Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Amanda had hoped that spending most of the day at school might take the children’s minds off what had happened, but Melissa kept going up to friends in the playground, saying, ‘My Daddy’s been shot.’ The school thoughtfully appointed her a companion to accompany her for the next few days, but still she was asking questions that no six-year-old should ever have to ask: ‘Mummy, if I was shot in the hand would I die?’ and plaintively, resentfully demanding to know, ‘Why couldn’t the terrorists have shot Daddy with a water pistol instead of guns?’

  Amanda now had the dilemma of whether to stay in London with the children or get herself out to Riyadh to be at my bedside. Saudi Arabia was obviously not safe for Westerners, she reasoned, and to run the risk of the children losing two parents did not bear thinking about, so she was hesitant to leave. Her parents made the decision for her when they got to London, taking over the care of Melissa and Sasha, who probably saw the unexpected arrival of their Pops and Gran as a huge treat. On Wednesday Amanda was taken shopping along with my researcher Katie Pearson for an abaya, the black cloak required to be worn by women in Saudi, and late that night they landed at Riyadh’s futuristic King Khaled Airport, together with a delegation from the BBC and Simon’s parents. ‘It was very disorienting,’ Amanda told me later. ‘We were given a VIP reception because the British and Irish ambassadors were there to meet us. There were security men with guns everywhere.’ Simon’s widow Louise had just spent a harrowing day being taken under heavy security to the spot where the Saudi police said her husband had died, a version they later changed.

  It was past midnight three days after the attack and Amanda was given the choice of going to the Embassy to get some sleep or going straight to the hospital to see me. Uncertain as to how critical my condition was, she chose the hospital in case I did not survive the night. It must have been quite a shock for her to see two armed guards posted outside my room. Having failed to protect us while we were filming, the Saudi authorities now seemed determined to prevent anyone from coming to finish me off. This extra security was probably just as well since hospital staff told her that gunmen had recently crept into another hospital, disguised as women, to try to kill a patient they had wounded earlier. In the light of this news Amanda now planned her own emergency contingency plan in case anyone had similar ideas for me. She prepared a sheet that could be pulled over me to cover my face and located a cupboard in which to hide herself. This may sound paranoid, but Riyadh at that time must have been a very frightening place for her and on each subsequent trip to the hospital she never knew quite what to expect.

  All this time I was under heavy sedation, pumped full of a whole pharmacy of drugs and hooked up to machines that helped my body perform its most basic functions, like breathing. But my mind was far from still; in fact it was extremely active. The morphine-derived drugs I had been given after being shot were so powerful that I was having some bizarre hallucinations. I imagined that someone was asking me to hold up two pails of blood while the contents were mixed together for my blood transfusion. But something was wrong. The young German medical student in charge of mixing the blood was arguing with a nurse and now he had stormed off in a huff. ‘Excuse me,’ I said weakly, but no one could hear me and now I was being left to balance the pails of blood on my own. Of course none of this was happening except in my head – the hospital notes at the time did mention I was ‘showing signs of delirium’.

  For five days Amanda came to sit quietly at my bedside, reading to my motionless form, mopping my brow and holding my hand. As I underwent operation after operation, she lost count of the number of consent forms she had to sign, knowing each time there was always the risk it could go fatally wrong.

  The Saudis continued to take a concerned interest in my case. On more than one occasion Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, visited me in my small room while I was still out for the count, accompanied by a retinue of up to thirty followers and bodyguards. The British, Irish and US ambassadors also came to visit my almost lifeless form. How ironic, I thought later, that only a few days previously I had called in on the US Embassy to hear their latest assessment of the Al-Qaeda threat, only to become one of their statistics myself. Still, the US ambassador James Oberwetter must have rated my chances of recovery as he left me a present of Ghost Wars, a six-hundred-page book on Al-Qaeda, Bin Laden and the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan.

  Amanda’s brother Mike, a former bodybuilder who had once run the gym at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, performed gentle physiotherapy on my arms, but they were slack and lifeless. The only reaction anyone got out of me was when Mark Perrow, my BBC line manager who had flown out to see me, joked that he had put me down for weekend duty in the newsroom; apparently my blood pressure went up noticeably.

