by John Sweeney
Keen to make himself useful, Joe helped the photographer pose the bodies for the best possible shot. The guard watched the two of them work for a time, then sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette and gazed at the dead, lost in quiet contemplation.
The photographer was, Joe thought to begin with, a silly fusspot. He insisted on taking several shots of each corpse: the face, in close-up; belly up and belly down; and he would concentrate on any scars or wounds. Some of the dead were pocked with cigarette burns or vile bruises, which could only possibly have been the result of torture. Happy to be doing something, however morbid, away from the crush of the cell, Joe assisted the photographer as best he could. He was on the fifth corpse when it suddenly struck him what the photographer was really doing. He wasn’t just logging the dead, but collecting evidence of how they had come to die.
The sixth corpse was a young man with a fine physique. He looked untouched, but his groin was covered by underpants. Joe looked at the photographer. His eyes floated towards the grey-faced guard, still staring into space, but not their space. Joe knelt down beside the corpse and pulled the underpants down. The man had been castrated. The photographer did what he had to do and when he was finished, Joe pulled the underwear back up. The photographer smiled grimly at him, and Joe returned the smile. Horrible as it was, they were doing something good.
When the work was done, the guard escorted Joe back to the cell. Touched by death, his fellow prisoners made room for Joe. And so his prison routine began.
On the fifth morning, the grey-faced guard started yelling at Joe, furiously, in Arabic. Joe didn’t understand a word of it, but he was the sole focus of attention in the cell. Three hundred pairs of eyes were on him when Mansour, dressed nattily as ever in a charcoal suit, cream shirt and saffron tie, appeared from behind the guard and said, ‘Ah, Mr Tiplady, so this is where you’ve been hiding from us. How clever of you.’
It didn’t feel like good news and it wasn’t.
PALMYRA, SYRIA
Before dawn they prayed, then rode away from the rising sun. Seven in their party, on three motorbikes: three guards, experienced motorcyclists, at the handlebars; Hadeed riding pillion on the first bike; Timur on the second; the executioner, Khalil, and the child, Haroun, on the third. As they drove out through Raqqa, Timur noticed that there was a sole prisoner in the line of cages in the main square: Haroun’s grandfather.
They travelled in the same direction along the same road, but separately, each bike two, three miles apart. The warriors of Islamic State had learnt from experience that the enemy’s drones would target convoys of any size, but that lone cars or motorbikes were, in general, left be. The safest option was to travel with a child – hence Khalil, the most beloved by the Caliph of them all, enjoyed the effective protection of Haroun. Whether Haroun’s companionship provided Khalil with other benefits, Timur did not know.
For Timur, for far too long shackled to the bomb factory, trapped below ground in fetid air, the idea of a trip away from Raqqa had seemed something of a liberation. Everywhere they went, the black flag of ISIS flew tall but, Timur observed, men were pitifully thin in number on the ground, the tanks they had stolen from the Iraqi army well camouflaged, hidden from the skies.
They passed through a landscape deformed by war: burnt-out villages, windows socketed by soot, roof beams turned to spider’s webs of charred wood, cement pitted by shrapnel, craters wider than the road, tank tracks ribbing the asphalt so that their motorbikes juddered for miles on end. Aside from the physical damage were the holes hollowed out of people’s souls.
Twenty miles out of Raqqa, Timur and his driver came across a family trudging along the road: a father with a club foot, wheeling a pushchair, in it his infant daughter; a boy, around ten years old, walking along the road; his mother behind him, and bringing up the rear, the grandmother. The family stopped dead at the sight of the two men in black riding towards them, knowing that it was against the law, as ordained by the Caliph, for any family to flee Raqqa. Struck by the family’s frozen tableau, Timur realised that they feared he was from the Hisbah or the Amn, coming to order them back. When Timur’s bike passed the family, their faces were wreathed with anxiety, but the men in black had somewhere to get to and rode smoothly on. Timur noted that the man with the club foot stared at him intently, as if memorising the features of the men from ISIS, as if, powerless as he was, he would do harm to them if he were ever given the chance.
