Deep Black

48

As he cut through my plasticuffs with a pair of scissors, the guy I’d shared a smile with spoke to the back of my head. ‘You got a ride waiting.’

Rubbing our wrists, Jerry and I were escorted out into a palatial corridor. We walked past carved stone columns, under vaulted ceilings and fluted domes. If the arches hadn’t been sealed off with plywood to make office space, and the walls and marble floors hadn’t been covered by miles of metallic grey duct tape, wires and cables, I’d have expected Louis the Fifteenth to appear at any moment.

We approached a large pair of double doors next to a ping-pong table. Two soldiers jumped up from the ornate chairs they’d been sitting in and opened them wide.

We stepped out into the sun. I had to squint to protect my eyes. Heat bounced off the top of my head. With a soldier either side of each of us, we were guided to a Hummer and ushered into the back. This wasn’t one of the MP vehicles. It belonged to Captain D. Frankenmeyer. His name was stencilled on the right-hand side of the windscreen, as if it was a jazzed-up P-reg Ford Escort. Our kit was already inside. I checked my bumbag. My passport was safe. The rest of it didn’t matter, but I was happy to find the three thousand-odd dollars in twenties and smaller.

The soldier behind the wheel wasn’t wearing body armour and his helmet rested on the steel hump between the front seats. There was another helmet on the spare front seat, with two rank bars. The captain it belonged to jumped in and threw on his Oakleys. As he slammed the door, I saw the very long nametag on his breast pocket. It was the Hummer’s owner.

The driver threw the engine into gear and we set off past the Smiley face. Frankenmeyer swivelled round to face us. ‘Kinda cool, ain’t it?’ If he’d been a few years younger, Frankenmeyer could have come straight from playing college football. Big shoulders, toned body, white teeth, golden tan: he should have been in films. I smiled back at him – or, rather, at the reflection of myself in his mirrored lenses. There was no point in being surly. These boys were just doing the best they could.

He pointed up at Smiley. ‘You know what? We got fifteen of them painted around town before we had to pull them down. What you guys do to get people so pissed?’

Jerry took a breath and I put a hand on his arm to shut him up. ‘I think we were asking the wrong sort of questions. He’s a reporter.’

Frankenmeyer turned back towards the windscreen. ‘We get a lot of them here. You been told to leave town today?’

I nodded.

‘You’re the third this week. Those guys like to keep things sweet around here. I just wish they’d do the same for us. They said we were going to be here no more than four months, period.’ He punched the driver’s arm. ‘How long ago was that, Davers?’

Davers didn’t bother to look at the captain: he was busy checking a junction left. ‘Fuck, that was Christmas, sir. And I joined the National Guard for the dental plan, not this shit.’

Davers wasn’t on his own. A lot of small-town America joined the National Guard for the medical insurance and education credits. Most saw the weekend training camps as a box to be ticked before they got to the real benefits. No one really expected to get sent away to war, let alone for a year or more.

That wasn’t the only problem. The National Guard deployed as independent units. The guy who ran the corner store back home might now be your commanding officer on operations. Everybody was a part-timer, and that always spelt trouble for command and control, and the standard of professionalism in contact. That was why most other countries integrated their part-timers into regular units.

We passed the tank and vehicle graveyard. Off-duty soldiers mooched around in the shade of their half-bombed homes. Davers turned a corner and passed a café furnished with an assortment of tables, sofas and chairs. The original Arabic sign had been crossed out and replaced with ‘Bagdad Café’ in crude white paint. The Whoopee Goldberg painting on the wall wasn’t much better. A couple of Hummers and AFVs were parked outside, alongside men and women drinking water and Coke, relaxing in the shade. Their body armour, helmets and M16s were piled on the ground at their feet.

‘Where we going?’ The fact that Frankenmeyer and the driver hadn’t bothered with their body armour and we were both in one vehicle had already given me the answer, but I thought I’d ask anyway.

He wiped the sweat from his shaved blond head with both hands. ‘Back gate, and that’s it – end of your ride.’

‘No chance of a lift back to the hotel?’

‘’Fraid not, man – you have to hail yourselves a taxicab!’ He liked the sound of that.

The driver gulped on a can of Minute Maid with such relish it made me feel thirsty. But there was no icebox in this wagon. There wasn’t even body armour on the doors, just sandbags on the floor.

We drove through the gate and turned right. The Tigris was to our left and the sandbagged sangar at the checkpoint was about two hundred metres ahead and on the river side of the road. Beyond that was the main drag, crossing the river via a big metal bridge.

The sangar looked like a square igloo built from hundreds of sandbags. As we approached I could see the rear entrance more clearly. Inside, three, maybe four soldiers were hurrying to put their belt-kit back on. They were supposed to keep it on at all times but that was a real pain in the arse. They probably just grabbed it whenever they saw a wagon coming; I’d done the same enough times.

Traffic boomed across the bridge. Trucks, cars, motorbikes stuck behind a military convoy, everyone hooting. They knew better than to try to overtake.

Awatchtower rose maybe fifty feet in the air just short of the sangar. It looked like something out of The Great Escape: four wooden pillars with crossed bracing and a little pillbox on top. Whoever was on stag up there wasn’t protected by sandbags, which seemed strange. They’d be a sitting target for any line-of-sight weapon, whether it was an AK or an RPG.

The Hummer kicked up the dust and rattled and groaned its way from pot-hole to pot-hole, so the first I knew of the attack were the dull thuds as three or four rounds slammed into the side of the cabin.

The radio crackled. ‘Contact, contact, contact!’