Shakir looked around at his surroundings—a half-destroyed living room—and caught an unpleasant whiff of raw sewage from somewhere outside the open door. Some poor family had been kicked out of their house so the army could use it. Like animals, the soldiers had simply tossed most of the personal items outside in a heap, breaking whatever would break. Keepsakes and heirlooms now mixed indiscriminately with garbage and dirt in the courtyard, as if those material items had never had meaning for any living person.
Then again, perhaps the family had been declared an enemy of the state, like me, Shakir thought. Perhaps their lives had been deemed as disposable as their property.
There was an animated conversation going on to his left between an officer and someone he could not see. Shakir had paid no attention, but a word—or phrase—had suddenly snagged his ear. They seemed anxious to communicate back to Baghdad that Saddam’s loyal forces in Kirkuk were not holding whomever Saddam’s Baghdad staff was looking for. At least that’s what it sounded like, and the words froze Shakir’s blood. He zeroed in on the conversation as best he could, trying to mentally filter out the noises of trucks passing outside, the clopping of heavy boots on the tile floors, and the background hum of other voices. He strained to listen for the names “Shakir,” “Abbas,” “Damerji,” or the name of the former colleague whose body he’d left to burn in the desert.
They were looking for someone. No, they had captured someone, but Baghdad didn’t know where they were. He must have misunderstood that part, Shakir concluded.
He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to unravel the garbled portions of each sentence, and realized suddenly that several of the last words he had just heard were neither words nor Arabic.
They were names. Two familiar names, which sounded like “Westaremon” and “Hair-ees.”
Shakir’s eyes came open instantly. He got to his feet somewhat painfully, but ignored the discomfort, moving rapidly into a better position from which to overhear.
Al Hajarah desert, south central Iraq
Saturday, March 9, 1991—8:45 A.M. (0545 GMT)
Leaving the bombed-out Iraqi hangar had been one of the most difficult things Will Westerman had ever had to do. He knew American rescue forces would be on the scene within hours—at least he hoped they would—and moving away from rescue once again seemed stupid.
But the two defecting Iraqi soldiers were spotter pilots. They had already radioed their officers that the hangar complex was a good place for their retreating armored column to hide while waiting for orders. Then they had gone to sleep in the hallway of an underground bunker beneath the hangar, only to be awakened by the sounds of the four Americans stealing their airplane.
The motorized infantry brigade was due by midmorning. There was no time to lose. What persuaded Will to go, however, was the chilling news that Sandra had flown off in an airplane hemorrhaging oil. The two Iraqis had planned to fly right past the hangar and on to Saudi Arabia to defect, but were forced down by the oil leak. They had radioed their main force, hoping to get the leak fixed when the column arrived. All they would have needed were the rudimentary tools the brigade mechanics carried to tighten the lines. Then, they had figured, they could try again.
Sandra, in other words, might not have made it all the way to a friendly air base. Rescue could be days away, not hours—while capture could be imminent if they dawdled.
With great reluctance Will and Doug loaded themselves in the truck and headed out again, this time bouncing east straight across the desert with the two Iraqis—brothers named Amal and Harun—sandwiched between them on the front seat.
Doug braked again, another stretch of loose sand looming ahead.
“Are you sure about this, Amal?”
“Yes, yes! I am sure. This … is right … is right point for to get … for going to American base.”
Amal could speak broken English, Harun could not, which made for a hilarious routine of not-so-simultaneous translation. Harun would speak in rapid Arabic and Amal would get wide-eyed trying to keep up, occasionally hitting his brother in the arm to slow down and let him catch up. When Will or Doug spoke, Harun could not wait for the translation and pressed Amal unmercifully to hurry up and explain—which he did now.
“What’d he say?” Doug asked, trying to suppress a smile.
“Harun agrees this is right, sir.” Amal nodded, his head continuing to bob in affirmation until Doug raised his hand to indicate enough.
Will sat by the right door of the crowded cab of the truck in deep worry, the desert wind blowing hot in his face now as the temperature rose into the upper eighties on its way higher. They had water, thanks to Amal and Harun, and they had some sense of direction. But they had no more gasoline, and the tanks were getting dry. Will estimated they had no more than an hour’s worth left. Once again they would be on foot.
He had tried to convince the Iraqis of this. Amal understood, but insisted there was a road, always “a road there … up there!”
It seemed as if they had been on the run forever, though only two and a half days had gone by since the marathon disaster of a mission had begun.
Will rested his right arm on the windowsill and looked absently at the horizon as Doug spoke and laughed with the two brothers.
Doug could make friends with Attila the Hun, Will groused to himself. It was a talent. An irritating talent, but a talent nonetheless.
Sandra’s face swam before him suddenly. He supposed he was just worried about her, but there was something more.
He missed her.
No, he corrected himself, I miss Janice back home. I’m just worried about Sandra.
Bullshit! something in his brain shot back. You miss her, bub, because you like her. Quit kidding yourself!
