Masters of War

by Chris Ryan

  ‘There’s no decision to make,’ Buckingham said quietly. ‘We have to get to Homs. We’ve a job to do.’

  Danny didn’t reply. He was looking east along the main road. About three kilometres away, he could see the lights of a chopper, flying low along the direction of the highway. And on the road itself, more lights, perhaps three pairs.

  ‘The Syrians might have something to say about that,’ Danny said at last. ‘Or the Russians.’

  ‘Just tell me what to do.’

  ‘Move.’

  Buckingham didn’t need telling twice.

  TWELVE

  06.00 hrs.

  Clara Macleod’s plans, such as they were, had failed to take one thing into consideration.

  Her fear.

  Huddled in the corner of the looted shop, she had just one objective in mind: to get to the Médecins Sans Frontières camp on the eastern side of the city. She didn’t know where she was, or which way was east. She had no phone and no money. Her French was passable, her Arabic non-existent.

  Her plan had been to wait until nightfall before leaving her hideout. Perhaps then she might keep to the shadows and have a chance of avoiding the violent government forces who had already killed both her boyfriend and the little girl she’d been tending. The thought of running into them made her limbs feel empty with dread. That plan had been a mistake.

  As soon as night had fallen, the bombing had started again. So she had crouched in a dark corner of the shop, weeping with terror and indecision: was she safer inside, out of sight and mind, or on the street, where the building couldn’t collapse on her? The impossible choice had paralysed her. As the city shook around her, the rumbling artillery punctuated by snatches of sniper fire, she’d remained where she was, wishing with a furious intensity that she could turn back time and not make the reckless, stupid decision to travel from the MSF base into Homs. She even prayed, and she hadn’t done that since she was a child of eight.

  The bombing had subsided an hour or so before dawn. The silence was almost soothing and, curled up on the hard floor, Clara had drowsed for perhaps forty-five minutes before waking with a sudden, horrible jolt as she realised where she was, shivering with cold, her throat rough with thirst. It was slowly growing lighter outside, and the new day brought her a new sense of determination. She could not suffer another night like that. She had to leave this place. She had to get back to the camp. Today.

  Clara urinated in the corner of the shop and, ignoring the stabs of hunger in her belly, ventured outside.

  The stars were still out, burning brightly in the indigo sky. A strange thought crossed Clara’s mind: that her parents might be looking at the same stars from the window of their comfortable Wiltshire home, while she was surrounded by the rubble and shattered ruins of a bombed city. One look across the road told her how close she’d come to dying last night. A three-storey building that had been largely intact looked on the point of caving in. The render had fallen from its façade to reveal the shoddy brickwork underneath, and a lightning-shaped crack ran the entire height of the building. Clara couldn’t tell if there was anybody inside. The street itself was almost deserted. A cat stood guard over the bags of rubbish fifteen metres away, its eyes glinting in the darkness. Twenty metres to the right, a man was loading a grey van with personal belongings. He had a furtive, hunted expression as he tried to stuff the end of a rolled-up carpet into the already crammed vehicle. A local inhabitant, collecting his gatherings and deserting his home. Clara ran to him. ‘S’il-vous plait, vous pouvez m’aider?’ she said.

  The man shook his head and slammed the rear doors of the van shut. Clara desperately grabbed hold of him, but he shook her off. Seconds later he was driving away, the tyres screeching on the rough road as he left Clara staring after him.

  The familiar feeling of paralysis gripped her. She knew she had to move, she had to get back to the camp, but she didn’t know which direction to go. It felt like an impossible choice, as if one direction led to freedom, the other to death. How could she know which one to choose? For a full thirty seconds she remained as motionless as the cat, but then the curious stillness around her was broken by a piercing, wailing voice.

  ‘Allahu Akbar . . . Allahu Akbar . . . Ash-hadu an-la ilaha illa illa . . .’

  The call to prayer.

