Hard Rain

Thirty-eight

I zipped the flight jacket up tight under my neck as the MH-60 Pave Hawk climbed into the haze. ‘What’s that?’ I said into the mike, gesturing at the huge, obviously ancient ruin sliding by below.

‘That’s Ur,’ replied the flight engineer.

‘Err… as in you don’t know?’

‘No, Ur, as in the ancient ziggurat of Ur, temple to the moon goddess, Nanna. That there’s the world’s oldest ziggurat, Special Agent. Over four-and-a-half thousand years old — older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Back when it was built, it was sited near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, on the Persian Gulf. If the experts are right and all those ice shelves melt, maybe that’s where it will end up again — on the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Ha ha. Ironic, right? If you’re interested, I do a little tour guiding there in my spare time.’

‘Really,’ I said.

Masters made a sound that implied we might just take him up on it. I doubted it. Our schedule was tight. And even if it was loose, I doubted it.

‘It’s within Tallil’s secure perimeter,’ the flight engineer continued. ‘Can’t miss it — the only thing you can see rising above the plain. Perhaps when you people are done, you can look me up at the squadron.’

Any moment the guy was going to hand us his business card. ‘What’s with the haze?’ I enquired, heading him off, a band of grey tinged with orange sitting on the horizon off to the north-west.

‘That’s a sandstorm we got coming in around two hours from now. If Kumayt was any further out, we wouldn’t be going. Engines and sand don’t happen to agree with one another, and these things have been known to crash. But we’ll get this baby out and back before it hits.’

My sphincter did the sphincter equivalent of nervously licking its dry lips. I’d only just gotten over a fear of flying, something I’d picked up on a tour of duty in Afghanistan — having two helo crashes back-to-back in one morning will do that. The Pave Hawk banked hard left, the rotors thudding as they chopped into the dry air, my arms and head heavy with the gs. ‘How’ll we get back?’ I enquired.

‘Wait out the storm and then we’ll come get you. Pretty much all you can do.’

‘How long will it last?’

‘The weather boys say it won’t be a bad one. A day and a half, max.’

I sat back against the bulkhead, the webbing on the body armour rubbing up against that problem rib, and watched Iraq slip past the Pave Hawk’s open side. Down on the ground, temps were sitting on 30 degrees Fahrenheit, the sand frosted white here and there by the last of the moisture that the cold had wrung from the air. It’d been snowing here just two weeks ago. In six months, it’d be hot enough to melt lead. What a place.

The chopper settled into the flare, nose high and tail low, all 24,000 pounds of it shuddering from wind buffeting and the various rotating masses working hard to counter-balance each other.

Masters’ voice bellowed in my headphones. ‘That must be the welcoming party.’

I scoped the LZ out the door on her side and saw a platoon-sized detachment of Brits — specifically, the Queen’s Dragoon Guards — a Mastiff troop carrier and several Land Rovers equipped with mounted and manned machine guns, parked upwind. Members of the platoon had set a defensive cordon around the detachment. I took a guess that the guy leaning against the windsock with a hand shielding his eyes was a Lieutenant Hamish Christie. I’d talked to the lieutenant already, back when we arrived at Tallil. He’d drawn the short straw and been assigned as our liaison. Apparently, the Brit military police, our usual sitters, were all down in Basra cracking heads. A riot had erupted there because some local politician had got himself whacked. The whole province of Maysan was on alert, which, Christie informed me, had been the general state of play here ever since the Ottoman Empire failed to come to grips with this place. The lieutenant turned his shoulder into the clouds of dust spun up by the MH-60’s rotors.

The flight engineer collected our headsets, food trays and blankets once the chopper had settled onto its wheels. The pilot leaned over behind the bulkhead, gave us the hurry-up signal, followed by a salute. I figured the aircrew wanted to be nicely hunkered down back at Tallil with a Dr Pepper by the time the sandstorm hit. Masters and I obliged, grabbing our stuff, hopping out, and running clear of the rotors. The Pave Hawk was airborne before we’d reached the windsock. The flight engineer threw us a wave out the side.

‘Welcome to Fantasy Island,’ Christie exclaimed, over the receding noise of the helo’s turbines, with an accent I’d pegged as Scottish.

We checked the names on each other’s shirts and then shook hands.

