Richmond raised his arms in surrender to the car roof, his fists clenched; his nails dug into his hands.
The machine-gunners caught the movement inside the car and pulled the gun towards the windscreen.
‘Oh, Jesus!’
The machine-gun crew screamed at the private. The crew sergeant got to his feet. ‘Lower your weapon, Soldier! That goddamn guy out there is one of us! Why don’t you use the fuckin’ sight?’
‘It’s my shades, Sarge. Covered in blood. I was assisting wounded and this car’s suddenly there, Sergeant. I couldn’t see good.’
The sergeant told the interpreter he could use English. The interpreter was confused. The sergeant grabbed the megaphone and walked towards the car. ‘OK you guys! There’s been a misunderstanding over here. Stand up and approach the roadblock!’
Zappa, whistling ‘A Ticket to Ride’, hauled his weight off the tarmac and went round to the source, who was still kneeling, crippled with fear.
‘Come on, pal, you’re safe. You tell him, Doctor.’
Ashe, still apprehensive, rolled over onto his back and snapped to his feet. Feeling dizzy, he tried to stop holding his breath.
Medics were pouring from the ’copter and racing across to the wounded soldiers. Richmond approached the sergeant, showed his ID and shared a joke – both trying to ignore the cries of the men being strapped onto stretchers.
‘You’re damned lucky, sir. My crew here had you marked out as fuckin’ terrorists. Excuse my language, sir; they’re in no mood to be delicate about it. If you take my advice, sir, you’ll be outta here as soon as possible. Lord knows what else is gonna come this way now. Those ’copters make mighty fine targets for rocket grenades. This whole damn country’s a weapon of mass destruction!’
‘That’s what they’d like you to believe, Sergeant. Good luck.’
Richmond thanked the apologetic machine-gun crew for not opening fire. Zappa went back to the BMW and manoeuvred it slowly through the smoke.
Dr Zaqqarah removed his trousers and used Richmond’s mineral water to wash his backside, drying it with the discarded garments.
And the source sat cross-legged by the car, praying out loud to Allah to deliver him and everybody else from the checkpoint inferno.
That night, Ashe drank himself sober. He lay still, gazing at the rough wool of the blanket in the bunk above his head.
Had he been frightened? Yes. Had he ever been as scared as that? No, he didn’t think so. But had he ever been more alive? That he couldn’t answer; he’d had some incredible experiences in the past, things so special that memory itself was inadequate to replay them. This was different – and what a bond had been forged in just a few hours between himself, Zappa and Richmond. He could see why many men found life outside the services difficult. Then he thought of poor Dr Zaqqarah going home to his wife that night: a pious Muslim, unable to drink, unable to speak, and with a new pair of ill-fitting trousers – and no explanation.
And what of the poor source? He seemed to have aged five years in an afternoon.
But, for all that, it had worked well. They’d taken the softened-up source to the edge of a stone quarry near the al-Tuwaitha installation, close to a Hungarian field hospital. Desperate to get back to his own world, the source had spilled everything he had on Kurdish political activity in Baghdad. Zappa even picked up some useful information on unrelated investigations. The source had gabbed and gabbed, and Zappa had been happy. They threw in a microwave and a spare set of tyres for his trouble. He said ‘Any time,’ but ‘could they meet in Baghdad next time?’
Zappa and Richmond doubted if they’d see him again – at least until his car broke down again for want of parts.
Both Yazar and Yildiz had been in Baghdad, ostensibly for discussions on the composition of the new Iraqi constitutional assembly, due to take control in the spring of ’05. Their presence there could be seen as innocent enough. They could just have been getting the low-down on Kurdish chances for autonomy, federation or even independence from central Iraqi power in the new Iraq so many dreamed of.
There were hundreds of issues of importance to Kurdish politicians and the people they represented. For example, would the Kurdish militia be expected to amalgamate with a new Iraqi army? The Kurds, allied to US Forces, had been partially independent since the safe zone had been established in northern Iraq in 1991. Who would control an Iraqi army? How could a future military coup be prevented?
These issues also exercised the minds of Turkish security forces. Yazar and Yildiz were operating under assumed names; the source had only recognised them from photographs in Zappa’s file. According to the source, Yazar and Yildiz had left Baghdad in a hurry. They’d gone north to Mosul.
Mosul was Zappa’s territory; he liked the north of Iraq. For a start, the area had more supporters of the US effort than any other part of the Middle and Near East. Zappa got on well with the Kurds and enjoyed the complex politicking that happened in every corner of the region. But, frankly, as he put it to Ashe before nesting down with a bottle of JD, Harlem at its worst was better than Kirkuk at its best.
Ashe himself longed to get out of the DIA HQ. It felt like a bunker. This was doubtless due to the fact that it had once been a bunker. An Oddball’s bunker, no less – one of Saddam’s many lairs. It had been no surprise to learn that Richmond’s ‘office’, in dull, lavatorial green, once was an interrogation chamber.
Ashe was beginning to think about getting back home; everyone was – except, perhaps, Zappa. Anyhow, no one voiced such thoughts too eagerly; the task lay before them, undone.
Ashe had, somewhat to his surprise, become a component in what Major Richmond called ‘the intelligence cycle’. The idea worked like this: a certain number of objectives would be established. These would lead to a series of source interviews. The interviews would be assessed, checked, crosschecked, analysed and compared. New information would coalesce into a new set of priorities and a fresh intelligence cycle could begin.
There was no jumping the gun, no place for undisciplined mavericks or loose cannons. In theory, original minds were welcome, but one man’s lateral thinker could be another man’s nut. There were no freewheeling agents acting on intuition, going from one gun-toting adventure to another. This was not acting, and James Bond could only be found on the Coalition Camp DVD screens.
Intelligence-gathering was many things, but one thing it could not be described as was ‘entertaining’ – though it might contain the odd glimmer of light relief. The story of Zaqqarah’s trousers would do the rounds for some time – as would a certain black humour associated with the private’s shades, covered with blood.
There was even some lightness to be gained from full exposure to Zappa’s extraordinary range of shirts. Like his shirts, Vinny’s turn of phrase was rarely anything less than florid. Vinny was an acquired taste; Ashe had acquired it.