For whatever reason, they did not obey. They continued to drive, waving and cheering.
When I saw the first 9mm parabellum round pass through the windscreen, and I saw the cloud of blood in the cabin, I shrieked at the Americans to stop.
I was ignored.
Burst after burst the huge American fired at the car, and I swear he smiled when the fuel tank went up.
There are no words to describe the fate of those six men. We cannot begin to imagine the agony of their mothers, deprived even of a body to cradle.
There is now no way to tell them apart, save perhaps for the teeth which grin in their blackened skulls.
If you could come with me, and gaze at the dreadful cargo of this vehicle,, and smell the unmistakable odour of burnt human being, you would never again tolerate the lie, that this was a war for the people of Iraq.
Is this the Pentagon’s idea of liberation? What happened here today was evil.
It was a massacre. If there were any justice, it would join the list of other acts of brutality by American troops against Third World people.
It won’t, of course. There will be no court-martial. There will be no inquiry.
The trigger-happy cowards who killed these six young men will say they were threatened.
They will say there were weapons in the car.
There were no weapons in the car, and none will be found.
And that, of course, is the central deception on which this war was fought.
Ends.
OK? Got that? Just whack that across to
Before Jason could do anything to stop him, the reporter raised his camera and squeezed off several shots in his direction.
Then Barry White nodded amiably at Jason Pickel and strolled off down the road in the direction he had come. Jason looked up and down the street. A man on a donkey was approaching. The fisher boys had returned to their pitches on the Tigris.
Apart from the wreck of the car, and a helicopter buffeting the air overhead, it was as though normality had returned. He saw Kovac draw near, and the mere thought of talking to Kovac was enough.
He turned his carbine round, and would have added to the US fatality rate. But Kovac was quick, and knocked his arm down, and the bullet whanged aside. Not harmlessly, however. For the first time in his narrative, Pickel began to blub. The donkey stopped it, he said.
The donkey took the carbine round in his grizzled little donkey chest. They’d brought Jason over from Iowa. They’d screwed up his marriage. They’d equipped him with the most technically advanced weaponry in the world, and he’d ended up killing six young men who may or may not have been wedding guests, and he’d whacked a donkey.
Indira was no longer listening. She sidled away along the duckboards. Her orders were very clear. If you were in the slightest doubt about the mental state of anyone, it was your duty to get help.
Adam Swallow at last found his way through the corridors in Norman Shaw South, and could see his way out to New Palace Yard. It occurred to him that the route would present a considerable challenge to the Arab torture victim and his companions. Should he go back? He decided against. No doubt Benedicte had thought it through.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
0944 HRS
Cameron was feeling irritated. The gloomy hall was starting to fill now, and it was with some difficulty that she had made her way to the steps at the far end. Why the hell had Adam given her these silly forged tickets? Where was she supposed to put them? Every seat in the place had ‘reserved’ on it. At length she found a seat, twenty feet away from the dais on the right, snaffled a reserved card, and sat down.
Cameron stood up. She saw a figure of Gallic nattiness, with the little red thread of the Legion d’Honneur, and a sense of disorder about his coiffure. ‘I am the French Ambassador,’ he explained. ‘I believe we met in the company of the good Dr Swallow.’
It took Cameron a second or two to remember, but a man does not rise to the top of the French diplomatic service without possessing the nimblest grasp of situation. In a trice M. Charpentier had rearranged the placement in Westminster Hall, finding a place not only for Cameron but for a beautiful dark-skinned woman, who appeared to be his girlfriend, and two friendly Arabs in djelabahs.
‘And here,’ he said, sweeping up the place cards like a professional palmist, ‘is the space for the good Swallow and his friends.’ Cameron found herself sitting behind this comforting fellow, who kept up a lively chatter over his shoulder. But how could he forget meeting her, he asked? She had been there for his
‘Ah yes,’ said His Excellency, ‘I was attacked. That is to say, I was ambushed by the cretins outside. Fortunately they did not hit me directly. That honour belonged unambiguously to my Dutch colleague, Mr Cornelijus.’
‘What did they hit you with?’
‘I cannot say. That is a question currently under investigation by the police. But I have my suspicions. It was a large white object containing a great quantity of albuminous matter. If I were forced to express an opinion, I should say it was an egg. It is so sad, of course,’ said the Ambassador, smiling at her. ‘They do not understand how many of us there are inside the hall, who sympathize with the objectives of those outside.’
M. Charpentier’s girlfriend smiled. The two Arabs smiled.
‘How true,’ said Cameron. She shifted in her chair, and looked up at the stained glass of the north end. She deliberately set her mind upon a historical meditation, something about the antiquity of this hall, how it predated the discovery of her own country by 300 years. It was no use.
Soon she was once again daydreaming, in a happy mental fug, about the events of yesterday. She had been so frightened yesterday, with that row outside NATO, and the horrible pockmarked Flemish policeman going for his gun. She’d been impressed by the way Adam dealt with the guy, and at lunch, frankly, she had been dazzled.
Several times she almost cried out with anger at the coarseness and cynicism of their anti-American views. Every time she thought she would have to walk out or pop, they all laughingly paid out some slack and made her feel good again; and then slowly, ironically, gently, they’d begin the business of winding her up.
At one point she thought she was actually going to cry, when she heard her boyfriend — she had even had nesting thoughts about him — say that ‘Osama bin Laden was more morally serious’ than the American President.
They made jokes about American food, the cheese processed to the point of macrobiotic extermination, the bleached bread that bore no relation to wheat. Cameron looked around the smoky restaurant, where harassed Croats were dishing out steaming pots full of goo, the summit of Belgian civilization. There was waterzooi, a frightening salmonella-rich soup of fish and raw egg. There was steak tartare, so eloquent of toxoplasmosis that in her country it would have been banned by the Food and Drug Administration.
Yeah, she said, she had to hand it to the euros. They still had the edge when it came to lunch. Then they started laying into the American farm system that produced these culinary disasters, the depopulated prairies, harvested at night by huge computerized combines, the robot-controlled pig farms with their slurry lagoons. Did she not know that America was now the world’s number one villain in dumping cotton on sub-Saharan Africa? Americans were obese. Americans were ignorant. They needed two airline seats per buttock. Most of them had never been to Yurp. Most of them didn’t have passports.
Some of them, like Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, were too terrified to get on a plane. Those that did travel abroad did not always leave their destination as they found it. Sometimes they blew up commuter trains on
