Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  ‘Heart of darkness, mate.’

  ‘If you think it’s bad in Afghanistan, you can forget the Congo.’

  ‘Best way to forget is to not think about it in the first place,’ said Dai. ‘Never fancied Africa, myself. Always thought it was a dump.’

  We took a nostalgic leak in one of Saddam’s gilded lavatories, and by the time we left the palace, the sky was turning orange as the sun went down behind the west wall. We carried on down to the river, down a ramp to where Cobus was waiting with a line of parked-up cars. To my surprise I saw Tanya was with him.

  Dai went straight into his boxing routine with Cobus and I thought if these two heavyweights ever stepped into the ring it would go the full fifteen rounds. Dai bobbed about, effing and blinding. He feigned a right hook followed by a left jab, gave Cobus a slapping and Cobus roared with laughter.

  ‘Fokken Welshman, I eat you . . .’

  ‘Not with no fucking teeth, you won’t.’

  Another slap. Two back from Cobus. One more from Dai.

  ‘You know something, I’ve got friends with kids who behave like this,’ Tanya said.

  I looked her in the eyes. ‘I’ve got kids who behave like this,’ I replied, and she paused for thought.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two girls.’

  ‘Little angels, I’m sure,’ she said, and her expression let me know she was glad I’d told her.

  ‘Like their mother,’ I told her. ‘Must be the reason I married her.’ I looked into her eyes, wondering what she was thinking. She didn’t look disappointed, just thoughtful.

  ‘I’m engaged to a lawyer back home. We’re getting married in four months.’ She replied in an emotionless monotone, looking to see my reaction.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were engaged last night!’ I was surprised, bearing in mind her body language and the crackling chemistry between us.

  ‘Well,’ she smiled, standing a little too close to me to be completely platonic. ‘You never told me you were married.’

  Dai finally stood back puffing and stared at Cobus.

  ‘You must give up this smoking, Dai. It’s going to kill you, man,’ he said.

  Cobus grinned and adjusted what I realized was his disguise. Our South African straight man was wearing black dungarees and there was a red and white shemagh wrapped expertly about his skull.

  He had dropped his bag and now bent to open the long zip. He pulled out two grubby coats, one that I’d worn earlier in the day, and a couple of spare shemaghs. A lot of PSDs travel in matching cars and barge through the traffic like the cavalry. We kept a low profile. Our disguises wouldn’t fool anyone up close, but from a distance, in a speeding vehicle, our silhouettes would blend right in with the locals.

  Tanya carried a clipboard and a couple of bags with some goodies from the PX for Sammy’s family. She was standing so close to me I could smell her hair.

  Cobus held up a dark green double-breasted coat with half the buttons missing.

  ‘You’re having a laugh, mate,’ said Dai.

  ‘I have no sense of humour,’ Cobus replied, smiling still.

  ‘I’m supposed to be on fucking leave.’

  Good soldier that he was, Dai always whinged but then always did what had to be done. We dressed and turned to the three vehicles. There was a black M-class seven-seater Mercedes dented in the driving door; the predictable white Nissan Patrol furred in dust; and a bronze Toyota Isuzu the colour of the desert.

  Tanya walked over to them and kicked a couple of jerry cans.

  ‘The vehicles have been sat here for a week now, and the locals have siphoned all the gas out, so I took the liberty of filling a few jerry cans for you guys.’

  ‘Not bad, darling,’ Dai said. ‘Did you do it all by yourself?’

  ‘Sure did.’

  He shook his head. ‘You lot are taking over. Next fing you know, there’ll be a bloody woman in the White House,’ Dai predicted. ‘Still, couldn’t be any worse than that wanker you’ve got at the moment.’

  ‘It may come as a surprise to you, Dai, but I happen to like Mr Bush.’

  ‘No accounting for taste.’

  ‘He’s cute,’ she said, ‘I always like strange men,’ and turned with a wink in my direction.

  She now shoved the clipboard under Dai’s nose. There were the inevitable Department of Defense forms to sign in order to allow us to fill up from the fuel depot in the Green Zone later on. I started thinking again about how little back-up infrastructure we had for our team. Lifting Sammy out of Baghdad looked easy and, in my experience, the easier a tasking seems, often the harder it turns out.