  Eight days after I had first gone under sedation on the night I was shot, I finally floated up to the surface and opened my eyes. Amanda’s face smiled down at me. ‘Honey, you made it!’ she cried. ‘You’re my hero!’

  I was groggy but full of questions. ‘Where is Simon?’ I asked.

  Amanda’s smile faded. ‘He didn’t make it, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.’

  This was too much to take in and I closed my eyes again. Perhaps she was wrong. How could he not be alive any more? Surely if I had survived he must have done too. I simply could not comprehend the possibility that Simon’s fate had been any different from mine.

  The BBC was doing its best to get me repatriated to a UK hospital as soon as possible. Initial arrangements had been made for the RAF to fly me out to Qatar and from there to a UK airbase. But Dr Bautz was unwilling to risk the life he had just saved and each time they asked him when I could be released he would reply, ‘Just give it one more week.’

  I remember little of the hospital in Riyadh, hooked up as I was to tubes and needles; just the sweet-sour smell of urine and a perpetual, overwhelming thirst. My guts were so badly damaged that I was not supposed to drink anything, but Amanda was allowed to give me tiny drops of mango juice which I sucked from a sponge on the end of a stick. She says I complained that it was never enough and also that I desperately wanted a monkey bar above my bed so that I could pull myself up. But I was not allowed to move, as the bullet wound to my right shoulder was still fresh and the bone there still damaged.

  Eventually, after eighteen days at the King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh, Bautz relented and agreed to let me go home, but only after he had secured a telephone link with the pilot of the air ambulance. Sherard had had a quiet word with the Saudi Foreign Minister, whose government generously paid both the hospital bill and the cost of the flight home.

  In convoy we drove under police escort through the streets of Riyadh to the military airport in the centre of this low-rise city, bypassing customs completely. I vaguely remembered passing through here in happier times with a junior prince, off to visit some tribesmen in the mountains of the Hijaz, but that was in another life. We then boarded a sleek executive jet with oval windows and swivelling armchairs that cruised at 45,000 feet. Strapped down on my stretcher, I was unable to appreciate its finer comforts, but I did feel I was in space. The sky looked so deep blue it was almost black and I was convinced I could see the curvature of the earth. Mike, my brother-in-law, was in hog heaven: he had found some fellow smokers up front. He spent the entire flight in the cockpit, helping the pilot and co-pilot kick up a dense blue fug.

  We landed that afternoon at Luton airport, where the English summer welcomed us back with a blast of wind and drizzle. There was a small, very cold-looking reception committee waiting for us: a handful of BBC News managers, someone from the Saudi Embassy and the ambassador’s security adviser, Nawaf Obaid, whom I had been on the phone to on the afternoon we were attacked. A whole hour was then spent transferring me into a little red helicopter for the short flight to east London. Mike sidled up to me and said conspiratorially, ‘So, Frank, who do you want to accompany you on the helicopter?’ ‘Amanda,’ I croaked. His face fell. After his six-hour joyride in t
he Learjet cockpit, Mike had clearly thought he was on to a winning streak.

  Unable to see very much from my stretcher, I felt the helicopter lift off, turn south then bank round and almost immediately, it seemed, steady itself for landing. We touched down into the wind on the roof of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, my new home for the next four months. As the whine and backwash of the helicopter’s rotors slowly subsided I was loaded into a lift and lowered into the bowels of the building. A second, slow-motion ordeal was about to begin.

  I did not realize it then, but when I was delivered to the Royal London that afternoon I was still very weak and ill. When the lift doors opened I was wheeled on a stretcher past the hospital’s consultants and registrars, earnest-looking men in pinstriped suits all lined up to receive me. It was my first sight of Frank Cross, a trauma surgeon whom Bautz had met and recommended to take charge of my recovery. A conversation developed over my head, literally, and I began to feel increasingly nauseous and begged to be put to bed. I was then brought up to the High Dependency Unit, a sort of halfway house between Intensive Care and a normal ward. On the way we passed a private room guarded by a cluster of armed police in bulletproof vests. I was alarmed to see guns again so soon so I asked a nurse what they were doing there. ‘Oh that,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘The patient’s a drug-dealer or something. Got shot in the neck in a drive-by last week. Police are just making sure the people who did it don’t come and finish the job.’

