Soon after the goon re-entered the room a TV turned on in the room next door. The young cameraman had some Bollywood style musical on and the volume way up high. I looked across at Dexter and said, ‘Fuck, mate, as if the torture wasn’t bad enough we now have to listen to this crap!’
I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get a response from Dexter. Hopefully the overdose of pills I’d given him had had some sort of effect on him. I could see he was very drowsy but he was still conscious so at least he was still alive.
It wasn’t long before Safi returned up the stairs and into the room. The very second he entered the room he shouted something out loud and the TV went off immediately.
‘It appears ASIO does exist,’ he said. ‘What is your role in it?’
‘I’m a field operative,’ I said.
‘So you are an Australian spy?’
I smiled in an attempt to lower his expectations of who I could really be and said, ‘No. I’m not a spy. I’m simply a low grade field analyst.
The lowest grade and at the very bottom of the ladder.’
‘Why are you working for the Americans if you are an Australian?’
‘I’m not working for the Americans,’ I said. ‘I have simply been attached to them as an analyst.’
‘What sort of analyst?’ he asked.
‘I have been tasked to record the types of ammunition captured from the old Iraqi Army,’ I explained.
‘Why are the Australians interested in this information?’
‘They want to know what countries Saddam purchased his weapons from.’
‘Why?’ he demanded.
‘So the coalition forces know who was an ally of the Saddam Government,’ I said.
‘But we have much ammunition given to us by the Americans, the British, the French and many other countries. Does this make them our allies as well?’ he asked.
‘Colonel, you are a military man and you understand orders. I was given an order to come to Iraq and make a detailed list of ammunition that the American company I was attached to gathers and blows up. What the Australian Government does with that list after that, I have no idea.’
‘Why did ASIO pick you for this position?’ he asked calmly.
‘I was an explosives expert in the army.’
‘Did you make IEDs?’
‘No. I simply destroyed unexploded ordnance.’
‘What is unexploded ordnance?’ he asked.
I explained that the term related to mainly artillery ammunition that didn’t go off when it hit the ground or its target.
‘Then why did the Australian Government give a job as important as gathering all of this information to someone with small qualifications such as you?’ he demanded in his broken English accent.
‘I am not the only one doing this job,’ I explained. ‘There are a lot of Australians in Iraq working with the American companies and many of them are far more qualified than I am. I suppose their jobs are more important. Mine is a simple job counting ammunition.’
‘Sami!’ he called. And the young man pushed the blanket aside and came into the room.
Safi walked over to where Sami stood and looked at me from across the room.
‘Sami is an expert bomb maker!’ he said. ‘He was an engineer in the Iraqi Army. He has made many bombs that have killed many men. He loves his job. Do you love your job?’ he asked.
‘Not at the moment,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘Then you should have thought more about what you would be doing here before you left your family,’ he scoffed. ‘Do you have a family?’
‘Of course!’ I said.
‘Then why did you leave your family to come here?’ he asked. I’d wondered that myself a fair bit of late.
‘Money,’ I said. ‘Only money!’
‘Do they pay you much money for this job?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said
‘How much?
‘About five thousand dollars a month,’ I said. This was a complete lie. The job paid me three to four times that amount.
‘Do you think this is worth it now you are going to lose your life?’ he asked.
I just stayed quiet and shook my head.
Suddenly Dexter leant to one side and fell sideways off his chair. His shoulder speared into the floor and his head hit hard. He was still tied up so there was no way he could have softened the fall even if he did have all of his faculties.
He lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling; his face and his chest were now ink black with the dry blood that covered his naked lifeless body. Safi knelt down beside him and placed his fingers on his carotid artery. Lifting his head and staring at me with a blank look he said, ‘It seems you will be sleeping alone again. Your friend is dead.’
I simply shook my head and said, ‘You mean you and your men have murdered my friend.’
Safi snapped his head around and gave some commands in Arabic. The two goons walked over to Dexter’s body and dragged him out of the room. I could hear the sound of his body bashing on every step as they dragged it down the stairs.
Safi spoke quickly to Sami and left us alone as he followed the two goons down the stairs.
As Sami calmly started to untie my feet I thought I could take advantage of the situation in an attempt to find out what he had stored in the room next door. When he finished with my feet I asked him in English if he could cut the ties off my wrists. He simply said no and told me to stand up.
Okay, so Sami can speak English, I thought. I have to get him into a conversation. I have to know what he has in his bomb-making room.
As I was standing I softly said, ‘So, Sami, Colonel Safi said you were an engineer!’
‘I am still an engineer!’ he said.
‘Well, obviously,’ I said. ‘But you’re not an engineer in the army any more, are you?’
‘I will be again one day!’ he said with pride.
‘So you love your job?’ I asked, trying to delay us from walking down the stairs.
‘I love my job very much. I kill very many Americans every day,’ he said in his broad Iraqi accent.
‘I think you have a great job,’ I said.
He gave me a grin.
