Fire Hawk (2 page)

It had begun.

THE DUSTY YARD
behind the old, three-storey imports warehouse in eastern Baghdad had been little used since 1991 when the UN cut Iraq off from the outside world. Just large enough for a small truck to enter through its dilapidated wooden gates, it was shielded from prying eyes by a high breeze-block wall.

A small pickup in the dark green of the Iraqi army stopped in the alley at the back, a canvas awning covering its load area. Its uniformed driver undid the heavy, new-looking padlock on the gates and swung them open. Then he reversed in until the closed tailboard of the pickup was just a metre from a small doorway into the building. He quickly shut the gates again, glancing furtively at the empty neighbouring blocks for signs that his arrival might have been observed.

Then he went inside.

A few minutes later a different man emerged from the warehouse, also dressed in the dark green of Iraq's armed forces. Dark-haired and with a moustache that was a copy of his much-feared president's, he had the bearing of a middle-ranking officer. He stood beside the truck and listened.

It was early morning still. In the maze of mean streets
behind the warehouse lived some of Baghdad's poorest. For them another miserable day was beginning. The officer heard a baby cry, children shouting and mothers jabbering in efforts to shut them up. Smoke with an acid bite drifted into the yard. Many families, he knew, had been reduced to cooking on fires fuelled by refuse.

He checked the windows of neighbouring buildings, then, as satisfied as he could be that he was not being watched, he unfastened the tarpaulin at the rear of the truck and lowered the tailboard.

A minute later the pickup's driver reappeared, his left hand gripping the pinioned arm of a prisoner hooded by a black bag with a small breathing hole cut in it. The captive, who wore a white shirt, grey trousers and no shoes, stumbled as if his feet had been cut by broken glass.

‘Where am I going?' An English voice. Weak. ‘Where are you taking me?'

‘No speaking!'

‘I want to know, damn you!' Stronger now.

Silently the officer with the moustache stepped forward and punched him in the stomach. The Englishman buckled. As they bundled him into the rear of the pickup, his damaged shins scraped the tailboard and he yelped with pain. Crouching beside the prisoner on the ribbed metal floor the guard sat the Englishman upright, then unlocked the cuffs that held his hands behind his back.

‘Tch, tch,' he clucked. ‘I told you, no questions. It is better for you.'

He saw blood seeping through the prisoner's trousers. It had been several days since the beatings, but shins took a long time to heal. On the floor of the pickup was a stretcher. He told the Englishman to lie on it.

‘Look, what the hell is this? Where am I being taken?'

‘You soon see,' the guard whispered, tying the man's arms to the poles. ‘If you lucky this finish quick for you.'

The Englishman felt as if his heart had stopped. The bastards were going to kill him.

The green pickup wove though the narrow alleys of the market district, squeezing past dusty tinsmithies where shutters were being rolled up for the day's business. The driver braked frequently to avoid crushing boys balancing trays of tea. Pungent smells wafted in through the open window. The moustached officer sat silently beside the driver, glaring out of the window, revelling in the intimidating effect his green uniform had on those who saw it.

The vehicle's jolting on the rutted back alleys of Shaikh Omar turned the stretcher Sam Packer was lying on into a bed of nails. He was a strong, fit man, just under six feet tall, but a couple of weeks of being battered by what he'd assumed to be the Mukhabarat – the Iraqi secret police – had reduced his strength to a girl's. Above all else he wanted to see again. Since the day they'd grabbed him they'd removed the foul-smelling hood from his head just once, and then only for a desperate purpose. None of the training he'd been given upon joining the Intelligence Service six years earlier had prepared him for what they'd put him through. But he'd told them nothing of what they wanted to hear. To confess to being a spy meant the gallows, and death had no appeal for him. A terrible dread, however, told him that death was now to be his fate, confession or not.

It had been the middle of September when he'd arrived in Baghdad, but how many days had passed since then he had little idea. His visa application had given his employer as Entryline Exhibitions of Egham, Surrey. The job was genuine enough. So was the purpose of his visit: to survey arrangements for a trade fair the following year. But his second job was the one that mattered: listening out for hints of which European and Asian
businessmen had plans to satisfy Iraq's appetite for arms once UN sanctions were lifted.