The truck bounced painfully hard suddenly, the engine and transmission protesting as the wheels began to slide on more sand and Doug fought successfully to recover, pushing ahead toward the spot Amal kept shaking his index finger at through the windshield.
“There … please go in there direction … that direction. We have the day before now come from there. American military is there.”
Once again Harun demanded an immediate translation, and he and Amal fell to speaking rapidly in Arabic.
In spite of himself—in spite of his anger at all things Iraqi—Will was beginning to like these two comedians. Somehow the fact that they could fly made it all right—as if he needed an excuse.
And the idea of these two killing anyone—or anyone killing them—didn’t make much sense either, whether they were military or not.
They had gotten stuck in deep sand and worked themselves free twice when the gasoline ran out. They climbed from the truck then to see for the first time a wall of brown approaching from the east, a sudden dust storm that engulfed them in minutes. They began trudging toward the southeast, the two Iraqis leading the way with surprising strength.
“You not worry,” Amal had told them while showing Will and Doug how to fashion face masks of simple cloth and bundle up against the choking grit. “The road is there, and after, American military. I know this.”
For hours they walked, Will and Doug staying in line behind the two brothers, guided as much by the sharp sound of their footsteps as by any visual reference, until the intensity of the wind at their backs and the impossible concentration of grit in the air made stopping a matter of survival. Virtually nothing was visible beyond ten feet ahead.
As Will and Doug sat, Amal pulled yards of parachute cloth and several collapsible aluminum poles from a small pack he had brought, and within minutes the four of them were huddled under a lean-to tent buttressed by sand piled behind them in a quickly made berm.
“Do they teach you to do this in military training?” Doug asked Amal.
“Teach? This … tent?” he asked, a puzzled expression coloring his swarthy features.
A smile broke out then, toothy and broad. “Oh, no no no. I am Arab. We are Arab. Arabs know to do this. This desert is home, no
?”
They were conscripts from a merchant family in Baghdad, young men in their early twenties who had girlfriends and parents and brothers and sisters and cousins they hadn’t seen in a year. “We have no choice,” Amal said of their induction. “We do not go, the army take us anyway and shoot us for not going. Either way we lose.”
“How long have you been out here in the desert?” Will asked.
Amal looked out at the swirling dust, his chin trembling slightly, ignoring Harun’s request for instant translation.
“We come here when Saddam invades Kuwait. We have no letters from home for many months.”
They fell silent as each in turn nursed the remaining water in two canteens and the brothers shared the food they had—which was little more than dried dates and hard bread—waiting for the storm to blow past, which it began to do in late afternoon.
As suddenly as switching on a bright light, the skies cleared, the sun began beating down on the makeshift shelter, and they started digging out. The four of them had begun walking southeast again, Amal leading the way over a low, shallow sand dune, when Doug suddenly saw him drop to his belly in the sand, motioning the others to do the same.
“Ahead! Republican Guard!” he whispered over his shoulder. “Not our … unit …” Amal gestured to his brother. “… but I know this one.”
A group of personnel carriers and tanks were parked in a ragged circle a quarter-mile distant, a few soldiers sitting or standing near their machines, but no one apparently looking in their direction.
Harun was obviously upset. He spoke rapidly and urgently to his brother before Amal translated.
“Harun say these are the … the … soldiers who came to shoot any Iraqi who try to run away, they come from units like this. They must not see us!”
Will turned his head toward Amal, kicking up sand with his chin.
Amal turned to Will and spoke at last. “It is better … if we are here until sun is gone.”
Amal’s sudden tugging on Will’s sleeve caught all of them off guard. He had been studying the far horizon.
“Sir, look there! You see helicopter? American military are there.”
Will followed Amal’s finger toward a small dot on the horizon that coalesced into a helicopter. The chopper was disappearing to the north, but in its wake they could almost make out something on the ground from where he had taken to the air. Eight to ten miles away, the suggestion of dark shapes that could be tents, tanks, or vehicles hovered in the slight mirage of residual heat in the waning sunlight.
“If those are our people …” Will began.
The helicopter was returning, closer to their position now, yet still at least five miles distant. Nevertheless, its shape was distinctive.
“Those are our people, Will!” Doug’s voice was tinged with excitement. “That’s an American Blackhawk!”
Will sighed a close-to-the-end-of-the-race sigh as the Black-hawk sank out of sight over the horizon. “Okay, we’ll do our usual trick of waiting until nightfall, then get around that Iraqi unit and make the dash as fast as we can. If that’s ten miles, it’ll take us, what, two hours?”
Doug was nodding, a broad smile on his face.
Amal was excited too. Excited and vindicated.
“I told you American military was there. You trust me, I say. They are there, I say, and now, there they are!”
Will smiled, reached over, and patted the Iraqi on the shoulder, a gesture that at first surprised the young soldier.
“Well done, my friend.”
As Doug watched, Amal’s face softened to an expression of gratitude, and he nodded solemnly to Will before turning to Harun to deliver the inevitable translation to Arabic.
Doug looked at his watch. It was 5:00 P.M., and two hours to darkness. It was too far away to see, of course, but he could almost feel Old Glory waving over the encampment out there in the desert only a few miles away.
