‘Because Kawthar al Deen’s a front,’ I said, picking up on her train of thought, ‘and an American company would’ve blown the whistle.’
‘What sort of front?’ Christie asked.
‘Before it’s anything else, Kawthar al Deen is a forward military base,’ said Masters. ‘The whole desalination-plant thing is just a cover.’
I nodded. Masters was making a lot of sense.
She took a few more pulls on the water bottle, then wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. ‘Only, who’d want to build a private, clandestine military base right on Iran’s doorstep?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘But let’s say that finding out was how Emmet Portman ended up getting himself butchered.’
Forty-two
Ahead, whole sections of the purpose-built road that linked Kawthar al Deen with Kumayt lay hidden beneath sand drifts, the only indication that a road existed at all being the roadside post markers placed at twenty-yard intervals disappearing into the red haze. I leaned forward, a scrap of paper in my hand. ‘You mind tapping these coordinates into your GPS?’ I asked our host.
Christie examined the numbers: 32°14′2.90″N, 46°52′16.86″E. ‘This got anything to do with your question about restricted areas in the vicinity?’ he asked.
‘It’s related. One of Tawal’s people slipped us the numbers,’ I said. ‘The guy was shitting himself.’
Christie fed the numbers into the hand-held device. ‘Ay, well, whatever it is, it’s out in the middle of nowhere – a drive of around an hour and a half from our current position. As far as I know, it’s all rock, dust and wadis out there. Any idea what you’d be hoping to find?’
‘Answers. Only just don’t ask us what the questions are. Like I said, the way the guy slipped me those numbers, I got the feeling they were important. Can we head there now?’
‘Sorry, can’t. There’s a situation brewing. Remember that politician down in Basra who got himself whacked yesterday? There’s been a lot of revenge sabotage at Al Amaran and Kumayt through the night, using this sandstorm as cover. The boss has tasked my lads to defend the hospital in Kumayt. We don’t want people getting dragged out of their beds and decapitated on the telly.’
‘I hear you, Lieutenant,’ I said. ‘But we need to check out that location, and the sooner the better.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he replied.
We were too late for at least two people at Kumayt. Their heads were planted on steel concrete-reinforcing rods on the outskirts of town, presumably as a warning to someone. The blood in their hair and beards had congealed with the dust and only the wisps flapped in the wind.
Christie pulled the patrol over to the side of the road. His men were deployed around the vehicles while photos of the scene were taken for the police. They also bagged the heads. Masters and I walked the area. The rest of the bodies were nowhere to be seen.
The force of the wind had tapered off some, and while there was not so much airborne sand, with the heavier particles having settled out, the haze was still impenetrable. An open truck appeared suddenly out of the murk before Christie’s men could react, loaded with armed men all wearing scarves over their mouths and noses. Everyone relaxed a little. Blue uniforms: local Iraqi police. The truck swept past and was almost instantly swallowed by the soup.
We motored into a square near the town’s centre. A couple of buildings were on fire, one of them being the police compound. The fires hadn’t managed to get a hold and were in the process of being extinguished. There were men everywhere, mostly civilians – shouting instructions at each other, ferrying buckets of water and sand to dump on the flames, directing traffic, helping each other.
Our unit continued on to its original objective. The streets were largely empty away from the police station. We passed a permanent vehicle checkpoint supposedly manned by Iraqi police, an old bullet-riddled vehicle occupying one of the blast-protected inspection pads. The place was deserted.
The hospital was big by small-town standards – four storeys, with a couple of stubby wings hanging off either side of the main block. Concrete blocks and heavy steel gates manned by Iraqi army units protected the entrances to the hospital grounds.
The Iraqis waved our vehicles through into a parking lot protected by more concrete walls and razor wire. The Iraqi flag, I noticed, was hanging limp on its pole.
Christie turned around in his seat. ‘We’ve got to have a chat with the Iraqis and then probably send out a patrol or two,’ he said. ‘What’re you going to do?’
‘Go talk to the hospital staff,’ Masters replied. ‘Got to be a few people who knew Portman, right?’
