Sandstealers

She said it straight, without humour, eyes locked into a steely stare at nothing in particular. Camille recoiled and studied Rachel more carefully. Who was she, this girl who seemed so endearing with all her naive ambition back then in Sarajevo? And a decade on, who had she become?

Munro came in and announced that First Cavalry had secured the area round al-Talha. They were offering to take him to the scene of Danny’s disappearance.

‘I’d like to come too,’ said Camille.

‘Not sure you’d find it very useful, and it might be quite upsetting. His car’s still there. Bit of a mess, apparently.’

Camille was irritated. Who was Munro to try and stop her? Danny was her brother, not his. She quietly insisted she would go and then, just to antagonise him a little more, she decided to invite Danny’s friends as well.

‘Maybe you guys want to tag along?’

Becky shivered again, the way she had when she first heard the news.

‘I don’t think so. Like he says, I’m not sure we would achieve much. Probably just get in the way’

‘Oh, I think we should,’ said Kaps. ‘There may not be another chance.’

‘Look, I just don’t want to, okay?’ Becky snapped.

‘Okay, Beck. It’s okay’ Rachel stroked her arm. ‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to.’

First Cavalry were taking no chances. Half a dozen Humvees with Mark-19 grenade launchers and .50-calibre machine guns formed an inner and outer ring around Mohammed’s car as if it were the Alamo. The vehicle still sat dead and useless where Abu Mukhtar’s boys had killed it.

In the end, all the Junkies had agreed to join Camille, even Becky. It was a question of supporting each other, sticking together. In a huddle they studied the car through their sunglasses. They were surrounded by a plain-clothes security detail from the embassy, requisite M16s on their hips, tight coils of plastic tubing sprouting from their ears and walkie-talkies glued to their mouths. Further away, nervy combat troops squatted on the road or lay face down in the dust and sand, pointing machine guns towards an enemy that could advance from any direction, at any time, in any form: a boy on a bicycle, a farmer pushing a wheelbarrow, a woman with flowers in her hands. The Holy Warriors of Iraq’s insurgency came in all shapes and sizes, and often with a belt of death tied around their waist.

Outside in the sun, Becky looked more washed out than ever. She knew she shouldn’t have come: her first instincts had been right; this would go badly for her. She’d held Rachel’s hand tight throughout the journey, and then cried in her arms when she saw the shattered windscreen and the blood baked dry on Mohammed’s seat.

A team of soldiers had started work, examining bullet casings, tyre marks and footprints, taking endless photographs and video footage of the scene. Munro was making his own measurements of the tyre treads on the road, and the distance between the bullet holes. He was in a world of his own, and making no attempt to involve Camille or any of the others.

The Junkies started wandering around, eyes fixed on the dusty ground. They seemed to be searching, too. Kaps, in particular, was preoccupied. He paced up and down imaginary channels, methodically retracing his steps from time to time. Eventually, Camille saw him pick something up; a card, she thought.

‘Found anything?’

‘Nah. Thought it might belong to Danny, but it’s just rubbish.’

She saw him put it in his pocket anyway.

The Junkies stood together again, swaying a little, gently kicking up the sand, lost in thoughts and memories. Kaps wrapped a long, muscular arm round Becky while Edwin let his half-smoked cigarette fall to the ground and pulled Rachel to him, stroking her back with small circular motions of his hand. Not that she could feel it. They were all firmly encased in flak jackets and helmets and wet with sweat.

‘What if we never know what happened to him?’ asked Rachel. ‘You know, sometimes they don’t even find a body.’

‘We have to stay positive.’ Edwin, still holding her, had wrapped his kafiyeh round his head to stop it burning in the sun and slapped some factor-50 over his face. There were white smears of it where he’d failed to rub it in. ‘There may not be a body. My bet is he’s a hostage somewhere, and absolutely fine.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Kaps. ‘A five-star hotel. The Iskandariya Hilton.’

‘But they’ll kill him, won’t they?’ said Rachel, ignoring both of them. ‘When was the last time they let a hostage go?’

Camille was a few yards away, the other side of the car, scrutinising the little holes in it. She felt a wind whip up from nowhere; a summer dust storm was stirring. Grit and rubbish and clumps of vegetation started to swirl around in circles, and the palm trees bowed and bent. Camille lifted her head and saw a young shepherd approach. He looked about 16, dressed in grimy rags and disintegrating sandals; he’d been tending a small flock of sheep nearby. There was an untapped intelligence about him. On the assumption that he had come to murder rather than talk, he was being frisked at gunpoint by the soldiers but accepted the indignity. It was just how things were in the free Iraq.

One of the American officers, a major, agreed to hear what he had to say through an army translator. The shepherd boy talked for at least ten minutes, pointing and gesturing, intense, insistent. He spoke calmly but with determination: he had a story to tell. At the end of it, the major pulled out the Washington dollars he kept in a side pocket for rewards. He peeled away a couple of twenties and the boy took them without a smile. It was no more than he deserved.

‘What did that kid have to say?’ Camille asked the major.

‘That shepherd boy? Oh, nothing much.’

‘Come on, you were talking to him for ages.’

The major hesitated.

‘Okay, I’m not sure if I should be telling you this, but he says he was here when it happened, over on that hill back down the road. Kinda watched it, but only from a distance.’

‘And?’

‘Look, this may be garbage, but he says there was another car as well as Danny’s; two people inside it, he thought, one of them in a blue flak jacket—probably a Westerner. Pretty soon after the kid saw them go by, he heard gunfire from the bridge up here. He guessed they’d been shot up in some sort of ambush, except they managed to get the hell out. Drove back down the road to near where he was. Then he saw one of their tyres had been shot up.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘That’s not all. Seems that it was after this that Mr Lowenstein came through on the same bit of road and slowed down to talk to these guys in the first car. But how about this? The kid says they didn’t try and stop him, just let him push on straight ahead—into the same damned ambush. How d’you like that? He couldn’t believe his eyes.’

‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Camille.

When Munro came over she told him the shepherd’s story.

‘Mmm. Strange,’ he said wrinkling up his face. ‘Could be useful. Not sure I’d believe everything he says, though. He’s just a peasant.’

‘That’s what I thought at first,’ said the major. ‘But he seemed pretty sure. Why would he make it up?’

Munro shrugged.

‘To collect some easy bucks? People can tell you a million different things in these villages.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘So does he have descriptions?’ Munro asked the major.

‘He said he was too far away. He remembers the car was red and white though, some sort of saloon.’

Munro wrote it down as if he had to, but walked away again to finish off his measurements. Camille decided he was surly and unhelpful. When he’d gone, she asked the major quietly, ‘Could the boy take us back there, to where he saw the other car?’

It was only a couple of minutes away. The major drove Camille in a Humvee along with the shepherd and the interpreter.

There was nothing to see, but Camille inspected the tarmac and tried to conjure up the picture painted by the shepherd. Down the road the Junkies were still embracing each other, but an orangey-brown cloud had billowed up and was enveloping the landscape. Wearily, because they’d had enough of desert days like this, the troops put on their sand goggles while the Junkies held hankies to their mouths and noses, and half-closed their eyes so the lashes could filter out flying dirt. Soon the wreck of Mohammed’s car was coated in sand. It seemed as though Iraq would like to bury it.

‘Okay, let’s get out of here now,’ the major said. ‘We can’t see shit and I hate being blind in a place like this.’

5 (#u33ae17c6-68bd-57bd-82fd-9c44103daad7)

Sarajevo, 1994