by Paul A. Rice
He blinked, twice rapidly, and the light disappeared.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right, I am someone else, someone who knows you, knows you quite well, Mr Collins.’ All traces of his Arabic accent suddenly vanished.
I felt my blood run cold. ‘What the hell does that…’
‘Later,’ he said, cutting me off.
Looking over his shoulder, Raouf said, ‘I will tell you later. But for now we must clean this mess up, yes?’ He swept his arm behind him in order to indicate which particular mess he was referring to.
In recognition of his words, I said no more. He was right; we had to get this place sorted out, and within the next half-an-hour.
And so, with lead in our hearts we started the process of taking our dead away from that blood-filled place. It took us longer than it should have because my phones just wouldn’t stop ringing – fucking typical. In the end, I turned the whole damned lot of them off.
14
Nightmares and Nightcaps
The rest of that day was a nightmare, from the moment we arrived back at the villa, right up and until we left for Tunisia the next morning, it was just a sorry state-of-affairs. Well, except for the serious piss-up that the lads and I had later that night on the rooftop.
The first thing I did upon getting back to the villa was to hold a meeting with everyone in the crew – the ones who were alive. The dead stayed on the cold stone floor of our own cellar. Gathering everyone around the table – and making sure that Skype was working correctly on Gracie’s laptop, so that the horrified editors in their faraway offices could hear what was being said in real-time – I simply told them how it was. From start-to-finish, I let them have the bad news. As I repeated all that Raouf had told me, recounted all the things that Rory and I had seen and done that afternoon, the only thing I heard from the audience was the sound of utter silence.
I never omitted anything, often turning to Rory for guidance if I thought I had forgotten something. I never skipped over the reasons why they had been taken, and of how and why they had been killed, nor did I brush-over Gino’s part in all of this. When I brought his name into the conversation, he scraped his chair back and stomped angrily from the room, slamming the door on his way out.
Like I’ve said before – the guy was an arsehole. Not once had he approached either Rory or me to see how we were, or to ask anything about those who had paid the ultimate price. He never even expressed any sympathy. The man was unreal. Still, I hadn’t finished with him, yet, and as soon as I got a moment, Gino and I were going to have a little chat…
At the end of my briefing there were a few inane questions from the others, most of which I can’t remember answering, and then everyone started to throw their opinions into the mix. In seconds the whole thing had turned into an arse-covering session. Who was to blame? Who should have done what? Etcetera, etcetera…
I’d heard enough, so, making some form of polite excuse, I left them to it and walked upstairs to take some time out on the rooftop terrace. I sat up there for at least two-hours on my own, just letting the events of the day slide through my head. It all made sense to me, the actions of the kidnappers, it was perfectly clear that they did what they thought they had to – totally insane, but perfectly clear. The fact that they were a murdering bunch of animals, never even came into my head. That was a given.
Instead, I tried to see if we had been at fault, if we could have done something differently. I wondered if I should have realised the dangers when Andi and I had watched them and their murderous actions in the compound. Perhaps I should have said or done something, perhaps I should have recommended that we left the country, perhaps I…
‘No! That’s just ridiculous!’ I thought. ‘Fuck-me, we don’t just bug-out because some mercenary gets his damned head shot off in a war-zone! Come on, Collins – start thinking straight, man!’
In the end, I came to the conclusion that we had been the victims of a set of circumstances, ones that lay, mostly, beyond our control. The one thing that stuck in my throat, and that I couldn’t reconcile with, was the Gino factor. Yes, the man was a breed apart, but when I had told the others in the meeting about his filming of the kidnappers doing their dastardly deeds in the compound, I had caught sight of Gracie staring at him in confusion. Her manner quite clearly saying: ‘What film from the inside of the compound are we talking about, Gino? What film of the rebels beating-up and killing people?’
No, for my money I would have betted upon the fact that Gino had never shown the tapes to anyone, but the question was, why?
I intended to go and find out.
Just as I started to rise to my feet, Rory and Jim appeared on the terrace, and they were carrying a six-pack of ‘lead-free’ beer.
‘Nice one, lads!’ I said, taking a cold one from Jim’s giant paw.
We sat and talked for a while – making a plan about what we were going to do with the bodies, and how we could get them into Tunisia. Jim said that the crew had been ordered to dismantle their gear as of this moment, and that they had already chopped the internet connection. This was done to stop anyone from letting the news out about the deaths of our friends before their families had been informed. Jim said that he knew Rick’s family and that as soon as London gave him the go-ahead, he was going to go down and see them. It was tough because I had barely got to know Rick – he and I always seeming to be out when the other one was in. There wasn’t a lot I could about that now, though. I was glad that at least one of us would be able to genuinely pay some respects
Rory said that Raouf had been in the villa for about two-hours and had assured Gracie that all the details of the evacuation to Tunisia would be taken care of – knowing how many people he had under his wing, I didn’t doubt that whatsoever. It was a massive relief to know that we wouldn’t have to try and sort it out ourselves.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Jim said. ‘I forgot to mention – there’s a whole shed-load of his blokes outside on the street as well, must be at least ten of ‘em, armed to the teeth. Looks like they’re here for the night, just to watch out backs…’
Good-old Raouf, whoever the fuck he was…
I asked what we should be doing on behalf of Farid – he had been driving for us and had been killed in the process. There was no contract and legal obligation on the crews’ behalf, but there was a moral one, and very much so. Rory rose to his feet and went downstairs to speak to Gracie about it. Within a few minutes he returned saying that she had addressed the problem and that Farid’s family would receive compensation.
