The One That Got Away - Junior edition Page 14

  He answered me in Arabic. I think he was saying, ‘One’ll come soon.’

  Wagons were rolling out from the town, and after a while one of them stopped. It was a Land Cruiser loaded with bales of hay. The driver could speak a little broken English. He said he was a camel farmer, and asked who I was.

  ‘My aircraft’s crashed,’ I told him.

  ‘Your aircraft? Where is it?’

  ‘Over the hill, over there. I need to go to the police.’

  ‘OK. I’ll take you.’

  He swung his vehicle round, and I got into the middle of the front seat, between him and the young man. I soon regretted it, though, because he started making aggressive comments. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘This is our country. This is a bad war.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied, and kept as quiet as possible.

  When we hit the edge of town, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I’d been imagining a fairly built-up place, with banks and shops. There was nothing here but crude houses made of grey breeze blocks, with heaps of rubbish lying round them. No vegetation. No sign of gardens. Burned-out cars in the streets. To my surprise, the Syrians 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.

  There’s something going on here, I thought. There’s going to be a lynching party coming out. They’re going to do me for my weapon, or put me back across the border.

  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 thought I was running – but when I turned round I saw a load of old guys easily keeping up with me. I was running in slow motion. I couldn’t go any faster.

  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, I’m not going to see any of this again. None of it was particularly valuable, but I’d become quite attached to it, having carried it all that way. Now it was being stolen in front of my eyes.

  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 one hand on the horn, swerving in and out of the vast potholes. After a while the passenger made signs to ask if I was hungry.

  I nodded a yes.

  The driver stopped and waited while his mate ran out, returning with a bag of apples. When I ate the whole of the one he gave me – core, pips and all: everything except the stalk – both Arabs stared at me. The one on my right hadn’t touched his apple, and he gave it to me. So I ate that too, core and all again.

  On we went, missing hundreds of dogs by inches. We swerved to avoid lots of dead ones too. Next we cleared the town, came onto a metalled road and down into a big valley. Then we were out in the desert, on a road that ran straight for miles.

  I knew my bag was in the back, but I couldn’t tell how much of my kit was still in it. I tried talking, and asked where we were going. ‘Damascus?’ I suggested. ‘Damascus?’

  No answer, so I shut up.

  After a while, we came to two dark blue Mercedes parked on the side of the road, with a group of six men standing round the cars. As we came towards them, my escorts started talking to each other. Obviously this was some pre-arranged rendezvous. We began to slow down. Fifty metres short of the cars, I could see that one of the waiting men had a pistol in his hand. Suddenly the guy on my right pulled up my shamag, quite roughly, so as to blindfold me, and grabbed hold of my arm.

  It’s an execution squad, I thought to myself, and my blood ran cold.

  We came to a halt. I was dragged out, run up to the back of one of the Mercedes and thrown down on my knees. Somebody pushed my head forward and I sensed someone standing behind me.

  Silence.

  Nobody moved or spoke.

  I thought I was going to die.

  Until then I’d always reckoned that if anything like this happened to me, I’d make a last-ditch run for it. But I was physically incapable of running. I just knelt there, waiting for him to shoot me in the back of the head. It was a terrible feeling, to be on my knees, expecting someone to do that to me.

  The silence seemed to last for ever. In fact, it was probably less than a minute. Then there was a movement. I was pulled to my feet and thrown into the back of a car. The doors slammed and we drove off again.

  Now I had three escorts, all in Western civilian clothes. On my left sat the youngest, a skinny fellow with a thin, weaseley face and a straggling moustache. He struck me as a weak character. The driver was quite a big fellow – dark, good-looking, maybe my own age, and wearing a black leather jacket. His front-seat passenger was about forty: chubby, and going thin on top, he wore a green safari-type jacket with patch pockets. All three had ties, but they had pulled the knots loose, and their appearance was scruffy.

  Who were these guys? Police, I hoped. But why were they messing about so much? In my state of exhaustion and confusion, I didn’t know what to think. I considered trying to take them out. I still had my knife on me – but the car was travelling fast, probably at 70 or 80 mph for most of the time. Also, there was another car escorting us, and police outriders. The desert we were going through was very open, with nowhere to hide.

  My shamag was still on, but the guy in the passenger seat pulled it down far enough for me to see. Then, leaning over into the back, he began to strip-search me: he took off my ID discs by pulling the cord over my head, undid my boot laces, removed my watch, emptied my pockets, took my notebook and map. He missed my belt, which had the gold sovereigns taped to the inside.

