The Company We Keep (30 page)

“Nobody cares about the place. It’s way in the middle of the desert. There’s no need to worry at all.”

The next day we hire an old Range Rover and driver and head to the border to see for ourselves if it’s as easy to cross as Marwan says. We’re about sixty miles outside Damascus when the Range Rover starts to whine and lose power. The driver pulls over to the side of the road, gets out to open the hood, and is met by a cloud of smoke. As Bob and I get out to assess the damage, a truck with Iraqi plates stops. A balding, heavyset driver climbs down from his cab with a bottle of water in each hand, and runs over and douses the engine fire.

We’re all standing there studying the charred engine block, when our driver turns to the Iraqi and tells him we’re Americans. The Iraqi’s face turns crimson with fury. He yells at us, “Why are
you bombing us?” He stomps back to his truck, climbs in, rolls down the window, and shouts as he drives away, “We are poor Iraqis only trying to make a living.”

Bob’s trying to call for help on the cell phone, but there’s no coverage. I’m the one who sees a lopsided, rose-colored bus coming down the road from the border. Bob steps out in the road to flag it down, and the driver agrees to take us to Damascus. As we climb in, Bob tells our driver we’ll send help. The Iraqis on the bus smile at us and make room so we can sit together.

The next morning while Bob goes out to rent a car—this time without a driver—I buy a Syrian map from the gift shop at our hotel and sit down to study it. It shows what look like spur trails crisscrossing the desert, a few even cutting across the Iraqi border. These must be the routes Marwan’s talking about. When I show Bob, he says that maybe it’s like the border between France and Switzerland, porous, with no one caring who comes and goes. I’m thinking,
Yeah, right
, but agree to take another drive to find out.

After an hour and a half we catch sight of the border post from a rise in the road. Bob pulls over to see if we can spot any tracks in the desert. We’re parked only a minute when a Bedouin with a tethered female camel and its baby come out of a
wadi
walking toward us. I ask Bob if we should ask if the Bedouin knows about the spur tracks, but when Bob opens the car door, the wind snatches up our map and sends it across the desert at a full gallop.

Amman, Jordan:
BOB

T
here’s this to be said for a professional lifetime spent in the company of eccentrics, rogues, and scoundrels: I have someone to call on for just about every occasion, and now, just when we need one, a prince of the Jordanian royal family. There are hundreds of them, but this one knows the back alleys of his country better than any. Inside the family he’s nicknamed the Black Prince.

As soon as the Black Prince sees Dayna and me, he shouts from across the Hyatt’s lobby, “To lunch, to lunch.”

The Black Prince is a big, baggy man, with a big Hemmingway beard. In black fatigues and black combat boots, he looks the character he is. I first met him in the mid-nineties, and we’ve kept up ever since.

“I’m famished,” he says. His accent is English public school.

The three of us file into the Hyatt’s cavernous restaurant, where a sprawling buffet waits. Dozens of servers stand at the ready, but we’re the only guests.

“It’s fixed,” the prince says, sitting down with a plate of pasta and a Pepsi. “Can you be ready in two nights?”

The plan is that the prince’s driver will meet us in front of our hotel and drive us to al-Ruwayshid, a small town in the Jordanian desert. From there the Bedouin will take us north through the desert to a place where they regularly cross the border, about ten miles north of the Baghdad-Amman highway. They’ll walk us
across the border, and on the other side we’ll be met by fellow Bedouin who’ll drive us to Rutba, a town back on the Baghdad highway. Malik’s people will meet us there.

“Why will they do this for us?” Dayna asks.

“I promised to pay them a hundred sheep,” the prince answers.

I agree to the Black Prince’s plan, but need a reality check. As soon as we’re back at the InterContinental, I call another Jordanian prince, an adviser to the king. That night he sends his car to pick up Dayna and me for dinner.

This prince’s house is outside Amman, in the royal compound in the middle of snow-covered hills and pine forests. On walls of the prince’s house are paintings you find in art books with the notation that they belong to a private collection—no name offered.

After dinner the prince takes us into the glass-cased library. There are so many books that they’re Dewey-decimal categorized. On one wall I notice a framed, glass-encased Kalashnikov. The action is gold-plated. The prince stands behind me, telling me Saddam gave it to him a couple of years ago.

We sit in a corner with soft leather chairs, and the prince offers us tea. Like his cousin the Black Prince, this prince speaks English with a public-school accent. He went to Sandhurst. But his sophistication comes as much from spending his life in such places as London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, and Crans-Montana. I’m sure he’s read and reread the thousands of books in his library, almost all classics. No wonder the Jordanian royal family is the West’s window on the Middle East.

“So you want to see the war,” the prince says. “And stay with our friends.”

The prince has known Malik for years. Malik’s father, the Dulaym chief, was a good friend of King Hassan.

