The One That Got Away - Junior edition

CHAPTER 15 Friends in High Places

The embassy was a disappointment. It turned out to be a boring office building, although there were a lot of guards dotted all over the place in ones and twos with weapons. As we pulled up, I grabbed my bag, thanked the driver and got out. It was a little before 1 a.m.

A young man was standing on the steps, waiting to meet me. He introduced himself as the second secretary, and I soon saw that he was a switched-on lad — tall, dark-haired, wearing glasses, in his early thirties, and quite smart looking. With him was the defence attaché — older, clearly an officer of sorts, fortyish, short, dark-haired as well.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Sergeant Ryan from 22 SAS.’

‘OK. Upstairs.’

I dragged myself up one flight and sat down in a room. What with the state of my hands, and blood oozing out of my stockinged feet, you might have thought the DA would give me an easy time. Not at all.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’m just going to ask you a few questions, to verify who you are — make sure you’re not a plant. What’s your parent unit? Who’s the commanding officer?’

I stared at the guy. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Don’t start. I’m from 22 SAS, and I’ve been on the run for eight days. Just get a message back to High Wycombe.’

That woke him up. He gave a kind of choke. ‘Look, cool it,’ the second secretary told him. The DA seemed to have no inkling of what had been going on behind the scenes in Iraq, but I got the impression that the second secretary had a pretty good idea.

‘There’s nobody else come out, then?’ I asked.

The DA stared at me. ‘No, you’re the first we’ve seen.’

‘Can you tell us what happened?’ the second secretary asked.

So I gave them a broad outline of the story: how the patrol had been deployed and had a contact, how we’d legged it through the desert, split up, lost Vince, moved on, had another contact, and so on.

The DA seemed amazed that anyone should have walked out into Syria. ‘Nobody told us you were anywhere near the border,’ he said. But then he let on that, a few days before, he’d had a visit from two British guys doing some sort of a recce. When I heard their names, I realized they were from the Regiment, and that they’d been making a security assessment. After I said I knew both of them, things began to make more sense to him. He warned me that the building was probably bugged, which meant the Syrians could be listening to every word we said. I just hoped they’d packed up for the night. Otherwise they’d immediately know that I’d been lying an hour or two earlier.

The DA wrote down some details of what I’d told him and brought in one of the communications clerks, a girl, who encoded a message and sent it off to the UK command centre at High Wycombe.

Once the message was sent, I reassembled my weapon and secured it, together with my ammunition, grenades, TACBE and night-sight, in the strong room. Then they told me that I could spend the rest of the night in the Meridien Hotel, just down the road. They felt that the hotel would be secure enough, but they told me to stay in my room and to order meals through room service. They said they’d put me on the British Airways flight to London the next day.

London! That wasn’t what I wanted at all. My only concern was to get back to Saudi and find out what had become of the rest of the patrol. But I realized that if I did fly in to London, I’d only have a very short time there — the Regiment would want me straight back in Saudi, for debriefing.

The embassy guys offered to get a taxi down to the hotel, but as it was only a couple of hundred metres away, I said I could walk. Yet when the DA set off at a normal pace, I couldn’t keep up with him. I padded slowly along the pavement, and anyone I passed looked down at my stockinged feet in some surprise. As we arrived at the hotel, the porters standing around in the lobby also glared at my feet.

‘We may have a bit of trouble here,’ the second secretary said, ‘as you haven’t got a passport. They don’t normally let anybody book in without identification. But I’ll see if I can square it away.’

Sure enough, the guy on the desk wasn’t amused. ‘No, no,’ he kept saying. ‘No passport, no room! He cannot book in.’

The second secretary began muttering about going back to the embassy and spending the night there. He said that to get a passport made out he’d have to contact the chargé d’affaires. A photo would have to be taken, and it couldn’t be done until next morning.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a telephone number from the police. The boss guy said if I had any trouble, I was to ring them.’

‘No, no,’ said the defence attaché hurriedly. ‘You can’t do that. Don’t ring them. Don’t involve them any more. In fact, we’ve got a cellar bedroom in the embassy, and you can sleep down there.’

‘No,’ said the second secretary. ‘The place is filthy. He can’t go in there.’

‘Nonsense!’ barked the DA. ‘He’s just roughed it for eight days. He’ll be all right.’ Then he added, ‘At a pinch, he can have my bed.’

We didn’t seem to be getting far, so the second secretary said, ‘Where’s that telephone number?’

