We were picking targets in a continuous rhythm. At the same time, we were looking out for each other, a subconscious glimpse lasting the same fraction of a second it takes a single shot to cover the space between you and the target.
‘Ash, above you,’ Seamus called.
I ducked and a burst from his PKM took out a sneaky bastard trying to get round behind us on the roof above me. That’s all we needed, for them to get clever and start using the rooftops. I mentally cursed Sammy’s family bitterly. Without them we would have long since kicked our way into a building and be escaping out the back door into another street, out of contact and free to run. With a bus full of women and children we were stuck here.
As I turned back, I noticed on the edge of my vision a militiaman creeping up, keeping his head down. He was hauling what looked like a Dragunov, a Soviet sniper rifle.
He slid into position behind a vehicle thrown on its side. I dropped down on one knee behind a piece of wreckage. I watched the Dragunov slide through a gap. I didn’t have a clear target, just the barrel, and knew that above was a head wrapped in a headband, a brain filled with radical Shi’ism, a searching eye, an itchy finger.
I squeezed once, twice, three times, and the Dragunov barrel jerked sideways. He was out of play.
In action, you fear getting killed, but you feel fully alive – as I’ve said before, it’s the most extreme aspect of your humanity, courting death and dealing death.
I’m also thinking: I should have drunk some water before I debussed from the SUV. I’m going to get dehydrated.
Fuck it!
‘Let’s go.’
I moved forward towards the upturned car where the sniper had taken cover. Dai followed. I indicated to Les, then Seamus. We were closing the net, setting up a crossfire, drawing them in like wasps to a nest.
Rounds were coming at us like hail. I didn’t want to think how lucky we had been not taking a hit. From the upturned car, I could see Sammy and the three wagons. They hadn’t turned the corner yet, but were waiting for us to clear the road. The barrel of the Dragunov was still poking through the wreckage. I gave it a pull, but there was a dead man’s weight on the other end and it wouldn’t budge.
Dai found a protected spot on the other side of the car. It was a good defence position, the engine block thick enough to stop the 8g of an AK47 7.62mm round.
In a firefight, you have to lay down enough suppressing fire to keep the enemy from moving. We’d done that. We were still doing that. And they were still popping their heads up like a deranged army of black moles with flashes of green and gold, zigzagging through the rubble crying Allahu Akbar. Cartridge cases were pinging out from the bolt on my M16 like popcorn. My face was black with soot.
‘Magazine.’
My fingers touched the blunt heads of the 40mm grenades in my chest pouch as I grabbed another full magazine. I’d gone through three mags and wanted the enemy to bunch together in nice convenient groups so that I could use the 203 to blow them up. I put a couple of grenades downrange at them, but they were widely spaced.
As soon as I was in, Seamus was out. We laid down a steady stream of fire while he changed belts.
‘Back in.’
You acknowledge, but it’s like spotting someone on an empty platform from a speeding train, Seamus a fleeting, impressionist image, left foot forward, knee and spine slightly bent, shoulders hunched, his right leg like a pivot. He had gained some height on the remains of a family car that had welded itself into the embrace of an upturned truck.
People made a fortune with scrap iron in the West. In Iraq, it got dumped and stayed dumped. The Mesopotamian desert with its biblical place names and the oldest artefacts created by man was a wasteland of blown-up tanks, burned-out trucks lost from American convoys, crashed bombers and choppers, and plastic bags that chased by on the wind like a strange species of rodents. In another two thousand years, anthropologists will study plastic bags and say we were a careless civilization.
We moved beyond the upturned vehicle. I saw the dead kid clutching the Dragunov, the headband ripped off, his face slack, an empty mask, the back of his head blown away by one lucky shot. Maybe he was enjoying those seventy virgins, how was I to know? It was the first confirmed kill I had actually seen after hundreds of rounds fired. He could only have been eighteen years old, maybe younger. Foolish and untrained. What sniper would close to within 30m of the enemy with a weapon he could hit them with from twenty times that distance? Or push his barrel out of cover for everyone to see?
