Bravo two zero (30 page)

    He had an exchange with the guards, very fast and aggressive, then slapped my face a few times. I had no idea what he was on about. Then he walked backwards away from me and pulled out a Makharov pistol. This is all rather nice, I thought, what's the story here then? He pointed it at me but he didn't cock it.

    Was this bluff kit or what?

    The hammer of the Russian-made pistol stays to the rear when you cock it-i.e." put a round into the chamber. If you pull the trigger, it will fire and reload itself again with the hammer still to the rear. If you don't want to fire, you put the safety catch to safe. The hammer will still go forward but is stopped just short of the firing pin by the sears that come out because you have moved the safety catch. This is unlike some semiautomatic pistols. They still have a safety catch, but the hammer will stay to the rear when it's applied.

    I was looking in earnest to see if the hammer was back. If it was, I knew that he wasn't bluffing, and that if he was nervous, he might have a negligent discharge and shoot me anyway. I looked at his face. His expression was very serious, and the eyes were welling up. I could see the shine of the tears. Our eyes met. He started to cry, and the pistol wobbled in his hand.

    Surely the guards wouldn't let him do it in their nice clean barrack room? But his eyes gave it away. He intended to pull the trigger, without a doubt. It didn't look official. This was off the cuff. But the bloke had got the hump, so even if it was unofficial, so what? He'd do it anyway. I might get slotted here through emotion rather than a decision made, and I found that scary. The character really looked as if he might squeeze the trigger, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

    Come on then, arse hole let's get it over and done with. The guards seemed to wake up to what was happening. They jumped to their feet, shouting angrily, and grabbed his arm. They took away the pistol.

    That single act gave me the biggest piece of information I had received since my capture: either these characters simply didn't want to get their barrack block messed up, or, more likely, they were under orders to keep us alive.

    One of the guards came over and squeezed my cheeks. "Son, son," he said. "Boom boom boom."

    One of us had killed the man's son. Fair one. In his shoes I'd be doing the same. Unfortunately it was me that he was doing it to.

    I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with one of my arms up in the air, handcuffed to the wall. He came over and started to try and fill me in. I put my head down and brought my knees up, crouching forward to protect my bollocks. I got as close to the wall as I could. Only my arm was vulnerable now. It was funny, he had been willing to kill me with the weapon, but he found it quite hard to lay hands on me. He was kicking, but it wasn't much good because he had leather sandals on. He'd throw a punch, but it had no weight behind it. He was clearly upset, but really he didn't have it in him to do anything severe. He lacked aggression and strength, and I was delighted.

    I was exaggerating, moaning and groaning as he kneed me in the back and slapped and spat. If it was my son who had been killed, and I was in the same room as the perpetrator, he'd have been honking good style by now. In a way I felt quite sorry for him, because his son was dead and he was too nice and gentle a man to do anything about it. Maybe, after all, he couldn have pulled the trigger.

    The squad dies started to get bored-and perhaps a bit worried that they might have to clean blood off the floor and walls. They calmed him down and led him away. When they returned, they sat on the beds again and smoked more cigarettes.

    "Boosh, bad, bad," one of them said.

    "Yeah, Bush, bad," I nodded and agreed.

    "Major," he said, and did an oinking noise.

    "Yep, Major's a pig," I said, and oinked.

    They thought this was great stuff.

    "You," he pointed at me and brayed loudly.

    "Me, donkey. Ee-aw!"

    They held their sides and fell over on the beds. They rolled up.

    They came over and poked me. I didn't really know what they wanted from me, so I just did another loud bray. They loved it. I didn't give a shit if they wanted to have fun at my expense. It didn't mean a thing to me. I thought it was just as funny. I wasn't getting filled in, that was all that mattered. It was absolutely splendid.

    This went on for about a quarter of an hour. There'd be a couple of minutes' silence, then somebody would get up and poke me again, I'd give them a good ee-aw, and they'd crack up. What a bunch of tossers.

    I thought I'd try to have my handcuffs sorted out while they were in such a good mood. I was at a 45degree angle, and my hand was elevated.

    Gravity was pulling my hand onto the handcuff, and it was swelling up badly. It was agony. I wondered if they'd strap me onto something lower down, like a pipe.

    I pointed at my hand and said, "Hurts. Please. Pain. Aaah."

    They looked at me and poked, and got another donkey bray. They had another roll-up, and I tried to indicate that my hand was agony. It didn't work. They just laughed. Then they suddenly got all serious.

    They must have thought that it was time to assert some authority. So they started to carry out their own questioning, as if I was supposed to think they weren't just guards, they were big-time interrogators.

    "Who? Who?"

    It was hard to make out what they were saying.

    "What? I don't understand."

    I kept pointing at my wrist, but to no avail. They asked more questions, their Halloween faces lit from below by the heater, but I couldn't understand them.

    One of them went and fetched another guard. He could speak fair English. They'd obviously told him that I couldn't understand what they were on about.

    "What's your name?"

    "Andy."

    "Commando, Andy? Tel Aviv?"

    "British."

    "British. Gascoigne? Rush? Football?" He beamed big smiles and scored an imaginary goal with his right foot.

    Everybody's face lit up, mine included-even though football did nothing for me. When I was a kid, Millwall was the local team, but I only went to see them three or four times. I stood there like a dickhead on the terraces and wondered what all the fuss was about. I couldn't see a thing because I was too small, and all I knew was that it had cost loads of money to get in. I went on a Wednesday night once and left halfway through because it was so cold. That was the extent of my football knowledge, and that was all football did for me-it reminded me of wet, cold, windy terraces. I had no interest in it whatsoever, yet here I was, a prisoner of soccer-mad Iraqis, and it might be my lifeline.

