Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  If there was a better place to lie low than here, I didn’t know it. The zone had been owned by Saddam’s family and for some reason – fear or respect – it had remained largely deserted. Among the groves Saddam had built some of the most spectacular mansions in Iraq, sprawling estates with swimming pools shaded by date palms – a sacred tree because Mohammed had survived on its fruit in the wilderness.

  The villas had been hammered in the bombing campaign that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the squatters who had moved into the area had plundered the ruins to construct lavish hovels with marble walls and gilt doors, the insides equipped with TVs and refrigerators, not that there was any electricity to power them. The squatters planted vegetables, kept goats and kept to themselves. They were too poor for al-Qaeda or Shia gunmen to waste a bullet on.

  After driving around what seemed half the city, we arrived at the safe house, taking one last loop to shake any tail and make sure we hadn’t been followed. The sound of gunfire to the north was constant and the sky was lit with flares, lines of tracer and explosions, occasionally punctuated by the loud hammering of automatic cannon, either from Bradleys or helicopters. The nonstop sound of intense fighting was grating on my nerves and I was glad finally to arrive.

  Sammy called ahead and they were waiting for us. The gate opened and we drove straight in, parking up as Sammy’s brother Abdul quickly closed and locked the gate. I noted that in one hand he had an old AK with no buttstock, an Iraqi standard.

  Without a word being spoken, each of us grabbed armfuls of weapons and ammunition and started carrying them in and laying them out on the sitting-room floor. The mission was buggered but the team was running with the Vorsprung durch Technik of a new Audi.

  Fara, General Mashooen, Ayesha and the six children had gathered in the sitting room. As they came to their feet among the cushions and mats they looked like porcelain figures, like the tiny islanders of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels. I felt like a giant, shouldering my way in, bundled up in body armour with a coat over the top. The two youngest girls were clinging to Ayesha’s long robe. Ayesha and Abdul looked afraid, of us as well as our unexpected arrival, their fear an almost tangible presence.

  The general drew himself up straight, his hair immaculately parted and Brylcreemed back. He gave me that distinctive swift nod of the head and, as I met his old grey eyes, what I saw was the trust a senior officer places in a junior. You come out of Sandhurst with the confidence that you are the best in the world. True or not, it’s what you believe, and it seemed suddenly as if all my training had been for this one task, to bring this family out of Baghdad.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ I said in greeting.

  ‘A pleasure to see you, Captain,’ he replied.

  I glanced at Les and Dai. ‘General Mashooen,’ I said. ‘My colleagues, Les, Seamus and Dai. Cobus, of course, you know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the general said. ‘You are too kind. I remember you from last year.’

  They nodded and all shook his hand before greeting Abdul and the others. No one offered to shake the hands of the wives although Fara regarded me warily with a smile in case I tried to kiss her again. Qusay, Sammy’s son, stood as tall as he could and squeezed our hands fiercely.

  Fara came towards me. ‘What’s happened, James?’ she asked. ‘You are here . . .’

  I pulled off my coat. ‘Let’s sit down,’ I said. ‘Wait for Sammy.’

  Dai handed out fags to the smokers. He loved Iraq because everyone smoked constantly and he didn’t have to go outside just for a quick tab. The pouches down each leg of his sand-coloured cargo pants were crammed with what seemed like a lifetime supply of Marlboro.

  The guys tossed their coats in the corner and sat cross-legged to one side like a line of Buddhas. Fara lit the oil lamps. The last light of day had faded and the people whom I’d thought looked like Lilliputians were magnified in shadow against the wall. I could hear the tinkle of glasses being placed on a tray in the kitchen below us. Other than that, there was silence.

  Sammy took a deep breath and started speaking in Arabic to the family, outlining what had happened during the day. When he mentioned Colonel McQueen, their faces brightened with smiles, but then fell as obviously he related the story that Mad Dog had been badly wounded. Fara shook her head sadly. The convoy to Mosul was off. In fact the whole trip to Mosul was off. The new plan was to escape to Jordan to be refugees. Sammy looked to his father, who nodded his approval of the plan.

