by John Sweeney
‘But we’ve only got a total of seventy-two hours in Serbia.’
‘We will need to keep him here under observation for several days.’
‘Can I see him now?’ asked Jameela meekly.
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
A look of bewilderment crossed Jameela’s features. This was the worst.
‘What?’
‘I’ve called the police and they will be arriving shortly. There is something we need to sort out.’
Jameela almost collapsed from shock as she registered the horror of what the doctor had just said: I’ve called the police . . . They had come all this way, suffered so much, escaped from ISIS, almost drowned, only to face arrest here in Serbia. And then what would follow? Discovery was inevitable. And that would mean the end of all hope.
Struggling to keep herself under control, she said softly, ‘What on earth is wrong? There was a car accident. It wasn’t my fault.’
‘What’s your name? Your real name?’
‘My name is Maryam Khashoggi and my son is Ham Khashoggi and’ – Jameela dipped into the bag she’d bought on Kos, and scrabbled in it to find the paperwork from three separate countries, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia, saying exactly that – ‘this proves it.’
‘It does no such thing. Where is your passport?’
‘It was lost in a storm when we crossed from Turkey to Kos. Seventy people were drowned; we were the only survivors.’
‘A likely story.’
‘What?’ Jameela was not just incredulous, but angry that her word was not trusted. ‘What did you say?’
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ said the doctor. ‘What is your real name?’
‘My name is Marya—’
‘Your son is a very intelligent boy. He can calculate the value of pi to a hundred places. He says that is a lie. He says that your real name is Jameela Abdiek and his is Ham Franklyn. So why are you lying to me?’
Jameela collapsed, crumpling to the floor, and started to sob uncontrollably. Dr Jelić left the waiting room to fetch a nurse to look after her, locking the door with a key so that the mystery woman could go nowhere.
The moment she was out in the corridor, Dr Jelić’s pager bleeped: another refugee child had arrived in Emergency, this one a suspected case of typhus. It turned out to be a false alarm – the child, a six-year-old girl from Afghanistan, was just badly dehydrated – but by the time she had attended that case, the police had arrived. The two men looked gloomy, as they always did when faced with child protection cases. Dr Jelić took them up three flights of stairs to the waiting room where she had left the Syrian woman. But when she unlocked the door, she found herself looking at an open window, the grimy net curtains flapping in the breeze. She hurried back down the three flights, followed by the two police officers, and stormed into the paediatric ward and all but ran towards the bed where the boy was being kept. The bed was empty.
Dr Jelić found a nurse who told her: ‘The new Arabic translator came to take the boy, who had been booked for some eye tests. She said she would be back in ten minutes.’
Dr Jelić doubted that, she doubted that very much indeed.
WESTERN SYRIA
Night had fallen. Joe was still blindfolded, but he could discern the darkening of the light coming through, or not coming through, the edge of his vision. No one had returned. Time to check out. He listened hard to the rhythm of the fighter jets taking off and landing. The take-offs were loudest, but the roars came in three stages: the first big one as the throttle was opened up, to move the jet from stasis; the second as it taxied down the runway; and the third, the loudest of them all, was take-off itself.
The first roar started the clock; the second roar normally came about fifty seconds later and the third – it was a long runway – about ninety seconds after that. After the first roar, Joe started counting. When he got to 135, he started rocking the chair he was tied to with all his strength, swinging back and forth like a maniac. Bang on 140, the chair crashed over and he was on his side. Panting, he strained his ears to detect whether anyone had heard him.
Nothing.
Like some poorly developed precursor of the hermit crab from the Jurassic period, he side-shuffled across the room, dragging his chair-shell along with him, hunting for something he could use to free himself. He bumped his head against the legs of the table. They were too smooth to be of any use, but whoever had bolted the table together hadn’t done a proper job and the edge of a screw stuck out a few millimetres beyond the trim – enough for him to try to break the plastic ties of his handcuffs. Every time he tried, he wrenched his shoulders and the skin of his wrists where the cuffs bit got chafed some more. The pain grew more intense with every attempt, and the only thing that drove him on was the absolute likelihood of pain to come. The thought of what Grozhov and Mansour might do to him once they arrived – safe in the knowledge that he definitely wasn’t someone the CIA prized, because why dump him at a Russian airbase? – kept him at it. Eventually, the plastic tie snapped and his hands were free to loosen, then untie the ropes that bound him to the chair as well as the rope around his neck.
