Deep Black

23

Thursday, 9 October

The forty-seater Royal Jordanian turboprop had hit turbulence several times during the hour-and-a-half flight. I had my head against the window, watching the blur of the prop. It was no surprise that most of the world’s major religions were born in the desert. There was fuck-all else to do.

Each time the aircraft bucked, it drew gasps from passengers who were new to the game. They probably thought we were being downed by a SAM 7. The not-so-funny thing was that they might soon be right.

I glanced over at Jerry in the aisle seat. He was busy sorting out his camera bits and pieces, so I turned back and stared out of the window again. Below me, in the emptiness of the Western Desert, I saw the strip of tarmac that connected Jordan to Baghdad. It looked as remote as a motorway across Mars.

Jerry had met me off the plane at Heathrow. After a three-hour wait, we were on our way to Jordan. The Sunday Telegraph wanted not just the picture but six thousand words on how Nuhanovic had been found, and what he had to say for himself.

We’d had to hang around in the Jordanian capital since Monday evening. There was only one flight into Baghdad each morning and every man and his dog wanted to be on it.

The only way of getting in earlier was chancing it on the hell-for-leather roads. There were three routes in: from Kuwait to the south, Jordan to the west, or Turkey to the north. At the moment, myth had it that Turkey was best, but it was still a nightmare. They’d been nicknamed the Ali Baba roads for a reason. Every gangster in the region knew that journalists carried big wads of US dollars. They held them up, then hosed them down. And if the hijackers didn’t get you, the nervous young American soldiers would. They didn’t like people overtaking their convoys.

Even if we had been robbed, it would still have been cheaper than flying. It was costing us over a thousand dollars each, but even pre-booking didn’t guarantee a seat. We’d paid for our Tuesday flight, but still had to turn up every day and try to blag our way on board. There was a list of passengers for each departure, but that really didn’t matter. You just had to line up and take your chances with the women on the desk. Each morning, I would point to our names on the manifest, and each time she would say something like, ‘Yes, you are on the flight, but you can’t go today.’ Jerry did the translating, but it always just sounded like ‘Fuck off’ to me.

It had still been dark when we left our minging hotel every morning to start the day’s bribery. We’d even tried to bluff our way on to the daily UN flight. It didn’t seem very full. They’d pulled out of Baghdad after a bomb had killed their representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and a shedful of others.

Jerry had been going apeshit because he wanted time to sort himself out on the ground before Nuhanovic arrived, but now he was coming in on the same day. I leaned over to him, and nodded surreptitiously towards a bunch of heavily bearded characters at the back of the cabin. ‘You sure he isn’t on this flight?’ That got a smile out of him. He’d been contacting his DC source every day, but there was still no int.

Most of our other fellow travellers seemed to be overweight businessmen, sweating buckets in their compulsory Middle East business suits – khaki fishing waistcoats, pockets stuffed with digital cameras so they could snap away and tell war stories afterwards. I’d heard a few German and French voices among them, but mostly they were American. Whatever the nationality, they all carried their laptops and other business stuff in macho, brand new daysacks.

A few rows in front of us was a guy called Rob Newman. At least, I thought it was him. I hadn’t seen him since the early nineties, when we were both in B squadron of the SAS. I’d got out and worked for the Firm. It was only later that I’d heard he’d commanded the patrol that dug in the LTD caches for me in Bosnia. Rob wasn’t a new boy to the Middle East either, or Baghdad for that matter. We’d both been into the city during the first Gulf War, fucking about trying to cut communication lines. He’d spent what felt like a lifetime sitting on a sand dune, just like me. If it wasn’t training some Arab special-forces group, it was trying to kill them. ‘Maintaining the UK’s interests overseas’, it used to be called, but it had probably had a shiny and very cuddly PR makeover under New Labour. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him. After all, every man and his dog with a mortgage to pay off would have headed straight to Iraq.

I’d seen Rob at Amman airport every day, doing the same as us, getting fucked off the flight. But while Jerry was foaming at the mouth, Rob never lost it. He was deep and consistent: he always thought about things before gobbing off. His was always the voice of reason, and it was directly linked to a brain the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.

The other constant with him was his dress sense. His uniform was blue button-down shirt, straining a little round the gut these days, chinos, Caterpillar boots, and a fuck-off Seiko diver’s watch the size of a Big Mac.

I didn’t know if he’d seen me; we certainly hadn’t had eye to eye. It was one of the unwritten rules. Even if you recognized each other, you wouldn’t go up and say hello. One or both of you might be on a job; you might be putting him in the shit if his name wasn’t Rob Newman today.

It would have been good to say hello, though.