by Baker, Adam
Lucy slowed the bullet-scarred GMC as she approached the blockhouse. Multiple checkpoints and blast barriers. Coils of concertina wire.
She lowered the side window and got a face full of rain. She flashed her provisional authority pass at an MP in a poncho. A hick reservist with a German shepherd on a leash. He checked his rain-sodden clipboard. He ticked Lucy and Amanda, then signalled the main gate.
The reception hall. Empty holding cells lined with wooden benches. Manacle rings set in the concrete floor.
Lucy shook rain from her prairie coat. Amanda slapped rain from her hat.
They badged a guard behind ballistic bank-teller glass and signed the log book. They cleared their weapons and passed them across the counter. They were patted down and scanned with a detector wand. They handed over their phones.
A big sign on the wall:
STRICTLY NO PHOTOGRAPHY
They clipped visitor tags to their lapels.
A young MP introduced himself.
‘Staff Sergeant Castillo.’
His rank and name strip were blanked out with duct tape in case prisoners used ex-pat contacts in the US to target family members for blackmail or reprisal.
They handed Castillo a form. Justice Ministry. Permission to interrogate a detainee. Cost them a box of Dominican Cohibas to get it stamped.
He consulted a clipboard.
‘Jabril Jamadi. A weird one. Guy walked out of the desert half dead. Picked up by a foot patrol. They held him at Balad for a while. Speaks very good English. We call him Jeeves. We’ve been holding him at the hard site while we enquired into his background.’
‘Can we talk to him?’
‘If he were an intel target, absolutely not. But his dossier is totally empty. He’s got prints, a mugshot and a magistrate number. We’ve got nothing on him. He’s a non-person. MI say they have a feeling he’s senior Ba’ath. He matters. He’s a player. But they can’t place him anywhere in the party power structure. Sooner or later we’ll have to hand him to the locals. Maybe they can beat something out of him.’
Castillo turned a key and pulled back a barred gate.
‘The lights are out, I’m afraid. Rain. Something blew.’
Castillo led them through the prison. They each held yellow cyalume above their heads.
Dank corridors. Papers scattered on the floor. Pervading odour of sewage.
A woman shouted through the food hatch of a cell door.
‘Heh-dee, bitch,’ yelled Castillo, as they passed. ‘Shut your noise.’
‘You hold women?’
‘Whores. We don’t put them in the main camp.’
Flashing light from the tier above them. Echoing rock music. ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. Strobes and a CD player hooked up to a car battery.
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing and no one.’
Ghost detainees. Softened for interrogation by a few days of sleep deprivation.
Castillo unlocked a cell.
‘I’ll wait outside.’
Jabril was lying on a bare bunk. Lean, fifties, white beard. He wore an orange jumpsuit and sandals. He had an ID tag clipped round his left wrist. His right hand was missing.
Jabril shielded his eyes from the sickly amber glow of the cyalume sticks.
He looked Lucy and Amanda up and down. He checked out high-end tactical gear. Expensive boots, slick drop holsters, clean Kestrel armour.
‘Salaam alaikum,’ said Lucy.
‘Alaikum salaam. You’re not with Intelligence.’
‘No. We’re civilian contractors.’
‘British?’
‘Long ago.’
‘I’m surprised they let you in.’
‘You might be disappointed to learn you are no longer classed as a high-value detainee. They’ve downgraded your status. You’ll soon be joining car thieves and pickpockets.’
Jabril crouched by the wall. He let Lucy and Amanda sit on the bunk.
‘You speak good English,’ said Lucy.
‘I was schooled by Jesuit priests from Boston.’
The cyalume sticks threw long shadows.
Lucy gave Jabril a pack of Parliament cigarettes and a matchbook. He smiled at the matchbook. Printed by PsyOps and distributed in every major city the previous year. A portrait of Saddam next to gold coins stacked like casino chips. REWARD. YOU DELIVER. WE PAY.
Jabril used his stump to hold the cigarette packet against his knee. He extracted a cigarette and lit one-handed.
