understand the real world. They didn’t understand that sometimes war was the price you had to pay for peace.
He realised as he made his way back down the corridor towards the lift that the price for the morning’s events could well be his job. And all thanks to that stupid girl. The bald guy from the Grosvenor Group was clearly annoyed, and it was nothing to him that the chances of Chet finding another job like this were practically zero.
‘Happy fucking birthday,’ he muttered as he limped out of the room. It was time to go find himself a drink.
SIX
Somewhere near the Jordan-Iraq border.
A car drove through the dusk. A red Toyota, automatic transmission. Its chassis showed signs of wear — a large dent along the side, a broken brake light and rust patches all along the undercarriage. But despite being beaten up, it was lovingly decorated. A picture of Saddam Hussein, the disciple of Muhammad, was propped on the dashboard and surrounded by little fairy lights; multicoloured garlands were pinned along the top of the windscreen. Arabic pop music played softly on the radio.
The driver had a short beard. Normally his hair was brown, but he’d dyed it black and applied enough fake tan to darken his skin a few shades. He wore a traditional Arabic dishdash, which fitted loosely enough for his shoulder holster and ops waistcoat to be invisible. It was stained and crumpled, saturated with the previous wearer’s sweat and stinking on account of it. The driver had gone to great pains to make sure he looked like the lowest of the low. The poor were looked down upon where they were headed. They were anonymous. Invisible, almost. That could be a distinct advantage.
The figure in the passenger seat wore a burka: a plain, black outer garment and a long face veil with a small grille for the eyes. At this moment the passenger was staring ahead, along the straight, featureless road with desert on either side. Then he spoke, his voice several octaves lower than the average burka-wearer, and with a Derry accent. ‘If you think I’m wearing this shit once we get in-country.. ’
Luke Mercer winked at him. ‘Finn, relax. You look fucking gorgeous. We bump into any ragheads, you’ll be fighting them off with a shitty stick.’
‘Fuck you, Luke.’
‘Worst comes to the worst, you might have to. You know, for the sake of appearances and all…’
Finn muttered something under his burka that Luke didn’t quite catch. He suspected that it wasn’t entirely complimentary. Finn had been sulking ever since he’d lost the toss to decide who’d be Abdul and who’d be Aisha on their little sortie into enemy territory. Still, Finn was four years younger than Luke and definitely the junior party in their little unit. From what Luke knew about him he’d moved out of the Province to the outskirts of Farnham before he was a teenager and his only ambition in life had been to join the British Army. Nice enough fella, but a bit of a trigger-happy reputation. He was new to the Regiment, though — just six months in. It wouldn’t take long for him to settle down, but as far as Luke was concerned, the coin had landed the right way up.
They were driving along the main road leading east towards the border with Iraq, which by Luke’s estimation was about twenty klicks away. For a main thoroughfare it was pretty empty. Not surprising, really. Given the way the Yanks and the British were flexing their muscles, Iraq wasn’t exactly a top tourist destination at the moment.
‘They still got us?’ Finn changed the subject.
Luke looked in the rear-view mirror. The road might be empty, but one vehicle was staying close: a white pick-up, manned by four other members of their squadron.
‘Rear-echelon motherfuckers,’ Luke said.
Luke and Finn wouldn’t be risking the official border crossing. Too dangerous. The car and its occupants might look authentic to the casual observer; they might have forged entry documents; but it wouldn’t take much to find the gear stashed in the back: two Colt M4A1s — compact, efficient weapons with sight and torch fitted — a Minimi light machine gun, an anti-tank rocket and the chunky black boxes and red wires of their comms gear. There were NV goggles, two boxes of grenades — fragmentation and white phosphorus — and several small blocks of C4 explosive. All in all, not a cargo they really wanted to start explaining to Iraqi border officials.
They drove in silence for a couple of minutes, before approaching a side road that veered off in a southerly direction. Luke slowed down while Finn took a GPS unit from the glove box. ‘This is it,’ he said.
To call it a road was overstating things. It was a neglected, stony, bumpy track. Luke took it slowly. The car wasn’t up to much, and the last thing they needed was to stop to make running repairs. It had a lot more work to do yet.
They followed the track for ten klicks before going static. The pick-up pulled up a few metres behind them. It was fully dark now, and Luke killed the lights while Finn pulled off his headdress to reveal a mop of black hair, high cheekbones, a black beard and a fake tan just like Luke’s. Good-looking and he knew it. They climbed out of the car.
The moon was low and bright, with clouds drifting occasionally past. It lit up the surrounding desert. Luke looked back the way they’d come. He could just make out the headlamps of the occasional vehicle on the main road. At right angles to that road was the Iraqi border. It looked to the two soldiers like a dome of light in the dark desert sky, and beyond it Luke could see more lights in the desert: Iraqi border-control vehicles, no doubt, patrolling the frontier. Get picked up by one of them and they’d be enjoying Saddam’s hospitality before they knew it — assuming they survived the initial arrest.
This was still Jordanian territory, though. They needed to find somewhere to cross into Iraq.
The driver of the pick-up joined them. Nigel Foster — Fozzie — was a tall man with a nose that had been broken in two places and a balding head. He was wearing civvies — ripped jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt — and he grinned at Finn. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
Finn ignored him and removed a kite sight from the boot of the Toyota. The unit had studied the imagery and the intelligence long enough to know that the border was marked by a berm — a low ridge of earth constructed to stop vehicles crossing — as well as, in places, a barbed-wire fence. But they also knew that there were places where the border could be breached. Black-marketeers smuggled their goods into Iraq at these locations. Every border was porous, if you knew where to look.
The night air was still, but suddenly an unsettling noise reached their ears, like a baby screeching. Luke knew that wild dogs roamed the area in packs, lean and hungry. Impossible to tell how close they were — sound travels in strange ways in the desert. But Luke had the distinct impression that they were looking for dinner.
Which wasn’t a bad idea. Fozzie returned to the pick-up. Luke got back into the Toyota and got some food down him — a foil pouch of sausage and beans, cold and stodgy — while Finn scanned the border with the kite sight. Every twenty minutes they swapped. The temperature dropped and a chill wind started to whip around the car.
‘Nothing,’ Finn said after an hour. ‘Looks like Abu Dune Coon might be spending another night with the goats before we get to him. Hope he likes the smell of shit.’ He handed the kite sight to Luke. ‘I hate the fucking desert.’
Luke shrugged. ‘There’s worse places than this.’ He started scanning the border again, running through their objectives in his mind. Abu Famir was an Iraqi academic who had been educated in the West and was an outspoken anti-Baathist. Given Saddam’s penchant for disappearing anyone who disagreed with him, Abu Famir had done well to survive this long. Plenty of men with similar politics had ended up rotting away in Abu Ghraib prison or at the bottom of a mass grave.
It was clear the Americans were closing in on Saddam. Nothing to do with his human rights abuses, of course. He’d been happily torturing and killing people even back in the day when the Yanks considered him an ally. No, the politicians had reasons of their own for an invasion. If and when Saddam was deposed, they’d need a new government in place — a government they’d be able to control.
Which was where Abu Famir came in.
War was only weeks away. That was an open secret. The UN weapons inspectors currently combing the country for WMDs weren’t looking for evidence; they were looking for excuses — excuses for a war that was going