He got on the phone to my friend in the secret police, and within five minutes two Mercedes screeched to a halt outside. A swarm of men ran in. It looked like a raid by the SS in a Second World War film; some of them were wearing long black leather trench coats.

With them was the interpreter. He came running up to me, grabbed me by the arm and moved me to one side. ‘Chris,’ he said quietly. ‘In two minutes, you’re going to sign the book. Sign with a name that you can remember, and give any address you can remember. Everything will be all right. If you get any more trouble, ring me again.’ He then had a word with the second secretary.

I turned round, and there were three blokes giving the hotel manager behind the desk a hard time. His eyes were going round in circles, and he was nodding like a robot.

‘I’ll see you later,’ said the interpreter, and then the secret police party walked out.

I went back up to the desk.

‘Yes, yes. Sign here, please. Anything I can do for you, sir?’

I gave my surname as Black, and made up some address near Newcastle. The man snapped his fingers for a porter, and two guys grabbed my bags. The diplomats said, ‘We’ll see you in the morning,’ and up I went.

By then it was after 2 a.m. and the past twenty-four hours had been the longest of my life. I’d really been looking forward to getting into that room. Once I close the door, I thought, I’ll be free of worry and danger for the first time in ten days. I’ll be able to lie down, chill out, and go to sleep.

But it didn’t work out like that. As soon as I was alone, I started worrying about the rest of the patrol. I’d hoped that some of the guys would have escaped into Syria ahead of me. Either that, or they would have been lifted out by chopper, back into Saudi; but now these possibilities seemed unlikely. If the five had been rescued, and three guys had still been missing, the Regiment would surely have alerted the Syrians to look out for us, and warned the Damascus embassy. I’d come up like a bad penny, but nobody else had. What had happened to the others? Were they dead, or hiding up somewhere? Were they still on the move? If they were, they must be in a bad way by now.

I was so wound up that I felt I was still on the run. I got out my notebook and began scribbling reminders about what I’d done. I’d brought the book with me in case I had to take down a radio message or compose one. Until then, I hadn’t made a single entry, for fear that I might be captured. But now I went back one day at a time, logging details to refresh my memory, and working out where I’d been at various times.

At last I got my head down. But still I was tossing and turning, my mind full of disturbing images — of my comrades wandering in the desert, or worse still being killed.

In the end, though, I fell asleep — only to be dragged back by the phone ringing just after 3 a.m. It was the defence attaché on the line, speaking in hushed whispers.

‘What happened to the Charlie Oscar Delta Echo Sierra?’ he breathed.

‘What?’

He repeated himself.

‘What are you on about?’

‘What happened to the codes?’

Suddenly I realized that he was trying to be covert, spelling out ‘codes’ like that. Also I realized that it must be High Wycombe who were asking for the information. Whenever we encrypt a message, we put it into code, then burn the cipher and smash the encryption device. In fact, Legs had carried our cipher equipment. He had burned the codes and smashed the device when we were first compromised.

‘One of the other lads had them,’ I said. ‘He burned them. I never had them at all.’

‘OK,’ he said, and rang off.

That was when I knew for sure that nobody else had come out.

In the morning I ordered breakfast from room service, and ate some fruit salad and a roll. I still didn’t want anything substantial, but I drank pints of fruit juice and tea. Compared with the day before, I felt quite good. Then the Brits came to collect me, and I hobbled back to the embassy, shuffling along the pavement in my stockinged feet, with my shoes under my arm.

By the time we arrived, the place was full of people. The chargé d’affaires had appeared, and there were two British girls on duty, one dealing with communications, the other a typist. I chatted to them for a while, then they put me up against a wall in my shirt and tie to take a black-and-white passport photograph with a Polaroid camera. ‘Better be careful,’ somebody said. ‘We’ve only got two frames left.’ But the first shot came out well, so they trimmed it, stuck it into a blank passport and stamped it. There I was, fixed up with a ten-year passport. The whole thing seemed so amateurish that I felt I was being given a Second World War escape kit.

During the morning some questions came back from High Wycombe. I mentioned that I’d walked through some installation which looked like a signals complex.

‘No,’ the second secretary said. ‘That’s not a signals complex. That’s the yellowcake processing facility at Al Qaim.’ He knew everything about the place — even the number of the Iraqi regiment guarding it. The latticework towers I’d seen on the high ground were for defence, not communication: the cables slung between them were in fact chains, to prevent attacks from low-flying aircraft.

