Last Light Read online

  Sally nodded. ‘Sure, I’ll get on to it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he muttered as he watched her disappear out of the control room. He shot another glance at the Reuters’ feed, more detail on the story was already coming in.

  There were a couple of other control-room staff in there with him and they stared silently at him, waiting for orders. Normally he fed his input through Sally to them. But with her gone and chasing down the things they were going to need, it was just them.

  ‘Okay Tim, patch me through to Sean and Nanette. I suppose I’d better let them in on this.’

  CHAPTER 2

  8.19 a.m. GMT Shepherd’s Bush, London

  Jennifer Sutherland hopped awkwardly across the cold tiles of the kitchen floor, whilst she struggled to zip up the back of her skirt and tame her hair with the straighteners, all at the same time. Too many things to do, too few hands, too little time. That bloody little travel alarm clock had let her down again.

  Jenny checked her watch; she had ten minutes until the cab was due; time enough for a gulped coffee. She slapped the kettle’s switch on.

  Today, if all things went well, was going to be the beginning of a new chapter; the beginning of a brand new chapter to follow the last one, a long and heartachingly sad one - twenty years long. She had a train to catch from Euston station taking her up to Manchester, and an interview for a job she dearly wanted; needed, in fact.

  So this was it.

  If they offered her the job, she could be on her way out of what had become a painful mess for her and Andy. This whole situation was hurting him a lot more than it was her. She was the one who was leaving and she knew when the dust settled, and both his and her parents performed a post-mortem on this marriage, the blame would fall squarely on her shoulders.

  ‘Jenny got bored of him. She put herself before their kids, put herself before Andy.’

  And the rest . . .

  ‘You know she had an affair, don’t you? A little fling at work. He found out, and he forgave her, and this is how she repays him.’

  The kettle boiled and she reached into the cupboard above it pulling out the last mug. The rest were packed away in one of the many cardboard boxes littered throughout the house, each box marked either with ‘Jenny’ or ‘Andy’. Jennifer had been busy over the last week, since Andy had gone off on his latest job, sorting out two decades of stuff into his and hers piles.

  The house was now on the market, something they both agreed they might as well get on and do now that they were going to go their separate ways. Living together under the same roof, after both tearfully conceding it was all over, had been horrible: passing each other wordlessly in the hallway, waiting for the other to leave a room before feeling comfortable enough to enter it, cooking meals for one and then eating alone.

  Not a lot of fun.

  Dr Andy Sutherland, the geeky geology student from New Zealand she had met twenty years ago, who had loved The Smiths and The Cure, who could quote from virtually every original episode of Star Trek, who could do a brilliant Ben Elton impersonation, whom she had once loved, whom she had married at just nineteen years of age; that same Andy had somehow become an awkward and unwanted stranger in her life.

  She tipped in a spoon of decaf granules and poured some boiling water into her mug.

  But it wasn’t all her fault. Andy was partly to blame.

  His work, his work . . . always his bloody work.

  Only it wasn’t work, as such, was it? It was something else. It was an obsession he’d fallen into, an obsession that had begun with the report he’d been contracted to write, the special one he couldn’t talk about, the big earner that had bought this house and paid for a lot more besides. And of course, the rather nice family trip to New York to hand it over in person. He’d earned a lot of money for that, but ultimately, it had cost them their marriage.

  The walls of his study were filled with diagrams, charts, geological maps. He had become one-dimensional over that damned fixation of his. It had eroded the funny, complex, charming person that he had once been, and now it seemed that anything that he could be bothered to say to her, in some oblique way, linked back to this self-destructive, doom-laden fascination of his with the end of the world.

  And she remembered, it had all started with a report he’d been commissioned to write.

