can never be erased. Don’t ask me more. What’s done is done and we go on.’

  She scooped some more water onto herself and then loped out of the river, pulling her clothes back over her wet skin.

  ‘We should get going. We’ll be there in a few more hours.’

  ‘Where, Alek?
Where will we be in a few hours? Don’t tell me it’s where the plants are. I’ve given up on believing that. You haven’t been straight with me – not once since we first met in Juba. I don’t think I can believe anything you tell me.’

  Alek looked at him sadly, but did not protest.

  ‘Where will we be?’

  ‘We will be where we need to be.’ With that, she turned and made her way up the embankment.

  It was maddening, her arrogant assumption that he would continue on whatever path she chose. And yet she was right, he had no options, and even if he did, even if he could turn around and miraculously find himself back in his damp home in Clifton Village, with sleet pattering on the bedroom windows, it was too late. He had come too far and seen too much. Did he have a choice? Perhaps, but only as a notion. In reality, his destiny was hopelessly in Alek’s slim hands.

  Gabriel pulled on his shorts, his shirt clammy on his skin. There seemed to be no way to get clean, to rid himself of the sweat and dust that had collected on him. He picked his way over the grass, taking care not to injure his delicate toes and feet.

  Voices drifted down from the road above him as he made his way up the slope to the Land Cruiser. He looked up to see three soldiers standing at the back of the vehicle, trying to open the rear door. Gabriel looked around but couldn’t see their vehicle. It was as if they’d materialised out of the bush. As he approached them, he saw that they were young, in their early twenties, perhaps even younger. They looked both nervous and exhausted, their arms and faces grimy. Their uniform was an assortment of camouflaged military issue and ill-fitting civilian clothing. One looked to be only a boy, with an incongruous strip of bright-pink material tied around his head as a bandana. An older one had a dirty bandage wrapped around his forearm, the blackened crust of blood attracting flies.

  Alek was engaging them in an agitated conversation. It wasn’t clear what the dispute concerned, but they were unhappy with her answers. The one with the injured arm kept gesturing down the road in the direction they had come; Alek shook her head and waved her arms in response. She scolded them and they retorted, shouting back, their voices rising with anger. Gabriel noticed that the eyes of the youngest were deeply red, as if infected, and he kept flicking a catch on his machine gun, on and off, on and off. Gabriel watched him, the boy-soldier’s eyes fixed on Alek, one finger flicking the safety, another on the trigger.

  The injured soldier – he had taken the lead – shouted at Alek again and tried to wrench the car door open. Alek yelled back, a scream of vitriol, and grabbed the man by the shoulder. The trembling youngster’s eyes widened and Gabriel heard the final click of the safety as he lifted up the AK-47 to his shoulder, his face hard now.

  ‘Wait, stop!’

  Gabriel heard himself shout the words, though he seemed to be standing outside his body, watching some other self approach the boy. He put his hand over the barrel. To his surprise, the boy let him push the barrel down with almost no effort. It was as if he’d anticipated Gabriel’s intervention, was perhaps even relieved by it. The three soldiers turned to him, waiting for him to continue. Alek was looking at him now as well. Somehow he had asserted momentary control over the situation.

  ‘What is it that you want?’ he asked. ‘We are on important business for the government. They have sent us here, all this way, to do important things. Why are you stopping us?’

  The injured soldier walked up to him, distrust in his eyes. ‘What business are you on? You must return to Aweil. You must take us there.’

  ‘Is that what you are doing? Trying to get a lift from us, forcing us to turn around and take you there? Is that it?’

  There was an authority in his voice that was quite foreign to him. The boy with the pink bandana had let his weapon drop from his shoulder now and was staring mournfully at the ground. The injured soldier also looked unsure of himself.

  ‘You cannot interfere in our work. We have orders from the minister himself.’ As he heard the words uttered, Gabriel knew that it was an overstatement and he saw the soldier’s eyes narrow.

  ‘Which minister?’

  Gabriel hesitated but Alek was quick to intervene, this time in English. ‘Minister Kuwa, ministry of justice. And if you delay us any further, we will request your court martial in Juba. Who is your superior officer? Where is he? Does he know his men are trying to bully a transport from civilians working for the ministry?’

  The soldiers could see the chance of a lift home dwindling before them. Disappointment spread over their faces as they resigned themselves to the fact. But the power dynamic required one last intervention from them, a reminder that they were armed and part of the military.

  ‘We still need to search your vehicle,’ the red-eyed boy said.

