Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  ‘Talking of the old trouble and strife, how’s the family, Ash?’ Seamus added.

  ‘Couldn’t be better. Two girls. They want a puppy now.’

  ‘Don’t get a dog, mate, tie you down worse than wives,’ said Dai, and he turned to Les. ‘Listen, how’s the new lady?’

  ‘Shagging him out,’ Seamus answered for him.

  ‘Still,’ said Les. ‘Nice way to go.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to make it,’ I said.

  ‘Me? Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

  ‘No one’s told him we’re not getting paid for this lark,’ said Dai.

  ‘Not getting paid! You fucking joking?’ screamed Les. ‘Oi, Rupert, stop the wagon, I’m getting out.’

  I hardly needed to be told to stop. The traffic had backed up. Cars were crawling into a bottleneck, trying to get around a stationary truck parked in the inside lane. We all became even more alert and studied our surroundings intently.

  Les pointed at a man beating a carpet out on a balcony to our right. ‘Hello, old Abdul’s having trouble getting it started this morning.’

  It was an old joke but we all still chuckled anyway.

  ‘Fuck me crossways,’ said Dai. ‘There’s something you don’t see every day. Look at that cunt.’

  A red Toyota hung in a tangled mess from the grill of the truck like a dead gazelle in the jaws of a lion. Two filthy flip-flops lay in the debris beside a tall old man with a bushy grey beard stretched out on the tarmac in a bloody dish-dash. There were splashes of blood and chips of glass strewn across the road. Three women swathed in black were hollering and cackling.

  ‘The jundhi must have scarpered,’ said Seamus.

  We were close to a row of buildings – half-built or half-destroyed, it was hard to tell – definitely not a good place for white-eyes to be stuck in a jam. The side windows were down far enough to let in the stench of rotting garbage, decaying animals, burning tyres, human waste.

  At night, Baghdad takes on a certain charm with the boxy buildings and brooding palms creating a cubist landscape. The darkness hides the turmoil, the remains of motor cars, sacrifices to the highway pushed to the wasteland beside the road, as someone in time would remove the red Toyota, its parts like human organs would be salvaged, and the shell would shelter orphans and widows and scavengers too poor to warrant a bullet from the insurgents and militias who ruled the night. This time of morning there were no shadows to veil Baghdad’s ugliness.

  There was in the Nissan an air of caution, not fear, but out there in the chaos that had evolved since 2003 everyone was afraid – afraid for their lives, of the neighbours, for the future. Men were afraid to express opinions, and where the religious fanatics held sway women were afraid to open their mouths. Iraq was no longer a land where Sammy and Fara could bring up their children and have decent lives.

  That’s what had brought the guys back to Baghdad. They were men with a firm sense of right and wrong. I am sure if Mad Dog had asked Seamus or Les or Dai to lead a team to escort Sammy and his family out of the city, they would have done so. It just came about that he had asked me.

  Usually I tried not to dwell too deeply on my work as a security contractor, about who I was, what karma I was accruing, as Krista once said. Now, at least, I was sure I was doing the right thing. I owed it to Sammy. I had no idea of the genuine reason for the invasion but, as General Mashooen had rightly said, Iraq has always survived the invader and toppling Saddam would be beneficial to the people in the long term. The oil, after all, would be there long after the Americans had left.

  We did our rubber-necking. The old guy was dead. One of the women had got to her feet and was slapping the side windows of the vehicles passing her by. Her unveiled face with blue tattoos marked her as belonging to some tribe beyond Baghdad, her distorted features a portrait of horror and alienation, of blind fear. The old guy was probably the breadwinner, the women – wives or daughters – were trapped in the steel river of impatient cars with passengers armed with loaded guns and perilous journeys ahead of them. There were no Good Samaritans on that road. In any event I could see the IP coming up the road, blue lights flashing and horns blaring. They would take care of this.

  We pulled into the Green Zone via the BIAP gate and zoomed towards the embassy.

  ‘There’s the old parade ground, and the tomb of the unknown soldier,’ said Seamus looking out the window as we passed the Crossed Swords. ‘Mate, I cannot believe we are back.’