    "Liverpool!" he said.

    "Chelsea!" I said.

    "Manchester United!"

    "Nottingham Forest!"

    They laughed and I joined in, trying to form some sort of bond. This was good, textbook stuff, but I couldn't sustain it for much longer. My knowledge was just about exhausted.

    "How long am I here?" I tried. "Do you know how long I'll be here? Can you give me any food?"

    "No problems. Bobby Moore!"

    I thought I'd try another ploy.

    "Mai? Mai?" I asked for water. I coughed dryly and gave it the old puppy dog look.

    A bloke went out and came back with a glass of water. I gulped it down and asked for more. That cheesed them off so I just thanked them again and decided to keep quiet for a while.

    They were all in their late teens, growing their first wispy mustaches.

    They behaved like young squad dies in any army, but what surprised me about them was the standard of maintenance of their uniforms and weapons. I had imagined the rag heads to be a bit of an undisciplined rabble, their kit dirty and shabby. But their uniforms were well laundered and pressed, and their boots were highly polished. Their weapons were in excellent order and well maintained. The buildings, too, were in a good state of repair, and spotlessly tidy. This was good; I felt that in their discipline lay some sort of protection for me. They were unlikely to do anything unless they were told to do it.

    It made me feel a bit happier that they weren't just a bunch of head bangers rushing around wanting to kill and maim. Somebody, somewhere, made them clean their weapons; somebody, somewhere, made them clean their boots and their rooms.

    What was more, there were obviously ways of striking up a relationship with these people, a fact which might help me at a later date. It was not just black and white in their eyes, as I was expecting it to be, with me the bad guy, them the good guys. There was this gray area of shared interest that we had already started to explore. So far, we had something in common in football. We were all talking and replying; it wasn't just me on the receiving end of rhetoric, abuse, and tactical questions. Relationships, however tenuous, can almost always be formed, and in the situation I was in this could only be good. I had engineered getting the water, and in that exchange I was doing the controlling.

    Well, there was no harm being optimistic.

    It went through my mind that maybe they were being friendly because it was all over now and the questioning was finished with. I was trying to think of all the optimistic things, but really you should be thinking of the pessimistic things, the worst-case scenarios, because then anything else is a bonus. At the end of the day they were just young lads.

    Dinger and I were the new kids in town, the commodities they wanted to have a look at, the new toys, the white-eyed prisoners. They'd probably looked on Dinger and me with a bit of awe, something to tell the grandchildren about. And now they'd seen us, spoken to us, taken the piss out of us, they were bored. They started to look tired, probably from the warmth of the heater and the excitement of the day. They tucked their weapons under their beds and got their heads down.

    My mind turned again to thoughts of escape. I couldn't get out of the handcuffs, and even if I could what was I going to do? Was I going to garofe them all and run away? Things like that just do not happen. It's a fantasy that comes out of films. Are you going to kill number one without number five hearing?

    My hand was fixed to the wall. I wasn't going anywhere. There was nothing I could reach from where I was. I would have to wait for the next stage of transit or some other opportunity.

    I was feeling a lot more at ease with my situation. I'd been caught, I'd gone through the initial drama, and now I was sitting in a warm room with people who weren't kicking the shit out of me. I wasn't going to be there for ever, but apart from the pain in my wrist, it was nice and relaxed. The people here didn't want to fill me in; they just wanted to talk about Gazza and Bobby Charlton. I had the hopeful thought-and even as I thought it I knew it was fruitless-that maybe this was the way ahead: that they were fed up with me and maybe I'd just be chucked in as one of Saddam's human shields.

    As the night wore on, my arm and hand started to hurt quite badly. I tried to keep my mind off the pain by going through the escape scenarios again, doing my appreciations.

    Out of the top of the window I could catch a little bit of the stars. It was a beautiful, clear night. I looked back at the sleeping jundies.

    If I managed to get away, could I get to Dinger? Where was he? I was assuming that he was on the camp somewhere, but was he next door? I couldn't hear anything. Was he along the veranda? I came to the conclusion that I'd have to grab the opportunity if it came, but I couldn't leave without making the effort to get hold of him. I knew that he'd be thinking exactly the same, as any member of the patrol would. Was it worth waiting until we were together? No, I'd grab any opportunity that came along. So-what was the first thing I was going to do? How was I going to find out where he was? Was I going to look through the windows for him or was I going to shout? Would his guards be awake?

    You've got to have a game plan and contingency plans. Hesitation is fatal. I would avoid being overt if possible-that's just another bit of madness from Hollywood. In the films they come at you one at a time so you can slot them neatly like ducks at a fun fair In real life everybody jumps in together and they kick you to pieces. It would have to be as covert as I could make it: just get out, get some firepower, get Dinger, get a vehicle. Easy! All that in an enclosed camp with troops, and me with maybe a 30-round magazine.

    Once we were out we would just have to move west. On foot or in a vehicle? Crosscountry or through the town? The drive from the culvert to the camp had been very short: we were still close to Syria. Our next transit was bound to take us into more secure areas, further from the border.

    I dozed off and woke in pain. My head was hurting, my body ached. I had to sort out the blood and snot in my nose.

    I heard hooting in the distance and the sound of vehicles. The big corrugated iron gates were being kicked open. It was still dark. People were walking along the veranda outside, guided by Ully lamps. They were talking. I felt a stab of apprehension. What was happening now? I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. One of the guards woke up and gave the other two a kick. They got to their feet.