by Paul A. Rice
‘I don’t think so, I’m always having random payments made, they know what I do for a living and that I don’t have regular wages and stuff,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring them next week and check – normally they don’t say anything. As long as the money is coming from a proper bank, and it’s not some dodgy deposit from an unknown source, then they don’t care. However, if there’s a problem I’ll let you know, so don’t stick anything in there until you’ve heard from me, Okay?’
‘That’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘The payment will be from a well-known, international bank. The footnotes on the transfer will be down as ‘consultancy fees for the year 2011’. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, cracking open a bottle of water.
We went the border-crossing down at the more southerly point. Mus’ man was waiting for us and it looked like he and Raouf were big buddies as well. A couple of guards came over and loaded some supplies, food, water, bread and diesel, stuff like that, into the rear of our truck. Climbing back into the cab, Raouf told me that they had asked him to drop the supplies of at a checkpoint up the road on the Libyan side. It wasn’t a problem, and anyway, we could hardly have said no.
Filtering through to the Libyan side of the border… there’s always a gap, a no-man’s land, between the two sides… we were pulled over and Raouf left the vehicle once more to walk across and speak to one of the guards. Seeing their friendly greeting, I knew that all was well. It was, and a few minutes later we were underway once more.
‘Where are we headed?’ I asked Raouf, fiddling with my GPS.
‘To the south of Tripoli, I think we will go to somewhere near Gharyan – my brothers are in the area now, looking for somewhere safe to meet us.’ Giving me a stare, he said, ‘There has been trouble already. This morning we found that all of our accounts in Libya have been frozen – a man came to my father’s house. They have taken him away!’ Raouf looked so angry, so frustrated, that I thought he was going to burst into tears. He banged the steering wheel, angrily cursing in Arabic. ‘Already they have started,’ he whispered. ‘Already we are making things just as they were before – we are supposed to be freeing ourselves!’
There wasn’t a lot I could say that wouldn’t have sounded terribly patronising, so I kept quiet. It must have been a nightmare, all those years of living under the iron-fist and now, as it seemed, nothing was going to change. What a mess.
I asked Raouf if we’d brought along any guns, he said we had and that there were two AKs wrapped in cloths in the back of the truck. I’d have felt happier if one of them had been in my lap, but I knew that being stopped whilst I, a westerner, was carrying would have caused all manner of problems.
The checkpoints were, as per-usual, endless. The rebels had spread their grip on Libya and now there were only a few of Gadaffi’s strongholds left in the east of the country. Fortunately for us, and even though we were heading in that general direction, we wouldn’t have to go too near the frontline.
We travelled for hours, crossing over some mountains and winding our way down a very steep and impossibly twisty road, graffiti covered every inch of the stone wall that lined the pass. Raouf told me that the scrawled letters pictures were all about the war, some pro-government, which were mostly defaced, and some were pro-rebel. We passed through several, small towns and villages along the way. Sometimes the desert stretched away on either side of the road, other times there were farms, their groves of olives littered along either side of the route. The rebel flag flew in most places, residents keen to show they were supporting the cause.
Some of the villages we drove through appeared to be almost completely empty, the only life being an occasional stray dog or, perhaps, a befuddled-looking old man, crouching on the corner of some litter-strewn street, watching curioulsy as we roared past.
It was strange to see because, further down the road, there would be another village, only this time there would be people all over the place, markets selling food, cafes opening. I supposed it was all to do with the fact that the full outcome of the revolution was yet to unfold in its entirety. There was a lot of history in that place, history, tribalism and forty odd-years of bad-blood.
A few hours later we found ourselves travelling along a piece of open road that was amazingly bereft of checkpoints. It was welcome break and we had soon covered many kilometres. After about two hours, we finally saw a checkpoint up ahead, several vehicles lined the road. There was a group of armed men standing by them and, unusually so, they actually looked to be very alert. My senses heightened, this wasn’t a normal group of rebels up ahead.
