Sandstealers. Ben Brown
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April 1990. I’d never wanted anything so much. Now? Two Gulf wars and a fucked-up occupation later, I don’t think I’d care if I never came back.’
Mohammed stood next to him and surveyed the scene, not with Danny’s weariness but the alert eyes of an intelligence officer: scrutinising faces, analysing cars, studying young policemen behind their sandbags—were they really police, or insurgents in impeccable disguise? Nothing was as it seemed.
A teenage pump attendant slid in the nozzle.
‘Can’t believe you forgot to fill up last night,’ said Danny.
‘I told you, it was Farrah’s birthday.’
Danny felt bad. He should have sent her a present. He’d remembered with all Mohammed’s other kids.
‘But even so, I mean, for fuck’s sake.’
Danny hated it when things went wrong. It made him feel the whole story, the whole day, might be cursed. He glanced at his watch. They were already running late for the rendezvous with Abu Mukhtar, and he was uneasy.
‘How long till we get there?’
‘Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.’
‘I hope you can find this al-Talha, or whatever they call it. It’s not even on the map.’
‘No problem—we ask people.’
As a rule, Danny liked to have a ‘chase car’, a second vehicle following behind, which could rescue them if they broke down in the badlands. Today, Saad, who usually drove it, was sick with an upset stomach—or claimed he was. Either way, it meant they were travelling alone.
First the chase car, then the petrol. Bad omens, thought Danny.
Mohammed’s hawkish eyes continued their search for anything that was different or out of place. It was how he lived these days, even in his own street in Karada—always watching.
‘You are sure you want to go there?’ Mohammed asked Danny for at least the third time. ‘You’re risking your life, you know.’
‘Sure I’m sure. I risk it whenever I leave Baghdad—or the hotel, for that matter. Sometimes I feel so damned incarcerated.’
‘No, no! Liberated!’
Mohammed was a fervent supporter of the invasion and endearing in his optimism. Just look at it like this, he’d insist: we’re an abused child, and abused children can be ungrateful. They need time, and a little love from their foster parents. You Americans, you must stay however long you want! Danny would reply that he didn’t see them as ‘his’ Americans at all.
‘At least when the old man was in charge I could walk the streets, day or night, without being bundled into a car and decapitated on the Internet,’ said Danny.
‘So why have we come here?’
‘Because I guess it’s worth the risk. I have cast-iron guarantees.’
Now it was Mohammed’s turn to be cynical.
‘You know what they say about such guarantees in my country? The cast iron is always full of bullet holes. I don’t want to die.’
‘Me neither, you idiot.’
Danny put an affectionate arm around him.
‘You are a single man,’ said Mohammed. ‘Me, I have a wife and five children. Nothing can happen to me.’ Mohammed had got into the habit of kissing each member of his family whenever he left home, in case he never returned.
‘And nothing will, my friend, nothing will.’
‘Maybe you should have some children of your own, Mr Daniel.’
Children! Why was it people were always telling him to have them? Didn’t they realise a free-wheeling, fast-moving war correspondent like him couldn’t be weighed down by a family? And anyway, who the hell would want to be his son or daughter? What kind of burden would it be to have a father who might come home one day in a coffin? It didn’t mean Danny disliked kids—actually he rather enjoyed them. But other people’s, not his own.
Danny thought about the happy moments he’d shared at Mohammed’s home. His last visit there had been a journey to an Iraq that was desperate to retain the appearance of normality. In his garden, Mohammed had barbecued masgouf, the delicious fishy smoke of it wafting around him as his wife Sabeen sprinkled it with lemon juice. Soon she had the table sagging under a relentless supply of her other favourite dishes: fasolada soup, baba ghanoush, eggplant salad, falafel, pitta and houmous, all washed down with a bottle of ferocious arak. Before they ate, Mohammed had sat on a red plastic garden chair while, one by one, his offspring piled on top of him until the legs buckled and they all toppled on to the grass in a hopeless, giggling heap.
Danny had entertained all five children, especially Farrah—six years old, the youngest and cutest. Under a lemon tree, he’d held her hands and swung her round so that she flew like a plane, horizontal and in dizzying circles. She’d screamed in ecstasy, and everyone applauded but now, in his anxiety about the trip to al-Talha, he had forgotten little Farrah’s birthday. It was something else to trouble him. Danny liked to lavish gifts on Mohammed and his family. Every time he flew into Baghdad, he’d bring back copies of the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, which Mohammed devoured. He was a former paediatrician who’d trained at Great Ormond Street. He’d only given up medicine because the foreign press paid him ten times what he’d been earning in his hospital, and he needed the money. Another triumph for the occupation, Danny told anyone who’d listen.
The first thing people noticed about Mohammed was his unfortunate resemblance to the fallen dictator: fatter and older, but with the same darting eyes and the signature moustache. When a bounty was put on Saddam’s head, strangers would come up to him and laugh: ‘Americans, we’ve found him. We claim our reward! Death to the despot!’ Mohammed would smile along with them, but the joke became tiresome and he felt he deserved more respect.
Now he wandered away from the petrol pump, his pot belly wobbling affably. He struck up casual conversations with a couple of shopkeepers and idle, jobless men who gossiped and fiddled with their worry beads. He was trying to get a feel for the area ahead and to pick up anything they might have heard about Abu Mukhtar and his boys. Of course it might only put them in more danger, tipping off hungry wolves that tasty meat was on its way. In Iraq, there were pros and cons to every move you made and death lurked around every corner. A couple of dirty street children hawked trayloads of cigarettes and fizzy drinks. Kids like these had been known to pass word that ‘foreigners’ were about, and Mohammed kept an eye on them.
Beside them a goat sniffed its way through a heap of rubbish. Lamp posts lay broken and some plastic bags were caught up in fencing, ensnared like fleeing prisoners. A burnt-out vehicle was nearby, charred and cannibalised, and a pool of stagnant water stretched across the street. It smelt as if, on closer inspection, it might well turn out to be an open sewer.
Danny climbed back into the Pajero and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked as worn out as he felt. Grey was advancing rapidly around his temples and wrinkles had multiplied around his eyes. He could almost hear the whispered questions from the twenty-somethings of the Baghdad press corps, people half his age, another generation: was Lowenstein really still the ‘operator’ that he had been, or just another ‘veteran’ past his sell-by date? Oh sure, he’d won a Pulitzer, but that was years ago, wasn’t it? I mean, Bosnia—who even remembers what that war was all about? The doubts weighed down on him. He felt a rookie insecurity, the same draining need to prove himself as when he’d first hit the road a quarter of a century earlier.
He could have shared the Abu Mukhtar interview and all its dangers with his fellow Junkies, but in Danny’s book you had to get away from the crowd to stand out from it, even if the ‘crowd’ included your oldest friends. Of course it could be a trap, and his general rule in Iraq was never to make appointments with people he didn’t know. On the other hand, these days the concept of a clandestine rendezvous with any kind of