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  “Better help them,” said Xiao. “Witnesses. Snap a couple of photos of me giving first aid.”

  Xiao made a laboured jog over to the upturned van while Han fiddled with the controls on his digital camera. There was a nice shot of Xiao using his Leatherman tool to slice through the seatbelt holding Georgina upside down. Another showed him cradling the Englishwoman as he dragged her carefully through the broken window. Chun-li, once they’d cut her free, managed to slither out by herself. As she checked the driver for signs of life, Han snapped him for the record and retrieved his cellphone. Then they all turned away, leaving his smashed face to dry in the desert sun.

  “Hold on a minute, where’s the other one?” said Xiao.

  Xiao and Han stood squinting at wet patch on the tarmac, where Brough’s body had been spread-eagled a moment ago,

  “That guy was dead, right?” said Hard Man Han.

  “Eyes wide open,” said Xiao.

  ~ * ~

  4

  They had shot Georgina, shot Carstairs and if they had not shot the driver and Chun-li that was probably because they were dead already-or police informers. Anyway Brough had counted two shots. He still had the USB stick wedged inside his anus, wrapped in a condom. If he could survive he now had a massive story on his hands. He owed it to his colleagues to survive.

  Brough had learned that the best thing to do when something happens is to accept the fact: the story has changed. One minute you are cracking jokes with a street kid in some barrio south of the equator, the next minute the kid is lying sprawled in the shit, life draining away through a gunshot wound. One minute you are staring at the computer screen in London, trying to decide between cappuccino and latte, the next minute a wire drops saying “FLASH: CONGO. JOURNALIST KILLED” and in the pit of your stomach you already know which journalist it is because your bosses are on the phone asking if you happen to know the name of the private school his kids attend.

  With death, but also with a host of less permanent reversals, the ordinary human response is denial. Carry on as normal for a few hours, days, and in the case of some people, forever. Brough had learned to do the opposite of this. He had learned to sense the worst of the situation, accept it and formulate a plan. Even, if truth be told, to welcome the onset of danger-just as a Pavlovian dog welcomes the arrival of an electric shock.

  So when he’d spotted the black Honda overtake them, slam its brakes on, force the van to swerve into the path of an SUV pulling some kind of trailer, his brain had registered this as a hostile act. When he’d woken up on the tarmac and seen the police chief from Tang Lu looming above him with a handgun he’d realised the Chinese cops were trying to kill him. So he’d played dead.

  He had swapped, drunkenly with other hacks in the dim-lit bars of various Sheratons, the usual “what would you do?” bullshit: what would you do if Al Qaeda stopped you at a roadblock in Iraq claiming to be cops?

  “Run”, is always the answer. If they are real cops they won’t open fire. If it’s AQ you are dead anyway and harder to hit while moving.

  So when he’d heard the first shot he had leapt to his feet and started running. His blood had gone cold. He had heard Georgina screaming so he’d assumed they had shot Carstairs. Then, boom. Another shot and Georgina’s screaming had stopped.

  So now he sprinted, legs the consistency of oyster flesh, towards a ditch where he flung himself face down, panting into the dust. He checked himself for blood, wiggled his fingers and held his hand in front of his face to test for concussion. His entire body felt punched and scraped.

  Now truck tyres came popping over the gravel and into the ditch behind him. There was a commotion - drivers shouting and engines revving. He stumbled through a dust cloud and found himself in the middle of a queue of trucks edging into the desert. One truck revved out of the dust and nearly flattened him. The driver braked hard and swore at him through the sand-caked windscreen. When the truck restarted, Brough was clinging to its high metal sides, whimpering.

  The truck bounced around crazily on the desert until, after a couple of hundred yards, it veered back towards the road.

  He jumped off, electrifying his neck nerves with an inept commando roll through vegetation that smelled like a drink from the 1970s called Dandelion & Burdock. He picked up his day sack and jogged-in that comical way shot people do when they are trying to run away from their own gunshot wounds-to a gully, where he threw himself to the ground.

  He scrabbled in the bag. There was a litre of water and three cans of warm Coke. All the other stuff he religiously carried round was there: packet of condoms, one missing; roll of duct tape; first-aid kit; Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit; passport; a foot-long piece of coat-hanger wire for prodding his way out of a minefield.

  The whisky bottle was just shards. His muesli bars were there, squashed and sodden. Sun cream he had. Missing from its usual hook was the USB stick, presented to him on a visit to the Conn-Selmer Corporation of Elkhart, Indiana, from which he had removed all the hi-res jpegs of the company’s famous trumpets and uploaded, in their place, two gigabytes of digital video in the .mov format. Twenty-three minutes and a bit.

  Something unspoken between Brough and Carstairs had made them avoid telling Georgina about the USB stick. The same journalistic sixth sense had prompted Brough to wrap the thing in a Durex and plug it into his anus the moment he’d heard police radios crackling in the stairway of the hotel.

  He could feel the sun scorching his neck and it was only, what, nine o’clock? He grappled in his jeans for his Blackberry. Fully charged. The time was 08.47.

