Sandstealers. Ben Brown
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US army intelligence would have heard of him. Even so, according to Asmat Mahmoud, Mukhtar had passionate opinions he wanted to pass on to the world. Danny could write it hard, with plenty of topspin to tickle the fancy of even the most blasé, battle-weary, war-numbed reader. My God, he thought, if I’m bored of it all, what must they be? Mukhtar’s views, however mundane, would ultimately be processed into front-page news. In his head, he had already written the story’s most important line: ‘…told me in a secret and dangerous meeting, deep inside the bandit country of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad…’ It was just a case of filling in the rest. He would sell it easily to his old paper, the New York Times, or perhaps turn it into a wider, more rambling piece for Rolling Stone magazine or Vanity Fair. And it would make at least a couple of pages in the memoirs he was struggling to complete.
Still, the premonition returned. Mohammed had reawakened it.
‘So, Mr Daniel, we go on?’
Why did he have to keep asking? Danny was already queasy with uncertainty. Even now he could call it off, he only had to say the word. He remembered all the moments in his career when he had faced dilemmas such as this, and each time he had picked the harder road. He remembered the twenty-somethings too. He couldn’t afford to relax and he certainly couldn’t afford to put down roots or have children. Danny breathed in deeply.
‘Absolutely, we go on!’
‘No problem!’ Mohammed smiled unconvincingly, a chubby Saddam-smile.
‘You’re a good guy, the very best.’
A few hundred yards away, men in a rusting white-and-orange taxi studied them both through binoculars with a hatred that was entirely sure of itself, and open to nothing so frail as doubt.
It is another two miles before the turnoff on to a narrower road. Danny wonders if it is one of the insurgent ‘rat runs’, as the Americans like to call them: a phrase, he has noted in one recent piece, that implies the enemy will be destroyed—just as soon as someone can come up with the right kind of pest control.
The wheels blow up a dust cloud.
Quiet roads. Danny seems to have spent a career travelling along them, wondering what they have in store for him: the story of a lifetime, or the end of a lifetime.
A small, mangy dog emerges from nowhere and starts to cross in front of them. It is limping badly.
‘Watch out!’ Danny screams at Mohammed, who is driving hard and fast and doesn’t see it till the last minute. His attempt to avoid the wretched animal is too half-hearted. There is a thud and slight crunch, and they carry on.
‘Did you really have to do that?’ Danny can’t bring himself to look back at the body, yet another corpse in a country overflowing with them. Has life here got so cheap that it’s not even worth the casual movement of a wrist to save a life? It’s more bad karma, another jinx on his day. First the chase car, then the petrol, now the dog.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he mutters to himself.
The undercarriage scrapes some chunks of rock and now it’s Mohammed’s turn to curse aloud, though with incomprehensible Arabic expletives.
Danny notices another car up ahead. It is a Toyota, red with a distinctive white roof. Shock smacks him hard around the face. He knows this car, he’d know it from a mile away. Two people: the journalist inside, someone else—the driver—kneeling on the ground, changing a tyre. There is very little time to think. Has Asmat Mahmoud flogged the same story twice? Is the enigmatic Abu Mukhtar actually just some media tart?
‘I don’t believe it—they’ve crashed our fucking interview!’
Danny’s first inclination is to drive straight on, but he can’t ignore them. He leans from his passenger window and talks to the other journalist. The words are venomous, the anger mutual. Danny’s foul mood has just got much, much worse, but after he has said his piece, he manages to calm himself.
‘Anyhow, I’m pushing on,’ he says, drawing a line under the argument. ‘How’s everything up there? Okay?’
The question is carefully calibrated. With this perfunctory request, Danny makes it clear he’s not interested in striking some last-minute bargain on the story, he’s merely seeking reassurance on what lies ahead.
His fellow Junkie says nothing, responding with…with what, exactly? Some vague movement of affirmation, or is it merely the absence of something—a prohibitive hand or a piercing cry that says: Jesus Christ no, Danny! We’ve just been shot at! Don’t go up there, don’t go another yard!
Whatever it is or isn’t, the biggest mistake of Danny’s distinguished career is to take it as a yes. Before any further complications can spoil his story, he turns to Mohammed: ‘Jalah, jalah!’ And obediently, Mohammed speeds away.
Still, Danny’s head is dizzy with doubt. In his younger days, he was never afflicted by the curse of hesitation. The life he led then was charmed: bullet-proof, blast-proof, death-proof. Shit happens, but not to me. Friends died, fallen soldiers on the battlefield, until it seemed he’d attended more funerals than weddings, but somehow it was always them who fell, and always him at the lectern in the home-town church, delivering the Bible readings and moving eulogies, the well-judged words of comfort for the grieving parents or partner, the final tears as the coffin was eased into the earth. Danny seemed agreeably immune to death, as though it were a ritual for him to observe rather than take part in. Chechnya showed him that. Against all the odds, he had survived it, though not entirely unscathed. Death had touched him there, laid its chilly fingers upon his face as he stood by and watched a good friend’s life drain away. He’d always expected that one day the gods would punish him. Perhaps part of him thought they should.
Yet now, as they regain speed, he feels the rush of the warm air on his face from the open window, the scent of eucalyptus trees, and there it is once more: the hit, the buzz, the drug. He might as well have rammed a needle in his vein. No, I’m not tired, he thinks, not exhausted, not settling down. And by the way, I’m not finished yet either.
Nearby, an Iraqi shepherd boy wanders aimlessly with his scrawny, filthy sheep. A few of them have broken away from the flock and are running around the road in panic. Like some reporters, it occurs to Danny: terrified of getting separated from the pack.
And then it is only them, on this the loneliest of roads. No more sheep or shepherd boys. The words of his Hostile Environments instructors at Walsingham, where the rolling Norfolk countryside had been transformed into a war-zone training ground, come back to him: ‘Just ask yourself, where are all the people? If they’ve smelt danger, so should you. And if there’s no oncoming traffic, you should wonder why.’
The story is sucking him in, though, as it always has. It’s just a little further on, down the road and over the bridge. It’s always just a little further on.
Only about half a mile now. Swallow hard, Danny boy, breathe deep. Relax! Enjoy!
As they come round the bend he sees, a few hundred yards on, the rusting oil drums spread across the narrow road. Clustered around them are the insurgents, six in all, different-coloured kafiyehs wrapped around their faces: orange, red and black. Fat sunglasses cover their eyes. They are armed with a menacing assortment of pistols and AK47s.
Mohammed stamps on the brakes.
‘Who are they?’
‘Don’t worry; just a poxy roadblock.’ Danny wants to make them both feel better. He’s a connoisseur of roadblocks, from Sarajevo to Somalia to Sierra Leone—the well-organised, polite ones; the drunken, chaotic ones; the downright dangerous ones, manned, or rather boyed, by 11-year-old African kids, sky-high on weed, with manic eyes that say killing a white man can be quite fun when you’re bored out of your mind.
‘Roadblocks, I could write the book on them,’ he sighs.
When the first shot is fired, he realises of course that he could not. The bullet blows out a front tyre and one side of the Pajero lurches down on to