Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  As I placed the empty glass on the zinc-topped table at my side it made a decisive ring, and there was silence as I outlined the plan – such as it was. I began by saying I expected Seamus, Dai and Les to be arriving by tomorrow. Sammy’s eyes lit up.

  ‘What a pleasure, to see Mister Les again,’ he remarked, grinning widely.

  Sammy had spent twelve months trying to kiss Les on both cheeks in the traditional matter and Les had spent those twelve months fighting him off, swearing it would happen over his dead body. The closest they’d got to being touchy-feely was arm wrestling, at which Les Trevellick – a former commando instructor – was unbeaten. I didn’t mention that Les had yet to confirm. I still refused to believe he’d miss the party.

  ‘When will leave, exactly?’ Sammy asked, and intuitively I decided to hedge.

  ‘That’s not fixed,’ I said. ‘Colonel McQueen’s going with a convoy up to Mosul. He’ll escort us to the US base. We’ll peel off and go straight to your house.’

  ‘You must stay with us, Mister James, it is beautiful. It is where I am grow up as a boy. Lovely mountains, just like in the Scotland, home of the whisky.’ As my ‘brother’, Sammy fondly imagined that Scotland was the same as the mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, but with fewer Kurds and more golf.

  ‘Let’s not get too far ahead,’ I said.

  It occurred to me that Mad Dog had arranged the convoy to usher Sammy to safety, but he was a practical man who wanted to see as much of Iraq as he could before being reassigned. He was into ancient sites and I recalled him once saying he wanted to check out the sixth-century Monastery of St Elijah, one of the oldest places of Christian worship in the country. It happened to be just south of Mosul, within the perimeter of the US Forward Operating Base there.

  I glanced around the room. ‘You won’t be able to take much,’ I said. ‘Just a few personal possessions.’

  ‘That’s all we have,’ said the general. ‘This is not our house.’

  ‘It is the third safe house in three weeks,’ added Sammy.

  ‘Cobus is being cautious.’

  ‘He is cautious man, no?’

  The South African followed the conversation as if we were talking about someone else.

  ‘When did you first know Ibrahim was gunning for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Mister James, I know immediately. There are no secrets in Baghdad.’

  ‘We are being Talibanized, James,’ Fara added from the corner.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  ‘Fara, she go to work, in the school,’ Sammy explained. ‘After Abdul was taken, we had nothing. Without Fara, we wouldn’t eat. Then the Shia came, they want to have Sharia law – like the Taliban.’

  ‘They want to make Iraq like the Afghanistan, or the Iran,’ Fara added. ‘The Shia are working with the Americans but they hate the Americans. They hate everything.’

  Fara was naturally serene, an intellectual. I had never seen her so angry. Sammy was wringing his plump hands.

  ‘They make her cover it the hair,’ Sammy continued. ‘Then they stop it, the women teachers. They stop it, the girls going to school. They do not want progress, they want more power, and in charge they put the criminals.’

  General Mashooen had tears in the corners of his eyes. ‘For the first time in my life I am afraid to go out,’ he said, ‘in my own city, where I have walked these streets for seventy years. I am afraid if I see these religious police I might kill them.’ His frail, papery hands closed into outraged fists. He couldn’t have killed a squirrel.

  It flickered through my mind that as one of Saddam’s generals it was unsurprising he had been strolling around without fear of being mugged.

  Fara had come to her feet. I did the same.

  ‘I am sorry, James, you understand,’ she said. ‘It has been hard. We are so happy that you come to help us. In Mosul, we can start again.’

  The men stood. I glanced at my watch. We’d been in the house almost an hour. I had eaten enough to be polite and show my appreciation for their hospitality, but as little as possible. I knew that the children were waiting in the kitchen for whatever leftovers remained from the meal. I noticed all the adults had eaten sparingly as well.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  I went around the room and shook everyone’s hand. Fara cupped my hand between her palms.

  ‘Thank you for the lovely meal,’ I said. ‘Iraqi food is very good, I always tell my wife.’

  They were all very happy at that. I had forgotten not to chew all the way down and nearly broken a tooth on the tiny stones you sometimes find in Iraqi rice.