  He would head into the desert and then call London. Or Shanghai. Did he have any numbers in Shanghai? No matter. He would survive. The story had changed: the action had to change. They had killed Western journalists. If this pollution footage was enough to make them kill, then he had a major scoop in progress.

  Overweight people can survive in the desert, because that’s the way veteran SAS guys always go in. He opened the water and took a deep swig, scraped the shards of the whisky bottle out of the bag and then set off, at a crouch, along the bottom of a gully, under a sky of eggshell blue.

  ~ * ~

  5

  “Why have the English decided to send a war reporter to Ningxia? Could they be expecting some kind of social upheaval we had not anticipated?” That had been the mission-defining statement given to Cai Chun-li by her personal mentor, General Guo.

  Two days ago she’d known the answer: coincidence; just a drunken hack tasked with producing eye-candy for some second-rate TV channel, approaching the end of his career.

  Both Brough and Carstairs had registered a mild “beep” on China’s intelligence radar. Both had passports plastered with entry visas into conflict zones. They’d been processed, noted and the Ningxia wai-ban alerted to their presence.

  General Guo, however, ran his own bureau supplying ad hoc, instinct-driven product to an unofficial unit of the PLA’s Military Intelligence Department. This unit was currently obsessed with potential conflicts within the higher echelons of the Communist Party, where relations between the pro-market “Princelings” and the more social-democratic “Youth League Faction” had been getting spiky since they’d each started to jail rival city mayors on corruption charges.

  Chun-li was one of those Chinese women who was just trying to live her life without lies and ideology, and with a bare minimum of lip gloss; to conduct her life, as the Tao Te Ching says, “without regrets” and to realise her full potential.

  Realising her full potential had, since she left Peking University, involved life-coaching various wannabe dotcom millionaires, translating for Western business delegations and, when she felt like a challenge, the foreign media. Out of pure devotion to General Guo she kept an eye on various things and various people, some of whom believed she was their informant.

  So Guo had pushed Chun-li into the Channel Ninety-Nine assignment, like a black stone into a white-held corner of the wei-qi board, as an intuitive move. He had s
een no possibilities in the targets themselves, but hoped to discern patterns in the lines of inquiry of those who routinely badgered Chun-li for information-officials, spies, crooks and Chinese investigative journalists.

  Now, with Brough headed for certain death in the desert, and some crazy Propaganda kid trying to kill her, Chun-li was having to revise the initial sit-rep. She also suspected there was a bit of ancestral intervention going on, for which - as she’d joked with General Guo many times - neither the Party nor the PLA has any Standard Operating Procedure.

  She handed Georgina and Carstairs each a bottle of water and made them sit in the shade. She fired up the GPS on her cellphone and marked the exact position where Brough had been lying. Her hair, which had been caked in breakfast milk and windscreen fragments, she twisted between her fingers into a shape; it had been shapeless and without life before. Her eyes, which had up to now been droopy, came to life like somebody had thrown neat gin into them. She started snapping pictures of the crash scene on her phone.

  “Georgina, David’s gone. Did you see him?”

  Georgina shook her head.

  “He’s escaped into the desert.”

  “Don’t make me laugh ‘cos me rib is killing me,” Carstairs groaned.

  Chun-li’s English, which she had not bothered to lace with definitive articles before, became perfect.

  “Am I correct in thinking David has a copy of the video rushes with him?” she asked Carstairs.

  Silence. Chun-li sighed:

  “You think I am some kind of agent?”

  Silence.

  “Just trying to live my life...” she muttered, under her breath but audible.

  Georgina’s adrenaline made her gabble:

  “Gotta phone Shanghai, and London. The insurance. It’s a private medical system here, correct? We’re all entitled to treatment - including you. He,” she motioned to the driver, “will be entitled to a lot of compensation. His family I mean. Do you know them?”

  Chun-li shook her head.

  She had spotted a blood-caked man walking towards them, swatting at the space around his head as if dodging a swarm of invisible insects. He was smoking a black cigarette, wearing a black v-neck sweater and black Evisu jeans, with black leather flip-flops. His roof-shaped eyebrows, square face and buzz-cut hair marked him out as Mongolian. Above forty years old.

  “You guys have killed the odds-on favourite to win the 2010 Wuhan Derby. I hope you have good insurance,” he said in English, with a slight European accent.

  “Channel Ninety-Nine,” Chun-li declined the Sobranie Black Russian he held out to her: “I thought horse-racing was illegal outside Hong Kong?”

  “We’re actually trialling it on a controlled basis.” He extended one shaky hand with a business card:

  “Come and visit my club. They’ll be taking you to Ordos General Hospital shortly, I imagine. Can I get insurance details from you?”

  Chun-li flashed a row of teeth, which nobody had noticed up to now were white and perfect. She became hippy and bone-shouldered, like a teenager negotiating her first drug purchase at some summer music festival in an English field.