‘You get to kill many of your enemies and don’t have to leave your own room. You can work and watch TV all at the same time. I wish they let me watch TV when I was working with explosives,’ I said.
Again he gave me a little grin, but this time he nodded.
‘What is your favourite explosive?’ I asked.
He pursed his lips and slowly shook his head thinking and said, ‘C4 or PE4 with detonator cord. Very easy to make bomb!’
‘My largest explosion was in Najaf,’ I said. ‘It was 375 tonnes of ammunition and explosives.’
His eyes opened wide and he exclaimed, ‘Wow! My biggest was four 500 pound bombs under a bridge near Iran border. I kill very many American soldiers in tank and trucks,’ he said proudly.
I said, ‘It must be hard to get explosives these days with the Americans collecting all of the ammunition from all over Iraq!’
‘No!’ he said shaking his head. ‘We get as much explosive to make bomb as we want. I have very much explosive. I can make very many bomb any time I want.’
That was the magic statement I was waiting for. If this young moron could make bombs with whatever he had in his room then I most certainly could.
I smiled at him and made my way to the top of the stairs as he placed his hand on my shoulder and led me down the stairs. I noticed as we were walking down them that there were fresh blood stains down the centre of the treads from where Dexter was dragged. At least he was out of pain now and if I made any future statements Safi didn’t like he would not get the floggings for my errors.
Safi was talking to the goons in the middle of the warehouse floor as Sami was leading me to my cell. As we got close he gave a command in a stern voice to Sami. Sami pushed me hard in the middle of the back as if to suddenly prove to Safi that he had control of me.<
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When we got to the open door of the cell Sami looked around to see if Safi was still watching. Although Safi was nowhere in sight the two goons were. Sami said something directed at me in Arabic and pushed me hard into the room, slamming the door hard, resulting in the sound of crashing steel echoing through the warehouse. Although I couldn’t see him I could hear Colonel Safi abuse Sami over the noise and all went quiet.
I assumed it was still early in the morning. We weren’t actually in the interrogation room for long before Dexter died. I had a feeling that other than the fact that near-dead Dexter was now really dead, out of pain and at peace, the morning had gone quite well. It was probably the best thing in the long run. Especially considering the fact that Safi was planning on killing him on the first day of Ramadan with the rest of his so-called hostages anyway.
It seemed that the colonel had believed my cock and bull story about me being in ASIO. Hopefully he would continue to do so whenever the next interrogation session was held. I still had my hands cable tied together but I managed to slide the toilet bucket off the strip of pain relief pills. I popped two out of the blister pack and swallowed them down with a few mouthfuls of still dirty water. One left in the slide. Bugger!
I stayed in the room by myself for the rest of the day. I had no idea what was going on but I suspected that Safi had better things to do than ask me questions all day. Although the story I gave him about me being in ASIO was a complete pile of lies I couldn’t think of anything that I’d told him that may not be true, so I was fairly confident the questioning would run along the same routine as this morning’s in the future.
Hopefully he would come to believe that I was a simple field operative and I didn’t have any real information that could be of any benefit to him or his people anyway. That way they would leave me alone so I could get on with trying to get the hell out of here somehow.
Later on that day, well after the evening prayers, one of the goons came back into the room with a tin plate full of flat bread and some goat’s cheese that absolutely reeked. I asked him to remove my wrist restraints. Just like the gorilla I took him for he just grunted and closed the door behind him. I threw the cheese into my toilet bucket and started to pick at the bread.
Over the next few hours a hundred different scenarios went through my head. What if I could take one of the goons down? They don’t often carry firearms inside the warehouse so what good would that do me? What if I could talk the young bomb-maker Sami into helping me escape for money and a promise to get him out of Iraq? Would he do it?
All of this became too much. My head was in a complete spin. I tried to take my mind off things for a while by cleaning my wounds as best I could, considering my hands were still bound, and I had no option but to use the dirty water and the same piece of dry, bloodstained rag that lay in the corner of the room that I’d used to clean up Dexter the day before.
Wriggling around, I did the best I could to clean my ankles, thighs and shoulder wounds underneath my orange overalls. Luckily the areas where my tattoos were sliced off were starting to scab over quite well but the cable ties were causing the gashes on my wrists to start to bleed again.
I decided to try my luck again and see if I could persuade Safi or the goons to untie me. I stood at the steel door and yelled out for Colonel Safi over and over while tapping the tin plate on the door. If nothing else it would be bloody annoying on the outside as it had to be echoing through the warehouse.
I heard an abusive yell come from the outside in Arabic just before the door swung open. One of the goons stood in the doorway with a piece of PVC pipe and pulled it high back over his head ready to whip down on me when I heard Safi’s authoritative voice call to him. Although he didn’t swing down on me, he did come to a standstill and froze solid with his weapon held high over his head, ready to come down hard on me in an instant.
Colonel Safi was obviously not a happy man when he came into my cell. He came straight up to me and stood inches from me, face to face. ‘What do you want?’ he growled, in a way I’d never heard him speak before. Something must be going really badly with another matter because someone had made him far angrier than my simple protest could possibly have done.
