‘So, Sammy, any relatives anywhere else?’ said Seamus.
Sammy bunched up his shoulders and shook his head.
We all knew the basic geography. If the north was out, so were the east and the south. To the east was nothing but desert and then Iran. It would be an even guess as to who would be more hostile to Sammy’s family, the desert tribes who killed anyone not in their tribe, or the Iranian Shia. To the south was the Shia heartland, where people had been busy hunting down former Ba’athists and kicking out the Sunnis, so that was not an option for this pale-skinned Sunni family.
The only direction left was west, into the heart of the last Sunni-dominated region, Anbar province.
‘So are you thinking about Anbar?’ I asked. ‘Ramadi? Fallujah? Do you still have friends near Habbaniyah?’
‘No,’ said Sammy. ‘I used to have the house in the Habbaniyah, but the people there they have steal it and live there now. They are very bad people.’
We all looked at each other.
‘I have another thought.’ Sammy seemed embarrassed, as if it were difficult for him to say. ‘I would like to take my family to the Jordan. There are many Iraqi there. We will be the refugees.’
‘That’s a great idea!’ I exclaimed, and the others agreed wholeheartedly. There were smiles all around. ‘In fact, the more I think about it, it couldn’t be better.’
Sammy still looked uncomfortable, and we all quietened down.
‘What’s wrong, Sammy? You can’t work there or what?’ asked Dai straight out.
‘No, this is not the problem. I can find the work, I am very clever man. You remember I know how to fix it the car. But the problem . . .’ He hesitated again and then forced himself to speak. ‘The problem is I do not have the money for the visa. I know it the man who sell the visa, but the money is 100 dollars each.’
There was silence and we looked at each other again.
‘Is that it?’ said Les. ‘You daft sod, how long does it take to get them, then?’
‘He can get them in two, maybe four, hours . . .’
Even as he finished speaking we were opening up our wallets and pass-holders. In our line of work you wear certain items on the body at all times, your pistol, and you also take your ID cards, your passport and a wedge of US dollars in case you need to run with what you have on your body. Everybody put in 300 dollars each.
‘There you go, mate.’ Seamus stuffed the bundle into Sammy’s hand. ‘Now, where is this guy. Do you need an escort to get there?’
Sammy was suffused with embarrassment, but at the same time he was amongst friends and there was no point refusing something he needed to save his family.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered, barely able to speak. ‘No, I will take it to him myself. He is a very good man.’ He regained his voice and wiggled his finger with emphasis. ‘He is a Christian man.’
Sammy had a very high regard for the Assyrian Christians. I remembered him telling me that if you took your car to a Muslim mechanic to be fixed, you had to stand there and watch it being repaired, in case the mechanic sold it to someone else while you were away. But a Christian mechanic was a different kettle of fish altogether. ‘You can take it your car to a Christian garage to fix and leave it. Even two or three days; it will still be there.’ Sammy had shaken his head in amazement.
After some discussion we agreed that Sammy could probably go on his own. The Christian’s office was in a relatively safe part of town, if such a thing could be said of Baghdad. We gave him the keys to the saloon car, a battered thing that most importantly looked nothing like Sammy’s trademark yellow Toyota. I told him to go back home and call us once he had obtained the visas.
Sammy went around all of us to shake our hands and say thank you for the money. Les was the last one and Sammy grabbed him and managed to plant one big hairy kiss on a cheek before Les lurched away.
‘Fuck off, you fruit,’ he yelled, loud enough for the Kurds and National Guardsmen at the gate to turn around to see what was going on. ‘Not while I still have life in my body.’
Les took up a boxing stance and Sammy danced away laughing, surprisingly light on his feet.
‘Right, let’s see who we can talk to about guns and cars,’ I said to the others.
‘There’s Mark,’ said Dai, and we went and caught him as he was walking between buildings.
He stood, feet planted like two tree stumps. ‘You look like you’re gonna ask me a favour,’ he said as I approached.
‘You’re a bloody mind reader,’ I told him.
