Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

We were almost there when a thunderous clatter ripped the sky apart and I thought another suicide bomber had let rip. But there was no dust, no aftershock. I ducked involuntarily. The sound was coming from above. I leaned sideways to look up and couldn’t believe my eyes. Two Kiowas close enough to touch swooped down and I realised that, with the swarm of police cars chasing us, it was our three cars that looked like the enemy. I sat there blankly, waiting for the inevitable machine-gun fire.

  CHAPTER 23

  CHRIST ON A crutch! My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t swallow. I knew these birds of prey. The Kiowa Warrior is a single-engine scouting chopper equipped with Hellfire missiles, Hydra 70 rockets and machine-guns. I remember a pilot telling me that they were so loaded up with weapons that they were difficult as hell to land if you got into engine trouble.

  Now, all those guns and rockets seemed to be pointed at us. Did they think we were insurgents? It was more than possible that the IP had called in to the Americans that they were in pursuit of AIF enemy forces, in which case we were up shit creek.

  I waited for the spray of incoming from the .50 cal and heard nothing but the roaring engines ratcheting up the volume to a deafening pitch and slowly fading away again as the flyboys skimmed inches above the roof of the SUV. What the fuck are they waiting for? We kept going. They may have been trying to warn us off approaching the VCP, but to stop and wait for the IP to catch us was a death sentence for Sammy and his family.

  In our Spartan days, we kept a low profile, waited our turn in backed-up traffic and mocked the contractors who barged in overt convoys to the front of the line, flashing their CPA passes. The faults we see in others we always end up duplicating. Still, it was an emergency. No time for discretion now. Only a blind and deaf man could have failed to notice our manic procession with half the Baghdad police force in pursuit.

  ‘Slow down, but keep going towards the checkpoint,’ I told Sammy.

  I held the Stars and Stripes out the window and let it stream behind us as we overtook the line of cars waiting to reach the barrier.

  As the Kiowas turned for a second buzz, we continued closing down the space to the checkpoint, not knowing what to expect when we got there. I had hardly believed we were going to get this far, and now the gate was in sight I hated to think that success would be snatched away from us.

  The Kiowas almost broke my eardrums, swooping down once again. I was certain we were in for it this time and was astonished to see in the side mirror that the cops were more startled by the helicopters than we were. They had given up the chase and were driving off like an unsettled swarm of flies in all directions. I realized that the attack angle of the Kiowas had been aimed behind us at our pursuers. I looked back to see Dai holding a huge flapping Union Jack out of the back window of the Peugeot. Good man.

  My back was drenched. I was panting.

  We’d reached the gate.

  A couple of American troopers were holding back the traffic at the front of the line to let us through. One was black, the other white, both big guys, rifles pointed down. I caught a flash of sergeant stripes. Sammy stopped in the shade of a metal awning and the white guy waved away my pass as I tried to show it to him. He leaned in the window.

  ‘You Ash?’

  I goggled at him. ‘I am,’ I admitted.

  ‘Got a message for you. Guy named Rick in some Special Forces team said to say if you got this far: Thanks, bro, you made him a hundred bucks,’ he explained. ‘Those boys are taking bets on how far you’ll get.’

  I wondered which of them had bet against us.

  ‘I’ll get a lot further if you keep these cops off my tail,’ I said.

  ‘They ain’t coming through my gate,’ he assured me. He pointed, first towards the city, then out into the wilderness. ‘Inside it’s a fucken’ mess. Out there it belongs to the Marines.’

  I realized their uniforms were different – desert digicam with plain brown Interceptor body armour.

  ‘Oorah, Sergeant.’

  I held my fist out and he tapped it with his.

  ‘Oorah, sir.’ He grinned. So did I. Semper Fucking Fi.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ I said, and – as simple as that – my little convoy slid out of Baghdad into Anbar province.

  The Kiowas flew over once more and disappeared through the low-hanging clouds. I wondered if it was Davor’s parting gift or a coincidence. I would never know. The Green Berets must have passed the word down the line to the guards on the last checkpoint. It wasn’t fate looking out for us. It wasn’t Allah. It was fellow soldiers.

