The Horse at the Gates (54 page)

When they arrived at their destination the shackles were removed and the prisoners were forced from the plane by guards in camouflaged uniforms, their heads covered with chequered shemagh’s, only their hard eyes visible through the slit of the cloth. Blows rained down, driving the frightened prisoners out onto the blistering heat of the runway, where the blast from the massive turbofan propellers whipped the dirt into a stinging, choking storm.

Danny cowered amongst the others, burying himself in the middle of the herd of terrified prisoners as they were beaten to the side of the runway and down a steep embankment. Behind them the plane roared and Danny crouched at the bottom of the slope, watching the huge tail fin flash past in a cloud of yellow dust, his eyes tracking the giant transporter as it lifted off and drifted away into the cloudless sky.

When the dust finally settled, Danny saw the camp for the first time. Row after row of white canvas tents stretched away into the distance, shimmering in the heat haze. There were no fences, no watchtowers or patrolling guards, just the tents, the flat desert and the unrelenting sun. Leather sticks whipped his arms and legs and he ran with the others as the screaming guards corralled them towards a large military compound, this one surrounded by a razor wire fence. Beyond the wire were rows of single storey huts and an assortment of military vehicles parked beneath huge sheets of camouflage netting that sagged beneath the heat of the sun. Inside the compound nothing moved, the occupants clearly avoiding moving around in the blistering heat. Danny was the first to faint, only to be brought back to consciousness by the boot of an angry guard. They were ordered to strip and prison uniforms were issued: black cotton smocks and baggy pants. Danny discovered later that black made it easier for the guards to locate the bodies of escapees against the white sands of the desert. Plenty of prisoners had tried, heading out into the wilderness under cover of darkness, but only death waited for them out beyond the endless horizon. Escape was nothing more than a dream.

They say the first month of captivity is always the hardest. For Danny, those early weeks in the desert were worse than anything he’d previously experienced. Wracked by his first bout of dysentery, confined to a hospital tent populated with the dead and dying and swarming with flies, he’d sweated by day, squirming in his own filth, and shivered by night, huddled beneath a thin blanket while his bowels emptied themselves with alarming regularity. Too weak to move or speak, Danny silently begged Death to take him soon.

And Death was close by during that first month. Danny had seen him many times, mostly at night, lurking around the hospital tent, the pale skull glimpsed beneath the dark hood as he silently circled the dying. As the fever consumed him, Danny often saw him in the shadows, the macabre grin, the bony digit that beckoned him, before the apparition melted into the darkness once more.

Waking was no better, merely a continuation of the nightmare. The tent heated up like an oven during the day and the medical staff, all fellow prisoners, had little or no real training. As an Infidel Danny was always last to be treated. There were no drugs, no pain relief of any kind, just survival or death. If you walked out of the hospital tent it was Allah’s will and nothing else, so when Danny finally managed to drag himself out of his filthy cot the other inmates were astounded. The word spread quickly. Rarely did anyone survive a stay in the hospital tent, Malik told him later. Those that did were looked on almost reverently, as if the hand of God himself had touched them.

Danny didn’t know anything about that. All he knew was that one morning he’d woken up and felt better. A lot better. The fever had broken, the stomach pains and the chronic diarrhoea gone. Only the thirst remained, but that was quickly sated by donations from some of the other prisoners, eager for their charity to be recognised by the same God should sickness befall them too.

That’s when he’d first met Malik, while recuperating. They’d met before, Malik informed him, while Danny was in the grip of his fever and the Egyptian had tended to him as best he could. Malik had been at the camp for nearly two years, a tall, thin man, his beard flecked with grey, the skin on his bald head burned almost black by the sun. His nose was twisted and his front teeth were missing, the result of several beatings when he’d first arrived.
No one likes a smart-arse,
he’d chuckled. Malik had been good to Danny, educating him on life inside tent city. He explained the rules, written and unwritten, the procedures and customs. As the infamous Luton bomber, Danny was a target for many of the inmates, but Malik managed to keep him out of the way, finding different tents for Danny to sleep in, sticking to safe areas within the sprawling canvas ghetto, disguising him. Danny wasn’t as scared as he might have been in the past. He’d looked death in the face, literally, and lived to tell the tale. The prospect of dying just didn’t fill him with dread anymore.

Danny was never forced to convert to Islam. In the early days, just before dawn, he’d hear the call to prayer amplified through tall speaker posts dotted across the camp. He’d watch Malik and the others in his tent rise quietly and gather their prayer mats, walking out to the dusty square at the centre of the camp, where the huge stone Qibla pillar rose out of the desert floor to point towards the Holy City of Mecca. Occasionally he’d follow, watching proceedings from the relative coolness of the morning shade as thousands prayed quietly, as one, the low murmur of their voices carried on the stillness of the dawn, their bodies rising and falling in devoted supplication. As time passed Danny began to crave the peace it appeared to bring, the comfort, the knowledge that a higher power had a plan for each and every one of them. In the months that followed Danny spoke to the Imams, in his halting Arabic and through Malik, about his innocence, his journey of self-discovery. He took the testimony of faith, the
Shahada,
in front of the
Qibla
and a small group of friends, publicly entering the fold of Islam, all previous sins forgiven. Things were different after that. He was no longer looked on with contempt, his victory over disease and subsequent conversion granting him the respect of his fellow brothers. Like many of the other inmates, he shaved his head but kept his beard, the sun turning his skin a dark brown. He’d become one of them, a devotee of the one true faith, the very thing he’d once detested. Sometimes, late at night as he lay on his cot, he thought of the regulars in the King’s Head and wondered what they would make of him now. The thought made him smile.

