Deep Black Read online

  The South African spotted their passenger and went to pick him up.

  Gaz gave me another big hug. ‘Listen, boy, really good to see you. There’s a coach that takes you into town. Follow them women, they’ll know.’ He nodded at the Iraqi quartet, then spotted someone behind me. ‘You with this dickhead?’

  Jerry couldn’t wait to answer in the affirmative. ‘Yeah. Hiya, I’m Jerry.’

  Gaz finally let go of me and shook Jerry’s hand. ‘What the fuck for?’ He pointed over at a group of guys in waistcoats, hunched over their MP5s. ‘You’d be better off with that bunch of tossers. At least they look as if they can do something.’ Then I got yet another bear-hug. ‘Only joking, boy.’

  Gaz’s mates had got PC Plod by their 4x4s and into body armour and were now getting their own on. Gary started to move towards his wagons. ‘That’s it, time to go. If I’m near the Palestine I’ll come on in. Can’t call, fucking phones ain’t working yet. See you later, yeah? Fucking brilliant.’ He looked over at Jerry, a huge smile under his aviator sunglasses. ‘Listen, mate, when he fucks up and you need a professional, give us a call.’

  ‘I’ll do that. You come across any Bosnians in the city?’

  ‘They’re fucking everywhere! Bosnians, Serbs, Kosovans, you name it. Course they’re here – it’s a war, innit?’

  He dragged his body armour out of his 4x4 and pulled it over his head, covering the big sweat marks on his T-shirt. He wouldn’t be dropping in to see me. His head would be full of something else in five minutes and by tonight he’d probably have forgotten we’d even met.

  Jerry smirked at me like the cat who’d got the cream. ‘Old friend from the advertising business?’

  ‘Yeah, sort of.’

  ‘Mother’s maiden name? Yeah, right. Nick Stone your real name?’

  ‘Yeah.’ And before he could follow up I pointed at the women who were still gobbing off nineteen to the dozen. ‘There’s a bus that takes us into town. All we’ve got to do is follow the Spice Girls.’

  27

  The twenty-seater minibus was run by Iran Airways, even though they didn’t have any flights into or out of Baghdad. Maybe it was a way of keeping the staff ticking over, and at twenty-five US dollars for a one-way trip of fifty Ks it was a nice little earner. There might be only one commercial flight a day, the one we’d just come in on, but there were plenty of NGO [non-governmental organization] people on the move.

  More of us piled in than there were places for us to sit. The four Iraqi women ended up sitting on their cases in the aisle as we rumbled past the sandbagged and gannet-wired security cordon that circled the airport. The vehicle wasn’t air-conditioned, and even with the windows open it was swelteringly hot. It was going to take us the rest of the day to unstick ourselves from the PVC seat covers.

  The approach roads into the city looked unscathed by the war, although the Americans were making up for it now. All the bushes and palm trees that lined the road were being cleared back thirty metres or so by local guys with axes and bulldozers so that there was no cover for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] or manned attacks.

  The roads were packed with a mixture of new Mercedes, 4x4s, minging old cars and trucks with the wings hanging off. The people inside them were mostly dressed in suits and chinos rather than the traditional dishdash. Quite a few women wore skirts short enough to show a fair amount of leg, and not many were fully veiled; most just had their hair covered. I’d seen more burkas driving through East London; not as many kebab shops, though.

  White goods were piled up outside electrical shops, alongside shiny mountain bikes and racks of clothes. New billboards advertised perfume and washing-powder, and there seemed to be plenty of food and computer games for sale on the stalls. I’d seen South American cities that looked far worse than this. Everything seemed pretty normal, if you ignored the seven or eight Blackhawks that thundered over the rooftops on their way back to the airport.

  Minutes later, there was no longer any doubt that this had been a country at war. Huge concrete blocks topped with razor wire channelled the traffic as we got nearer the Tigris. A convoy of high-back Hummers appeared. The roof gunners, all in helmets and Oakleys, nervously checked the buildings either side as they screamed past.

