by Andy McNab
I was dying to tell him the al-Hamra had a full pool but I’d be here all night listening to him honk about it.
‘Who do you work for?’
‘CNN. It’s a good team. I’ve been with them since Christmas. We came up from Kuwait with the Marines. It was difficult getting the training in to begin with, but there’s no problem now. If the fucking pool was working I could get some decent stuff in.’
‘What’s it like here?’
As if in answer, another burst of AK rattled around the streets somewhere beyond the safety of the garden.
‘Belfast times ten. The Yanks out here, I feel sorry for them. They haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re doing. They’re not trained for all this shit.’ He stood with his hands on his hips, panting away. ‘Even during the war, we’d be harbouring up for the night and they wouldn’t send out clearing patrols. Then they’d honk in the morning that they were getting hit. For fuck’s sake! I took two American patrols out myself, just to make sure we were secure.’
There was a massive wave of AK gunfire just the other side of the wall. This time, everyone ducked. Then we heard the warbling of the women. It was OK. It was a wedding.
35
Connor thumbed towards the noise. ‘The Yanks still haven’t worked out Thursday nights yet. The wedding opens up, the Yanks think they’re firing at them, and they open up in return. The wedding guests get pissed off, they start firing back, and soon everybody’s got their heads down. I’ll tell you what, watch yourself here – nobody knows what the fuck’s going on.’
Connor was still honking about the Americans, something he had always liked doing. I wondered if it was because they couldn’t understand his accent.
‘The Yanks reckon the militants are stringing cheese wire across the roads to chop their heads off as they scream through in their Hummers. But you know what? All that’s happening is the locals are running cable from the parts of the city that have power, and shoving them into their houses. Decapitation, my arse – they just want to get the fucking kettle on!’
He roared with laughter as more tracer zipped across the horizon, followed a split second later by the rattle of gunfire. ‘There they go again. The party will start soon. Any cabbying after that will be the real gear.’
‘There’s a no-firing-till-after-the-confetti rule?’
‘Is there fuck. They don’t even know the twenty-minute rule. I had to tell them yesterday, while we were filming them.’
One of the rules of urban guerrilla warfare is that if you’re static for more than twenty minutes, guerrillas will have time to react and get an attack going.
Connor laughed. ‘I should be paid more, I’m training the US Army! Bet they’ve got a full-on gym.’
The clatter of tracked vehicles came from not many streets away. Armoured troops were on the move. ‘I bumped into Rob Newman and Gary Mackie. Not together, but they’re in the city.’
‘Yeah, fucking Mackie, the bastard. He’s got a gym. All I’ve got is the bottom of this fucking thing. Still, at least I don’t get zapped in it.’
That seemed to be the end of the conversation for Connor. He turned to walk away, closing one nostril with a finger and clearing the other on to the grass.
‘You heard about any Bosnians in the city?’
‘Aye, the fuckers haven’t lost any time bringing their tarts over. They got the whorehouses sorted out already. Those dirty fat NGO bastards will be spending their money soon enough.’
‘It’s a Bosnian ayatollah called Nuhanovic I’m thinking of.’
‘What the fuck does a Bosnian ayatollah want to come here for? They got enough of their own.’
I shrugged. ‘Just what I thought. You going to the party later?’
‘What the fuck for?’
Of course. He’d be going back to his hotel room to knock back a few pints of orange juice or whatever the new fad was, and get his head down.
‘See you, Connor. I’m staying here if you hear anything.’
‘Yeah. Don’t forget to get some in. Sort yourself out, for fuck’s sake.’
The night’s festivities were slowly getting under way. Some speakers were being rigged up in the garden area and the barbecue was blazing. I walked back into the lobby.
It wasn’t just military contractors and security companies that made money after an army had done its stuff. The bars and whorehouses sprang up like mushrooms in shit. It was nothing new – even the Romans had camp followers – but the set-up for these girls would be very different. They weren’t self-employed prostitutes, here to make some fast cash for themselves and their families. It was an open secret in the Balkans that people-trafficking rings ran through Montenegro to Bosnia and Kosovo.
