Bravo two zero (19 page)

    The road was half an hour's tab away. We got to the highish ground just on last light. Legs found a purpose-made ditch in the area to the right of the road, and we all piled in. We had a good view to the southeast because the road was long and straight for a number of miles and we were on high ground looking down. To the northwest, however, there was a small crest about 900 feet down the road. We wouldn't have much time in which to react if the vehicle came from that direction. Bob and I would try to stop it right opposite the ditch so the lads could just jump up and give them the good news.

    We sat there with the binos out, looking to the east. Two trucks moved along the road and then went off in the general direction of our last LUP. Because of the low light I couldn't see whether people were getting out, but there appeared to be general activity on both sides of the road. They were obviously looking for something, and I took it to be us. After a while the vehicles came back onto the road and started to move towards us.

    Fuck! Was this the follow-up from the night before? Either we were lucky that we had moved, or unlucky that we hadn't held the old boy and had let him go and bubble. But he had gone in totally the opposite direction to the one these troops were coming from. It didn't make sense.

    We watched the lights coming nearer, and then we could hear the engine grinding up the hill. We got our heads down, just hoping that the elevation of the trucks would not give any blokes in the back the chance to see down into the dip.

    We waited. As soon as we heard the trucks stop opposite us, we'd be up and firing. We had nothing to lose.

    They drove straight past. Big grins all round.

    Bob and I moved up onto the road and sat watching in both directions.

    After about twenty minutes, vehicle lights came over the small crest and drove towards us. Satisfied that it was not a troop truck, we stood up.

    The vehicle caught us in its headlights and slowed down to a halt about 10 feet down the road. I kept my head down to protect my eyes and to hide my face from the driver. Bob and I hobbled towards it.

    "Oh shit," I muttered into Bob's ear.

    Of all the vehicles in Iraq that could have come our way that night, the one we had chosen to hijack and speed us to our freedom was a 1950s New York yellow cab. I couldn't believe it. Chrome bumpers, whitewall tires, the lot.

    We were committed. Bob was in my arms giving it the wounded soldier.

    The blokes were straight up from the ditch.

    "What the fuck have we got here?" Mark shouted in disbelief. "This is the story of our lives, this is! Why can't it be a fucking Land Cruiser?"

    The driver panicked and stalled the engine. He and the two passengers in the back sat staring openmouthed at the muzzles of Minimis and 203s.

    The cab was an old rust bucket with typical Arab decoration-tassels and gaudy religious emblems dangling from every available point. A couple of old blankets were thrown over as seat covers. The driver was beside himself with hysteria. The two men on the backseat were a picture, both dressed in neatly pressed green militia fatigues and berets, with little weekend bags on their laps. As the younger of the two explained that they were father and son, we had a quick rummage through their effects to see if there was anything worth having.

    We had to move quickly because we couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be other vehicles coming over. We tried to shepherd them to the side of the road, but the father was on his knees. He thought he was going to get slotted.

    "Christian! Christian!" he screamed as he scrabbled in his pocket and pulled out a keyring with the Madonna dangling from it. "Muslim!" he said, pointing at the taxi driver and trying to drop him in it.

    Now the driver sank to his knees, bowing and praying. We had to prod him with rifle barrels to get him to move.

    "Cigarettes?" Dinger enquired.

    The son obliged with a couple of packs.

    The father got up and started kissing Mark, apparently thanking him for not killing him. The driver kept praying and hollering. It was a farce.

    "What's his problem?" I said.

    "This car is his occupation," the son said in good English. "He has to feed his children."

    Bob came storming over and said, "I've fucking had enough of this."

    Sticking the end of his bayonet up one of the driver's nostrils, he walked him over to the ditch.

    We left them all there. We had no time to tie them up; we just wanted to get going. We needed to put in some miles.

    "I'll drive," I said. "I saw Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver."

    It was an old column gearshift, and I couldn't work it. To the accompaniment of jeers and much slagging, I did a six-point turn to get us facing west, and off we lurched. Legs was in the front to do the compass bearings; the other three were crammed into the back. The way our luck had been going I fully expected the compass to pack in and the next sign we saw to be "Baghdad Welcomes Safe Drivers."

    We had no shorts (pistols); they were all longs, and it was going to be almost impossible to bear them if we were compromised. Nevertheless we were happy as Larry. This was make-or-break time. We'd either make it tonight or we'd be dead.

    It was unfortunate that we were committed to going on roads but we'd just have to make the most of it. We had just over half a tank of fuel, which was plenty for the distance we had to cover. We were going at quite a fuel-efficient pace anyway because we didn't want to look conspicuous or get involved in the slightest accident. We'd just drive as far as we could, dump the vehicle, and go over the border on foot.

    We tried to make up game plans for what we would do if we got caught in a VCP (Vehicle Checkpoint). We didn't know what we'd do. We couldn't try to barge through a checkpoint barrier on the road. That might happen in films but it's fantasy stuff; permanent VCPs are made to stop that sort of thing. The vehicle draws fire every time, and we'd end up as perforated as Tetley tea bags I'd probably just have to brake as fast as I could, and we'd pile out and do a runner.

    Unfortunately, we were reading air charts, not an AA road atlas. The roads were very confusing. Legs directed me to take junctions that went generally west, and I constantly checked the mileometer to see how far we'd gone.

    The first major location we came to was the pumping station area. There were military vehicles and blokes milling around, but no checkpoint.

    Nobody took a blind bit of notice of us as the cab chugged past.

