Seventy-Two Virgins (6 page)

‘I guess those guys would rather Saddam was still in power,’ said the second Permanent Protectee indignantly, and took her husband’s hand.

And now Bluett’s top man, the sharpest sharpshooter in the US Army, was looking out from his eyrie across Parliament Square and trying to wish the bad feeling away.

Here and there across the crowd, the bleats were turning into an anti-American chorus; and it took Jason Pickel back to the rhythms of the cretinous song the Iraqis sang, the song of adulation of a man who had tortured and killed thousands, some said hundreds of thousands, of his own people.

‘Yefto, bildam! Eftikia Saddam!’

After that statue had been pulled down, on the day of the ‘liberation’, they had briefly and obligingly changed the lyric.

‘Yefto, bildam! Eftikia
—
Bush!’
they sang, ingratiatingly. But it didn’t have the same swing. It didn’t last.

The trouble with Baghdad was that the fear never let up. You couldn’t sleep at night because it was so hot, and they couldn’t fix the air con in the Al-Mansouria Palace, one of Uday’s little pied-à-terres, a hideous place constructed of marble, crystal and medium-density fibreboard. And even if they had been able to fix the air con, they wouldn’t have gotten no electricity, because no one seemed able to get the generators to work; and even if the generators had worked, the juice wouldn’t have made it across town, seeing as people kept ripping up the copper cables, and barbecuing off the plastic, and melting down the metal. And then the self-same looters, or their relatives, came and screamed outside your compound, and cursed America.

And when you had to go on patrol, in your Humvee, the crowds of protesters would part sullenly, and the sweat would run so badly down your legs that you would get nappy rash, even if you never got off the Humvee, and no one, to be honest, was very keen to get off the Humvee.

‘We’re going into the Garden of Eden, boys,’ his commanding officer had told them as they flew over Turkey in the C-130s. ‘It’s the cradle of mankind, so I want you to treat the place with respect, and remember that these are an ancient people, and they want our help.’

Garden of Eden? thought Jason after he had been there for three weeks. Call it hell on earth.

The economy was shot to hell, the Baathist police wouldn’t turn up for work; and almost the worst thing of all was the food. Wasn’t this meant to be the Fertile Crescent? Surely this was a place so rich in alluvial salts that it had first occurred to mankind to scratch a bone in the earth and plant seeds.

And all they could get to eat was shoarma and chips, chicken and chips, shoarma and chips, chicken and chips. And you know what the Iraqis really loved, their number one smash hit recipe? They called it Khantooqi Fried. It was funny: back home, people complained about the imposition of American values on an ancient civilization.

Well, there was one delicacy that every Iraqi short-order chef could produce, and that was the brown-grey salty batter in which they caked the corpses of their poor, scraggy, underfed roosters. Long before General Tommy Franks, there was one American military figure who had conquered Iraq, and that was Colonel Sanders.

After a while McDonald’s did arrive in the barracks. They installed Coke machines. The troops’ skin began to suffer. All the guys were getting seriously homesick, and they were only allowed five minutes per week on the phone.

All of it might have been tolerable, however, had it not been for the streets. He hated the streets, walking among these skinny and malnourished people as though you were from an alien planet. You felt like Judge Dredd, with your big padded helmet, your flak jacket, your chest a kind of mobile drugstore: watch, radio, aspirin, scissors.

Always there was the heart-thud of anxiety when the cars cruised towards your station. Everyone was afraid of the guys with the mad eyes, who ran in from the crowds and
pop pop pop
they fired or
ka-boom
they blew their killer waistcoats. No damn good a flak jacket was going to do you, not against a man who really wanted to whack you.

Pickel had been standing on the mound outside the Al-Mansouria Palace, watering his geraniums. Actually, he wasn’t watering them, he was Diet Coke-ing them, since some clerk’s error in the Pentagon meant they were supplied with more Diet Coke than bottled water. The geraniums liked Diet Coke, even if it was bad for people, and Jason just loved the way they grew, the way they responded to him. He loved their geranium smell when he broke their stalks, to make them grow better. He stroked their pinks and reds and whites that mimicked his sunburnt Germanic skin. He marvelled at their long woody stalks, and thought how much bigger they were than the geraniums at home.