  Somebody once worked out that enough AK47 assault rifles had been produced to arm every sixtieth person in the world. As we worked our way through the streets it looked as if most of them were in Baghdad. Nearly every shop and building was guarded by an Iraqi in sandals with one hanging off his shoulder, the very same weapon he’d probably been cabbying at American Hummers a couple of months ago. Others also had them slung over their shoulders, their hands full of shopping or their kids.

  Some buildings bore strike and scorch marks, with half-burned curtains still hanging where window-frames had once been. Some were no more than heaps of concrete clinging to reinforced-steel skeletons. One whole shopping mall had been flattened, then there was a run of three or four buildings that had remained intact, then more piles of rubble. But for all that, the city wasn’t a wasteland: people were out and about, doing their thing, just as they had in Sarajevo, just as they do anywhere in the world when the shit hits the fan. These guys were just getting on with their lives as best they could. Customers from the teahouses and restaurants overflowed on to the street. News-stands were doing a roaring trade. I’d read there were nearly a hundred different papers in print now Saddam had gone.

  As we fought our way on to a roundabout I caught my first glimpse of the great man. There was a tiled mural of him in the centre that had been used for some serious target practice. The small parts of his smiling face that remained had been painted a bilious yellow.

  Drivers stopped at the roadside and kids filled up their tanks with black-market petrol from an assortment of plastic containers. It was Baghdad’s answer to the Formula One pit-stop. They smothered every car that came within reach, checking tyres and cleaning windscreens like they were going out of style.

  The minibus only had one stop, which was as near to the Iran Airways offices as the concrete and razor-wire barriers would permit. As we clambered out I could see our hotel, the Palestine, less than a hundred metres away. The driver got on to the roof and started throwing down cases. The four Iraqi women stopped gobbing off at each other long enough to give him some serious grief, and he gave back as good as he got.

  A couple of AK-carrying Iraqis sauntered over and stood around smoking as we got ourselves organized. Jerry was in the back, passing bags forward. He started laughing.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Looks like the Spice Girls don’t wanna be dropped here. They want the other side of town.’

  I picked up my daysack, and waited for Jerry to emerge with all his kit. We went through the barrier and started up the street parallel to the hotel, past the shuttered-up Iran Airways and Aeroflot offices.

  A line of huge generators chugged away on the pavement, leaking diesel and feeding power to a row of seedy hotels. The road was full of pot-holes and puddles, and hadn’t been cleared of litter since the days when Saddam still had a smile on his face.

  28

  The Palestine and the Sheraton were now part of a fortified complex at the end of a road sealed off by five-metre-high concrete sections. We’d just turned through a man-sized gap in the wire when we were spotted by a posse of little kids. They came running towards us, nothing on their feet, their arses hanging out of their trousers. They followed us silently, but we both knew better than to hand out cash in daylight. Help one, and about six hundred others will leap on top of you. If you’re going to do it, you only do it at night, and well out of sight of the others. They’d gang up on whoever got the cash and steal it.

  We followed the wall for about twenty metres until we joined the end of a queue of news crews, Iraqis, drivers and businessmen with their BG. Half a dozen different languages were being bounced backwards and forwards along the line. There was a makeshift guard post, in what looked like a B&Q gard
en shed. The checkpoint was manned by a family of Iraqis. Dad vetted the men, Mum the women, and a boy of about twelve was looking through the bags. They all had AKs. Sitting outside the shed on folding chairs were three US soldiers, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, sweating under their helmets and body armour, well-worn M16s across their laps. It looked as if they could all use a lesson from Gaz on community policing.

  Once Jerry had finished talking Arabic to the dad, we filed through the gap and turned left between two huge, newly installed concrete walls. Directly ahead was the rear door of an AFV [armoured fighting vehicle], its engine rattling. In front of it was a solid line of nylon containers the size of skips, each filled with sand. Its .50 cal was manned.