‘They want to transfer you to Ganci,’ said Lucy. ‘The tent city. They say it’s a bear pit.’
‘I’ll survive.’
‘You’ve got no kin, no chance to buy your way out. Once you are transferred to the Provisional Authority, you’re screwed. Those tattoo dots on the back of your hand. You’re from Tikrit. Saddam’s home town. Everything about you screams party elite. Your manner, your accent. Once they put you in the main prison population only a matter of time before someone cuts your throat.’
‘That’s my concern. Saddam. Did they hang him?’
‘Not yet. They will.’
‘I haven’t spoken to anyone for weeks. The soldiers bring food. They empty my bucket. They never talk.’
‘We could be your ticket out of here.’
‘Is that right?’
‘You spoke to a friend of mine. During the transfer from Balad. You’ve got a story to share. Let’s hear it.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me how you lost your hand.’
Jabril took a long drag on his cigarette.
‘It’s not about the money. I want to make that clear from the outset. It’s not about the gold. It’s about restitution.’
Lucy waited for the man to continue.
‘I was a member of the Republican Guard, years ago. One of Saddam’s elite troops. This is a tribal culture. I was born in Tikrit. I’ve led a privileged life since the day I was born.
‘I was seconded to the retinue of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s oldest son. I was head of his personal security. It was my job to arrange round-the-clock protection. I arranged decoy motorcades each time he left his home. I even had to arrange plastic surgery in Switzerland for his body-double, Latif. Accompanied the poor man to Zurich with a portfolio of reference photographs. Instructed the surgeon to widen Latif’s nose, stretch his eyelids, reshape his earlobes.
‘Uday was a maniac. You have no idea. Loud. Vulgar. Some nights he would cruise the streets in a blacked-out Corniche. He would pick a girl from the sidewalk. It didn’t matter who she was. A young mother with her children. A wife with her husband. No one could protest. He would order the car pulled to the kerb. He would kick open the door and beckon. Sometimes he flashed a machete. He would take them to a hotel. He would clear a floor, order everyone from their rooms. I stood in the corridor, listening to muffled screams.
‘I cleaned up the girls. That was my job. I gave them money, sometimes took them to hospital. The man was impotent. He blamed the girls. Each assignation ended in blood, recriminations, smashed furniture. It was horrible, but what could I do?
‘Anyone who incurred Uday’s rage would be seized in the night by the Mukhabarat and brought here, to Abu Ghraib. His enemies would be tortured until they confessed to imaginary crimes. Inmates would be forced to chose from a list of torments. An actual menu. Decide if they wished to be lowered into boiling water or have a cigarette stubbed out on their eye. Get raped with a Coke bottle or suffer endless electric shocks from a hand-cranked field telephone. Some were eventually released. Many were killed and dissolved in acid.
‘They tell me some of the cell floors in this prison are indelibly stained with blood. Many have inscriptions scratched on the wall. “Tomorrow I die. God have mercy.”’
‘Uday became increasingly unstable. He developed an irrational hatred of Kamel, Saddam’s food taster. I don’t know why. The argument came to a head at a party in honour of President’s Mubarak’s wife. Uday bludgeoned the man unconscious with
a heavy cane. The Egyptian delegation had to stand and watch while Uday cut off the man’s head with a carving knife right there on the dance floor. I had to usher screaming guests to an adjacent room and make apologies. It was clear, from that day forward, that Uday had fallen out of favour. He was too impulsive, too easily provoked to lead the country. Saddam began to favour Qusay, his younger son, for succession.
‘One night we were at a private club. A discotheque on the roof of the Al-Mansour Melia Hotel. He danced, so we all danced. He cracked bad jokes and we laughed.
‘Uday played blackjack. He was drunk. He snorted poppers. The croupier was a young girl. She was terrified. Her hands shook so much she couldn’t deal cards. He slapped her around. He kicked her.
‘He told me to take over. I dealt cards. He lost. He kept losing. He spat. He swore. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t control the cards. Each time he drew bust he threw cards in my face. He told me to stop laughing. I wasn’t laughing. He said he would rape my mother. He would gut my father. He described how he would do it. Fresh detail each time he drew a bad card.