  And I knew he was experiencing that strange sense of homecoming to this foreign country that had become part of us, yet which none of us had expected to see again.

  ‘It’ll be good to see Mad Dog again, and that bloody thieving Yaapie, Cobus,’ added Les.

  ‘I’ll just give ’em a call, mate, and let them know that we’re on our way,’ said Dai, getting out his Iraqna mobile.

  ‘Hello, Cobus, it’s me. Yeah, we’re in the Green Zone, just coming past the Crossed Swords, mate . . . Yes both of them . . .’

  There was a long silence on the phone. In the rear-view mirror I watched Dai’s features harden. He tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Jim, drive straight to the Cash, mate, Cobus is waiting for us there.’

  Momentarily befuddled, I took the wrong road and had to back up and do a U-turn to get back on track. After all the chit-chat, no one spoke again until we reached the Combat Support Hospital. Cobus was standing out in front by himself, no body armour, just his pistol in his belt and a daysack on his back.

  ‘Cobus, you OK?’

  ‘Ja, ja, I’m fine.’

  He didn’t smile as he shook hands with Les and Seamus. He took a breath and glanced at each of us in turn.

  ‘It’s Colonel McQueen,’ he said, then he looked at me. ‘And Tanya. They were both wounded early this morning. The convoy didn’t even get twenty Ks out of Baghdad. It was completely destroyed, man. Every vehicle shot out. All the PSDs dead or wounded. It was another military convoy brought them back in.’

  We stood there in shock. No one spoke.

  ‘She’s asking for you,’ added Cobus, motioning at my rifle. ‘You must leave your long here in the wagon. Net hand wapens inside.’ Pistols only.

  I felt like a fist was clenching my guts. I unslung my rifle, took off my body armour and put them in the car. Cobus was saying that McQueen was seriously injured and had already been casevaced to the BIAP, military side. He was probably already on a plane to Ramstein en route to the US military hospital at Landstuhl.

  He led me into the CSH, around a few turns, which I memorized absent-mindedly.

  ‘How badly wounded is she, mate?’

  ‘Not too bad.’ Cobus put on a brave face. ‘Broken leg and some shrapnel, she’ll be fine. But they need the beds here since there are more serious casualties expected all the time because of the Surge. She wants to see you before they move her down to Basra or out to Germany.’

  ‘I’ll leave you here, man. Meet you back out the front.’

  I entered a large bright room with white walls and neat charts. She was the only occupant. She looked up with a faint smile. I was shocked at how pale she looked.

  ‘Oh Jesus, don’t look at me like that.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not dead – just got a broken leg. I only got two hours’ sleep last night, this is what I look like in the morning without makeup!’

  ‘You look as beautiful as ever,’ I assured her.

  ‘That’s enough of your Brit charm, Ash,’ she said. ‘I gotta tell you about the colonel.’

  I pulled up a chair and took her hand. I gently squeezed her fingers as she told me what had happened. The convoy had left at 3a.m., a bunch of containers on trucks driven by local jundhis and escorted by McQueen, Tanya and an American civilian contractor team. No military vehicles, only big GMC Suburban SUVs, one armoured and the rest converted into gun trucks.

  ‘The PSDs were a bunch of complete idiots,’ she said bitterly. ‘They were all wearing their do-rags instead of helmets,
those stupid little goatees, bare arms with big tattoos, knives and grenades strapped all over them . . .’

  ‘Like Rambo,’ I said.

  ‘Without the brains. Instead of doing anything constructive like going over the route, they were too busy checking out their reflections and making sure they looked like bad-asses. They were a fucking joke,’ she continued. ‘One of these guys was wearing his shades and it’s like fucking 3a.m. and still pitch black.’

  ‘Where d’you find these guys?’

  ‘I don’t, Ash, they’ve got a contract. Colonel McQueen always used to tell me how professional you guys were, and I could tell it with Cobus driving us around. I mean, he never used to show off or tell me how tough he was.’ She stopped to sip some water, tears of outrage in her eyes.

  ‘Cobus is a pro,’ I said, thinking to myself he was more like a wolf amidst sheep.

