Ned Beauman - Glow

6.03 a.m.

The problem started when rumours reached the camp of what had happened in Mauritania. Three weeks ago, after the collapse of their financing, a Chinese oil syndicate had abruptly pulled out of the country, leaving behind nearly a hundred low-grade private military contractors who had already been hired as security for the project. The rations began to run out, and the men soon realised that they were not going to be paid the wages they were owed, nor were they even going to be flown home. They’d been abandoned like a litter of kittens. So they spent a few days half-heartedly pillaging the countryside before they were dispersed by a series of confrontations with the army, and by now most of those who hadn’t already been killed or jailed had reportedly found their way to the streets of Nouakchott, where they were eking out the money for plane tickets by any means they could. There is no such thing as a consulate for mercenaries.

When Bezant’s boys found out about this, they started to worry that the same thing might happen to them. That was nothing new. Mercenaries on deployment are always needy and neurotic. In other circumstances, instead of indulging them, Bezant would simply have reminded his boys that Xujiabang Copper and Gold was not some tinpot oil syndicate, that its annual turnover exceeded Guinea’s entire GDP, that the cash registers in its staff canteens were more solvent than most of the banks in their home countries. In other words, they should shut up about Mauritania because they were certainly going to get paid. But then Angus Yu announced that to ‘restore confidence’ they were all to receive an immediate advance on their wages. He hadn’t consulted Bezant and it made the entire command structure look feeble.

What arrived on the courier plane last night was not even a steel briefcase, just a white cardboard mailing box, as if someone had ordered a pair of high heels off the internet, and inside that a mylar bag, and inside that a few dozen vacuum-sealed stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Because the box was too big to fit in any of the camp’s safes, three men were posted outside the door of the metallography shed, which nobody ever uses, to guard the box until the money could be disbursed. Bezant did not mention to those men that he was going to spend the night dozing on a camping mat in the nook beside the eyewash station. So when Angus Yu comes into the windowless shed just after six o’clock in the morning, he must be expecting to have the place to himself. Bezant waits until Yu shuts the door and flips on the lights before he gets up from the mat with a pantomime of yawning and stretching.

‘G’day, Angus,’ he says. ‘Have you brought me breakfast?’

To watch Yu flail is going to be a real pleasure. Since his arrival he has been so prissy and condescending and autocratic that Bezant sometimes lulls himself to sleep with fantasies of feeding the boy limb by limb into the impact crusher. He can’t do anything of the sort, though, because Yu is the son of one of the vice-presidents of Xujiabang Copper and Gold. For this princeling who spent four and a half semesters at Harvard to have been sent to manage a mine in Guinea, he must have done something exceptionally naughty. Someone must have died, maybe on American soil, maybe in baroque circumstances. Yu knows nothing whatsoever about mining, and although he once announced that he was ‘too busy’ to appraise himself of the difference between Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and Papua New Guinea, he spends most of his time here watching sitcoms and video chatting over the satellite broadband.

Admittedly, Bezant doesn’t have much to do here either. It’s quiet out on these scrubby hills. There have been a few silly rumours about the Gandayaw Liberation Organisation operating in West Africa, but he knows for certain that the cunt who called himself Zaya has been dead of unknown causes since at least the start of the year, so Bezant isn’t exactly gnawing his phalanges off with apprehension. And the workers here are docile. The turquoise pills that arrive on the courier plane every week make sure that they don’t sleep and they don’t make mistakes and they don’t complain. They might look like voodoo dolls of themselves by the time their contracts finish, but Yu claims the pills are chemically analogous to the nootropics some of his friends used to take when they were studying for exams at Harvard, so they can’t be so bad for you.

Still, Xujiabang are keeping those prescriptions a secret. They’re even more obsessed than Lacebark were with ‘process efficiency optimisation’, but they also don’t want the reputation for human rights abuses that was just beginning to break out like herpes sores on Lacebark’s face before the takeover. Last year they announced with plenty of fanfare that they would welcome inspections by human rights charities and television crews even at short notice. Apparently the first of these inspections took place at a mine back in Shaanxi. Because Xujiabang had access to the NGO’s email servers, they knew about the visit several weeks in advance. So they simply built a second mine, a temporary fake, a few miles away from the real one. The inspectors never knew the difference. Bezant has heard that a lot of the people who used to work on MOUT training facilities for Lacebark are now doing set design and special effects for these Potemkin mines, including one English guy whom everyone calls either the Invisible Man or the Gimp because on sunny days he walks around in one of those latex masks that Chinese women wear at the beach to avoid getting a tan. The investment’s worthwhile because they won’t have to play the trick many times. When there’s too much good news people lose interest.

‘Who opened this package?’ Yu says, pointing at the box that sits on the steel table in the middle of the room. Predictably, he’s going to try to bluster his way out of this, but when he’s nervous he keeps shooting the cuffs of the shirt he wears under his ridiculous designer blazer.

‘I did,’ says Bezant.

‘You aren’t authorised to open it.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I should have been present.’

‘I counted. There’s three hundred and fifty grand in there. That’s five thousand each for seventy men.’

‘So?’ Young Angus is now alternating between his cuffs with such force that he looks like a skydiver trying to deploy a faulty parachute.

‘As you know, there are only forty-eight grunts on site at the moment. So we only needed two hundred and forty grand. That’s a difference of a hundred and ten. You must’ve thought no one would check the paperwork. Like one of those Chinese restaurants where they don’t bother to itemise the bill so you never know if you’re getting ripped off. Is that where you learned how to do it? The old moo shu switcheroo, eh?’

‘That is racist language,’ said Yu.

‘So you’re desperate. You owe someone a bundle. Fair enough. What I don’t understand is, how can it be so urgent? Whoever it is, they’re not coming to collect. We’re in fucking Simandou.’

‘You should leave right now.’

‘Listen, Angus, we both know what you were going to do and we also both know I can’t prove anything. But if you think you’re keeping any of this, you’ve got tailings for brains. And you’ll show a little bit more respect from now on, eh?’

Since the takeover Bezant has been trying to learn Mandarin from a language tape but it doesn’t cover any of the words Yu is muttering as he leaves the shed. For an instant before he slams the door a rectangle of dawn nudges limply at the fluorescence within. After making sure the latch is closed, Bezant retrieves his rucksack from the nook beside the eyewash station and goes back to the box on the table. He’s in the process of counting out the twenty-two stacks of bills he’s going to take back to his quarters when he feels something hard against the back of his neck.