The white girl the fixer had said he could get me was probably some poor kid who’d been kidnapped or duped, then smuggled in and forced to ‘repay her debt’ to her owners. It was just as easy to get these girls now as it had been during the war, when both sides had sold their female prisoners. Ads in the papers in places like Moldova or Romania spoke of well-paid waitressing and bar jobs in the Balkans. When the girls arrived at their new places of work, they were lifted. Their passports were taken off them, and the next thing they knew they’d been sold as sex slaves. It looked like the Bosnians were spreading their wings and going global instead of sticking to Europe.
No sooner had I got to the bar than the main doors burst open. A crowd surged through, chanting and clapping, all the women doing their Red Indian yodel.
Next in was the bride, done up to the nines in a big fluffy white gown. She was young and very beautiful. No wonder the groom beamed beside her, looking very smart in his shiny suit. The bridesmaids were in pink and looked like little princesses, tiaras and all sorts in their hair.
They surged off to the right and down a corridor, probably heading for one of the conference rooms. The women were all in trouser suits or dresses, the men in suits or leather jackets. It could have been a wedding anywhere in Liverpool, except this lot were unarmed. They’d probably had to leave their AKs in the B&Q garden shed.
Jerry came in at the end of the conga, clapping and smiling away with the best of them. ‘Great, huh?’ He grinned. ‘Life goes on.’
We headed to the lift.
‘Any luck?’ I checked out his Baghdad market gear: polyester trousers and shiny plastic shoes. They went down a treat with the lime-green shirt. He looked like one of the wedding party. ‘At the mosque, I mean. I can see you had none at the clothes shop.’
‘Yeah, funny. I’m not too sure. But I tell you what – he’s definitely here.’ He looked about him at the others in the lift. ‘Later.’
We got to the sixth floor. For once we were on our own. ‘He’s here, Nick. No one said anything, but you know when they can’t quite look you in the eye. The fucker is here somewhere. I had to leave kinda quick – some of the guys weren’t too happy that someone was asking questions. Any questions. What about you?’
‘I talked with one of the military contractors and a couple of guys I know. Maybe I’ll find out at the party. You coming?’
He looked me up and down. ‘Of course. Big question is, do you think the beer will be cold?’
‘Don’t care, I won’t be drinking it. Not on a job.’
36
From where I stood on Jerry’s balcony, Baghdad was now a patchwork of light and dark. On the other side of the Tigris, entire neighbourhoods were pitch black; I imagined them criss-crossed with cables so the locals could get their kettles on. Next to them, a few streets had lights that flickered, then whole sectors were reasonably well lit, probably thanks to generators like ours that droned on the back of an artic trailer with a sign saying ‘A gift from the people of Japan’.
‘You fashioned up yet?’
I’d drawn the curtains behind me so I wouldn’t be someone’s warm-up shot before a night’s sniping at any soldier who stood still long enough.
Jerry was changing out of his local ‘look at me, I’m one of you�
� clothes. ‘Nearly. I’m dying for a beer, but the fridge is fucked.’
I looked down. Either the party had split into two or there’d always been rival events. The grassed area was full of people, and about twenty or so were congregated round the barbecue near the pool. Johnny Cash’s dad had moved out of the bar to serenade a group of Iraqis and whites sitting round a plastic table, and the Balkan boys were doing a meet-and-greet.
The raffia cabanas and fencing now made sense to me. They hadn’t done it to make it look good: it was to stop outsiders having an unrestricted view and therefore a good arc of fire into the compound. It obviously worked. Everybody looked very relaxed, even though a random cabby into the fencing might take any of them out. But fuck it – as Gaz would say, ‘It’s a war, innit?’
Quite a few more people wandered around the pool as Bob Marley sparked up from the speakers and went into competition with Johnny’s dad, but neither of them was making much headway against the rumble of conversation and laughter. The whole lot got drowned out as a helicopter swooped low over the rooftops just the other side of the hotel.