    We had to look as though we knew where we were -going. If we looked lost it would arouse suspicion, and people might even come over and offer to help.

    We came to yet another set of junctions. There was nothing going west and the best we could do was to turn north. It was a normal two-way road instead of the single-track ones we had been moving on. It was busy with convoys of oil tankers. We pulled out to overtake, but military vehicles were coming the other way. Nobody else was doing it so we had to play the game to blend in. At least we were moving, and the heater was going full blast. It was blissfully warm.

    The convoy stopped.

    We couldn't see why. Traffic lights? A broken-down vehicle? A VCP?

    Legs jumped out and had a quick look but could see nothing in the darkness. We started inching forward. We stopped again and Legs got out.

    "Military vehicles at the front of the convoy," he muttered. "One of them has crashed or broken down."

    Squaddies were hanging around on foot and in Land Cruisers, and cars and trucks were maneuvering around them. We started to drive past, and I held my breath. One of the blokes directing the traffic spotted us and started to wave us on. Mark, Bob, and Dinger pretended to be asleep on the back seat; Legs and I grinned like idiots inside our shamags and waved back. As they disappeared in the rearview mirror, we laughed ourselves silly.

    We hit a built-up area. Statues of Saddam stood outside public buildings and pictures of him were plastered on every available space.

    We drove past cafe bars with people milling around outside. We passed civilian cars, armored cars, and APCs. Nobody turned a hair.

    Sometimes the roads and junctions funneled us in totally the wrong direction. We did a touch of north, then east, then south, then west, but ensured we were generally keeping west. Mark had the Magellan on his lap in the back and was making attempts to get a fix so that if the shit hit the fan, we would each have the information we needed to get us over the border.

    Dinger was smoking like a condemned man enjoying his last request. I was considering whether to join him. I'd never had a cigarette in my life, and I thought: By tonight I could be dead, so why not try one while I have the chance?

    "What's the score on these fags?" I asked Dinger.

    "Do you drag all the smoke down, or what do you do?"

    "You've had one before, have you?"

    "No, mate-never smoked in my life."

    "Well, you ain't going to start now, you wanker. You'll flake out and crash the car. Anyway, do you have any idea how many people die of lung cancer each year? I can't possibly expose you to that sort of risk.

    Tell you what, though-you can have a bit of passive."

    He blew a lungful of smoke in my direction. I hated it, as he knew I would. When we were on the Counter Terrorist team together, Dinger used to drive one of the Range Rovers. He knew I loathed cigarettes so he'd be at it all the time, keeping the windows wound up. I'd go berserk and open them all, and he'd be laughing his cock off. Then the windows would go up and he'd do it again. He had a tape called something like "Elvis-The First Twenty Years." He knew I hated it so he'd put it on at every opportunity. We were driving along the M4 one time, and I'd wound down the window because he was smoking. Dinger put the cassette on and grinned. I pressed Eject, grabbed the cassette, and chucked it out of the window. War was declared.

    I had my own tapes which I took with us on long drives, but the difference was that it was good music-Madness, usually, or The Jam. One night, many weeks later, I put one of them on and closed my eyes as I complained about his smoking and farting. Before I realized what he was doing, he ejected the tape and sent it the way of Elvis.

    I waved away the cloud of Iraqi cigarette smoke.

    "I hate it when you do that," I said. "Do you know, for every nine cigarettes you smoke, I'm smoking three of them?"

    "You shouldn't honk," he said. "It's cheap. You're not paying, I am."

    The road signs were in English as well as Arabic, and the blokes in the back had a map spread out on their laps, trying to work out where we were. Nothing actually registered. The built-up area stretched all along the Euphrates, and there were no place-names.

    All things considered, we were doing rather well. The mood was quietly confident but apprehensive. They must have found the people at the hijack site by now and would be on the lookout for the yellow cab.

    Compared with what we'd been through in the last few days, it was quite a funny time, and at least it was warm. The car fugged up, and our clothes started to dry.

    There were more convoys, consisting of about twenty vehicles at a time.

    We tagged on behind. There were civilian cars everywhere. There was no street lighting, which was rather good. We tried our best to hide our weapons, but there had to be a compromise between concealment and being able to get the weapons up to bear in the event of a drama.

    We rounded a corner on the open road and got into another slowly moving jam. Vehicles had come up behind us, and we were stuck. This time Legs couldn't get out or he'd be seen by the people behind. We'd just have to bluff it out.

    A soldier with his weapon slung over his shoulder was coming down the queue on the driver's side, the left-hand side as we were looking.

    People were talking to him from their cars and trucks. There were two more squad dies on the right-hand side. They were mooching along more slowly than their mate, weapons over their shoulders, smoking and chatting.

    We knew we were going to get compromised. The moment the jundie stuck his head inside and had a look at us, he'd see we were white eyes. There was no more than a 1 percent chance of us getting away with it.

    Big decision: What did we do now? Did we get out straightaway and go for it, or did we wait?

    "Wait," I said. "You never know."

    Very slowly we tried to get our weapons up to bear. If we had a drama, we would have to get out of the car. Every handle had a hand on it, ready for the off.

    Mark quietly said, "See you in Syria."

    We'd try to keep together as much as possible, but there was a strong chance we'd get split. It would be every man for himself.

    We waited and waited, watching these people slowly working their way down the line. They didn't look particularly switched on: they were just killing time. Mark tried to get a fix on the Magellan to find out how far we were from the border, but he ran out of time.

    "Let's just go south, and then west," I said.