  We turned left again just short of it, down the road that separated the two hotels. This one was blocked by an M60 tank, also bunkered in behind nylon skips, with a cam net over the top to keep the crew out of the sun. It faced on to a huge roundabout, beyond which I could see the blue domes of a mosque.

  I recognized the area at once from news footage. In the middle of the roundabout was a large stone pedestal, all that remained of the giant statue of Saddam that had been toppled symbolically at the end of the war. The roof had given a grandstand view of the shock-and-awe bombing of the government buildings just the other side of the river. Every one of Saddam’s men had moved out of them long before, but it looked great on TV.

  I could see now why everyone had got such great pictures: they hadn’t even needed to move off their hotel balconies.

  The secure area between the hotels was teeming with news crews jumping in and out of 4x4s, sweating buckets after a day in helmets and body armour. The word ‘Press’ was stencilled just about everywhere there was space.

  The Palestine wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Moscow slum. It was sixteen storeys high, rectangular and very plain. A few single-storey sections, probably ballrooms and restaurants, jutted out from the base. Every room seemed to have a balcony, no matter whether you were looking out over the Tigris, the garden or the roundabout, each protected by an ugly concrete section that looked like the wings on one of Darth Vader’s imperial fighters.

  Satellite dishes the size of flying saucers were mounted on the roof, and smaller ones sprouted from almost every balcony. Cables were strung everywhere.

  A German news reporter in body armour was doing his piece to camera, with the tank, the mosque and the roundabout as a backdrop. A convoy of Hummers screamed round the roundabout, looking very warlike, machine-guns and M16s sticking out all over the shop. Jerry was wearing his bad-smell face. ‘Look at this bullshit. Give me Nuhanovic any day.’

  We followed the driveway up to the hotel and went in through a set of big glass doors, past the security, a couple of Iraqis with AKs. Not that they checked us. Maybe it was too hot for them.

  Thronging the lobby were the guys you’d find in any big hotel in any trouble spot: the fixers. Drink, drugs, guns, cigarettes, women, you name it, they’d get it for you. At a price, of course.

  The inside of the hotel was just as 1970s as the outside. The dark marble floors had seen a few years’ hard polishing. I’d heard that during the sanctions all these places stank of petrol. It was much cheaper than water, and used to clean the floors.

  US soldiers in uniform wandered in to buy cans of Coke. Others had their PT kit on, blue shorts and trainers and a grey T-shirt with the word ‘Army’, just in case we hadn’t guessed from the M16s slung over their shoulders.

  Overweight men in suits and khaki waistcoats had monopolized every available sofa, while their BG stood a discreet distance away. It looked as if it was pretty much business as usual in Baghdad. Soldiers, businessmen, BG, journalists: everyone was in on the act.

  A sign on the desk announced that rooms were ‘$60 US’ a night, no ifs, no buts. A deposit covering half your stay was required up front and always in cash. In this neck of the woods, it said more about you than American Express ever could.

  Jerry counted out a week’s worth of dollars in cash. I wanted to be on the first floor – a jumpable height if we needed to get out in a hurry – but everything was full. The closest to the ground we were going to get was the sixth.

  We took the lift. Our rooms were next to each other, and whoever had stayed in mine had left about ten minutes earlier and not told the housekeeper. The place reeked of cigarettes and sweat.

  There were two single beds. The veneer was lifting off every chipboard surface, and the carpet was scarred with cigarette burns. The walls had been sprayed with concrete and were now a lumpy, faded yellow. The tiny bathroom had a toilet, basin and shower. I tried turning on the tap. Nothing happened. Maybe later.

  I dumped my kit on the bed, which was covered with old, mustard-coloured, furry nylon blankets. No sheets, and a couple of saliva-stained foam pillows without cases. B-and-B owners in Margate and Blackpool would have been proud of this place, charging so much for so little.

  I went and pulled open the glass sliding door to the balcony and was mugged by the noise of the city. The Tigris lay in front of me, glittering in the mid-afternoon sun. Apart from the mosques and a few surviving government buildings, all I could see was miles of middle-class housing, little blocks of concrete fighting for space among the towers. Further out, on the edge of the city, was the Baghdad I knew.