After a while we decided that all the loose-ends of this whole sorry mess had been tied as tight as they could be. There were no authorities in Libya, no ambassadors or consuls, no police or lawyers. It had all turned to shit in the wind of revolution and it would be many a week before anything remotely near such things would return to this land of chaos.
Tomorrow we would leave in a convoy for the border with all of our equipment and all of our dead colleagues on-board. Mus would be waiting for us and he would guide the crew through the procedures of getting the dead repatriated. Once in Tunisia, the various embassies and other legal representatives could wield their might and we three knew that the journey would end there for us.
All of us wondered if we’d ever work again.
Deciding that tomorrow could go to hell, and knowing we could relax safe in the knowledge that Raouf’s gang were outside watching our backs, we all went downstairs to see the crew and make sure they were Okay. Not one of them was around, choosing instead to lock themselves in their rooms to try and deal with the tragedy in that way. Sitting in the room and crying into your soup over the dead may well have been the way in which some people dealt with things like this, but not us. It wasn’t in our nature.
Fifteen minutes later and we were back on the roof with a case of Coke, Andi’s ice-bucket, which I’d found in the kitchen and filled to the brim, and two full bottles of Mr Jack’s finest. We proceeded to get rip-roaring drunk and talk
ed a whole load of shit about nothing more than an even bigger load of shit in the process.
I decided that I would let the Gino issue go until we had least seen our deceased taken care of by the authorities, then I would see what he had to say for himself. Anyway, having a mass row on tonight of all nights would have been a stupid thing to do. No, I just stayed on the roof with the lads and drank like there was no tomorrow. By the time I collapsed into my bed there was no room left in my head for any bad dreams, and that was probably a bloody good thing.
15
Hidden Truths
At 05:30hrs that morning, we departed from the villa, fully loaded with our kit and corpses. Travelling in a pickup, I took up the rear of the convoy. Raouf was driving, whilst my three deceased chums made themselves comfortable in the back of the truck. They had all been tightly wrapped by a local mortician who had been under Raouf’s strict supervision. No embalming fluids or any form of interference with the bodies had been allowed. They had to arrive in one-unaltered-piece so that the coroner back in our world could do his investigation.
The only real piece of good news, which arrived that morning, was the fact that we didn’t have to endure the long journey all the way down to the southern border-crossing. Rebel forces had now taken control of the most northerly crossing-point into Tunisia, which meant we could high-tail it straight there – a journey that, with the wind behind us, should take no more than two-and-a-half hours. It was a real bonus as everyone was thoroughly depressed.
I wasn’t depressed – I just had a massive hangover. As we drove along, stopping every-so-often at the checkpoints, I gradually rehydrated myself, knocking back several bottles of cold water in the process.
Raouf looked across and smiled at me.
‘Hard night was it?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, a hard night and then some…’ I replied, winding down the window in preparation for a cigarette.
‘Are you smoking today?’ I asked, passing the packet over to him.
Raouf took one, so I leaned over and sparked it up for him. He inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out in a tight-lipped stream, and then proceeded to clue-me-in on a few things that I perhaps ought to have known before this day, if only I hadn’t been so blind, or naïve, or perhaps I was just plain dumb – maybe I was all three, because what he was about to tell me sure made it feel that way.
‘Do you remember the road-accident in Lashkar Gah?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I said, in surprise.
‘The big one on the Kandahar road, lots of people were killed – the fuel tanker and the bus, everything was on fire, surely you remember? Raouf said, glancing at me.
I could see full-well he knew that I remembered, but how he knew was beyond me. It had been bad; bodies all over the place, a huge blaze taking hold of the wreckage, people trapped and burning.
‘Yes, of course I remember,’ I said. ‘Afghanistan, it was a bad accident, lots of people were killed that day – it was a bloody mess!’
‘But you managed to save some of them, didn’t you? One man in particular was saved by your bravery…’
‘I can’t remember exactly, we helped several people,’ I said, desperately trying to recall the specifics of that day.
‘He was trapped in his car, it was burning and yet you still came to help him, you burned yourself, you risked your life. Now do you remember?’
I looked down at the inside of my right wrist; the scarring was still there – nothing too serious, just a slight reddening of the skin. It had been very painful at the time and I recalled cursing like a banshee as the heat had smeared my skin off. I remembered, yes – the blue car, the big guy inside, trapped and unconscious. I had managed to get the door open and then cut his seatbelt off, dragging him onto the road and pulling him to one side.
‘Yes, I remember that,’ I said, softly. ‘But the question is…’
‘…how do I know, that is the mystery here, isn’t it?’ Raouf said.
‘Yes, it is – how do you know about all of this?’