  It didn’t matter that it was Sammy who was fifty years old and had been running around in a war zone for four years supporting the entire extended family. His eighty-year-old father was still head of the family and nothing would happen if it did not merit his approval; that’s just the way it was.

  Sammy continued. I heard him mention Gabir and the women gasped. The general and Abdul both looked down and then the wives and the children were hugging each other with tears in their eyes. Sammy kept talking, and I could hear him referring to Fallujah and then Amman.

  They all seemed to take it in, but then Abdul was asking about Gabir and how had the police known to search his shophouse. Sammy looked at Fara and she spoke softly in English. Tears rolled down Fara’s cheeks and fell on the front of her green smock. I watched the stain grow as she switched from English to Arabic. She spoke quickly, gasping for breath, telling them the story of how she had told her aunt they were leaving for their country house in Mosul and Aunt Zahrah had decided to arrange a taxi with her regular driver, Abeer al-Mazyad.

  ‘A Shia,’ added Sammy. ‘With a wife who talks louder and longer than the imams in the mosques.’

  The puzzle slotted together instantly for the family. They could easily imagine what had happened when Fara left her aunt and Zahrah made that fateful call to Abeer al-Mazyad.

  Suddenly Fara gave out a low cry and clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Zahrah!’

  Sammy gave Fara the phone. She scrolled through the contacts. I heard the ring across the room, two rings and the line opened.

  Her face brightened. ‘Auntie Zahrah . . .’ She went into Arabic, then screamed and dropped the phone.

  I reached for it. The line was dead.

  ‘It was a man, he sounded . . .’ she said, and stopped, unable to describe his voice.

  I glanced at Sammy. We knew exactly who it was waiting for that cellphone to ring. Sammy had no need to punish Fara. She would feel her guilt until the day she died. Sammy took the phone from her and dialled another number, walking into the next room.

  Fara spoke to Ayesha and the younger woman looked relieved to have a task. On the table, dominoes stood like a miniature Stonehenge, the game interrupted. I watched Ayesha placing the pieces in a box, stacking them to face the same way, before hurrying off to make chai.

  She returned shortly with a tray, kneeled before us and poured tea from a silver pot. We sat watching in silence, the tang of fresh mint rising into the air, and it felt as if we were taking part in the same Japanese tea ceremony captured in the prints on the wall, the girl’s movements having some deep significance. Ayesha looked up at me as she gave me the glass on a small saucer.

  ‘Shekir?’

  ‘A little,’ I replied, demonstrating with a narrow gap between my thumb and finger.

  She added sugar and smiled. I hadn’t noticed before – strange for me – but that smile changed her completely: her face came to life. She was a real beauty with small, delicate features and big dark Madonna eyes.

  I burned my fingers and tongue playing out the tea ritual. I quickly held up my palm to prevent my glass being refilled. Everyone waited in silence while they were served their tea, and sipped it appreciatively.

  Sammy came into the room with a grim look on his face. I looked at him questioningly but he shook his head. He would tell me later.

  I cleared my throat and got everyone’s attention by standing up. ‘OK, we have to get ready to move tomorrow morning. Sammy, can you get your family to pack everything, then eat and then th
ey need to get to sleep as early as they can.’ I looked at the Brits. ‘We need to strip down and clean these weapons and check that they are all good to go for tomorrow morning.’

  Sammy got the family moving out of the room and Les, Seamus and Dai got straight to it, carefully laying out the weapons on top of their coats on the floor. The SF had been more than generous before leaving and had left a marked-out pallet of ammunition, MREs and cleaning products for us to take. We hadn’t even taken half of it.

  In a few seconds of clacking metal the M4s and M16s were in pieces, all carefully laid out and being inspected minutely with torches. We all knew that the M16-type weapons were suffering higher levels of stoppages than normal in Iraq. By some bizarre quirk of fate, the size of the average dust particle in Iraq was much smaller and finer than the ‘standard’ dust particulate used in US Army weapons-testing trials in the States. If you visited any American unit that had been in country more than a couple of days, you would always see troops with weapons broken down, constantly cleaning them.

  The Brits started to lay out cleaning cloths, rods and fluid.

  Cobus came up to me. ‘OK, man, I have to move off now, back to the Green Zone.’

