Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  He might have been in his eighties but there was no problem with his reflexes. The general dropped in a flash, virtually tucking himself into the footwell of the passenger seat.

  After my initial shock, my brain had kicked into gear and I realized that, as a ‘walker’, the explosives vest she had under her coat would be limited to the amount she could carry. The main threat would come from fragmentation and I had no doubt that the outer layer of her vest would be taped with hundreds of nails, screws and other bits of metal. With enough vehicles and bodies between us and her to soak up all the shrapnel we might actually make it.

  I unbuckled my day sack and pulled my helmet out. My gaze was still riveted on the girl, time stretching painfully towards the inevitable outcome. I could not believe no one else had noticed her and seen her for what she was.

  A lone Iraqi soldier, posted out in the traffic, turned as she walked up and held out his hand to stop her. I saw his face change as he looked down at her. He turned to run and I ducked my head down, slapping my helmet on.

  I was waiting for the detonation and, when it came, it was still a surprise.

  There was a colossal bang and the SUV rocked back on its suspension as the shockwave slammed into it. A cacophony of noise deafened me as hundreds of metal fragments shredded metal and glass, spraying off the buildings to the side. When the screeching of metal passed, I look up at an alien scene; everything before my eyes vanished in a cloud of debris and dust, buildings, cars, the sky. There would be nothing left of the bomber. Nothing.

  In those first seconds after the blast, there is nothing but the blinding Iraqi dust billowing out across us. Sprays of blood and pieces of people rain down with the glass. My brain goes into overdrive. I am thinking faster than the normal human being but at the same time a precise calmness slams down on my thoughts with mechanical brutality.

  My priority list flashes in my mind. I need an immediate status report on my people and vehicles. I need a route out for them from this ambush killing zone. I need to organize a defence against any follow-up from enemy forces.

  ‘General, you OK?’ I shout, grabbing his shoulder.

  He answers affirmatively and I am already moving out of the back seat, buckling my helmet strap.

  ‘Stay here, don’t move.’

  I pull the 203 after me and run back to the bus.

  ‘Seamus, are you all OK? Send sitrep, over.’ Sammy is already checking the family in the bus. The windows on the bus and even the ones on the SUV are untouched. We were far enough back.

  ‘Yes, yes, all OK, over,’ Seamus answers me.

  ‘We need to get out of here. Try and start moving the vehicles around you so that we can get off on a side street, over.’

  ‘Roger, out.’

  I look back southwards past the SUV. The dust still swirls but is clearing. There is no movement at all. The cars nearest the girl have no windows and every vehicle around bears the tiny pinpricks of shrapnel and fragmentation. Of the soldier and the girl there is nothing left that I can see.

  I look north, the way we have come and two cars behind the bus I see Les and Dai debus. They are also wearing their helmets and carrying M16s. Seamus stays at the wheel ready. They are already looking for an alternate route out. There is no need to start moving the Iraqi drivers. All the way down the line, people are frantically trying to reverse.

  That’s when the secondary device goes off. A car bomb 60m behind us that makes the girl look like a firecracker. I see the flash then I am hurled off my feet. It was the closest I’d been to a car bomb and the sheer magnitude was incredible, the explosion like the sound made plunging into deep water but magnified a million times, louder than anything you can imagine, a sonic roar as if the world itself has been ripped apart. This is a much bigger thump that whiplashes through the air and the earth. Cars, not just people, are picked up and thrown to the side. Another wave of choking dust and smoke flies out and surrounds us.

  I don’t bother using the radio. I pick myself up and run straight back to Seamus’s car. Dai and Les are already on their feet, coughing.

  The ground has moved, but the Peugeot has settled again. We are on the edge of the quake. We are witnesses, not victims.

  ‘Fucking hell, that was close.’ Les wipes his eyes and holds his weapon ready. He is shouting. We are all slightly deafened.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get out.’

  The three of us start walking back northwards through the traffic, away from the military VCP. Seamus stays with the car but gets out to stand next to it. He pulls out one of the PKMs, his M16 on his back.

