There were grunts of agreement from everyone.
‘We need to think of somewhere else for them to go. Let’s talk to Sammy about it when we pick him up. See if he’s got any other havens stashed away in his back pocket.’
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS LUNCHTIME, middle of the day, and we didn’t bother going for the disguises. We peeled out of the car park and headed down the road towards the traffic circle with the statues of the heroic Iraqi soldiers in the middle. We screeched through it, turning left, giving each other quick radio checks when suddenly, halfway up the 14 July Bridge, Cobus slammed the brakes on in front of us and we nearly piled into the back of him.
I looked past him. I could see that the Bradley parked there actually looked alive for once, hatches buttoned down and turret pointing towards us. There were three US soldiers walking towards Cobus and they meant business. All three had weapons tight in the shoulder, eyes looking through sights and barrels directed straight at Cobus.
They were spaced out so as to give each other and the Bradley clear fields of fire. One of them signalled the others to stop and moved forward to Cobus’s window alone. Cobus had his hands up in plain sight, but the soldier still didn’t shift his muzzle from Cobus’s face. I could see them talking and then Cobus showed him his pass from around his neck and the man relaxed and signalled the others to stand down.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ muttered Seamus in front, next to Les. Les was driving, wanting to get back into the Baghdad groove, and to be honest was a much better driver than me. I also wanted some time to think.
Cobus drove off slowly, and we started up and pulled up to the soldiers, who waved us down. We stopped with the windows down and passes ready to show.
‘What seems to be the problem, officer?’ asked Les, smiling.
The soldier appreciated the humour and grinned back.
‘Sorry about this, fellas, but you should all be aware that there is a white SUV driving around the International Zone, full of bad guys. They’ve shot up a couple of people, so tell your buddy up ahead to approach checkpoints with caution, and you guys keep your eyes open driving around inside the zone.’
‘OK, thanks for that. Have a good one, stay safe,’ said Les and we pulled away. ‘Fucking great, that’s all we need. Some nutters driving around raising hell up, inside the Green Zone.’
Up ahead, Cobus saw that we were moving and he accelerated as well. Once past the second Bradley we all made weapons ready. Seamus cocked Les’s rifle.
‘There you go, mate, one up the spout, safety catch on.’
‘Cheers,’ grunted Les as we swung right and left through the chicane of concrete T-barriers. Once past them we accelerated fast towards Karada. On the other side of the road, heading into the Green Zone, was an Australian military packet, a green and brown camouflaged LAV in the lead, its turret swinging left and right in a non-stop oscillation, seeking targets.
We shoved through traffic and in no time we were pulling up outside Gabir’s shophouse.
‘Fuck me,’ said Les.
His window went down. We passed the warehouse, drove on 50m and swung in a U-turn to drive back again. We parked up both wagons in front of the building and debussed.
‘Seamus, Les, you guys stay out here and watch the street,’ I said, and heard the reassuring rasp of metal as one safety after the other was taken off.
The doors to Gabir’s garage were open and smoke was pouring out from a burning car outside the back, in an alley.
Suddenly Sammy was next to me, coming out of a doorway where he had been waiting. I gripped his hand firmly as I exited the car, then got both hands back on my rifle and turned to look at Gabir’s shophouse. I saw the large patch of blood on the street, still drying. Up the road, Cobus had remained next to the 4x4 while Dai had debussed and crossed the road to take up a fire position in a doorway.
I turned back to Gabir’s place. It was an ordinary-looking two-storey building, the same as all the others in the street except for the fact that people were hurrying in and out like it was the entrance to the souk. Two women wrapped in abayas stood opposite, but disappeared quickly when we appeared. A crowd of thickly moustached men, some with shemaghs, were milling around the door leading to the apartment. A van was parked outside, the back doors open, and two men were loading a table with ornate iron legs.
Everything that could be taken was being taken. I noticed Sammy shaking with anger and squeezed his arm. Sammy’s face swelled in anger. He went forward and started screaming at people and slapping men in the face.