  That was another frightening moment. If I’m going to safety, I thought, they shouldn’t be doing this to me. Could these fellows really be the Syrian police? If not, who were they? Why were they behaving like this? It was all very strange and alarming.

  After a while they blindfolded me again. They talked a bit among themselves, and played loud Arabic music on the stereo. They also chain-smoked.

  Soon I was in agony. In the warmth of the car – the highest temperature I’d been in for days – my feet and knees began to swell. The pain became excruciating and I kept trying to ease the agony by shifting around. I was finding it harder and harder to breathe, especially with all the cigarette smoke, and I started feeling claustrophobic. ‘Can’t you take the blindfold off?’ I asked. Until then, whenever I’d tried to pull the shamag off my face, the guy in front had twitched it back. Now, though, he seemed to realize that I was in trouble, and let it drop out of the way.

  The second Mercedes was ahead of us now. Whenever we came to a village, our outriders went ahead on their motorbikes to seal off any side roads, so that we could go speeding straight through. Then they’d come howling past us and take the lead again.

  The scrawny fellow next to me kept poking me in the ribs and going on about the war. ‘What were you doing in Iraq? You shouldn’t be here. Do you like Americans?’

  At any other time I’d have thumped him. As it was, I grunted short answers. I didn’t want to give anything away. I still didn’t know who these people were, or what they were doing. I felt fairly confident they weren’t taking me to Baghdad, the capital of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s centre of power, but I thought they might be going to hand me over to some terrorist group as a hostage.

  Sometimes our driver would overtake the other car and lead for a while. Every time we came to a village, one of my escorts would pull the shamag over my eyes so that I couldn’t see any names. But after four or five hours I looked ahead and saw a motorway sign coming up.

  In enormous letters it said: BAGHDAD. With a big arrow pointing from right to left.

  My heart dropped.

  The driver said something to the fellow beside me, who started poking me in the ribs and cackling. ‘Yes, you right. You going Baghdad! You going where Baghdad is.’

  I was growing angry – partly with the idiot beside me, partly with myself. How the hell had I ended up in such a situation? Why had I given myself up to these people? Why hadn’t I tried to pinch a vehicle and drive myself to Damascus?

  The front-seat passenger turned to me and said, ‘Yes – we’re Baghdadis.’

  I tried to get my mind in gear. I had to accept that I was going to a prison camp. I was going to be interrogated. I was going to get a bad kicking, a beating. Think your thoughts, I told myself. Get organized.

  I considered doing a runner, but it was impossible. I was physically exhausted, and wouldn’t have gone a hundred metres. It’s no good,’ I told myself. They’ll have you. Instead, I sat still, trying not to annoy my escorts by fidgeting.

>   Every part of me was aching: back, shoulders, knees – but worst of all, my feet. Although I’d drunk the water and tea in the barn that morning, I was desperately in need of both food and more liquid. I had been weakened more than I realized. My mind was so confused that I couldn’t remember the simplest details of everyday life.

  Through my blindfold I could see and feel that we were heading towards the sun, and that hour by hour the sun was going down. But what did that mean? Did the sun set in the east or in the west? Unable to remember, I tried to think back to what used to happen when I was a kid. Gradually I got it: from my bedroom at home I could see the sun coming up. That was the direction of Newcastle and, further off, China. That meant the sun rose in the east, and set in the west. Now we were heading into the setting sun: therefore we must be driving west.

  In that case, I told myself, we couldn’t be going to Baghdad.

  For the final half hour or so they kept my head wrapped up. Then darkness fell, and still we went on driving, until in the end we hit the outskirts of some town or city. By then the blindfold was off again, and I started to see signs saying: DAMAS.

  Desperately I tried to visualize the map and remember which part of Syria Damascus was in. I began daring to hope that we were approaching the Syrian capital, and that my companions had just been winding me up.

  My escorts started to smarten themselves up. They put out their cigarettes, turned off the radio, slid their ties tight and straightened their clothes, as if preparing to meet somebody important. All that alarmed me. What were they getting ready for?

  Then, on a piece of waste ground, we pulled into the kerb, behind yet another Mercedes. The front passenger got out. His place was taken by a man of maybe fifty; he was well-dressed and balding a little. His dark suit gave him a sombre appearance, but at least he looked cool and calm. The other two characters in my car were obviously in awe of him. As he walked towards us they stopped chattering, and more or less sat to attention, hardly daring to breathe.

  The new man closed his door and gave a short order. We moved off towards the city centre. Every now and then he snapped a direction at the driver: ‘Left . . . right,’ and that was all.