‘He kept drinking. He kept losing. He needed five or less. He drew ten. He finished the bottle and smashed it over my head. He kicked over the table. I was on the floor. He stood over me with his machete. I raised my arm to protect myself. I don’t remember much after that.’
‘At least the fucker is dead.’
Lucy had watched the endgame play out on Al-Jazeera. Uday and Qusay fled Baghdad after the invasion and hid in a mansion in Mosul. Someone ratted them out. 101st Airborne surrounded the villa. The brothers refused to surrender. An A10 airstrike quickly reduced the building to rubble. Their bodies were shown on TV. Bloated, bruised faces.
‘They had been sheltered by Nawaf az-Zaydan. Supposedly a loyal comrade. But, years earlier, Uday had ordered the execution of Nawaf’s brother. Nawaf saw his chance for revenge.’
‘And the chance to claim a twenty-million-dollar bounty,’ said Lucy. ‘They say Nawaf moved to California.’
Jabril shrugged.
‘The man had a family. He gave them a new life.’
He coughed long and hard.
‘I got a job as a guard at The National Museum. An old man with one arm. What else could I do? It was a fine job. The museum received few visitors. I patrolled empty rooms each day. Browsed cases of Babylonian pottery and Sumerian tablets. Relics from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. For the first time in years I was at peace. I was safe from party intrigues, the regular random purges of Uday’s entourage. Looking back, those were the happiest days of my life.’
Jabril lit a fresh cigarette.
‘We knew the Americans were coming. State television broadcast nothing but propaganda and dreadful Egyptian soap operas, but anyone with a radio could listen to the BBC World Service. We knew Bush was determined to invade. The city was ready for war. Sandbags in the streets. Anti-aircraft batteries on the rooftops. Windows taped up. Baghdad became a ghost town. Most shops, most restaurants closed. Anyone who had family outside the city packed their possessions in a car and fled.
‘I thought I was safe at the museum. I thought the conflict would pass me by. Too old to fight. I had no intention of joining a futile war.
‘We received a list. Artefacts to be retrieved from the museum basement ready to be shipped west. I assumed some effort would be made to preserve Iraq’s history. I assumed the list would include the delicate Mesopotamian sculptures and pottery that drew tourists and academics from all over the world. But the only materials scheduled for preservation were plastic bank boxes hidden in a locked basement room.’
‘Gold?’
‘Saddam’s personal wealth. Some of it. His private hoard. Had it been part of Iraq’s official reserve it would have been held in the vaults of the central bank.’
‘You saw gold? With your own eyes?
‘The cases were sealed, but one of them fell and split as we loaded it onto a pallet truck.’
‘How much in total?’
‘The consignment weighed approximately two and a half tons.’
‘Jesus,’ said Amanda. ‘That would be nearly two hundred million dollars’ worth of bullion.’
‘You need to understand the importance of gold in this part of the world. The Middle East is constantly swept by war and revolution. Paper currency has a habit of becoming worthless. And many people would rather trust their local hawala exchange than a big city bank. Saddam hoarded gold. That’s how he kept the country together. He bought the loyalty of tribal warlords. He could bestow unimaginable wealth or order arbitrary executions. He played on their terror and greed.’
‘So what happened next? You loaded the gold. Then what?’
‘We were assigned a battalion of Republican Guards to protect our convoy. The battalion was known as the Army of Sacrifice. It ran at half strength. Two hundred men. Praetorian troops. Each man underwent a strange initiation when he joined the battalion. He had to stand before his new commanding officer, drag a knife across his bare chest and swear to die for Saddam.
‘The troops should have been guarding the southern frontier. Madness to waste able men supervising a consignment of gold. But I think they were secretly glad to flee the battle zone. They could survive the war with honour.
‘We were given an armoured bank truck. Our instructions were vague. Seal the gold in the truck and leave Baghdad.
‘We consulted a map. Where would be the best place to hide a Pharaoh’s treasure? We needed a site so remote, so godforsaken, the gold would be hidden forever unless someone could guide you to the precise spot. We chose the Western Desert.
