Free The Abrupt Physics of Dying by Paul E. Hardisty Page B

Army. Perhaps Medved would push Parnell to take action. If it was really about money, as Clay was beginning to suspect, they could ransom Abdulkader back.
    A third enemy aircraft plummeted ground-ward in flames.
    Clay tore a tin of Budweiser from the plastic noose and handed it to the American.
    ‘Thanks,’ said Jim.
    Clay pulled the tab on a beer and took a long draught. ‘You heading up to the CPF soon?’
    ‘Tomorrow.’
    ‘What’s with the lockdown out there?’
    ‘They’re worried about terrorists.’
    ‘You mean the locals.’
    ‘I guess.’ Jim took another gulp of beer.
    Clay put down his beer and leaned forward, forearms across his knees. ‘Did you know Thierry Champard?’
    Jim turned away from the screen and fixed his gaze on Clay. ‘Yeah, I knew him. He was my back-to-back.’
    ‘What was he like?’
    ‘French.’
    ‘I heard.’
    ‘Great guy. The best.’
    Clay looked over his shoulder. There was no one else in the room, the corridor was quiet. ‘Do you know why Al Qaeda would have wanted him dead?’
    ‘What’s it to you?’
    ‘The same guys have my driver, Abdulkader.’
    Jim drained his beer, set the tin on the floor, tugged at the worn peak of his cap. ‘He’d been in country for a while before I started here. Who knows what people get up to?’
    ‘He never said anything to you?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Nothing to suggest conflict with the locals?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘A woman perhaps?’
    ‘Ever meet his wife?’
    Clay recalled the pang that had lodged in his throat that day on the way to the airport, looking at the photos of Champard’s family. A family of his own. Funny how something you’d always taken for granted would just happen, could turn to an irrelevancy, an
impossibility
, so quickly. Without ever really thinking about it. Just there one day, and not there after. There had been a girl, once. They’d dated in high school but lost touch when he went into the Army. He’d come back on leave, a few months into his second tour, and she’d been waiting for him in the crowd at the airport. She’d been wearing a sexy, strapless, cotton summer dress and he remembered how her skin had felt when he’d held her, standing there in the arrivals hall with people streaming past them and the smell of shampoo in her hair and the way she was everything that the war wasn’t, clean and soft and safe. He remembered the surprise at seeing her there, the way she’d thrown her arms around him, the way she’d run her fingers through his freshly cut hair. She’d tracked him down through his uncle, she’d said through the tears, after hearing about his parents’ death. The next day he’d borrowed a mate’s bakkie and they’d driven south to the ocean and along the coast to Port Shepstone , and taken a hotel room on the beach. She’d been warm andsympathetic and they’d made love as if it were their last days on Earth. He thought she might ask him about the war but she hadn’t, and he’d realised he had no way of telling her anyway. A day later he asked her to marry him and she said yes. He was twenty and she was nineteen. They picked out a ring for her – a tiny flawed diamond set in fourteen-carat gold, all he could afford – in a shop in Durban the day he went back to the war. He’d written her for almost a year, whenever he could, until he was wounded again. She’d come to see him in the military hospital in Johannesburg, but by then he was someone else. He’d been distant and hurtful, his anger spilling out uncontrollably. She’d left the ring in an envelope with one of the nurses.
    ‘Money trouble?’ asked Clay.
    ‘I said no, Straker. Drop it, OK?’
    Clay swirled the beer in his tin and eased back into the couch. ‘Dropped.’
    Zdravko Todorov appeared at the common room doorway, a black duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He smiled, sat on the couch next to Clay, stared at the TV. Tomcat fighters catapulted from a carrier deck, afterburners roaring. Clay ignored