  “We’re terribly sorry,” Georgina butted in. “Obviously any damage caused by our vehicle will be paid for but the question is what the driver of that,” she swished her hair towards the Honda, “was trying to do.”

  “Kill you, I imagine,” the Mongolian horse owner ran his palm over his skull and staggered backwards:

  “Sorry I am a little bit concussed. As far as I could tell that car is Propaganda Department, Tang Lu plates. And the cops very keen to retreat over the provincial border, not taking you guys but taking the driver. We’re into all kinds of jurisdiction problems here but the fact remains I have to cite you guys for the collision and the Propaganda Department for dangerous driving. The excess on these Audis is unbelievable.”

  Chun-li rummaged in her bag and pulled out her own business card, which the SUV guy studied for a moment and slipped into the back pocket of his jeans. Then she hit him with a wacky, clueless grin:

  “Do you by any chance have access to a helicopter?”

  ~ * ~

  6

  Brough’s plan was to walk south, turn east, walk parallel with the highway and then rendezvous with the rescue team back at the road towards nightfall. For now, as a precaution, he had killed his Blackberry in case they were using scanners to find him.

  He would make a call to London later. His mind had been subconsciously computing the chances of the Chinese having an agent inside Channel Ninety-Nine, or somebody they’d put the burn on. That plus the correspondent’s instinct to avoid all contact with his superiors had dictated the course of action: become invisible and unpredictable.

  It would mean spending a day in the desert but, now he was out there, he could see it was not exactly the Sahara. There was low, sparse scrub everywhere and as the sun got higher clouds were forming. With the Coke and water he had two and a half litres of liquid. He had survived on less in hotter places. He covered his neck and face with sun cream and his nose and eyebrows, like a cricketer, with white zinc.

  He squatted down in the sand, pants around his ankles, and squeezed the USB stick out of his anus; removed the condom, blew a few grains of sand from the object itself, mentally thanking the Conn-Selmer Corporation for choosing the smooth, bullet-shaped profile of the stick. He looped his gold neckchain through an eyehole on the stick: people were always taking the piss out of his gold neckchain but it always came in useful.

  He’d been trying to stop his mind composing lush obituaries for Georgina. It was his fault the poor kid had got blown away. Jimmy Carstairs? Well he knew the score: been to the edge of the diving board a few times and looked over. In a deeper layer of Brough’s brain there was a parallel process of obituary composition going on, for himself.

  It was getting humid. He needed to get a good five miles south of the road - well out of visual range. That would take two hours. By then it would be 11 - that was 3am in London and the worst time for finding journalists awake other than lonely and dishevelled ones slumped across the bar towels at the Basra Lounge, in need of a rescue party themselves.

  He would get to where the mobile phone signal was weak, reducing the chance of them triangulating his position off two masts, send a text to Twyla and then shut down again; then find shade and rest for a couple of hours to give London time to alert the British Embassy.

  He shouldered his bag, rolled his shirt-sleeves down to his wrists, pulled his collar up against the sun and started walking.

  He’d been calm up to now but soon found himself shaking with fear and fury as he swung along. A little bit later he was wiping snot off his upper lip because he had begun to cry.

  Thirst made him sit down amid the liquorice bushes and open a can of Coke. He gulped it down, wiped his face and immediately wanted to piss. While he was pissing he fired up the Blackberry. It took forever.

  The time was only just before 10am. He fired up the GPS map system and it came up: a lat-long reading but no map. He waited minutes for a local map to download. When the red line of the National Road appeared it was startlingly close to where the position marker said he was standing. On the scale of a major desert he’d gone nowhere, basically.

  He saved his position into the handset as a waypoint and set another one, due east ten kilometres. A low hum started in the distance.

  He pointed the top of the Blackberry in the direction of the next waypoint and scrambled to the crest of a small hill to try and find a landmark to head for. In the very far distance there was a glint, just half a glint, like a truck mirror flashing in the sun. A glint surrounded by a huge dustcloud.

  It was a helicopter landing near the road.

  The panic that had been trying to claw its way out for the last hour, through twenty years’ worth of learned insouciance, finally won.

  They were tracking the Blackberry. Turn it off. He was already thumbing the red button as he started sprinting - wher
e? Anywhere he could find cover. Shallow breathing and the Coke turned his spit acidic.

  What would an SAS guy do? Anything that moves can be seen, anything that can be seen can be killed. Where had he learned that? In a bar in Beirut? In a watchtower in South Armagh?

  He limped to the top of a small rise, out of breath. The other side was a shallow ravine. There came the sudden flaring of the chopper’s rotor noise as it banked to take off. He yanked two shrubs up by the roots and ran with them to the edge of the ravine. There was a tiny overhang and he leapt down under it.

  Must keep still. He sat on his bag to obscure the fluorescent decals and squatted with the bushes over his head. He smeared his face with desert earth, earth sticking to the sun cream. He poured a handful of desert over each boot and scrubbed more into his hair. The earth was grainy, quartzy, coarse, metallic.