‘You’ll do better than God. You’ll get on the cellphone to T.P. Costello and tell him to call the UNHCR or UNECTA or whoever the hell runs this show down here and tell them that we know what’s going on and they’d better leave us alone.’
The dirt road fought Gaby like it was trying to steal her car. Muscles were knotted up and down her bare arms with the intensity of the struggle.
‘I am afraid we are probably out of range of the cell network,’ William said coolly.
‘Well, that is just wonderful,’ Gaby said. ‘Just fucking wonderful.’
‘They do not seem to be gaining on us,’ Faraway said, peering out the still-open door and the dust billowing into the ATV. A small herd of Thompson’s gazelles scattered in every direction from Gaby’s killing wheels.
Faraway spoke something short and savage in Luo then said in English, ‘I regret to inform you that things have just become most serious.’
The helicopter came in a hammer of sound so low and loud everyone in the ATV ducked. The car plunged into a whirlwind of dust thrown up by the rotors. The helicopter turned in the air in front of them and hovered.
‘Go south!’ William shouted. ‘To the edge of the Chaga. They will not dare follow us there.’
Dare I lead them there? Gaby thought, activating the internal satellite tracker and flicking on the wipers to clear the dust-filmed windscreen.
Lazily, the helicopter drifted after them. It moved effortlessly across the sky, like a cheetah stalking a wounded impala, that the cheetah knows it can run down and kill when it finally tires of playing. Oksana had made sure that Gaby knew the specifications of every aircraft, military and civilian, in the East African theatre. Those black insect-things under the stub wings are air-to-surface missiles. That thin black proboscis is a chain-gun. Five hundred rounds a minute will shred you and your car and your friends and your story of a lifetime like pissed-on toilet paper. Five hundred rounds a minute, and all you have to bluff them with is to keep driving south, south, south.
The dirt road dissolved into high acacia plain. Flat dark clouds were rolling down from the mothermass anchored to the distant mountain, spreading slowly out across the land that shivered like liquid with heat haze. Between the two ran a line of shadow: the edge of the Chaga. Terminum. Gaby McAslan drove straight into the line of darkness at one hundred kilometres per hour.
‘They are still with us,’ Faraway shouted from the back. Flirting, the helicopter swept in to harry the little car from the left and the right. It ducked down in front of it in a shatter of engines to try to get the driver to swerve. The driver did not swerve. She drove on to that line of darkness that minute by minute was emerging from the heat dazzle into shapes, silhouettes, seductions. Like a mirage, the Chaga deceived. Its trick was to play with space so that you were always nearer to it than you thought. The darkness Gaby saw lifting out of the heat-haze was not terminum. It was the great upthrust of life she had seen and marvelled at from the baobab on the Namanga road, that the researchers called the Great Wall. Terminum was elsewhere. Terminum was right in front of them. Terminum was under their wheels.
Gaby slammed to a stop. The helicopter passed raucously overhead and pulled a high gee turn.
‘We lost the APCs a kilometre back,’ Faraway reported.
Gaby did not hear him. She stared at the edge of the Chaga, one hundred metres in front of her. One hundred metres. Two days. If she sat in this seat and did not move, the Chaga would come to her, grow around and into and through her and take her to another world. She could step out of this car and walk to it and take off her clothes and lie down in it and feel it press into the skin of her back, like the old Vietnamese torture in which they tied people over bamboo and let it grow through them.
‘Gaby.’
‘The helicopter?’ she asked.
‘It’s standing off about half a kilometre west of us,’ Faraway said.
‘Go closer,’ William whispered. ‘Their guns and rockets can shoot a long way. Get as close as you dare.’
As close as she dared was fifty metres. The helicopter held its station, the black nose of its chain-gun locked on the beetle-blue ATV.
‘Closer,’ William whispered. Gaby moved the ATV in until she could smell the musky, fruity, sexy perfume of Chaga through the vents. The helicopter gingerly waltzed a little nearer.
‘Do these bastards not give up?’ Faraway asked.
‘Closer,’ William ordered a third time and this time Gaby drove until the pods and bulbs of Chaga-stuff popped beneath her tyres and the hexagonal mosaics cracked and spilled orange ichor that blossomed into helixes and coils of living polymer. The helicopter darted in, suddenly swung high in the air so that its rotors looked like the sails of a insane windmill, then spun away and receded across the Chyulu Plain and was seen and heard no more.
‘Yes!’ Faraway shouted. Tembo smiled like a man who knows his prayers have been answered. Gaby leaned forward until her forehead touched the top of the steering wheel and tried to stop her hands shaking.
‘Go west,’ William said ‘We should follow the edge until we come to the Olosinkiran road. They are South Africans over there. We can trust them.’
Gaby put her foot on the accelerator.
And the blue Nissan All Terrain Vehicle died.
‘Oh no,’ said Gaby McAslan, turning and turning and turning the ignition, pumping and pumping and pumping the gas pedal. The diesel pressure lamp glowed at her. ‘Oh no no no no no.’
Tembo got out and put up the hood. He beckoned to Gaby. Chaga-stuff crackled and burst beneath the soles of her boots. Strange pheromones challenged her.
‘I think we have a problem here.’
Compressor, fuel lines, cylinder head wore coats of tiny sulphur-yellow flowers, like miniature cauliflower buds. As Gaby watched, not wanting to believe what her eyes were showing her, the plague of flowers spread to the oil pump, oil filter and engine block. Tendrils were rising from the open flower heads on the cylinder block, waving sentiently in the sunlight. In under a minute the engine compartment was a pulp of pseudo-coral and oily metal. A sudden bang, like a shot. The fuel cap had blown off. Yellow fungus dripped from the fuel pipe. The body panels over the fuel tank were bowed out. The tyres popped little blue blooms around their rims. Something like crystalline rust was trying to work its way along the paintwork under the protective lacquer. Gaby yelped. The synthetic soles of her heavy-duty boots were blistering. There was man-made stretch fibre in her jodhpurs, in her underwear. It would eat that.
She should have obeyed T.P.’s panties catechism to the letter.
She jumped onto the hood of the ATV to get away from the treacherous earth.
‘What is the finance company going to say about this? I only just made the first payment.’
‘I do not think you are going to get much satisfaction from your insurers,’ Tembo said ruefully.
They were saying these little things because none of them dared think about the big things. At terminum. Angry Azerbaijanis behind them. Sixty kilometres of semi-desert on either side. No food. No water. No means of communication.
‘Shit! The disc!’
Tembo seized the camera and ran as fast as he could out of the Chaga into the virgin savannah. Gaby saw the flexible disc heliograph in the sun, Tembo unbutton his pants and then Faraway asked her to please spare his friend’s dignity.
‘Just pray his digestion is good today,’ he said.
The camera he brought back was a purulent mass of lichens and pseudo-fungi. Gaby winced at the SkyNet sticker on the side as responsibility went in and opened up inside her like the Gae Bolga of her childhood legends, the belly spear that unfolded a thousand barbs and tore out your guts. Mrs Tembo and Sarah and Etambele had waved their father off that morning and Gaby McAslan could not bear the responsibility that they might never be waving him home again. They could die out here, or be vanished by the UN, like Peter Werther, which is worse than dying to those who wait outside. She had put them all into this place and did not have an idea how to get them out.