Sandstealers

‘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 him of a farmyard. The hessian brushes against his lower lip and then his tongue, so that he can taste it too.

His assailants frogmarch him, screaming at him all the while and lashing out with kicks when he fails to respond to their unfathomable commands. Like a drunk in the dark, Danny stumbles, his balance and bearings lost, guided by the shoving and poking of their guns.

The easy flat of the road beneath his feet is becoming more unpredictable, a landscape now of ragged rock. He’s being taken further from the car, from the reassurance of everything he’s ever known.

The hood has ramped up his fear. He is dizzy, one moment feverishly hot, the next perishingly cold. His chest is compressed, a dead weight pushing down on it, like a cardiac arrest. Lower down, there is only slush and mush, Edwin’s curry from the night before. He has lost control of his bowels. Rewinding back to infancy, or spooling onwards to senility, his sphincter widens. He tries to clench his buttocks, but then surrenders. The first trickle of shit starts to ooze into his boxer shorts. He is beyond embarrassment. Nausea is rising up through him and he needs to vomit, but nothing emerges, merely the foretaste of it in his throat. He remembers the toilets when he’s been embedded with the army, the ones marked ‘D & V’, set apart, as if for lepers, to accommodate troops afflicted with diarrhoea and vomiting.

Just as his body will no longer obey him, neither will his mind. The committed atheist who has spent a lifetime scorning religion is now praying with holy zeal: Please, oh Lord, I promise I will always worship you. I have sinned but am ready to repent. Oh merciful Lord, just get me out of here. Right now, and I mean right fucking now! I’ll never set foot in a war zone again, or get on another plane, or write another story, so help me God. Amen.

But he knows that this time there’ll be no last-minute reprieve, no scoop, no prize. Instead of the award ceremony, there’ll be the funeral. He has pushed his luck one story too far, taken one chance too many, and he wishes more than anything he’s ever wished for that he could step back into that refreshing, effervescent hotel shower and start this day again.

Deprived of sight, all Danny can see are his alternative futures. Will it be the one that lasts for just a few more seconds, with a cursory bullet to the back of his hooded, anonymous head; one more death among so many in the catastrophe of Iraq? Or will it drag on for weeks, with the perpetual terror of incarceration in a cage, broken only by video appearances, paraded bowed and broken, begging for his life? And will it end, as it has for so many others, with a screaming madman’s knife hacking at his neck, captured in Technicolor? Images flash before him: Nick Berg being slaughtered by al-Zarqawi in person; the four American contractors, shot, burnt, mutilated, and their remains hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

This time he’s not reporting the story, he is the story. Other journalists will circle over his carcass. He pictures it—cold, blue and flabby—lying on a slab in a mortuary full of flies. The morgue is familiar to him; he’s been there countless times in Baghdad, Grozny, Gaza, Mogadishu—all the visits blend into one. He has counted more corpses than any man should have to—hundreds, probably thousands, of them, and now he can add one more. It’s wearing the clothes he put on that morning, when he was getting dressed to die, including those lucky, lucky boots.

He sees the funeral too. Who will come? The Junkies, of course; his adopted family, addicted to their work, their drugs and each other. Rachel inconsolable, yet still so fuckable in her sleek black dress. Becky, for once not laughing. Edwin and Kaps, his brothers in arms. Others will be there too—the media glitterati, and some of the Great and the Good who have admired his work: politicians, editors, novelists. There will be generous obituaries, mini hagiographies. Failures and excesses will be discreetly airbrushed out; there’ll be no mention of his many sins. All in all, his death will be an ego trip. Too bad he won’t be able to enjoy it.

Rough hands force him down on to his knees. A rifle butt smashes his mouth. The shock of it reminds him of his boyhood: Lukas hitting him, Camille watching. He tastes his own blood, sour and sickly. His tongue discovers a couple of uprooted teeth and briefly probes the holes they’ve left behind.

The final act. One more collective shout of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ from his kidnappers, a kind of choral harmony to signal that the time has come. The hood is ripped from his head but he cannot look; his eyes are screwed shut.

