by John Sweeney
The fiery envelope of light to the west was dying. Soon it would be pitch-black. They were both gasping for breath from their exertions, and from the coldness of the water they were crouched in.
‘Shall we wait here until it’s fully dark and then run for it?’ asked Agim.
‘He’ll have a star-scope on that weapon of his. Picks up starlight and magnifies it to the power of ten, so night becomes day. We wait till it gets fully dark, he’ll pick us off, sure as eggs are eggs. Funnily enough, we have a better chance now in this weak light. It messes with the optics a little.’
‘Forwards or backwards?’
Zeke looked up at the cone of red sky ahead, framed by the culvert’s entrance.
‘Backwards. Then we track downhill, fast. He’ll be expecting us to go up to the mountains. Let’s not oblige him by doing the obvious. We go down, we lose him, then we go high when it’s safe, when he’s gone. You go first.’
Agim didn’t question the older man’s judgement. Later, on reflection, he realised that although the risk for the first person backing out of the culvert to the car was slight, the risk for the second person following the same track was much higher.
Disaster almost did for Agim the moment he started. Cold, colder than he realised, his legs were stiff and slow and pushing against the current was hard work. Very soon he slipped and fell awkwardly, banging his head on a submerged rock. Bloodied, still in plain sight, halfway between the culvert and the car, he struggled to get moving, to shift himself the next few yards so that he was at least covered by the car. Only then did it occur to him that he wasn’t – he had never been – the assassin’s target.
The gap between the bottom of the Yaris and the riverbed seemed horribly narrow, but he dived down back into the stream, pulling himself along by grasping on to rocks, struggling to squeeze through the newly created funnel before coming head to head with his dead cousin, his hefty body still snagged, blocking the route to safety. He twisted around and used his feet to stamp on the corpse’s head, furiously, desperately, until suddenly the dead man was freed and floated out from underneath the car. Agim pushed himself down, under the car and beyond it, and resurfaced, his lungs burning with pain, desperate for air.
He scrambled along the riverbed, using the high bank to shield himself from the sniper. One hundred yards on, he found a hollow in the bank where he could hide and rest. He looked back to see whether Zeke had been able to follow him.
No sign of the American.
Agim, shivering, screwed up his eyes and thought he could make out something inside the culvert: a darker shade of concrete, or the shadow of the old man? Then Agim heard the unmistakable clatter of a tractor, coming along the road behind them. His experience as a policeman was that snipers didn’t like company. All they had to do was hunker down and wait, and when the tractor came along, hitch a ride on it.
What he didn’t expect was a hail of sub-machine-gun fire from the tractor, spraying the car, the stream and the surrounding countryside with bullets. Agim pressed himself into his hiding place and stayed there for an hour until the light was dead. Then he fell back into the stream, slithering along it, head down, for two hundred yards. He forced himself upright, climbed out of the bank and started to run, hitting a slope of loose scree and sliding down it so fast that he almost went head over tail. Eventually he came to a stop, panting, shivering with the cold because he was soaked to the skin from the stream, his breath forming balloons of vapour in the cold air. But he was alive. And that somehow felt wrong, and he began to wonder how that could possibly be.
Of Zeke, there was no sign; none at all.
RAQQA, EASTERN SYRIA
The bus from Damascus toiled through the barren land, an emptiness broken only by telephone poles every two hundred yards, linking dead lines to eternity. In silence, the passengers stared out through dirty windows, at multistorey villas pancaked flat, burnt-out shops, and bridges bombed to shards of concrete, strands of steel wire and thin air. The people on the bus had little to say because they were lost in their own troubles, thinking of what the future might hold and what had been taken from them by the past. The men were heavily bearded, the women garbed in black abayas, the girls the same, the boys dressed in dishdashas or plain T-shirts because any symbol of Western culture, however tatty or faded, would be an invitation for unwelcome attention once they crossed over to territory under the control of ISIS, from the Hisbah, their vice squad. All that is, except one, a bright-faced, sunny-looking boy with dark-brown eyes in a Batman T-shirt.
Ham gripped his mother’s hand and started counting out loud: ‘One and one is two and one and two is three . . .’