Les pulled in closer. I saw two militiamen, boys in identical costumes, rush towards him.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
The boys were shooting from the hip as if their training had consisted of watching Rambo films. Les gave them the good news, one-two, one-two, four shots straight from the textbook, and they crumpled, dropping flat in their tracks. They hadn’t got anywhere near us.
‘Come on, you cunts, you want some?’ I heard Les shout.
Still they kept coming. We were at the centre of the hurricane. Up until that point, our safety had relied on the churning smoke, the dazed figures trapped in the field of fire, the sheer ineptitude of the enemy. In Afghanistan, the Taliban had drilled their recruits in training camps set up by Osama bin Laden. The Mahdi in Baghdad was not the Taliban, and was even different to the militias down south in Basra. The Baghdadis hid in dark rooms and mosques throughout the city. They had no ranges to practise their marksmanship skills, no nice parade grounds for their victory rallies.
The Mahdi Army was more like the Salvation Army with Kalashnikovs instead of tubas and trombones. There was no need for training. Volunteers were driven by passion, by the sermons preached by their imams. There were a million Shia kids willing to die for their faith. It was the end of time. The time of the Mahdi. Martyrdom was a privilege. We were merely the tool granting that privilege. The foot soldiers of the Mahdi Army weren’t firing at us, not exactly, not accurately; they were firing at what they had been taught we represented: the Infidel, the Zionist crusader capitalist conspiracy. To have taken a bullet would have been bad luck, a flaw in the flow of karma, like Mad Dog McQueen catching the full blast of an IED.
That feeling of being protected in the eye of the hurricane came to an end now. They were rallying around a makeshift barrier of cars parked across the full width of the road. Rounds were cracking back towards us. Seamus had dropped down from the heights to move forward. We were no longer a bowl. We were a line. The last line. The line where the attack has to stop. The gunmen who had been firing wildly into the inferno, running recklessly in to finish off the dazed survivors of the car bomb, had instead found a nasty and unpleasant shock in the form of us four Brits. But they were recovering now. From the rooftops I could see cautious peeks of balaclavas. I wondered who was directing them, who was sending them to their deaths?
I turned just long enough to catch a glimpse of the undamaged vehicles outside the main circle of the blast. Our three vehicles had found a gap into the alleyway off to the side, back near the main road. If we could hold on for another few minutes we’d able to withdraw and be out of there.
‘Les, Seamus,’ I screamed. They looked over. ‘Sammy has found a way out behind us. We need to hold on long enough for him to get the wagons out and then we will withdraw.’
‘All right, mate, roger that.’
I glanced back and, and at that moment, I saw a patch of white in the sky above.
‘About fucking time,’ Dai said.
I grinned. The parrot had taken wing.
‘Heads up,’ Dai screamed.
He took two shots and turned. I did the same. Christ knows how many kids had been killed out there and still they kept coming. My hands were burning.
‘Magazine,’ called Les.
We moved the nozzle of the hose a few degrees to the left.
‘Back in.’
And back again. The incoming rounds spat into the dirt, ricocheted off chunks of metal, roared and cra
ckled. They were running through the rubble, weaving a path through the spilled vehicles and piles of dead and debris, firing wildly, and I thought if one of those blokes out there just ducked down, took a breath and concentrated his aim, we’d have caught it long ago.
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.
‘Magazine.’ Dai this time.
The spray moved.
‘Back in.’
There was a lull. There is always a lull.
They come again. I could see their eyes now, the tails from their black turbans flying in the wind, expressions wooden like puppets carved with rage, that slipped from their faces as they fell, none of them getting more than two paces from the barrier of cars thrown across the road. They were cannon fodder running into our guns like soldiers in the First World War. An RPG cracked overhead, hitting the building 50m behind us and throwing dust across the street.
I turned at last to see the street empty, our vehicles gone. Sammy was peering around the corner at me, waving wildly, holding his AK. Jesus, I hoped he wouldn’t get shot by Hank the Yank. With his shemagh and moustache he looked like an insurgent. Sammy started firing up at the rooftops over our heads.
