He was almost level when the senior man spoke, brusquely, with authority.
“Hey, old man…Iraqi?”
Eilat nodded and kept going, moving past them, exaggerating the limp. For a split second, he thought they would ignore him, but then the soldier spoke again.
“WAIT!”
Eilat was not surprised. He was moving into a particularly sensitive area of his country. Al-Kut was the town where the Tigris splits, and where the great drainage program to dry out the marshes had been in place for many years. It was a program designed to destroy the wild wetland homes of the ancient Marsh Arabs, who were believed to have lived there for the entire 6,000 years of the region’s history. In the opinion of Saddam Hussein, those watery miles had become a haven for deserters from the Army, and even for Iranian insurgents. Gangs of ex-Army personnel still roamed the vast overgrown areas where water remained. Eilat knew the place was crawling with soldiers because it was still believed to be somewhat out of control. Drier, but still out of control.
He obeyed the command of the Iraqi officer, turning slowly and saying softly the traditional greeting of the desert, “
The officer was a man of around thirty-five, tall and thin, with a hooked beak of a nose, hooded dark eyes, and a full mouth. He did not smile.
“Documents?”
“I have none, sir,” replied Eilat in Arabic. “I’m just a poor traveler.”
“Traveling to where?”
“I’m looking for my son, sir. I heard from him last in An-Nasiriya three years ago. I have no money except for a few dinars, enough for some bread in Kut.”
“And then you plan to walk right down the Shatt al Gharraf…120 miles?”
“Yessir.”
“On a loaf of bread, on your own, with no documents?”
“Yessir.”
“Where do you live?”
“In Baghdad, sir. In the south of the city.”
“A city Arab with no documents?” His tone was questioning. “And what do you carry in that bag?”
“Just water, sir.”
“Show me,” said the officer, uttering the two words that would end his life.
Eilat turned away, but he came back as fast as a striking cobra, jamming the end of his stick with colossal force into the small space between the officer’s eyes above the bridge of his nose. All three men heard the bone of his forehead splinter, but it was the last sound the Iraqi soldier ever heard. Eilat slammed the butt of his right hand upward into the great beaked nose, effectively ramming the bone into the man’s brain.
The younger soldier just stood there, his mouth open with total amazement, as this elderly, crippled traveler killed his commanding officer in two seconds flat. He held his hands open wide, trying to speak, perhaps to surrender. But it was too late for that. Eilat was on him with his knife, thrusting it between the ribs straight into the young man’s heart. He was dead before he hit the sand.
Eilat kicked and rolled the two bodies under the jeep, located the toolbox, and shoved that under there with them. Then he cut and sliced three long strips of material from the front seat, tied them together, and shoved them into the petrol tank. He pulled them out and made a jury-rigged strip, about six feet long, going back into the tank. He lit one gasoline-soaked end and hurled himself into the sand 20 feet away as the jeep blew up in a blast of flame and black smoke. Then he picked up his bag and stick and fled the blazing wreck, racing along the river for more than two miles before he finally slowed and resumed his careful, stooping, old man’s gait. He hoped the burned-out jeep and corpses would not be discovered for a few hours, but he did not bank on it.
“Anyway, who would suspect me?” he muttered. “It’ll take them a few days to run an autopsy on the soldiers — a few days before they find out they were taken out by a professional.” But he thanked God for the training of the military in which he had served — especially for the courses he had attended in unarmed and armed combat. He had finished first in both of them, as he had finished first in every course he had ever taken.
He reached Kut by nightfall, limping into the city. Food was easy to find, and he purchased grilled lamb and rice with extra pita bread from a street trader. He refilled his water bottles from a hose at a gas station and slept on a bench in a dark corner of the bus depot. So far as he knew, only the curbside cook had seen his newly bearded face, and even then he had kept his head well down, mumbling his order and offering no conversation.
Eilat left before dawn, following the river as it swung east away from the city toward the Iranian border. His little map marked the spot 80 miles farther on at the oasis settlement of Ali Al Garbi, where the wide stream would turn southward again, toward the Gulf — and the marshes.
For four more days and nights he walked and slept intermittently, both under the raging desert sun and through the unbearably hot and clammy nights. He saw few travelers, spoke to no one, and ate and drank only what he carried with him. His ration was three pieces of bread and four pints of water every twenty-four hours. Twice each day he would move down to the river and immerse himself in the waters. Then he would walk on, in cool but heavy robes, which dried out all too quickly.
He arrived exhausted and dehydrated in Ali Al Garbi just before midnight on July 5. He located a water pump in the middle of the town and stood drinking alone in the dark for almost ten minutes. He filled his water bags again and found an abandoned market stall on the sand, where he slept until dawn. He was two days away from al’Amarah, which was a much bigger town, but there was nothing along the route. Thus Eilat could not leave Garbi without replenishing his food supply. And he hoped there would be a cafe that opened early.
His luck, which had held for a long time, ran out there. Nothing opened until nine, and Eilat was obliged to wait around for three hours. He finally ate breakfast, drank copious amounts of fruit juice, and found another shop to buy bread for the journey. Because of the heat, he was wary of taking even prepacked meat, but he risked a few tomatoes and some tired green local lettuce leaves. In the second shop he had noticed a newspaper which carried a front-page photograph of a burned-out Army jeep, under the headline:
IRAQI SOLDIERS DIE REPAIRING ARMY VEHICLE.
It took him another three and a half days to reach his turning point at Qal At Salih, deep in the eastern marshes, only 30 miles from the Iranian border. It was easily the most hellish part of the journey. The unforgiving sun beat down from morning to night, the days grew hotter as he went south, and the humidity became worse. He was now 16 pounds below his regular weight, and the insects that hovered above the still waters were vicious. Eilat used his spray sparingly, when the mosquitoes were at their worst. He stuck to the river, and he knew that out to the east were the surviving ancient lands of the Madan, the Marsh Arabs.
Away to the right, on the west side of the river, Saddam Hussein had drained hundreds of square miles of the marshes right down to the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. For hundreds of years those wetlands had provided a haven for slaves, Bedouins, and those who had offended against the state. The area was accessible only by small boats, and no army, however determined, had ever successfully operated in that treacherous swampland. Saddam had a solution to that. He diverted the rivers and built a couple of gigantic canals to cut off the water supply to the entire al’Amarah Marsh. The result was a dry, arid, silted-up land, in which an entire ecosystem was decimated. A huge range of wading birds, storks, pelicans, and eagles — not to mention another vast range of fish, small mammals, and people — lost their homes.
Marsh Arabs, whose families had lived there for thousands of years, were forced to leave, as the Army of Iraq in the 1980s drove through the dried-up swamps, laying down great causeways for armored vehicles to move more easily to the east, to Iraq’s smoldering enemy across the Iranian border.
Eilat did not approve of the drying program. But at that moment he was much more concerned with his side of the river, where the great surviving marsh stretched for 50 miles, to the border and on into Iran, toward the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.
He rested for a whole day at Qal At Salih, regaining his strength after his sixteen-day march from Baghdad. He ate chicken, lamb and rice, fruit and vegetables. But he still risked no other human contact except for the two elderly street traders who served him. And in the late afternoon of July 12 he turned away from the Tigris for the first time and set off through the marshes for the border. His little map marked the causeways he could follow, but there were no road signs, and his navigational guides were simple. The Pole Star would show him due north, and so