‘The man you saved was my brother – you met him yesterday, in the empty garage, before we attacked the villa.’
‘I… wait – the guy in the suit, the big one with the red tie, him? He’s your brother; he was the man in the car, really?’ I was absolutely amazed.
‘Yes, Faizal was the man you met yesterday, and it was he whom you pulled from the car in Afghanistan, he was over there working for us at the time, but, as you say – he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time...’
I sat in silence for a while. The event had happened all those years ago and yet I had still end-up meeting the guy on a random street during the events of anything but a random day, and all of it happening here, in Libya. This was crazy, wheels were turning.
‘It was the least I could do; anyone would have done the same, it was no big deal,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes, but it is the small things we do that make the big things possible, Jake. Faizal is in excellent health these days, he now has five children and a very successful business, and that is all thanks to you and God,’ Raouf said, giving me a genuinely warm smile.
‘I’m glad he’s Okay.’
‘He is fine, and very shortly he hopes to repay you for your selfless actions on that day…’
Knowing that after yesterday’s debacle I would probably never work in Libya again, and guessing that Raouf was simply being polite about his brother’s gratitude, I ignored his last remark.
Something more pressing was bothering me.
‘Just one thing, before we go on,’ I said.
‘Yes, what is it that you must know?’
‘You said that you knew me, right? Okay, this thing with your brother aside, how, exactly do you know me, what does that mean? How did you figure-out that it was me who pulled him out of the car?’
‘We saw you, at the Rixos Hotel, Faizal and I saw you.’
‘What, the Rixos? You and Faizal were there? I didn’t see you…’
This was getting ridiculous.
‘My job is to ensure that no-one ever sees me, just like it was your job to make sure that no-one ever saw you, Jake.’
‘Saw me, what? You could hardly fucking miss me,’ I exclaimed. ‘We were either stuck in the hotel or taken around in that blue coach all day, I mean, you’d have needed to be blind not to see me!’ I said, sarcastically.
‘Faizal and I were in the car, sometimes he drives me around, it helps me blend-in, people think I am just doing business, which I am, but not like they think… Anyway, he saw you and told me about you, he knew you were security because you had guns and body armour at the scene of his accident. We wondered what you were doing here, in Libya. I was curious; it’s my job to be… so I began to watch you.’
I didn’t like where this was going, the lump of ice starting to surface in my guts would have easily been big enough to sink the obvious cruise-liner…
‘Well, come on then,’ I said, somewhat tetchily. ‘Let’s hear about what you saw… me in a café downtown Tripoli, drinking coffee with some local guy who wanted to tell my crew his ‘big story’, wow…’
Raouf then proceed to make it worse, much worse.
‘I saw you doing many things,’ he said, softly.
‘Yeah, well… you must have been pretty bored watching me; all I did was travel around with the press on that bus, hardly interesting stuff, was it?’ I tried to keep my tone light, nonchalant.
Raouf laughed, and the ice started to turn into a glacier.
‘On the day before Gadaffi’s birthday…’ he said, ‘…you went on a little trip in the afternoon, did you not? But it was not on that silly blue coach this time, was it? You went for a ride in a white Toyota Corolla; you travelled to the flats by Bab al-Aziziya. It must have been a very nice apartment, because you were there a long time. You left at five-thirty the next morning and went to the shop, walking back inside the hotel with milk and newspapers under your arm – those stupid gate-guards didn’t even come out of thei
r hut…’
My thoughts exploded.
‘Shit! This fucking guy knows what I was doing, what the hell…’
I looked out of the side window, staring at the road as it went rushing past. Glancing at the speedo out of the corner of my eye, I could see we were currently going way too fast for heroics. Any crazy thoughts that I’d been garnering about leaping out and legging it across the desert, suddenly disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. Pushing the panic away, I sat and thought for a while.
On the day in question, I had, indeed, been out of the Rixos of my own accord. It was simple, I just walked straight out of the front gates as normal, telling them I was going across the road for water, as was always done by us inmates, and then instead of going to the corner shop to buy any water, I simply wandered off down the street, turned right and climbed into the front seat of my contact’s car, who was waiting exactly where they said he would be.
After taking the equipment and being dropped-off at the chosen location, I spent the rest of that evening sitting in a high-rise apartment, firing my laser-target-marker at each and every single thing of military interest, which the view from my perch allowed me to see. There weren’t many places overlooking the compound, but there were a few – you just needed to know where they were.
It was a given that the reconnaissance planes and drones of NATO had already picked up most of the targets my friends back in the military wanted to see, but they still liked to have someone on the ground confirming any buildings of military use.
Gadaffi’s compound was full of them and it took me, my binos and my laser, the best part of a whole night to try and see where the best places to strike would be. I guessed that the air-assets above were watching and recording my invisible beam of light as it illuminated all the places that I thought would be of interest.
I don’t know if they ever made use of my efforts, but let’s put it this way: The following day, Mr G’s birthday, I was sitting in the garden of the Rixos and having a coffee when NATO started their bombardment. It was the first time they had seriously bombed Tripoli in the daylight hours, and they weren’t joking.
