Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  I keyed in the numbers. Krista answered on the second ring.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘James, hi. You all right?’ It was always her first question.

  ‘Never been better,’ I said, ‘ah . . . except when I’m home with you, that is.’

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’

  I chatted with Veronica in baby language, then Natalie got on the phone.

  ‘Where are you, Daddy?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m up on the roof of a big house, Princess.’

  ‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

  ‘You sound like Mummy.’

  ‘Is it, though?’

  ‘No, darling. Not at all. How’s school?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘What did you learn today?’

  There was a long pause. ‘I can’t remember,’ she said.

  ‘Can’t remember?’

  ‘Yes I can,’ she said and started reciting. ‘Once nine is nine, two nines are eighteen, three nines are twenty-seven . . .’

  This would have gone on but Krista must have wrestled the phone from her.

  ‘That’s lovely, darling, Daddy hasn’t got much time,’ I heard her say. She came back on the line and was immediately businesslike, although I could hear plaintive bleating from our youngest daughter, and I could see in my mind’s eye Krista walking, bouncing Veronica on her hip trying to calm her down.

  ‘Are you going to be back for Sunday lunch?’ Krista asked.

  ‘Maybe . . .’

  At that moment, gunfire erupted out of the night and bullets hammered against the wall surrounding the old warehouse beside the villa.

  ‘I heard that . . .’

  ‘Uh, gotta go, sweetheart, people to do . . .’

  ‘Be careful, darling, call me back when you’re done.’

  ‘Love you.’

  I was talking to myself. The phone was dead. Krista would now read Natalie a story and all the time she’d be worried about me far away in a foreign darkness.

  Everyone ran back into the villa to get tooled up. Our sentries on the riverside wall were returning fire, shouting in Kurdish and English. I couldn’t see the firing point but was fairly calm, thinking that it must be across the river directly west of us, nearly 300m away.

  Dai pounded along beside me. ‘Fucking hell, Jim, you’re a bullet magnet you are. You didn’t say the fucking “Q” word again, did you?’

  ‘No, mate, the bad men must have something contagious going around. Or lots of bullets they need to shoot off before the sell-by date.’

  I ignored my AK, sprinted for the stairs and rushed up to the roof. The last time I had been in the villa the team had had weapons ready in all the firing positions as if the Easter Bunny had been around dropping off guns and ammo. As I got to the main balcony, though, I realised that I was surplus to requirements. The enemy firing point was a boat floating in the middle of the river 100m away.

  Kurdish sentries had jumped down from the wall and had actually run to the water’s edge to return fire. From the wall and every balcony on the main building, machine-gun fire flayed the boat from the SF team. The volume of fire was such that Dai wasn’t even bothering to look for a weapon. He did, however, grab a night-vision scope and go to the other side of the roof to see if this was just a diversion for another attack from the other side.

  The jihadis on board the boat must have been nutters to take on Special Forces in their own villa. Nutters or martyrs rushing into the arms of the virgins lined up in suicide heaven. The only thing going for them was the current carrying them to safety. They had almost missed the villa before opening fire and were heading around the long curving bend that would cut off our line of sight.

  Davor was on a satellite link, giving a calm sitrep to headquarters. Rick was behind the firing line, coordinating fire and also on another radio making sure that the guys on the other side of the villa at the front gate were doing the same as Dai and Cobus, keeping their eyes open for an attack from the east side of the compound.

  ‘Yes, confirmed hostile fire from the boat, at least two machine-guns. Fuck it, they’re moving out of sight,’ Mark said. He was on a walkie-talkie, yelling at people to move down the shoreline and keep up the fire on the boat as it rounded the bend. Apparently without success since Kurdish gibberish was the only reply he got.

  ‘Goddamn, why don’t these assholes speak American!’

  I knew that most of the team if not all were fluent Arabic-speakers, but I guess that the focus at language school had not included Kurdish unless you were posted to the north.

  ‘Don’t you have any wheels?’ I returned and his eyes lit up.