He was doing one of his most favourite things, adding up Fibonacci numbers – a curious mathematical sequence that is found in nature in tree branches, on leaves, ferns, pineapples, artichokes and the family tree of honeybees. But Ham was speaking loudly in English and that, on this bus, considering its ultimate destination, was not good.
‘. . . and two and three is five and . . .’
Karim, one of Qureshi’s men who had been prevailed upon to act as Jameela’s mahram, turned around in his seat in front of them and punched Ham in the head with his fist, causing the boy to shriek in pain.
‘Woman, tell the kid to shut his mouth or I stop the bus here and get off and you go there on your own.’ Karim was a thin, agitated man, with long wisps of hair fussily plastered over his baldness. His nervousness at the prospect of going to Raqqa was written in his every gesture, an anxiety that transmitted through to everyone on the bus. Karim was the only member of Qureshi’s security team who had been willing to take the big risk of going to Raqqa at this time, because he had a sister there, whom he was hoping to get out. But the closer they got to the ISIS capital, the more jittery he became. Had Qureshi still been at liberty, Jameela would have appealed to the oil baron to send a replacement mahram. But Qureshi had been arrested by the Mukhabarat and his whole operation had gone silent.
Jameela had no option but to submit. No woman could go to Raqqa on her own. She shushed Ham as best she could and told him that he could play his game, only he had to count in Arabic.
‘One and one is two . . .’ Ham said slowly in Arabic, mutinously loud. Karim scowled at him but kept his fists by his sides and the bus trundled on. Overhead, a trio of Russian jets streaked by, part of Zoba’s fraternal solidarity with the people – or rather, the government – of Syria. There was a distinction between the two that the Kremlin seemed unaware of.
At the last government-controlled town before they entered ISIS-land, soldiers entered the bus and went through the passengers’ bags, ripping open thin plastic holdalls with their bayonets at the slightest delay, surly – no, angry – that people were daring to cross to the other side.
A sergeant stopped by Karim. Jameela buried her head; Ham looked out of the window, silent.
‘Why are you going there? To make jihad?’
‘No boss, no way,’ said Karim. ‘Our mother’s in Raqqa and she’s dying. We’ve got no choice but to go.’
Ham jolted in his seat – he hated lies of any sort – but said nothing.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Karim, soothed by the tone of the sergeant’s voice, did not anticipate the knife at his throat.
‘If she’s dying, she doesn’t need any money, does she?’
The sergeant tweaked the blade so that it caressed Karim’s Adam’s apple. Karim handed over two hundred dollars in dirty twenty-dollar bills he’d stashed down a sock. Every other man on the bus did the same.
The ‘security check’ done, a soldier with an iPhone went through the bus and took photographs of everyone on board. Jameela did her best to look away, to thwart the shot. The sergeant, standing behind the photographer-soldier, told her, ‘It’s fine if you don’t want us to take your photo. But if you insist on that, you don’t go to Raqqa.’
She hugged Ham and grinned at the iPhone camera; the soldier took the shot. Every face record
ed, the government troops got off the bus, counting their dollars. As the bus chugged forever eastwards, out of the last regime-held town each and every woman dived into her handbag and got out a pair of black gloves and two black veils, one on top of the other, so that not a trace of their femininity was visible. So on the bus, as throughout ISIS-land, womanhood, as a visible entity – as a spectacle – ceased to exist.
The first checkpoint was signposted by black flags fluttering in the wind and manned by men in black, their beards ferociously long, their chests garlanded with ammunition belts. The bus was waved through; the ISIS security and modesty check took place at the second checkpoint. There, everybody was ordered to get off the bus and stand by their bags. Three men from the Hisbah went through every possession with a fastidiousness that bordered – no, that crossed the line into – a kind of madness. Hairbrushes, bras, razors, an electric toothbrush – all were thrown aside, haram, forbidden. But no money was stolen. The regime were gangsters; the other side fanatics. There was nothing left in the middle.
Karim and Jameela had heard tell of the search process, and had deliberately packed nothing that the men of the Caliphate might object to. But Jameela had overlooked Ham’s Batman T-shirt, his pride and joy, because he always wore Batman gear. The youngest of the Hisbah, a wispily bearded youth not more than twenty years of age, if that, grabbed hold of Ham’s shirt and barked, ‘Haram.’