“It’s fine. But don’t go in with the Bedouin,” he says. “If you
absolutely must be there before the American army arrives, it should be by helicopter.”

The prince gives me the private number for the deputy chief of Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, saying he’ll call him in advance.

As we move to leave, the prince asks if we’re sure we want to do this. When I say yes, he offers us a story. A couple of years ago he went to Baghdad to meet Saddam. After the meeting, Saddam’s son Uday invited the prince to go hunting. The prince imagined standing on the bank of the Euphrates with a shotgun, waiting for a flock of ducks to fly over. Instead, Uday landed in front of the prince’s guesthouse in an Mi-8 helicopter. There was no way to refuse.

As the helicopter approached Lake Thar Thar, Uday handed the prince a Kalashnikov, pointing to the ground where deer were scattering from the thump-thump of the rotors. The prince declined to join in the slaughter, but Uday emptied a magazine on the deer. Afterward the helicopter landed lakeside, where a small boat waited. Out on the lake, Uday pulled a stick of dynamite out of a pouch, lit it with his cigar, and threw it into the water. There was a muted explosion, and half a dozen dead fish rose to the surface. Uday took off his pouch and jumped overboard. When his head came up out of the water, he had a dead fish clutched in his teeth.

“You see why I don’t want to put you in the hands of just any Iraqi,” the prince says.

The next morning I call the GID deputy. He’s polite enough, but says now that the bombing campaign has started, it’s too dangerous to fly a helicopter to Ramadi. That puts us back to crossing the border with the Bedouin.

In the InterContinental business center we find a computer
terminal so we can read our e-mail. There’s one from Marwan saying he needs to talk to me right away.

I go upstairs for the satellite phone and come back down so I can call from poolside. With no water in the pool, there’s no one around to overhear me.

“There’s someone who’d like to meet you at the compound,” Marwan says.

Marwan starts talking about family obligation, friendship, how much Malik and the Dulaym are respected in Iraq. “It’s at times like this that we all need to help each other,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” I say, interrupting him. “Who is it you want me to meet?”

“It’s someone important.”

It’s obvious he’s not going to tell me on the phone who it is. I can only assume it’s some Iraqi political figure.

“He understands I’d be meeting him for ABC News and not my former organization?” I ask.

Marwan says he does. But even as Marwan says it, I wonder if he still doesn’t suffer from the once-in, always-in syndrome you come across in the Middle East: the belief that CIA operatives never leave the CIA, no matter what they say.

Back inside the lobby, a frenzy of journalists are getting ready to go into Iraq the moment Iraqi forces abandon their posts on the border. Everyone’s got one eye glued to cable news as they talk on their cell phones.

Dayna and I find a quiet corner in the hotel’s Mexican restaurant. Journalists are three deep at the bar, drinking, telling stories about other wars they’ve covered, the close calls they’ve had, how they’ve smelled enough cordite to last them a lifetime. I suspect it’s not all bravado. Right now there are dozens of them in Baghdad, covering its impending fall. More are embedded with coalition forces.

That night, while waiting for the Black Prince’s driver to show
up, Dayna and I help the ABC News team pack up for Baghdad—they’ll convoy in as soon as Baghdad falls. Looking at the mountain of camera cases, antennas, water, and food, you might get the impression that ABC itself is about to liberate the city. There’s not a lot we can do, and Dayna and I go to our room to finish our own packing. The driver will call us from the lobby.

By midnight there’s still no sign of the driver, and I can’t get the Black Prince on the phone. The next morning we stick close to the hotel, constantly checking the front desk for messages. There’s nothing, and the Black Prince’s phone is still off.

On April 11, still no sign of the driver, we go down to the hotel’s business center to read our e-mail. It’s the usual junk, but there’s one from Marwan, the subject one word, “Malik.” The text isn’t much longer. I read it twice before I comprehend what it says. I call Dayna over. She stands behind me and grabs my shoulder when she gets to where it reads, “Malik and family are no more. They were killed this morning in an air strike.” Dayna slumps to the floor, her head in her hands.

I call Marwan. He’s barely able to talk, but finally says Malik’s house was hit early this morning with six American cruise missiles, killing sixteen family members. Malik, who was holding his two-year-old daughter, died instantly.

Baghdad, Iraq:
BOB

O
n April 13, after the Amman-Baghdad road is taken by American forces, we make it into Iraq—in the ABC convoy.

On the twelve-hour drive in, I make friends with our Iraqi driver, an old habit that pays off when we get to Baghdad’s Sheraton and find there’s no running water. The driver arranges to have a dozen plastic containers of water brought up to our room on the seventeenth floor. A makeshift shower and a toilet that flushes make a world of difference.

We’re exhausted, but we can’t sleep. Dayna and I stand at the window and look at the dark city lit only by the orange glow of burning buildings. F-16s pass overhead on their way north on bombing raids. We have a sense we’re watching history being made, but don’t understand how.