Sandstealers

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 the road, like a horse gone lame. Danny’s desperate hope is that the men in kafiyehs are just trying to scare them.

‘Shit. Don’t they understand 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.’