Rare Earth Page 5

  Added to that, Grandfather Li did not know what to say. Being a restless spirit he had the right to intervene to prevent his grandson from fucking things up. Spirits who’ve already passed into the underworld can just relax-back to the mountain, feet to the river-and watch the passage of events in the world, like going to a movie. But the unquiet dead, though not exactly allowed to be in the movie, can hover in the aisles like peanut vendors, occasionally casting their shadows onto the screen.

  What Grandfather Li should have said is “Stop, don’t do it!” But he could see that Li Qi-han, like himself, had a hardness in the eye that, notwithstanding the modern obsession with maintaining social order, you do not want to mess with. So he said:

  “You should drive more carefully and back off a little or they will spot you. There’s only one road across the desert; you will not lose them.”

  “It’s because of you they named me Li Qi-han!” Li snapped; “If I wasn’t named after a famous revolutionary...”

  He’d been picked on and ridiculed since nursery school.

  “Li Qi-han was a great Communist. That’s why nobody remembers him. Get over it. What you want them to call you? Bruce?”

  Li sniggered and yanked the steering wheel to overtake a swaying truck, dangerously overloaded with sacks of metal ore. This made Grandfather shoot, ethereally, through the back seat and outside the car, forcing him to adopt a Superman-style flying position in order to catch up.

  “Sorry,” Li murmured, as Grandfather drifted back into vision.

  “These westerners are going to kill my career. They’ve made the Propaganda Department look like idiots. It’s supposed to be my fault. The cops confiscated the tape-but Western journalists are clever like rats. They had two hours to make copies - maybe onto a laptop or a disc. Should have grabbed the lot. But no, the dick-head cops go dewy-eyed over some blonde and just take the tape. Zheng says the whole department will go to Tibet unless I sort it out.”

  “I know,” said Grandfather Li,

  “You know everything?”

  Grandfather laughed: the bitter laugh of somebody who’s done fifteen years’ hard labour in a bauxite quarry and then been, summarily, shot.

  “We only know what we see in real time. We have no advance knowledge.”

  “So you were there with me in the office? With Zheng?”

  “Logically, Zheng should just let this thing blow over. Maybe Beijing even wants that factory to get its ass kicked for environmental damage. Otherwise why did they let Western journalists go roaming around there?”

  Li had been weighing these options since Zheng had called him to the office after midnight. They had both been struggling to sober up but had quickly found the Provincial wai-ban missive, buried in an unread file-apparently signed off by Li Qi-han and countersigned by Propaganda Chief Zheng, but in fact just rubber-stamped by Belinda Deng-warning them, as a matter of courtesy, that a Western news crew would be visiting Shizuishan and that all surveillance contacts should be put on alert, especially around sites of a sensitive nature.

  Busybody Guo, who would get an award for spotting the news crew, had already made a statement saying she was not alerted. The only solution was to get the tapes, the laptops and all kinds of digital storage media, find the rushes and destroy them. That was an order, Zheng had stated.

  “I need to see it on there,” Zheng had pointed to the 42-inch Samsung TV on his office wall. “If we can get the tapes and do a deal with Xiao, we can plaster the whole thing over. The cops nearly killed some drug dealer overnight, so we can use that as leverage. Make no mistake,” Zheng had said, using the old negotiator’s trick of looking Li straight in the eye and putting his fist right under Li’s cheekbone, “don’t come back and tell me it’s all sorted. Come back with tapes, laptops and any sneaky storage devices you find in that van. Or do not come back at all.”

  It was only after he had drunk one third of a bottle of Wuliangye spirit, burned a fistful of ancestor money and contemplated suicide with the Type 51 that the logical option of killing the news crew had come to him. It had thrown him when Mrs. Ma refused to put her door team on the case, but now that his brain was clearing he could appreciate the risks to her.

  Li Qi-han would do the job himself. He’d been hoping Grandfather Li might show up and was not surprised to be seeing him now, much older but still dressed in the same shabby PLA uniform as in the photo, right there at his side, the colours distorted by - presumably - his status as a deity.

  ~ * ~

  2

  The road beyond the Yellow River levelled off into a dawn-lit sprawl of truck-stops and road-houses: white-tiled shops fronted by dogs and diesel-spill.

  The van sped past a hutong nestling in a hollow, its passageways the colour of ginger cake, the shacks huddled up against a colonial-era Methodist church topped by a neon cross.

  A few human forms were visible; a lone truck driver with his vest pulled up to his nipples to let his belly catch the sun; a weary prostitute hobbling out of the all-night cafe to resume her job as checkout girl at the petrol station.

  Now the Ordos Desert began to stretch and undulate to the horizon. Scrub thinned out to semi-scrub, the patches of clay between the spindly shrubs got larger. In the distance a few dilapidated Bactrian camels chewed the wild alfalfa. The terrain was bent into gullies and hills, parts of it still cool with shadow.

  Bird life was zero. Pedestrian life was zero. Only the trucks gave the landscape movement, cycling through a medley of digital siren wails and honks as they formed up into unofficial convoys at a steady 55 miles per hour.

