Bravo two zero (31 page)

    The five or six blokes who came into the room were strangers. I felt helpless, that little kid feeling you get when you know you're cornered by the rival gang. They towered above me in the shadows and flickers.

    When my hand was released from the wall it was well past the pins and needles stage. It was swollen and completely numb. Two blokes held me either side and lifted me up. Somebody handed me my boots, but my feet were too swollen to put them on. I carried them the way an old granny carries her handbag, clenched to my chest. I wanted to keep them; I didn't want to spend the rest of my days without any footwear.

    As they frog-marched me outside I played on the pain, moaning and groaning. I must have looked a right dickhead. The blokes did lots of mock "tut-tut tuts." One pulled a face of feigned concern and said,

    "We're really worried about you."

    The cold air hit me. It was a refreshing, bracing feeling, but I would have preferred to be back in Aunty's nice warm room. I started to shiver. It was a beautifully clear night. If we managed to get away, we'd be able to navigate westwards very easily.

    Nobody said where we were going. They dragged me along, and I had to take silly little steps because my feet weren't carrying me properly. We stopped by a Land Cruiser, and they shoved me into the back with my boots on my lap. They squeezed the ratchets of my handcuffs and tied a blindfold painfully tight.

    I tried to lean forward to rest my head on the seat in front to relieve the pressure on my hands, but a hand on my face pushed me back upright.

    The interior light shone through the blindfold. I could tell there were two in the front. The door slammed noisily and made me jump. I clenched my teeth, ready for a twat around the head.

    I was sitting on the right. There was the sound of shuffling to my left, then I heard: "All right, mate, all right, mate."

    Dinger was honking as he hit his head on the way in. This was really excellent news. I instantly felt happy, that wonderful feeling again of being in it together.

    He was positioned with his knees pressing against mine.

    "Can you help my hands?" I asked into the darkness.

    I got hit around the back of the head, but it was worth it. I'd let Dinger know that I was there, and I'd learn that there was a guard in the back with us and that these people meant business.

    The driver sounded like an officer. "You, no talking. Talking-boom boom!"

    Fair one.

    Every movement brought a retaliatory prod from the guard, but I couldn't avoid taking deep, sighing breaths because my hands were so painful.

    The vehicle stank of the usual cigarettes and cheap cologne. I ran through an appreciation. This transit probably signified the end of the tactical phase. We were getting moved further down the chain. I had no idea whether it was going to get better or worse. The optimistic side was saying: Right, I'll just go to prison now. The professional side was saying: Let's wait and see. You don't know what's going on.

    I tried to concentrate on keeping my orientation. We came out of the gate and turned left. That meant we were heading east, not west, so we weren't going in the direction of Syria. As if we would. He was driving like an idiot. Normally you'd consider it very handy to have a crash, but at the speed he was going we would all die in the wreckage.

    I once saw a film of Houdini clasping his hands behind his back and stepping through them to bring them round to his front. I wondered if I would be able to do it with the injuries. Then I thought: You dickhead, you've never done it in your life anyway, what are you on about? But I would have turned myself into an elastic band if it had meant getting away. All I needed was an opportunity.

    I felt incredibly tired because of the heater and the heavy cigarette smoke, but the pain in my hands kept me awake. As if to make sure we stayed awake, they put on a cassette of Arabic music. It was so loud that at first I didn't hear the bombs falling.

9

    They must have been thousand-pounders. We heard several explosions; the area was getting severely hammered. The pressure waves hit us and the car rattled. The guards cursed. The vehicle stopped. I heard all the typical noises of disaster-the screeching of brakes, screams of pain and loss, shouts of panic and anger, a distressed woman crying, a child whimpering, metal scraping on stone. The driver and guards jumped out and cold air rushed over us. This could be our moment. The blokes had gone, the doors were open, but I could hear talking. I couldn't see what was going on. It was unbelievably frustrating. I had to piece things together purely by sound. Was the road bombed? Was it an obstruction? Had he stopped to help somebody? And more to the point, were they now going to come around and fill us in, purely because we were white eyes and they'd just been bombed? The thoughts raced through my mind, but before I even had time to speak to Dinger, the Iraqis got back in and we started moving again.

    We drove for about an hour and a half. My sense of direction had gone to rat shit as soon as we'd come out of the camp and turned left, and I didn't have a clue where we might be. I was pissed off with myself again.

    When we finally stopped, we could have been in Timbuktu for all I knew.

    They dragged us out of the vehicle, and I was put back into what I sensed was the same room as before. I had the feeling the guards were still in bed. Somebody pushed me to the floor and handcuffed me to what I assumed was part of a bed. It was actually quite comfortable. I wasn't crunched up in the back of a vehicle, my knees weren't up around my ears, and my arm wasn't chained high up in the air. I sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to sort myself out, trying to tune in.

    I sensed that I was facing the wall. I tried putting my head right back so I could see past the bridge of my nose. I couldn't see anything except a bit of the glow from the paraffin heater.

