by Andy McNab
Jerry wasn’t so lucky. Either the Arab face on the American passport threw them a bit, or they were just trying to show off to their new bosses who’d given them such nice shirts.
I waited for him in the general area. It was hot and noisy, and most of the noise was Italian. They put the four women to shame, and their hand gestures were much better as well.
It wasn’t just the soldiers who were armed. The place was heaving with guys wearing body armour over their civvies and carrying AK47s, MP5s, M16s, pistols, you name it. It made me feel good. Even if I was just holding Jerry’s hand, I was working, and I was back with my own kind.
This was where I felt comfortable; this was my world. Maybe I had done the right thing coming here.
26
Dazzling sunshine streamed through a dust-covered window. I peered through and wondered how we’d get into the city. There were no taxis because they couldn’t get on to the base. We were in a fortified confine: all I could see were rows of unmarked 4x4s with darkened windows and a few guys standing around with body armour under the obligatory sand-coloured safari vest, sun-gigs hanging off their noses, shoulder-slung MP5s at the ready. To complete the effect they had boom mikes stuck to their mouths to help them look like they were on top of the job. They hardly needed to be: there were more soldiers on show here than there were in the entire British Army. I reckoned they were the official freelancers in town, probably protecting the American and Brit bureaucrats who ran the country, looking good so the CPA thought they were getting their money’s worth.
In the midst of this chaos one thing was for sure: Rob wouldn’t be queuing up for a bus. He’d have organized everything down to the last detail, and was probably already gliding towards Baghdad in an air-conditioned 4x4.
It looked like the Canadian had got herself sorted too. Gap Man was busy loading her bag into the boot of a white Suburban as she jumped into the back and the BG started the engine.
Jerry was still being questioned. I caught his eye and indicated that I was going outside. He nodded, then turned back to yabber some more to his new friend. Ever since we’d got into Jordan he’d been saying how strange it was speaking Arabic all the time. Apparently this was the first occasion he’d ever used it, apart from talking to his grandmother and his mum or going round to one of the corner shops in Lackawanna.
I put my sunglasses back on and walked outside. The midday sun drilled into me as I looked round for transport. I hadn’t gone more than a dozen paces when a loud cockney voice bellowed behind me, ‘Oi, shit-for-brains, how’s it going?’
I recognized him at once, even with Aviators on. I hadn’t seen him since leaving the squadron, but there was no mistaking Gary Mackie. No discreet stuff for Gaz: it had never been his style to obey the written rules, let alone unwritten ones.
He was still shorter than me, and was still hitting the weights. His arms and chest were huge.
I came out with the regular greeting you give people when you bump into them like this. ‘Fucking hell, I heard you were dead!’
He didn’t answer. He just advanced on me with his arms wide open and banged himself into me for a big bear-hug. Then he stood back, still holding me by the shoulders. His eyes were level with my nose. ‘Fucking hell, mate, you look a bag of shit!’
Fair one: I probably did. Gaz had to be in his early fifties now, but looked much younger. His black sweatshirt was soaking wet, front and back. It had started out with long sleeves but they’d been ripped off, leaving the threads hanging over the top of his big tanned Popeye arms. He’d been in the Light Infantry before the Regiment, and still had a faded tattoo of his old cap badge on his right biceps. Only now it looked more like an anchor.
‘Thanks, Gaz, good to see you too. How long you been here?’
He was jumping up and down, speaking with his hands. ‘Six months. It’s fucking brilliant, know what I mean?’ He pulled his jeans up by their thick leather belt. A 9mm sat in a pancake holder at his side. ‘Who you working for, Nicky boy?’
‘Newspaper guy, American. He’s still in Immigration.’
He grabbed my arm. ‘Come here – come and see my crew.’ All smiles, he dragged me towards the four guys lounging in the shade nearby, all dressed in his regulation jeans and T-shirt combo. I’d never seen Gaz firing on less than six cylinders: everything was always great with him. He’d been married more times than Liz Taylor and still loved every one of them. They probably felt the same about him.