  Cobus stared up at the sky. The first stars had begun to appear, their light dimmed by the smog like the light of knowledge.

  I’d made a mess of my turban. Tanya fixed it for me.

  ‘There, that should do it,’ she said, and pulled on my lapels to reach up and plant a kiss on my cheek that ended up on the corner of my lips. I could smell her perfume; it was musky, feral, sensuous.

  ‘I guess I’ll see you when I get back from Basra,’ she said. ‘Shame you’re married,’ she breathed gently in my ear.

  Funny, that’s exactly what I had been thinking.

  She marched off with her clipboard, papers signed, job done. I stared.

  ‘Oi, Casanova, you fucking coming or what?’

  Dai and Cobus were already fuelling their vehicles. I ran over, dumped my pack in the back seat, grabbed my jerry can, popped the funnel in and started doing mine. We were surrounded instantly by the strong odour of petrol fumes. I glanced over alarmed as I realised that Dai was still smoking his cigarette.

  We climbed into our individual cars and, after a quick radio check, drove off through the Green Zone to the fuel dump. The paperwork was fine and we filled up the vehicles and the jerry cans stacked in the back of each. We would need every drop to get up to Mosul, with potentially few refuelling stops for the convoy. Each car also held spare weapons – for Sammy and his brother – plus ammunition, medical packs, the lot.

  With that job done we did another radio check to each other, then pulled out and headed over the 14 July Bridge. The plan was all to go in one trip, since the 14 July Bridge exit was at the start of Karada and it was literally a two-minute drive to another safe house where we were planning on stashing the vehicles. With the three of us as individual drivers in different vehicles mixing with the traffic, it was highly unlikely that anyone would even look twice at us.

  The second safe house was a shophouse, with a little shop on the ground floor and an apartment above it, where Sammy’s cousin Gabir and his family lived. It was near the river, beyond the Shia market where car bombs and suicide bombers had left more than 100 dead and injured during the previous twelve months. After thirty years of enforced harmony under Saddam, Sunni and Shia neighbours eyed each other suspiciously now that he’d gone.

  It was useful that the shophouse was close to the Mashooen family. On the day of the bug-out, the three vehicles, already packed, would arrive quickly and remain only briefly outside the safe house – a time when the hustle of eleven Sunnis with their baggage and all of us whitefaces armed to the teeth would be hard to conceal. Colonel Ibrahim would probably be informed in about two minutes. Even if he was unable to prevent the escape, he would know Sammy was on the run and it wouldn’t require Sherlock Holmes to work out where he was going.

  I was running this through my mind as we crossed the 14 July Bridge. We shot by the growling generator powering the harsh portable floodlights of the checkpoint, through the long shadow of the last guntower and came off the traffic circle to slide through the empty streets.

  We accelerated to a steady 100 klicks. After nightfall the militia and criminal gunmen went about their murderous deeds: al-Qaeda planting IEDs; Mahdi elements assassinating Sunni ‘traitors and apostates’; bandits robbing, kidnapping and killing for revenge and reward. US patrols were sporadic, and during the hours of darkness the streets belonged to the bad guys.<
br />
  Cobus gave calm directions over the radio. No more swearing or banter from Dai. With each of us driving solo we were totally focused, trying to see in all directions at once. We followed the long loop of the Tigris and turned left into an unlit street of warehouses. Gabir’s store faced the water and wasn’t overlooked by other buildings. It was dark, shadowy, silent. Cobus had obviously called to say we were on the way because as soon as we pulled up the door slid open. Barely braking, Cobus drove straight in, his headlights beaming a sudden flare of light into the dark garage. Dai and I drove right in behind him, squeezed up bumper to bumper.

  Gabir was inside with Sammy. The door shut behind us and we killed the engines and lights. The store was lit by a couple of oil lamps, the light dancing with the sudden movement, the smell of fumes nauseating in the confined space. Sammy had a wide grin and, when he put his arms out for a hug, Dai lifted him clean off the floor.

  ‘Fuck me, you’re getting fatter,’ he said.