  We raced back downstairs and this time I did pick up my vest and AK before following him out of the door. As I came out he was already gunning the engine of a Humvee facing south towards the end of the small island on which the villa had been built. I jumped in the back and he pulled off down the road. He was wearing PNGs and the headlights were off, so as not to give our position away to the enemy.

  The Humvee had two weapons on the back, a .50 cal on a turret ring, and a 240 GPMG at the back. After fumbling around in the dark I gave up on the 240, stumped by the canvas dust cover firmly buckled around it. I just couldn’t see the buckles. For some reason the 50 was uncovered, so I wriggled up into the ring and broke off the seal on the box of ammo ready in the cage next to the gun.

  I whipped out the end of the belt, surprised at how stable the ride was as Mark zoomed the Humvee down the shoreline. We were hidden from the boat by a thick line of trees. I guess the previous owner of the villa had insisted on smooth asphalt being laid around his estate. I swivelled the gun to the right and went through the loading drill, feeding the rounds in, jerking back on the cocking handle, releasing the bolt, jerking back the handle and releasing the bolt again.

  Job done, there was nothing more to do but wait while Mark continued down the road, looking for a decent firing position. I locked the bolt release on automatic and occupied myself by digging around in my vest for my ear plugs, which I always carried in case I ended up at the range. The .50 cal was a noisy bugger and my ears were still a little tinny from the contact earlier and then hearing the shooting from the roof. I found them, rolled them up and stuffed them in my ears just as we pulled up behind a lone fishing shack at the end of a spit of land.

  ‘Here.’ Mark was handing a set of PVS night-vision goggles to me.

  I put them on and fumbled around. ‘Shit, Mark, I’ve never used these Yank models, where’s the switch?’

  He reached over to my head, switched it on, then got back to uncovering the 240 and loading it up.

  Immediately my world was illuminated in impressive detail. I could see the fishing boat clearly now, lit up by what looked like twenty lasers from the villa. But I had seen war at night before. What seemed like a crazy lighting show from a rock concert, I knew was careful and rapid scanning from a dozen or more professionals looking for targets. In the confusion of a dynamic assault you might only have lasers from the team commander and the 2i/c on each flank, using their beams to indicate left and right boundaries of movement for the team. But in this static defence everyone was free to use them for rapid target acquisition or indication.

  I had no comms with the villa, but I turned on my PEQ2 laser on top of the .50 to let them know we were in position at the tip of the island.

  I readjusted the turret ring and checked the gun was able to swivel freely. Then I waited. There was no movement from the boat. Having passed through the gauntlet of fire from the team up at the villa I would have been surprised if there had been any.

  One by one the lasers all switched off from the villa. The boat was out of line of sight for them. Only Mark and I still had eyes on.

  ‘Are we shooting or are we letting it pass?’ I asked Mark quietly.

  My eyes never left the boat and the barrel of the .50 never ceased searching out the shadows on its superstructure. As the MNF man on the spot, it was his call.

&
nbsp; ‘Are you serious? We’re going to light that sucker up. I can see an armed man at the back.’

  I’m not really sure why we were whispering, because after waiting two seconds the boat was side on to us and Mark let rip with the 240. I followed an instant later. I let him shred what was left of the upper deck and worked my fire along the lower hull at the waterline. Even through the ear plugs it was deafening. Before I knew it I had run through my belt. I threw the empty can behind me and heaved a second box out of the rack and into the ammo mount next to the gun. Five seconds later I had reloaded, ripping back the cocking handle at lightning speed, releasing and doing it again. Even through my NVG I could see that the boat was in pieces and listing heavily, an ironic reverse image of my position just a few days ago, when I was riding a RIB shredded by pirate machine-gun fire.

  I was mindful, after my own experience of abandoning ship and floating about, that survivors from a sinking boat can still get a shot off. I switched to single shot and scanned the surface of the river to the left and right of the boat. If there were any survivors in the water, which I seriously doubted, they were doing what I would be doing in their place; hanging on to the other side of the boat and praying like fuck that the boat would move faster downriver away from those lethal Americans. I also realized that throughout the whole contact I had not seen one of the enemy.