Once free, Joe ripped off his blindfold and lifted his head to the window. He was in one of a row of huts lying along the base of a long runway – its lights twinkled away to a near eternity. What lay on the other side of the hut was impossible to work out because there were no windows on that side. He was still wearing the tracksuit and white vest he had been given by the Syrians. On the floor of the hut he found a blue-and-white stripy T-shirt, the kind worn by Russian marines. It smelt so strongly it cried out for a wash, but he thought it might just help him camouflage himself so he suppressed his squeamishness, took off his shirt and donned the smelly Russian one.
He listened for two, three minutes. He could make out occasional traffic from a road, not so far away, the chug-chug of power generators and a bit of chit-chat in Russian, not Arabic, further off. He opened the door – it wasn’t locked – and stepped out with a flourish. When you’re up to no good, moving confidently, without a care in the world, is the way to do it. Which was lucky, because he was immediately challenged in Russian.
‘Kak dela?’
Joe couldn’t make out the whereabouts of the sentry. In front of him was a jumble of merchandise, cases, large trucks, a couple more huts, and in the distance an arc light shining from the airport perimeter that effectively blinded him.
‘Nichego.’ ‘Nothing’ was pretty much the only response he knew; that and ‘very good’ and ‘two beers’ and ‘I love you’. Joe was quite the linguist when he thought about it.
The sentry gave a kind of muffled laugh. Clearly, the moment he heard a bit of Russian, he could go back to zoning out. Joe carried on moving to the right, along the line of huts, not too slow, not too fast.
The night was clear, chillier than he had expected, the skies above pockmarked with stars. If he looked up, away from the airport perimeter lights, the stars seemed extraordinarily bright thanks to the lack of light pollution you get when the electricity dies. In the distance, a dog howled twice; closer to, insects chirruped gossip to the invertebrate night watch. It felt like it was the first clear night that he had been free – or free-ish – since he’d left LA. But to go home, he had to get away from this Russian airbase. The difficulty was that the perimeter fence lay a good two or three hundred yards off. To run towards that would clearly mark him out. But to stay was to invite the certainty of arrest and torture the moment the new day started.
And then someone fired up a phosphorus shell, turning sleepy night into Benzedrine day. As the shell reached its zenith, the base was bathed momentarily in a chemical brilliance, light and shade etched as unforgivingly as high noon. He cursed his luck, but if it hadn’t been for the phosphorus he would never have spotted the bicycle, leaning against the side of a hut. It was a black Mary Poppins lady’s bike, with a wicket basket hanging from the handlebars. He got the feeling it didn’t quite belong to a Russian airman,
that someone had pinched it. Morally, it didn’t feel that naughty to steal it himself – Father, it has been two decades since my last confession – and the bike would be down towards the bottom of a long list of sins, starting with killing.
The shell was falling now, the light beginning to fade to chemical dusk. He wobbled onto the runway and then a second phosphorus shell lit up the night, and again the sentry shouted something in Russian at him, this time more forcefully than before. Joe guessed the sentry was asking him to stop.
His mind froze, then unfroze. After Weaver had shot Katya dead in Utah, there had been a long, horrible wait while the authorities ummed and ahhed before they freed her body for cremation. Zeke had done his best to chivvy them along, but Joe had spent about three weeks as the old man’s guest, mourning the loss of the woman he loved. Pretty soon Zeke, a teetotaller his entire life apart from one night of madness, worked out that only Irish whiskey would see Joe through his grief, so he drove off and came back with bottles of Bushmills, Jameson and something called Writers Tears. Where the old ex-Mormon had got that stuff in Utah’s mountain country, Joe didn’t know, but he had.
Being an Irishman, when drunk he sang. Zeke’s wife, Mary-Lou, had a fine voice, and regaled them with songs like ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’, but eventually they got a song off Zeke – the Soviet national anthem, the Stalin version. Joe had got to know every word:
Soiuz nerushimyj respublik svobodnykh
Splotila naveki Velikaia Rus.