‘What’s going on there?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know exactly. Some sort of nuclear processing.’

‘What? I drank some water coming out of that place, and it tasted terrible.’

‘Effluent,’ he said. ‘Nuclear effluent.’

I felt my insides go cold. Had I swallowed some radioactive waste and contaminated myself, maybe with fatal consequences?

Later we headed down to the airport to buy a ticket and get me on the flight to London. I got as far as the check-in desk, but there the guy stopped me because I didn’t have a stamped visa showing when I’d entered the country. I couldn’t argue with him, and I ended up back at the embassy. It looked like I’d have to stay in Syria for a couple of days.

I went off with the defence attaché to see about a visa. We visited a building which was full of tiny offices. We were passed from pillar to post. All in all we saw about twenty people. ‘Well,’ the final official said, ‘if you haven’t got an entry visa, you can’t leave.’

So we’d wasted the whole morning. I said to the DA, ‘Why not phone my friend in the police again?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘we can’t do that.’

So I waited till I was away from him, and asked the second secretary the same question. He put through a call, and very soon a message was on its way from the police to the visa building. When we next went down, I collected my exit visa without difficulty.

The next flight out was in two days’ time — but now things had changed. Instead of returning to the UK, I was told I’d be flying to Cyprus, where I’d be put onto a Hercules that was coming across from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. From Cyprus I was to fly to the Saudi capital, spend one night there, and then return to the squadron at Al Jouf. That suited me much better. All I wanted was to get back to the squadron, so that I could find out about the rest of the patrol, and brief any other guys who might be going in.

That evening, back in the hotel, I had a meal in my room and went to bed. But still I couldn’t relax: the missing guys were too much on my mind. It felt really bad to be sitting in Damascus, unable to contribute any information which might help with their recovery.

Back in the embassy next day, I was chatting to the two girls. One of them suggested I’d be more comfortable chilling out in her flat. As we sat there talking, I said, ‘D’you mind if I take off my shoes and socks, and have another look at my feet?’

By then the cuts had dried up a good bit, but they still weren’t a pretty sight, and when I stripped the dressings off, they were horrified. Until then, I don’t think either of the girls quite realized what I’d been through. They imagined I’d just been for a bit of a walk. Anyway, they were full of sympathy — and it was good just to sit there and let my feet breathe.

My fingers were nearly as bad as my feet. I still had no feeling in the tips, and when I squeezed my nails, pus kept oozing out. So I asked if she’d got a scrubbing brush, and went to the basin and scrubbed my fingers really hard. It was total agony, but I got the dirt out from under the nails, and all the pus, until blood was running freely. Then I rinsed my hands off. I hoped they would now begin to heal. Obviously I should have seen a doctor, but the embassy had no medic in residence, and a message from High Wycombe had told me not to make contact with anyone outside.

The embassy people did their best to entertain me. The DA’s assistant, a sergeant, took me out for a drive round the heights of Damascus and showed me some of the military installations. We chatted about my escape. ‘You’re going to get a medal for this,’ he said.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It was nothing special.’

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d done anything exceptional. I’d just been for rather a long walk. The job we’d been tasked to do had proved rather more difficult than expected — but I’d had to go through with it all the same.

When the time came to leave, my weapon and ammunition obviously had to stay behind, but I wanted to take the TACBE and the night-sight, because I knew that those things were in short supply back at the squadron. But the second secretary made me leave them, in case they aroused suspicion and got me pulled in for questioning at the airport.

When I went to board the Syrian Airlines aircraft I kept my bag with me, but as I reached the top of the steps, the steward said something aggressive to me in Arabic and threw it back down to the ground. As I went in through the door, I could only hope that someone would put it on board. On the plane, my seat was right at the back. As soon as we were airborne, with the no-smoking lights still on, everyone lit cigarettes. I’ve never been on an aircraft so full of smoke; you couldn’t see from one end of the cabin to the other.

I didn’t care about any of that. I was just relieved to be leaving Syria. Even in the hands of the embassy people, I’d never felt entirely safe. Damascus had a dangerous air about it, and memories of the mock-execution out in the desert kept me on edge.

It seemed crazy to be flying to Cyprus. The island lies more or less due west of Damascus, and it was east that I wanted to be heading. But the flight lasted less than a couple of hours, and soon we were coming in to land at Larnaca.

All the while I had only one thing on my mind: what was the score back in the squadron?