‘Just to get the protocol right, what do I call you?’ he asked. ‘“Sir” and “ma’am”? “Provoh marshals”? I’m at a bit of a loss…’

‘I get called plenty of things, so whatever you like,’ I replied, having already broken the ice with Christie over the phone. ‘But “Vin” and “Anna” will do, unless you want to go formal, in which case I’m Your Royal Highness and this is Special Agent Masters.’

‘I’ll keep it casual, then, eh? So where do you want to start?’ he said, heading towards a dusty, desert-camo-pattern Land Rover.

‘What about the storm?’ Masters enquired.

‘I understand we’ve got around forty-five minutes till it hits. But I wouldn’t let a little skin-flaying dirt and gravel divert you from your purpose — keeps the snipers indoors. You’re here to look at the new desal plant, right?’

Masters nodded.

‘Then let’s start there, shall we?’

‘Say hello, lads,’ he said to his men as we piled into the Land Rover.

The lads mumbled a greeting.

‘This is Special Agent Cooper and Special Agent Masters. They’re cops, so I hope you’ve all got your parking fines paid up.’

The driver did a U-turn.

‘What do you know about this part of the world?’ Christie asked us.

‘That there are lots of ways to get killed,’ said Masters, beating me to it.

‘You don’t say. Well, Iran is around thirty miles over the horizon that way,’ he said, pointing directly ahead through the windshield. ‘So while this place might be within Iraq’s national borders, its allegiances lie with the Ayatollah. Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army is top of Ali Baba’s tree around here. Those Shiite asshats run this rat hole and push everyone around — with the exception of Her Majesty’s British Army, of course. Lately, another group called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has been trying to muscle in on the action, but so far they haven’t become serious contenders, though it has raised the body count amongst the locals somewhat. The polly who just got a handful of hot lead inserted in his person is a case in point.

‘The Mahdi Army recruits from the poor and the pissed off, so it has a pool the size of a small ocean to draw from in this place. If you have a different political point of view, whether religious or secular, you’ll end up with a bullet-riddled car, and usually while you’re in it.’

‘What about the plant?’ Masters asked.

‘Kawthar al Deen, which means, “Sweet water is the way”, or, “Sweet water of life” — take your pick. We’ve been up here for the last month, tasked to protect the final construction phase. A crafty Egyptian gent by the name of Moses Abdul Tawal fronts the project. He flies in occasionally to kick a few arses for the fun of it. Has his own full-time private security force on-site, made up of mercenaries. And these lads are at least as crazy as any lunatic on the other side of the fence. Fortunately for Tawal, his lunatics are fiercely loyal to his chequebook.’

‘We going to pass through town?’ Masters enquired, establishing the geography.

‘Through Kumayt? No, that’s behind us on the other side of the Tigris. The plant is twenty-three miles north-east of it. We just follow the pipeline.’

‘Twenty-three miles. That would put it within spitting distance of Iran.’

‘It would,’ said Christie, ‘if you could spit ten miles.’

The scrub of the airport gave way to low marshland, something I hadn’t seen a lot of in Iraq. ‘What’s the water like here?’ I asked.

‘Fucking awful, mate. Best you stick to the bitter on tap back at barracks. Failing that, take your own supply. That’s why there’s a desalination plant here. The ground water had a high salt content and traces of DU were found in the surface water. There’s supposed to be a burial ground of contaminated Gulf War I scrap out here somewhere.’

‘We heard. Does anyone know where that burial ground might be?’ Masters asked.

‘No, though I’m sure someone in one of your government departments would have the coordinates tucked away somewhere.’

‘You wouldn’t happen to know why the water was tested in the first place?’

‘When you’re in Kumayt next, call in to the hospital and visit the children’s ward.’

‘What’ll we find there?’

‘Birth defects, many times the national average.’

The marshland came to an abrupt end, becoming the Iraq I was more familiar with — a flat and empty moonscape of powder fine enough to blush a woman’s cheeks. The convoy zigzagged through a half-dozen dry river beds called wadis, eventually hooking up with a broad, smooth strip of two-lane asphalt tracking a fat pipeline that disappeared into the haze. I didn’t see another living thing the entire journey, not even a goat. We followed the road for twenty minutes, the elevation climbing steadily, plenty of signage along the way keeping us informed of the miles remaining to the plant.

‘You ever meet a Colonel Emmet Portman?’ I asked Christie.

‘Colonel Portman? Ay, he didn’t invite me over for tea or anything, but I met him a couple of times. Seemed like a good man. Friend of yours?’