  ‘Do you want us to escort you up?’

  ‘Nie, it’s one minute’s drive, I’ll be fine. Don’t take the risk of coming in and out of here again and compromising this location. It’s all we have left.’

  We shook hands and said goodbye. I knew almost nothing about Cobus’s covert actions in Baghdad – it was better that way – but I was sure there were a lot of Iraqis who said his name in their prayers.

  ‘Give this to Sammy when you get to Jordan, man.’ He tucked a wad of dollars into my hand.

  ‘Sure thing.’ I put it away in my pass-holder around my neck. ‘And, next time you have a fucking problem, call some other poor sod to come to Baghdad.’

  He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder, then went to say goodbye to the other guys. There was a lot of laughter and backslapping.

  ‘I’ll call you when I get to the Green Zone to let you know I got in.’ He waved and was gone.

  Sammy followed him out to open and close the gate. I sat down with the others and broke down the FAL to start cleaning it.

  ‘How are we going to zero these?’ Dai asked. The SF had also left us half a dozen optical sights from various manufacturers. They were asked to test so many that they couldn’t use them all. We had left them since we had no way to zero them, but a couple of these M4s had ACOG scopes already on.

  ‘Well, they’ve all got see-through mounts,’ I said, examining one of the uppers. ‘We can do a rough estimate at first light, put them on a rest and look through the iron sights and then the optics and see if they are pointing at the same thing. Otherwise, first chance we get, we do a quick test-fire and adjust.’

  We all got back down to cleaning and Sammy came back into the room to sit next to me.

  ‘I have called to the neighbour of Zahrah and he has told me what has happened to her.’ For once his perpetual smile was gone.

  It was an old friend, I’d learned, a Sunni. The IP had taken Zahrah. They had told the neighbours that she was a spy working with al-Qaeda and was helping to plan the bombing of the local market. Sammy had been described as the senior al-Qaeda terrorist behind the spate of bombings across the city. It made sense if you wanted it to. Al-Qaeda was Sunni. Assam Mashooen was Sunni, a former MiG pilot in Saddam’s air force, a man who might well bear a grudge towards the new Iraq.

  He threw up his plump hands. ‘People do not believe these lies,’ he said. ‘They pretend to believe, or they have trouble.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ I said to Sammy. ‘Will the family be all right?’

  ‘Allah will provide,’ said Sammy in the tone of a non-believer.

  If the justifications for war were created from dodgy dossiers, an out-of-date PhD thesis and a tapestry of lies, it was hardly surprising that the new Iraq was being stitched together from the same fabric.

  Gabir would have been tortured before being dragged out into the street and shot, a demonstration of what happens to traitors, a show of power that could have been adopted from the Nazis, Stalin or Pinochet. Gabir would have told the IP everything. Fara’s aunt would have filled in a few more details before the cops went after Abeer al-Mazyad.

  Sammy looked depressed and I knew why. Iraqi insurgents captured in combat by the Americans would beg to be sent to a US camp, and not to be turned over to the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces. A middle-class Sunni woman taken in the middle of the night by a Shia police unit would be gang-raped before being tortured to death and dumped in an unmarked grave or into the Tigris.

  So many similarly abused bodies were being recovered from the river, dozens every day, that fatwa had been declared on the fish normally caught in the river as part of the staple diet. The population of Baghdad, both Shia and Sunni, had been banned by their imams from eating the fish; it was now haram, since it had undoubtedly been feeding on human corpses.

  Sammy had received another call. From Abeer the taxi driver. As a Shia he had only been roughed up lightly before being released, although that still meant the loss of several teeth. He had wanted to let Sammy know he was sorry and had soundly beaten his wife for all the trouble caused. I twisted my lips wryly, not knowing whether to feel satisfaction or exasperation with the local manner of doing things.

  My phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. It was Cobus.

  ‘Hello, mate. Back safe?’

  ‘Ja, you guys take care. Let me know when you get to Amman.’

  ‘Sure thing. Thanks for everything. Hallo.’

  ‘Hallo.’

  We both laughed and clicked off.

