by Mark Dawson
“That way,” Isabella said, pointing down the street. There was a junction ahead that would allow them to turn to the north.
Aqil turned the wheel and the car rolled ahead.
They found their way to the main road that headed north out of al-Bab. It was a two-lane highway, in reasonably good condition compared to the bombed-out city that it served. Aqil drove carefully, seemingly gaining in confidence as they progressed. The buildings around them became sparser and the desert started to take hold of the landscape.
Isabella had started to believe that they were going to make it out of the city without incident.
“What’s that?” Aqil said, squinting through the windshield.
Isabella had seen it, too. She saw the red taillights of a car that had stopped ahead of them, and then, as they drew nearer, the shape of buildings immediately to the left and right of the highway and an obstruction in the middle of the road.
“Slow down,” she said.
They drew closer. Isabella peeked between the two front seats and looked ahead. It was a checkpoint. There were two cars ahead of them: a Peugeot 207 and an old Volkswagen Golf. The roadblock did not look particularly professional. There was a four-by-four and a Humvee that had been parked end to end, blocking the road, but the desert on either side of the road looked to be passable. It was flat and did not have any large rocks or other obstructions that would be a problem to traverse. There were two hastily erected wooden buildings on the left and the right, with light shining from small windows. The Golf’s headlights shone ahead, and Isabella watched as the shape of a man was lit up as he passed through the beams.
“What do we do?” Aqil said.
Isabella took off the niqab. “We can’t stop,” she said. “You don’t have any reason to be out here.”
“No,” he said.
“And they’re probably looking for us already.”
“So? What do we do?”
“We’ll drive up to where the Peugeot is now.”
“You want me to talk to them?”
“No,” she said. “Let them come up to the car. When I tell you, drive off again and go around them. Go to the left, onto the desert. The ground is better on that side.”
His voice was tight with tension. “But they’ll shoot at us.”
“They might.”
“So what do we do then?”
“Leave that to me.”
The insurgents finished with the Peugeot and waved it on. The Volkswagen rolled forward, the driver braking as the nearest sentry raised his hand. Isabella stayed low, behind the seat, but looked out the window for additional sentries.
“Edge forward a little,” Isabella said.
Isabella watched as Aqil nervously clasped and unclasped his hands around the wheel. “Why don’t we turn around?” he said. “There was another turning. We passed it—we could go that way, go around them.”
“Too late. You think they won’t come after us if we turn around? Don’t be crazy. Our best chance is to run. We’ve got surprise on our side. Drive.”
He did as she asked, the car jerking as he inexpertly put it into gear. Isabella wished that she was driving, but she knew that she would be more useful with the Kalashnikov. She stayed low, looking out from between the seats, the rifle held down low in both hands. The two insurgents were on either side of the Volkswagen. The man next to the driver was crouched down a little and leaning over so that he could speak to the occupants of the vehicle. His partner was walking around the car, inspecting it, looking—perhaps—for the prisoner who had escaped just a few hours earlier.
Isabella slid the index finger of her right hand into the trigger guard. She reached with her left and laid the barrel of the rifle in her palm. She closed her grip, holding it loosely.
The second guard had a torch and he shone the beam into the interior of the car.
“Ready?” Isabella said.
“No.”
“Yes, you are. Wind down your window.”
He did as she asked; the mechanism was rusty, and the handle squeaked as he turned it. She felt the coolness of the air on her face as it filtered into the stuffy cabin.
“It’s going to be very noisy. Ignore it. You just need to drive us away from here. That’s all you need to do. Okay?”
He didn’t answer.
The sentry at the window of the Volkswagen had straightened up. The second man was walking back around the car, his back turned away from them.
“Aqil?”
“I’m frightened.”
The Volkswagen pulled away, sliding around the four-by-four and then gathering speed as it headed north.
The first sentry waved at them to come forward.
“What do I do?” Aqil said.
“Take it easy,” Isabella replied. “Drive on. Nice and slow.”