As soon as people turned and saw us, five large Westerners in body armour, carrying rifles, they dropped whatever they were carrying and fled. Sammy was ranting and raving with a gold pistol in his belt, and to Iraqis a pistol is a sign of authority, a prestige item amongst the Ba’athists, and thirty years of conditioning had developed an almost spinal reflex of fear at the sight of someone who might be a secret policeman or government agent.
I was thinking we might have to fire a couple of warning shots but it wasn’t necessary. In less than a minute the house was empty apart from two men arguing and shouting with Sammy.
‘What’s going on?’ I said, making sure that both these guys could see Cobus and I pointing AKs at them. ‘Take it easy. Go slowly,’ I said.
He took a deep breath, controlled himself. ‘Yes, Mister James, I am ready,’ he said. ‘This man . . .’ He indicated a man with a thick moustache who looked to my Western eyes to be late fifties, but was probably only forty. ‘This man is a friend, the neighbour of Gabir. Also a cousin. He is trying to stop the ali-babas from stealing everything. He and his brother have taken many of the things from the house and stored them in his house.’ Sammy took another deep breath.
‘Where are the wife and kids?’
‘Still inside, they have locked themselves in the room and will not come out.’
I thought quickly. ‘OK, Sammy, tell him it’s dangerous for him to be seen being friendly to us, tell him for his own safety he has to get down on his knees with his hands on his head and pretend to be our prisoner in case the Shia militias are watching. Tell both of them, now.’
Sammy spoke rapidly in Arabic. Understanding dawned on both their faces and, when I shouted angrily at them and waved my rifle, they both dropped to their knees and clapped hands on top of their heads. Sammy got out his gold pistol and pointed it at them as well. It was just in time; in my peripheral vision I could see a small but rapidly growing crowd up at the corner of the main street, gathering to see what was going on.
‘Ask him to tell us what happened.’
Sammy and the man talked rapidly for a couple of minutes while I got more and more worried about the enemy turning up.
‘Fuck it, Sammy, we have to go. Tell him if you have any more questions you will call him on the phone later. We have to move. Now.’
I slung my rifle and picked up the cousin and slapped him about a bit and kicked him into the open door of the house. Then I grabbed his brother, roughed him up, shouting abuse at him and smacking him on the top of the head for the benefit of the crowd. He cowered away and I shoved him into the doorway as well.
We checked the ground floor. This house was totally inoffensive and stripped of everything other than the items that had been broken by the looters in their rush to get in.
We climbed the stairs. A door at the top of the house was locked. We could hear sobbing from inside. Sammy knocked and whispered. He kept knocking, he kept whispering, and I had to control my urge to kick the door down before Gabir’s wife was finally persuaded to open up. She was with her young daughter, who was cowering behind her, and her son, a boy of about fourteen with the faint stain of his first moustache on his top lip. He stood in front of his mother and stared at me, jaw set.
Sammy took the woman in his arms. She rattled out a stream of Arabic, then started wailing. I understood nothing. When the woman crumpled to her knees, her son lost his composure and fell weeping beside her. It was
a private moment. I shouldn’t have been there to witness their terrible grief and couldn’t even begin to imagine how I would feel if something happened to Krista or one of the girls.
Sammy translated. The police had come for Gabir and dragged him out of the house. He had not fought with them, only protested his innocence. The neighbours came out of their houses to watch. Like the guillotine and public hangings in days gone by, police brutality is entertainment if it’s happening to someone else. When a big enough crowd had gathered, the cops held Gabir down and shot him twice in the back of the head: ‘resisting arrest’. They took his body away. An unusual courtesy, but I supposed criminals and traitors didn’t get a family burial. It would also make any honourable funeral impossible if the body were dumped in the river or the desert where it would not be found.
Sammy sniffed back his tears.
‘Does she know who shot him?’
Sammy asked her a quick question in Arabic. She shook her head.
‘No.’ He paused.