‘He grinned. ‘Do what I can.’
‘We lost our vehicles, taken by the IP.’
‘Assholes.’
‘Can’t get out of Baghdad on foot,’ I said.
‘What you looking for?’
‘Three covert rigs good enough to get us to the border.’
He didn’t ask which border; a Special Forces sergeant, Mark Amin knew the drill.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
We followed him out to a yard where a mass of cars and minibuses were lined up like it was a car lot. The Green Berets regularly had to dump and rotate vehicles to avoid being compromised. I left Dai, Les and Seamus to pick out some wheels and went with Cobus to see Rick in the concrete guest-house that had been turned into an armoury.
‘Hi, Rick, how’s it going?’ I walked through the door and then looked around me. ‘Holy shit.’
Cobus was speechless.
‘Holy shit.’ I said again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘Impressive, ain’t it?’
Rick pushed his big form off the chair where he’d been sitting and his carved features broke into a grin. We shook hands and, when he sat down again, he carried on fiddling around with the working parts of a .50 cal he had stripped down on a table in the middle.
Arrayed on the shelves around us was a display, a museum, an Ali Baba cave of armaments. Cobus and I stood rooted to the middle of the room, gaping in awe. One of the walls, as expected, was racked with American weapons, although if I am honest I wasn’t expecting that many. The SF team obviously could choose M4s and M16s, depending on what they wanted, but there were also specialist weapons, a few silenced MP5s, shotguns and half a dozen sniper rifles. Most of the floor was taken up with support weapons, 240 GPMGs and M249 SAWs, two more .50 cals and a couple of Barrett M82s. The whole of the back wall was shelves and shelves of ammunition, including anti-tank rockets, grenades, and a stack of over a hundred mortar bombs.
‘Mortar?’ I enquired.
‘It’s dug in out the back by the swimming pool,’ Rick answered. ‘It’s not obvious, you guys probably haven’t seen it.’
‘Check these out.’ Cobus nudged me.
The third wall was amazing. It was encyclopaedic. These were obviously captured or seized weapons from locals. There was twenty-first-century, state-of-the-art Belgian hardware, and there were hundred-year-old British Lee-Enfield .303s. There was a batch of Second World War LMGs, including Brens and MG34s. In pride of place, just above a museum-quality MP44, was a silver-plated, lever-action Winchester cowboy rifle, completely impractical but beautifully ridiculous. Both Cobus and I ignored a pair of Uzi and HK MP5 submachine-guns and walked over to a shelf of pistols.
‘Jesus, these must be worth a fortune,’ I remarked. There were Nazi-stamped Lugers, Mauser Schnellfeuers and a host of other peculiarities, many garishly plated in gold, silver and chrome.
‘Fuck, can you see me with these, man? They weigh a ton.’ Cobus had grabbed a pair of .44 Magnum revolvers.
‘They look tasty, but we got four bullets between the whole lot of them,’ Rick said. ‘Most of the rest we ain’t even got the ammo for.’
‘What can you spare?’ I asked, expecting the same generosity I’d found with Mark Amin. ‘We’re desperate for a bit of firepower.’
Rick shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Sorry, buddy, no can do,’ he said. ‘They’re on our books now. We have to account for everything we seize, all s
erial numbers, date taken, all that shit. Although some of them get destroyed and some of them we sabotage and put back on to the market to trace. The rest we have to register for our own safety.’
‘How do you mean?’ Cobus asked. I was wondering myself. It wasn’t as if there was a working government here, let alone anyone licensing firearms.
‘It’s to avoid any American unit building up a store of unaccounted-for weapons, for two main reasons,’ Rick explained. ‘First to reduce the risk and temptation of guys trying to smuggle this shit back home. Nothing gets taken back to the US unless it was shipped out on our original manifest. Hell, I could even bring my own personal USP from North Carolina, but I would have to leave it here in Iraq. You can’t take anything back.’
‘And the second reason?’ I asked.