‘We best watch ourselves here,’ I said to Raouf. ‘These guys look serious…’
‘It will be fine, just stick to the story – we are collecting a dead-body, that’s all they need to know,’ he murmured, cruising to a halt in front of the man who stood, blocking our way.
The first thing I noticed was that some of the men were carrying American weapons, and they were of the latest specification. I slowly glanced around, making sure it wasn’t obvious to anyone watching me, and there were several men doing just that. I noticed that the pickups also had weapons of western origin, mounted on the rear of them. This was not good, something wasn’t right.
Raouf was busy talking in Arabic to the man who had stuck his head in through the driver’s side-window. I kept quiet, sitting and staring straight ahead, wondering if this was going to go down the pan. There was nowhere to run and, by the looks of these guys, I wouldn’t have got very far anyway. They were all shemaghed-up, cloths over their faces, sunglasses on and chest-webbing full of ammo. I noticed all of their weapons being held at the ready. Whoever these men were – they knew what they were doing.
Raouf kept talking to the man at the window; he showed him a few papers and also offered him a smoke, which the man took. After having bent down to light his cigarette, the man walked around to my side of the car, tapping on the window with the muzzle of his M4.
Winding down the window, I was treated to a very big surprise.
In perfect English, his Geordie accent as clear as a bell, the man said, ‘Hello there, JC – are you not talking to me today?’
I nearly jumped out of my skin, jerking back from the window in surprise. ‘What, who the hell…?’
Taking his sunglasses of and the unravelling the shemagh from around his head, the man leaned into the cab, saying: ‘What? Don’t you recognise me anymore – has that senility finally done its job?’
I stared at him, struggling to see past the heavy beard and the suntan. Then it came to me, the scar on his forehead did the trick.
‘Malc – Malc Sanderson, is that you?’
‘The very-one,’ he said, grinning from ear-to-ear.
‘Jesus Christ, Malc! What the fuck are you doing here?’ I said, in amazement.
‘More’s the point,’ he replied. ‘What are you focking doing here?’
I may have spent my youth in the same area as Malc, but any accent had long-since disappeared from my voice. Not Malc, his Geordie accent was as thick as the day he was born, when he spoke English. The guy was a linguistic wizard; the last time I had worked with him he had been able to speak at least five languages fluently, and that was years ago.
I jumped out of the pickup, telling Raouf that the men were my friends. He stayed in his seat, nodding slowly. By the look upon his face, Raouf was shitting himself. I didn’t mind, it was nice to see him on the other side of the fence for once. In a few seconds I was surrounded by four members of the British Special Forces – all fully kitted-out like locals. I was amazed, what a crazy set of circumstances.
The boys didn’t really say what they were up to, just something about, ‘Doing a bit of advisory work, JC, you know how it is, mate…’ I knew exactly how it was and didn’t ask for details. I told them I was heading south to escort a corpse back to civilisation – they stared at me for a moment, and then immediately began taking the piss out of my morbid occupation. Looking at the
ir stupid faces, I know it wouldn’t be too long before I started getting emails addressed to ‘The Mortician’, or some such other piss-taking name, from every person I knew.
‘Great, just what I need, letters taking the piss about me and my dead people. Fucking SF guys, arseholes!’ I thought, with a wry grin. In reality, letters about the dead were about the last thing I needed.
We shot the shit for a while, talking about this and that, what was going on in the country and when it would be that we could all get together on the piss back in UK… In the end, and seeing Raouf getting fidgety, I decided to say my goodbyes and get back on the road. We swopped phone numbers, and saying that I would catch up with them later, I turned around and headed for the pickup.
‘Just before you go, JC, me old mate,’ Malc said, handing me a roll of glint tape. ‘Stick some of this on the roof of your motor, there’s a lot of ‘buzzards’ up there and we wouldn’t want them to decide to come down and feed on you, now would we?’ He jerked his thumb upwards in reference to the air assets.