  It suddenly felt like yesterday that Gaz, Rob and I had been mincing about on the north-eastern edge of the city during the ’91 war. It was a slum, a massive township of crumbling buildings, a world of poverty and shit. The Shia who lived there were forced to call it Saddam City. Finding the fibre-optic cables that ran beneath it on the way from Baghdad to the Scud teams in the Western desert had been a fucker, but it had had to be done. If they weren’t destroyed, the Scuds could still be fired into Israel. The Israelis would have joined the war, and the coalition’s alliance with the Arab states would have been over.

  I looked out into the heat haze beyond the city. It had been about this time of day that I would give my orders for the coming night’s fuckabout, and my four-man patrol would start preparing. We would stay in the sewer under a market square until last light, then slip out to do the night’s work. It was more or less the same each time, checking the power lines leaving the city, checking any communications towers still standing after the last twenty-four hours’ air attacks.

  When my patrol finally located the cables, it was almost an anticlimax. All they needed was one good tap with a two-pound ball hammer and that was it.

  Looking down, I could see that the garden area was surrounded by a low wall and some pretty serious rush fencing. A couple of guys were drinking coffee inside a cabana in what looked like a small oasis. The war seemed a million miles away. There was even somebody cutting the grass with a petrol mower.

  Then two Blackhawks came screaming across the river, so low I could have headbutted the pilots, but nobody took the blindest bit of notice.

  29

  One of the single-storey rooms jutting out from the ground floor seemed to have been taken over by CNN. All its windows had been sandbagged, and their logo hung from a small shed where the security guy was sitting. Just outside, on the grass, were a black leatherette sofa and chairs that would only get sat on once they were in the shade. The place was heaving with important-looking cables and antennae. Beyond it, a guy in shorts, T-shirt and trainers was sprinting along the bottom of an empty thirty-metre swimming-pool. Each time he got to one end he did a shedload of sit-ups, ran to the other, did some burpees, then back again for more press-ups. It was making me sweat just watching him.

  I needed to check out our escape route, since jumping six floors wasn’t an option. A green sign in the corridor directed me in Arabic and English to the fire escape.

  A push-bar door led to a bare concrete stairwell. There were no lights, just slits in the walls, so fuck knows what happened here at night. The stairwell was littered with cigarette butts and old newspaper photographs of Saddam smiling and pointing at something in the
distance. I’d always assumed it was a fucking great suitcase full of money. I wedged one of the papers between the door and the frame so it wouldn’t lock on me if I needed to come back up.

  Moving down the fire escape, I checked the doors on each floor. They were all locked from the inside. Even worse, on the flooded ground floor, the double exit doors that led out into the open were chained, padlocked and blocked by a mountain of rubbish. The only way out from the sixth was the lift.

  I went back up and knocked on Jerry’s door. He was busy sorting out the recharging equipment for the camera and phone. The Thuraya, about the size of a household mobile, was resting on the balcony ledge. He’d pulled the thick plastic antenna out from the side in an attempt to get a satellite fix.

  No cell networks were operating in Iraq now the Ba’ath Party’s had been obliterated. There was a system of sorts, but for the exclusive use of CPA officials. With a Thuraya it didn’t matter if you were in the middle of the Russian steppes or on top of Mount Everest: as long as it could shake hands with a satellite, you could talk to anyone, anywhere, with a mobile or a landline. Where anyone got the money to run them, I didn’t have a clue. You could buy a week in Greece for a few minutes on one of these things.

  I went out on to the balcony while Jerry untangled several lengths of wire, one of which connected the phone to the camera so he could transmit images down the line. Jerry’s plan was to download them to the Telegraph as soon as he got them, then wipe the memory card clean so there was no chance of anyone else getting their hands on them.

  The guy in shorts was still bouncing backwards and forwards in the pool. I picked up the Thuraya to see if it had a signal, but the five-bar indicator was blank. I carried it along the balcony a few steps, but still got nothing.