Deep Black Read online

  I tried the shower tap and got a trickle of cold water, so I jumped under it before it ran out. The 1970s radio set into the Formica bedhead was tuned to American Free Radio and pumped out country-and-western.

  The sun was going down when I emerged. I switched off the radio and turned on the steam-driven TV, which was tuned to a snowflaky version of CNN, but at least I had decent sound. The only other channel was showing a football game.

  Not wanting to be the object of tonight’s target practice, I turned out the lights before I went on to the balcony and looked out over the thousands of satellite dishes that sprouted like weeds from the rooftops.

  The rattle of automatic gunfire came from somewhere in the distance. A few more rounds of heavier automatic fire, probably 7.62 short from AKs, were met by a huge amount of fire from the Americans’ lighter 5.56 ammunition. Then a stream of heavier-calibre stuff was unleashed, probably .50 cals, and this time I saw tracer bouncing up into the last few minutes of dusk from the other side of the Tigris.

  It stopped as quickly as it had started, but the lull didn’t last long. Two Apache gunships thundered overhead, their shapes deep black against the evening sky. Somebody was going to wish they’d had an early night.

  They swooped over the river and, moments later, one of them opened up, strafing the riverbank. It felt strange to be spectating from the very place that most of the shock-and-awe footage had been shot, watching the same area taking hits all over again.

  Below me, preparations for the pool party continued as if no one had a care in the world about what was happening the other side of the rush fence. Either they felt immune to attack or wanted to believe they were. Plastic tables straight from the same B&Q as the garden shed were being dragged into the grass and round the still empty pool, and a couple of big oil-drum barbecues were on the go.

  Another brief contact rattled round the city somewhere, followed closely by an explosion. Nobody stopped doing what they were doing. Nothing mattered beyond the garden wall and our American protection. The Palestine was a little oasis, a bubble of safety.

  I looked around the sky. There was no tracer, and I couldn’t see any smoke. It was time for a brew.

  The lift bounced at every floor as it took me down to the lobby.

  From a mug the boys had found behind the counter, I took a heat-testing sip of Nescafé. There were just a couple of Iraqis left in here, maybe because all the eggs and cheese had been eaten. The Casio and guitar stuff was still in place but the player wasn’t to be seen. Shame: Johnny Cash’s dad had grown on me.

  I heard Jacob before I saw him, coming up the stairs saying goodbye to his BG. He saw someone to talk to and gave me a smile. ‘Hey, Nick, they glued you to that seat?’

  I stood up and we shook hands as he asked for three coffees at once – unless they had another mug?

  ‘How’s your half-day been, Jacob?’

  ‘Oh, just had to go check up on a few things. Kinda got to keep on top of them. Say, where’s your reporter fella? What’s his name? He treating himself to an early night?’

  I thought he was going to treat me to another of his winks. ‘Jerry. No, he’s gone to the mosque.’

  The waiter brought the first two coffees over and started to pour in the milk. Jacob lifted a hand. ‘No, fully leaded when the sun goes down.’ He turned to me. ‘Well, I’ve been talking to a few people for you. Ain’t heard nothing about no Bosnians. They kinda should have – it’s a mighty small town in some ways.’

  Jacob had an asbestos mouth. He’d already picked up his second cup as the waiter brought the third. ‘Anything else I can do for you, you just let me know, y’hear? Maybe I can make some connections for you.’

  I was starting to get an uncomfortable feeling about Jacob. He was being a bit too helpful. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t give a fuck about the Bosnians. We’re just throwing out a net and seeing what gets dragged in.’

  The third cup was about to be killed. ‘Tell you what, I’ll keep my eyes open. What room you in, just in case you decide to unglue yourself from here?’

  I told him and we shook hands. ‘Thanks, Jacob. Appreciate it. Have fun tomorrow with your son.’

  ‘Sure will. We’ll talk later.’

  I left him to it and walked down into the lobby to wait for Jerry. He might have bumped into his ayatollah in the mosque, but I wasn’t counting on it. Tonight I’d see who was about on the circuit. A Bosnian would certainly stick in their minds.

  34

  A huge amount of automatic gunfire kicked off close by. From where I was, near the main entrance, tracer seemed to bounce straight up into the sky. It wasn’t necessarily a contact. After all, it was Thursday night. I went out into the garden to see if anyone had arrived early. There was no music yet but a couple of guys were preparing the barbecue. They weren’t remotely interested in the firefights as they tipped charcoal from paper sacks into two sawn-off oil drums.

  I wandered over to the pool. I couldn’t see the bottom of it from where I was, but I could hear a chorus of grunts and the rhythmic slap of running feet. I went right up to the edge and looked in, just as another burst of tracer shot skywards. I saw a headful of sweaty, short, wiry ginger hair training in the semi-darkness. The last time I’d seen Danny Connor was in Northern Ireland in 1993 – in a gym, naturally.

