Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  ‘We cannot outrun them, their car is faster,’ Cobus said.

  ‘We can’t lead them to Aradisa.’ I looked at Cobus.

  ‘Ja, and we can’t ride around all night or we’ll bump into more of these assholes. They’re already on their cellphones now.’

  I considered whether we could take them on in a rolling firefight, but Dai was leaning out of the right-hand window right behind me, since he was left-handed, firing to the rear. I couldn’t shoot out the back or lean out past him, so of the three of us he was the only one able to fire.

  ‘Cobus, pull over and we’ll shoot them up.’

  ‘That junction up ahead, I’ll do a U-turn to the left and stop for a snap ambush as they come past us.’ Cobus pointed ahead.

  I nodded and screamed our plan out of the window to Dai, who was rapidly plinking single shots back at the BMW, which had dropped back slightly but was keeping pace with us. It was weaving from side to side in an attempt to throw off his aim, but the only effect of this was to make it impossible for the enemy gunmen to shoot anywhere near us. It was a shame that we were not in a faster car, or we could have just left them to it, but they kept doggedly on our tail.

  ‘Roger that,’ Dai shouted back.

  He gave them five more rapid and dropped back into the car. He moved to the other side of the back seat behind Cobus on the left, legs splayed wide, feet braced against the upcoming turn. Lightning-quick he dropped out his magazine and put a new one in.

  The junction was approaching fast as Cobus gunned the engine and we pulled ahead. I checked that my AK selector was all the way down on automatic, pulled the bolt back slightly to check chamber and then smacked it firmly forward. We were less effective than we would have been had we had an LMG with us, but at the same time I almost felt sorry for the car behind us.

  ‘OK, brace yourselves!’ Cobus slammed on the brakes, then hit the clutch and the handbrake as we screeched into the junction.

  We slid in a perfect 180-degree U-turn. Cobus dropped the clutch and we came back up the other side of the road before pulling into a dead stop.

  It was a good position. The central divider between the two sides of the road would prevent the other car from simply driving over and ramming us. As soon as we stopped I hit my door, got out of the right side, ran forward and leaned over the engine of the car, facing to the left – the front of the car is good cover as the engine and the tyres are about the only things on a car that will stop bullets.

  Dai and Cobus poked their rifles out of the left-hand windows and we sat and watched over our front sights as the enemy car approached from our front. Forced to react to our unexpected manoeuvre, the BMW driver was braking to make the same turn. If he had thought about it for two seconds he would have stamped on the accelerator and zoomed through, but instead he slowed right down and the mistake would cost him.

  Our positions were now reversed. They were Shia gunmen. I could see the standard issue black balaclavas clearly now. Only one guy in the back seat had a clear shot at us, and he was too busy pressing against the G-force as the driver slammed his brakes on. He got off a two-round burst, nearly straight up in the air, no danger to anything but the moon. The driver had his hands full, and the gunmen on the other side of the vehicle couldn’t bring their weapons to bear on us.

  The BMW passed less than 10m away, point-blank range, and the three of us opened fire. The AK is relatively easy to control on full auto, especially at that range, and not a single round missed the target.

  There were four seconds of deafening carnage as ninety high-velocity rounds tore through the doors, windows and bodies in the other car. Broken glass, metal fragments and blood sprayed out of the other side of the BMW. Then there was silence. I was already moving back into the car and jumped into my seat even as Cobus finished firing, dropped his rifle on his lap and accelerated off down the street. My ears were ringing and every sound was muted, as was normal after the first round goes off and you’re not wearing ear defenders.

  I reloaded, as did Dai, and then reached over and put a fresh mag on to Cobus’s weapon for him and cocked it.

  ‘One up the spout, mate, safety catch is on.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied.

  I looked back in the mirror. The BMW was still moving, but the driver’s foot had slipped from the accelerator pedal and the vehicle rolled to a halt on the other side of the junction, drifting into the shadows away from the street light. Blood and glass were strewn along behind the vehicle.

  Job’s a good ’un, Les would have said.

