looked quite European. I even saw two men with flaming, carrot-coloured hair, one of them with a red beard.
My driver pulled up outside a house on the left-hand side of the road and beeped his horn. Out came an Arab dressed in a black dishdash. They spoke, then the driver said something to the young farm lad, who got out of the truck. He looked frightened, but I felt helpless because I didn’t know what was happening.
‘Everything all right?’ I asked, but the driver spoke sharply to the lad, who set off walking, back towards his home.
The two of us went on into town, and the driver started having a go at me again. ‘You want to go back to Iraq?’ he said, and roared with laughter. ‘I should take you back.’
‘No, no!’ I said. I brought out the letter, written in Arabic as well as English, that promised ?5,000 to anyone who handed me safely back to the Coalition. The driver snatched it and began to stuff it into his pocket, as if it was actual cash.
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I have to be with this piece of paper. Me and the paper at the same time. You only get the money if the two are together.’ I took it back from him and put it away.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK.’ At least he had stopped talking about taking me back across the border. But then he asked, ‘You have gun?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No gun.’
We came to a petrol station, and he pulled up. On the other side of the pumps was a car with a gang of young lads round it. The driver touched my bag, with all the kit in it. ‘What is all this?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, nothing. Just my things.’
He reached over to pat me on my stomach, to feel if I had a weapon concealed about me.
‘No,’ I protested. ‘I’ve got nothing.’
Suddenly he called out to the lads by the pump, and one of them came over. The boy stood by the window. He didn’t look at me, but straight at the bag. The driver went on talking to him — until suddenly he ran off into the building.
It was time to go.
I opened the door, grabbed the bag and began to get out. At that moment the driver seized my left arm, trying to hold me back. I dragged him across the front seat and half out of the vehicle. When I kicked the door shut, it caught his head in the opening and he had to let go of me. He let out a yell, and I took off.
Fear boiled up in me again, almost worse than before. Away I went, running up the street, with the plastic sack in one hand. At least, I
Soon there was a big commotion, and a crowd of over a dozen people coming after me. They were barely thirty metres behind me and closing fast. Somehow, these Syrians knew I had a weapon in that bag. They were out to get it, and then to throw me back into Iraq, or worse. The pavements were full of people, and the ones on the other side of the road were all looking, alerted by the noise. Ahead of me, more pedestrians were staring. I kept hobbling and staggering along, hampered by the plastic sack in my right hand. I couldn’t even wave my weapon in threat, because it was stripped down. To put it back together would mean stopping for at least a minute, and by then the mob would have been on top of me.
Then, as I turned a corner, a miracle: there stood a man with an AK-47, wearing chest webbing. He was right next door to a pillar box, obviously on duty. It flashed into my mind that this might be the Iraqi border post, but it was too late to worry.
‘Police?’ I shouted. ‘Police?’
I don’t know what the guy said. I’m not sure he said anything at all. He just pulled me through a gateway and into a walled garden. I saw bunting of triangular flags over the entrance, greenery all around, and a big bungalow. He had me by the arm and the scruff of the neck, and ran me into this enclosure, out of reach of the crowd in the street, who by then were yelling for my blood. What his motives were, I’ll never know. He may have been trying to save me from the mob, or he may just have thought he’d grabbed a prisoner.
Inside the bungalow a man sat behind a desk, smoking. He was wearing a black leather jacket. So were the other men in there — black leather bomber jackets and jeans — and they all seemed to be smoking. Nobody spoke a word of English. There was a lot of pointing.
‘I’m a helicopter pilot,’ I said. I started making chopper noises, whirling my hand round to indicate rotors, and then diving it down to show that I had crashed.
Very soon they’d opened my bag and got out the 203, together with my webbing. Then the driver who’d given me the lift rushed in and started shouting in Arabic, jabbing his finger in my direction.
I felt another surge of fear, and motioned to the bomber-jacketed guys. ‘Get him out!’ I pleaded. They bundled him into another room.
These guys in leather obviously had no time for the driver, but they didn’t like the look of me either. I couldn’t blame them. My hair was matted with dirt; my face was thin, my eyes staring. I had ten days’ growth of beard. I was filthy and stinking. I was also an infidel.
They started stripping my kit, and pulled out the two white phosphorus grenades. One of the guys, who was smoking a cigarette, held a grenade up. ‘What’s this?’ he asked in Arabic.
‘Smoke,’ I told him. ‘For making smoke.’ I waved up clouds of the stuff in mid-air.
They started lobbing the grenades round, one to another, catching them like cricket balls. The safety pins, which I’d loosened before our first contact, were hanging out. I knew that if one of the grenades went off, it would kill us all; so I made to stand up and grab them. That didn’t go down well. The instant I was half-upright, three guys pulled pistols and levelled them at me, yelling at me to sit down. So I sat back, and everything gradually calmed down. The man who’d finished up with the grenades brought them over, and let me push the pins back into place.
By then the others were ripping out all my kit: the night-sight, my little binoculars. All my stuff was disappearing, and I thought,
After about twenty minutes I was taken through a door into another room. In came a man of fifty or so, wearing a grey suit. He sat me down at a table with a piece of paper and said, ‘Details? Name? Birthday? Country?’
I wrote down: ‘Sergeant Chris Ryan, 22 Turbo Squadron, Para Field Ambulance,’ followed by my date of birth, and left it at that. 22 Para Field Ambulance didn’t exist, but I thought that if I finished up in a prison camp, and the number, combined with the word ‘Turbo’, reached the Coalition, somebody would click on to the fact that I was a medic in 22 SAS. I gave my rank as sergeant because I knew it would command a bit more respect than if I said ‘corporal’.
While I was writing, I was given a cup of coffee. It was thick and bitter, Arab-style, and made me feel thirstier than ever. The man took the paper, went out, then came back in and beckoned me to follow him. Two other guys were waiting outside. They grabbed me by the arms and pulled me into a different room. There they pointed down at a white dishdash and motioned me to put it on.
Now I was really scared. What were they doing, making me dress up like an Arab? The dishdash came down to my feet. Someone then came in with a shamag and wrapped it round my head. At first I could just about see out, but then they pulled it right down over my face.
Nobody told me where I was going or what was happening, and I felt panic rising. I had handed myself over to these people, and they now had complete control of me.
I saw my bag of equipment go out the door ahead of me. A Land Cruiser pulled up outside. Two men armed with AK-47s came in. I was passed over to them and marched out. One man climbed into the driver’s seat, I was pushed into the middle, and the second man got in on my right.
As we drove out of the police station, I held my breath. I felt certain that if we turned right, we would be on our way back to Iraq. If we turned left, there was a good chance that the Syrians would be keeping me.
We turned left. I breathed again.
We sped off, along rough streets full of kids playing. The driver didn’t stop for them; he just kept going, with