  The feral cat, disturbed by the noise, scampered away. Clara blinked. She turned left, in the direction of the voice, and an idea came to her. All mosques faced towards Mecca in Saudi Arabia. All Muslims prayed in that direction. She scrunched up her eyes and pieced together a hazy mental map of the Middle East. Mecca was almost directly south of Homs, she was sure of it. That meant she need only find the mosque if she wanted to orientate herself.

  Suddenly released from her paralysis, she ran, her footsteps echoing against the shell-damaged buildings that lined this empty street. She didn’t try to keep track of her location, but followed the muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to prayer. As she turned right at the end of the street, she found herself in a wider one. Like everywhere else it bore the scars of the bombing. In front of a building on the far side was a pile of debris, three metres high and ten long. It contained old boilers and white goods, tyres and pieces of broken furniture, the accumulated detritus of homes that no longer existed. The street itself, although far from busy, was not deserted. Here and there, local people – all men, Clara noticed – hurried with their heads down and their collars up, in the direction of the voice. Nobody spoke. They didn’t even look at each other, although Clara did feel the occasional curious glance as she joined these men on their way to the mosque.

  Three minutes passed. The muezzin had fallen silent but Clara was now able to follow the little crowd. At a corner of this main street she saw a boy no more than ten years old sitting in a purple plastic chair. He had short black hair and a stripy jumper. On one side of him, sitting on the pavement, was his little brother. On the other side, propped up on a stool, a tray of cigarettes and lighters for sale. The eyes of both little boys followed the curious sight of this Western woman hurrying to the mosque with the men.

  The men turned left off the main street into a smaller one that led to a large, open square about sixty metres by sixty, lined with trees and with an area of greenery that seemed quite out of place in this war-torn town. On the far side of the square was the mosque, low, sprawling and ornate, with a minaret on either side. The sun was just rising behind the mosque and its beams stabbed Clara’s eyes, which had seen only darkness for nearly twenty-four hours. Her hands remained over her face for ten seconds as the dazzle subsided. Then, keeping her head down – as much to avoid attracting attention as to protect her vision – she moved forwards. For the first time since the horrific events of yesterday, she felt a twinge of hope. The sun was rising from the east, the direction in which the mosque was pointing. She knew which way to go. She had a chance of getting back to the camp. To safety, or something like it.

  She stopped.

  Fifteen metres to her right, a woman was crying. Clara turned to look at her. She was dressed in a black robe and looked poor. She had a child in her arms, little more than a toddler – Clara couldn’t say whether male or female. The reason for the woman’s distress was obvious: the child’s face was covered with blood. He or she was conscious, but clearly in shock, silently trembling in the woman’s arms. She kept approaching men on the way to the mosque, babbling at them through her tears, clearly asking them for help. None of them stopped. None of them even looked at her. Her distress grew worse.

  The sun was a little higher over the mosque now, beckoning Clara eastwards, back to the MSF base. But the child needed her help. She froze for a moment, torn between fear and duty.

  She tried to smile as she approached the woman, who at first backed away nervously – perhaps because Clara was obviously not Syrian. ‘Doctor,’ Clara said, before repeating herself with one of her few words of Arabic: ‘Tabib.’ She opened her backpack of medical supplies and pulled out a fistful of
swabs, crumpled but still in their sterilised packing. The sight of them seemed to calm the woman, and she allowed Clara to take her gently by one arm and lead her to the shelter of one of the trees that surrounded the square.

  The woman sat cross-legged on the ground, still cradling the child. Clara softly used a moist wipe to clean the blood from her patient’s face – she saw now that it was a little boy – until she came to the source of the bleeding. The wound was not nearly so bad as it appeared. There was a gash, about an inch long, in the fleshy part just under the child’s left eye. Clara wiped it carefully and flushed it with an antiseptic spray, all the while making gentle cooing noises to keep the boy calm. When the wound was as clean as she could make it, she closed it up with three thin lengths of Steri-Strip. She even found a forgotten piece of chocolate at the bottom of her bag, which the boy gratefully accepted and wolfed down as though he hadn’t eaten in days. Then he stood up of his own accord.