Jerry came out and watched it go as he clipped his bumbag round him. ‘Must be the cheese-wire patrol . . .’
As we headed for the lift I wondered if Rob would turn up. I hoped so. Seeing these people again made me feel as if nothing had changed, and I liked that. It wasn’t as if Rob and I’d been in and out of each other’s houses during our time together in the Regiment, but whenever we met up we connected – mostly because we were the sad fucks who hadn’t scored down town all night and were still trying to chat up women at the Chinese takeaway on the way back to camp.
The lobby was still heaving. Loud Arab music drifted out of the wedding reception and the women were warbling big-time. They’d be knackered by the morning.
Outside, a crowd had gathered round the far end of the pool, waiting to collect food from the barbecue. The necks of beer bottles stuck out of big bins of ice like the spines of frozen hedgehogs. An Apple PowerBook had been rigged up to a couple of speakers, its screen displaying the music menu. The Wailers were fighting hard to make themselves heard over the country-and-western.
Jerry swayed to the beat and pointed at the strings of fairy-lights in the palm trees. ‘This could be the Caribbean, man.’
‘Must be what makes it so popular,’ I said, as I made my way along the pool side. ‘And I bet the Yardies don’t have many of those.’ A tracked vehicle screeched noisily down the road just the other side of the wall and helicopters clattered across the sky.
The guests were mostly Brits and Americans and seemed to know each other. The news agencies always did have a pretty incestuous set-up, with the same crews moving from war zone to war zone. None of their protection was carrying: the guys all had their party kit on, lurid Hawaiian shirts and Bermudan shorts. It was fun time, and we were the right side of the fence. They outnumbered the women by about sixteen to one, and hovered round the few available like flies round shit.
Jerry picked up a beer for himself and a Coke for me and we gave the place a good scan, me keeping an eye out for Rob, him for anybody who looked like they might know the secret of the Bosnian ayatollah. We must have looked like the proverbial spare pricks.
Sporadic gunfire punctuated the hubbub of conversation, but it was obviously too far away to worry about. I wondered how they defined too close for comfort. A hundred metres? Fifty? Or wait till someone drops? That really would be effective enemy fire.
A huge contact sparked up nearby. This time everybody did look up. An amazing amount of heavy .50 cal tracer stitched hot dotted lines across the sky. Every pair of eyes followed its trajectory, but once they realized it wasn’t going to fall on our heads, their owners got back to their chats and beers.
I was just treating myself to a swig of Coke when I got a huge slap on the back that made my teeth bang against the bottle.
‘Wanker!’
I recognized the broad Geordie accent even before I turned round. I’d known Pete Holland for years, but thankfully not that well. He was one of those guys who had an opinion on everything, and a lot of them disappeared when you held them up to the light. Built like a prop forward, he was known in the Regiment as a good Bergen carrier, a strong back you could depend on to get kit from A to B. So strong, in fact, he could make the muscles in his back bulge like bat wings. His nickname was, of course, Lats-Like-A-Bat.
We shook hands. ‘All right, mate? How’s it going? This is Jerry.’
It wasn’t long before Jerry made his excuses and left, probably so I could start quizzing Lats about Nuhanovic. But I’d need to be pretty fucking desperate before I went that route. He’d want to know why, where, when – and how much I was willing to pay him for answering.
Pete had a beer in one hand and a spare in the other, what he called ‘having one on the loading tray’. He’d been in the Artillery before the Regiment. That was his problem: once he’d started on the beers, the loading tray was as busy as a factory conveyor belt. He could have given Ezra a lifetime’s work.
He nodded at the two Balkan boys I’d seen in the coffee-bar area, who had just joined a group at the end of the pool. The one with the goatee had a huge smile on his face as he offered round his pack of cigarettes. ‘Not working for them cunts, are you?’
I shook my head. ‘A journalist. That guy Jerry. You?’
He stuck out his jaw and pranced around on the spot as if he was sizing up to throw a punch. ‘Doing me own thing. A wee bit of freelance. I’m on a good number, BGing some Japanese. Five hundred a day. Champion.’ He took a hefty swig of free beer.