  At the end of an hour working on the weapons, with a small interval to shovel down some MREs, we were good to go. We agreed that we would use the M4s in the cars but would have the M16s, with their longer effective range, ready to go in case we had to abandon vehicles and fight in the desert. One of the M16s had an M203 40mm grenade launcher under the barrel. We had twelve magazines of 5.56mm each and a dozen 40mm grenades for the 203.

  If we ran through all of that, we still had our AKs and quite literally a mountain of decent Yugoslav 7.62mm ammunition. We exchanged the AK magazines in our tactical vests for 5.56mm magazines and repacked the AK ammo into day sacks, each one with an AK strapped to the side. We split up responsibility for the other weapons. Dai would take the FAL, I would take the 203, and Les and Seamus would each take a PKM with two boxes of ammo for each. I thanked God we weren’t on foot. There was no way in my old infantry days we could have humped this much hardware around.

  When we had finished I got Sammy to call Abdul to join us in the sitting room.

  ‘So how are we going to do this, Ash?’ Seamus asked. ‘Who do you want in which vehicle?’

  We had three vehicles; a four-wheel-drive SUV, a minivan that could seat twelve, and a fairly powerful saloon car, a Peugeot.

  ‘We’ll lead off with the SUV. That will have myself, Sammy and the general.’

  ‘Ahhh, Jim.’ Dai cast an embarrassed look at Sammy. ‘No offence, Sammy, but, Jim, Sammy’s dad is fucking five hundred years old. He’ll be about as much use a chocolate teacup, mate.’

  ‘Yeah,’ grunted Les, ‘about as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition.’

  ‘Sammy and I will be the shooters if necessary. Sammy, I need to talk us through any Iraqi checkpoints. My ID should get us through any Coalition VCPs. The general’s job will be to sit in the front passenger seat and look old and harmless.’

  They all hesitated. It was true. A large SUV full of fit-looking men in Iraq meant trouble. Even putting a woman in the vehicle would only look like a feeble attempt to feign innocence. But an ancient white-haired man with a snowy white moustache and a shemagh would evoke sympathy and respect, obviously some elder being driven out by his sons, and too old to cause any trouble.

  ‘In the middle I want Abdul at the w
heel of the bus.’ Les was probably the best driver out of all of us and I had wanted him to have this, probably the biggest responsibility, but we simply didn’t have enough guns to spare him. ‘You will have all the women and kids with you in the bus.’ I pointed at Abdul. ‘Your job will not be to shoot at all, just drive and get the family out of any trouble if we get into it.’ Abdul nodded his understanding. ‘You can have Qusay next to you. Can he shoot?’

  ‘Na’am.’

  ‘OK, but remember, if anything happens it is critical that you just keep driving. Leave the shooting to us, OK?’

  ‘Inshallah.’ He nodded. I gritted my teeth but didn’t bother to push the point.

  ‘You three are the fire support.’ I looked at the other three Brits. ‘Behind the SUV and the bus your car should be low-profile. Your job, if anything happens, is to zoom up to the best firing point and mallet the fuck out of whoever is giving us grief. I want you bringing up the rear. Firstly, so that if we get chased you can drive them off. Secondly, if we hit trouble from the front, I don’t want you caught up in it. I want you a tactical bound behind; close enough to see us if we’re in trouble, but far enough behind that you’re not drawn in, or under fire yourselves. That’ll give you the freedom to manoeuvre to the best position and lay down a shitload of fire.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Seamus.

  ‘Roger that,’ said Dai.

  ‘OK, let’s pack the vehicles up with the AKs and AK ammo, plus all the baggage. All the other longs, keep next to you until we mount up tomorrow morning. We’ll head out as soon as it’s light enough to see. Best get to sleep now. We’ll need all the rest we can get.’

  After shifting all the weapons and baggage into the cars, we trooped back and unfolded sleeping bags in the room Sammy had said we could sleep in. He had no mattresses for us, only a few rugs and blankets folded over to use as insulation and take the chill out of the concrete floor. It was late at night and the house was freezing cold.

  Seamus was one of those guys who said, ‘Yeah, I’m sleeping.’ And he slept in an instant, training wired into his mainframe. The rest of the guys gradually nodded off too, relaxed and comfortable.