  Cobus floored it back the way we had come and we made it back into Aradisa Idah, our old sector of the city. We needed to get our Nissan out of sight ASAP in case the Shia had called in our description and location.

  Wide awake, and looking at every window and side street, I grimaced as we passed the old neighbourhood checkpoints we had set up, that had kept the community safe from the ravages of the gangs for nearly two years. Without us white-eyes conducting snap inspections they had fallen into disrepair. The roadblocks had disappeared, possibly used for firewood and construction, or more probably stolen by other locals for some reason too bonkers to understand. Instead of alert sentries, ready to step out and challenge any stranger, there were only a handful of old men, huddled around glowing braziers against the night cold. They didn’t even look up as we drove past, and we slipped back into Aradisa, unnoticed. Soon we were back up to the river and approaching the empty road through the plantation that led to the SF villa.

  Cobus stopped short in a shadowy stretch where we disappeared under the trees and got on the phone to call ahead and make sure that they were expecting a vehicle to turn up. Always wise to double-check, in case a jumpy gate sentry decides to make your day.

  ‘Ja, we are just down the road. Your front gate is warned off? Goed. See you in a minute.’

  Dai and I kept our eyes open, left, right and rear. It was almost totally silent, unusual for Baghdad. Cobus put his phone away, put the car in gear and we rolled forward slowly with our lights dimmed.

  A Kurdish guard at a crude guardhouse halfway along the road checked our ID passes, then spoke into a walkie-talkie while waving us through. As we approached the outer wall of the villa, the front gate opened and a mixture of armed Iraqis and American soldiers checked our IDs again. I did not recognize any of them from before, but if they were following the same routine; the Americans would be from a separate unit on a fairly easy guard detail, securing the location as a home base for the Green Berets to operate from.

  As the gate shut behind us, I thought of Tanya again. I was feeling increasingly guilty that I could find someone so intensely attractive when I was a married man, but I liked to think of myself as the kind of guy that would remain faithful to his wife. Still, I had to admit to being secretly happy that some force beyond my control, destiny maybe, was keeping me out of the Green Zone tonight. It was much easier to remain virtuous when I had half a city full of insurgents and murderous militias between myself and any temptation.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE GREEN BERETS are part of US Special Forces and perform much the same role as the SAS in counter-terrorism, unconventional warfare, specialist reconnaissance, etc. ad infinitum. In Iraq, they often lived in the community, the better to carry out their missions of mayhem.

  When we had set up shop in Aradisa Idah, so had a Green Beret ‘A’ Team or ‘ODA’, a dozen men who, as far as we could work out, were conducting all kinds of covert chaos. Specialists in mountain warfare, I remember, they had found an unexpected bonus for their skillset, fighting in Fallujah, climbing up the sides of buildings to grenade from above unsuspecting insurgents who were waiting patiently for an American assault at ground level.

  They were right on the Tigris River five minutes away from our old house in a well-defended villa whose former high-ranking Ba’athist owner had fled during the invasion. Their 18C engineer, a Nascar fanatic who was dumbfounded that none of us Brits had ever heard of Nascar, had fixed
the place up nice and shipshape. More importantly, he had also built a quite excellent electric rotating sheep spit over the fire, which novelty greatly interested our South Africans due to their unfamiliarity with electricity. We had exchanged useful intel and maintained good relations, which usually involved a lot of barbecues whenever they were between missions. The day we were finally chased out of the old bus station by our Shia guards, we took shelter at their villa.

  Cobus had told me that due to their frequency of rotation, six-month tours as opposed to twelve months, it was our good fortune that the current ODA knew us from the old days and was happy to put us up for a couple of nights. As we pulled up past the Humvees and the covert vehicles they used to drive around Baghdad, I saw that the team members were all gathered around the back at the barbecue pit. We were just in time for dinner.

  ‘Magic.’ Dai sniffed the cooking meat from the back of the car as Cobus parked up. ‘It looks like the Septics have put on a right good spread for us.’