  As Clara gathered her soiled medical equipment into a separate compartment of her rucksack, she felt the woman’s tear-filled eyes on her. For the first time, Clara looked properly at her. She was young, maybe not even twenty. Clara had assumed she was the boy’s mother, but perhaps not. Tentatively, the woman pulled at the foreigner’s sleeve and said something in Arabic. When Clara gave her a helpless look, she tried again in French. ‘Venez avec moi . . .’ Come with me.

  At first Clara shook her head. Tending to the boy had been a distraction, but now the fear had returned. The sun was fully above the mosque and more people had ventured out of their battered houses. She could only assume that more people meant a higher chance of troops, and she didn’t want to come face to face with anyone else bearing arms. But this woman was dogged, tugging at Clara’s sleeve with a look of forlorn desperation. Then the child started crying, and Clara crumbled. She could always find the mosque again, she decided, so she zipped up her rucksack, looked anxiously around and nodded.

  The woman went first. Clara and the little boy followed. She held his hand. He was as unsteady on his feet as a newborn foal. They made slow progress. The woman led them away from the mosque and through a network of streets even more war-torn than those Clara had already seen. She saw gunshot pockmarks all over what remained of the walls of certain houses. Everywhere there was an overpowering smell of sewage. On the corner of one street, a group of men were feeding rubbish into a burning iron barrel. The familiar chill of fear slid down her spine. Even though she wanted to run, the touch of the child’s hand stopped her. Every thirty seconds or so, the woman looked back over her shoulder to check they were still following, before beckoning them on with a curled finger.

  They hadn’t walked for more than five minutes when the woman stopped outside the entrance to a narrow alleyway between two rows of shelled buildings. A large satellite dish hung precariously from the wall above, looking like it would fall at any moment. The woman looked around nervously, as though checking that nobody was paying them any attention, before slipping down the alleyway. Clara followed with the child. The smell of sewage was even stronger here. Clara had to hold her breath to stop herself retching, though it didn’t seem to bother her companions. Twenty metres along, on the right-hand side, there was an iron door about five feet tall. The woman pushed it open – it was unlocked – and curling her finger once more she whispered, ‘Venez . . . venez . . .’

  Clara swallowed nervously. She looked in both directions along the alleyway, then gently encouraged the little boy to enter, bent down low and followed him in.

  It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. They were at the top of a flight of narrow, winding stone steps. Sudden panic spilled over her. What was she doing? She should turn back now, find the mosque again, head east. This was madness. But then the little boy looked up at her, his big eyes imploring, and before she knew what was happening she had started to descend the steps. She trod carefully as she followed her companions down into the basement of the building. After five steps she felt the air temperature drop slightly. After ten steps a foul smell hit her nose. A few steps more and she was in the basement.

  It was a large room, about fifteen metres by fifteen. The only source of light was a flickering, wind-up torch suspended from the ceiling by a short piece of wire. As Clara entered the basement, the light failed. A moment of silence, and then she heard the grind of someone winding it up again. Its feeble glow returned and Clara was able to look around.

  There were twelve people down here, six of them children. The adults were all female. Their faces were as frightened as they were dirty. The foul stench came from a wooden box in one corner that Clara assumed was a makeshift toilet. Certainly none of the occupants of this squalid basement sat within five metres of it. They were huddled on the ground. At least three of the children were crying quietly, and two were coughing – a hoarse, croupy bark.

  The downtrodden women were scared of her, that much was clear. They didn’t know who she was, or what she was here for. In a strange way, it gave her strength to realise she was not the most terrified person in the city. And she suddenly understood why the woman had brought her here. These women and children clearly needed medical attention.