Da zdravstvuet sozdannyj volej narodov
Edinyj, moguchij Sovetskij Soiuz!
And so that’s what he sung when the sentry called out. He roared the anthem Zeke had taught him at the top of his voice while peddling hard for the dead centre of the runway. Once at the centre, he somehow forgot to balance properly and crashed onto the concrete.
Not just the sentry but the whole airbase – everyone who was still up – seemed to find that extraordinarily funny. In the full glow of the shell-light, his shadow etched huge against the runway concrete, Joe got up, bowed to his audience, brushed the blood from his knees, and sang the lines he knew all over again. Jubilant at the madness of it all, his watchers joined in. They saw a drunken Russian marine singing Stalin’s anthem. That was fine by Joe.
At the end of the first verse, he remounted his bike and headed off down the runway, weaving in and out of the airport lights and singing the anthem over and over again until a dip in the earth cast the runway into shadow and he knew they could no longer see him. To the left, the land sloped away, the darkness widened. He turned the bike that way and soon enough he came across the perimeter fence. He leant the bike against it, climbed up and jumped over the razor wire. Next he took off his tracksuit trousers, fed them through holes in the wire fence and knotted them around the bike frame and then, bit by bit, pulled it up, over the razor wire. It toppled onto his face, giving him a black eye. Fair enough.
The land was dry and rough underfoot, but he dragged the bike over it until he came across a road. It was, he guessed, three or four o’clock in the morning. He mounted the bike and turned away from the airbase. The moon sank quickly but there was just enough light from the stars above to make out the blacker asphalt against the darkness. He’d spent enough time at sea to read the stars so he looked up and headed north, to Turkey. Alone in a silent dark world, afraid and exultant, he hummed quietly the songs he truly knew, those he really loved: The Saw Doctors’ ‘N17’, The Wolfe Tones’ ‘Dingle Bay’, The Dubliners’ ‘Dirty Old Town’.
A few miles on from the base, the road curved up and down through the hills. One tight bend, the sound of rushing water led him to a small waterfall, and he dropped the bike with a clatter and gulped down the freezing cold water, as fresh as he’d ever drunk in his whole life. Thirst quenched but hungry, he rode on through the darkness that comes before dawn. When the road was open to the sky, he could navigate by the stars. When the road was confined – or worse, the sky blocked by overhanging trees – he stood a good chance of crashing. Soon his knees, elbows and the backs of his hands were bloodied. It hurt, but not so much as to make him slow down. The more miles he could put between the airbase and him before daybreak, the better.
The airbase, he guessed, was in the Alawite heartland, ultra-loyal to Zarif, and close to the coast. In this area, as someone who could be mistaken for a Russian he wouldn’t be treated with immediate suspicion, but it made sense to lie low once the sun came up. To the east, the sky was fading from midnight black to imperial purple to postbox red. Pretty soon the road began tilting downhill and he could make out, through the aroma of lemon trees and olive groves, the smell of the sea. He cycled through a small hamlet, past a few houses and a small mosque, running the gauntlet of a variety of yapping dogs that tried to nip his ankles. Once the world was awake, the make-believe Russian marine wouldn’t get so far.
Then he heard them: two or three vehicles, behind and above him, twisting and taking the U-bends at speed. They could be passing traffic; they could be part of a manhunt under orders to capture the missing prisoner without delay. To the left, through a thickness of pine, he could make out a steep, almost-vertical drop to a black cove illuminated by waves breaking against rock. At his feet, only just visible in the reddening gloom, was a miserable path, probably more often used by animals than people, pointing downhill. He took the path, the bike forcing its way through the undergrowth by sheer force of gravity. He was moving dangerously fast when he saw headlight beams flash past above his head. They hadn’t seen him.
Like an idiot, he kept on going downhill, too fast. A bird shot out of the undergrowth and brushed against his face and, startled, he closed his eyes – only to open them to realise that he was staring down at the sea, seventy feet below. He slid off the bike and rolled towards the cliff edge, grabbing onto a gnarled root with both hands. The bike fell first, making a splash far below. Joe’s feet were dancing in thin air, and now the root he was clinging onto – slowly, inexorably – started to come free.