The end of a gun is shoved into the nape of his neck. The trickle of faeces becomes a torrent now, running down his legs. Danny is shaking so hard it looks, perversely, as if he’s laughing. There are no more memories or predictions, no more thoughts—rational or otherwise. No more hypocritical prayers. His kneeling, hooded body is heaving backwards and forwards with such convulsions that he barely hears the trigger.

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

Jamail, the avuncular hotel manager, had assigned them the ‘Presidential Suite’. He said he’d persuaded the owner they could have it for nothing, though it was usually empty in any case. The suite, rather like the country itself, had seen far better days and no self-respecting president would go near it. It sat atop the taller of the Hamra Hotel’s two towers with a sweeping view of the city, but the threadbare carpet was blighted by wine and coffee stains, and there were cigarette burns on both the sofas. Rachel and Becky sat on one of them, staring at a dreary painting on the wall—a waterfall surrounded by forest on some other continent. At first they had cried till their throats ached, but now they simply sat in shock. A pair of mosquitoes strafed their ears, taunting them in their grief.

Edwin and Kaps busied themselves at the kitchen table, studying a map of Fallujah, trying to pinpoint where it was that Danny had been ambushed. Edwin, tank commander turned war reporter, was in his element, applying with military precision the various coordinates the US Army had given them. He smoked a Marlboro right down to its butt as fingers, rulers and pencils roamed purposefully around the American map he’d stolen from the Green Zone.

‘Look, it must have been here, around this bridge.’ Edwin lit another cigarette from the old one, doing it without even looking.

‘But why would he have been there?’ argued Kaps. ‘Where would that road go that would interest anyone, let alone Danny?’

‘Oh, stop it!’ Rachel shouted. ‘What does it matter where the fuck it happened? It’s not going to bring him back, is it? He’s dead, isn’t he? Even if they’ve kidnapped him, they’ll put him in an orange jumpsuit, stick him in a cage and…’

The others knew she was right. Thoughts of death were consuming all of them; not just Danny’s but potentially their own. It could so easily have been one of them and so there was a guilty, furtive exhilaration. They were still alive.

Becky had been first to hear the news. She’d just finished lunch when ‘Dancing Queen’ had rung out on her mobile. It was Adi, the diplomat. Ever since she’d met him at a drinks party in the embassy, he’d pestered her with calls in an effort to ‘like…maybe get to know you better’. She remembered with mild disgust how the folds of fat rolled off him and fumes of halitosis wafted from his mouth. The ring on his chubby finger told her there was a loyal wife—poor, deluded dear—waiting for him back home in the Washington suburbs. However desperate Becky might become, however much she yearned for warm flesh to wake up with, she made herself promise she would never, ever sleep with him. Why couldn’t one of his colleagues have propositioned her instead? One of those clean-cut diplomats with perfect partings and bright white teeth, the Paul Bremer clones who looked like the stars of commercials for hair restorer or denture cleanser.

‘Hey, Becky—Adi here.’ The sound of his voice made her heart sink. She began assembling implausible reasons why she would be busy every night for the next three weeks of her tour of duty.

‘Oh, I…Adi, I was just…’

‘Listen to me carefully. There’s been a bad shooting on some road south of Baghdad. Near Iskandariya. I’ll get straight to the point: it’s Daniel Lowenstein. He’s a friend of yours, I believe?’

‘Yeah, course he is. Oh my God.’

‘Look, I’m really sorry, but his car was ambushed a few hours ago. Shot up pretty bad according to our units up there. His driver’s dead and Lowenstein’s missing. No sign of his body yet, but it doesn’t look good.’

Despite the humidity, Becky began to shiver. The flashback came to her as it always did, unexpectedly, like a mugging in a darkened alleyway: before her yet again, he was dying while she prevaricated. All these years later, she could still hear his pleas for help as the blood emptied out of him and soaked the snow, his ever-weaker voice calling out her name—calling, calling, calling—and her legs running to him, going nowhere. Now, as then, there was only one logical conclusion: that she had killed him.