The lieutenant nodded. ‘Have a word with Doctor Bartholomew. He’s an Aussie. He’s the one who raised the alarm about those birth defects. And you might like to give him the heads. He’ll put them on ice till the Iraqis get around to finding out who they belonged to.’
‘How long we here for?’ I asked.
‘The duration, I’m afraid, however long that is,’ said Christie. ‘It’s up to my boss – he doesn’t tend to consult with me. I haven’t forgotten about your problem.’
We left Christie to get his unit organised and went to collect the heads from a warrant officer in the Mastiff. A couple of Iraqi soldiers were looking in the bag, shouting at each other. One of them had tears running down his cheeks, cutting valleys through the dust caking his skin.
‘What’s up,’ Masters asked.
‘One of the heads belonged to this man’s sister’s husband,’ explained the WO, in a regional English accent as thick as a bowl of rolled oats. ‘It appears he was a copper, manning that empty checking station we passed.’
‘Can you explain to the man that we’re taking his brother-in-law’s remains into the hospital?’
‘Do my best,’ said the WO.
The Brit spoke to the two locals in a mixture of Arabic, mime and English. He seemed to get the point across. The Iraqis drifted away with slumped shoulders, heads down.
I swung the bag over my shoulder and made for the front entrance. Inside the hospital, it was standing room only. The sandstorm had been the cause of plenty of accidents – broken limbs, burns, motor-vehicle accidents. Folks were either asleep, groaning or arguing, a couple of men in particular giving an Iraqi nurse a hard time, yelling at her.
Masters found someone who could point us in the right direction. She led the way through an access door and down a hallway, which eventually opened out into a large ward. The place smelt of disinfectant, blood and urine. Here and there a few people moaned.
I walked up to one of the nurses, an Iraqi woman wearing a full black burqa, and gave her a peek in the bag. ‘Doctor Bartholomew?’ I asked.
It took a few long seconds for the contents of the bag to register with her, and then her eyes widened behind the black slits. She grabbed my sleeve and excitedly pulled me into an annex, where a tall guy in jeans and a T-shirt with a stethoscope around his neck was bent over a basin, washing his hands. The woman waved her arms around, talked animatedly, pointing at me and the bag I was holding. The man talked to her in Arabic briefly before she swept out of the room, muttering to herself.
‘Got something there for me, mate?’ asked the doctor in a broad Australian accent, walking towards us. The guy had unkempt longish blond hair that was greying slightly at the roots. His olive skin had a blanched look, and his brown eyes were rimmed with red pinstripes. I guessed he’d been up a while.
‘They’re probably more for your fridge,’ I replied. ‘We found them on the outskirts of town, welcoming visitors.’
‘It has been one of those welcoming kinda nights,’ he said, looking into the bag. A stink rose from it. He shook his head. ‘I know these guys. They’re police. The one there on the left – I took his tonsils out only last week.’
‘So he hasn’t had much of an opportunity to miss them,’ I suggested, always looking for that silver lining. ‘This is Special Agent Masters and I’m Special Agent Coop
er, doc. We’re with the OSI. Mind if we ask you a few questions?’
‘What about? These two?’
‘No, about Colonel Emmet Portman.’
‘Sure, what about him?’
‘He was murdered.’
Bartholomew blinked a couple of times while this news registered with him. The guy was clearly exhausted.
A nurse walked in, a European woman – dark, Spanish-looking. Bartholomew spoke to her in a language that sounded Italian. She looked in the bag, shook her head, and carried it away.
‘I’ve just finished a triple shift and things are getting quieter. Let’s go to my office.’
Along the way, he was continually pulled into corridor consultations with other doctors and nursing staff. Doctor Bartholomew was obviously an important cog in this machine.
His office was windowless and airless and small enough to wear. There was room for a minute desk, which was covered in piles of reference books that leaned against his computer screen and swamped the keyboard. A single chair for visitors and the one behind his desk took up most of the floor space. A whiteboard with various meaningless names and lines drawn in red and green marker pen accounted for most of one wall, while on the other hung the framed photo of a green wave, curling perfectly, shot by someone in the water aiming back down into the hollow barrel. A brown, muscled guy was inside the tube, casually dragging his hand along the glassy concave face of the wave.