Glint tape would help those who roamed above, the buzzards, to identify me as a friendly. It was, as its named suggested, tape that glinted, and could be seen from above, especially at night. Only friendly-forces used it. I asked what letter or symbol I should mark out as there usually was one for each operation.
‘Tango Uniform,’ one of the guys said. ‘We’ll get in touch with the flyboys and tell ‘em that it’s you...’
‘Cheers, fellas,’ I said, standing on the door sill of the Toyota and whacking a rudimentary T and U onto the roof with the tape.
After a hearty round of handshakes and telling each other to keep our heads-down, we parted company, Raouf and I pulling away from the checkpoint with a toot of the horn and an a wave out of the window. I watched the patrols in my wing-mirror, disappearing into the distance. I felt a twinge of remorse, those days had been fun and I kind of missed them, but only kind of.
Then I realised that the tape on my roof would never have been used for two letters. Just one was standard, as far as I could remember. Tango Uniform? Yeah, the bastards! My bets were on the fact that I’d already become known as ‘The Undertaker’. I shook my head in disgust, what a bunch of wankers! Still, at least the aircraft could see that I was a friendly, even if only a funny one. I guessed the boys laughed long and hard about that little ploy, and I had no doubt I’d be hearing about it soon.
Raouf turned to me, asking: ‘So, they are friends of yours, are they?’ He didn’t look too happy.
‘Yeah, it’s no problem,’ I replied. ‘They’re cool, just doing their own thing.’ Looking across at him, I could see that he wasn’t convinced. ‘Raouf,’ I said. ‘Those guys haven’t got a clue what we’re doing, I haven’t seen most of them for years – it’s just a coincidence.’
‘They are the SAS, are they not?’
‘Who, that lot back there… what makes you think that?’ I said, playing down the boys’ role.
‘Jake,’ he said, looking at me despairingly. ‘Let us not play silly games here, those men were British soldiers, they were wearing all sorts of different uniform, and each man had something different on his feet. Only a Special Forces unit would be dressed like that – plus, did you see their guns? I did…. So, how many other units can they have been?’
I stared at him in complete silence. There wasn’t a lot I could say to that. Raouf had proved to be just as observant as he was smart. Seeing that I wasn’t going to comment any further, he turned back to concentrating on the road ahead.
Occasionally, Raouf’s phone would ring and he would engage in conversation, nodding and replying with rapid-fire answers. Seeing me watching, he would always tell me that all was well and that it was just his family telling him where to go. I wondered if anyone else was listening-in and finding out where, exactly, it was that we were going. Still, this was Libya and a man just had to go with the flow. There was no point in worrying about things I had no control over. I tried to relax a bit and enjoy the scenery.
We made more good time, and before I knew it was approaching two o’clock. I took some more water, Raouf joining me as Ramadan had now ended, I guessed. We had turned in a more southerly direction, taking a wide dirt track, which I figured Raouf had done to bypass some place on the main road where there may have been trouble. The track was good and we managed to keep driving at a fairly-decent pace.
It turns out that I should have made sure he used code-words after all, because, at the next checkpoint I was going to wish I had. I was also going to wish that I hadn’t bothered coming along on this little jaunt. One minute we were racing along through the desert, deep wadis reaching away down to the right, and an endless ribbon of dirt track reaching out before us, and then, in the next, the whole lot went down the pan.
Rounding a steep cutting, I was just in time to see the sight of two vehicles racing through the dust on the other side of a big mound of earth that lay about five-hundred meters away. They were heading to cut us off and, with the wadi on one side and a mound of earth and rocks on the other, there was no way in which we could escape.
‘Watch it!’ I said, urgently. ‘There are some vehicles closing in on us from the right – there’s two of em’ and they’re in a hurry!’
‘Where are they?’ Raouf asked, flooring the accelerator.