‘We left Baghdad the night of the first airstrike. As I say, we were glad to be gone. Every soldier, no matter how old or infirm, had been sent to fight the Americans in the southern oil fields. But we had been spared. Our orders would allow us to flee west and avoid battle. You see, we knew the Americans would win. The deputy prime minister appeared on Al-Iraqiya, the national TV channel, waving a pistol. Parliament declared they were ready for martyrdom, swore to give their blood and their souls. But we wanted only to survive. Our mission would allow us to hide in the desert for the duration of the war, then emerge to rejoin our families.
‘We left the museum in the early hours of the morning. We drove in a convoy of forty vehicles. Troop carriers, supply trucks, civilian cars. We crossed the Tigris just as air-raid sirens began to wail. Anti-aircraft fire streaked from rooftop gun emplacements. Then bombs began to fall. The sky lit up like sunrise. Volcanic eruptions of fire. Tomahawk cruise missiles slammed into the presidential palace, the foreign ministry and the main television stations. We drove through streets half choked with flames and rubble. Saddam broadcast a radio message. He promised victory. He said the Americans would endure a bitter defeat. We fled the burning city as fast as we could.’
‘So what happened? An entire battalion drove into the desert. Weeks later, you walk out.’
‘Gold. Gold can drive men to do terrible things.
‘We built a camp deep in the desert. We listened to the radio each night. One by one we heard cities fall. Central command ordered us to join the fight, but we ignored the order. Eventually Baghdad ceased to respond and we knew that the regime had been swept away. We were on our own.
‘We agreed to share the treasure. The gold belonged to Saddam but Saddam was gone.
‘It should have been easy. But greed and distrust swept through our ranks like some kind of contagion. We split into armed factions. Each man became fearful of his brother. Pre-emptive betrayal. Fights became battles. A horrible exchange of fire. The details are unimportant. These were decent young men living in impossibly corrupt times. Let them rest.’
‘So the only person to walk away from this bloodbath was you?’
Jabril held up his stump.
‘I am an old cripple. I was happy to be overlooked.’
‘How did you survive? You must have covered two-, three-hundred miles of desert. The average person couldn’t l
ast a day in that heat.’
‘It is a matter of will. Put a man in a fiercely hostile environment like the desert or leave him marooned in Arctic wastes and you’ll soon see what lies in his heart.’
Lucy unfolded a map.
‘Give me a rough location.’
‘There.’ Jabril pointed to blank terrain. ‘Al-Qa’im district, near the Syrian border. But you’ll never find the gold. Not unless I lead you to the exact place.’
‘Anything else we need to know?’
‘The gold is still locked in the truck. That’s the only problem. The door is secured by two combination locks. My colleague knew the combinations and I watched him die. You would have to cut your way into the armoured car.’
‘Not an issue.’
‘And I have to warn you. That section of desert is poisoned ground. There are toxins in the sand.’
‘Like what?’
‘Anthrax spores, sheltered in crevices and shadows. The odds of infection are low, but the consequences could be severe. Pulmonary collapse. Maybe worse. Intramuscular shots of antibiotic would give you some protection. But the real concern is botulinum residue. A strong neuro-toxin. It could paralyse your whole respiratory tract, kill you in minutes.’
‘Bio-weapons? Chemical munitions?’
‘Saddam’s legacy. An attempt to suppress internal dissent. The airstrikes were methodically documented, although the files have long since been destroyed. It was an open secret. A deliberate attempt to obliterate the tribal population, instil terror and obedience.’
‘What exactly happened?’
‘It was early evening. The best time of day to release a chemical weapon. Diminishing sunlight. A blanket of rapidly cooling air hung over the desert. Perfect conditions for the dissemination of aerosol particles. They used an adapted L-29 Delfin trainer. Czech. A light jet with three-hundred-litre storage tanks slung below each wing. They flew at two thousand feet. Made a slow pass over every hamlet and farmstead in the western sector. Released their payload like a crop-duster laying down pesticide. A steady stream of vapour.