Jon Grimwood - Effendi

Faced with five men who had wrists heavy with Rolexes and Tag Hauers worn like bracelets, she’d stood up, straightened her shirt and recited the first verse of the Holy Quran.

She’d been learning the words for weeks. Everyone she knew had been learning them in secret, when the officers weren’t around; friends testing each other until their recitations were perfect.

The men still raped her, of course, but not that violently and when she crawled to her knees afterwards to find her clothes, she buttoned her shirt around a throat that was uncut and over a stomach that still had its guts where they should be, on the inside.

They’d taken nothing she couldn’t afford to lose. At least that’s what she told herself as she limped away towards her new camp. Equally it was nothing she’d wanted to give them either. And so the ice froze inside her and hardened around her like a shell, unnoticeable to everybody except those who got too close.

“Now,” Ka told her.

Close up it was possible to see blue lettering on the bonnet and a whip aerial that flew a blue pennant, which cracked and flicked in the afternoon air. Two white men sat together up front, both wearing shades and talking to each other rather than keeping watch on the rough track.

North European or American. Or that other continent that began with A. There were a lot of those. Pulling in a breath and holding it, Sarah aimed her rifle high, then slowly lowered the barrel and fired the moment she dropped through her target.

“Clean shot,” she said to no one.

Ka was already up and running. He rolled once at the bottom and came upright, then crashed forward, his doublePup already sighting itself in . . . Not that Ka needed hi-tech to cut down the uniforms scrambling from the back of the truck. Those he missed with his first magazine were too stunned to do anything but panic as his next reduced them to noncombatant status.

Only one man, an elderly sergeant, hit the ground and racked back the slide on his own submachine gun. Which was as far as he got. Ka’s third magazine took off the top of the man’s skull in a single burst.

“Got it.” It was the man’s battered AK49 Ka wanted. A cookie-cutter buzz gun stamped out of cheap metal, idiotproof and unbreakable. Just getting that made his whole trip worthwhile.

“Lieutenant Ka,” he answered his radio without consciously realizing it had buzzed. The voice on the other end was quietly impressed. “I knew you could do it. Heap sand over the bodies and drive back to the river . . .”

“What about the cliffs?” Ka said.

“You can get to within three hundred paces. Walk the rest. Now open the passenger door and check the glove compartment . . .”

Ka pulled the door open and yanked out both bodies. He must have missed hearing Sarah’s second shot. The jelly splashes he wiped off everything with Kleenex taken from a pack on the dashboard. The blood puddles, urine and shit proved more difficult so Ka did what women used to do in his village and scrubbed handfuls of sand across the plastic seats and floor.

The tissues he burned and the sand went back to join the other sand and the bodies Ka lost under the crusting edge of an overhang. It wasn’t hard. Ka just dragged the dead over one at a time, then crumbled away the overhang by stamping along the sharp edge of its crust.

All the while, Sarah sat and watched and Ka let her, even though he was senior. She got like that after a firefight. Most of the time everyone else pretended not to notice. It was safer.

“Open the glove compartment,” said the Colonel. Ka could hear from his voice that he was preparing to be patient. “It’s that grey handle . . . That’s right, on the dash . . .”

Inside was a map the Colonel obviously expected to be there, plus a big bar of chocolate and two cans of real Coke, both chilled.

“A map,” said Ka, “sweets and two cans of Coke, they’re still cold.”

“The compartment doubles as a chill cabinet,” the Colonel told him. “What else?”

“Nothing.”

“Lift out the base.” There was additional static to the voice this time. A bigger distance.

“Tiny glass bottles,” Ka announced as he pulled out a handful of ampoules. “With needles.” Each one was the length of his smallest finger, with a hollow needle the length of his thumbnail fixed at one end. The needles had plastic safety caps. Red lettering and a picture of two twisting snakes were printed on the side of each bottle.

“Well done,” said the Colonel. “Now break a line of squares off the chocolate for Sarah and eat another yourself, then put the rest back in the cool compartment along with the ampoules . . . You can have the Cokes,” he added as an afterthought.

That Raf cried worried the cat not at all. Tears salty as blood ran into his neat beard and trickled across his chin. The cat would happily have dined on the puddle of fresh vomit between Raf’s knees, but the tiny bats the man plucked out of the air were richer and warmer. And besides, they were being offered, the almost-kitten didn’t even have to steal or beg. All it had to do was kill and eat.

Leaving Raf to his own memories . . .

“T-cells down fifteen percent again.”

“Will he die?”

One could almost hear the shrug. Well, Raf could from where he sat in a window, staring out at the crooked tip of the Matterhorn. It was late spring and the lower meadow was alive with dog violet, speedwell and ladies smock. If he pushed his sight until his eyes hurt, he could just see a dark hawk frozen on the edge of the upper slopes, waiting to hit its prey.

“You know, sir,” said the first voice, “I’d really be tempted . . .”

“Would you?” The answering laugh was sour.

“Well, suppose . . .”

“Don’t suppose,” the second voice was suddenly cross. “Think instead. We can either carry over the costs or close the project and put the costs against this quarter’s bottom line. Which one do you suggest?”

The other person thought about that.

“Fit one of the new synthetics,” said the cross voice. “Ditto on the bone marrow.”

“Sir, we’re already over budget.”

The senior man sighed, heavily. “Take it off R&D. Slap a couple of new patent numbers on the chart. The usual . . .”

Twelve weeks followed in a blur of morphine until reality finally drip-fed its way into the analgesic fog and ruined the next three months of Raf’s life. The three months when Raf didn’t have to remind himself to eat or worry about whether or not he could get to sleep, because the snakes did that for him. They wove themselves under his skin and up his nose, into his throat and up his pee-pee. A fat one even came out of the side of his stomach.

One time when Raf grew bored exploring the walls inside his own head, he woke himself up to find a girl he didn’t recognize sitting on the end of the bed, crying.

“What’s wrong?”

She jumped and squeaked at the same time, and Raf smiled.

“You’re awake . . .” The girl sounded shocked. She checked the readout from a grey box sitting on a bedside cabinet. “It says you’re asleep.” Her words were to herself.

“Look at this,” said Raf and jerked the dancing line so that it peaked right off the screen, then he levelled it out until it looked like the flat bit at a valley bottom. “See, you just make it do what you want.”

The nurse looked at the small boy wired into the surgical slab. Her name was Anne Rigler and she was Scottish. The medical brokers were paying her less than nurses usually earned in Switzerland but much more than she could earn in Aberdeen now that the oil was gone.