by John Sweeney
Joe attempted a Japanese accent while hoping the gas mask would make his voice sound less obviously Irish: ‘It new suit and I want stress-test. Better find out it works here in Damascus, rather than on-site. Makes sense, Marty?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ he said. Joe’s sigh of relief was short-lived, however. ‘You’ve got a great Irish accent for a Japanese,’ said Marty. He edged closer and stared directly at Joe through the mask. Joe’s eyes, close up, didn’t look the slightest bit Japanese.
‘I’m half-Japanese, half-Irish. My da’s from Tokyo, my ma is from Tipperary. She’s an O’Grady.’
‘Japanese-Irish? That’s an unusual combination,’ said Marty.
‘But one allowed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I believe.’
That sandbagged him.
‘Heh, Kazumi, no offence. It’s great to have you on the team.’
‘Thank you, Marty. And one more thing: I bet you a bottle of Japanese whisky that the Syrian side will find a reason to block us today.’
‘I’m hoping you’re wrong there, Kazumi.’
The OPCW team trooped out of the changing room, picking up four UN security men and a phalanx of Mukhabarat in the hotel lobby. By the reception desk, Joe saw the two goons – the ugly one was on his cell phone, the young one was staring, listlessly, in their direction. A small coach was parked directly outside. Joe hurried ahead, got on first and walked down the aisle, and yes, there it was, a second exit door at the back of the coach, on the opposite side to the hotel. Joe muttered something to the others behind him, wrenched open the door, went down the steps, pulled off the gas mask and hurried towards a taxi. Joe got in the back, fished out a hundred-dollar bill and said, ‘Beirut.’
The cab driver studied Joe in the rear-view mirror coolly, put the taxi into gear and drove off, taking a sharp left, then a sharp right, driving smoothly but fast.
The two goons darted out into the street, just in front of the coach, staring in the wrong direction, then spun round, but by that time the taxi and, in it, a man in a bio suit from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, had vanished down a side street.
‘Beirut,’ Joe repeated.
‘No Beirut,’ said the taxi driver flatly.
Joe was still looking out of the rear window, to check that they weren’t being followed. Not even ten o’clock, but the sky was red, redder than before, the sun a blur of smoky bronze towards the east.
‘Why no Beirut?’ Joe asked.
‘Beirut checkpoints, Mr Chemical’ – in the rear-view mirror he studied his fare – ‘no go checkpoint.’
The driver was right, of course. It was just plain crazy to try to get to Beirut looking like someone from a chemical-hazard horror movie.
They traded names: the taxi driver was called Hussein, but not, he added drily, Saddam Hussein. Driving a big Peugeot estate, Hussein was in his late twenties, thin, balding, wearing a fading but snazzy Union Jack T-shirt.
‘Mr Chemical go tailor?’ suggested Hussein.
‘Mr Chemical go tailor,’ Joe agreed, and the car slipped through a myriad of backstreets to an address not far from Straight Street. Outside the Peugeot, the air swirled with grit and it made Joe cough.
The tailor’s shop window boasted mannequins in mock-Savile Row suits and, for visitors from the Gulf and western tourists, dishdashas, the ankle-length Arab robes, complete with keffiyeh, white headdresses that, when necessary, double-up as scarves.
‘Mr Chemical go Mr Dishdasha?’ suggested Hussein.
‘Mr Chemical go Mr Dishdasha,’ Joe agreed.
Joe paid the tailor, a dapper, pale-faced guy called Mohammed, exactly what he asked him, and then gave him a hundred dollars extra. Mohammed edged close to Joe, so that the rest of his staff could not overhear: ‘Sir, will you be taking the clothes you were wearing with you?’
‘No,’ Joe said. ‘You keep them.’
‘Sir, too many people would have seen you enter the shop. The taxi driver, maybe, tells the Mukhabarat.’
Through the window Joe glanced at Hussein, sitting behind the wheel of his Peugeot, scowling at the world.
‘La,’ Joe said.
‘Then maybe someone on my staff. No one can be trusted these days. Everyone tells the Mukhabarat. So, to protect ourselves, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call them.’
‘Can you give me twenty minutes?’
‘No, five. Please, go now.’