Thing was, he was worried about how things were at home. He hadn’t talked to his wife for more than twenty minutes in the last month, and he missed her.

Anyhow, he was Diet Coke-ing the blooms, when the Humvee with Jerry Kuchma rolled up. They were already yelling for help as soon as they came in sight, and when they braked poor Jerry Kuchma’s helmet rolled out into the yellow dust of the street. There was a big nametape stitched to the brim, as if he were at school, saying that it belonged to Kuchma, blood type A neg. But Jerry wasn’t going to be needing a transfusion now. You only had to look at the exit wound in his back, when they rolled him over, to see that the blood wouldn’t stay inside him.

Pickel was so horrified that he just stood there, and the only thing he managed to say was ‘Hey’. He said ‘hey’ because at one point he was worried that the stretcher guys were going to damage his blooms.

But the worst bit was when the English journalist came. Why the hell he had been picked to come to London he did not know. He’d told his superiors.

He’d explained how it left him with a rancorous feeling of resentment towards anyone with one of those smooth-talking freaking British accents. If Jason Pickel had been asked to do a word association test, and you had said the word ‘British’, he would have said ‘rat’ or ‘fink’ or ‘shithead’.

So he was on geranium patrol, a week after Jerry Kuchma died, and it was meant to be extra-tight security because of some pow-wow or shindig inside. A lot sheikhs and mullahs and fat Iraqi businessmen were trying to sort out some blindingly obvious problem, that should have occurred to the Administration before it invaded the country, such as who was going to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of Iraq, and who was going to set monetary policy, and who was going to be in charge of the Iraqi army, now that it had been routed, and who was going to be Foreign Minister, now that Tariq Aziz was being held out at the airport, or how they were going to get the air con back, that kind of thing.

Then this guy walks down the street towards him, a white guy, wearing one of those special Giraldo Rivera war-zone waistcoats, with the pouches. Except that he had nothing in the pouches, and he was wearing stained chinos and trainers.

Thing Jason really noticed about him was his hair. His hair was like an Old Testament prophet, all silvery and swept back. But the detail that mattered, the thing Jason fixed his eye on with almost romantic excitement, was what was clamped to his ear.

‘Yuh, yuh,’ the man was saying, ‘OK, I’ll file 400 words about the scene of the American torture orgies. OK I understand. Listen, if you’re tight for space, I’ll just do 300.’

The reporter hung up, and then directed a look at Jason that was grave and charming. Jason knew he was going to be corrupted.

‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ began the reporter.

‘No trouble at all,’ said Jason.

‘My name is Barry White, and I am a reporter for the
Daily Mirror
of London, and I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me.’

‘I’ll surely do what I can,’ said Jason.

‘I’m trying to track down General Axelrod — hang on,’ —he pretended to consult his notes — ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant Axelrod Zimmerman.’

‘I am afraid I don’t know Lieutenant Zimmerman,’ said Pickel. ‘You’ll have to consult with the media department if you want to arrange an interview. You need to go back to the football stadium.

‘No, it’s all right,’ said the Moses-like reporter. ‘I’ve just come from the media department and they said that Lieutenant Zimmerman would be expecting me here.’

‘Sir, I am afraid I can’t let anyone in here.’

‘This is Uday’s palace, isn’t it, the one they call the love-nest?’

‘It surely is, Mr White sir, but like I say, if you want to see that stuff, you’ve got to get clearance. Haven’t you all done that torture story, anyhow?’

‘Well, there’s just a detail I’d like to check, and I was told that Lieutenant Zimmerman… Tell you what, I’ll ring them up now, and you can talk to them . .

Jason Pickel felt his mouth go dry. He knew he was in the presence of a pusher. It was six days since he had talked to Wanda. Anyway, he needed to know about the soccer matches his kid was playing in, that kind of thing.

The Brit was dialling the number, and then he was offering the phone to him. Jason could see the screen lit up, the plump rectangles indicating a full battery, a clear signal. It was a Thuraya, a satphone. Jesus, he ached for a quick conversation.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but my regulations state that I may not talk in public on a civilian telephone. One of our guys was killed doing that.’