  Seconds have passed and now there is movement; figures emerging in slow-motion like demons dripping blood, clothes ripped from their bodies, leaving charred rags, empty eyes, unfocused stares.

  As your hearing returns, the film speeds up. The smoke climbs in a spiral, sucking the oxygen from the air. I saw a girl Natalie’s age, completely naked, hair and flesh in flames, a scene recalling the napalm bombings in Vietnam. A woman in a smoking coat, face and hair uncovered, drifts by like a sleepwalker, the bloody rag of a dead infant in her arms like a sacrifice, an offering. Old men, lost children, women screaming, throwing back their heads and wailing wordlessly in misery and pain.

  Time is out of joint. Only a few seconds have passed since the suicide girl detonated the first device, but my retinas have been scorched by more images than I can take in. Grey dust hangs in the air. It peppers your taste buds. You are swallowing history. You are stunned, in shock, immobile. You feel hollowed out, useless. You can do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Which burning child or haemorrhaging woman do you risk your life to help? You are programmed to save yourself, the people you’re with, to complete your mission.

  Family cars have become metal coffins holding blackened, unrecognizable people. Mercifully they are unconscious or dead as they burn. The smell of burning rubber and metal is overpowering. They burn tyres in the villages taken by rebel armies in Africa just to show they’ve been there, the eternal flame of destruction and death.

  With the smell of rubber is the smell of roasted flesh, the sharp, chemical vestiges of explosives, and you can sense the cold coppery panic that passes through crowds when tear gas is fired into the air. I remember an old friend of my father who had been present shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz who said the smell of the concentration camps was the smell of concentrated human suffering. That was the smell at the south gate that March morning.

  Dead bodies were strewn across the ground at the side of the road. Survivors were limping and crawling from the eye of the blast, burned, distorted, limbs ripped off. It was worse than the worst nightmare I’d ever had, Blake’s visions of carnage and hell. Around the site of the car bomb all the vehicles had been shifted aside and were burning. In the spin of my thoughts I was trying to imagine how the bombing would be reported. Iraqis killing each other was barely worth mention; it was just a number, a statistic. If we four British contractors were among the dead it would hit the headlines. Behind the news, the death mask that holds our attention is the mirror image of ourselves.

  I turned back towards the VCP and jogged forward again to Sammy and the bus. The vehicle in front of the SUV was empty and blocked the way forward. At least my head was clear.

  I turned to Sammy and the general. They were shaken, numbed, eyes dead. I spoke slowly.

  ‘Let’s get the cars turned around,’ I said. ‘We’re moving out. See if you can fit between that car and the concrete barrier and get on to the other side. The road’s pretty clear behind us.’

  Sammy’s big features had frozen in a look of horror. His plump hands were trembling.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked.

  He took a deep breath. He nodded slowly and his eyes sparked to life as if a flame had been lit behind them.

  ‘Yes, Mister James. I am ready.’ He glanced beyond me, at the burning vehicles and dead bodies. ‘Such waste,’ he said. ‘Such waste.’

  He climbed into the driver’s seat o
f the SUV. I glanced at the general and he held up his palm.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ he said and I closed the door.

  My hearing had fully recovered. I was thinking that actually the car bomb had cleared a lot of the road. If we could just shift a couple of cars we could all reverse out of this. Then the machine-guns and AKs opened up from the rooftops of the buildings around us. Rounds were coming in, pinging against the sides of cars, thudding into the dirt, picking out windscreens that hadn’t blown in the explosion. I dropped to a fire position on one knee.

  Dai had ducked down behind the engine mounting. Vehicles aren’t the best shield in the world but are better than nothing. He scanned the buildings adjacent to the checkpoint. They were mud-coloured four-storey tenements with muzzle flare in numerous windows and along the flat roof. As the rounds came in I wondered who they were for. There was still no clear field of fire and the people wandering dazed through the smoke and carnage were Shia as well as Sunni. They were Iraqis.

  The incoming was all over the place. You could see the little puffs of dust as they drilled into the dirt. You could hear the smack of each impact.