In the heat of the afternoon, Timur and the others rode into an old caravanserai, stopping for tea and fuel. They were together for the first time since leaving Raqqa: Khalil, Hadeed and him. Unbidden, his mind’s eye suggested the midnight hags of Macbeth, recast for twenty-first-century Syria: Double, double, toil and trouble . . .
The ancient inn had been popular before the war with tourists from the West, but now the place was empty, its corners dank, strewn with rubbish, smelling of piss and shit. A three-legged dog sat in the shade, eyeing the visitors morosely. They ordered tea but it didn’t come; the boy serving seemed both fearful of them and inattentive. No adults were visible, perhaps because the men in black were not welcome here. Khalil barked at the boy fiercely, to no effective end. Hadeed vanished into the kitchens and came back, to announce: ‘They’ve run out of gas so they’re having to make tea by burning wood. We will have it soon.’ Hadeed’s mirrored shades hid a practical sense, rare in ISIS.
Khalil muttered something under his breath. Hadeed challenged him to say what he had on his mind out loud.
‘I said that you always find an excuse for everything.’ The executioner enunciated every glottal stop with vehemence. ‘That blue-eyed American bitch, she’s a threat to us, but you always interfere, begging the Caliph to spare her.’
In silence, Hadeed took off his sunglasses and stared at Timur and Haroun, then returned his gaze to the executioner. The implication was clear: Khalil had spoken about something not to be discussed in front of a technician like Timur and a child such as Haroun. Khalil, a huge man, seemed to shrink in size, and said not a word more until the boy came out with the tea.
They set off separately again, at thirteen-minute intervals, taking a higgledy-piggledy route away from the main roads, approaching Palmyra from the south through the desert. Their path took them through a landscape of extraordinarily austere beauty, past wave upon wave of immense dunes, suggesting an inland sea made up, not from droplets of water, but grains of sand. The shadows of the dunes lengthened in the evening sunlight, turning the burnt land from ochre to charcoal.
At dusk, they rode underneath a transmission tower, painted red and white, high on a bluff, and then into Queen Zenobia’s oasis capital, Palmyra. She had been a pagan enemy of Rome in the third century, her god Bel, her ancient city of colonnades and bathhouses an affront to the pure of the Caliphate. Palmyra’s famous arch had been dynamited by ISIS warriors in an act of pious desecration.
The men on motorcycles turned away from the town and rode through the Valley of the Tombs, past towers of stone – ancient at the time of Jesus – and little hillocks of rubble marking entrances to hypogea, underground chambers, pretty much every single one looted by grave robbers. In a deep cleft between two ridges was a cliff-hang, and underneath that a tunnel had been carved into the rock. Hadeed arrived before the others and waited by his motorbike, one hundred yards inside the tunnel and so invisible to the drones of the Far Enemy; next to the bike was a truck, covered with a white tarpaulin. Then Timur arrived and they waited in silence, engines off, for Khalil and Haroun.
Swifts flew in and out, emitting swooshing sounds as they gunned across the darkening half-moon of sky framed by the tunnel entrance. Timur stretched his legs and marvelled at the beauty of the birds, luxuriating in their speed, when he heard a fresh sound. He turned slightly and realised that it came from what was hidden underneath the truck’s tarpaulin: a soft, low whimper, as if from a wounded animal. He looked across to Hadeed who, he realised, had observed him registering the sound and was studyin
g him closely.