The cousin, standing behind us, piped up and jabbered away. Sammy quickly got hold of a piece of paper and started writing.
‘Yes, the cousin, he saw them, he know the policemen. They are all living here in the neighbourhood, these are the names and the police station where they work.’ Sammy wrote quickly, and put the paper safely in his pocket. ‘Gabir died for me, Mister James. For my family.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, Sammy.’
‘What can I do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
Tears welled up in Sammy’s eyes.
‘I will kill these men. We go now. We must go and kill them.’ He clenched his fists. ‘I am sorry, Mister James. Of course we cannot, but their names, I will remember until I can come back and kill them.’
We were quiet for a long moment, a small group in semi-darkness in the heart of chaos.
‘Bring them with us,’ I said instinctively. ‘We’ll sort something out.’
‘We take them?’
‘Three more makes no difference.’
After another burst of Arabic, Sammy explained that his cousin’s wife had her parents and sisters in Karada. This was her home. She could not leave.
‘OK, but we have to move now,’ I said. ‘Every second we are here it is dangerous, for them as well as us. Say goodbye, Sammy. Tell them you probably won’t see them again.’
I moved to the top of the stairs and waited for Sammy to say goodbye in private. The woman was sobbing hysterically. I looked around the house, which only an hour ago had been a home to a happy family, and was now a bare shell, stripped clean. The neighbours had watched a policeman in uniform perform the coup de grâce, those two shots starting the race to rob Gabir’s widow. One day his son would discover who had robbed his family, and one night he would kill them, an eye for an eye. On this primitive framework Mr Bush and Mr Blair planned to build their vision of democracy.
We ran out of the house and with a quick shout to the others we all piled into the cars and headed off. I took Sammy in my car, with Les driving, leading the way. Seamus had joined Cobus and Dai in the vehicle following behind. We revved the engines, beeping our horns and barrelling through the scattering crowd.
We turned left on to the main road and almost immediately there was an IP checkpoint with three police pickup trucks parked on the sides of the road and half a dozen policemen in navy-blue body armour, armed with AKs, stopping cars in the middle.
They flagged us down. I worried suddenly that one of the policemen would be one of Gabir’s murderers and that Sammy would not be able to control himself. If that happened it would all kick off very quickly.
‘Stand by, stand by,’ I sent over the radio to the SUV behind us. I could imagine them going to full alert, training their weapons on the cops around us.
Les and I were in the front, smiling grimly at the approaching policeman, showing our ID cards. Les had one hand on the steering wheel, one hand on his lap holding his pistol, and I had the muzzle of my AK resting on the window, my left hand still on the pistol grip.
‘Sammy, you just keep calm, OK?’
‘It is OK, Mister James, this man, I know him, he was one of our guards, he is Sinneh.’ Sinneh was how the Iraqis pronounced ‘Sunni’. I was slightly surprised that a Sunni had managed to get a job in the police, but I supposed that it was possible after all.
The policeman was right at my open window now and I salaam alaikumed him. I didn’t remember the man’s name, although his face seemed familiar, but he obviously recognized me and his face lit up with pleasure.
‘Alaikum salaam, Mister James.’ He peered into the cab and smiled at Les. ‘Mister Les, hello, hello, how you are very much?’ he asked in mangled English.
Then he looked into the back of the car and his face fell when he saw Sammy. ‘Salaam alaikum, Abu Qusay,’
I recognized the name the Iraqis had given Sammy. It meant ‘Father of Qusay’ and was a customary name change for all Iraqi men after the birth of their son. Back in the old days, even though it was not normal to do the same with a daughter, Sammy had tried calling me ‘Abu Natalie’ for a while but it kept making him laugh so we had gone back to ‘Mister James’.
Sammy and the cop chatted away in Arabic. The policeman looked back at the other cops and said something to Sammy. Sammy picked up a shemagh from the back seat and quickly wound it around his head and face. I picked out the policeman’s name, Tariq, from the exchange.
‘Why is he so worried, Sammy?’