  Now coal mines and power stations began to smear the landscape; some visible only from a sky-stain and a gas flare where the heavens met the sand; others towering right beside the highway, swaddled in high blue netting to thwart the prying eyes of inspectors, intellectual property thieves and compensation lawyers.

  Brough, sprawled across the back seat, had been drifting in and out of sleep to the sound of Georgina and Chun-li bickering. Carstairs, in the passenger seat up front, snored, oblivious to sight and sound.

  “After Olympic Year, not really normal to give up tapes to Public Security Police on request,” said Chun-li.

  “Problem is, if we don’t they mess us around for a day and mess up our entire schedule.”

  Georgina had adopted a managerial tone towards Chun-li-remembering that foreign fixers, like dressage mounts, would take charge unless you told them exactly what you wanted.

  “Should at least have tried to give fake tape.”

  “Wasn’t time. They viewed it anyway didn’t they? That’s why they started bawling at you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, maybe. I think so.” She seemed suddenly capable of turning vagueness on and off at will.

  The road signs had become bilingual, in Mongolian and Chinese.

  “How far to Ordos?” said Brough.

  “Driver says 350 kilometres. He’s never been this far away from home,” said Chun-li.

  “Can we stop at one of these truck stops?”

  “Truck stops unhygienic. Also rife with criminal elements and those transporting so-called unofficial cargo.”

  “That’s why I want to stop there. See if any of them is carrying stuff that produces chlorine or anything that goes to that battery factory.”

  “What!” Georgina’s yelp was loud enough to wake Carstairs:

  “Turn that fucking music off!”

  She jabbed the driver in the shoulder with her finger and blew strands of hair out of her eyes. Overnight she’d ditched the cambric skirt for jeans and the Birkenstocks for a pair of battered Aussie stockyard boots. She’d been expecting some kind of delayed outrage from Brough and Carstairs, who’d merely snorted sardonically after she’d given up the tape. Now she said:

  “Look, they were going to turn us over. It was a good spot; it could have worked in the film; it’s gone. Let it go - when we get to Baotou we can...”

  “It’s not gone,” Brough smirked.

&
nbsp; “What do you mean it’s not gone?”

  “I mean that Jimmy, here, and me, over a glass of warm beer, digitised it shortly before the boys in blue arrived.”

  Georgina had spent the half hour before dawn explaining to Twyla in London that she had “sorted out” a potential incident, skimming over the details of their arrest and the written apology she’d signed, but logging the fact of having to surrender footage to cover herself in case things went haywire. Twyla had reminded her of the basic aim of the broadcast from Shanghai-”constructive engagement” with the Chinese government-and that the Channel had long-term plans to get onto the Chinese satellite system.

  “Where is it?”

  Georgina put on that face that managers adopt to signal they are no longer your work buddy but are about to assume command.

  “I think we should keep it on a need-to-know basis,” Brough shot a glance at Chun-li. “Love, did we ever get the name of that factory?”

  Chun-li shook her head. “Something like a metal element, I never had chance to write it down.”

  “I don’t care what the name of the fucking factory is because we’re not ...”

  Georgina trailed off, realising she would have to confront Brough later, in a hotel room, threaten him with the sack. Or get him so drunk that he would commit some kind of sackable offence. She was first in line for the New York bureau job at Channel Ninety-Nine after this, and had already begun looking at apartments in the newly gentrified district under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

  “Is it on your laptop?” she scowled at Carstairs, who shook his head and replied flatly:

  “It’s safe.”

  “Chun-li-eee,” Georgina went into name-stroking mode. “There’s no chance that the police would plant a bug in this van is there?”

  “Police chief probably just happy to see us go. Propaganda Department in deep trouble. Normally local propaganda guys and wai-ban and undercover cops are incessantly tailing foreign news crews, and know their itinerary. Normally, foreign media don’t just stop van and begin interviewing residents. David very clever I think. And normally residents don’t just talk to foreign media...”

  “So why did they?”

  “Don’t know. CCP constantly saying it will crack down and prosecute polluting factories.”

  Georgina wedged her boot against the wheel arch and swigged her milk, which tasted like a liquid version of Kellog’s Frosties. Her original plan had been to tone down the footage and work it into a wider theme: good China, bad China. It would be worth a watch, as they say, despite the presence of a has-been hack with his Yorkshire accent from twenty years ago.

  But Twyla had sounded extra wary. She had not exactly said “thank God the cops took the tape,” but the whole tenor of the conversation had conveyed that meaning, together with the subtler message of “forget the district under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass” should any more panicked calls to London become necessary.

  What Georgina needed now was “content”: colourful footage to fill seven minutes’ worth of airtime. She needed an interview with a senior Party guy, and some pretty landscape shots. And to take control.

  “What’s Ordos famous for?” she snapped at Chun-li.

  “Ordos a boom town. Driver says if you only have one million RMB in Ordos you are poor.”

  “What’s the boom? I thought there was economic downturn?”