  The woman Clara had followed started babbling Arabic at her. Clara held up her hands. ‘English,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  As she spoke, another woman stood up and walked towards her. She was older, forty maybe, with streaks of grey in her black hair. ‘You are a doctor?’ she said. Her voice was dry and weak.

  Clara nodded.

  ‘Allahu Akbar,’ the woman said softly. ‘My name is Miriam. We need a doctor very badly. Our children are sick. So are we. You can help us?’

  Clara looked around the room. ‘Where are your husbands?’ she asked.

  Miriam smiled sadly. ‘All dead,’ she said.

  Instantly, an image of Bradley rose in Clara’s mind. She hadn’t even loved him, and the pain of his death was still raw. Imagine what these widows and orphans must be feeling. If she’d had any tears left in her, Clara might have cried.

  ‘How?’ she asked.

  Miriam shrugged. ‘The war, of course. The men die, the women are left . . .’

  ‘Your homes?’

  ‘Destroyed.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Clara said. It felt like a completely inadequate thing to say. ‘But you can’t stay here,’ she said.

  ‘We can’t leave.’

  Clara shook her head. She pointed out the makeshift toilet in the corner of the room. ‘That will kill you,’ she said. ‘The germs . . .’

  Miriam’s expression was helpless. ‘We have nowhere else—’ she started to say, but she was cut short by the renewed coughing of one of the children. It sounded terrible. The child needed strong antibiotics, which was more than Clara’s shoulder bag of medical supplies could provide. And that was just the start. Clara dreaded to think what assortment of illnesses were festering down here. She approached another of the kids and bent down to listen to his breathing. Heavy, laboured. The child had a chest infection at the very least. Another – a little girl – had bloodshot eyes and some sort of fungal infection on the inside of her mouth that had caused several suppurating white sores the size of ten-pence pieces over her inner cheek and tongue. Some of the occupants of the cellar – both child and adult – smelled as though they had wet themselves rather than use the disgusting toilet.

  Most of the children at least had someone to cuddle. There was one who was alone, a boy with curly dark hair, huddled up against the wall. His wide eyes followed Clara’s every move. She knelt down before him and took his hands. There were angry welts around his wrists, and his face was dotted with burns.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Clara.

  Miriam was standing behind her. ‘They tortured him,’ she said in a flat, emotionless voice.

  ‘Tortured him? But he’s only—’

  ‘Twelve, yes. The men came to his school. They put a hundred children in one classroom, and t
ook them out one by one to question them.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Their parents . . . their friends . . .’ Miriam’s voice grew quieter. ‘They tortured Hassam – his name is Hassam – worse than the others.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They found him playing at being a rebel fighter, using a stick for a machine gun. So they tied plastic cords around his wrists and hung him from the ceiling with his feet off the ground. Then they beat him. Most people last an hour hanging like that before they pass out. Hang for two hours and you are dead. Hassam passed out from the pain of the beating, so they woke him with cold water. Then they burned the skin on his face with cigarettes. They did this every day for five days. They wanted him to confess to something, but he had nothing to confess. His parents were already dead.’

  Clara brushed the back of her hand against the child’s cheek before standing up again.

  ‘You see,’ Miriam said, ‘why we would rather stay down here?’

  Clara barely knew what to say. With her limited supplies, there was very little she could do for them.

  Unless . . .

  She took Miriam by the hand. ‘The streets are quiet,’ she said. ‘I know somewhere we can go, where my friends are. East of the city. There are lots of doctors there, and medicine. Do you understand? Medicine?’ As she spoke she tried to block out the sound of scurrying from the toilet corner. Whatever rodents were attracted by the excrement, they were sufficiently brave not to be put off by the presence of humans. ‘Medicine?’ Clara repeated.

  Miriam nodded, but her face was uncertain. She turned to the others and addressed them in Arabic. As they spoke, the women seemed to shrink back against the walls. They started to mutter and it was clear that Clara’s suggestion was unpopular.

  ‘They will not come,’ Miriam said. ‘They are scared. The government men have guns . . .’