Sandstealers. Ben Brown
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we’re only here because their own leader wants to talk to us?’
He sees another of the men raise his Kalashnikov, aiming higher now, straight at them. It’s gone wrong so quickly, too quickly, and yet in slow motion too.
‘Oh fuck! Reverse, Mohammed. Let’s get out of here now. Now, I said!’
The driver’s corpulent body will not move. Terror has paralysed him and for once he disobeys his master’s voice.
‘Reverse, Mohammed. Will you do as you’re told and fucking well reverse?’
As Danny shouts, a burst of fire hits the windscreen. Instinctively, he ducks as he has done before—all those times when death has, arbitrarily, turned its attentions elsewhere.
He is about to bark more orders when he sees that Mohammed is thrust back against his headrest, blood spreading out evenly in two distinct patches on an otherwise spotless white dishadasha: one around the middle of his sternum and the other a little to the left. The eyes—Saddam’s eyes, as everyone used to joke—are wider than Danny has ever seen on any man’s face before, peeled back and accusing. The mouth is open, as if it meant to say one last thing.
‘Oh shit no, sweet Lord, no! Fuck, no; oh fuck me, no!’ Daniel L. Lowenstein, master of reportage, reduced to a rhythm of profanities.
He has slipped from his seat into the footwell, curling up there like a foetus clinging to the womb. Rationally, he knows this is no strategy. Part of the survival lore they’d drummed into him at Walsingham was the fact that bullets can cut through the chassis of a car almost as easily as they penetrate human skin. Between bursts of automatic fire he can hear the insurgents’ bloodcurdling cries of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’
If only there were some peace and quiet, thinks Danny. If only he had stopped to talk to the occupants of the Toyota rather than launch into an argument. If only he’d never come down this road. If only he’d been warned of what lay ahead. If only he’d listened to his premonition and Mohammed’s unspoken fear. If only he’d taken no notice of the worthless assurances of Asmat Mahmoud in Baghdad. If only he’d ‘settled down’, as he’d been urged to, had children and stayed at home with them—a happy brood of little Daniels and Daniellas. If only he’d never become a war reporter. If only he’d never become any kind of reporter…
The shooting and shouting stop for a while—a minute, maybe only 30 seconds—but to Danny, it’s an eternity. He can make no use of it, for now he’s as crippled by fear and indecision as Mohammed was. Poor Mohammed. Five children without a father, a wife without a husband, a reporter without a friend. Nothing can happen to me. Farrah flies more rings around the lemon tree, Sabeen garnishes the masgouf. Danny cannot bring himself to look at him again.
Instead he stares at the scraped plastic and mud marks on the bottom of the passenger door. Mud from his lucky boots, bought from Silvermans on Mile End Road before the first Gulf War in 1991. He’s survived that and every subsequent hellhole he’s ever been in, so how could he ever trade them in for another pair, even when they’ve walked across mass graves, through refugee camps riven with disease, not to mention putrid, Third-World hospitals? God alone knew what dangerous microbes inhabited those worn-out rubber treads, but every time the cab delivered him safely back to his apartment, he would lovingly put the boots back in their box, ready for the next time, certain they had kept him alive. Some worship the cross, Danny worshipped his lucky boots. They’d still be on his feet when his body was discovered—even though, if he were dead, it would surely represent their catastrophic failure. Not so lucky now, his friends would chuckle callously, as they stood at the boot-end of his body to identify it.
The car door is opened so that Danny, pressed hard against it, tumbles out. There’s a another gratuitous chorus of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, so familiar from al-Qaeda snuff videos just before they execute the hostage. He cannot bear to look, but finally allows his eyes to meet those of the two gunmen screaming at him loudest. One has unwrapped his kafiyeh, careless now whether he shows himself, and this alone spreads an extra layer of dread over Danny.
The young man’s face tells no special story. He is like so many Iraqis Danny has met down the years: bearded, brooding and with fingers welded to his weapon. He is unusually tall, and a scar across his forehead distinguishes him. It is a gruesome burn that makes him look as if he’s been branded. He shoves the barrel of his Kalashnikov just below Danny’s nostrils, the ring of grey metal hot upon his skin.
‘Please, you don’t understand—Abu Mukhtar, your leader, Mukhtar—I’ve come to see him. Al sahaf. Interview? Asmat Mahmoud arranged it—you know, big politician, Baghdad?’
Another ‘if only’. If only he had learnt better Arabic. He’s spent enough years of his life here, but lazily relied on Mohammed, and now his doctor-cum-driver-cum-translator-cum-friend is no good to him, staring manically at the shattered windscreen.
Then—a gift from the heavens. The one with the scar and the muzzle of his gun in Danny’s face is muttering something in English.
‘You people. So stupid. You come in one car and we shoot. You come in another car and we shoot again.’
‘Great! You speak English. Oh, thank you, thank you so much. Now listen, I need to explain. You don’t understand…’
‘No talk.’
‘But you see, I’m a journalist and…’
‘We know who you are.’
‘Good. That’s really good to hear. So I’m a journalist and I’m here to see—’
‘No talk!’
Danny decides his best hope is to co-operate. A surge of optimism. They know him. They know English. They must be reasonably intelligent. Shooting Mohammed was a blunder—some trigger-happy idiot who’ll have to be disciplined. They won’t make the same mistake again, or else there’ll be hell to pay with Abu Mukhtar, not to mention Asmat Mahmoud, Danny’s gold-plated, copper-bottomed contact.
Anyway, Danny has been this close before and every time it’s been the prizes that have come his way rather than the wooden box and the grave that no one can ever quite find the time to visit. Near escapes run through his mind: the mock execution by Serbs on the road to Vukovar; the mob who wanted to set fire to him on a street corner in Kigali, as if he were some heretic to be burnt at the stake. And Chechnya, of course. Always Chechnya.
Now, as then, he is terrified, but it would show disrespect to death not to be: total, all-consuming fear is the price you pay if you want to claim the prize. Inevitably, hours or even days of captivity lie before him, but in due course will come the negotiated release. The mighty Abu Mukhtar, embarrassed by his overzealous foot soldiers, will apologise profusely and beg forgiveness.
The crack of a rifle butt on his head snaps him from these reveries. He mutters again about Abu Mukhtar, but now it’s more of a low groan than a statement. Either they don’t understand what he’s saying or they’re not interested.
The leader gestures with his Kalashnikov, jerking it upwards to show he wants the infidel up and away from the car. There is, thinks Danny, something alien about the clarity with which people like him see the world.
As he obeys, he looks again at the small mountain of Mohammed’s slumped paunch, the patches of blood on his pristine white gown now merged into one. His progress is not quick enough for his captors; the tall one with the scar and another gunman grab his arms with such force he worries they’ll rip them from their sockets. He should yell out in agony as they drag him away, but his fear leaves him silent, a quiet hero. They search the deep pockets of his chinos, and when they find the passport they study it briefly before hurling it aside. It spins through the air and lands at an angle in the sand. It feels as though they have discarded his identity. In that moment, Daniel Leon Lowenstein, born 17th June 1955, has ceased to exist.
A hood is thrown over his head, the dazzling sunlight of the Iraqi day switched off. It is some sort of hessian sack, Danny guesses, rough and scratchy against his skin, and with a musty smell that pollutes his nostrils. It reminds