  When he’d first stumbled upon . . . it . . . and breathlessly talked her through it - what they should do to prepare, should it happen - she had been terrified and so worried for their children. They had taken a long hard look at their urban lifestyle and realised they’d be thoroughly screwed, just like everyone else, if they didn’t prepare. In the early days they had looked together for remote properties hidden away in acres of woodland or tucked away in the valleys of Wales. He had even nearly talked her into moving to New Zealand; anything to get away from the centres of population, anything to get away from people. But, inevitably, life - earning a crust, paying the bills, getting the kids into the right school - all those things had got in the way. For Jenny, the spectre of this impending disaster had faded after a while.

  For Andy, it had grown like a tumour.

  Jenny gulped her coffee as she finished fighting with her coarse tawny hair and turned the straighteners off.

  Sod it. Good enough for now. She could do her make-up on the train.

  The interview was at one o’clock. She was surprised at the shudder of nerves she felt at the prospect of sitting before a couple of strangers and selling herself to them in just a few hours’ time. If they gave that job to her she would have to pull Jacob out of his prep school; the very same school she had fought hard to get him into in the first place. Jake would be going up north to Manchester with her. Leona on the other hand, had just started at the University of East Anglia; home for her was a campus now, as it would be for another two years.

  Jenny hated the fact that she was being instrumental in breaking her family up, but she couldn’t go on like this with Andy. She was going to make a new home for herself and Jake, and there would always be a bed for Leona - wherever it was that Jenny eventually found for them to live.

  The worst task lay ahead of course. Neither of the kids knew how far things had gone, and that she and Andy had made the decision to go their separate ways. Leona perhaps had an inkling of what was on the cards, but for young Jake, only seven, whose focus was on much more important matters such as his next major Yu-Gi-Oh deck-trade, this was going to be coming right out of nowhere.

  Outside she heard a car horn, the taxi. She drained the rest of the coffee and grabbed her handbag, heading out into the hallway. She opened the front door, but then hesitated, looking back inside the house as the taxi waited outside.

  Although she planned to be back in a couple of days to begin tidying up all the ends that were left for now flapping loosely, it felt like she was walking out for the last time; it felt like this was the moment that she was actually saying goodbye to their family home.

  And goodbye to Andy.

  CHAPTER 3

  8.31 a.m. GMT University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich

  Leona stirred, slowly waking by inches. And then still half-asleep, she remembered who was sharing her bed. She shuddered with a smug, secret pleasure, as if she were holding a million pound prize-winning lottery ticket but had yet to tell anyone.

  Danny moved sleepily in the bed next to her. She sat up and looked down at him. He was breathing evenly and deeply, still very much lost in the land of slumber, a content half-smile spread across his lips.

  Daniel Boynan.

  He looked even more lovely with his eyes closed, his lips pursed, and not pulling any stupid faces to make her laugh. Totally angelic. His mop of dark hair was piled around him on the pillow, and his dark eyebrows momentarily knit as his mind randomly skipped through a dream. Leona had spotted him on the first day, registration day, queuing like her to get his Student Union card and his campus ID.

  Donnie Darko, she thought. That’s who he had reminded her
of.

  And throughout most of the first term Leona had pursued him, discreetly of course. Never appearing too interested, though, just enough that he got the message, eventually.

  God, boys can be so flippin’ blind - he hadn’t noticed Leona had been eyeing him up for the last eight weeks.

  And then it sort of happened last night. What should have been Step Five of her Ten Step Plan to conquer the heart of Dan Boynan, had turned into a rapid tiptoe through Six, Seven, Eight, Nine . . .

  And Step Ten had been just about perfect.

  She watched him breathe easily, and pushed a lock of hair away from his porcelain face. Here he was, Daniel, gorgeous normally - doubly-so asleep. A brass ankh pendant, dangled down from his neck, the fine leather thong draped over his collar-bone, the small looped cross nestled in a hollow at the base of his throat. That’s what she liked about him - with any other lad, that would have been a big chunk of bling on a thick silver chain.

  Outside her room, she could hear the others stirring in the kitchen. The dinky little portable TV was on, and she could hear the tinkle of spoons on mugs as someone was making a brew.