Khalil the executioner was a beast, Timur reflected, a moron armed with full powers to hurt, maim and kill, but somehow Hadeed was worse, a civilised and intelligent man who out of cynical calculation had ended up one of the Caliph’s most trusted lieutenants. A few minutes later, Khalil and Haroun joined them and all three bikes switched on their lights – the truck, too, driven by one of the Hisbah – and together they drove deep into the tunnel, their engines extraordinarily loud, reverberating monstrously in the confined space. They drove into the rock for maybe a mile, the tunnel not straight but curving through the rock, until they came to a stop in front of a wall made of steel, three men high, and the engines were killed. Cylinders of dust turned in the bike headlights. Someone coughed and spat; the cough and spit echoing and re-echoing down the tunnel; that whimpering sound was heard again, softly echoed and re-echoed. Backlit by the headlights, Hadeed walked towards a door embedded in the steel wall and produced a key to unlock a padlock. He opened the door, disappeared from view for a second, and the sound of a generator filled the tunnel. Light poured in through the far side of the door, and Hadeed reappeared and gestured for the others to follow him.
Through the steel door, a vast space receded into gloom, beyond the reach of the electric lights. Immediately to the right was a small portacabin, its door open. Timur glanced inside and saw two portraits, side by side: one of a smiling Asian man with gleaming teeth; the second, on its left, another Asian man, pouty, rather sulky, with an air of petulance about him. Ahead of them was a wire fence and, behind that, long rows of stainless-steel cylindrical drums, each one featuring a skull and crossbones and something written in a script Timur had never seen before: not Cyrillic, not Roman, not Chinese ideograms, but curling squares and squarish circles.
Hadeed studied Timur, whose powers of deduction were famous throughout the whole of Islamic State.
‘So, Timur, what do you make of this?’
Timur made no reply, but walked past the cylindrical drums, counting under his breath, then found two small prefabricated sheds. He opened the door to the first, and discovered it was packed with cardboard boxes, again featuring this alien scribble. He opened a box at random and found three chemical warfare suits; a second box contained three gas masks.
‘Bio suits, gas masks, chemicals hidden from the sky, far underground,’ said Timur. He was aware he was being played by Hadeed; the more literal his observations, he sensed, the less danger for him. But he was becoming sick of the pretence, and he let some measure of his true feelings show directly: ‘So, why this game, Hadeed – why bring me to this hole in the ground? I have work to do for the Caliphate.’
‘Your work is now here. So, Timur, what have we found?’ Again the challenge from Hadeed, taunting him, putting him on his mettle.
‘I will need to take photographs and check on the Internet, but this looks to me like a consignment of chemical weapons – sarin, VX gas, something like this. The writing I don’t recognise, but from the two photographs in the office, I suspect this was a gift to Zarif from the people of North Korea.’
‘Excellent,’ said Hadeed. ‘We’ve seized a lot of paperwork, but much of it is written in foreign gibberish.’
‘Korean,’ said Timur.
‘Foreign gibberish,’ repeated Hadeed. ‘A few words are in English, which can be read. The gas is sarin, so you guessed correctly.’
Timur inclined his head, then said warily, ‘What is it that you wish me to do?’
‘Your immediate task is to stay here in this place and master the ways of this gas, so that we can manufacture chemical suicide bombs. But first let’s see whether this devil’s gas works.’
Khalil turned towards the clever Chechen engineer. His mouth smiling but his eyes not, he gestured to Timur to follow him. He walked back through the door over to the truck, and pulled off the white tarpaulin, revealing what was hidden: seven cages, a metre square; crouched within were five men in orange jumpsuits, a woman in a black abaya, her face covered by two veils, and a boy of around seven years old. Each prisoner was handcuffed with his arms behind his back, though the lack of space, the confinement, would be torture enough, Timur thought to himself. Six were silent, their eyes watchful, impassive; one of the men was whimpering, his mind gone.
Khalil clicked his fingers, and gestured for Timur and the others to take the cages off the truck and through the door in the metal wall to just outside the second hut. The cages were heavy and could only be manhandled one by one. The men had a wooden stick inserted underneath their armpits, further immobilising them. One or two did their best to struggle, but the others accepted what was to happen next as if their will to fight for survival had been extinguished.