  He pounded up and down the pool, totally focused on the job in hand. I watched him for several minutes, wondering whether to interrupt. He ran to one end, did twenty press-ups, spun round, ran to the other and did some sit-ups. I started to grin like an idiot. Connor’s motto had always been: ‘I train, therefore I am’. Well, after he got married it was. Before that it was ‘Training + lots of = women pulled’. He had to do a lot of training in those days to be in with a chance. His face was covered with acne scars; it looked like someone had been chewing it. His accent did him no favours either. He came from the bit of Glasgow where everyone sounds like Rab C. Nesbit on speed. Connor hadn’t been born, he’d done star jumps out of the womb. I worked with him on and off in the late eighties and early nineties. In all that time the sum total of any conversation from him was, ‘You done yours yet?’

  ‘Oi, Connor! You’re getting a bit of lard on!’

  He stopped running, but dropped to do some sit-ups as he looked up. I stood there and smiled, but he didn’t react. He sprinted to the other side and started to do some burpees.

  I shouted, ‘Connor, you knobber. It’s Nick!’

  ‘Yeah, I know, don’t wear the name out. You done yours yet?’

  I sat down on the edge of the pool, dangling my legs, as he thundered up and down.

  We were together in an OP once, overlooking a farm. PIRA had an arms cache in one of the barns. Our information was that in the next eight days an ASU [active-service unit] was coming to lift the weapons for a hit. There were four of us in the team, and we’d been lying there for five or six days. One man was always on stag, watching the target; another was always protecting the rear. Two would be resting or manning the radio.

  The success of these jobs depended on being honest with each other, not macho. If you were tired and you needed a rest, you just said so. Better that than bluff it and fall asleep on stag just as the ASU appeared. It was no bad thing to turn round and say, ‘Can someone take over for a bit, because I’m fucked?’

  We were in a dip in the ground in a forestry block, no protection apart from our Gore-Tex sniper suits and M16s. Connor was doing his two hours on stag, covering the target. I was lying behind him, weapon at the ready, but resting. I felt a boot make contact with my shoulder, and looked up to see him gesturing for me to come up alongside while he kept his eyes on the barn. I thought he’d seen something, but he hadn’t. ‘Take over for half an hour, will you?’

  No problems about that. I took the binos and moved into position behind the GPMG [general-purpose machine-gun]. Connor crawled backwards and I assumed he’d either got his head down or was taking a shit into a handful of clingfilm – we never left anyth
ing behind to show we’d been there – so when I heard his muffled grunts I didn’t even bother to glance behind me. Ten minutes later he was still going strong: the fucker was doing press-ups. He carried on like that a full half-hour, then slid up next to me, sweating but happy. ‘I had to get some in.’ He gulped in oxygen. ‘It’s been nearly a week.’

  Twenty minutes later, he climbed the ladder to ground level. His running vest and shorts were soaking wet. His body might have been a temple, but the rest of him wasn’t exactly a work of art. He couldn’t reverse the damage years of working in the Middle East had done to the pale skin that comes with ginger pubic hair. The skin around his eyes and mouth was more creased than the bartender’s shirt. Mrs Connor called them laughter lines, but nothing was that funny. Not to him anyway.

  I stretched out my hand. ‘All right?’

  He gave me the once-over. ‘You’re in shit state. You still getting it in?’

  ‘Nah, been busy, mate.’

  ‘Hey, my boy’s nineteen, at university now.’

  I was taken aback. Connor had gone off message. Maybe he thought I was a lost cause when it came to the god of training. ‘That old?’

  ‘Yep. I’m only getting it in twice a day.’ That hadn’t taken long, then. He was on a twenty-second loop. ‘I’d rather be swimming but the fuckers won’t fill the pool. They can, you know – I’ve heard other hotels have, but the fuckers here won’t fill it.’

  I was dying to tell him the al-Hamra had a full pool but I’d be here all night listening to him honk about it.

  ‘Who do you work for?’

  ‘CNN. It’s a good team. I’ve been with them since Christmas. We came up from Kuwait with the Marines. It was difficult getting the training in to begin with, but there’s no problem now. If the fucking pool was working I could get some decent stuff in.’

  ‘What’s it like here?’

  As if in answer, another burst of AK rattled around the streets somewhere beyond the safety of the garden.

  ‘Belfast times ten. The Yanks out here, I feel sorry for them. They haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re doing. They’re not trained for all this shit.’ He stood with his hands on his hips, panting away. ‘Even during the war, we’d be harbouring up for the night and they wouldn’t send out clearing patrols. Then they’d honk in the morning that they were getting hit. For fuck’s sake! I took two American patrols out myself, just to make sure we were secure.’

  There was a massive wave of AK gunfire just the other side of the wall. This time, everyone ducked. Then we heard the warbling of the women. It was OK. It was a wedding.

  35

  Connor thumbed towards the noise. ‘The Yanks still haven’t worked out Thursday nights yet. The wedding opens up, the Yanks think they’re firing at them, and they open up in return. The wedding guests get pissed off, they start firing back, and soon everybody’s got their heads down. I’ll tell you what, watch yourself here – nobody knows what the fuck’s going on.’