  I bunked down on the top floor in the ladies’ quarters. There were no ladies in the house. Less than an hour had passed. The girls were in bed and Krista sounded relieved when she answered the phone.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I miss you.’

  ‘A likely story.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  We were quiet for a moment.

  ‘What happened, James?’ she then asked.

  ‘A couple of madmen floated down the river and took some pop shots at the house,’ I replied.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes, why do they do it? They can’t win.’

  ‘They’re not trying to win, they just want to be a bloody nuisance,’ I said. ‘They’re waiting for us to pack up and go home so they can fight each other for what’s left.’

  ‘So what about Sunday lunch?’ she said. ‘Alicia and Jamie want to know if we can make it.’

  ‘Ummm, tell you what, ask if we can change it to dinner. I should be back but I don’t know about the flights. Besides, if I get back early, then we can spend Sunday lunch with the girls, just the four of us.’

  ‘OK, that shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll tell them we’ll be over for seven.’

  There was a pause. I could hear her breathing.

  ‘What are you wearing?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, James . . .’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘As it happens, I just stepped out of the bath when you called. I’m not wearing anything but a pair of earrings and some moisturiser. I thought I might put some high heels on and walk around naked for a while.’

  ‘That’s what they call cruel and unusual treatment.’

  ‘You did ask.’

  ‘Love you, darling.’

  ‘Love you, too. See you soon.’

  We did phone kisses and hung up.

  I had a shower myself and then sat on my fold-out cot and sleeping bag, chatting with Cobus and Dai, catching up on news. Cobus cracked his bottle of whisky and he and Dai sipped theirs while I threw a glass back in one.

  In spite of my good intentions, it was Tanya Carillo who visited my dreams that night in Aradisa Idah. It was weird and confused. Mortars were raining down over the Green Zone. I was looking for Tanya and, when I eventually found her, she was lying in a trench covered with blood.

  Dreams to me are meaningless and I dismissed it as the light of morning pierced the shutters. The smell of freshly brewed coffee was seeping up the stairs and passageways. American logistics are phenomenal, and although the SF team were happy to source local food, the freshly ground coffee was a top-notch American brand that was definitely the best part of waking up. I drank two cups, shovelled in a mound of scrambled eggs with pita bread and was bright-eyed and beaming as Cobus, Dai and I jumped back in the black Nissan and slid out of the gate at 09.00, deliberately after the usual morning traffic bombs.

  We were off to drop Cobus at the Green Zone car park, and then Dai and I would head straight out to pick up Seamus at the BIAP on the first flight in.

  CHAPTER 13

  SEAMUS HAYES HAD been working as a VIP bodyguard for a young but famous actress. She adored Seamus. She paid him vast sums of money. Obscene amounts. She asked his advice on tour dates and flower arrangements, new houses and new scripts. The star was very intuitive. Each time Seamus was on the verge of quitting, she gave him more money.

  There’s cachet having a military attaché on the staff.

  Who’s the guy with the big moustache?

  My bodyguard. I don’t go anywhere without him.

  When I first met Seamus with Les in Baghdad they were both obviously cut from the same cloth, lean and fit from boxing and running marathons. Professional soldiers from the old-school British Army and hard as coffin nails.

  Les had been too busy falling in love to send me a text but it was a relief to see him striding almost a head taller beside Seamus across the concrete concourse at BIAP. His back was straight as a ramrod, his green eyes glowed and there was a whisper of dark curls creeping over the buttons of his white shirt. As an appreciator of fine art and good architecture, I can without self-consciousness say Les Trevellick was a looker. In fact three girls in fatigues waiting to fly out watched him saunter by and you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what fantasies were playing in their heads.