Aqil released the handbrake and almost stalled the car again. He cursed, low and urgent, panicking, and Isabella knew then, for certain, that it wasn’t going to go down the way she wanted. It wasn’t going to be smooth. He put the car into first gear and jerked forward. Isabella stayed low, hidden behind his seat. She felt the trigger against the pad of her index finger.
Aqil braked and the car came to a stop.
The engine coughed; Isabella prayed that he wouldn’t stall it.
She heard, over the spluttering of the engine, the sound of footsteps approaching.
She was down low now, holding the rifle vertically so that it was hidden behind the seat but ready to aim when she needed to. She couldn’t see anything. She had to go on instinct.
The guard called out to Aqil. “Turn off the engine.”
Isabella could almost feel Aqil freeze. “Don’t,” she hissed.
The voice was closer now. “Didn’t you hear me? Turn off the engine.”
Isabella straightened up, bringing the rifle down and pointing it so that the muzzle was between the edge of Aqil’s seat and the frame of the window. She saw the guard. He was a metre away and his own Kalashnikov was pointed down at the ground. He saw Isabella. His eyes widened in shock and he started to bring his own rifle up, but it was always going to be too late for him.
Beatrix had trained Isabella how to shoot an AK. She gently squeezed the trigger and loosed off a burst of three rounds. The distance between her and the guard meant that it was almost impossible to miss, and she did not. All three rounds found their mark. The insurgent stumbled back, tripped and fell beneath the line of the window, out of sight.
“Now!” she yelled. “Go!”
Aqil stamped down on the gas, but his foot was still on the clutch. The engine whined impotently.
The second guard had already started to turn at the distinctive bark of the AK. He was on the other side of the car, the wrong side for Isabella, and she couldn’t aim at him through the open driver’s window. She pulled the AK back, shoved it into the gap between the two front seats and took fresh aim. The man had raised his own AK and he fired before she did. The rounds blew out the windshield, shards of glass tumbling into the cabin. The passenger seat juddered on its fixings and a puff of upholstery blew out into the rear of the cabin. Isabella drew a bead on the man and fired off another three-round burst. The remnants of the windshield exploded, the shards blown out over the bonnet this time. The guard was hit and he fell to the ground.
Isabella saw a vehicle approaching from the other side of the barricade.
“Aqil!” Isabella shouted. She had no idea whether he had been struck.
The engine revved again, and still they did not move. At least he wasn’t dead.
“The clutch.”
“I can’t . . . it won’t . . .”
“Release the fucking clutch!”
It was too late now. The vehicle on the other side of the blockade was a pickup truck. It had stopped to disgorge four more regime soldiers. They were all armed, and they were fanning out around the four-by-four and the Humvee. They must have heard the sound of gunfire; maybe they had seen what had happened; maybe it wa
s just bad luck.
“Aqil,” she said as she reached for the door handle, “listen to me. We can’t drive now. We’ve got to run. Back into the city.”
The engine revved impotently again. He was panicking.
Isabella pulled down on the handle and flung the door open. “Come on, Aqil. Run!”
She stepped down, using the open door for concealment. She peeked around the frame so that she could position the four new arrivals in her mind’s eye. They had split into two groups of two. The first two were behind the Humvee and the second pair were behind the four-by-four. The four-by-four was closest. The four of them were staying in cover; the two shot men on the ground provided a very compelling reason why it was in their best interests to be cautious. But there would only be a temporary stand-off. They would realise, very quickly, that there was only one enemy facing them, that she was a young girl and that she was very badly outnumbered. They would be able to flank her.
Isabella wouldn’t give them the chance.
Aqil was still in the car. “Aqil, listen. We have to run. I’m going to go back into the city. If you stay here, you’ll either be captured or killed. It’s up to you, but I’m going on three.”
Isabella was sheltering behind the rear door; she couldn’t go forward to help him get out of the car without exposing herself to the enemy. Nevertheless, as she reached her left hand down to grasp the AK around its forestock, she heard the door open. She couldn’t see whether Aqil had got out or not, but she couldn’t wait any longer.