  It was not until over a year later that Frank Cross confided, ‘When we first saw you we were very worried that you were not going to make it. You just didn’t seem to have enough small bowel left to survive nutritionally.’

  Partly for my own security and partly to ward off any press enquiries, I was given a pseudonym. To everyone’s bemusement this was ‘Dan Kilo, Unknown’, an invention of the hospital’s Emergency Department. Many trauma patients are brought in unconscious with no identity so they are named in alphabetical order. I rather liked Dan Kilo, it made me think of some comic-book hero. It also came in useful in preserving my anonymity, as before long an enterprising journalist from a Sunday paper crept into the hospital, pretending to be an old friend of mine, seeking an in-depth interview. He did not get past the nurses.

  Inside the HDU ward there were monitors bleeping everywhere. The first thing I remember was a Bengali woman having some kind of fit in the bed opposite mine. She was moaning and wailing, shaking her head, her hands trembling, and I wondered what had happened that had so upset her. Once my bed was installed in its bay someone handed me a mirror and I saw myself for the first time since being shot. I was a shocking sight. My eyes were yellow with jaundice from my liver being thrown out of kilter by the cocktail of drugs I had been fed over the past three weeks. But what horrified me most was the sight of my legs, especially the left one. Lying slack and useless after being disconnected from my spinal nerves, the thigh was withered where the muscles had atrophied to little more than skin and bone, and I did not recognize it as my own. My arms were still slightly tanned from the Saudi sun but they were dreadfully shrivelled, the flesh hanging off the bone like that of someone more than twice my age. I had a cannula inserted into the back of my hand, which was purple, bruised and swollen. A large tube called a ‘central line’ for administering drugs ran into the side of my neck and to this was attached a whole cluster of drips like a bunch of grapes, so that it hurt to turn my head. I had often wondered what those tubes were that people had taped to the top of their nose on hospital programmes. Now I knew: a nasal-gastric tube fed through my nostril and all the way down the back of my throat into my stomach to provide basic nutrients. Another pair of much smaller plastic tubes provided oxygen; they smelt of stale cigarettes. I had a vacuum dressing on my abdomen where nine abdominal operations known as ‘laparotomies’ had been performed and the flesh was raw. When Bautz and his team had rescued me on the operating table of the Al-Iman Hospital my intestines had been in pieces, so now a colostomy bag was attached to my right side which a nurse came to check at intervals. My bladder was another war zone. I had never seen a catheter before, in fact I was not entirely sure what they were, but now the nurse pointed out two of them, like a salesman showing off the features of a new car. I had what is called a suprapubic catheter coming straight out of my abdomen where it was inserted through the abdominal wall into the bladder. I could see the second one, known as an ‘indwelling’ catheter, emerging to my alarm from the tip of my penis and connected to a urine bag. I was briefly thankful not to have been awake when that one was inserted. When no one was looking I took a quick peek down there; there was some colourful bruising but mercifully no bullet holes. Frank Cross told me later that when they first examined me my genitals were so badly bruised it looked as if I had been ‘helping the police with their inquiries’.

  My right leg was in traction for a hip fracture known as an ‘acetabular’ break. My left foot was drooping to one side in a very unnatural-looking position, while both my calves were encased in Flotrons, mechanically inflating stockings designed to stop potentially fatal deep-vein thrombosis. All in all I was still in quite a state and this was three weeks since the shooting. All the surgical attachments had been put in in Riyadh while I was out for the count, under general anaesthetic. And I still did not know about the paraplegia.

  In those first few days I got so used to being injected, tested and monitored that one nurse’s visit blended into another’s. At one point a figure in a white coat loomed towards me with a Russian name on his white hospital coat. ‘Lobotomy,’ he said, in a deadpan voice but with a thick Slavic accent.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I come for lobotomy,’ he repeated.