‘But that’s absurd,’ said Barry White, with the look of a headmaster uncovering a case of fourth form bullying. ‘Why don’t we just nip in there and you can use the phone in private?’

That was when the disaster happened, said Jason to Indira, as they sat on the duckboards, on the roof of the House of Commons, surrounded by pigeonshit.

What disaster? asked Indira. But Jason looked brooding, and in her imagination she supplied the answer.

It was the usual thing. Soldier rings home unexpectedly. Crack of dawn. Wife picks up. Sleepy male voice in background.

Before this conversation could go any further, there was another noise, said Jason, outside the gatehouse he was supposed to be guarding. It was like someone quickly popping bubble wrap next to your ear. It was the shooting, and cheering.

And then there was someone else yelling, almost screaming, in English, that unless someone else stopped now, and got out of the car, he was going to open fire.

By this time Barry White was running back outside, and Jason Pickel was following. When his ex-wife was later to sue the US Department of Defense for traumatic stress, it was on the grounds that he had failed to terminate the conversation, and she heard the whole thing.

But now there was a new noise in Parliament Square. The first BMW 750 motorbike had arrived at the traffic lights by St Margaret’s, the forerunner of the precursors of the harbingers of the outriders of the cavalcade. A blue light flashed weakly in the sun. The cop waved a gauntleted arm.

Indira was glad of the interruption.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

0854 HRS

And now that he could actually hear the police sirens, Dragan Panic began to wonder whether he had chosen the right place for succour.

The Serb tow-truck operative looked at the men standing around him on the building site. They observed his face, pasty, sweaty, the moles like fleshy Rice Krispies that were the legacy of the air pollution that had been part of childhood in communist Eastern Europe.

As soon as he had gasped ‘Where is police?’ he saw their burning eyes, hook noses and hairy black eyebrows that joined in the middle. He knew who they were.

They were Skiptars. They were Muslims, almost certainly from Pristina. And they knew who he was.

He was a Serb.

‘Here is not police,’ said the leading asylum-seeking brickie, whose family farm had been torched in a place called Suva Reka.

They pressed round him, breathing silently, as a bunch of bullocks will press round a terrified picnicker, and drove him backwards.

Handsomely rewarded under the terms of the Private Finance Initiative, the gang of Skiptars had efficiently driven in the piles of the new ministry. They had sunk huge corrugated sheets of steel into the grey loam of London, and now they were pouring lagoons of concrete between the sheets. Towards one of these pits of gravelly slurry they now herded their enemy.

‘What do you want, Serb?’

Dragan saw it all. In fifty years’ time this building would be torn down for reconstruction by the next lot of asylum-seekers, from China, or Pluto, or wherever, and they would break up these concrete blocks to find his whitened bones.

He dodged and ran. Then he tripped, and fell face first in the mud, and then he was up and running again, back down Horseferry Road towards the sirens and the chugging of another helicopter.

Of course he wouldn’t admit it, not even to Grover, but Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was deeply cheesed off by the arrival of the Black Hawk.

It was his airspace. He had sovereignty. But the Black Hawk had somehow bullied away his Twin Squirrel, in a humiliating vindication of their brand names.

‘Are we going to tell them about it?’ asked Grover. He was thinking of the ambulance.

‘Let’s just concentrate on finding the thing.’

Stuck in the gummy shade of London’s plane trees, the ambulance was waiting at yet another traffic light, this one at the back of Parliament Square by a statue of Napier. It was getting hotter in the cabin; the rusty metallic smell of freshly spilt blood rose from the back, and Jones was conscious of a sense of mounting disorder.

Despite their enormous breakfast, Habib was now eating a tub of hummus, spooning it down with a tongue depressor he had found in the glove compartment.

‘Why do you eat it now?’ asked Haroun.

‘Show me where it is written a man may not eat on the eve of battle.’

‘But we are all about to die.’

‘We’ll be lucky,’ said Jones bitterly.

He tried to concentrate on all the things he had to get right in the next five minutes.

On leaving Parliament Square, the plan was to turn left up Whitehall, and then, just before the Cenotaph, to turn right at the Red Lion pub. There Dr Adam would supply them with a parking permit.