“One.”
Isabella shuffled closer to the edge of the door.
“Two.”
The abaya was impeding her. She undid the clasps and let it fall to the ground. She slid her finger into the trigger guard.
“Three.”
She stood, aimed the rifle at the four-by-four, and opened fire. There was little prospect of hitting the men, but that wasn’t necessary; she just wanted to give them a good reason to stay where they were. The rounds streaked across the medium range between Isabella and the blockade, pinging brightly off the vehicle’s bodywork. The soldiers reeled back behind the bulk of the vehicle, and Isabella encouraged them to stay there with another well-aimed volley.
Now that she was standing, she could see that Aqil had got out of the car. He was sitting on the road, his back pressed against the open door, his knees hugged to his chest and his arms over his head. He was terrified, but there was nothing Isabella could do for him. He wasn’t coming with her. She looked up again, switched aim and fired another three rounds at the Humvee.
Her volley rattled off the armoured hull as she turned away from the car—and Aqil—and ran.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Isabella ran as fast as she could. She had run every day in Marrakech, miles and miles, and she knew that she had the endurance to run hard for forty or fifty minutes. She needed to put as much distance as she could between herself and the men at the blockade. She wouldn’t be able to outrun them. They had their pickup, and it wouldn’t take them long to round up Aqil and then come after her.
They had travelled north, to the residential district on the outskirts of the city. The road to the south led into a quarter that was dominated by five- and six-storey apartment blocks. There were two hundred metres between the checkpoint and the start of the blocks. Isabella sprinted, the AK clasped in her right hand. The weapon felt heavier with every stride, but she couldn’t relinquish it. She pumped her arms and legs until her lungs were on fire, and then she kept running. She didn’t look back, but as the road passed through a narrow grove of cedar trees, she heard the sound of incoming gunfire. It was a burst from an automatic weapon, the rounds passing harmlessly overhead.
Isabella gulped down as much air as she could in ragged gasps and ran harder.
She sprinted until she was within the curtilage of the first apartment block. There was no one else on the street—she wondered if the regime insisted upon a curfew—but there were lights in some of the windows in the flanks of the buildings on either side of her. The residents had been disturbed, perhaps, by the sound of gunfire. Isabella was sweating hard as she turned onto a side road, a narrow canyon formed by blocks that faced each other on opposite sides of the road. The district had evidently been subjected to some sort of bombardment, for the road between the two buildings was pregnant with the debris of an explosion. Huge bites had been taken from the buildings: some had suffered the indignity of having their balconies peeled away; none of the windows had been left with glass, and other buildings had been bestowed with blackened scars from where fires had been allowed to burn themselves out. The debris in the road was significant, with huge chunks of rubble and twisted metal girders that had been flung around like pick-up sticks. Isabella picked her way across the pile of rubble with care, knowing that to twist her ankle now would be disastrous. She knew, too, that this road would be impassable for any vehicle that might be in pursuit.
She had negotiated the first half of the obstruction when she heard the sound of an engine and then, immediately after that, the squeal of rubber biting on asphalt. She heard the sound of a door opening and then a man’s voice, a word barked out in Arabic that she couldn’t hear over the gasping of her breath. She clambered over a large mound of rubble and slid down the other side as she heard the ugly rattle of gunfire. There was enough debris to shield her, but that could only be temporary. The men from the blockade had dealt with Aqil and they were coming after her now.
She scrambled down the slope, the loose rubble skittering ahead of her, and, staying low, crept across so that she could see around the mound of debris to the road beyond. The jeep was there, with the figures of three men visible in the moonlight. She raised the AK and fired off another controlled burst. The men dropped, the rounds sailing overhead. It didn’t matter; she just needed a few extra seconds.