He punched me in the arm. ‘It’s good to see you, mate. I didn’t know you was on the circuit. I haven’t heard about you since fuck knows when.’
Once I’d left the Regiment and started to work for the Firm, I dropped out of almost everything I’d known. That was just how it had to be.
The ‘circuit’ was the job market for the ex-military. Security companies snap up personnel for helping out in a war, VIP protection, guarding pipelines, training foreign armies, that sort of thing. There’s a whole bunch of firms, British and American, some more reliable than others. The work is mostly freelance, payment always by the day. You’re responsible for your own tax and insurance, which means that most blokes don’t take care of either. It’s called the circuit because you bounce from one company to another. If you hear of a better job, you drop the one you’re doing and move on.
Gaz introduced me to a South African, a Russian and two Americans. I didn’t bother taking their names – I wouldn’t be seeing them again. We shook hands anyway. ‘Me and Nick used to be in the same troop,’ Gary announced, with evident pleasure.
The guys nodded a hello, then fell back into their own conversation. It was no big deal: I wasn’t expecting a group hug. It’s not as if we’re part of some brotherhood – it’s a business like any other. That’s just how it is. This lot looked different from the guys working for the CPA. They were in it for the money, not the boom mikes.
It wasn’t just transport out of here I wanted to know about. ‘What’s the score on getting a weapon – you got any spare?’
‘Got ’em coming out our fucking ears. Where you staying?’
‘The Palestine.’
I spotted the four Iraqi women further along, struggling with their luggage, shouting and hollering at each other.
‘Great place. Fucking odd-looking – wait till you see it. Good protection, though. Tell you what, you’re better off just getting them from one of the fixers. They’ve got shedloads, but they’re tearing the arse out of the prices. Be a lot quicker than waiting for me to bring a couple round, know what I mean?’
I turned back to Gaz. ‘I’ll do that. So what you doing here, mate?’
‘Fucking brilliant. Money for old rope, mate. Training the police. They’re using AKs, but we’re showing them how to use the fucking things properly. I get my training in twice a day and then I head out on patrol with the boys.’
I wanted to keep up this pretence of being on the circuit. ‘How much a day you on?’
‘Three fifty, plus expenses. Better than last time we were fucking about here, eh?’
In those days it had been MoD pay of about seventy pounds a day. Three hundred and fifty for freelancing sounded about right. Where middle-management guys in London talk about the rise in their house prices at dinner parties on a Saturday night, guys on the circuit talk about their daily rate. Nine times out of ten they’re bullshitting. Anyone who says, ‘Six or seven hundred,’ is lying through their teeth. As far as Gaz was concerned, three hundred and fifty pounds a day was the dog’s bollocks. He was just happy to be there, and had probably even paid his own fare.
‘I’m staying as long as they want me, Nick. There’s a bit of drama now and again, but fuck it. It’s Baghdad, innit?’
It was wonderful to see him; it added to the good feeling I was already getting. I didn’t know about the Canadian woman, but for me it was definitely like coming home.
I didn’t want to be with Gaz when Jerry turned up, but I had one last question. ‘Do you know how we get out of here? We�
�re trying to get into town.’
He was apologetic. ‘I’d give you a lift if I could, mate, but we’re waiting for PC Plod. Some superintendent from the Met. The poor fucker’s been seconded here for a couple of years. I can’t wait to watch him trying to teach ethical policing, know what I mean? The boys we’re training were lobbing RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] at American tanks five minutes ago.’
The South African spotted their passenger and went to pick him up.
Gaz gave me another big hug. ‘Listen, boy, really good to see you. There’s a coach that takes you into town. Follow them women, they’ll know.’ He nodded at the Iraqi quartet, then spotted someone behind me. ‘You with this dickhead?’
Jerry couldn’t wait to answer in the affirmative. ‘Yeah. Hiya, I’m Jerry.’