  ‘You are always welcome in my home,’ she replied, and she shrugged, smiling, a little of the tension gone.

  Sammy followed us out to the car while Abdul waited.

  ‘I will let you know as soon as things are organized,’ I said.

  ‘Mister James, I am ready.’

  I smiled. How many times had he said those exact words to me? No matter whether I was asking him to find decaffeinated coffee, or to go into a gunfight, he would answer the same way.

  ‘This is in case . . .’ I stopped myself from saying that I might not come back, for some unforeseen reason – no point tempting fate. ‘This is in case of emergencies.’ I slipped him 500 dollars without letting his family see. He didn’t bother trying to protest. His family had been on the run for months now, and he was tired.

  ‘And not a word about Mosul, not to anyone.’

  ‘Of course.’

  CHAPTER 10

  DAI JONES GOT in at midday. I had dropped Cobus off back at the embassy to sort something out with Mad Dog and then went straight out to the airport in a single SUV with the two other members of Mad Dog’s admin team, two sergeants named Shaun and Scott, who looked similar enough that they could have been brothers. They were both clearly happy to defer to me in terms of driving tactics and what our actions on drills were to be should we have a contact en route.

  God alone knows what stories Mad Dog had been telling them about us. And I was the mellow one. Wait until the rest of the gang turned up.

  Still, I watched Shaun and Scott as we drove up and they both seemed alert and comfortable with their weapons. They paid attention to the right combat indicators and choke points on the road, and I guessed that Mad Dog and Cobus had been taking them out around the city on a regular basis. I was pleased. They would be forming part of our escort team, and there was no room for passengers.

  At 12.30pm on the dot, Dai walked out of the terminal, lighting a fag as the door opened, and we greeted each other wreathed in clouds of tobacco smoke. We went through the necessary pleasantries. He asked after Krista and the kids, and I discovered he was two girlfriends on from the one he’d had last time I’d seen him. I coughed through his smoke.

  ‘Filthy habit,’ I spluttered.

  ‘Have a heart, Jim, I’m gasping after that flight. Bring back the good old days when you could smoke at the back of the plane.’

  He looked around curiously, much as I must have done, I realized, to see if anything had changed, whether it still matched his memories of the place.

  Dai had brought his kit and, as I handed over his ammo and ID cards, he filled his vest pouches and tut-tutted as he realised that the spare weapons McQueen had scavenged up for us were all AKs.

  After our initial greetings we made the journey back down Route Irish in silence and I couldn’t recall ever having gone so long without the soundtrack of Dai’s voice and its constant swearing. Shaun and Scott kept their eyes on their arcs around the vehicle, but as soon as we got back into the embassy car park they goggled surreptitiously at Dai as he got out and stretched.

  He lit another cigarette, took the smoke deep into his lungs and continued staring into the distance. The sun had found a gap in the smog and the chain-link fence around the T-walls glistened like strings of fairy lights. Soldiers and embassy staff walked around us. In the background a small convoy of MPs rolled past in their ‘up-armoured’ Humvees.
Dai stared at it all, noting every detail. Reflective. We’d given a chunk of our lives to Baghdad and now that chapter was over it felt weird being back.

  ‘This place is doing my fucking head in,’ Dai said through a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Nothing’s changed, then?’ I said.

  He sniffed, had a good spit, and did a mock shadow box, weaving about me, feigning and throwing the odd slap.

  ‘Where’d you get that suntan, you bastard?’

  ‘Just under five grand a week, tax-free, playing frisbee on the beach.’

  ‘Shit, nice work if you can get it. Ain’t it about time you got a proper job telling us poor sods what to do?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

  He managed to get a good slap in and I got one back.

  ‘Looking good, son,’ he said, and stamped out his fag. ‘Let’s go and take the piss out of Mad Dog, shall we?’

  We fell into step as we wound our way through the rubble left by last night’s mortar attack. We passed four Iraqis in maintenance uniforms sitting on the kerb, drinking chai and smoking with grim determination, shovels and brooms neatly stacked next to them.

  ‘You missed a bit there, sunshine,’ said Dai, pointing at a pile of rubble.