‘Sir, I’m so sorry,’ said Jameela, ‘but his grandmother is dying and this is his favourite T-shirt.’
‘Haram,’ he repeated.
Karim snapped at Ham to take off the T-shirt, which he did, and reversed it so the bat emblem was hidden when the boy put it back on again. The Hisbah man looked at Ham irritatedly, but half-nakedness, even for a boy, was more haram than a hidden Western logo, so he moved on. Jameela, suppressing a smile, gripped his hand and squeezed it.
‘He reminded me of the Joker,’ whispered Ham in English. The hissing sound they heard was Karim, hating the boy’s cheek but afraid to take out his anger lest it bring back the Hisbah.
The bus pulled to a stop on the edge of Raqqa and the passengers hurried off into the tented streets, looking up at the sky for fear of bombs. They passed a TV reporter doing a piece to camera in front of a bombed-out building; the man was gaunt but well dressed, speaking confidently in English. He stooped down, scooped up some dust from the bomb site, then let it fall through the fingers of his hand. In the background, a mini traffic jam of white saloon cars waited for the lights to change; beyond them was a small crowd of men going about their business, moving diagonally to and fro, and through that crowd a youth carried what appeared to be a small child in a white sheet soaked in blood.
‘Again,’ shouted a man in Arabic, his moustache noticeably bigger than his beard.
The white cars reversed in sequence, the crowd of men walked backwards to their starting positions, and the youth laid the child-doll down on the ground and adjusted his underpants. The TV reporter wiped the dust from the palm of his hand.
‘This time, more passion,’ said Hadeed, and the reporter nodded quickly and the scene repeated itself, every fabricated detail – the traffic jam of cars, the politely criss-crossing crowd, the youth running in the background with a small child in a white sheet soaked in blood – choreographed for the greater glory of the Caliphate, every deceit rehearsed to the nth degree.
Jameela found what she had been looking for, what she had feared, just past the film set. In the main square, in the dead centre of town, sat five metal cages, in them five men dressed in orange jumpsuits, the latest captives of the Caliphate. The light was harsh, brilliantly white, but even so Jameela could make out Rashid’s big frame in the confines of the second cage along.
Karim started walking away. ‘Please, Karim, don’t go,’ begged Jameela, knowing that if she was caught without a mahram it would be the end, not just for her but for any hope of saving Rashid. Karim ignored her, pivoted on the spot, and ran down an alley and vanished.
Jameela held back in the shadows, trying to make herself as invisible as she could. The heat pulsed, causing the men in the cages to shimmer, as if they were dancing. As a woman, she dared not move in a public place of her own volition. She couldn’t walk a step on her own without fear of arrest. But Ham was a boy. Ham could move freely without drawing attention to himself. Jameela fetched a water bottle out of her bag, opened the lid and gave it to Ham.
‘See Rashid’s cage? You see his hands are tied behind his back?’
Ham nodded.
‘Run to his cage and pour the water on his head. If you can reach his mouth, that would be wonderful. Run there and run back.’
Ham nodded again and lolloped across the open space to the cages. On the far side of the square, deep in the shade, sat five Hisbah. When Ham got to the cage, Rashid looked up at him and his throat, raw and parched through dehydration, managed to croak one word: ‘Run.’
But Ham would not do so – he did what he had been told to do by his mother, dutifully aiming the water from the bottle directly over Rashid’s head and onto his tongue, slowly, almost drop by drop, the perfectionist in him to the fore.
‘Boy! Leave the prisoner. Get out of there,’ yelled one of the Hisbah.
Ham ignored him; his concentration was total.
Two Hisbah got up and ran towards the cages, yelling their anger at this grotesque insult to the management of savagery. Ham, intent on his task, did not hear them. Every drop he poured found its mark.
‘Run,’ Rashid repeated.
In the shadows, Jameela put a hand to her mouth and whispered through it, ‘Run, Ham, run.’
The last drop fell from the bottle. And then the leading Hisbah knocked Ham flying with the back of his hand. Ham fell over, and wriggled up only to be hit once more. But the policeman was slow, and in a sudden movement that took him completely by surprise, Ham lunged forward and bit him on the hand and kept on biting.