In the short walk from the tailor’s door to Hussein’s Peugeot, Joe inhaled so much grit he fell into a spasm of coughing. Now the sun was wholly occluded by a browning of the sky. He got in the car, cleared his throat and said, ‘Beirut.’
‘Beirut,’ echoed Hussein, and the car slipped into the treacly traffic. Eyeing the dishdasha through the rear-view mirror, Hussein said, ‘Nice.’
‘What’s wrong with the sky?’ Joe asked.
‘Sandstorm.’
And there was Joe thinking it must be the end of days. ‘How long will it last?’
‘Three, four days.’ And then, after a pause, Hussein asked, ‘Checkpoints, passport, no problem?’
Good question. Joe had specifically been told by Mansour not to leave Damascus. Worse, Joe was some kind of associate of Qureshi – or at least he would have to explain why he had been a guest at his party. And worst, he had fled Qureshi’s hotel in a stolen bio suit. The very first roadblock Joe came to, he would be stopped. His dishdasha looked local but his Irish nose didn’t. Nor did his passport. If by some crazy luck Joe made it to the border, the moment his passport was examined there he would be held. So he had to think again. He could go to the Irish embassy or consulate, the Swiss or Swedish, whatever, and get some diplomatic protection. But Joe had a feeling that if Mansour were happy to kill Humfrey in cold blood, he wouldn’t be that fussed about diplomatic niceties.
Joe was trapped. If he tried to flee Damascus, Mansour would track him down. If he stayed, he was dog meat. He could go back to the hotel and sit in his room and go bonkers staring at the wallpaper, waiting for the knock on the door. Only, next time, it wouldn’t be Daria.
Or he could do his job, do what he had come to do in Damascus in the first place. Joe could locate the block of flats where Jameela had filmed her ISIS video. Why not?
As the Peugeot hit the main road parallel to the tailor’s shop, three police cars zoomed towards it. Joe slid down in his seat and waited. When the police had passed, he sat up and produced a crumpled screenshot printout of the ruined street where Jameela and Ham had posed with the ISIS flag and gunmen, the telephone pole at a tilt.
Joe showed the photograph to Hussein: ‘Know that place?’
Hussein scowled at him, then nodded. ‘Ghouta,’ he said. Joe produced a hundred-dollar bill, then a second, a third.
‘Ghouta, a thousand dollar,’ said Hussein.
Joe nodded. This morning was proving rather expensive for Dr Franklyn. On the dashboard he saw, for the first time, a tiny photo frame in the shape of two hearts, in the hearts were two little girls.
‘You sure?’ Joe asked.
In the rear-view mirror, Hussein’s scowl turned even more ugly. He wasn’t an idiot; if he said yes, it meant yes.
‘I born Ghouta,’ Hussein said, now almost the chatterbox. In the middle of a wide boulevard, he executed a 360-degree turn that made him no friends, and headed south-east. Joe could work that out from the position of what had used to be the sun and now was a fuzzy ball of brownish-reddish light.
‘Is it safe now?’
Hussein shook his head.
‘Who owns Ghouta? Zarif or ISIS?’
He jabbed at the photo of the street. ‘In the day, Zarif, perhaps. In the night, ISIS.’
‘Does anyone live there anymore?’
‘Sure.’
‘I want to go there to ask a few questions. Not long.’
‘How long?’
‘Say, twenty minutes.’
‘Make it ten.’
Joe had a deal. As it turned out,
even ten minutes was too long, too long by half.
The storm was forcing people off the streets, into their homes. The further south and east they drove, the emptier Damascus became. The sand started to seep in through the Peugeot’s air vents, and soon it was as if someone had put up a brown net curtain between Hussein at the wheel and Joe in the back seat. Hussein suffered a coughing fit so severe he stopped at a kiosk, got out and bought them both bottles of water. But even the brief opening of his door, twice, let in a settling of sand, fine-grained, on the seats, on the floor mats, on Joe’s hands, on every surface where it could land. Outside, sky, roads, trees, earth, buildings, ruins – all brown. No great noise came with the sandstorm but the silence made it all the more ominous. Claustrophobia gripped Joe, as if he were tied down, helpless, while a giant emptied an hourglass down his throat.