  ‘Hallo, mister,’ one of them replied.

  ‘Lazy fuckers.’

  Dai was lumbering along like a gunslinger on his way to the OK Corral. He was as big as a house and had a similarity to his namesake, the footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones. Defenders went weak at the knees when they approached him on the edge of the penalty box. I’d seen militia guards and USAID staffers do the same when they came face to face with Dai. When the Welshman scowled he carried a palpable aura of imminent physical violence that rolled off him like a cold wave.

  Despite the chill in the air, his sleeves were rolled up over biceps proudly displaying the Welsh red dragon tattooed on his right forearm. He’d grown up on army camps all over the world, then followed his father into the forces. Dai was in his early forties, and in twenty years’ service to his country he’d seen and done it all.

  ‘What’s the package they’re offering you out in Afghan? Making good money?’ I asked.

  It’s what you always ask. You go into our line of work for the life and for the professionalism, but it’s also about the money, and it’s as rare as rocking-horse shit to find men who will give up their time and risk their lives for anything but the money. In three terse sentences, with only three ‘fucks’, he let me know the monthly wage, the leave package and what the insurance deal was.

  ‘It’s all right, but it’s fucked out there. Afghan’s not Iraq. We’ve been lifting al-Qaeda chiefs out of their holes – but what’s the point?’ he said. ‘You take out one of the cunts and two more pop up like that monster who keeps growing new heads when you cut ’em off.’

  ‘Hydra?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one, smartarse.’

  ‘Benefits of a classical education,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘When are the others in?’

  ‘I got a text from Seamus. He’ll be here first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘For now. I’m waiting on Les.’

  We unloaded, re-holstered and slung weapons, namastayed the Gurkhas guarding the gates and entered the building. As we made our way through the narrow corridors, the stomp of Dai’s size-twelves made the walls tremble.

  The door was open. We entered the office and Tanya Carillo’s dark eyes almost popped out on stalks as she watched Dai leap at Mad Dog and make the same mock attack as he’d made on me. Shaun and Scott actually lurched forward ready to defend him.

  ‘All right, my son?’

  ‘Ducking and diving.’ Mad Dog ducked and dived. ‘What about you, old buddy?’

  ‘Knackered, mate. Haven’t slept for two days.’

  ‘We haven’t slept here for two months,’ said McQueen.

  ‘Tsk, tsk, you should stay off the Internet porn, Steve, it’ll rot your mind.’

  Colonel McQueen got serious. ‘Did you have any problems getting through Iraqi immigration without a CAC card?’

  ‘Never have any problems, me mate. I’ve got a valid CAC card from Afghan, innit?’

  They settled down. McQueen glanced at Tanya.

  ‘The one and only Dai Jones,’ he said by way of introduction, and glanced back. ‘Sergeant Tanya Carillo, my most valued assistant.’

  ‘Better-looking than the last one,’ said Dai. ‘All right, treacle?’

  ‘Doing fine, asshat.’

  Dai raised an eyebrow, slumped down in a chair and lit a cigarette. Tanya had those perfect Cupid lips that turned into a bow as she smiled. She looked at me and we exchanged shrugs.

  ‘Good to see you, mate,’ he said.

  ‘And you,’ said McQueen. ‘How’s things in Afghanistan? We doing OK?’ he asked, and I thought: here goes.

  Dai didn’t answer for several seconds.

  ‘How’s things in Afghanistan?’ he repeated. ‘I’ll tell you how things are in Afghanistan. It’s the arsehole of the world. Graveyard of empires, that’s what they call it. Fucking British, we never even got in there, not with the whole of India under our belts. Alexander wasn’t so great when he got to the Khyber Pass. How many Greek temples do you see in Afghanistan? I’ll tell you: fuck all. Russians gambled the shop and lost it. You Septics made a pretty good go of it there after 9/11, doing very well actually . . .’

  ‘Thank you . . .’

  ‘. . . until you invaded Iraq, and then pulled all your assets out of Afghan to hunt down Saddam and his mates. Fucking waste of time if you ask me, and lost all the good ground you’d made getting into the tribes. As for us Brits, well . . . as usual Tommy Atkins is underappreciated, doing a fucking amazing job on half rations, undermanned, without the right kit and being let down about twice a day by those cunts in Whitehall. Bunch of tossers.’