How did you answer that? ‘Five hundred. Good for you, mate. Listen, those flat-tops. They Bosnian, Serb, what?’
‘Fuck knows. I fucking know what they’re up to, though.’ He pointed at the others in the group with his bottle. ‘Don’t these cunts know what they’re doing? Some of them are younger than my two girls.’
It clicked. These two were part of the Balkans’ globalization campaign. It didn’t sound like they’d be spending much time with the ayatollah.
He took another swig, not that he needed it, and I realized what the posturing was all about. He was trying to keep his balance. No wonder he was on his own. Anybody working for a decent firm and found drinking on a job would be thrown out, no exceptions, no second chances. And word flew round the circuit quicker than tracer. He wasn’t an independent by choice. No one would vouch for him. It was a big deal to do that. If the guy you vouched for turned out to be crap, that meant so were you. It was just the way it was.
I hoped he hadn’t come over and slapped me on the back because he thought I was a kindred spirit. ‘You and the Japanese in the hotel?’
‘Aye, I’m here and there. You know how it is.’
I didn’t. I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.
37
The Canadian woman floated into the pool area with Mr Gap in tow. He looked as if he’d stepped straight out of the shop window, only tonight his polo shirt was green. She was in a black cheesecloth dress that she knew made the best of the buttons she had left unfastened between her breasts.
Lats couldn’t keep his eyes off them as she joined the bunch by the barbecue. He put down his empty bottle and kicked into the next as he fished in the bin for another. ‘I’m gonna fuck her. She with that dickhead in green?’
‘Don’t know, mate.’
‘I’m going to give her the old special-forces chat-up. Know what I mean?’
This time I did know what he was on about. ‘Well, good luck, mate. I’ve got to go talk to my man about tomorrow.’
It was a mistake shaking the hand that had just come out of the ice bin. As I walked away I felt like I’d just had a close encounter with the living dead.
Jerry hadn’t wasted any time. He’d hooked up with a guy who looked a bit like a New Age traveller. Randy was a TV cameraman, though I wondered if he’d remember that come the morning. Waccy baccy was probably as easy to get hold of here as be
er and Randy had been making the most of it. ‘I’ve been here seven fucking months, Jerry,’ he drawled. ‘Ain’t no Bosnian Messiah here, no way, my man.’ So much for not talking to the media. ‘I came in with the Marines—’ He stopped and looked up as three helicopters screamed overhead, one after the other. We couldn’t see them: they were unlit. Randy staggered backwards and pointed up, shouting, like a driver with road rage, ‘Quiet! For fuck’s sake, be quiet – it’s my fucking birthday.’
Once he regained his balance he had a fit of giggles, then leaned an arm on Jerry’s shoulder. ‘I got a way with choppers. See, they get off my case pretty damn sharp, man. It’s those fucking tanks I have issues with, man.’
Over Jerry’s spare shoulder, I saw Rob coming into the pool area from the lobby. He looked as though he was heading for a different kind of party. There were sweat stains on his T-shirt from where he’d just removed his body armour, he had a pistol on his belt and an AK in his hand. I didn’t think he’d be staying long.
‘Good to meet you, Randy.’ I had a crack at trying to shake his hand, but he was too busy waving at another burst of tracer. ‘Jerry, I’ve got to go – Rob’s here. See you later.’
Randy tried to focus his eyes on mine, but gave up. ‘Yeah, me too. I’ve gotta get out of here. Right out of fucking Iraq. Seven months, man.’
Rob was searching the crowd. He smiled as I approached. ‘Sorry, mate. I’m not hanging about. Ten minutes and that’s it.’
‘You with your man?’
He shook his head as his eyes scanned the party. ‘At the al-Hamra. Thought I’d come and say hello. How’s your search for the Bosnian getting on? You have a name for him?’
‘Nuhanovic. He’s their answer to Mahatma Gandhi. You heard anything?’
