We soon reached a door, and huddled together, lit by the chink of light that gleamed through the tiny crack that outlined its frame.
'This leads into a private bedchamber,' whispered David. 'Uday would bring his whores here in secret. It should be unoccupied, but you never know. Once I open the door we run to the balcony. It looks out over the river, and over the wall. There's a ladder under the bed. I'll get it; we lay it across the gap, walk over the wall and drop down. Clear?'
'And if the room is occupied?'
'Then, Sergeant, we have fight on our hands. Everyone ready?'
There was the sound of four guns being cocked and then David counted down from three. We burst into the room, guns waving.
'Clear,' said Dad. I got to the balcony first, and looked out into the night. I couldn't see much because the balcony looked out of the compound across the waterway. There was less gunfire than before. It was coming in sporadic bursts now, somewhere off to my right, from a building that stood close to where one of the bombs had exploded. I could see the riverside wall was ablaze, flames licking out of the empty window frames. Tariq had only a few people left to him after last week's massacre. The plan was that they would stay outside and lay down covering fire at the points where the wall was breached, that way the Yanks wouldn't know which breach we planned to exit by. We would go across the wall here and then we and the rest of the gang would simply melt away into the darkness. It was a good plan, but it had one fatal flaw.
'Where is it?' hissed Tariq urgently, behind me. I turned to see the three of them standing by the bed. No ladder.
'I don't know,' said David. 'It was here this morning. Someone must have taken it.'
'Fuck,' said Tariq, succinctly. 'Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. What now?'
'Can we jump it?' asked Dad.
I shook my head. 'It would be suicide. Options? David, you know the layout of this place. Where's the nearest breach in the wall and how do we get there?'
'Two hundred metres east. I set a charge near the swimming pool.'
'Okay then,' said Dad, looking for the door. 'Hang on. Where's the door?'
'There isn't one,' replied David. 'Secret bedroom, remember? The passage is the only way in or out.'
'Jesus,' I said. 'Who the fuck builds a secret chamber with only one entrance?'
'The Ba'ath party,' said Tariq, 'never could do a damn thing properly.'
'So you mean we're trapped?' asked Dad, incredulous.
'Yeah,' said David.
'And how long before someone figures out where we are?' I asked.
'Not long.'
'Then we have to go out the window.'
'You said it was too high,' protested the Iraqi.
'He didn't say anything about jumping,' said Dad, smiling. Weird, but that moment, when he read my mind before the others, made me feel closer to him than all the hugging and wailing a few minutes earlier.
'We climb,' I said.
One of the good things about the palace compound is that the buildings were as ornate as they could possibly be. It wasn't hard to climb up on to the roof using all the elaborate cornices, cupolas and jutty-out bits. Tariq went first, then me. Then David gave Dad a boost while Tariq and I pulled him up. David was still outside on the wall, perched on the ledge above the balcony, reaching for the lip of the roof when Uday Hussein's secret fuck pad was blown to shit by grenades.
The shockwave dislodged him and he began to topple backwards. I leaned out and grabbed his flailing right hand, pulling him back in. He scrambled up, flinging himself on to the roof. Almost immediately we heard someone run out on to the balcony and shout 'clear!' I silently mouthed 'close'. David nodded and mimed back 'thank you'. I smiled and patted his shoulder.
The flat roof was littered with discarded bits of stone, half cut rolls of waterproof tar stuff and other assorted junk left behind by the builders responsible for this architectural abortion. We moved away from the edge so we couldn't be seen from below.
'Now they're going to be confused,' whispered Tariq grinning.
'I hope so,' replied Dad. 'Because if they figure out where we are, they'll just blow up the building, or worse, set a fire and leave us up here to burn.'
That shut us all up for a moment, and in the silence we all realized the same thing; the gunfire had stopped. Tariq's forces had fled, been captured or killed.
We were on our own, trapped on a roof in the middle of a compound swarming with people who wanted to kill us.
'I told you I hated this plan,' I said.
There was little we could do but wait.
From our vantage point we could see that the area was heavily patrolled, plus there was a team sorting out David's creative rewiring of the backup generator, so the building was a hive of activity. Come daylight, things would start to return to normal. This part of the compound was usually pretty quiet, said David; the main activity was all focused on the barracks, supply dump and vehicle store, about half a mile away on the compound's northern side.
'It may sound counter-intuitive,' he said, 'but we've got a better chance of sneaking out in broad daylight tomorrow than we do now.'
And so we decided to get some sleep. I was just clearing a space to lie down when Dad came over to me and sat beside me.
'I'll take first watch, keep an eye out,' he said.
'Okay,' I replied.
There was an awkward silence. I don't think either of us knew what to say to each other.
'When I last saw you, you were a just a schoolboy. It was all Doctor Who, Grand Theft Auto and wondering if you were going to snog that girl from the High School, Michelle, wasn't it?'
'Yeah,' I muttered.
'Did you?'
I looked at him, incredulous. This is what he wanted to talk about?
'She's dead, Dad.'
He looked down at his feet. 'Yeah, of course she is.'
Another silence.
'So you're going to take watch, yeah?'
'Um, yeah,' he said, lifting his eyes and regarding me curiously, as if he had no idea who I was. 'You get some sleep.'
'Wake me when it's my turn.'
'Will do.'
I lay down and turned away from him, resting my head on my folded arms and closing my eyes.
'And Lee, thank you,' he said softly.
I said nothing. A moment later I heard him moving away.
Of course he didn't wake me. A distant secondary explosion jolted me awake; the fires must have reached an old fuel tank or gas cylinder in one of the other buildings. It was still dark, but I checked my watch and saw I'd been asleep for four hours. I lay there for a moment looking up at the stars, so clear and bright now, without electric light bleeding into the sky to hide them. I pulled my jacket tighter around me as protection from the cold, even though I knew it was still hot by English standards.
I looked around and saw that Tariq was on watch now; my dad was asleep over to my left, and David was sitting balled up in the middle of the roof, head rested on his knees, staring blankly into space. I didn't think he'd welcome it if I approached him.
I could tell I wasn't going to get any more rest, so I got up and went to sit next to Tariq.
'Anything happening?' I asked.
'Not really. They've fixed the generator and gone away, but they are still searching all the buildings. It's the
