Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Two weeks later I had a call from his mother: Simon H. had finally taken his own life. He had joined a gun club in the US over the internet, flown to Las Vegas by himself, taken a day of instruction, then turned the pistol on himself. I was saddened, but somehow not surprised – this was his third and final attempt to commit suicide.

  A rather different character was Stu. Like me, he was a gunshot-wound victim, having been shot and robbed by bandits in Guatemala on New Year’s Day 2001. They had left him on the jungle floor, bleeding and paralysed from the chest downwards. But two days after he arrived in a Texas hospital he was out of bed and in a wheelchair. Stu had a can-do attitude to everything. When I met up with him for the first time he had just come back from a month in Cameroon, exploring remote bird habitats in a dug-out canoe, with his wheelchair wedged in the back. Now he was planning to swim with killer whales in Norway’s Arctic Ocean. Stu had a healthy disdain for his paraplegia; it was almost as if he didn’t notice it. I decided that if anyone was to be my role model for pursuing an active life after such appalling injuries, it should be Stu.

  For me, the avalanche of mail sent in by the public has been recognition enough for surviving six bullets and then coming back to work. But there was more to come. Not long after returning to my old job – and even my old desk – at the BBC I got an official letter from the prime minister’s office at Number Ten Downing Street:

  Dear Sir,

  The Prime Minister has asked me to inform you, in strict confidence, that he has it in mind, on the occasion of the forthcoming list of Birthday Honours, to submit your name to The Queen with a recommendation that Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to approve that you be appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire . . .

  I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant . . .

  I was in mild shock. So this is how people get their gongs, I thought. I had always wondered how it worked. I duly kept it secret for nearly three weeks, telling only my parents and Amanda, until at last my name appeared in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. By happy coincidence, I had agreed to be the compère that same day at our children’s school carnival. My parents drove up from the country and glowed with pride as the headmistress announced my honour to the assembled parents and pupils. I wheeled myself up the ramp to the stage, but no sooner had I begun to do the commentary on the parade of children in their costumes than I was interrupted by an RAF flypast for the Queen’s birthday. ‘Ah, they really shouldn’t have,’ I said into the microphone. ‘I mean, it’s just an OBE!’

  Four months passed and then came the day of the investiture at Buckingham Palace. I was allowed to bring three guests to watch the medal being pinned on to my chest in the ballroom, so here was a dilemma. Amanda would obviously come, but should we bring our children or my parents? Melissa and Sasha, who have finely tuned antennae for picking up words like ‘palace’ and ‘queen’, overheard our discussion and got very excited and begged to come too. But we decided that after all my parents had been through this was the least we could do to reward them; we also felt it would mean more to them, since having lived through the reigns of three sovereigns, George V, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, they had an inbuilt respect and fascination for the Queen and the pageantry of the Palace.

  After a warm autumn, the morning of 13 October 2005 dawned cold and rainy and there were few people outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. But the weather made no difference to us. The all-important Royal Standard was flying from the flagpole: the Queen was in residence, which meant she would be doing the honours. (Earlier, I had not been able to resist winding up my poor mother by telling her the Palace had informed me that ‘since the Queen was away in Balmoral it would be Viscount Linley awarding the medal’. Baah.)

  Police in black anoraks searched the bonnet and boot of our car and then we were through the gates, past the sentries in their chocolate-box uniforms and into the Quadrangle, where a line of pages in red waistcoats was waiting to escort guests upstairs. Over twenty investitures are held each year, mostly at Buckingham Palace, and there were at least a hundred recipients here today, together with their guests, yet the Palace staff still made everyone feel as if they were the most important person in the building. Except for the Queen, of course.

  The week before the investiture, I had said on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that I was determined to attend social events standing up in my callipers, instead of being two feet below everyone else in my wheelchair. Well, today, of all days, was an occasion to be upstanding and looking the Queen in the eye, I thought. I had strapped on my clunky callipers as soon as I woke up, but as the time came to shuffle the final few yards to Her Majesty I grew suddenly nervous. The red carpet stretched ahead of me like an aircraft-carrier runway and I could sense the palace flunkies watching me nervously as I gripped the bars of my rolling zimmerframe. What if I lost my balance and toppled over in front of a thousand guests, live television cameras and in the presence of the sovereign?