The distance in space from peace – well, a kind of peace – to war zone was extraordinarily short, four miles if that. But in time it was far longer, because Hussein drove like a bumblebee, switching direction again and again, left, left, right, left, right, right, zig-zagging down brown alleys, the springs of the Peugeot crunching in protest at every pothole. Every now and then, a Syrian army roadblock would emerge through the sand-fuzz and Hussein would grunt a single-syllable curse in Arabic, brake sharply, and reverse, fast, before the soldiers could do anything about it.
The brown-out made the desolation all the more surreal. Now they were driving through a Somme-scape, re-versioned for the twenty-first century. Instead of blasted trees, there was chewed-up concrete. City blocks held their shape, a memory of before, but the ruin was in the detail: window frames intact, windows gone; shopfronts pockmarked, flats shredded by bullets, walls pitted with shrapnel scars. The half-ruins afforded a sick, voyeur’s pleasure in seeing other people’s tastes in wallpaper, bathroom suites, clothes.
Hussein took a right and they almost collided with an army patrol, three jeeps with anti-aircraft guns, coming their way. He reversed as if without looking, and fishtailed the Peugeot down a street, left, then right.
‘Sand bad,’ said Hussein.
‘You can say that again.’
‘Sand make night. Sand make ISIS strong.’
The longer their journey took, the browner, the darker the sky became, until their way was blocked by a telephone pole at a crazy angle like a felled tree, bringing with it a cat’s cradle of wires, so thickly entwined they blocked the road. Hussein pulled up.
‘This,’ he said.
He handed Joe the photo and, even through the mist of sand, Joe could see that every detail in the video shot on a clear, sunny day chimed with what was in front of them.
They got out of the car.
Joe pressed his keffiyeh against his mouth to try to block out the sand. That’s what it had been designed for. The wind was picking up now, a soft susurration much of the time, every now and then rising in power and causing the telephone wires to sob eerily. From the middle of the street you could see inside people’s old flats. Hussein studied the screenshot showing the innards of the flat Jameela and Ham had stood in wearing their suicide vests, realigned himself, walked some distance backwards, went too far, came forward, looked up, stopped. He pointed to the first floor and you could clearly see, even in the darkening storm, a Batman poster by a bed, bright-yellow wallpaper with laughing black whales on it.
Joe whipped out his phone and concentrated on getting the zoom right. In the sandstorm, that simple task was beyond fiddly, so fiddly he ignored Hussein’s warning shout. He hit the button and took a fast series of photographs of the wallpaper and the Batman poster, and was examining the phone’s screen to see the results when Hussein rugby-tackled him to the ground, knocking him flat.
‘What the hell!’ Joe shouted, fearful that Hussein was about to kidnap him. Then a rocket-propelled grenade socked into the Peugeot, igniting the petrol tank and sending a flash of heat rolling towards them that singed his skin. Hussein grunted at Joe and gestured with a nod of his head towards the far end of the street, about three, perhaps four hundred yards away. Through the flames from the ruin of the Peugeot, Joe could make out six or seven men in black, wielding Kalashnikovs, walking steadily towards them, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’
But the figures vanished, momentarily, as the sandstorm gathered force and a hail of grit rained down, reducing visibility to twenty yards, if that. Under cover of this fresh flurry, Hussein, far slighter than Joe but with the strength of a madman, grabbed hold of Joe’s arm and got him on his feet, and they ran into the block of flats where Jameela and Ham had once been. Running now, running for their lives, they climbed a blackened stairwell, up two, three, four, five flights of stairs, before coming out on the roof. The cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ were getting closer and closer.
On the roof, they had two choices, neither of them good. One way led back in the direction the ISIS fighters were coming from; the other way was good for thirty yards, then there was a steep cliff of concrete, maybe twenty feet high, and beyond that a tower block offering the possibility of shelter. Hussein darted towards the concrete cliff.
‘Wh . . .’ Joe shouted but his voice was lost in the roar of the sandstorm, now a monster, a raging torrent of dust and grit in the sky, clogging mouth, nose, ears. Joe’s eyes smarted so much he couldn’t see. He had to stop to wipe them, almost tripped on a bare sprig of wire emerging from a lump of cooked concrete. Looking ahead, he realised that Hussein had a plan after all. At the very edge of the roof, overlooking a drop of fifty feet, was a spindly frame bolted onto the smooth wall of the tower block, supporting an array of four or five satellite dishes, one on top of another. Hussein zipped up the dish framework like a chimpanzee climbing a gnarled tree at the zoo, standing on the tip of the highest dish and then throwing a hand up to a lip of the top of the tower block. He wiggled his legs, kicked one over the lip and was out of sight.