    I sat there for an hour, the scenarios rushing around my head. We had definitely been going through a built-up center of population when the bombs fell. Was it Baghdad? Why take us to Baghdad? So that people could see us? To be part of a human shield? Would the Allies bomb a position where prisoners were? Damned right they would. Schwarzkopf would hardly stop the war effort because Dinger and Andy were held in a radar center. Who were we going to get handed over to? Would we make a video? I wouldn't mind. I wanted people to know that I was still alive.

    I could hear two sources of slow, regular breathing. To test if they were asleep I leaned forward and rested my head on the bed. Nothing happened. I slid over onto my right side and got my head down on the carpet. Still nothing. I put pressure on the blindfold against the carpet and managed to slide it down a little. I was indeed back in the same room.

    I tried to work out what had happened to the others. Were we the only two survivors? Would they say if people had got across the border? I didn't come up with any answers, but it was good mental exercise. I might have to be doing a lot of that. I was already pacing myself for a long capture. It would obviously be nice to get released as soon as the war was over, but I couldn't really see it at this stage. There would most likely be a hostage period to come after this, lasting perhaps a couple of years.

    I thought back to the American POW. He had endured years in solitary, and everybody back home assumed he was dead. It was only because an exchange took place that the truth came out. There was a US sailor that the Viet Cong had taken for a bit of a bonehead and used for menial tasks like mopping up. He was released because he was just an able seaman of no consequence who had fallen overboard-the classic gray man.

    In fact this character had taken it upon himself to remember the names, ranks, and numbers of over 200 prisoners. When he came back he reeled them all off. Our POW was among the names. It was a traumatic discovery for his family. I was trying to relate my experience to his, and there was no comparison. A year or so was bugger all. I'd only start worrying after two.

    My hands were agony. I tried to work them out of the cuffs, but it was futile. They were far too swollen. I considered waking the guards up and asking to be released for a while, but they wouldn't have the keys -and they certainly wouldn't bother going and getting them.

    My thoughts turned to Jilly. I wondered what she was doing.

    Two hours later the boys came back with their Tiny lamps. Just as before, they undid my handcuffs and picked me up and dragged me back into the cold. It was a nice feeling on the body; I kidded myself I was about to start a long country walk or ski a good mountain.

    Nobody talked. I hoped and prayed that Dinger was coming too, but I couldn't hear him. I was put in the same position at the back on the right-hand side, behind the seats, legs up around my head. This time I took the precaution of arching my back to make space for my sore hands, so that I wouldn't have to make the movement later on and earn myself a whack on the head.

    "No talk or shoot," the driver said.

    "Okay."

    "Yeah, okay mate," said Dinger from beside me.

    I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was as relieved to hear me as I was to hear him. But the relief was short-lived. Just as we were setting off, somebody leaned into the vehicle and said: "I hope that Allah is with you."

    I didn't know if it was said to spark me up, but if it was, it succeeded.

    We got the same bad driver as before and were soon being flung around all over the place. There was no music this time, just small talk between the blokes in the front. Occasionally a window would go down as one of them snot ted up a grolly and gob bed it, or shouted a greeting at somebody in the darkness. We stopped on one occasion while the driver had a long conversation with somebody in the street. I got the impression he was showing us off. I heard giggles from two or three people outside the car, then hands came in and tugged our mustaches and slapped our faces. I clenched up. It pissed me off more than the kickings. That had been tactical questioning, and I could understand the reasons behind it. But these dickheads were having fun at my expense, pure and simple.

    We drove on in silence. We were going further and further from the border, but I was just about past caring. I was too worried about my hands. They were swollen to nearly twice their normal size, and I had no sensation left in the fingers. I could feel nothing beyond the wrists, where the handcuffs had dug in so deeply that I was bleeding.

    The pain was becoming unbearable. I feared that at this rate I was going to lose the use of my hands for ever.

    I tried to think of the positives. At least I wasn't dead. It was now about twelve hours since my capture, and I was still alive.

    I started to think about the patrol as a whole. What would the Iraqis know about us? I had to assume that they'd link us with the contact at the MSR. They would know how many of us there were, because they would have found eight berg ens They would have found the LUP as well, with the cache of water and food.

    What would give us away in the berg ens Because of SOPs, I knew there wouldn't be any written details of codes or our tasking. What about the equipment? How would we get around the explosives, timing devices, and detonators? I'd say they were area protection devices-they would have found the claymores, which would add weight to my story. Perhaps they wouldn't even know what the timing devices were. And maybe the jundies would have been so busy looting the berg ens that all that kit would have disappeared anyway. I almost giggled when I imagined them rifling through the berg ens in darkness and sticking a finger straight through one of the plastic bags of shit.

    One thing I could be sure of was that nothing remained that was compromising to the task. We always refold our maps so that they aren't on the part we've been using, and we never put markings on them.