‘Les, Seamus,’ I shouted across the road. ‘In pairs, withdraw back to Sammy.’ I point back to Sammy at the corner.
‘Roger.’
‘Jim, you move first,’ Dai shouted to me.
I ran past him, slapping him on the shoulder out of habit, and took up a position near the middle of the road. I start firing rounds at gaps in the barriers, militiamen if I see them.
‘Dai, Move.’
Dai rolls out of my line of fire to the side and runs straight back down past me, hugging the wall.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the road, Seamus has stood up and is firing out a hundred rounds from the PKM in one continuous burst. His massive frame holds the barrel down mercilessly and every round hammers into the barrier, through cars and bodies.
I trigger the 203 and the grenade thumps into the barrier and explodes, throwing up a gratifying dust cloud. I eject the empty and reach for another, slotting it into the breech as Dai starts firing behind me.
‘Jim, move.’
‘Seamus, move.’
I fire the 203, turn to the side and get out of the way, then run back down the pavement. On the other side of the street Seamus is doing the same thing. He slings the PKM on to his back as he moves and gets the M16 into his hands. I am busy sticking another 40mm grenade into the breech as I run.
Les and Dai are both kneeling behind a car in the middle of the road, firing straight up the middle. In two bounds we are virtually at the mouth of the alleyway, where Sammy still waits.
‘Dai, move straight back to the cars.’ I start firing my rifle.
No pause. He legs it.
Seamus drops down, shouts to Les and covers his retreat, firing repeatedly at the shadows and silhouettes emerging from the wreckage.
Les reaches the corner in two steps, turns back to cover Seamus.
He empties his mag and takes off. He is a marathon man. He’ll do the distance back to the cars in three seconds.
I fire another bomb and run across the road, reloading.
‘Les, go.’
And he runs like a deer, almost in Seamus’s shadow. They were rivals. They both did those 26 miles in sub three hours and kept clipping off minutes every year they got older.
I am the last man at the corner. Everyone else is safely down the alleyway and we have made it, broken contact and are on the way out. The militia have had the stuffing knocked out of them on this road. Between Seamus’s last long burst and my three grenades the barrier is shrouded in smoke and dust, and the enemy is in disarray. I pause, greedily, and unload one more 40mm bomb into the barrier before running to the vehicles.
Then, of course, I get shot.
I actually see the round that hits me. It’s a ricochet that skips low on the wall about 15m down the street with a puff of concrete dust and there is a lighting fast blur of dark movement that I see as an after-image, after it smacks me in the stomach, pushing me backward. I sit down hard with an ‘oof’ of breath. My rifle clatters to the ground.
Fuck.
‘Come on, Jim, stop showing off.’ Dai is leaning out of the back window of the saloon, laughing. He thinks I have tripped.
I grab the 203, get up and run. Run past the Brit car, noticing Seamus is back at the wheel. Dai has his rifle up, covering the corner behind me.
‘Faster, Ash, that’s like running but fucking slower,’ Seamus crows as I run past.
There was a burning feeling across my gut as I rushed past the van full of children and leapt into the rear of the SUV. Sammy accelerated and our small convoy raced off down the alleyway into a tangle of cars, some dragging barbed-wire coils from the barriers.
The vehicles on that section of road had not been damaged in the bomb blast and were trying to push through the chicanes before turning back to the city. No one would give an inch. Drivers were screaming from side windows and pumping their horns as they clattered like dodgems into the whirl of steel, each gap wide enough for one car blocked by two trying to shove their way through at the same time.
‘Look at them. Iraqis,’ Sammy said. ‘They cut off their own noses.’
I glanced up at the chaos and continued scanning my arcs as we bumped through the maze of alleyways. Sammy knew the neighbourhood like the back of his hand and we spent a bewildering several minutes turning this way and that, but always heading north, slowly but surely, back into Karada.