  ‘No, Mister Dai, you are getting older,’ he replied. Sammy glanced at us in our shemaghs and turned to his cousin. ‘You see, Gabir, now everyone is Iraqi.’

  Gabir was pixie-like with a neat moustache, a pointed head and small dark eyes that flicked from face to face like a startled bird. I wasn’t sure if he was more nervous of storing the vehicles in his garage or of us, the foreigners, bringing them. Gabir was a middleman, buying and warehousing goods. In the complex rationale of Sunni–Shia hatreds, as Fara’s cousin, he wasn’t the same bloodline as Sammy and remained nominally safe from Colonel Ibrahim’s net. At least that was the thinking.

  ‘Tea time, Mister James,’ Sammy said.

  ‘Just James, please,’ I replied.

  He threw up his plump hands and I followed him into the office, a cubicle little bigger than a telephone box to one side of the garage. There were two chairs, one piled with battered files, and pinned to the wall were handwritten bills of lading. The papers on the desk had been swept to one side and in the centre stood three tulip-shaped glasses Sammy filled with scalding mint tea. There was a plate with cakes ‘made by Fara’.

  ‘Please, you are my guests,’ said Gabir.

  We ate cake. We burned our fingertips on the glasses as we sipped sickly sweet chai. Dai pulled out a packet of Marlboros. Smoking American cigarettes was like owning a piece of America. As smoking declines in the West, the tobacco giants follow the tanks into the Third World and plant their billboards.

  He tapped out a couple of cigarettes and passed the blue flame of his lighter over the fizzing ends of the two fags Sammy and Gabir stuck between their lips. He closed the Zippo and opened it again to light his own. They said in the First World War that the third light was unlucky and soldiers are notoriously superstitious.

  As we finished our tea we decided to leave the weapons and ammo in the vehicles. It was just asking for bad luck for Sammy to take them home. He ran the chance of getting picked up by an American patrol and being taken in. He drove around with a rifle anyway, for which he had a permit. But explaining away half a dozen rifles and two thousand rounds would be a different matter.

  Gabir assured us, through Sammy interpreting, that the garage was secure; only he had the keys to it. Sammy and Gabir would spend the rest of the night packing the vehicles up in advance with the Masshoen family baggage.

  I grabbed the bags we’d brought along from the PX and handed them over to Sammy. There was plenty of candy for the kids, cigarettes, shampoo and all sorts of goodies that Tanya and Mad Dog had bought up.

  ‘This should keep you going,’ I said.

  ‘Mister James, please . . .’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank the United States government.’

  ‘The American, they are too kind,’ Sammy said, and I thought, If they’d been a bit kinder they would have looked after their interpreters and I’d still be on the beach playing frisbee.

  We moved back out into the street, hands on our AKs under the coats. The street was deserted. The moonlight was bright, revealing in the shadows Cobus’s other car, a black Nissan, a white van with Arabic logos and Sammy’s yellow Toyota, the back left side drilled with holes from where my own Spartan guards had tried to gun me down over a year ago.

  ‘Still going?’ I smiled looking at the old car, remembering a hundred trips to the range in it.

  ‘Like a dream,’ Sammy replied. He looked from me to Dai and back again. ‘Mister James, Mister Dai, I still cannot believe it, you are here.’

  ‘Neither can I, mate,’ said Dai in disgust. ‘I’m on fucking R&R!’

  ‘OK, guys, let’s go. We are going to Aradisa Idah now.’ Cobus was already in the Nissan, in the driver’s seat.

  Gabir offered me his hand and I took it.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, glancing at Sammy, and it was strangely moving the way he cupped my hand between his palms.

  Gabir slid the door back. We slung in our bags and piled in, Dai in the back, me up front. After a hurried goodbye, we took off. Cobus accelerated along the riverbank and took a different route, keeping to the backstreets. We thumped over barely seen potholes, and crawled around alleys, but it was safer. After four years of war, a single car packed with bulky men tended to draw the eye of civilians and soldiers both. The streets weren’t just quiet. They were dead. The shadows lay heavy. It was like there had been a plague, the people had died or fled and the buildings that remained were like stone footprints following on from the Babylonians, the Abbasids; as if all that ever remains of a people are their empty buildings.