  Relieved, Gabriel was quick to agree, taking out the keys even as Alek started to object. She seemed reluctant and jumped in front of them to get to the rear passenger door first. Gabriel pressed the button and the door locks clunked open. The bandaged soldier glared at Alek, but she opened the door and pulled out her bag, taking it a few metres away from the vehicle.

  ‘It has personal things in it,’ she informed them as she made sure the zips were closed. The young man said something to her and pushed her away. She walked backwards, standing by the open door once again, while the soldier attacked her bag as if he were disembowelling a shot animal. Gabriel noted that Alek was barely watching the undertaking, her eyes constantly flitting to the bundle of red cloth under her seat.

  Within minutes, Alek’s clothes were strewn about in the earth, her underwear rubbed between dirty fingers and lingered over, her skirts lying in a discarded pile. Once her bag was empty, Alek slammed the door and advanced on the men with anger. Her accusations seemed to work, and the youngest two looked down in mortification. Only the injured man tried to defend himself, but Alek had worked herself into a fury, whether real or feigned seemed not to matter. English words were mixed with her dialect, the word ‘mama’ making a regular appearance. She was shaming them into retreat. The youngest soldier started to try to repack the bag, but Alek shooed him away, picking up her clothes while still berating them. They were in fact only children and Gabriel almost felt sorry for the three of them, standing now in silence while she scolded them.

  They left the soldiers in a spray of dust, Gabriel watching them recede in his rear-view mirror. Only once they had disappeared behind a bend in the road did he break the silence.

  ‘Alek, what’s wrapped in that red cloth?’

  She didn’t respond at first, perhaps mulling over whether to answer at all.

  ‘Evidence,’ she said finally.

  ‘Evidence? Of what?’

  ‘Something to do with my father’s death. He was killed by some kind of bomb, a missile that came out of the sky. But the villagers say there was no plane, no noise in the sky. They say the explosion came from nowhere. Bashir throws his bombs from noisy Antonovs. I don’t believe the SAF can send missiles from helicopters or jets that are far away. So someone else was involved.’

  She fell silent again and Gabriel wondered if her answer, though it explained nothing, had been exhausted. But then she continued, her voice quivering slightly. ‘The bomb left a piece behind. The villagers found it stuck in the wood of the door and gave it to my cousin. He brought it to Jila for safekeeping. It has markings on it and I’m going to show it to the UN military police in Juba. It’s the key to finding out who’s responsible.’

  Alek let out a long sigh, her breath filled with longing.

  ‘That explosion took the last of my life away. It left my father and Adama in small burnt pieces. And this piece of metal.’

  * * *

  The dense bush gave way to a sparse, open plain with acacia and other hardy trees as they moved further west. They were approaching the transition zone that Gabriel had spoken about in his lecture, the soil and vegetation increasingly denuded by subtle shifts in average temperatures. The air seemed hazy with dust, or smoke, and the contrast betw
een tree and sand and road started to blur. The mud had been replaced by dry ruts and stony ascents, making the car shudder and bounce. They passed some burnt-out huts, the roofs collapsed into the middle of the dwellings. Seen like this, they looked like a child’s construct, a temporary fort for a game of hide-and-seek, easily abandoned and mourned by no one. Until one saw the area around which the huts circled – the family fireplace. Gabriel noted a cooking pot overturned in the ash, the everyday signs of a former life, proof of a small unit that had once lived here and had seen their world destroyed. He slowed the vehicle and stared. The surrounding bush was unscathed. It wasn’t wildfire that had taken these homes. He looked at Alek for an explanation, but she stared ahead, unwilling to engage.

  Ahead of them the haze seemed to thicken, and Gabriel started to pick up the smell of burning. In the distance, black-grey smoke rose in a thick plume. As they proceeded, he realised that the fire line in fact stretched some distance, crackling in the grass and flaring when it reached dry bush. He changed down a gear and slowed around a bend.

  A field of millet, now just an expanse of dry grasses, was on fire. The sun filtered through the smoke, giving the scene a muted orange glow. A few villagers, armed with cloths and the branches of trees, were trying to beat back the flames, each swipe of their arms sending up yet more sparks and starting new fires around them. Gabriel could see in an instant that their efforts were doomed.

  ‘Shouldn’t we stop and help?’ he said.

  ‘There is nothing we can do. We are only two people.’

  Gabriel’s anxiety heightened when, a few miles further, they came across a group of about twenty people, carrying bags and tracking close to the road, leading two goats and carrying chickens by their feet. Children walked glumly alongside their mothers, while men carried bundled figures too small to walk. They passed without remonstrating, hardly looking up at the vehicle as it crunched past.