  Sammy put his foot down and in a few minutes Baghdad vanished in the grey haze behind us as we raced through the nondescript suburbs clinging to the edge of the city.

  ‘Next stop, dinner at the Marriott, boys,’ I said over the radio.

  ‘Dinner’s on me if we get there,’ Les came back.

  ‘Done.’

  We headed towards Highway 10 with its roaming gangs of highwaymen, windstorms, sandstorms, freak floods, IEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, a normal day’s driving in Iraq and comparatively less risky than what we’d already been through that day. Once we cleared the small towns on the outskirts of the city, the arid waste stretched in all directions, grey, flat and featureless. The road ahead was virtually empty and vanished into infinity at the horizon.

  ‘Just another 500 klicks, lads,’ I said over the net.

  ‘I am ready,’ Sammy laughed.

  I turned to General Mashooen. ‘You all right, sir?’

  ‘Yes, and me, I am ready,’ he answered, and we all had a good chuckle.

  We had covered the first 15km through the city in what had seemed like a hundred years. Just another 500K – 300 miles – to the Jordanian border. If we averaged 100K an hour, not difficult on the highway, we’d reach the frontier in daylight.

  Only one small problem, we had to pass Fallujah, 55km west of Baghdad, and the most dangerous city on earth – not my phrase, by the way, it was coined by the Marines who had daily run the gauntlet of the two main thoroughfares, known as Mobile and Michigan. IED alley for short.

  Tribal heads in this part of the world had been firm supporters of Saddam and had backed the al-Qaeda uprising. It all came to a head in 2004 when insurgents famously ambushed and killed four Blackwater PSDs in Fallujah. A mob mutilated the bodies, burned them and strung them from the bridge over the Euphrates. The images and film clips had flashed around the world.

  The marine and army assault on Fallujah in November that year ended in arguably the most savage house-to-house combat in the war. The city’s infrastructure was shattered, the residents fled and, while the Sunni fighters who had escaped continued their battle against the Coalition, other parts of Iraq prospered with aid money providing roads, water, schools and security.

  By 2006, Sunnis were sick of the struggle against the CF and had grown tired of the al-Qaeda foreign fighters with their Wahabist fundamentalism, a cruel and divisive Islam totally alien to the more liberal Sunnis of Iraq. Tribal leaders met in Anbar province and what emerged from the summit was the Awakening Movement, a Sunni self-preservation pact that became known as the Sons of Iraq and spread across the entire country. When they stopped shooting Americans, the Americans gave the Sons of Iraq aid, money and new guns that they turned on their erstwhile fanatical comrades.

  The Sons of Iraq may have preferred shooting Shias, but were not averse to slotting foreigners and strangers. They were proud, armed to the teeth and maintained a network of roadblocks around their tribal homelands. I saw the first of these obstacles up ahead. For some reason, we were allowed to pass through without being stopped, although men in turbans denoting their tribe observed us like hawks from the side of the road. Others stood in the backs of open trucks mounted with machine-guns, weapons cocked, their belts of cartridges gleaming in the sunlight.

  We passed a cart laden with sacks pulled by a donkey, an old man with bare feet guiding the rig. It was a scene from the Bible, except for the smoke from his cigarette, an
d it was always hard in a war zone to understand that while we were fighting some battle between opposing forces, right and wrong, Shia and Sunni, the West and Islam, life for most people carried on: they sowed and reaped, they celebrated births and buried their dead. I remembered the wedding party driving in noisy procession through the city the morning I arrived and it was hard to believe it had been only four days earlier.

  We passed through a second checkpoint. I could see the outskirts of Fallujah rising in the distance. Awakening-council checkpoints would be all over the place now. If we were entering a trap, there was nothing I could do about it. We couldn’t turn back to Baghdad.

  We passed the third checkpoint. I heard engines igniting, the muted sound as alarming as RPGs exploding around me. Gearboxes crunched. The engines growled as the motors turned over, then hummed as five pickup trucks filled with militiamen began to tail us. Some of them were in a mixture of pseudo-military uniforms, others in a mishmash of civilian dress. They all appeared relaxed, and were holding their weapons casually, not ready to use.