Now he was falling. He closed his eyes, fully expecting to crash onto the rocks below: dead outright, if he was lucky; broken and paralysed, a slow, miserable ending, if he wasn’t.
The water that swallowed him up was cold and shocking, but he was alive.
Gasping for air, he surfaced, looking around the cove for some kind of beach or rocks that would allow him to get back on dry land. Nothing doing on the main shoreline, but in the distance was a sliver of white sand. He swam towards it and clambered onto the sand, panting. Further along he saw the entrance to a shallow cave. Inside the cave he found a very old skiff, its paint cracked and peeling. Two oars, weathered with age. With a fair wind and a bit of luck, it might – just – get him out of this corner of Syria. But would it float?
He dragged the skiff out onto the beach and into the sea. It bobbed around, satisfactorily enough. Hungry and thirsty as he was, it made no sense for him to row to Turkey in broad daylight. The Russians would be scouring the coast for him. They knew he couldn’t have gone far.
Getting to Turkey was going to be slow work. He rowed over to the cliff he’d fallen down, and there was the bike, clearly visible in the crystalline water at the bottom. He threw the skiff’s anchor over the side, took a great gulp of air and dived, using the anchor rope to pull himself down to the seabed. It was some time before he lifted the bike into the back of the skiff. He rowed back to the cave and hid everything, then he lay on the sand and closed his eyes.
The sun was low in the sky by the time he woke up. He waited another hour, then tied the bike to the back of the skiff, sat in the front with his face to the stern and started to row. Navigation was simple enough. However dark it got, he kept the black hulk of land to the east and rowed north, the oars dipping and rising, through a silvery sea. It was a still night, and in the distance he could make out an artillery duel, guns barking at each other.
Not too much to the Syria–Turkey border at sunset: a long, rickety fence topped by a coil of elderly barb
ed wire, wooden watchtowers every mile or so. Where the land was flat, the border would be tricky to cross, and so Joe cycled west for a dozen miles until the terrain grew more lumpy, creating blind spots for the soldiers in the watchtowers.
As the light in the sky to the west died, Joe hunkered down in a small copse of trees and fell asleep. He woke up in darkness and realised that a light, gentle rain was falling. Thunder rumbled, close by, and a flash of lightning lit up the night sky, illuminating a towering cliff of black clouds coming his way. He’d come to depend on his bike so much that he hated the thought of leaving it in Syria. So Joe shifted it onto his shoulders and carried it, stumbling every now and then, through the rough country towards the border fence.
A great fork of lightning ignited the darkness. Its electric clarity defined the world in front of him: the fence and, at his feet, a narrow asphalt road; some yards away a tall, spindly watchtower, on guard a soldier, the outline of his face, rifle and upper body etched against the lightning. Then the clouds broke and it started to rain, big fat droplets. Joe set off in the opposite direction to the sentry, and when the road dipped down into a cleft in the hills, he mounted the bike and started to pedal, as fast as he dared in the darkness.
A series of lightning flashes lit them up: four figures, walking. A short, stocky man with a kind face, a thick moustache and a club foot. He was hobbling along, wheeling a pushchair piled high with blankets and plastic bags; from within came an infant’s cries. With the man was a boy, dark-haired, wet through, crying half-heartedly; behind them a woman, her hair dyed blonde; on her arm, an old lady in a headscarf and black clothes, limping. A sorrier sight would be hard to imagine.
Joe got off the bike, and as the lightning flashed he mimed a soldier holding a rifle and pointed in the direction the family were heading. The man with the club foot understood and shrugged – what to do? Joe pointed at the wire fence in front of them.
Joe kneeled down by the fence and scrabbled away at the earth with his hands. The soil was loose, not hard rock. The man joined Joe and the two of them worked hard, scooping out the soil. During a break, he pointed at himself and said, ‘Mustafa.’ Joe did the same: ‘Joe.’ Soon the hole was deep enough for them to crawl under the fence. A puddle of water had formed in the bottom of the hole and Joe looked a mudlark when he got to the other side, but Mustafa gave him a huge grin.