Gaz finally let go of me and shook Jerry’s hand. ‘What the fuck for?’ He pointed over at a group of guys in waistcoats, hunched over their MP5s. ‘You’d be better off with that bunch of tossers. At least they look as if they can do something.’ Then I got yet another bear-hug. ‘Only joking, boy.’
Gaz’s mates had got PC Plod by their 4x4s and into body armour and were now getting their own on. Gary started to move towards his wagons. ‘That’s it, time to go. If I’m near the Palestine I’ll come on in. Can’t call, fucking phones ain’t working yet. See you later, yeah? Fucking brilliant.’ He looked over at Jerry, a huge smile under his aviator sunglasses. ‘Listen, mate, when he fucks up and you need a professional, give us a call.’
‘I’ll do that. You come across any Bosnians in the city?’
‘They’re fucking everywhere! Bosnians, Serbs, Kosovans, you name it. Course they’re here – it’s a war, innit?’
He dragged his body armour out of his 4x4 and pulled it over his head, covering the big sweat marks on his T-shirt. He wouldn’t be dropping in to see me. His head would be full of something else in five minutes and by tonight he’d probably have forgotten we’d even met.
Jerry smirked at me like the cat who’d got the cream. ‘Old friend from the advertising business?’
‘Yeah, sort of.’
‘Mother’s maiden name? Yeah, right. Nick Stone your real name?’
‘Yeah.’ And before he could follow up I pointed at the women who were still gobbing off nineteen to the dozen. ‘There’s a bus that takes us into town. All we’ve got to do is follow the Spice Girls.’
27
The twenty-seater minibus was run by Iran Airways, even though they didn’t have any flights into or out of Baghdad. Maybe it was a way of keeping the staff ticking over, and at twenty-five US dollars for a one-way trip of fifty Ks it was a nice little earner. There might be only one commercial flight a day, the one we’d just come in on, but there were plenty of NGO [non-governmental organization] people on the move.
More of us piled in than there were places for us to sit. The four Iraqi women ended up sitting on their cases in the aisle as we rumbled past the sandbagged and gannet-wired security cordon that circled the airport. The vehicle wasn’t air-conditioned, and even with the windows open it was swelteringly hot. It was going to take us the rest of the day to unstick ourselves from the PVC seat covers.
The approach roads into the city looked unscathed by the war, although the Americans were making up for it now. All the bushes and palm trees that lined the road were being cleared back thirty metres or so by local guys with axes and bulldozers so that there was no cover for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] or manned attacks.
The roads were packed with a mixture of new Mercedes, 4x4s, minging old cars and trucks with the wings hanging off. The people inside them were mostly dressed in suits and chinos rather than the traditional dishdash. Quite a few women wore skirts short enough to show a fair amount of leg, and not many were fully veiled; most just had their hair covered. I’d seen more burkas driving through East London; not as many kebab shops, though.
White goods were piled up outside electrical shops, alongside shiny mountain bikes and racks of clothes. New billboards advertised perfume and washing-powder, and there seemed to be plenty of food and computer games for sale on the stalls. I’d seen South American cities that looked far worse than this. Everything seemed pretty normal, if you ignored the seven or eight Blackhawks that thundered over the rooftops on their way back to the airport.
Minutes later, there was no longer any doubt that this had been a country at war. Huge concrete blocks topped with razor wire channelled the traffic as we got nearer the Tigris. A convoy of high-back Hummers appeared. The roof gunners, all in helmets and Oakleys, nervously checked the buildings either side as they screamed past.
Somebody once worked out that enough AK47 assault rifles had been produced to arm every sixtieth person in the world. As we worked our way through the streets it looked as if most of them were in Baghdad. Nearly every shop and building was guarded by an Iraqi in sandals with one hanging off his shoulder, the very same weapon he’d probably been cabbying at American Hummers a couple of months ago. Others also had them slung over their shoulders, their hands full of shopping or their kids.