‘He was murdered,’ said Masters.

‘Oh, sorry to hear that. Is that why you’re here? On the trail, as it were?’

‘As it were,’ I confirmed.

‘And here I was, thinking perhaps it was the weather that brought you here. For what it’s worth… and don’t take this the wrong way — rumour had it Portman and Tawal hated each other’s guts.’

‘Do you know why?’ Masters asked.

‘No — the rumour didn’t come packed with a lot of detail. Take the turn-off, boyo,’ Christie instructed the driver. There was no turn-off that I could make out, just a bunch of divergent tyre tracks in the mushroom-coloured dust. ‘I’ll take you to where you can get an overview of the project. Might as well do that before we drive you up to the front door. You seen a desalination plant before?’

Masters and I shook our heads. No.

‘You’re in for a surprise then. Our base is up this way, too.’

Several corners later, the trail swept past the aforementioned base, barricaded with barbed wire, sandbagged machine-gun posts and sentries. We motored by in a swirling cloud of choking grit that drifted towards the Brit guards, one of whom gave us a merry wave.

Not five minute’s drive past Club Dragoon, the convoy pulled to a stop on a low hill. Spread out below was a vast facility.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Masters as we left the vehicles.

Countless shiny new stainless-steel pipes were laid out on the desert below like the sand had been sucked away to reveal the skeleton beneath. Here and there, clusters of vertical stacks rose into the air. There were huge water storage tanks, covered cooling ponds, an enormous power station to provide the facility with electricity, a 10,000 foot newly surfaced runway, hangars, garages and several groupings of buildings that looked like office blocks. Surrounding the facility was a trench deep enough to swallow tanks. Inside it, there was a double perimeter of gleaming razor wire that reminded me of an exercise yard in a correctional facility. Concrete bunkers that I guessed contained machine-gun emplacements dotted the perimeter every 300 yards or so. ‘You’d think they were expecting trouble,’ I remarked.

The roar of jets at high altitude echoed around us. I squinted at the sky a long way ahead of the sound and saw two tiny flecks of silver racing north, parallel to the Iranian border.

Christie rested the butt of his SA80 assault rifle on his hip. ‘Ay, like I said, Iran is barely ten miles across the plain. On a clear day you can see Khuzestan, the Iranian province Saddam annexed during the Iraq — Iran war. I’ve heard they’re pretty jumpy over there. And while I think about it, best not to venture off the road. The surrounding area has been mined.’

Masters peered through a pair of binoculars. ‘Who owns the white Eurocopter? That’s a lot of money parked down there on the helipad.’

‘If it’s white, it’s Tawal’s,’ Christie replied. ‘You’re in luck. He must be in.’

‘He is,’ she said, passing me the glasses. ‘Take a look.’

She indicated that I should aim at a particular building. I refocused until a tall man in a long white robe sharpened in the lenses. Tawal — we’d seen pictures of him on the net. He was beating two other men to the ground with a clipboard. The guys taking the lumps were cowering, protecting their heads with their arms.

‘And don’t you ever ask me for a raise again…’ Masters said, taking a camera with a long lens out of her bag and snapping off a bunch of shots.

I kept watching. The guys put up no resistance whatsoever. When Tawal had finished dishing out the punishment, he spat on the two men sprawled on the ground.

‘I’ve seen Tawal do worse,’ said Christie, peering through his own pair of glasses. ‘The place is a couple of months behind schedule. He’s on edge.’

I moved the binoculars over the facility while Masters took photos. There were plenty of armed stooges wandering around, looking bored. I noted one of them also had a set of binoculars. And the guy was looking straight back at us. ‘Let’s go introduce ourselves,’ I said.

A grey veil was suddenly drawn across the sun. The light intensity went from mid morning to late afternoon in a couple of seconds. The sandstorm moved across the sky and the ground. I saw the guy with the binoculars become enveloped in a swirling eddy of sand that forced him to bury his face in the crook of his arm, and then he disappeared. I felt a shift in the air around us, sucked out just like sea water retreats ahead of a tsunami. A heartbeat later, we were consumed by a howling, blinding wind that stung exposed skin and filled my mouth and nose with a choking dry clot of dust and grit.

I put on the eye goggles and tied some camouflage netting around my face. Masters, Christie and his men did likewise. Christie gave the ‘move out’ hand signal, the shriek of the wind and the intense sandblasting making further talk a waste of breath.