    Everything was in our heads.

    I was feeling confident-at this stage about the lack of knowledge they'd have on our equipment. If they knew more than I expected, we'd just have to waffle our way through and make excuses. The only problem really was that we didn't exactly look like your aver age search and rescue team. But by this stage we didn't exactly look like anything anyway, apart from total and utter bags of shit.

    The vehicle stopped, and by the sound of things there was a reception committee waiting. I'd started to feel secure in the car: I'd got adapted to it, and now we were starting all over again.

    They were talking in a low mumble, perhaps because it was the early hours of the morning. As the back doors opened there was a rush of cold air. We were pulled out and marched across a courtyard at quick pace.

    The cobblestones were agony. The cuts reopened, and my feet were soon slippery with blood. I stumbled and started to fall, but they grabbed me and kept on going. We went up a step, turned right along a veranda, and came to a door. I stubbed my foot on the doorframe and cried out.

    There was no reaction from them at all. They were very professional. It was all well rehearsed.

    We went straight in. There was the usual smell of paraffin and the hissing sound of Tiny lamps, and I almost felt at home. They shoved me onto the floor and arranged me so that I was sitting cross legged with my head down and my hands behind my back. I let them do whatever they wanted. It was pointless resisting. I clenched up, fully expecting something to happen. They ripped my blindfold off. The cloth had scabbed to some pressure sores on my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose. I flinched with pain and felt warm blood dribble down my face.

    The pain was forgotten the instant I saw Dinger. I hadn't heard him get out of the car, and I'd had the horrible feeling I was on my own again.

    They yanked his blindfold off as well, and we got some eye-to-eye.

    Dinger gave me a little wink. I'd been avoiding eye contact with my interrogators since I'd been captured.

    It was fantastic to have human contact again. Just a little wink was enough.

    We were in a semidark room that had a medieval feel to it. The walls were bare stone and glistened with damp. It was cold and smelt musty.

    The windows were bricked up. The concrete floor was pitted and uneven.

    I raised my head a little, trying to stretch my neck, and a guard I hadn't noticed behind me pushed me back down. I saw that his uniform was olive drab, not the commando DPM we'd become accustomed to.

    I had managed to see that facing us was a six-foot folding table and a couple of foldaway chairs. Everything looked temporary. The Iraqis drink their coffee and sweet, black tea out of small, fruit juice-size glasses. There were two or three of them on the table, half-full of drinks that must have been old because they weren't steaming. Two ashtrays were heaped with stubs. Bits of paper were littered around.

    They'd put their weapons on the table as well.

    There was activity by the door, and I lifted my eyes. Two characters came in. One was dressed in a green flying suit with a civilian leather jacket over the top and Chelsea boots with big heels and elasticated sides. He looked like the oldest swinger in town. I looked at the shape of him and had to try hard not to laugh. He was tall, but with a massive pot belly that was straining against the flying suit. He obviously thought he still had a 30-inch waist, the dickhead. He had all this Gucci kit on, and it was obvious he saw himself as a really smart, tasty geezer, but in fact he looked like a bag of bollocks.

    The other character was much shorter and smaller framed. He was a skinny; sunken-cheek type, wearing a terrible suit that he must have been issued with and hoped one day he might grow in to.

    Guards brought in our belt kit and weapons and dumped them on the table.

    What did I have in my belt kit that would give me away? Were they going to bring in the berg ens as well?

    Mister Tasty handed a large brown envelope to the skinny runt. The back was covered with rubber stamps of nine-pointed stars, and there was Arabic writing on the front. This was a definite han dover-either commandos to military intelligence, or military intelligence to civilian police. Whichever, we were going further down the chain, and it was going to be more difficult than ever to escape.

    Nobody spoke to us. All this was going on as if we weren't in the room.

    There seemed to be no reference to us, no looks or nods in our direction. We stretched our legs out with cramp, and they came and pushed them back up. I looked at their wrists when they bent down to see if I could find out the time. It was irrelevant, but I wanted some sort of grip on reality. But nobody was wearing a watch, which was ominously professional. And yet they let us witness the han dover which seemed strange.

    The Top Gun geezer in the flying suit left the room, and soon afterwards I heard transport moving off.

    So this was it-we were with our new hosts.

    I started to worry. Soldiers don't wear suits. Who was this guy? With soldiers you know where you stand, and you can understand what's going on. Now we were getting handed over to somebody in civvies. I'd heard all the horror stories from the Iran-Iraq war. I knew all about electrodes and meat hooks in the ceiling. These boys had been doing this professionally for years; they'd got it well squared away. We were not a novelty: we were ten years down the line; we were just another couple of punters. I was filled with dread. But there was nothing I could do about it; I had to accept the landing. The only hope was that they wouldn't want to damage us too much; they'd want to keep us looking nice for a video. Perhaps they would be less physical than the last bunch-but I doubted it.