It was Malik who’d persuaded the gang masters to let Danny join him on one of the grave digging teams. His divine salvation from death had earned Danny a somewhat unique status around the camp and Malik’s request was granted. It was hard work, gruesome at times, but it was infinitely better than working the mine. If you died in there your body was hurled down a disused shaft. If you died in the camp, Malik and Danny would be called to transport the corpse by donkey and cart to the graveyard a mile across the desert.

And business was booming. Men here died in a variety of different ways: disease, heat stroke, heart attacks. Then there were the screams that rang out across the desert night, the murders, the knifings and strangulations, the religious punishments. The mornings always brought fresh corpses. There was never any investigation, no inquiry into the cause of the violence. This was a prison, after all, one never visited by officials from Brussels. Or, as Danny had begun to suspect, even heard of.

At the end of each day, when they had fed and watered the donkey, Danny and Malik would eat quietly around the campfire then disappear into the darkness. Often they would sit up near the runway, on the embankment overlooking the camp. They would watch the fires glowing across the desert and talk about home, about their past lives. Danny often wondered if his father was still alive, the pain of uncertainty an almost physical thing. Not one letter in years, and no opportunity to write one either. There were no phones, no radio or TV, no way of knowing what was going on beyond the horizon other than the gossip of the new arrivals. For Danny, the lack of contact with home was punishment far beyond cruelty.

They’d watch the night breeze ruffle the tents in gentle waves across the camp, the tiny figures below gathered around the myriad of cooking fires, and wonder how their deaths had been reported. A fight maybe, disease, an accident. Because both Danny and Malik believed they were officially dead. Prisoners only arrived here, never leaving for any reason, the cargo flights to the north always empty, no appeals, no parole boards, nothing. When Malik had suggested that the camp didn’t formally exist, that they might as well be wearing striped pyjamas and a yellow star, Danny had shivered in the darkness. Malik was right – they’d been sent to a death camp. And it was only a matter of time before they all ended up buried beneath its shifting sands.

The hot sun was beginning to dip towards the horizon as Danny wandered between the tents, carefully stepping over the guide ropes that crisscrossed his path. He didn’t go up on the embankment that much anymore, the relentless fatigue that assaulted his mind and body sending him to his cot much earlier these days. Lately he’d found his memory fading, his sandals catching the tent ropes once too often. Exhaustion was starting to become a permanent state of being.

He skirted around the last tent and the empty desert opened up before him. A mile away the burial ground shimmered like liquid in the distance. He shielded his eyes against the setting sun, spotting several other prisoners making their way to and from the gravesite, their silhouettes quivering in the heat haze. He took a disciplined nip from the water bottle on his belt, wiped the sweat from the grey stubble of his head, then climbed aboard the wooden cart. He gave the listless donkey a gentle slap of the reins and set off across the desert floor.

By the time he reached the cemetery the shadows were beginning to lengthen, stretching across the sand like black fingers. Danny tugged on the reins and brought the cart to a halt. He jumped down and gave the donkey a pat on its bony flanks. Only two bodies since noon, and a waiting trio of Somali grave diggers gave him a hand to unload the white-shrouded corpses. The cemetery was kept neat and tidy in accordance with Islam’s respect for the departed, and many prisoners spent time amongst the long rows of graves, praying quietly or reading the inscriptions on the white-painted boards that served as headstones. Danny and the others used a handcart to transport the bodies to the far edge of the cemetery, where fresh graves bordered the empty desert. Danny liked this spot. It was peaceful here, far from the camp, like standing on an empty shoreline, an unchartered sea stretching away before him. They buried the dead and a few words from the Qur’an were spoken. Danny slapped at the graves with his shovel while the others hammered white headboards into the dirt. The sand had already found its way into the grooves of the roughly-hewn letters.

The Somalis packed up and left but Danny stayed on for a while, watching the blood-red sun dip beyond the distant horizon. He thought of Malik, as he did every day at sunset, remembering his smiling face as he hugged a distraught Danny farewell and headed out across the desert. Malik, a quiet man who’d always believed in Danny’s innocence, who’d befriended him and kept him alive, who couldn’t bear the separation from his family a moment longer. They’d never found his friend’s body, and Danny imagined he was back in the world somewhere, reunited with his loved ones, safe, happy. Free. And despite his sudden and unexpected departure, despite the loss of his friend, Malik had left something precious behind – hope.

The sun was sinking fast now, the sky to the east turning a deeper shade of blue. It would soon be time for evening prayers, then food. The twice-daily meals were deficient of any real nutrition and water was carefully rationed, each prisoner receiving not much more than a few litres a day. The whole operation was pared down to the bone, hence a constant supply of fresh labour and the ever-expanding cemetery. The longer a prisoner survived, the weaker he got and the less chance he had to make a run for it. Danny had been here for almost six years now and time and age were working against him. He was dropping weight and his strength was fading. Soon his job would go to someone younger, stronger. He had to make his move soon.

The plan would take a little more time to finalise. He’d been watching the runway for months now, the daily cargo flights, the distracted ground crew, the listless guards, numbed by the boredom of their duties. Certain details needed ironing out but there was a chance, a very slim chance, that it could work. He gave himself another week to prepare, to steal a little more food, get a little stronger, before he executed his plan. If he could make it to Cairo, make it back to civilisation, then he had a shot at getting home. His Arabic was fluent, his appearance and familiarity with Islamic custom more than passable. All he needed then were money and documents. And he would kill for those.

Because somebody had to pay, had to be held accountable for the pain and suffering that Danny and his father had endured since that terrible day in September all those years ago. The conspiracy had been vast, the orchestrators working in the shadows, targeting innocents like Danny, like the victims of Whitehall and Luton. Sully was one of them. There would be others too. And Danny would find them. Or die trying.