I looked at him and backed off a bit due to his intense bad breath and said, ‘My cuts on my wrists are starting to bleed again. If I don’t get these ties cut off I am worried I will cut through to the veins in my wrists. Can you cut them off? Please? Come on! You can see I’m not going anywhere!’
Angrily he gave a command in Arabic. The goon lowered his arm and he and Safi left and closed the door behind them. Almost the very second they left the door reopened and the goon came back in and snatched the tin plate from the ground and left again.
A few minutes later the door was opened again and Sami came in carrying a pair of side-cutter pliers and cut the restraints from my wrists. It was a relief to be able to move my arms around and rub my wrists in an attempt to soothe the pain. I was considering taking the opportunity to take him down when I heard a guard standing outside the door mumble something to himself. Lucky I didn’t as it wouldn’t have gone down well.
While the door was open I noticed a few lights on throughout the warehouse itself. They must be getting mains power from somewhere so again I hoped we were in a major city like Baghdad. If I were to escape it would be easier to get to a US checkpoint or wave down a US convoy or something.
Later on that night I was taking a piss, doing everything I could not to gag on the stench coming from the old paint tin, when I saw it. The paint tin still had the eight gauge steel wire handle attached. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
I went straight to work, bending the handle out of the circular pivot point attached to the side of the bucket. Carefully. The last thing I needed was to tip this thing over. It took a while but I managed to get one side free and the other then came out easily. I needed to hide this somewhere. I had no idea what I was going to use it for at this point but I was sure it could come in handy as a weapon of some sort.
Looking around the room I discovered that the mortar between the bricks was extremely irregular. Some gaps between the bricks were 10 millimetres and others as much as 20 or more. Some bricks didn’t even seem to have any mortar between them and simply sat one on top of another.
I decided to try to hide the wire inside the brick mortar somehow. I started to scratch away at the mortar down low against the floor and discovered the mortar was almost as soft and sand. There mustn’t have been very much concrete in this mix at all. Thank God for Iraqi building methods! I thought to myself.
It didn’t take long before I had scratched almost all of the mortar from around a complete brick that ran parallel to the floor. I brushed the loose sandy concrete up with my hands as I went and dropped it into my toilet bucket.
Although I had gone all around it and to the full depth of the brick itself it wouldn’t come out. There must have been some of the crappy mortar fixing it to another brick at the rear. I tried to lever it with the wire but it simply bent. I tried to pull it out with my fingers but nothing moved. I slid myself back along the floor and hit it with the heel of my foot over and over, harder and harder, until it finally let go.
I removed the brick and got down low to have a close look at the remaining wall when the bloody lights went off. I was now in complete darkness. Feeling my way around the best I could I continued to scrape my way around the bricks. Hopefully the wall was only two bricks thick and the dodgy bricklayer had been miserly with his mortar mix. I soon had the brick above out and started to scratch around those beside the ones I had already removed.
I thought it would be a good idea to keep the hole to a size where the toilet drum would cover it up. Or at least a little. I continued to scrape away the mortar all through the night, being very careful not to make any noise that would give my plan away. As soon as I heard the early morning call to prayers the light bulb came on, revealing a whole in the wall two bricks wide to make the hole big enough
to crawl through on the first night as I had no idea what lay on the other side of the wall.
I knew that someone would be in soon after prayers so I bent the wire in two and placed it in the hole in the wall. I then replaced the bricks, placing little pieces of broken brick and mortar between them so they looked a little more normal. I then slid the toilet drum hard up against the patch-up job in an attempt to cover up my work.
I decided to take the last of the pain pills as I had no idea what Safi had in mind for me today. I just knew whatever happened I had to survive it and get locked back in here tonight.
23
The Black Sack
White Phosphorus Smoke Hand Grenade No 80 MK1
Made in the Netherlands. These grenades can produce extensive second and third degree burns that carry a greater chance of killing a person than other burns because of the absorption of the phosphorus into the body through the burned area, resulting in liver, heart and kidney damage. WP weapons are particularly dangerous because white phosphorus continues to burn unless deprived of oxygen or until completely burned out. One quick but temporary way to stop it burning is to completely submerge the area in water. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of buckets of water lying around combat areas. It is dangerous if breathed in and the average lethal dose when swallowed is 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight, but even swallowing as little as 15 milligrams can kill you. Even though the Netherlands manufactured these particular grenades it’s no secret that almost every country in the world has used them at some stage in the past.
Later on that morning I remained in the cell, not game to restart any of my previous night’s work. Although I had no idea what the time was I felt as if it had been hours since the morning prayers. I heard a few people come and go through the empty warehouse and the steel roller door opened once or twice and crashed to the ground as they pulled and rolled it back down again. Maybe Safi got enough information out of me yesterday and didn’t feel any more questioning would get us anywhere. Let’s hope that’s the case, I thought to myself.
Kicking Bombs Page 17