  ‘They’re tailing us, mate. We’re keeping an eye on them.’ Les’s voice came over the net.

  Everyone was set. If we had to take them on, we were ready for it. It was suicide, but we were ready.

  The first of the five cars accelerated to overtake and drew alongside when it reached the SUV. The front passenger wore a black beard and a white turban that looked freshly washed. He studied Sammy and the general in their red and white headscarfs. He stared at me for several moments, pointed at himself, then pointed at an exit ramp ahead. There was little choice. I gave Sammy the nod and he turned off the highway.

  In a few minutes, the way was blocked by a metal barrier. The driver in front flashed his lights. The barrier cranked up to allow us access to the city limits of Fallujah, and I imagined the road to hell would look like this: bleak, dusty, dilapidated, the same style of barrier, but rusted permanently open. The ubiquitous roadside herd of goats munched stolidly on rubbish and old tyres, watching us drive past without interest. The little boy herding them looked out from his shemagh and a coat too big for him, shouted some abuse and drew his finger across his throat. The little shit.

  The driver ahead led us into the usual chaos of careworn streets that comprises the centre of so many townships in the Middle East. Men sat under arcades, playing dominoes, drinking tea, smoking, always smoking. Women in black stumped by, carrying loads. You imagine towns in the Mesopotamian desert would be colourful, picturesque, romantic. They are not. They are mean, decaying, hostile, and smell of shit and urine, donkey, camel and human.

  We followed an avenue dotted with young palms, the fronds still wrapped in plastic, and stopped in an open square outside a mosque that must have been damaged by the Marines in their assault on Fallujah and was still being repaired. The men in turbans jumped from their vehicles and surrounded our little convoy with rifles readied. I imagined I heard the click of safety catches two cars behind me as the Brits slid off the safety on their weapons. I remembered Les once saying that dying was part of living, being taken prisoner for him would be worse than death.

  Sammy in his red and white shemagh stepped from the SUV, hands held high. One of the gunmen prodded the barrel of his AK into his plump belly. Sammy didn’t flinch. He spoke softly, a smile pinned to his heavy lips. Now I could see them close up, the gunman and his comrades looked both fierce and impoverished, ground down like the small town, bleary eyes, scruffy beards, loose clothes, intricate turbans and dirty feet in broken flip-flops.

  What I assumed was the commander of these Sons of Iraq materialized from the building beside the mosque. I noticed several official vehicles with Iraqi flags parked up in the shade next to the building. There was a Humvee, obviously ING, with a huge Iraqi flag painted on the gun shield.

  The guy approaching was heavily built, with a white smock and loose white pants, a clipped beard threaded with grey, a pockmarked face and intelligent eyes likes chips of flint. He clapped his hands and threw out instructions.

  ‘We must get out,’ translated General Mashooen. ‘Without rifles.’

  ‘Lads, we have to debus, without rifles,’ I said over the net.

  ‘Fuck that,’ Les replied immediately.

  I noticed the head guy approaching Sammy. He seemed relaxed. They both bowed, shook hands, touched chests.

  ‘They look friendly to me, mate,’ I said to Les. ‘Let’s go along with it.’

  I debussed. The other Brits joined me, looking reassuringly unfazed, ignoring the weapons of the Iraqis. We stood either side of the general, who seemed to be inspecting these ex-Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda militiamen as if they were on parade. They eyed his white moustache and fierce scowl warily.

  Abdul slowly unloaded his bus of passengers behind us.

  The sharp eyes of the commander passed over our unlikely party, the women with heads covered, the children, Sammy with his plump hands gripping his waist, Abdul, the general, and us, four Brits with our shades and pistols stuffed down our chest rigs.

  One of the guards stepped in front of Les, shoving his rifle forward, trying to stare him down. Les just gave him a bland look I recognized as meaning that if he tried anything Les was going to feed him that rifle. The other militiamen shuffled restlessly in the manner of troops eager to brutalize unarmed civilians.

  The chief asked Sammy something and Sammy pointed me out.

  ‘He ask me who in charge. I say you,’ said Sammy with the demeanour of someone not wanting to look important. Cheers, Sammy.