‘This street it is only one-way street,’ said Sammy, indicating that we were heading the wrong way. Shit we don’t have time for the tour. He’s going to show me the house he was born in next. My free hand was firmly pressed on to my stomach to stop the bleeding. I hadn’t even looked at it yet. The adrenalin had kept me going as I ran. Now the pain was kicking in.
Sammy pushed and bumped his way through the traffic, the two vehicles staying close behind. Odd shots rang out from rooftops. Explosions detonated in the distance. The air smelled of smoke and death.
Forty-five long minutes after leaving the safe house, we drove back past it on the main drag through Karada. It seemed bizarre after the carnage at the checkpoint to see men in dirty white dish-dashes at outdoor cafés and women in abayas strolling off to the Shia market, life continuing in one part of the city while for scores it had ended in another not far away.
Ten minutes later, using the alternate route, we headed south past the Dora refinery, straight up the overpass on to the six-lane highway. We looped west and then north over Route Irish. In another five minutes – if we were lucky – we would be on the main road that leads past Abu Ghraib and out into the Western Desert.
CHAPTER 22
IT STILL WASN’T easy to get my head round the fact that Colonel Ibrahim was collaborating with the militia in their hunt for Sammy. He knew Sammy wasn’t a traitor. They had worked together. I could even recall having seen them having a laugh together, although over what I couldn’t imagine. Arab relationships are intricate and paradoxical, filled with immense generosity and deep hatreds, profound wisdom and utter ruthlessness. The Italians think they invented the notion of the vendetta but blood feuds are as ancient as the Babylonians.
We all knew Ibrahim was smart, but it had not occurred to me until that moment that he must have been as slippery as a bag of eels to have reached the rank of colonel in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led army. It was ironical, to say the least, that, as the local police commander, he was now leading the very water guards we had trained. That’s what we were dealing with, the web of politicians, police, army and Shia militias furtively taking the levers of power and eradicating anyone from the past who might get in their way.
Ibrahim would have known from the Karada grapevine that the Mashooen family were preparing to flee Baghdad. The seizure of Gabir’s storehouse with the vehicles had told him it was imminent.
I had hoped that Gabir and Zahrah’s deaths would at l
east serve the purpose that two independent sources would have confirmed to the Shia, undoubtedly under torture, that Sammy intended to head north to Mosul. In that way their precious resources would have been used up planning roadblocks and ambushes on the route north.
However, after this morning’s bloodbath someone might put two and two together and realize that the PSDs involved in the shoot-out were seen to have been escorting a couple of cars full of Iraqi civilians. Any police car now could be a potential threat, ready to inform Ibrahim of our location. We just had to get out of the city. Once we headed into the desert the Shia would be reluctant to follow us into what was Sunni-dominated territory.
We carved a route into the western suburbs through slums edged by sprawling cemeteries, collapsing tenements, affluent suburbs of flat-roofed villas built around mosques and ragged parks where the homeless slept and children never played. On my direction, Sammy changed course often, guiding the three-rig packet into passageways where sheets were strung between buildings for shade and unassuming displays of dish-dashes and djellabas dripped on the windscreen where they had been hung out to dry.
Every street is a souk pin-cushioned with umbrellas advertising Coke and Marlboro, our consumerist dream drifting into Baghdad. Almost everyone is in business, poor families often with such modest displays you wonder why they bother – six eggs, a handful of tomatoes, a cabbage, batteries in packs with Chinese lettering, sandals with pointed toes, live chickens and dead chickens. Men were mending shoes, sharpening knives, working on treadmill sewing machines, beating pots and pans. Women float by like black-sailed ships, like shadows of each other.
Men were driving to work, to meetings, to prayers. The muezzin were chanting again, words like small birds taking to the air. Insects pattered on the glass. The general was gazing out of the window with a fixed expression. He had known these streets for eighty years and seemed to be memorizing each one as we passed. He was going into exile. He knew that once we got out, if we got out, he would never see the city of his birth again.
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