  “Land under this desert is very rich in minerals. Coal mines everywhere, also iron ore. Also Rare Earth. Lots of people get rich during the privatisation of state-owned enterprises and come to Ordos to take part in brand new, private sector mining ventures.”

  “What will we see?”

  “Don’t know, never been. This desert very fragile - very beautiful. Early Mongol culture is known as Ordos Culture...”

  “What the fuck is Rare Earth?” said Brough.

  “Rare Earth a kind of metal,” Chun-li began.

  “Yes but what’s the English translation for it? Rare Earth sounds like some weird Chinese concept like inner fire or-Fuck! Why is that car following us? That’s not the cops is it?”

  Brough’s voice signalled a rising panic.

  “And what the fuck is he doing now?”

  ~ * ~

  3

  Xiao hit the siren and set the lights flashing out of instinct. He had no jurisdiction in Inner Mongolia but an accident is an accident.

  He strode out from the SUV, motioning his driver to initiate a roadblock. Hard Man Han leapt out of the car and sprinted over to the nearest casualty, a businessman slumped against the wreckage of a metallic-green Audi Q7. Xiao had his pistol out, held against his thigh like a movie gunslinger.

  There were the limbs and bowels of a horse smeared and scattered across both lanes of the highway, together with the remnants of a horse-box. There were flight cases, camera lenses, videotapes, aspirin tablets, stale cakes, spotlights and rolls of coloured gelatin filter. There was the black Honda, which had skidded round and hit a road sign sideways-on. Its doors were open and its seats empty. There was the grey Ruifeng van, on its roof, wheels still spinning. It was a mess of blood, broken glass, airbags and women’s hair.

  Both women were hanging upside down, pinned by their seatbelts. The Chinese girl was gabbling into her mobile trying to call an ambulance; the blonde, face caked with dirt and glass, was screaming English obscenities at the driver, who was dead.

  The cameraman was moving: crawling out of the wreckage using one arm.

  The reporter was lying in the road amid the luggage, at Xiao’s feet: eyes glazed like a dead fish, a day sack wrapped around his neck. There was a damp patch on the sun-seared ashphalt beneath his body that smelled like whisky.

  There was the odour of clay, alfalfa, liquorice, diesel, tarmac, blood, horse-flesh and Jack Daniels.

  It occurred to Superintendent Xiao that this was a neat conclusion to the entire episode, if not exactly welcome. Dead lunatic propaganda guy; dead foreign reporter; scratch one lowly informant for the State Security Police; film crew neutralised.

  Then he saw Li Qi-han stagger up from a ditch at the roadside, hands gripping a pistol. The pistol seemed to have a life of its own: it seemed to be pulling Li in a crouching run towards the wreckage of the van.

  Xiao’s brain kicked into gear. “Ah-ha,” he said to himself: “this little shit has caused the accident and is intending to put bullets into the survivors.”

  There was no chance of hitting him from this distance but Xiao knelt down, levelled his own pistol and fired. He was out of breath. Years since he’d done this. The shot had got the punk’s attention. He was young, scrawny: sensible haircut, scowling face. The kid ducked back down behind the Honda.

  Xiao strode past Brough’s body. He saw Carstairs make a weird, disoriented grab for his camera in the wreckage, following the cameraman’s instinct to film everything, and then collapse to the floor. Georgina’s screams were getting louder. She had worked out that she was still alive, but had heard the gunshot.

  Xiao saw Li Qi-han stagger up to the top of the roadside embankment to stand, legs akimbo and with blood seeping from a head wound, the sun behind him.

  “Please send an ambulance to the National Road, east of Tang Lu about 50 kilometres,” Chun-li was saying to her cellphone. A bullet grazed the tarmac next to Xiao’s feet and the report boomed across the desert. Shit, he should have put the Kevlar on! Georgina’s screaming suddenly stopped.

  “I demand the posthumous rehabilitation of Li Rui-dong, veteran of the PLA, unjustly jailed during the anti-rightist purge of 1956,” Li shouted, bringing the pistol up to aim at Xiao in a cool tai-chi-like arc.

  “Enough of this, son. Give yourself up!”

  There was a brief moment of eye contact over the sights of their pistols but then Li crumpled to the sand. Hard Man Han, creeping like a wraith across the desert, had tasered him from a range of less than 10 feet.

  “Good,” Xiao grunted. “Let’s get him back to base. That other guy alright?”


  “Mad as a firework, boss” Han hiked up a huge, green snot into his mouth and spat it into the sand. “On the phone to his lawyer already. Very upset about the horse.”

  There was a small crowd of truckers forming about fifty yards beyond the crash site, where the traffic had backed up. They watched the two cops haul Li to the unmarked SUV and throw him into a dog cage in the back. Meanwhile the SWAT team had arrived and were trying to sort out a chaotic detour that the truckers had begun to make into the desert. One truck was already stuck and others were inching their way around it, kicking up a dust cloud to above head height.

  “Think we can dump this lot on the Inner Mongolian Ambulance Service?” Han jerked a thumb at the van.