‘You?’ I asked, giving the photo a nod.
‘A long time ago. And in another life,’ Bartholomew said as he cleared a pile of magazines off the spare chair and motioned for Masters to sit. ‘So what happened to Emmet?’ he asked.
‘The killers cut him up into itty-bitty pieces,’ said Masters.
The doc shook his head. ‘Well, you know, there’s no justice in the world, is there? Emmet Portman was one of the good guys. He spent a lot of time here, mostly with the kids in the cancer ward.’ Bartholomew leaned back in his chair, his hands resting on his stomach. ‘Now, what is it exactly I can help you with?’
‘A Lieutenant Christie said you were the man to talk to, that you and Emmet Portman were tight,’ I replied. ‘There are quite a few odd factors connected with the Attaché’s death and we’re looking into them.’
‘Such as?’
‘Radioactivity in the water supply here. Vast sums of money disappearing and a water treatment plant out in the middle of nowhere. One of Portman’s squadron buddies mentioned that the colonel had a connection with a hospital around here. We’re assuming it’s this hospital, and our enquiries have led us to you.’
‘Mr Christie will vouch for you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you call him and find out?’
‘I will.’ Bartholomew pulled out his cell and walked out of the room.
Masters and I glanced at each other and shrugged. I picked up a model of an eyeball from the doc’s desk and looked it over.
A minute later, Bartholomew walked back in and locked the door behind him. ‘I know I’m taking a hell of a risk here, but with Emmet dead, that just leaves me.’
‘I take it Christie gave us the nod?’ Masters asked.
The doc gave half a grin and said, ‘He told me you gave Tawal a major dose of the shits, which makes you my kind of people.’
The Australian went to his filing cabinet and unlocked the bottom drawer. Then he pulled it out entirely and tilted it over onto its side. Taped to the underside of the drawer was a folder. Bartholomew pulled away the tape, releasing the folder. He opened it, took out a handful of photographs and spread them across his desk. Each one showed a baby or child with horrible deformities.
‘Jesus,’ said Masters quietly, passing a few of the photos to me. ‘This stuff breaks your heart.’
‘After Gulf War I,’ Bartholomew began, ‘the staff at Basra Hospital became highly concerned at the number of leukaemias amongst children in the area, as well as the alarming number of congenital malformations in newborn children. From 1990 to 2001, data showed an incidence increase of 426 per cent for general malignancies, 366 per cent for leukaemias and over 600 per cent for birth defects. At Kumayt, we’re almost double those figures. Or we were. There had to be a reason for all the abnormalities suddenly turning up. We thought it might have been something to do with a depleted uranium dump supposedly somewhere upstream of us, a hangover from the first Gulf war – perhaps the stuff had finally worked its way into the water supply. That was over three years ago, by the way. Around the same time I met Colonel Emmet Portman. He’d flown down here from Turkey, looking into something to do with a reconstruction project.’
‘Kawthar al Deen?’ Masters asked.
‘Yeah, but I didn’t know anything about it back then. Anyway, the colonel had cut his hand, nothing too serious. He stopped by to get the wound cleaned up. While he was here, he toured the hospital – saw the children’s ward. It got him pretty worked up. Said he felt a personal responsibility towards the kids. He sent gifts and toys. About a month later, he phoned and told me in confidence that the authorities in Baghdad were aware of the problems with the water supply here. An environmental study of the area had been undertaken and high levels of depleted uranium had indeed been found in the water. Locally, promises were made to clean up the dump and build a desalination plant to treat the ground water and make it drinkable. Tenders went out for the project.’
‘That was when Portman met Tawal,’ I said.
‘Yeah – talk about oil meeting water. Anyway, I gather there were some issues around the way the tender was conducted, complaints from other companies involved in the tender process. To say that Emmet didn’t like Tawal would be an understatement, and from what I’ve heard, the feeling was mutual. Emmet told me he didn’t believe there was a DU dump in the vicinity of Kumayt – couldn’t find records within the Department of Defense of the existence of such a dump. His conclusion was that the whole desalination thing was crooked. So, around six months ago, he had the water tested independently.’