  ‘Mr Frank Gardner,’ announced the chamberlain, ‘for services to journalism.’ I could hear the equerry whispering in the Queen’s ear, ‘Riyadh . . . 2004 . . . survived’ as I concentrated on covering the ground up to the dais. I attempted a bow then looked up at her, recognizing the face so familiar from close-ups on television and feeling as if I knew her already, which was ridiculous.

  ‘How very gallant of you to come like this,’ said the Queen, pointing to my callipers.

  ‘Thank you, Your Majesty,’ I gasped; I was quite out of breath after hobbling just thirty yards across the ballroom.

  ‘So are you still recovering?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I think this is probably it,’ I replied, and then told her how I had hung on to life in Riyadh for the sake of my family. She asked me if I had returned to work, and this was my cue to shamelessly promo a programme I had been working on. ‘I gather you are an avid Radio 4 listener, Ma’am?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I do enjoy listening to it.’

  ‘Well, you may like to tune in this Sunday morning to Broadcasting House. I’ve done a special report on the survivors of the London bombings and how they’re coping with their injuries, which you may find quite moving.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Queen, ‘yes, I will do.’ And that was it: out came the royal handshake, which was the signal that the audience was over and my time was up.

  That evening I was back on parade for a BBC party in my honour; it was one of the happiest moments in my career. There in a large room were gathered over one hundred of my closest colleagues, many of whom had known me ten years ago when I was making the difficult transition from banking to journalism. As I tottered in on my callipers – for most people this was the first time they had seen me standing up since the shooting – the James Bond theme played over the sound system. Wine flowed, canapés were passed round and Helen Boaden, the Head of News, gave a speech that made me blush for its tributes. When I looked around the room at such stellar broadcasting figures as Kate Adie, Brian Hanrahan and Jeremy Bowen, I thought, This is mad. What an earth am I doing getting an OBE for services to journalism at the age of forty-four? But if you take six bullets and survive, there’s a good chance people will credit you with rather more than you deserve.

  Going home that night in a taxi, through the rain-washed streets of London, I felt better than I had in a long while. I knew that nothing was going to bring back Simon or the highly active, spontaneous life I had led before Riyadh, but I was alive and fit and happy. As Amanda had said when I first came out of heavy sedation in hospital: ‘You made it! Now we get to spend the rest of our lives together.’

  Afterword to the original edition

  BEING SHOT – DELIBERATELY, methodically and at close range – by people who know exactly what they are doing is one of those very personal close encounters you never think will happen to you. It has, of course, changed my life and those of my family.

  While I don’t spend every day wondering why it happened, there is no getting away from the fact that I am n
ow based in a wheelchair. This was not something I ever planned for, in fact I always imagined I would in time be a fit seventy-year-old, still striding up hillsides, keeping pace with my children. Being made paraplegic while you are still relatively young and fit is an absolutely catastrophic blow. But I know I am luckier than many others who have sustained Spinal Cord Injury: I still have my upper body, I have a loving family, a caring employer and I live in a city, London, that is increasingly conscious of the need to make adaptations for people with disabilities.

  In the months after I emerged from hospital many people wrote to me. Some of the best advice I received was from Stu, shot in the chest by Guatemalan robbers. When you first come to terms with your new life, he told me, it can be fairly depressing, but you have to focus on what you can still do, not on what you used to do. How right he is. Had I been a professional tennis coach my career would now be in serious trouble, but as it is, I am finding that I am busier than ever, trying to navigate our audiences through the complexities of terrorism, security and the Arab and Islamic world.