  Beside her, the radio alarm clock switched on quietly and she heard the nattering, way-too-cheerful voice of Larry Ferdinand bantering with one of his studio sidekicks. Leona smiled, Mum listened to him too. If you asked Mum, she would swear blind that it was her who turned on to him first, and then got Leona listening to him, which was, of course, rubbish.

  She turned the volume down slightly, not wanting Daniel to be woken up, well, not yet anyway, and then slid gently out of bed. She picked up Daniel’s burgundy coloured FCUK hoodie, discarded by the side of the bed, and slipped it on. It was so big on her, it hung down almost to her knees.

  Daniel said he loved her Kiwi accent. Leona didn’t think she had even a trace of Dad’s clipped vowels. For the most part she thought she sounded like everyone else: same ol’ Home Counties’ blandness. But there you go.

  It was odd though, it’s not like she had been particularly close to Dad, not for the last four or five years, anyway. In fact, she hardly ever saw him. He was always either off on some contract abroad, or distracted with some freelance work in his study. But perhaps from earlier years, when he’d had the time for her and Mum and Jake, that’s where the faint echo of his New Zealand accent had been picked up.

  Still who cares, Danny loves it. Bonus.

  On the radio she heard Larry Ferdinand hand over to the newsreader.

  Daniel stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that sounded like ‘take my other d-d-dog . . .’

  He had the slightest stutter, just very slight. Leona found it charming. It made him seem just a little vulnerable, and when he was cracking a joke, somehow that little hitch in his delivery seemed to make the punch line that much more amusing.

  She smiled as she looked down at him. Love seemed too strong a word right now - way too early to be throwing around a word like that. But she certainly felt she was more than just in lust with him. And sure as hell she wasn’t going to let Daniel in on that little secret.

  Play it cool, Lee.

  Yup, that was what she was going to do, especially after she had let him get his cookies last night.

  ‘. . . now this could mean a very serious shortfall in oil supplies . . .’

  Leona cocked her head and listened to the faint voice coming from the radio.

  ‘. . . if the situation is allowed to get much worse. As it is, it’s early days, and it’s unclear exactly what has happened over there. But this much is certain: it will have an immediate knock-on effect on oil prices . . .’

  She sighed. Oil . . . terrorists . . . bombs - that’s all news seemed to be these days; angry mobs, guns being fired into the sky, faces full of hatred. The news reminded her of the tired old doom ’n’ gloom Dad tended to spout after a glass or two of red wine.

  ‘It’ll happen quickly when it happens . . . one thing after another, going down like dominoes. And no one will be ready for it, not even us, and Christ, we’re in the minority that know about it . . .’

  Shit. Dad could be really wearing when he got going on his pet hobby-horse; rattling on about stuff like Hubbert’s Peak, petro-dollars, hydrocarbon footprints . . . it was his special party piece, the thing he talked about when he couldn’t think of anything else interesting to say. Which, to be honest, was most of the time. God, he just wouldn’t shut up about it when he got going, especially when he thought he had an interested audience.

  Leona reached over and snapped the radio off.

  She knew Mum was getting to the point where she’d had enough, to put it bluntly; she wondered if Mum was getting bored of Dad. She could feel something brewing at home, there was an atmosphere. Leona was just glad to be away at uni, and glad her little brother, Jacob, was at his prep school. It gave her parents some room and an opportunity to sort out whatever they needed to sort out.

  She padded lightly across the floor of her room, stepping over the trail of clothes both she and Daniel had shed behind them as they’d worked their way briskly from first base to last, the night before.

  She opened the door of her room and headed into the kitchen where a pile of pots, plates and pans encrusted with beans and ravioli were waiting in vain to be washed up, and a couple of her campus floor-mates were watching Big Brother Live through a haze of cigarette smoke on the TV nestled in the space above the fridge.