  This had to be either a joke or another blasted morphine dream. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong patient,’ I croaked.

  He glanced down at his clipboard. ‘You are Mr Gardner, no? Date of birth 1961?’

  This was no longer funny. ‘Yes, but . . . what did you say you’re here for?’

  ‘Phlebotomy. Blood test.’

  Within days of my arriving in London I had some welcome visitors: first my daughters, and then my parents and in-laws. By this time I had had yet another tube inserted into me: a ‘Hickman line’ had been fed into my chest under local anaesthetic so that nutritional supplements could be fed straight into my body. Melissa and Sasha stared at me in horror, whispering to Amanda, ‘What’s happened to Daddy?’ But if my parents were alarmed at my appearance they did not show it. For three weeks they had waited at home, consumed by worry and desperate for information. They had even gone to their GP and had vaccinations for Saudi Arabia (not something I had ever bothered with), preparing to fly out to Riyadh in their eighties until Amanda assured them I would soon be back in London. Now they were here in Whitechapel, smiling bravely at what must have been a startling sight. I was jaundiced and emaciated, I had not shaved since the day of the attack, and I must have looked like a ragged porcupine with all these tubes sprouting out of me. I was too weak to answer their questions with anything more than ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ My mother could see I was exhausted and she seemed content to just sit there beside the bed, while my father showed a boyish fascination with all the gadgets and bleeping monitors around me. I remember whispering to them, ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ and my mother just squeezed my hand and smiled at me.

  On the ward, life settled into a grim routine. I was given daily injections of Heparin to thin the blood and prevent clotting. The nurse always asked where I wanted the needle and I always pointed to my thighs as I had almost no feeling there. Annoyingly, though, whenever I grew hot I kept getting a sensation like being jabbed in the thigh with a sharp needle. I thought, ‘This does not bode well for summer holidays.’ There were daily blood tests from the veins in my arm and a blood-sugar-level test using a pinprick on my fingertips. This was not an issue the first few times, but very tedious once I had gone through every finger twice. I was still being fed intravenously, but n
ow at last I was allowed small swigs of juice and even soft food. But my spine was a worry to the hospital’s resident Libyan neurosurgeon; he was keen to open me up and remove any remaining grit and bone splinters that may have still been lurking in my lower back from the Riyadh shooting. I remember having dreadful headaches at that time, but as soon as I came round after the four-hour operation the headaches had gone and I felt wonderful. The surgeon had drained five millilitres of fluid from an abscess on the spine. Depressingly, though, he told me afterwards that he had seen some severed spinal nerves down there. Yet still I did not realize that I could be paraplegic – largely paralysed below the waist; I convinced myself that the numbness I felt in my buttocks and pelvis was just from lying too long in a bed.

  After I had served my seven days in the High Dependency Unit, my kindly consultant Frank Cross arranged for me to be moved upstairs to a single room on Treves Ward, due to the horrific nature of my injuries. The walls may have been blotched and peeling but I did not care; getting a room to yourself on the NHS was a privilege not to be sneered at.

  My cell-like room allowed me to have visitors whenever I wanted, which kept my spirits up considerably. Even without visitors, the room was rarely quiet for long. All day long the hospital’s little red helicopter took off and landed on the roof above my head. I liked this, as the sound of the rotor blades and the smell of the Avgas fuel never failed to quicken my pulse and remind me that there was a big wide world beyond my window, and it reminded me of some of my more adventurous assignments in places like Afghanistan. The immediate view out of the window was not inspiring. All I could see was a couple of cranes and what looked like a half-built multistorey car park. Life on the TV was rather more colourful: by day I watched Maria Sharapova slam and grunt her way to victory at Wimbledon. In the evenings I could hear some of the local lads gathering outside in the deserted east London building site, shouting, screaming, kicking cans and smashing bottles. Once there was a frightful cry of pain, which went on long after dark and brought back bad memories of lying alone and nearly bleeding to death in a street in Riyadh.