It took another four or five minutes until she calmed herself enough to ring the others, but her finger still trembled as she dialled their numbers: Rachel first, then Kaps, then Edwin.

Soon they were huddled in the Presidential Suite, its two landlines and their assorted mobiles in frantic, perpetual use till nightfall.

They talked to the New York Times. Even though Danny had gone freelance, the assistant managing editor said he would be on the next flight, bringing with him an ‘investigator’—a former Special Forces guy. He would work out of the bureau. Danny’s older sister was on her way in from Dubai, where she was a big shot at some investment bank. The company was pulling out all the stops to get her to Kuwait and from there she’d pick up a US Air Force C-130.

They talked to Danny’s elderly parents in Pittsburgh. Lukas and Eliza Lowenstein were originally from Germany, and the hint of an accent was still there as Eliza repeated, over and over, ‘My baby boy.’ They realised she would never remember him as they did, but as the infant she’d cradled in her arms.

They talked to Sabeen, Mohammed’s widow. What would become of the children, she demanded of Becky in English every bit as fluent as her late husband’s; how would she support them? Becky would have liked to assure her, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be well looked after, you’ll want for nothing,’ but since Danny no longer worked for any organisation, she could make no promises.

They talked to the Iraqi police, the US military, diplomats and politicians, and—a novel experience for all of them—they talked to the press. The embassy Hostage Crisis Group had recommended a media blackout, so now it was down to the Junkies to persuade their colleagues to hide from the world the news that a fellow journalist had disappeared.

Much of the press corps was staying in the Hamra too; it had become famous for its raucous poolside parties, where reporters, aid workers and diplomats would talk and dance the night away while Danny held court. These gatherings ceased as a mark of respect for him, their missing warrior; the Baghdad party was on hold. No one used the pool at all now. It was as if it had suddenly become contaminated.

The journalists agreed to the blackout—after all, what if it were one of them? Still, they wanted answers for when they finally ran the story. What had he been doing down there? Why hadn’t he told anyone he was going? Did his friends think he was dead or kidnapped? And if the latter, how did they rate his chances? For once the Junkies knew what it was to try and fend off these ravenous birds of prey.

‘We really can’t say much at the moment,’ Edwin and Kaps kept repeating. They had decided a party line and were determined to stick to it. ‘The embassy and the military have told us it’s best not to get into any speculation.’ They were stonewalling, and the Danny they knew would have railed against it.

The sun he had cursed that morning was slowly dying, slipping away unmourned behind Baghdad’s higher buildings. Shadows of those still on the streets fell long and curfew beckoned. In the morning it would be one day exactly since he had disappeared. His friends wondered if, after that, it would be one week, one month, one year, until all the anniversaries began to flow into an ocean of time where Danny Lowenstein would exist only as a fading memory.

The moment Camille Lowenstein stepped nervously off the Hercules from Kuwait, a phalanx of embassy security guards swarmed around her, weighed down with M16s and 9mm Beretta pistols strapped to their thighs. They wore wraparound sunglasses and tight T-shirts showing off muscles that bulged and tattoos that boasted of lost loves or units. She had never been in the presence of so many big men and big guns. This was her brother’s world, she realised, where violence and fear were the norm, peace and tranquillity banished to a distant universe.

She was flanked by Tommy Harper, the lanky executive despatched by the New York Times, even though—strictly speaking—Danny was no longer on their payroll. Harper wore little round spectacles and clutched a briefcase. Camille’s first impression was that, if she was out of her depth here, so was he. Alongside Harper was Munro, a small, muscular Scot hired by the paper to find out more about what had happened to their distinguished former correspondent. Harper had told her, in reverential tones, that Munro was ex-SAS: ‘You know, Brit Special Forces.’ So what’s he going to do, Camille felt like asking, bring my brother back to life if he’s been shot, or rescue him single-handed if he’s been kidnapped?