  CHAPTER 4

  11.44 a.m. local time Pump station IT-1B

  Ninety-five miles north-east of Al-Bayji, Iraq

  Andy Sutherland reached into the back seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser and grabbed hold of a large bottle of water. It had been sitting in the sun back there, and although he had pulled it out of the freezer that morning a solid bottle-shaped block of ice, it was now almost as hot as a freshly brewed cup of tea. He gulped a few mouthfuls and then poured a little across his face, washing away the dust and the mild salt-sting of his own sweat.

  He turned around to look at Farid, standing a few feet away from him.

  ‘You want some?’

  Farid smiled and nodded, ‘Thank you.’

  He held out the bottle to him and then shot another glance at the burned-out remains of pump station IT-1B.

  There was nothing worth salvaging, just a shell of breeze blocks and twisted piping that would need to be pulled down before a replacement could be built. IT-1B, along with three other sibling stations, serviced the north-south pipeline leading to Turkey. The whole thing, pipeline, connection nodes, pretty much everything, was screwed-up beyond belief in so many places.

  Utterly fubar.

  Farid handed the bottle of water back. Andy noticed the old man had only taken a small amount of water, just a few sips.

  ‘Have some more if you want,’ he said, miming washing his face. After all, the old translator was just as covered with dust and dried-on sweat as anyone else.

  Farid shook his head. ‘Not know when you will need the water only for drink,’ he replied in the weak, cracked, high-pitched voice of an elderly man. His command of English was pretty good, better than the last translator, who had just decided to vanish without warning a few days ago.

  ‘Okay,’ Andy nodded. That was a fair point. Finding regular clean water was still an ongoing concern for many Iraqis. Water scarcity was what they had grown accustomed to over the last few years.

  Parked up nearby, in a rough approximation of a defensive laager, was another Land Cruiser, used by the other civilian contractors, and three modified Nissan pick-up trucks manned by a dozen men from the Iraqi Police Service, who were warily scanning the irregular horizon of building carcasses around them.

  The caution was well placed; the militia had been this way only a few days ago - not to destroy the pumping station, that was old damage - but instead to make an example of some of the men at the local police station. Four men had been taken from outside the police building the day before yesterday, friends and colleagues of the men standing guard. Thei
r bodies had yet to be discovered, but undoubtedly right now, they were lying out in the afternoon sun at some roadside waiting to be found.

  According to Farid, for now, they were relatively safe. The militia had been, done their work and moved on. They’d be back again of course, but not for a while. There were so many other places that needed their special attention.

  Andy picked up his hat; a well-worn, sun-bleached turquoise fishing cap, that he wouldn’t dare don in public back in England, but over here it cast merciful shade over his head, face and neck. His pale scalp, inadequately protected by a sandy-coloured mop of hair, was beginning to burn as he pulled on his cap and tugged it firmly down.

  He wandered across the densely packed, sun-baked clay ground towards the other engineers surveying the remains of IT- 1B. He approached the engineer he had shared the Land Cruiser with on the way up, a big, round-shouldered American with a dense black beard called Mike. He reminded Andy of a bigger, less cuddlier version of Bob Hoskins.

  ‘It’s totally fucked,’ Mike offered analytically as Andy drew up beside him.

  Andy nodded. ‘I don’t see anyone getting much out of the Kirkuk fields until this mess is sorted out.’

  Mike shrugged. ‘That isn’t going to happen for a while.’

  Too true.

  As they all well knew, it really didn’t take much to trash an overland pipeline; hundreds of miles of thin metal casing riding across the ground. It only took one small improvised explosive device placed anywhere along its length, and that would be a done deal until the damage could be repaired. In a country like Iraq, you could forget about using overland pipelines, especially up here in the Salah Ad Din region where every single mile of pipeline would need to be guarded day-in, day-out. Of course it had been a different story thirty or forty years ago when most of the pipelines were laid down. Iraq had been an ordered, prosperous country back then.