  We got out with our packs and weapons, and dumped our coats and shemaghs in the car. Two large sergeants were waiting for us, Mark and Rick, whom I remembered from nearly a year and a half ago. They beckoned us over and we followed them through the front door of the villa, shaking hands and exchanging greetings. They were clearly in relaxed mode, in civilian T-shirts and fleece jackets, not even wearing pistols. Well, not that I could see. These two guys were living proof that strength comes in every shape and size. Rick’s Austrian genes, combined with a punishing physical regimen, gave him a six-and-a-half-foot physique like Hercules with the chiselled features of a GI Joe action figure. Mark Amin, whose family came from Iran via Los Angeles, was a bear of a man just over five feet high and as wide as he was tall, with a low centre of gravity and arms too big for his sleeves. Disdaining the evening chill, he was wearing only a T-shirt and, despite the XXXL size, the sleeves were as tight as sausage skins on arms bigger than my legs. I’m not small, but each of these guys easily had fifty kilos on me, all of it muscle.

  They showed us where to dump our stuff and we headed out the back door, taking a shortcut to the barbecue. We wandered through a dark passage narrowed by sandbags and out into an open courtyard that smelled of burning charcoal and sizzling meat. The rest of the team was out there, regular human size, and everyone raised a bottle and said their hellos as we walked around the circle, shaking hands and getting reacquainted. I pulled out the last and final bottle of whisky I had brought from London, and ceremonially presented it, to loud applause, to the team’s officer, Davor ‘A to Z’. We called him ‘A to Z’ because his Eastern European surname was unpronounceable and seemed to contain every letter of the alphabet.

  They all looked lean and focused, and for a second I envied them. They were at the top of their game, successfully fighting the war of their lives, year after year, with a tempo of operations that most soldiers had not seen for decades. For career special-forces soldiers, life doesn’t get much better. I was glad to see that all the same faces were there and that they had not taken any casualties.

  At the same time they had a healthy interest in our lives, since the Circuit is the natural progression for someone who eventually does leave the Specops community for one reason or another. We didn’t bother telling them about our little contact that evening. These guys had been on hardcore missions for months and – unlike a PSD, who might never fire a shot in anger – they had been firing thousands of rounds in the last few days. As one of the sergeants had said, when asked why he looked so tired, ‘Man, I just been killing people all week.’

  He hadn’t meant to say it in a cavalier fashion; it was just a simple statement of fact. Our little gunfight was just five minutes in a week like theirs. So instead Dai and I happily lied our arses off about how many millions we had earned off our last few lucrative contracts. The more outrageous the story, the more they laughed. They knew we were lying, but part of them wanted to believe at least half of the fairytale. After all, if the money were not fantastic, why were we doing this as a career? It seemed a fairly shitty job, soldiering without the motivation of patriotism behind you. I hoped the fact we weren’t getting paid this time around wouldn’t surface, as it would be embarrassing.

  ‘What brings you back, Ash?’ asked Davor from the front, as if on cue.

  ‘Your barbecued chicken,’ I replied.

  ‘We’ve got a leg of lamb roasting tonight.’

  ‘Jim loves a bit of lamb, don’t you, son?’ said Dai.

  ‘Oh, yeah, can’t get enough of it.’

  ‘Cobus made sure we got something for you,’ Mark said, and I watched him stamp off, the ground moving beneath him.

  Rick pulled a couple of beers from the ice chest and threw them to Dai.

  Dai opened them both and we clinked cans. ‘Never mind, son. They get hotter when you keep them waiting,’ he said. He lit a Marlboro, then offered me the packet. ‘Here, you want one of these?’

  I shook my head. ‘Shove it up your arse.’

  He proffered the packet around the fire. Only Davor and one other took him up. The others that needed tobacco were chewing it.

  I didn’t need a fag after our contact out on the street, although traditionally I celebrated surviving with a cigarette. It was a habit developed as an army officer when I found that the adrenalin rushing through my body caused my hands to shake so much afterwards that even when perfectly calm I could barely write out the contact report. I had a couple of my favourite pipes and some tobacco in my pack, but I would wait until after I ate before having a pipe next to the fire.

  Mark returned with a plastic bag. ‘Said you’d appreciate this.’

  I looked inside. Cobus must have remembered that I was still off the lamb and had provided me with a chicken.