  Dai blew smoke towards the No Smoking sign and stabbed the air with an index finger the size of a pork sausage.

  ‘Fucked,’ he said. ‘We need a shitload more troops, a surge just like this one here. And we need someone in the Pentagon to get some oxygen up to the collective brain cell you all share and realize that the Taliban isn’t some super-evil global organization. In Afghan you need to deal with each tribe, each village and damn near each individual fucking farm to win them over one by one. That’s how you’ll do it, mate, one valley at a time. And don’t get me started on the CIA, what a bunch of tossers.’

  ‘Some of my best friends are CIA,’ said Mad Dog,

  ‘Then you want to get yourself some new mates, mate.’

  I imagined Tanya Carillo had been warned. She sat coolly behind her laptop as Dai Jones spent the next few minutes ripping US foreign policy to pieces. I zoned out, feeling tired after two days travelling, and thought about Sammy and his family, whether they were doing any last-minute packing. Eventually Mad Dog took up his position straddling the corner of the desk.

  Dai drew breath and continued. ‘Your Congress is all about looking after number one and they don’t give a monkey’s about foreign affairs.’

  ‘An interesting theory. But it’s only a theory. There are people in Congress who do give a monkey’s.’

  ‘Colonel, you fink everyone’s like you. They’re not. They’re wankers. What politicians worry about once they’re in government is staying in government. You think those cunts care if there’s fresh water in Baghdad or schools in Kandahar? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve been in Lashkar Gah and I’ll tell you what happens there, as soon as they build a new school, the Taliban come along and blow it up again.’

  ‘So we build another school, and another,’ said McQueen. ‘That’s why we’re there. That’s why you’re there. We’ve got to show the people who do want schools that we’re there to help them, we’re there in the long term – there’s no oil in Afghanistan.’

  ‘There’s nothing, mate, ’cept poppies. If rocks and ignorance ever become valuable they’re
sat on a fucking goldmine.’

  ‘We’ve got to show that we will endure. That we’ve got more patience than the Taliban. That we’ve got right on our side.’

  ‘But have we, though?’

  ‘Why are you there?’

  ‘For the money.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Dai.’

  ‘You’d better fucking believe it, ’cos it’s the God’s honest.’ Dai stubbed out his fag just as Cobus walked in, carrying a cup of coffee from the chow hall.

  ‘Bliksem, has someone been fokken smoking in my office?’ Then he turned and saw Dai sitting at his desk. ‘Ach nie! I should have known it, it’s the Welshman.’ He turned to Tanya, ‘It’s going to take days to get the smell out of that chair. And I’m not talking about the smoke.’

  ‘Jim!’ Dai grabbed my arm in mock amazement. ‘Fuck me it’s a South African walking on its hind legs! Have you got a camera?’

  ‘No smoking in the building you doos, can’t you read yet? Do you want me to draw you pictures a fokken three-year-old can understand? We’ll have every bugger down the hall complaining to the contracting officer about us!’

  ‘Jim,’ Dai whispered to me in disbelief, ‘that noise coming out of its mouth . . . It’s almost as if . . . it’s trying to speak to us.’

  The two men laughed and shook hands. Dai grabbed his day sack and pulled out two bottles of whisky, one for Cobus and one for McQueen. They both looked delighted, and Cobus’s bag clanked as he put it away with the one I’d already given him. The three sergeants Shaun, Scott and Tanya all looked interested in the growing stash of booze.

  ‘So, what we supposed to be doing, or is that top-secret?’ Dai asked.

  McQueen stretched a crick out of his back. ‘Easy ride up to Mosul Friday. We’ll take our two SUVs and escort Sammy’s folks in three civilian cars. I’ve arranged for us to accompany a military convoy so there’ll be decent comms and fire support for the journey. Sergeant Carillo is staying here to mind the shop. Me, these two,’ he indicated Shaun and Scott, ‘and Cobus, plus four of you. A piece of cake for you guys.’