  ‘You said that right. Jesus he could have had all of these guys for breakfast.’ She put her glass down. ‘So anyway, once these asshats all finished hitting on me, checking out my tits and ass, and telling me their “street names” and trying to impress me with their warrior-code bullshit, we finally got on the road.’

  I listened in silence as she calmed down and coolly told me the tale of their nightmare journey.

  They had set off first to Abu Ghraib to pick up the trucks from the depot. They were mortared in the depot and fought off a ground assault. They were mortared again and finally got their small convoy out of the gate and headed back to Baghdad to circle around the highway to the south. The PSDs – the asshats, as she called them – had done nothing during the assault but cower in their vehicles while Mad Dog had picked himself bleeding off the floor, rallied the depot sentries and directed fire at the enemy.

  I would learn later that he had already suffered serious injuries by this stage, but was determined to get the convoy down to Basra. Securing the perimeter, marking out the unexploded mortar shells and rounding up the terrified civilian truck drivers had wasted precious time.

  ‘So it’s already like 06.30 hours, probably nearer seven, dawn is on the horizon, and the colonel is seriously pissed because we haven’t even left yet. He stuck me in the armoured SUV with a couple of PSD shooters to bring up the rear of the convoy and took the lead with the other PSDs in the front gun truck. He ordered me to holler on the radio if the rear trucks started to lag too far behind, then we headed out the front gate.’

  They had circled the city and started making their way south. I knew the road, and understood the relief they had felt as they passed safely through the bandit town of Mahmudiyah.

  ‘Oh, and this PSD next to me in the vehicle, a guy called John Hunt, that same dickhead wearing the shades, he was a real whiner the whole time. He’s this really short, chubby, wimp with serious small-man syndrome. He kept wanting me to call him by his street-tag, “Blade”, but I refused. Even the other PSDs thought he was a jerk. Hunt had been mouthing off in the Green Zone about what a bad dude he was, but after the mortars he was literally crying and kept asking every five minutes if we should just cancel the convoy and head back to the Green Zone.’

  She was doing another radio check with McQueen when the world exploded. Daisy-chain IEDs buried on the roadside devastated the convoy and blew half the vehicles off the road in front of her. Even as she screeched to a halt, enemy machine-guns opened up on the surviving vehicles.

  ‘I was in shock. There was no return fire at all,’ Tanya said. ‘The colonel, well I was waiting for him to give orders over the radio, but he wasn’t saying anything, nor answering me when I called. I didn’t know what to do because our immediate action was supposed to be to drive out of it, but all the vehicles were stopped. I mean, they were all on fire apart from us. It took me a while to realize we had to get out and fight.’

  ‘First rule, return fire,’ I said.

  Her eyes searched mine for understanding, and she relaxed, obviously seeing it there. The unexpected is just that, unexpected, and it often takes time for the brain to forget about being surprised and overloaded with new information.

  ‘So I cracked my door, poked my rifle out past the armour and started firing back at the AIF,’ she said.

  It was a brave reaction, but a trained operator would have crawled over the passenger seat to debus from the vehicle on the side facing away from the enemy, then got away from those bullet and RPG magnets as fast as possible. Tanya was a clerk, not an infantryman, but she was still a US soldier and determined to hit back.

  It was then, she said, that she had seen movement in the tree-line off to the left-hand side of the road, the enemy pouring bullets into the convoy. The American contractors still standing were firing and moving off to the right-hand side, away from the enemy fire. The Iraqi civilian drivers had either run off immediately or were dead. Colonel McQueen was still on the road, running up the line of the convoy towards the rear, and checking the cabs of each vehicle for casualties.

  Then a secondary explosion on the road had picked him up and thrown him nearly 10m.

  One of the PSDs had turned back and run to McQueen, a Kurdish ex-Peshmerga, Tanya had realized.

  ‘I yelled at the shooters in my car to get some goddamn fire down and cover them, and we all started firing. I could see the Kurdish guy is now pulling big chunks of smoking shrapnel out of the colonel with his fucking Leatherman pliers!’ she said and a hopeless smile crossed her lips. ‘In the meantime, this fucking contractor, Hunt, is shrieking next to me so loudly I nearly shot him to shut him up. He was always giving it to us how important he was, and how he was “the man”, and now we’re in trouble he is literally weeping and snotting all down his shirt. That fucking asshole never fired a single shot during the whole contact.’