But would the frame support Joe’s weight? More shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ rose above the racket from the storm, giving Joe no choice but to try. He almost made it. He was shinning up the framework, his hands on the top dish, when the whole thing sheared from the cliff, bolts popping like flying bullets, and he flew through the air, hugging his satellite dish, legs wrapped around the framework as it arced 180 degrees and came to a sickening halt with him dangling in mid-air, upside down, thirty feet from the ground. The base still held, so the framework, though horribly buckled on itself, was sound for the moment, but to what end? Death had been delayed for a few seconds, that was all. If Joe let go, he would break his neck. If he stayed where he was, soon ISIS would be on the roof. They could shoot him. Or, if they chose, rescue him, so that he would star in a video kneeling in the sand in an orange jumpsuit, a man in black with a scimitar in his hand standing over him.
The sandstorm intensified again, but within it there was something new, a mechanical clatter, like a tractor, from above, from the sky. And then came the end of the world.
TROPOJË, NORTHERN ALBANIA
To the west, the light blurred scarlet, but just before the invisible sun dipped completely below the horizon, the cloud cover broke and a long thin letterbox of brilliant red illuminated the mountains. Jeton drove the Yaris; Agim sat in the passenger seat with Zeke behind the driver.
‘This country is beyond beautiful,’ said Zeke, and that was when the first bullet punched through the windscreen and drilled a hole in Jeton’s forehead, killing him instantly. The car lurched out of control off the road, its left-side wheels sinking into soft mud and sliding, sideways, towards a steep gully, down which a river flowed furiously.
Slowly, inexorably, the Yaris tilted side-on into the river. Water ran past the windows, spurting through the ventilation ducts so that the footwells on the left were soon awash. The water level was rising by the moment. A second bullet clanged into the engine, while Agim scrabbled over his dead cousin and fought hard and pointlessly to open the driver’s side door. It wouldn’t open, the door had somehow jammed in the crash; to ope
n the passenger door would be to invite more attention from the sniper. To pick off a man climbing up out of the car would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
‘Best open the window,’ said Zeke as conversationally as he could, bearing in mind he was trapped behind a dead man, in the back seat of a two-door car filling up with water while someone was shooting at it. The moment Agim did so, water from the stream rushed in, so cold it took his breath away. Agim tried to move Jeton but he was pinned to his seat.
‘Best unbuckle his seat belt,’ said Zeke in that calm, matter-of-fact voice of his.
Cursing at his own foolishness, Agim hit the release button for Jeton’s seat belt and tried to shove the dead man out of the window. The corpse tilted down, half out of the window, but an ankle had jammed underneath the accelerator, trapping it, trapping them. Agim sucked in some air, put his head below the rising waterline, felt his hands find the dead man’s foot, shifted it so it was free and then he came back, snorting hungrily for air. There was two feet of water in the car; maybe more.
Agim thrust the dead man through the window, and followed him out. The corpse got snagged almost instantly, and for a moment the force of the current pressed Agim against the dead man before he wriggled free and the river’s blind energy took him in its grip, bashing him against rocks and knocking the wind out of him until he surfaced, gasping for air, his feet finding a gravel bed where he could get some kind of purchase. A high bank protected him from the sniper. He scuttled towards the safety of a concrete culvert a few yards ahead. Once tucked in that, he looked back to see Zeke sliding over the rear seat. As he did so, the car slithered further down, almost to the stream bed, ruining the sniper’s third shot, which whistled a good inch above Zeke’s head. Zeke disappeared from Agim’s view only to surface in front of the car, and he, too, crawled into the safety of the culvert.
‘OK?’ asked Agim.
‘Never felt better,’ replied Zeke.
Their situation was not good. If they went forwards through the culvert, some twenty yards of it, they would expose themselves head first to the sniper, presuming that he was playing nice and staying exactly in the spot from where he’d fired the first shots. If they went backwards, back the way they had come, towards the river, they faced the same problem, though his field of vision was more circumscribed that way.