‘Just in front of us, behind that mound of earth…’
I pointed out of the window, turning to watch the approaching vehicles as they raced towards the road. There was one land Cruiser and one, oversized, black GMC. It looked like one of those, but they all look pretty much the same to me and I couldn’t properly see through the dust anyway. I just knew the oversized vehicle was of Yank design and that it was moving, and fast.
‘I see them,’ he said. ‘They are Gadaffi’s men!’
‘Fuck! Should I climb out the back and get the AKs?’ I asked him, undoing my seatbelt and reaching for the door handle.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘That will only make it worse, just watch them and see if you can find a place to turn!’
As I stared out of the side window, desperately looking for a place to do a U-turn, a searing light suddenly exploded inside my head. The last thing I remember is the pain, and then it was lights-out, Jake.
Raouf had decided to burn me. For some reason, he’d turned me over. Oh yeah, he’d turned me over all right – turned me over, tied me up and smoked me like a kipper.
It sure is funny how things turn out, isn’t it? Funny how you think you can trust someone, only to find out they’ve had it in for you all along. Yeah, well, that’s what assumption gets you, and I should have known better. Never, ever, assume anything.
18
Headaches and Assumptions
I don’t think I dreamed during my unconsciousness, well, certainly not of anything I can remember. I guess that it was just black and quiet in there, which, in many ways, must have been a major bonus for me, yes – a nice little bout of undisturbed, soundless sleep would have done me the world of good. It was just a shame about the headache…
I’ve had a few headaches in my time, but this one was a peach. I lay there, somewhere soft, and tried to open my eyes. The pain in my head was excruciating, an axe-wound of a pain. My eyelids seemed to be glued together and my mouth was a dry as a witch’s tit. I gagged, tensing muscles firing a whole new barrage of pain down my neck. It literally felt as though the back of my head was splitting.
In the end, I simply gritted my teeth, took the pain, and sat-up. My teeth stayed gritted for about a minute as I sat in the darkness, rocking back-and-forth until I no longer felt like puking. I tried to remember what had happened, where was I, how had I ended up here? Then it came back to me and my head did some more pounding as I realised the truth.
‘Raouf, that slimy sonofabitch…’ I thought. ‘He clouted me, I must be…’ The thought of being held by these people, filled me with unease. I needed to get out of there in a hurry, or die trying. I turned to my right, reaching out an
d fumbling in the darkness.
Two things then, quickly, became apparent.
One – it was dark because my eyes were shut.
Two – my hands weren’t tied.
I opened my eyes and flexed my fingers; they, and both my eyes, all seemed to be in good working-order. Looking around, I discovered that I wasn’t in a cell, or strapped to a metal bed-frame, waiting for the guy with the crocodile clips and the truck battery to come and play with me. This was a far nicer place, and if it was a cell, then it sure wasn’t second-best…
The bed was a double and it had clean bedding. There were bedside tables, one on each side – mine had two bottles of water standing on the top. I cracked the seal on one and downed the whole lot as fast as I could. I checked my watch, the luminous dials showing me that the time was now sitting at 19:30hrs, on the same day we had started this head-splitting journey. I must have been out for at least three-hours. No wonder my head hurt. Then again – perhaps I’d simply been catching-up on some dreamless sleep. I grunted at the thoughts, looking around for my phones and other equipment. None of it was there. Dragging myself off the bed, I walked slowly over and tried the door-handle, gently twisting the knob.
It was locked.
‘Maybe this is a cell, just a very posh one…’ I thought.
There was also a bathroom, so I had a walk over and took a look at that, maybe there was a way out... There wasn’t even a window, but there was mirror, which I had a quick glance into. I saw that I had a welt of raised skin running from left to right across my forehead. Fingering the back of my scalp, I could feel a nasty, egg-sized lump sitting under my hair, just below the crown. I supposed it was where that prick, Raouf, had whacked me, with the mark on my forehead being from where I jerked forwards and cracked my head off the window-frame in the car. Either way, my head still hurt and I swore that if I ever saw that guy again, which I seriously doubted, then he was going to receive some serious payback.