  As the Peshmerga started dragging McQueen away, Tanya had emptied her magazine out at the enemy positions, aiming at their muzzle flash and smoke. She stopped, dumped her mag and reloaded.

  ‘I don’t know how many I got. I’m pretty sure I dropped a couple of AIF, and then a couple more went down. At least some of the firing stopped, so I reckon I either hit those guys or made them change position. Then an RPG hit the front of the SUV and blew me the fuck up,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Thank God you’re here to tell the story,’ I said.

  She was gripping my hand tightly, belying the calm expression on her face.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  She had woken up in terrible pain. The armoured passenger compartment had shielded her, but the front of the SUV, including the engine, had vanished. Her left leg was broken and full of shrapnel, and she couldn’t move. Piercing agony ripped through her as she tried to shift her leg.

  She looked to her right, where the PSDs who were still alive had bunkered down in a ditch and were pinging a couple of shots back across at the enemy. With growing horror she realized that she was the only person left on the road. On her left, an assault line of insurgents was walking steadily towards the burning convoy, firing into the vehicles.

  ‘I couldn’t find my rifle. I thought it must have been blown out of the SUV, and there was dust and smoke everywhere.’ Tanya’s voice was steady but the smile had gone now. ‘I looked out again and I could see that maggot Hunt crawling away with my fucking rifle. That shithead left me there and took my weapon.’

  I made a mental note that this John Hunt was someone I would do my best to find and have a word with.

  ‘Hunt stood up to run and got shot about a hundred times,’ she said, saving me a job. ‘He went down like a sack and lay there crying until he died. I called out the open door to those PSD jerks to come help me but no one budged from their positions. I tried to move again, but it hurt so much and I couldn’t reach down and free my foot.’

  When she glanced back towards the ditch, she watched Mad Dog rise up from where the loyal Peshmerga had dragged him before being killed himself.

  ‘I tell you Ash, the colonel looked like frozen shit warmed up,’ she said and the smile was back again.
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  McQueen by this time had a long list of injuries: he had been hit in the legs, abdomen and back by shrapnel that had punched straight through his body armour and compacted half his vertebrae. He had lost the use of his right arm, which would be shattered permanently, his right eye and his right ear, and had severe facial injuries.

  None of the contractors came with him. A full-bird colonel, fifty-six years old, wounded and half-blind, McQueen came up on to the road and attacked the insurgents alone. Firing his rifle with his left hand, Mad Dog staggered forward and managed to drop six insurgents before the rest realized where he was and took cover, pouring fire into the armoured chassis of the SUV. McQueen collapsed against the SUV, leaned around it and shot another two enemy before his rifle was empty. Almost dropping from blood loss, Mad Dog didn’t try and reload, but let his rifle drop on its sling, grimly ignored the enemy fire and reached in to start freeing Tanya.

  ‘I tell you what, I thought we were both dead.’

  She looked me in the eye, and I was starting to think this was a bullshit story – there was no obvious way that they could plausibly have escaped this impossible situation.

  ‘And then,’ she paused for dramatic effect, ‘I have never been so glad in all my born days. An army convoy came up the road the other way from the south, came straight on up right into the ambush zone and started machine-gunning the fuck out of those AIF. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. So then the colonel pulls me out on to his shoulders. We nearly both fall down, and then he stands up, and there, right in front of us not four feet away, is a fucking I-raqi pointing an AK at us. I shit you not.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I breathed. ‘So what happened? He let you go?’

  ‘No! He starts laughing,’ she answered. ‘We are totally fucked. The colonel is practically dead and is blind and covered in blood with me on his shoulders and his right hand stuffed into his belt to keep it out of the way – and I don’t even have a weapon . . . I mean, we are totally fucked, right?’ She paused again. ‘And then as the I-raqi brings the AK up to nail us, there are two loud bangs and I think to myself, Oh Jesus, he just shot the colonel and I’m next, but then the insurgent falls over with two holes in his face. I look down and I see the colonel is holding his M9 in his left hand.’