‘To prevent any accusation that we shot up some unarmed civilians, then tried to cover it up by placing unregistered weapons on the bodies afterwards and claiming that they shot first and we killed them in self-defence.’
‘Makes sense,’ I said, and turned to Cobus. ‘Looks like we have to check out our own black-market guy, I suppose.’
He shook his head and looked glummer than ever. ‘I called on the way in after I spoke to the guys on the front gate here. It’s the fucking surge. The Americans are hammering the militias and there are no guns for sale, not anywhere.’
We stood there in silence. We had to make our way through a combat zone with militias and surge marines locked in a duel to the death, with a family of Iraqis hunted by death squads, with nothing but a ragtag, de minimis collection of AKs and Swiss Army knives. And that was before we began our journey through the badlands to Jordan. The despair must have shown on our faces.
‘Hold on, guys.’ Rick could see that we were stuffed for ideas. ‘We use a local dealer to slip weapons we’ve fucked around with back into the market. He owes us, big-time. He always has stuff. Let me call the LT.’
Five minutes later we were sitting around the main dining table, listening to a one-sided conversation as Lieutenant Davor spoke on the phone to the arms dealer. His Arabic was fluent. I was impressed.
‘OK, inshallah, shukran jazeeran, hallo.’ He hung up and looked at us. ‘He’ll meet you at six tonight, just after sunset. Do you know the old range you guys built?’
‘Sunset? Does it really get dark that early?’ I replied.
‘Yeah, just don’t forget this is 6p.m. Iraqi time. He may turn up any time between six and eight. He’s got just the stuff you need. Usual arrangements.’
‘What are the usual arrangements?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll fill you in later.’ His brow furrowed and he gave me a strange look. ‘You know, you might have dealt with this guy before, because he deals with us exactly the same way you described getting your guns from your guy.’
I mulled that one over. ‘I’ve got to be honest, mate, I can’t think of all the Baghdad black-market arms dealers I’m good mates with off the top of my head.’
‘Well, maybe there’s just not that many ways to deal in guns and the word got around.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anyway, who wants a coffee?’
The ‘usual arrangements’ were the methods by which two parties strange to each other would exchange guns for money. Although often seen as a little theatrical, a certain amount of cloak-and-dagger precautions were necessary if each side was putting their lives at risk. The seller knows that the buyer is coming with a large amount of cash, and presumably doesn’t have many guns, which is why he wants to buy some. The risk is therefore to the buyer, who may simply be robbed of his cash if the seller decides he is the one holding all of the guns and can get away with it.
The risk to the seller is that he is doing something that the security forces may decide to clamp down on. In a war zone, if you’re an underground arms dealer, your clients aren’t going to be government forces, they will be the rebels and criminals.
Each side has to ensure that there is a carrot and a stick: an incentive for the deal to go ahead as agreed, and at the same time a deterrent of a suitably violent and terminal nature to ensure good business practices. At the same time, just as important as the handover itself, each party needs to ensure that their routes to and from the place of business are as hard to ambush as possible.
Rick joined us with a pot of steaming coffee. We sat around their dining table and discussed what help they could give us in general and, specifically, what help they could give us before we met up with the arms dealer. After getting the go-ahead from Davor, Mark went back out to look at the armoury to see if there was anything taken recently that was (a) not yet on their books and (b) had some ammunition with it.
‘There must be something, and ammo shouldn’t be a problem,’ Davor said. He then almost looked embarrassed. ‘The last team told us when you left you gave them a dozen rifles and thousands of rounds of ammo, so we owe you something.’
‘That’s not forgetting all that good intel we shared,’ I added.
At least the wheels weren’t a problem. They were looking to dump half a dozen vehicles and were happy to give us two at least, since it saved them the hassle of going out and abandoning them around the city. Mark and the boys had picked out an SUV with a powerful engine to use as a gun truck, and a reliable minivan, with rows of seats like a bus, that would take most of Sammy’s family in comfort.