  The darkened glass of the car windows framed fleeting cityscapes. A row of gutted houses, a stretch of empty land littered with the shells of bombed and burned-out cars, the light above the oil refinery like a strange planet. A line of new electricity pylons loomed up like demons – like nude, giant girls that have no secrets, as the poet Stephen Spender wrote. By day companies that had won juicy contracts would lay copper cables and at night ali-babas would dig them up again. The War on Terror wasn’t just an open bank for hired guns, it was a licence to print money for the reconstruction companies and thieves alike.

  Finally, after ten minutes Cobus judged we were far enough east and we got back on to the main street.

  ‘Truck approaching at speed,’ Dai said from the back.

  Cobus pulled tight to the sidewalk. The truck hurtled by at 150 klicks, the grim jundhi behind the wheel choosing speed as his ally. Trucks usually travel in convoy with armed guards and circle the wagons at night. A lone trucker at that hour was either mad or up to mischief.

  I recognized the area; we were about ten minutes away from our old patch. I prepared myself in advance for the déjà vu experience of coming back through the looking glass, but already a part of me knew that I was going to be less affected. I had already significantly re-acclimatised to being in Baghdad, not least because we were back in the danger zone and had to be totally switched on.

  I couldn’t believe my own ears as, without thinking, the words just came out of my mouth. ‘Quiet, isn’t it? So far so good.’

  You never, ever tempt fate.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ muttered Dai, ‘that’s just asking for it, isn’t it? I can’t believe you just said the fucking “Q” word.’

  Cobus sat grimly at my side, window down an inch, and clenched his jaw, his wide shoulders blocking my left view.

  ‘Rooftops left,’ Cobus said. ‘Three men.’ He accelerated.

  Wow, I thought, Fate works fast. But nothing happened. We left them behind.

  They’d taken a look at us and let it go. Perhaps we were moving too fast? Perhaps the shemaghs we were wearing had helped? Perhaps they’d buzzed their chums further down the line?

  I thought about Tanya Carillo for two seconds, and then got back into my zone and focused on my arcs again.

  My window was down a couple of inches, enough to let some air in, and thank God it wasn’t the dusty season, when you breathed the stuff in like a fine mist. The air tasted musky, sensuous, with only a hint
of diesel and mud. Nothing moved except the moon slipping like glass across the sky. We were making a wide circle to approach Aradisa Idah from the north.

  I noticed a black BMW approaching from behind in the mirror and let Dai know. He swivelled around and knelt on the back seat, so as to bring his weapon up quickly if necessary. Cobus kept an eye on them through the side mirrors.

  ‘Four men inside,’ said Dai.

  Cobus slowed down to let them pass. They drew up alongside, had a look in at us then dropped behind again. Cobus sped up and they accelerated as well.

  ‘Ach, these oaks are up to some shit, man. I will try and lose them. Dai get ready to wave them off if we cannot shake them.’

  Cobus rammed his foot down and swung the car left and right, feigning that he was going one way, then going the other. We screeched off the main road, looped around a block of buildings and came back on to the highway. Cobus floored it and we gained a couple of hundred metres before they came back out behind us. They accelerated steadily and this time in the rear-view mirror I saw two men emerge from the windows on each side, holding AKs. We all swore at the same time.

  ‘Give ’em a couple of warning shots, they might be cops,’ I said.

  I started opening my window fully to get some shots off if necessary. In a sudden contact you wouldn’t bother, you would just fire through the door or the window, but this looked to be a long chase and I couldn’t fire straight out the back window with Dai sat right behind me. Also there was no point in making a mess of the windows now to draw attention to us later on. It’s also noisy as hell, if I am honest, and I didn’t fancy going deaf.

  Dai leaned out of his window and waved a red torch from side to side, then fired a couple of shots into the road in front of the rapidly gaining car. Cobus hit the four-way flashers on for a few seconds as well.

  The reaction was immediate. The other car switched its headlights on full beam in an attempt to blind us, and the two gunmen on each side opened up. Their accuracy was awful and nothing came near our car. Tough for them. It was big boys’ rules now, and we were free to return fire. They were about to have a bad day at the office.