Deep Black

36

From where I stood on Jerry’s balcony, Baghdad was now a patchwork of light and dark. On the other side of the Tigris, entire neighbourhoods were pitch black; I imagined them criss-crossed with cables so the locals could get their kettles on. Next to them, a few streets had lights that flickered, then whole sectors were reasonably well lit, probably thanks to generators like ours that droned on the back of an artic trailer with a sign saying ‘A gift from the people of Japan’.

‘You fashioned up yet?’

I’d drawn the curtains behind me so I wouldn’t be someone’s warm-up shot before a night’s sniping at any soldier who stood still long enough.

Jerry was changing out of his local ‘look at me, I’m one of you’ clothes. ‘Nearly. I’m dying for a beer, but the fridge is fucked.’

I looked down. Either the party had split into two or there’d always been rival events. The grassed area was full of people, and about twenty or so were congregated round the barbecue near the pool. Johnny Cash’s dad had moved out of the bar to serenade a group of Iraqis and whites sitting round a plastic table, and the Balkan boys were doing a meet-and-greet.

The raffia cabanas and fencing now made sense to me. They hadn’t done it to make it look good: it was to stop outsiders having an unrestricted view and therefore a good arc of fire into the compound. It obviously worked. Everybody looked very relaxed, even though a random cabby into the fencing might take any of them out. But fuck it – as Gaz would say, ‘It’s a war, innit?’

Quite a few more people wandered around the pool as Bob Marley sparked up from the speakers and went into competition with Johnny’s dad, but neither of them was making much headway against the rumble of conversation and laughter. The whole lot got drowned out as a helicopter swooped low over the rooftops just the other side of the hotel.

Jerry came out and watched it go as he clipped his bumbag round him. ‘Must be the cheese-wire patrol . . .’

As we headed for the lift I wondered if Rob would turn up. I hoped so. Seeing these people again made me feel as if nothing had changed, and I liked that. It wasn’t as if Rob and I’d been in and out of each other’s houses during our time together in the Regiment, but whenever we met up we connected – mostly because we were the sad fucks who hadn’t scored down town all night and were still trying to chat up women at the Chinese takeaway on the way back to camp.

The lobby was still heaving. Loud Arab music drifted out of the wedding reception and the women were warbling big-time. They’d be knackered by the morning.

Outside, a crowd had gathered round the far end of the pool, waiting to collect food from the barbecue. The necks of beer bottles stuck out of big bins of ice like the spines of frozen hedgehogs. An Apple PowerBook had been rigged up to a couple of speakers, its screen displaying the music menu. The Wailers were fighting hard to make themselves heard over the country-and-western.

Jerry swayed to the beat and pointed at the strings of fairy-lights in the palm trees. ‘This could be the Caribbean, man.’

‘Must be what makes it so popular,’ I said, as I made my way along the pool side. ‘And I bet the Yardies don’t have many of those.’ A tracked vehicle screeched noisily down the road just the other side of the wall and helicopters clattered across the sky.

The guests were mostly Brits and Americans and seemed to know each other. The news agencies always did have a pretty incestuous set-up, with the same crews moving from war zone to war zone. None of their protection was carrying: the guys all had their party kit on, lurid Hawaiian shirts and Bermudan shorts. It was fun time, and we were the right side of the fence. They outnumbered the women by about sixteen to one, and hovered round the few available like flies round shit.

Jerry picked up a beer for himself and a Coke for me and we gave the place a good scan, me keeping an eye out for Rob, him for anybody who looked like they might know the secret of the Bosnian ayatollah. We must have looked like the proverbial spare pricks.

Sporadic gunfire punctuated the hubbub of conversation, but it was obviously too far away to worry about. I wondered how they defined too close for comfort. A hundred metres? Fifty? Or wait till someone drops? That really would be effective enemy fire.

A huge contact sparked up nearby. This time everybody did look up. An amazing amount of heavy .50 cal tracer stitched hot dotted lines across the sky. Every pair of eyes followed its trajectory, but once they realized it wasn’t going to fall on our heads, their owners got back to their chats and beers.

I was just treating myself to a swig of Coke when I got a huge slap on the back that made my teeth bang against the bottle.

‘Wanker!’

I recognized the broad Geordie accent even before I turned round. I’d known Pete Holland for years, but thankfully not that well. He was one of those guys who had an opinion on everything, and a lot of them disappeared when you held them up to the light. Built like a prop forward, he was known in the Regiment as a good Bergen carrier, a strong back you could depend on to get kit from A to B. So strong, in fact, he could make the muscles in his back bulge like bat wings. His nickname was, of course, Lats-Like-A-Bat.

We shook hands. ‘All right, mate? How’s it going? This is Jerry.’

It wasn’t long before Jerry made his excuses and left, probably so I could start quizzing Lats about Nuhanovic. But I’d need to be pretty fucking desperate before I went that route. He’d want to know why, where, when – and how much I was willing to pay him for answering.

Pete had a beer in one hand and a spare in the other, what he called ‘having one on the loading tray’. He’d been in the Artillery before the Regiment. That was his problem: once he’d started on the beers, the loading tray was as busy as a factory conveyor belt. He could have given Ezra a lifetime’s work.

He nodded at the two Balkan boys I’d seen in the coffee-bar area, who had just joined a group at the end of the pool. The one with the goatee had a huge smile on his face as he offered round his pack of cigarettes. ‘Not working for them cunts, are you?’

I shook my head. ‘A journalist. That guy Jerry. You?’

He stuck out his jaw and pranced around on the spot as if he was sizing up to throw a punch. ‘Doing me own thing. A wee bit of freelance. I’m on a good number, BGing some Japanese. Five hundred a day. Champion.’ He took a hefty swig of free beer.

How did you answer that? ‘Five hundred. Good for you, mate. Listen, those flat-tops. They Bosnian, Serb, what?’

‘Fuck knows. I fucking know what they’re up to, though.’ He pointed at the others in the group with his bottle. ‘Don’t these cunts know what they’re doing? Some of them are younger than my two girls.’

It clicked. These two were part of the Balkans’ globalization campaign. It didn’t sound like they’d be spending much time with the ayatollah.

He took another swig, not that he needed it, and I realized what the posturing was all about. He was trying to keep his balance. No wonder he was on his own. Anybody working for a decent firm and found drinking on a job would be thrown out, no exceptions, no second chances. And word flew round the circuit quicker than tracer. He wasn’t an independent by choice. No one would vouch for him. It was a big deal to do that. If the guy you vouched for turned out to be crap, that meant so were you. It was just the way it was.

I hoped he hadn’t come over and slapped me on the back because he thought I was a kindred spirit. ‘You and the Japanese in the hotel?’

‘Aye, I’m here and there. You know how it is.’

I didn’t. I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.