  The big man walked over and stared at me grimly, looking me up and down as if sizing me up for a suit.

  I thrust my chin out, shoulders back – keeping a stiff upper lip in front of Johnny foreigner, but inside I had a sudden desire that the ensuing conversation be carried out through intermediaries, or ideally perhaps by telephone from my hotel in Jordan.

  ‘Ahlen wah sehlen,’ the commander said. Then, ‘Please. You are very welcome here,’ in a bloody good English accent, and I thought, Jesus, he must have done a BBC Learning English course.

  He spoke to his men, who stood down and gave us grins full of bad teeth. Teeth like a recce patrol Dai would have said; all blacked up and well spaced apart. He spoke to Sammy, and we traipsed towards the building beside the mosque. The atmosphere visibly relaxed and I felt my tense shoulders unwinding.

  ‘This better not be a fucking trap,’ Les whispered.

  ‘No, they would have shot us in the open.’

  ‘Maybe in there’s where they keep the swords so they can cut our heads off.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, mate, they’ll use a blunt spoon on you.’

  We passed through a serene courtyard with a fountain at the centre and entered through a pair of doors into a cool shady hall scattered with cushions and lit by the light falling obliquely through a row of high arched windows. We were invited to sit and dropped down cross-legged in a circle, the women and children to one side, Sammy chatting ten to the dozen with the commander. Turns out that he was an ex-air-force officer like Sammy. Although they had never met before, they had many mutual friends and had both served at the nearby airbase.

  Several men brought chai in proper tea cups with a plate of sweetmeats. The old comrades asked politely in English about each other’s health, about their children, the state of everyone’s health, and then switched to their own tongue to get down to the nittygritty. I caught enough Arabic words to think they were talking economics. With its wars and currency fluctuations, like the US dollar, gold and precious stones in the Middle East are understood and appreciated by everyone. I wondered how much we would have to pay to get past this.

  When Arabs barter, they want to reach a deal where neither party feels they have given away too much. With their short fuses and long memories, Arabs in any negotiation consider future harmony.

  I sipped tea, gazed out into the yard with its dappled light, words flowing over me like moody jazz. Arabic spoken well is melodic. The Koran is one
long poem. You can lose yourself in its rhythms. I could understand why boys taught in the madrassas by chanting the Prophet’s words turned into fanatics, all that testosterone, all those virgins. At least the volunteers in the Mahdi Army thought they knew what they were fighting for. I felt for the squad-dies sent to Afghanistan. In the War of Terror, it was hard to know exactly which bunch of turbaned tribesmen were allies and which were the enemy. Since 9/11 our grasp on the moral imperative had loosened. If your friends die or you come home with horrific injuries it’s important to know why, to maintain your humanity.

  I was tired suddenly. The injury was sapping my strength. Snapshots from the firefight were running through my head, a round taking the padding out of my Kevlar vest, another whistling across my helmet. I could see in my mind’s eye the Mahdi militiaman creeping into position, the scope on his Dragunov gleaming, the long barrel like a compass needle seeking my life. I’d beaten him to the draw. One blink and it would have been me, not him. Now he was on the battlefield with his brains spilled in the dust and I was drinking tea from Doulton china.

  Two green birds hopped across the gravel in the courtyard. The seconds were eating time. The pressure running a mission chips away at your mental reserves like the tide lapping at a sandcastle yet, perversely, I felt myself relaxing. I gazed out at the fountain, the water rainbow-coloured in the glare of the sun, and wondered what I was doing in this God-forsaken town when I could have been sitting in a lawyer’s office in London. I’d be looking at the clock there, too, that’s the trouble. It’s not action that gets at you, it’s the waiting, that moment of stasis when everything stops except your emotions. You feel an ache in your right shoulder. A faint migraine that’s not exactly there but coming like a plane through clouds.

  I could smell the cordite clinging to my clothes. I could taste the death smell of my own breath. The scenes at the checkpoint that morning were vivid in my mind, the suicide girl approaching the doomed Iraqi soldiers, the daylight vanishing in black smoke, the eager expressions of the Mahdi boys racing through the blazing ruins. These pictures stay with you, change you in some way. When it’s them or you, you count yourself lucky.