  They were close, but not too close. Iraqi gunmen are excitable, driven by dogma not training. Thank God. Also, most of the fire seemed to be heading at the soldiers who had survived up at the checkpoint. That was the good news. The bad news was that we were stuck out in the open, in the middle of it all.

  I looked to see how Sammy was doing. Using the raw power of the SUV he had shunted a smaller car out of the way and was now driving back down the side of the road, one set of wheels up on the pavement. I could see the ghostly figure of the general with his white moustache sat next to him. The bus followed on behind. We needed to clear a route out for them.

  ‘Get in front of Sammy, we need to cover them and clear the route out. I’ll cover you,’ I shouted to Dai and Les.

  They moved at the same time, bodies bent, making the target smaller, and took cover behind the molten chunks of steel to the left and right in front of Sammy. Once they had gone to ground, I got up and sprinted down the road. I took a knee at the corner of a building and peeked around. It was clear. I waved the others forward. Seamus watched over us all with the PKM propped on the bonnet of the car. When Sammy and the bus both pulled up next to Les, Dai and me, he threw the gun into the back seat and quickly drove around to catch up with the other two vehicles.

  We were level with the seat of the explosion from the car bomb. The puddles left from the rainstorm were slicked in oil and blood. The wind was moving the smoke about. People were crying and screaming, wandering in circles with blinded eyes. There were limbs and body parts everywhere. Dust films your eyes and goes up your nose. I could feel the grit in my teeth and spat it out. The firing was all behind us now, the Mahdi Army and the joint US and Iraqi soldiers duking it out in a vicious short-range firefight. Even as I looked back a mixed squad of Iraqis and Americans stacked next to a doorway, then kicked it in and piled in to clear the building of militia. Impressive. Fighting a common enemy would be one of the things that bonded two nations together more than any politician’s empty gestures.

  More importantly, the road back to the junction 100m north of us was clear. I was about to tell Dai and Les to mount back up when firing rang out from ahead of us, in the direction I had thought was safe. A PSD convoy was passing through the junction, overt and heavy. Two Mamba armoured personnel carriers and two refurbished Saxons, the old British Army ‘Michael Jacksons’. The turret gunner and top-cover PSDs on each vehicle were hunched down pouring fire into the buildings back at the junction.

  To my dismay figures in black uniforms and shemaghs were firing back. There was an enemy cut-off group blocking our escape. Even if it had just been us, I wouldn’t have risked trying to shoot our way through. With a bus full of women and children there was just no way. I looked back down the side street next to where the car bomb had gone off. Apart from the dead and the dying, it was empty.

  I waved in Les and Dai.

  ‘There’s no way out through the VCP, and the junction behind us has a cut-off team.’

  The two of them nodded. They had both seen the PSD convoy roaring through the junction.

  ‘We’re going to take this side street, and I think we can follow it all the way to the canal. We’ll cut back into Karada and then into Dora from the other side. We’ll escort them a couple of blocks on foot and then mount up once we’re out of the danger zone. Any questions?’

  ‘No mate, let’s fucking do it,’ said Les.

  I ducked down behind a Toyota to look up the side road again, wondering if they had a secondary device up there, or another cut-off group. The Toyota’s engine was spitting green and blue flames. The front seats were occupied by two dead, disfigured men and, in the back, among the pieces of luggage, was a white parrot in a bamboo cage. It was silent. It moved sideways along its perch, one way and back again. It stared accusingly at me, as if I had let off the bomb.

  I lifted the cage through the shattered back window. ‘Pretty Polly,’ I said stupidly as I unhooked the catch. The parrot stepped out. It continued gazing at me, but it didn’t fly away and I wondered if its wings had been clipped. It was a prisoner afraid to leave its prison, like most of the 7 million people in Baghdad.

  ‘Shoo. Shoo,’ I said.

  But it just stood there, staring, and I wondered if the parrot was blind or in shock.

  Dai Jones had thrown himself on the ground behind the car.

  ‘Poor cunt,’ he said. ‘Go on, fuck off back to the Green Zone.’