  For me, there was never any question of not returning to the Middle East. I had to go. Perhaps not straight back to Saudi Arabia, but certainly to the Gulf, where Amanda and I have had so many happy times. Obviously there were now limitations on the sort of travelling and reporting I could do in a wheelchair, but I did not want there to be any taboo on my going to a part of the world that has been so integral to my life. So when the opportunity came up to return to Dubai for a few days just before Christmas 2005, I seized it.

  Along with nearly five hundred other journalists, commentators and political figures from both the Arab world and the West, I was invited to attend the Arab Thought Foundation Forum on the shores of the Gulf. Everything was up for discussion: the pros and cons of democracy, religious extremism, suicide bombing, Western coverage of Islam, the role of women in the Arab world. Amanda came too, partly in case I felt strange about returning to a region where I had so very nearly been killed. “You lucksters,” complained Melissa, when we told the children we would be leaving them behind with their doting great-aunt Judy for a few days. It was true, it was a welcome break from the London winter and Amanda and I badly needed some time together after all those hospital months apart. Since I was a delegate, we were put up in one of the new luxury hotels that have sprung up along Dubai’s rapidly developing coastline. Our suite at the Mina A’Salam Hotel looked out on to the tranquil azure waters of the Gulf, where a vast and heavily decorated Christmas tree quivered incongruously beside the beach. Amanda spotted a sea kayak for hire and looked at me with a raised eyebrow: the conference was not due to start until the next morning.

  By the time we had got the beach hands to lower me into a wobbling kayak, a sea chop had built up. With each wave that slapped against the boat I found myself dangerously close to tipping over, since I was incapable of bracing with my legs. But a solution was found: a burly South African instructor sat in the seat behind me to steer and I soon got the knack of balancing myself with the oar, like an aquatic tightrope walker. The further we got from the shore the more freedom I felt, and as I glanced back at the sand-coloured skyline I reminded myself that I had begun that year still weak and supine on a hospital bed.

  But the spectre of terrorism refused to leave us alone entirely. The following morning, Amanda and I were sitting outside on our hotel balcony having breakfast, congratulating ourselves on having come back to Dubai, when the tannoy crackled into life.

  ‘Your attention please’, said a stern English voice. ‘An incident has occurred in the hotel. Please remain exactly where you are’. Amanda and I looked at each other in alarm. Was it a fire? A bomb scare? Had a crazed gunman burst into the lobby? After all, many people were baffled as to why Al-Qaeda had not yet targeted Dubai, a city awash with Western tourists and expatriates. If we now had to get out of the hotel in a hurry, how would we manage with me in a wheelchair? When we discovered the cause of the alarm, our fears turned to laughter: it turned out that a waiter had spilled some water on the marble floor of the lobby. In tranquil Dubai, that called for the tannoy.

  Dubai had changed since we had left it in early 2000 and there were places we hardly recognized. Where our hotel now stood we used to go picnicking on the bare dunes, our infant daughter toddling bowlegged into the water on a white-sand public beach. Now, a short drive away stood a massive indoor ski slope, where we stood and gaped as young Arab men snowploughed down the piste beneath banks of giant air-conditioners. Quite a few of our friends still lived here, others had moved here recently, and we managed to catch up with them all. There was Aly Rahimtoola, a Pakistani who had wept as he heard of my shooting while watching the in-flight news; now we shared a narghila water-pipe with him in an artificially re-created traditional shopping souk. With him was Tejan, a handsome and once hedonistic young Sierre Leonean we had last seen flirting at a pool party; now he was running convoys of merchandise from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr up to Basra, dodging insurgents and ambushes. Sean and Brian were here, fellow journalists who had been with me on my first reporting foray into Saudi Arabia a decade ago in another lifetime. So was Brad, the no-nonsense Australian who had asked me if I was wearing lipstick along with my studio make-up after my first TV appearance; he had landed a comfortable job looking after the irrigation of various sheikhly golf courses. And then there was Rupert Wise, senior prefect from my first year at school thirty years ago and later my boss and mentor at Flemings bank in the early 1990s. Rupert had had a difficult autumn.