Bartholomew handed me a photocopied report pulled from the packet taped under the file drawer. It was dated three months ago. I recognised the black and white logo in the top left of the page. Now I had time to read the writing: Sage Laboratories, Ca. I passed the report to Masters.
‘There’s a lot of competing noise about depleted uranium,’ the doctor continued as Masters scanned the report. ‘Some experts reckon that breathing the dust will fuck up the immune system and alter your genetic code. Others say it’s harmless.’
‘Only there’s no argument about uranyl fluoride,’ observed Masters, examining one of the pages. ‘Radioactive and toxic like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘The toxicity is the real problem,’ said Bartholomew. ‘The levels of hydrogen fluoride they found are just as bad. That stuff is seriously gnarly.’
‘Any ideas how these chemicals got into the water?’ Masters asked.
Bartholomew shook his head. ‘As you can probably understand, I’ve become a bit of an expert on all this stuff. Depleted uranium is a dense metal. It oxidises and small pieces get weathered off it. It’s radioactive, but it doesn’t turn into uranyl fluoride, and certainly not hydrogen fluoride.’
‘That doesn’t exactly answer my question,’ said Masters.
‘Do I know how it got in the water?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I have no idea how, but I’ll give you one guess who.’
I didn’t need to guess and I didn’t believe Masters would have to, either. I said, ‘So Tawal somehow got his hands on uranium hexafluoride and contaminated the water with it, just so there’d be a good excuse to build a desal plant here.’
‘So, you know . . . Yes, that was Emmet’s conclusion.’
And Bartholomew didn’t need to remind me that it was the one Colonel Emmet Portman had reached before being gruesomely murdered by persons keen to throw us off the scent.
‘You obviously know about the link between HEX, depleted uranium and uranyl f
luoride?’ Bartholomew asked, breaking into my thoughts.
‘We know it’s their common ancestor,’ I said.
‘HEX is a major part of the nuclear fuel cycle. You can’t just go to the corner store and buy it,’ observed Bartholomew.
‘Yep,’ I agreed. The realisation had already occurred to Masters and me. If HEX was used – and as far as we knew, there was no other way to produce uranyl fluoride – where the hell had it come from?
‘What’s your water like now?’ Masters enquired.
‘Salty, but not lethal. I had it tested again a month ago. Not a trace of either DU, uranyl fluoride or hydrogen fluoride.’
‘Where did you get the sample you tested?’ I asked.
‘Straight from the tap.’
‘Do you know where Emmet Portman got the sample he tested?’
Bartholomew balked. He was about to say something, then changed his mind.
‘Problem?’
‘You know, it never occurred to me to ask. The truth is, I don’t know for sure where he got it from. I just assumed he took a sample of the local drinking water.’
‘Can we keep this?’ Masters asked, tapping the report on the palm of her hand.
‘Sure. I have copies.’
‘Doc,’ I said, ‘if I were you I’d burn them. Keep your knowledge to yourself. Folks who know about that sample tend to end up whacked.’
There was a knock on the door followed by a female voice speaking in Arabic. After a brief exchange, the Australian turned to us and said, ‘Your transport has landed.’
Forty-three
‘That crack about there being copies – I don’t think he trusted us.’
‘Can’t say I blame him,’ I said, tightening the lap restraint. The air quality had improved. Outside it was now like LA on a bad day. The sudden absence of wind had allowed much of the choking dust to settle. And it had settled over everything, a grey blanket of ultra-fine powder that boiled into mini mushroom clouds around every footfall.
‘You can thank Mr Christie,’ said the English flight sergeant over the front seat of the Land Rover we were travelling in. ‘The chief pilot, Flight Lieutenant Robear, owed him a box of Scotch, a debt your Dragoon mate was prepared to waive if we gave you a ride. So now you’ll take over the chit, I suspect.’
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