  Connor was still honking about the Americans, something he had always liked doing. I wondered if it was because they couldn’t understand his accent.

  ‘The Yanks reckon the militants are stringing cheese wire across the roads to chop their heads off as they scream through in their Hummers. But you know what? All that’s happening is the locals are running cable from the parts of the city that have power, and shoving them into their houses. Decapitation, my arse – they just want to get the fucking kettle on!’

  He roared with laughter as more tracer zipped across the horizon, followed a split second later by the rattle of gunfire. ‘There they go again. The party will start soon. Any cabbying after that will be the real gear.’

  ‘There’s a no-firing-till-after-the-confetti rule?’

  ‘Is there fuck. They don’t even know the twenty-minute rule. I had to tell them yesterday, while we were filming them.’

  One of the rules of urban guerrilla warfare is that if you’re static for more than twenty minutes, guerrillas will have time to react and get an attack going.

  Connor laughed. ‘I should be paid more, I’m training the US Army! Bet they’ve got a full-on gym.’

  The clatter of tracked vehicles came from not many streets away. Armoured troops were on the move. ‘I bumped into Rob Newman and Gary Mackie. Not together, but they’re in the city.’

  ‘Yeah, fucking Mackie, the bastard. He’s got a gym. All I’ve got is the bottom of this fucking thing. Still, at least I don’t get zapped in it.’

  That seemed to be the end of the conversation for Connor. He turned to walk away, closing one nostril with a finger and clearing the other on to the grass.

  ‘You heard about any Bosnians in the city?’

  ‘Aye, the fuckers haven’t lost any time bringing their tarts over. They got the whorehouses sorted out already. Those dirty fat NGO bastards will be spending their money soon enough.’

  ‘It’s a Bosnian ayatollah called Nuhanovic I’m thinking of.’

  ‘What the fuck does a Bosnian ayatollah want to come here for? They got enough of their own.’

  I shrugged. ‘Just what I thought. You going to the party later?’

  ‘What the fuck for?’

  Of course. He’d be going back to his hotel room to knock back a few pints of orange juice or whatever the new fad was, and get his head down.

  ‘See you, Connor. I’m staying here if you hear anything.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t forget to get some in. Sort yourself out, for fuck’s sake.’

  The night’s festivities were slowly getting under way. Some speakers were being rigged up in the garden area and the barbecue was blazing. I walked back into the lobby.

  It wasn’t just military contractors and security companies that made money after an army had done its stuff. The bars and whorehouses sprang up like mushrooms in shit. It was nothing new – even the Romans had camp followers – but the set-up for these girls would be very different. They weren’t self-employed prostitutes, here to make some fast cash for themselves and their families. It was an open secret in the Balkans that people-trafficking rings ran through Montenegro to Bosnia and Kosovo.

  The white girl the fixer had said he could get me was probably some poor kid who’d been kidnapped or duped, then smuggled in and forced to ‘repay her debt’ to her owners. It was just as easy to get these girls now as it had been during the war, when both sides had sold their female prisoners. Ads in the papers in places like Moldova or Romania spoke of well-paid waitressing and bar jobs in the Balkans. When the girls arrived at their new places of work, they were lifted. Their passports were taken off them, and the next thing they knew they’d been sold as sex slaves. It looked like the Bosnians were spreading their wings and going global instead of sticking to Europe.

  No sooner had I got to the bar than the main doors burst open. A crowd surged through, chanting and clapping, all the women doing their Red Indian yodel.

  Next in was the bride, done up to the nines in a big fluffy white gown. She was young and very beautiful. No wonder the groom beamed beside her, looking very smart in his shiny suit. The bridesmaids were in pink and looked like little princesses, tiaras and all sorts in their hair.

  They surged off to the right and down a corridor, probably heading for one of the conference rooms. The women were all in trouser suits or dresses, the men in suits or leather jackets. It could have been a wedding anywhere in Liverpool, except this lot were unarmed. They’d probably had to leave their AKs in the B&Q garden shed.

  Jerry came in at the end of the conga, clapping and smiling away with the best of them. ‘Great, huh?’ He grinned. ‘Life goes on.’

  We headed to the lift.

  ‘Any luck?’ I checked out his Baghdad market gear: polyester trousers and shiny plastic shoes. They went down a treat with the lime-green shirt. He looked like one of the wedding party. ‘At the mosque, I mean. I can see you had none at the clothes shop.’

  ‘Yeah, funny. I’m not too sure. But I tell you what –
he’s definitely here.’ He looked about him at the others in the lift. ‘Later.’

  We got to the sixth floor. For once we were on our own. ‘He’s here, Nick. No one said anything, but you know when they can’t quite look you in the eye. The fucker is here somewhere. I had to leave kinda quick – some of the guys weren’t too happy that someone was asking questions. Any questions. What about you?’

  ‘I talked with one of the military contractors and a couple of guys I know. Maybe I’ll find out at the party. You coming?’

  He looked me up and down. ‘Of course. Big question is, do you think the beer will be cold?’

  ‘Don’t care, I won’t be drinking it. Not on a job.’

  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.