The moment of his entrapment was a scene he'd relived countless times as he lay on the stone floor of the latrine-like cell waiting to be beaten again. It had happened out of the blue. No inkling. Sitting in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel on his fourth evening in Iraq, he'd been glancing at a week-old
Herald Tribune
a German had passed on to him when a middle-aged Iraqi had approached. Small and scruffy, with pale, strangely dead eyes, the man was a creature he'd never seen before.

‘For you, Mister Packer.'

It had been terrifying to hear his real name used, terrifying to hear it spoken by this stranger. The Iraqi had ignored his denials, leaning forward until his mouth was just inches from his ear. Then he'd begun to whisper, a warning that had taken Sam's breath away: ‘
Anthrax warheads – they have been taken outside Iraq and will soon be used
.'

Anthrax. Biological warfare. BW – the UN's living nightmare, the primary target now of its five-year-long inspection regime inside Iraq.
Will soon be used
. . . Where? And when? Before he could ask the man was gone.

His mind had cartwheeled. Was the warning true, or a trick? The man had known his name. Not Terry Malone, the name on his passport and the hotel register, but Packer. Sam Packer. And if they knew his real name, they knew he was a spy, and
they
must be Iraqi counter-intelligence. He'd felt caught in a spotlight. He'd scanned the lobby for watching eyes. The hotel was riddled with hidden cameras and microphones.
Someone
would have recorded the contact made with him. Slowly he'd stood up, slipping the envelope into the pocket of his jacket and making for the lifts.

Up in his bedroom, unmasked and a very long way
from home, he'd felt the first shiver of panic. He'd locked himself in the bathroom and hidden behind the shower curtain to avoid covert lenses. Inside the envelope he'd found a single sheet of lined note-paper. On it, two sentences of four words each.

Beware of Salah Khalil. He is Saddam's man.

The name had meant nothing to him. Two messages passed to him; one written, one verbal, one about a man, one about a plague. No obvious connection between the two.

He'd memorised the words on the note, then burned it, flushing the ash down the drain. Common sense had told him this was a trap – the Mukhabarat feeding him phoney intelligence in the hope of catching him passing it to London. Yet his guts had told him something else, that the messenger had been risking his neck to speak to him. That the man was in fear of his life. With no time in which to think, he'd concluded the warnings could be genuine, and since the danger from anthrax weapons was so great, the tip-off, however vague, had to be passed on fast. Direct communication with London was impossible. No phone was safe. But he'd remembered the German businessman who'd given him the newspaper, remembered he was heading home via Amman that evening.

He'd set to work fast, squatting on the loo seat and searching the newspaper for the crossword. Filling in blanks in its matrix, he'd scrawled K-H-A-L-I-L S-U-S-P-E-C-T and B-W A-T-T-A-C-K A-L-E-R-T – there'd been no time for code. Then he'd buried a phone number on the small ads page. Not the direct line for his controller at SIS – too risky if the German were to be stopped by the Mukhabarat – but a personal number, someone whose reaction to the message would be as instinctive as his.

Chrissie Kessler, his lover until three months ago.

Downstairs, the German had had the taxi door open when Sam found him.

‘Your paper. You wanted it back,' he'd declared, willing the man to understand. In a whisper he'd added, ‘Look inside. Later, not now. Ring the number on page six. It's London. Ask for Chrissie. Read her the crossword. Please.'

Not wavering for a moment, the German had climbed into the taxi and driven off.

Three minutes later, back in the hotel lobby, Packer had been arrested. The Mukhabarat had seen everything. A trap after all. Two men had hustled him to a car, one of them with shiny black hair and a Saddam moustache. And now, God knew how many days later, here he was, strapped to a stretcher in the back of some truck that smelled of piss, heading for whatever fate they'd decided on. He was helpless. On his own. They could do what they liked with him – and they would.