  He went up on one knee, made himself comfortable, elbows resting on the boot of the Toyota, stock rammed into his right shoulder, sniper eyes gauging distances, picking targets.

  Les was on the other side of the road, to our left. Seamus ran up to join him, M16 on his back, holding the PKM across his chest. I looked back in surprise and saw Sammy’s son, Qusay, behind the wheel of the saloon car. He grinned manically and waved. We were ready. I gave the signal and we all stood up and started walking slowly forward, rifles in the shoulder, front sights seeking out every doorway and window.

  There was movement through the still-thick cloud of smoke and dust, and we all froze and went to ground behind the ruins of cars and their grisly occupants. I raised my rifle, eye glued to the scope, movements slow, steady, like a pendulum, muscles tight across my belly, years of training carved in every reflex. We hid ourselves and waited.

  Coming through the mangled breaker’s yard of twisted cars and dead and dying non-combatants were the militiamen of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. It was hard to know exactly how many there were, but the numbers seemed to grow as they got closer, aim all over the place, spurts of orange flame leaping from the barrels of AK47s.

  ‘Fuck me, there’s hundreds of ’em,’ said Dai.

  ‘There’ll be less later,’ called back Les with a dirty laugh, and I couldn’t help smiling at his black humour.

  They were easy to spot in their black suits, most wearing black turbans or black balaclavas, others with green headbands spelling out religious texts from the Koran. Some of those militiamen had photographs of al-Sadr pinned to their tunics – it was blasphemy to show the graven image, but I guess as al-Sadr was a god that was all right.

  The men of the Mahdi were fanatics with no safety vests – only the occasional green sash tied around their waist – zealots hyped up on faith; drugs, too, some of them – harder to fight when they keep coming forward with no sense of precaution or fear. These were the bullet chewers. Grunts in the Shia uprising. The holy martyrs fighting for the Shia vision of Sharia law: women veiled, girls ripped out of school, Fara Mashooen expelled from teaching, limb amputations, stoning, beheading, the great clock of time being turned back fourteen centuries.

  I squeezed the trigger, aiming at the centre button on one man’s chest-rig pouch and squeezed again and again. The guns of my three companions chattered in fury, announcing our presence with a deadly bouquet of lead.

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 21

  THE NEAR DISTANCE was lit by the muzzle flash from a score of rifles. They had no real idea of our numbers or position in the thick smoke and dust and were firing blindly at every car and building in front of them.

  Steady. Squeeze. No hurry. Pick a target. Don’t look to see if he goes down and stays down. There were too many out there for counting kills.

  I heard the dead man’s click as the mag expired, ducked my head behind cover and reached into my chest pouch to change mags.

  ‘Magazine,’ I yelled over the gunfire.

  The arc moved to cover me. I changed mags. My hands were sweating.

  ‘Back in,’ I shouted.

  The clatter and ping of gunfire in the mud-brick street was punctuated by moments of silence. It’s hard to know what’s worse, the crack of rounds coming in or the silence warning of fresh bursts still to come. What you hang on to is the memory of some grizzled training instructor who reminded you that when you hear the song of incoming rounds you know you’re still alive and free to fire back.

  ‘Magazine,’ shouted Les.

  I moved forward and ducked down again, seeking a better firing point. I was impatient to move forward and drive the enemy down another road so that we could get past. Staying where we were and fighting a battle of attrition was not an option. The US and Iraqi troops sounded as if they had their hands full back up at the VCP and some of these battles could go on for hours. Even worse if the army started doing well, they would drive the Mahdi fighting them back down here.

  The momentary silence had gone. The day was alive with lead and cordite, the air whistling and cracking, ripping apart, a sound like silk tearing. Grit caked the corners of my eyes. My throat was dry like old bones.

  ‘Back in,’ Les yelled.

  We had formed an inverse fan. Seamus was on the left, then Les, then Dai, with me on the right. We were fighting our own individual duels, but the shape protected us all. We could cover for each other as we changed magazines, as we advanced, switched positions and drew the militiamen into the bowl of fire spitting from our four scalding barrels.