Some buildings bore strike and scorch marks, with half-burned curtains still hanging where window-frames had once been. Some were no more than heaps of concrete clinging to reinforced-steel skeletons. One whole shopping mall had been flattened, then there was a run of three or four buildings that had remained intact, then more piles of rubble. But for all that, the city wasn’t a wasteland: people were out and about, doing their thing, just as they had in Sarajevo, just as they do anywhere in the world when the shit hits the fan. These guys were just getting on with their lives as best they could. Customers from the teahouses and restaurants overflowed on to the street. News-stands were doing a roaring trade. I’d read there were nearly a hundred different papers in print now Saddam had gone.
As we fought our way on to a roundabout I caught my first glimpse of the great man. There was a tiled mural of him in the centre that had been used for some serious target practice. The small parts of his smiling face that remained had been painted a bilious yellow.
Drivers stopped at the roadside and kids filled up their tanks with black-market petrol from an assortment of plastic containers. It was Baghdad’s answer to the Formula One pit-stop. They smothered every car that came within reach, checking tyres and cleaning windscreens like they were going out of style.
The minibus only had one stop, which was as near to the Iran Airways offices as the concrete and razor-wire barriers would permit. As we clambered out I could see our hotel, the Palestine, less than a hundred metres away. The driver got on to the roof and started throwing down cases. The four Iraqi women stopped gobbing off at each other long enough to give him some serious grief, and he gave back as good as he got.
A couple of AK-carrying Iraqis sauntered over and stood around smoking as we got ourselves organized. Jerry was in the back, passing bags forward. He started laughing.
‘What’s up?’
‘Looks like the Spice Girls don’t wanna be dropped here. They want the other side of town.’
I picked up my daysack, and waited for Jerry to emerge with all his kit. We went through the barrier and started up the street parallel to the hotel, past the shuttered-up Iran Airways and Aeroflot offices.
A line of huge generators chugged away on the pavement, leaking diesel and feeding power to a row of seedy hotels. The road was full of pot-holes and puddles, and hadn’t been cleared of litter since the days when Saddam still had a smile on his face.
28
The Palestine and the Sheraton were now part of a fortified complex at the end of a road sealed off by five-metre-high concrete sections. We’d just turned through a man-sized gap in the wire when we were spotted by a posse of little kids. They came running towards us, nothing on their feet, their arses hanging out of their trousers. They followed us silently, but we both knew better than to hand out cash in daylight. Help one, and about six hundred others will leap on top of you. If you’re going to do it, y
ou only do it at night, and well out of sight of the others. They’d gang up on whoever got the cash and steal it.
We followed the wall for about twenty metres until we joined the end of a queue of news crews, Iraqis, drivers and businessmen with their BG. Half a dozen different languages were being bounced backwards and forwards along the line. There was a makeshift guard post, in what looked like a B&Q garden shed. The checkpoint was manned by a family of Iraqis. Dad vetted the men, Mum the women, and a boy of about twelve was looking through the bags. They all had AKs. Sitting outside the shed on folding chairs were three US soldiers, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, sweating under their helmets and body armour, well-worn M16s across their laps. It looked as if they could all use a lesson from Gaz on community policing.
Once Jerry had finished talking Arabic to the dad, we filed through the gap and turned left between two huge, newly installed concrete walls. Directly ahead was the rear door of an AFV [armoured fighting vehicle], its engine rattling. In front of it was a solid line of nylon containers the size of skips, each filled with sand. Its .50 cal was manned.
We turned left again just short of it, down the road that separated the two hotels. This one was blocked by an M60 tank, also bunkered in behind nylon skips, with a cam net over the top to keep the crew out of the sun. It faced on to a huge roundabout, beyond which I could see the blue domes of a mosque.
I recognized the area at once from news footage. In the middle of the roundabout was a large stone pedestal, all that remained of the giant statue of Saddam that had been toppled symbolically at the end of the war. The roof had given a grandstand view of the shock-and-awe bombing of the government buildings just the other side of the river. Every one of Saddam’s men had moved out of them long before, but it looked great on TV.