  Les Trevellick was an ex-Royal Engineer staff sergeant who could build or blow up anything and had done both the Para and Commando course, on which he became an instructor. Seamus Hayes had been in the Paras fourteen years and come out as a colour sergeant. They were both in their forties, like Dai, sharp as Gurkha khukris and fit as a butcher’s dog.

  Seamus and Les dropped their day sacks and greeted Dai and me with big smiles and firm handshakes. Although we’d kept in touch we hadn’t all been together in one spot since the last time we had been in Baghdad.

  ‘Any problems getting through immigration?’ I asked.

  ‘You know what they say, mucker, “Ask no questions, hear no lies.”’ Seamus laughed back at me.

  Dai and I unloaded our bags full of weapons and ammunition for Les and Seamus to get kitted up. Neither of them had been working in a high-threat environment, so Dai and I had brought body armour and helmets as well as the rest of the kit. They filled pouches and checked weapons while ripping the piss out of me with the Rupert routine, beloved of all soldiers, which presupposes all officers are not particularly bright, inbred, upper-class toffs called ‘Rupert’ who have difficulty distinguishing rrrs from wwws, and who possesses the minimum intelligence required to shoot pheasant and quaff port. As I got behind the wheel of the car there was horror on every face.

  ‘Fuck me, Wupert’s dwiving. Are we even going to make it out of the car park?’

  ‘Ha ha. Just get in the fucking wagon or you can walk to the Green Zone.’

  There was more piss-taking along the lines of how I was the worst driver in Baghdad, a reputation I had gained the year before (extremely unfairly, I would like to point out).

  After passing through the BIAP checkpoint, I accelerated along Route Irish, heading for the Green Zone, the metallic clacking as everyone made weapons ready echoing in my ears. I don’t know how the others felt, but with the rest of the old Brit team back together, zooming through the morning traffic, eyes flickering left and right, it felt like I had never been away. I also relaxed, letting go of a tension in my shoulders that I hadn’t realized was there until that moment.

  Driving around with just Cobus, or just Dai, was pushing the limits of prudence. Now that Les and Seamus were here, I understood how much I had come to rely on
them and felt a rush of renewed confidence. We could pull this off in our sleep. We knew this city and the threat environment like the backs of our hands. And, if things did go wrong, there were worse people with whom to face trouble than three hard-as-fuck, armed-to-the-teeth, ex-British Army senior NCOs.

  ‘Dicker up on the bridge,’ said Dai.

  We all noted the potential dicker and then looked around to see what he might be triggering. I screeched into the inside lane as we were approaching the bridge and shot back into the centre as we exited, a cacophony of horn blasts and Arabic blasphemy following us down the highway. Insurgents pay kids and widows small sums to watch the road and warn insurgents with RPGs, and jihadis with their finger on IED remotes, that foreigners are passing.

  In the time that we had been in Iraq there had been lethal contacts on Route Irish nearly every day, even at the peak of the US security efforts with Bradleys and Abrams tanks dug in nearly every 100m. We kept our eyes open. We all knew people who had been shot up on this road.

  We chatted as we watched our arcs, bringing Seamus and Les up to date; saying that we’d be staying in the old SF villa in Aradisa, that the SF guys were all right, that Mad Dog was down in Basra but would be back up the next day to join us on our ride up to Mosul. We did not talk in detail about the tasking; there would be a time and a place and this wasn’t it. Travelling through Baghdad was always risky and now was the time to concentrate on the road and make sure we got back to the zone without any dramas.

  ‘Oh, and don’t forget to tell them about your girlfriend, lover boy,’ said Dai. He explained that I had fallen for McQueen’s new sergeant, to howls of derision from the back seat.

  ‘And you a married man as well, that’s disgusting. I thought officers were gentlemen,’ Seamus scoffed.

  ‘Don’t worry, mate, once she gets a look at me you won’t have to worry about it any more,’ added Les. ‘Poor thing don’t stand a chance – I mean she’s not made of wood, is she?’

  The traffic slowed to a crawl.