  ‘Thoughtful bastard,’ I said to Cobus on my left. ‘This must be in appreciation for us bringing civilization to your country.’

  Mark sat down on a crate next to Dai, who immediately offered him a cigarette. ‘No thanks, bro, I don’t do that shit.’

  ‘Yer having a laugh, mate.’ Dai’s eyeballs swivelled right to look at biceps the size of pumpkins dwarfing his head. He sniffed, unconcerned. ‘Still, each to his own poison, I s’pose. I’d never do steroids myself. Shrinks the cock, dunnit?’

  A soldier wearing an apron with a nude woman down the front cut the legs and breast off the bird and slung it on the grill, liberally coating it with barbecue sauce. Dai helped himself to some slices of lamb, a half-dozen sausages and a jacket potato with a dollop of butter. I started shovelling down coleslaw and sausages and potato myself.

  A couple of Blackhawks thundered overhead, probably casevacs carrying some poor bastards back to the Green Zone CSH. There was now a constant thud of explosions in the distance behind the music banging out of a boom box. When Jimi Hendrix ripped into All Along the Watchtower, someone hiked up the volume and Davor and Mark went straight into riffs on air guitars.

  I flopped down on a bench with my second beer and a picture of Krista and the kids came into my mind.

  Hendrix was telling us that life is but a joke and who can argue with that? It’s not easy to make sense of things. Winchester, Oxford, Sandhurst, a commission, I was the classic establishment figure bred for pips on my shoulder and stripes on my City suit. But the truth is that, even though I missed my family and our life in London, I felt just as at home in that courtyard in Baghdad, or sat on an RIB riding the blue swells off the African coast. Working in a law office discussing legal points and interest rates was killing me. It was death. This was life.

  Dai was back on his feet, getting seconds.

  ‘How’s my chicken doing, you wanker?’ I called.

  ‘It won’t be laying any more eggs, I can tell you that.’ He forked a leg and a breast, stuck a potato on the plate and brought it over. ‘Here, get that down you, son, you’ll feel better.’

  Dai sat back, lit up yet another cigarette and blew smoke up to the stars, then looked over at me as I started wolfing down
the perfectly barbecued chicken.

  ‘So, no problem with your appetite, you cold-hearted shit,’ he sniffed, ‘tucking into that scoff like a starving man just after you’ve walloped four poor cunts down the road.’

  We both laughed.

  ‘Speak for yourself, mate, I was only aiming high to scare them off,’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, right. Still, not bad drills on your part, I guess they must have taught you something at Sandhurst.’

  ‘What did you think, it was all tea with Princess Anne and ironing one’s kit?’

  He blew out smoke. ‘How’s that chicken?’

  ‘It won’t be laying any more eggs.’

  ‘You . . . fucking . . . what’s the word, pederast?’

  ‘Plagiarist.’

  ‘Yeah, plagiarist. Like that.’

  ‘Funny that they tried taking us on, though, wasn’t it?’

  I looked at him and he looked back thoughtfully, knowing what I meant. Whether insurgents or criminals, Iraqis tended not to have the appetite for a stand-up shoot-out with PSDs or CF soldiers. The odds were just stacked too high against them, hence the predilection in the last few years for IEDs and indirect-fire attacks.

  ‘I’d have thought all the nutters with a death wish had been killed long ago,’ I added.

  ‘New recruits maybe? Out to prove themselves?’ Dai clearly wasn’t worried about the unusual behaviour of our erstwhile and now presumably deceased foes. ‘Still, that’ll fucking learn ’em. They won’t do that again, will they?’

  Someone else had grabbed the other two pieces of chicken and I dumped my empty plate on the pile. It was a good time to call Krista. Half past ten in Baghdad made it seven thirty in London. She’d just be getting ready to bath the girls before putting them to bed.

  I wandered out of the courtyard and up to a terrace that would have had a romantic view of the river before the Green Berets added sandbags and razor wire to the walls. The villa was a fortress, a warren of arches, passageways and gardens shaded by palms, the mosaics in the corridors chipped and broken.