Doug let himself think of Kathy and the kids. They would have been notified by now that he was missing, and she would be in agony.
There would be at least a field telephone over there on the American side. He’d call home the moment they made it over the line.
Two more hours!
17
Iraq Military Command Headquarters, Baghdad
Saturday, March 9, 1991—4:00 P.M. (1300 GMT)
General Hassoun of the Iraqi army tossed the teletype message on the scarred wooden surface of the makeshift desk and scowled at his aide. His tooth was hurting again, but there was no time to attend to it. He rubbed his right cheek and motioned for the man to sit down as he pulled a cigarette from a small silver case and lit it. He had too few left to offer one to the aide.
“When did this come in?” he asked the younger officer.
“About ten minutes ago, sir. It was brought here by courier, from the other communications center.”
The general nodded. To call this a command anymore was a ridiculous joke. For the last five days what remained of Saddam’s command staff had been scrambling out of hardened shelters and into ordinary civilian neighborhoods to hide from the new laser-guided American bomb that had punched through thirty feet of concrete and taken out a vital command post—along with several lifelong friends and a senior army commander—in the last day of the ground war. Bunkers were no longer safe, regardless of the concrete. Yet residential areas had no communications. It was like fighting a war with postcards.
And there was still a war to fight, though it was now a civil war.
Hassoun had made his own plans. If the worst came and Bush decided to invade all the way to Baghdad, he would escape to Jordan. His family was already there, though Saddam did not know that.
“Where were these American colonels supposed to be again?” the general asked.
The aide spread a tattered map on the desk and indicated a point in south central Iraq. “Their transport crashed here, General. They were supposed to have been captured”—his finger moved the equivalent of a hundred and fifty miles—“here.”
“We have checked with all the outposts in that area?”
“The ones we can reach, sir. They are all, as you know, scattered badly.”
Hassoun nodded, and sighed deeply.
“If the Americans are convinced these two colonels are our prisoners, they will push and scream at us until we send them home, and we cannot send them home until we have first captured them. We do not want to hand Bush another reason to start bombing again. So we must find these two colonels by whatever means necessary.”
“Sir, that’s what we’ve been trying to do. The message—”
“The message simply says, Captain, that none of our people who have reported in are holding them. The message does not say they cannot be found. They are obviously still out there somewhere, and obviously, if they aren’t stupid, they’re heading for the nearest border or for their own forces. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where to look. Start notifying all the units we can reach that these two are to be found and brought immediately, and in good condition, to me. Whoever makes the capture will be rewarded with either money or a discharge, whichever they want.”
“Yes sir.”
Hassoun watched the man leave before getting to his feet and walking to the window. There were several helicopters in a small village on the outskirts of the city under his control alone, fueled and ready to fly him out if the time came. He didn’t trust helicopters, but those were the only Iraqi craft the Americans would allow in the air unchallenged.
With the latest dispatches from Kirkuk, and the noise the Americans were making about protecting the Kurds and the Shiites, his escape plan was looking more attractive by the hour.
Al Hajarah desert, south central Iraq
Saturday, March 9, 1991—6:05 P.M. (1505 GMT)
The sun was hanging low in the western sky, the temperatures starting down from the upper eighties, as the lengthening shadows began to creep toward the crest of the small sand dune hiding Doug Harris, Wi
ll Westerman, and their two Iraqi deserters.
They were all lying on their stomachs, partially burrowed into the sand and hiding, Will to Doug’s left, the two Iraqi defectors on Will’s left. As the day wore to a close, the angled sunbeams began highlighting features in the sand they hadn’t noticed before.
Like the others, Doug was lying with his chin resting on his crossed hands. For several minutes he’d been studying two small bumps in the sand an inch or so apart and lying directly in front of his face.
“Will?” Doug’s voice was low and questioning.
“Yeah.”
“Ask Amal if they have horned toads in Iraq.”
Will didn’t answer at first. The question sounded like a typical buildup to a joke, Harris-style, and Will wasn’t in a joking mood.
Nor was Doug.
“Ask him what?” Will said at last.
“Homed toads, like in Fort Worth. Ask him if they have them here.”
Will turned his head to look at Doug, a scowl on his face.
“Why the hell would—”
“Just … just ask him, will you?”
Will sighed and turned to Amal, relaying the question, then describing what a horned toad was. He turned back to Doug.
“No, they don’t. But he wants to know why.”
“Because I see something in front of me that looks like a horned toad.”
“Right in front of you?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Look about a foot in front of my nose. See those bumps?”
Will turned toward Amal, and the conversation took on an urgent tone before Will turned back to Doug, speaking slowly, his voice now tense and little more than a whisper.
“Okay, Doug, listen very carefully. Do exactly what I tell you … okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” Will cleared his throat as quietly as he could.
“Doug, that’s not a horned toad.”
“What is—”
Will cut him off. “Just … just, when I give the word … I want you to flip your entire body … to your left … over the top of me.”
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