The bumping of the wheels that had been causing him such discomfort ended suddenly. The truck's tyres began humming on smooth tarmac. There was no more stopping for lights or crossroads. They were on some highway now. He forced himself to concentrate, to make an intelligent guess at what was happening. He knew what the pattern was. Foreigners arrested in the past had been interrogated in police cells, then moved after a farce of a trial to the main prison at Abu Ghraib, west of the city. Abu Ghraib. A place of misery and executions. His heart turned over again. Did they give prisoners fair warning when they were about to kill them, or did they just string them up?

In the days that had followed his arrest, the worst part for him had been the isolation. Not knowing what was happening or why. No comfort call from the Red Cross. No diplomatic visit from the Russians who looked after British interests in Baghdad. It was as if the outside world had forgotten he even existed. He knew that once caught,
a spy must expect to be disowned by his own people, but the reality of it had been hard to stomach.

At first they'd questioned him without physical violence. His interrogator who'd spoken in a plummy English accent acquired, he guessed, at a British staff college several years back, had demanded he confess to spying and name his contacts. But he'd denied everything, maintaining he truly was Terry Malone, an exhibition contractor. Then after a couple of days the atmosphere had changed. They'd begun to rough him up. Instead of the catch-all about spying, the interrogator, whom he'd nicknamed ‘Sandhurst', had posed a different question: what was it the middle-aged informant had whispered to him in the Rashid Hotel lobby?

The switch of question had thrown him. Why were they asking it if the informant had simply been acting on Mukhabarat orders – and he must have been, he'd reasoned, because he knew his real name. Only a counter-intelligence service could have broken his cover, and he had no clue how. He'd begun to wonder if the tip-off man had gone further than his Mukhabarat masters had intended and revealed a secret in that fear-laden whisper. He'd bluffed it out with his questioner, pretending the informant had simply exhorted him to read the letter then destroy it. The interrogator's response had been brutal. Concentrating first on the small of his back, the blows had knocked the air from his lungs. But he'd told them nothing. In later sessions they'd used sticks on his shins and glowing cigarettes on his chest. But he'd still said not a word about anthrax.

Between beatings they'd returned him to his cell and deprived him of sleep and nourishment. How often the cycle had been repeated he didn't know. He'd lost sense of time and place, floating on a cushion of pain, kept alive by his certainty that to admit anything at all would mean certain death. As his strength had faded, two
questions had circled unanswered in his head. How the hell had the Iraqis broken his cover? And had they received his message in London – had Chrissie ever been given it and had she passed it on?

Confirmation that the thin-faced informant must have exceeded his instructions had arrived soon after. They'd been interrogating Packer again, punctuating their questions with blows to his feet. Then suddenly they'd stopped, dragging him to another room and whipping the hood off. Dangling in front of him was a corpse, naked like himself. The anthrax messenger had been suspended from a rope by hands bound behind his back. His arms were half wrenched from their sockets, his eyes were cataract white, his belly black from the beating that had ruptured his innards.

‘This will happen to you, Packer,' Sandhurst had hissed from behind his head. ‘Unless you tell me what he told you.'

Back in the interrogation room his captors had forgotten to replace the hood at first. For the first time since his arrest he could see his surroundings. The room was some sort of store, large and bare, its windows blacked-out with cardboard. And for the first time too he had seen the faces of his tormentors.

Sandhurst, he'd finally realised, was the creature with the Saddam moustache who'd arrested him at the Rashid, dressed now in a dark green uniform which bore no insignia. The guard who'd carried out the beatings on Sandhurst's orders had been the second man at the arrest.

And there'd been a third person in the room, a man whose presence he'd been unaware of until then. A commanding figure sitting a few feet away from the others, motionless and silent, eyeing him with a brooding intensity, his dog-like face leathery and lined, his hair and mournful moustache a distinguished sandy-grey. This was the man in charge. The man who controlled his fate.
For several seconds he'd felt the intensity of his gaze, the commanding presence. This sand-blasted figure was a veritable Saladin of a man. And it was him, this one, he'd decided, who was so desperate to discover what the messenger had whispered to him.