Khalil went to a control panel on the outside of the hut and pulled a switch. A light clicked on, revealing that it was lined within with stainless steel and had a small observation window, like a porthole, on one side. Khalil operated another switch, and the hut’s heavy metal door with rubber lining started to swing open. One of the men in the cages – not the whimperer – started to scream obscenities, damning the Caliph to hell, mocking Islamic State as ‘Daesh’.
Hadeed yelled at him: ‘Shut your mouth, Rashid! Your time has come.’
But Rashid, clearly a brave man, was having none of it. ‘You call yourselves Muslims but you are committing crimes against Islam. Daesh is filth! Daesh is filth! Daesh is filth!’
The other men who were still in control of their faculties took up the chant. For the first time, Timur noticed that the woman and the boy had tape over their mouths so they couldn’t talk.
Hadeed said something to Khalil, who took off his backpack, and from it produced a strange chunky pistol, coloured black and yellow, that Timur had never seen before. He switched it on and an electric-blue spark of fifty thousand volts flashed brilliantly against the cave’s shadows. The other caged men fell silent, but Rashid carried on with his heretical chant: ‘Daesh is filth!’
Khalil passed the electric gun to Haroun, whose black eyes lit up when he pressed the trigger, making the sparks leap. The boy went up to Rashid’s cage and plunged the Taser down through the bars, zapping the man within. The chant died, to be replaced by the heavy clunking sounds of a man’s head, limbs and torso jerking uncontrollably against metal bars in electric spasm.
The spark died, and in the time it took to rebuild a charge Rashid said his chant again – ‘Daesh is filth!’ – but this time far more feebly, almost on the edge of hearing. Haroun waited for the recharging cycle to complete, then carefully aimed the Taser directly at Rashid’s face. His eyeballs spun white as the blue sparks made contact, and Rashid’s agonising scream was something that Timur would never forget. Rashid passed out, unconscious, quite possibly dead. Haroun, reluctantly, returned the Taser to Khalil. The eyes of the other prisoners, even the whimperer, never left the Taser until Khalil put it away in his backpack.
‘The woman, the child, the noisy one whom Haroun has shut up with that electric gun,’ said Timur, ‘let’s keep them for another day.’
Hadeed shook his head. ‘They must all die.’
‘No. I cannot experiment on corpses. I cannot calculate the required dose of gas for chemical suicide bombs unless I have living specimens to work with. Give me these three, or what you ask of me is impossible and I shall have to inform the Caliph of that.’
Hadeed gave way. He saw the common sense in Timur’s position and he didn’t want him to go complaining to the Caliph. Quietly, the four cages containing the condemned men were lifted into the hut and the heavy metal door was closed, then sealed with eight butterfly locks tightly screwed down. Hadeed, Khalil and Haroun – and Timur, despite himself – gathered at the observation window to see what would happen next. Inside the hut, eight eyes swivelled this way and that, mutely watching what fate had in store for them.
Hadeed turned a valve that opened a tap on the inside of the hut, then took out his phone and switched the camera to video mode. The men in the cages
reacted within ten, fifteen seconds: their arms and legs flailed within their confines, their eyes fluttered in their sockets, strawberry-pink foam started oozing from their mouths, noses, ears and eyes; their faces went pale, then paler still until they were all a ghostly white and all four were dead. It had taken two minutes, if that. Haroun clapped with joy, his applause echoing inside the confined space. Khalil disappeared and reappeared with a gas mask, which the boy eagerly put over his face. Raising one finger to Paradise, Haroun posed for a photograph – behind him, just visible through the porthole, four corpses, deathly white. There was something bewildering and dark about the contrast between the childishness of Haroun’s physique and the plastic exoskeleton clamped to his face.
In Timur’s mind, the line jumped up, unbidden: Something wicked this way comes. Outwardly, he did not speak.
‘Well?’ asked Hadeed.
Timur looked at Hadeed, then his eyes turned to the four white ghosts locked in their cages in the hut, Haroun prancing in front of it, his gas mask wobbling, too big for his face. Still, Timur made no reply.