I looked at Tariq curiously. I had deliberately turned my muzzle away from him, but the man was visibly perspiring despite the cool of the day. Little beads of sweat had popped out at his temples and forehead.
‘He say that he and two others are Sinneh in this patrol, the rest they are Shia and they are looking for me. He does not want any shooting. He remember you, Mister James, he remember you shoot very well.’
I remembered back to the days of range practice when Sammy and I had drilled the guards, shift after shift of training cadres, trying to improve their usually abysmal shooting accuracy. Because we were never sure how much we could trust our own men, Sammy and I finished the day at the range with a little play-acting routine that would always be the same.
Sammy would gather the entire group and ask if they would like to see Mister James shoot at all. They would all shout loudly that of course they would. I would feign embarrassment, but eventually let myself be persuaded to show them if I could hit the target. Then they would all cheer loudly as I readied myself, and then the cheers would die out in puzzlement as Sammy walked down-range to the targets. The men had been firing on man-sized targets all day, six feet high and two feet wide.
Sammy leaned over and placed an empty coke can on the ground, and the men burst out laughing. This was obviously a joke on me. By the time Sammy walked back, the laughing had died out. I readied my AK and started firing rapidly on single-shot. For me, after a few months having spent every day on the range, it was a relatively simple process to shoot the can and then keep pinging it as it bounced around the end of the range 30m away. For the men who had been struggling to get half their shots anywhere on the big screens it was nothing short of miraculous.
The first few shots would attract shouts of amazement. After ten shots they would usually clap. After twenty rounds they weren’t laughing or clapping any more. In fact, there would be dead silence as I finished off firing through a thirty-round magazine. For my finale I would let the empty rifle drop on its sling, quick-draw my pistol and nail the can with one last shot. Some classes would clap. Others would just remain silent until Sammy rounded them up on to the trucks to get back to our headquarters.
Sammy had made the message clear. Don’t get into a shoot-out with the white-eyes because you will die. The objective went beyond just impressing a class of ragged students. We had thousands of guards coming through our range. All of them were local Iraqis who loved to gossip. The message would soon spread out into the neighbourhoods of
south-eastern Baghdad; don’t fuck with the PSDs living in Aradisa Idah, there are easier targets out there.
I looked back at the nervous policeman, who had just realised that the SUV behind us was full of Western contractors as well. I don’t know if he could see that it was Seamus and Les, but the colour drained out of his face and he really started to sweat. He looked back at me. I smiled at him and his eyes bulged.
‘Good to see you again, Tariq, stay safe,’ I said. Sammy translated for me. He was now completely hidden by the shemagh.
‘Inshallah,’ Tariq replied. He swallowed and waved us through. We drove past the checkpoint and I started scanning the street ahead. I looked back once and saw one of the Shia IP looking after us, talking on his radio.
‘Where to, Ash?’ Cobus came over the radio.
‘Aradisa, mate. We’ll head to the SF villa. Can you give them a call and let the front gate know we’re coming?’
‘Ja, will do.’
We needed a place to regroup and think out our next move, somewhere secure. We needed guns, we needed vehicles and we needed a plan, and I was hoping that the Green Berets would be able to help. More importantly, we needed to get off the street as fast as possible.
CHAPTER 16
BACK IN THE SF villa we dumped our body armour and rifles, stretched, had a quick toilet break and then convened a little council of war over mugs of English breakfast tea. A reliable pillar of the British Empire, tea was not only a vital source of caffeine and antioxidants but also of inspiration and moral fibre.
On the drive through Aradisa I had already prompted Sammy to start thinking about where else he could go with his family. He had agreed with me that now the plan was compromised, it was highly likely that we would be ambushed and chased down long before we even got halfway. In addition, my suspicions as to the security situation there were validated when he confirmed that the foreign al-Qaeda fighters and other fanatical Sunnis not keen to join the Awakening councils were rumoured to be regrouping in the north.
Escape from Baghdad Page 19