Isabella turned and surveyed the way ahead. There was more rubble in the road, enough to slow her down. Now that her pursuers were on foot, too, the rubble would not serve quite the same advantage. They might be able to move more quickly, and if she had to slow down to negotiate it, she would be vulnerable to their rifles. No. She needed an alternative. There was a narrow alleyway to her right. Two apartment blocks shouldered up close together, a green, white and black Syrian flag painted on one wall and a large square of red paint on the other. There was just enough space between the walls of the buildings for a person to be able to pass through, provided the gap was negotiated in single file. The alley was dark, but she could see a glimmer of light at the end of it.
It was as good a way forward as any.
She vaulted a tangled nest of thick metal wires and ran hard again, sprinting until she was inside the alleyway. The temperature was two or three degrees colder in the darkness, but Isabella ignored it and ran. There were bags of trash that had been dumped here, and rats the size of small cats paused, indifferent, to regard her with sly languor as she rushed by. She heard the sound of a man’s voice at the other end of the alleyway; it was an Arabic curse and then a clear instruction: “Follow her!”
Isabella emerged in a small market square. It, too, had been shelled. The buildings that formed it had been shattered; yet more debris spilling out in treacherous piles. A white pickup truck was on its side, the windshield ruined by a filigree of cracks, the glass now a milky opaque grey. Telegraph and electricity wires draped down from their poles, and bullet holes pocked the hood of the pickup and the walls beyond it. The square was presided over by the minaret of a mosque, with another in the middle distance behind it.
A man tripped and fell in the alley behind her. She heard his grunt of pain, his curse and the invective of another man who was stuck behind him. She turned, aimed the rifle and fired another three-round volley into the black maw. She thought she heard a yelp of pain and wondered, maybe, if she had been fortunate enough to score a hit. She saw muzzle flash, much closer than she had expected, and flinched as a track of impacts was scored across the stone cladding to h
er right. She felt the sting as razored chips scratched across her face. She turned and ran.
The piles of debris in the square were insurmountable, though a path had been cleared around the perimeter. She followed it, edging around the flatbed of the overturned pickup, and then, once the road was clear of debris, rushed toward the first mosque. The road continued for another hundred yards until it was crossed by another, and as Isabella ran on, she saw a large vehicle rumble across the junction. It was the Humvee, and it jerked to a sudden stop.
Not good.
The mosque had been flattened. The damage was more severe than would have been caused by a shell; it was as if a giant hand had slapped down on it, flattening it completely. Isabella had seen reports of barrel bombs that were dropped from regime helicopters, and she wondered whether something like that had happened here. The minaret was precarious, but somehow still standing, a lonely sentinel presiding over a huge mound of rubble. There was no way Isabella could scramble up the slope in time, but just as she was about to disregard that side of the road as a way of escape, she saw that the explosion had torn an opening in the building that had once abutted the mosque.
More shots. She flinched, the bullets chewing up a storm of fine dust as they landed short. She glanced back to the junction. Two men had disembarked from the Humvee. She looked back to the overturned pickup and saw another pursuer emerging around the side of the vehicle.
Three men, at least. She had to get away from them. She scrambled ahead, leaping over the debris until she was at the opening. The wall had collapsed, offering access to the ground floor of the building. Isabella hopped down. It was dark, the scant moonlight absorbing into the gloom so that she couldn’t see for more than six feet. There was a flight of stairs in the middle of the floor, and acting purely on instinct, Isabella crossed the floor and ascended. The building must have been declared unsafe, because it had been abandoned. Isabella climbed to the first floor, then the second, third and fourth. The stairs ended at a landing that, in turn, ended at a closed door. Isabella turned the handle; it was unlocked, and she opened it. The door offered access to the roof. She scampered outside, closed the door behind her and surveilled her new surroundings. The minaret was to the left, the perspective altered now that she was halfway to its top. The roofs of the buildings on the same side of the street stretched away to the south; some were a little higher, others a little lower, and the way forward was littered with satellite dishes, walls and sills, clotheslines and boxy air-conditioning units.