Now the second Hisbah started kicking Ham, the two men laying into the boy, beating and punching him till blood gushed from his mouth. Hadeed looked up from the film shoot, puzzled by the commotion, to see a woman in black running on her own to one of the cages in the square, by which two Hisbah were wrestling with a boy.
In Raqqa, women dare not run.
The woman kicked the first man; the second clubbed her on the side of her face with his fist.
‘Stop!’ said Hadeed to the film crew. Motioning to the TV reporter, he said, ‘Put him back in his cage.’
Hadeed took out his revolver and fired one shot into the air. One shot would be enough.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA
The al-Hayat prison: it sounded like the hotel chain, but it wasn’t like the hotel chain. Joe had come to in a basement cell, with frosted windows casting some sense of daylight on the gloom within. The cell was a big rectangle that would comfortably hold fifty men. But it was home to three hundred, so tightly packed together that at night, if one man wished to change his sleeping position, ten others had to do so, too. The constant traffic of humanity killed sleep. You couldn’t rest, couldn’t zone out, because every few minutes or so you had to make room for someone passing. Some prisoners were incontinent, moving to the stink-hole at the back of the cell to piss or shit; others wrestled with demons in their half-sleep; a few fought to get to the bars at the front, intending to beg for release, only falling into stillness when they got close; and some returned from amiable snitching with the guards to murderous hostility once back in the cell. The prisoners who had been tortured, they were easy to tell. The favoured method of interrogation was to cuff men’s hands behind their backs and then hoist them up on hooks, so that their own weight killed their shoulder nerves. After suspension for hours, sometimes days, all a man could do with his arms was flap them, helplessly, like a newborn chick.
Joe was in no great shape himself. He couldn’t quite work out exactly what was wrong with him, but a shortlist would include a concussion, a broken or possibly just severely bruised
right arm, a broken or severely bruised jaw, stitched lower lip, broken or twisted ankle, burnt left hand and loss of sight in his left eye, permanent or temporary he did not know. That made him one of the fittest men in the cell, and so he ended up helping to shift the dead. In his dishdasha, with three or four days’ stubble and his dark hair, he passed as a local.
Nobody had taken his name when he arrived at the prison because he had been unconscious, in a semi-coma. By the time he had re-entered the land of the living, the guards – never enough of them – seemed to have forgotten all about him. In the cell, nobody had engaged him in conversation for long. If they did, he made a point of turning his back on them, playing deaf-mute, very occasionally grunting or mouthing words that made no sense. His size meant he was left alone.
Every night, someone would die, nearly always one of the zombies whose torture had gone on for too long, or whose hold on life was too feeble. In the morning, the dead would become obvious. Most of the time they would be found close to the stinking hole at the back of the cell that passed as a toilet. If you had an ounce of life left in you, you fought to get away from the hole.
Joe’s stint as the corpse-man started on his second morning in al-Hayat. At the back of the cell, next to the wall but some distance from the stink-hole, a man in a grey dishdasha lay on his belly. It was obvious from the space around him that he was dead, but none of the prisoners close to him cared to move him. One of the guards, whose face was as grey as the prisoners he watched over, pointed unambiguously at Joe, gestured to the corpse, and beckoned for him to shift it. Joe picked his way through the men lying on the ground to the back of the cell. Tentatively, he turned the dead man over to discover a knife blade lodged in his right eyeball. Joe removed the blade from the eye, placed it in a pocket of his own dishdasha in full view of everyone, guard included, then dragged the corpse with his good arm, limping across the cell to the door. The guard unlocked the cell door to allow Joe and his cargo through, then locked it while Joe placed the body on a gurney. The guard then led Joe, pushing the gurney, down a corridor to a much bigger room, half-open to the sky, that had become a kind of morgue. It stank of some kind of bleachy chemical, which did something but not enough to mask the honey-shit stink of the dead. There were ten or twelve corpses in the room, all of them naked, watched over by two photographs high up on the wall of Zarif the Father and Zarif the Son. Shortly, a pitifully thin, nervous-looking man with bloodshot eyes entered the morgue, and took a camera and flashgun out of a shoulder bag. The man with the camera started methodically taking photographs of the dead.