  A serial expatriate with a visceral grudge against income tax, Rupert had moved his investment business out to one of the glittering new towers that now dominate Dubai’s skyline and had installed his young family in a palatial villa near by. He had decided to invest some of the fruits of his banking career in a luxury catamaran and then, in November 2005, had hired a local Australian skipper to take him and his wife Linda to an offshore island for a weekend picnic. Unfortunately the island, Abu Musa, was disputed territory, being claimed by both Iran and the UAE, and when the Good Ship Wise nosed into harbour they quickly found themselves surrounded by the gun-toting Iranian sailors and coastguards who had occupied the island. The Wises were arrested under suspicion of spying, flown to the Iranian mainland and held for two weeks, during which Rupert had had to suppress his boxing instincts when he was mildly roughed up in a corridor.

  I had been alerted to their plight on day one by our mutual friend Khaled Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti prince who had ventured briefly into Iraq with me in 1991. Together we worked hard to get them released. Khaled put his Gulf connections on notice to call in favours with Tehran, while I kept up the pressure on the Foreign Office, pestering the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s office for him to reason with his Iranian counterpart, which he did. Against my journalistic instincts, I insisted we keep the story out of the news until the pair were freed, lest the Iranian regime should feel itself backed into a corner and resort to trumped-up charges.

  Now, a fortnight after their return, the four of us had a celebratory dinner on the shores of the Gulf, dining al fresco beneath the moon while Linda calmed her still-frayed nerves with a succession of Marlboro Lights and Rupert tried very hard not to think what had now become of his beloved catamaran, still marooned in Iranian waters a few miles offshore. With the new, hardline anti-Western leadership in power in Tehran, they had been incredibly lucky not to have been imprisoned indefinitely, held as human bargaining chips while the West piled pressure on Iran to suspend its controversial uranium-enrichment programme.

  Returning to Dubai, even for just four days, whetted my appetite for more of the Middle East. I had felt enlivened to be back in the Gulf, even though Dubai now had five times as many British expats living there than there were in our day and somehow the place did not feel quite as foreign any more. Cairo, however, was still Cairo, and in early 2006 I made a flying visit back to the Egyptian capital, a place I still hold in great affection. BBC Radio 3 had commissioned me to write a tw
enty-minute talk on the city to be broadcast in the interval between two acts of Verdi’s classic Egyptian opera, Aida. On impulse I had suggested that rather than writing it from memory in some windowless studio in west London, why didn’t we fly over for the weekend and record my impressions on-site? So on a cool, wind-blown January evening, the veteran producer Simon Elmes and I wheeled though customs at Cairo Airport, a place still infused with the dust of centuries and the ash of a thousand cheap cigarettes, to be greeted by Raouf, the BBC Cairo bureau’s loyal driver. To say that Raouf was emotional would be an understatement. For two years he had driven me and my family around Cairo when I was the resident correspondent there, but he had not seen me since I had been gunned down in Riyadh. Now he fell to his knees, clasping my hand and kissing it repeatedly while sobbing uncontrollably. People were starting to stare, and I had to gently move us along as a bottleneck of homecoming Egyptians built up behind us.

  It was thrilling to be back in Cairo, but so frustrating to be there in a wheelchair. In a city where the broken pavements are either teeming with people or barricaded by illegally parked cars, there was no possibility of my being able to wheel around the streets. Instead, we went everywhere by car, dismantling and reassembling my wheelchair at each stop. But Raouf and I were in our element: he got to show off his city to my producer, I was being paid to describe it into a microphone. In the space of twenty-four hours we bounced from one location to another: from the serene majesty of the Pyramids of Giza to the cacophony of downtown Cairo’s traffic (where we recorded a minor car crash that obligingly took place beside us); from the pulse-quickening rhythm of an Arab orchestra playing on the banks of the Nile, to the spit-and-sawdust atmosphere of a backstreet café. At times I almost forgot I was in a wheelchair, but I found it almost unbearable not to be able to leap from the car and vault up the first few blocks of a pyramid I had once scrambled all the way up as a twenty-one-year-old.