As for the rendezvous location, the range was isolated with a single road leading to it. This was a problem and a potential ambush risk, but one of the large fields around it bordered a highway, and the SF had previously loosened the barrier so that they could access the field off the highway. That would be our exit.
We arranged to accompany the SF out to the range so that they could test some weapons an hour or so before sunset. Then they would mount up and drive back from the range, leaving us hidden inside the high earth berms that made four sides of a square. Other than the black-market dealer, no one would be expecting us to be there.
‘Let’s wait for Sammy to come back. He can do the translation if we need it,’ I decided. ‘Cobus and Les, you two can drive the pickup vehicle. Seamus and Dai, you can be the fire support. I’ll be with Sammy in the middle.’
Cobus called Sammy to let him know we needed him to come back as soon as he had the passports. As I sat back with a second cup of coffee, my thoughts wandered to Tanya and Mad Dog. I was getting pissed off with the whole operation. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
It was supposed to be a simple job, in and out, a quick road trip to Mosul, job done. Now half the team were out of action. Tanya and Mad Dog were wounded, Mad Dog seriously, the two sergeants in Mad Dog’s team were unavailable and the convoy cancelled. Poor old Gabir had been killed, leaving a grieving wife and two kids, and all of our kit and vehicles had been stolen.
The original plan was shot to hell and, instead of our military escort up to Mosul, we were going to be making a break across the desert to Jordan with no support and hoping that Fallujah would be so occupied with the surge that we could slip by without any trouble.
Things were getting too complicated, there were too many variables in play and the city was a lot more violent than I had been expecting it to be. The last thing I needed now was to be taking any more risks by walking into a deal with some Iraqi black-marketeer with whom I had never dealt before.
CHAPTER 17
THE SUN SET quickly and Sammy and I sat next to each other for warmth, little seats dug into the sand berm behind us. Without power in the neighbourhood, the blackness of full night fell quickly, broken only by the flaming tower at the Dora oil refinery across the river. I was glad of my fleece, the shemagh around my neck, and gloves. The heavy body armour was a welcome source of warmth, too. Off to the side, the engine on our car pinged as it cooled down.
A kilometre or so to the north, the gunfire had already started in Sadr City. It was distant enough that the non-stop crackle could have been a fireworks celebration, but I knew that, in streets, houses and the c
ramped interiors of armoured vehicles, both soldiers and insurgents were swearing, sweating and shooting at each other in a fierce firefight that would last until dawn. Invisible helicopters thudded overhead, totally blacked out, on their way to unknown missions.
For Sammy and me it was just another pleasant, calm and deceptively quiet evening.
‘So, any problem with the visas?’ I asked, rubbing my gloved hands together for warmth.
‘No, no problem at all, Mister James,’ he said and paused. ‘You are I need an Iraqi passport?’
‘What?’ I was momentarily puzzled by the grammar and the question. ‘Do I want an Iraqi passport?’
‘Yes, my friend he make it for fifty dollars.’
‘Must be fake.’
‘No. No. It is real. He work in the Ministry. You give him the photograph and fifty dollars. One hour and you have the passport. Any name you want. You are want which name? Osama bin Laden? George Bush?’
We both laughed.
The SF team had departed half an hour ago in a cloud of dust, bumping over the waste ground back to the main road, dropping off Dai and Seamus in the tree-line at a point invisible to anyone watching from the nearest buildings. We had been on the range, shooting for just over an hour beforehand, and I didn’t think anyone here would be professional enough to notice that the number of vehicles coming out of the SF villa was more than the number heading back.
We had all mucked in together to help the Green Berets save time on their maintenance, sorting the headspace and timing on a couple of .50 cals and the gas settings on their 240s, before settling into a very interesting shoot, watching them practise their drills.
Before going down to the range, Cobus had suggested that we have a friendly wager with the SF on a shoot, like the old days, but, after watching them double-tapping Coke cans effortlessly, I was glad that I had vetoed the idea. These guys had clearly been on the range constantly over the last year. We hadn’t.
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