The Istanbul Puzzle

‘That’s the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll be heading inland soon, now that we’ve picked up our escort.’

‘What do we need an escort for?’ I was trying to sound as unfazed as I could. I turned, looked out the window again, just to check the F-35 was actually there.

‘We’ll be flying near the Syrian border soon, and with everything that’s been going on, we don’t want to take any chances. Thankfully, air cover is one of the few things we can still rely on here.’ He leaned back in his seat.

‘I should have told you we were making a stop before taking you to London,’ said Isabel, looking at me. ‘But I was asked not to.’ Her gaze flickered towards Peter.

A list of questions came into my mind. ‘Where are we going?’ was the one that came out.

‘Mosul,’ said Isabel.

‘Northern Iraq?’

She nodded. ‘The expert I told you about – Father Gregory – has been working on an archaeological dig not far from the city. We don’t have much choice, Sean, unless you want to wait a month until he finishes up there.’ Isabel sounded genuinely sorry she hadn’t told me what was going on.

If I remembered right, Mosul had been the scene of a number of bloody battles after Saddam’s fall.

‘Isn’t Mosul still a bit hot for archaeological work?’

Peter closed his eyes. ‘Mosul has been hot for a long time. The whole of Iraq is an archaeological minefield. Everyone has a different view about which layer of history is the most important and which you can trample on.’ He waved at Isabel. ‘Why don’t you tell him what we dug up?’

Isabel sat forward. ‘Mosul was the earliest Christian city outside what is now Israel,’ she said. ‘The reason Father Gregory is there is because the Greek Orthodox Church wants him to look at some very old Christian sites, before someone bans them from digging in the country. It’s not an ideal time to dig, but when is it around there?

‘Mosul has nearly as much history as Istanbul,’ said Peter. ‘It’s not far from the tar pits, which were the original source of Byzantium’s secret weapon, Greek fire, which saved their asses from the Muslim hordes. All of us might be worshipping Allah now, if the Greeks hadn’t won in 678 with the help of Greek fire.’

Suddenly, we dropped altitude. A gaping hole opened in my stomach. I looked out the window. I could see a range of grey mountains. One, far off, still had snow on its peak. To our right there were bare rolling hills stretching away into a yellowy horizon. Our altitude stabilised after about thirty seconds. Then our escort was alongside us again.

‘An evasive manoeuvre most likely,’ said Peter. ‘Some unknown radar signal must have lit us up.’

I continued staring out the window. Was this for real?

‘Can anyone just walk into Iraq these days?’ I said.

‘You can, if you have the right visa,’ said Peter. ‘The Iraqi Department of Border Security has a temporary visa programme for just this sort of occasion. And we have friends at Mosul airport. I don’t expect there’ll be a problem.’

He was right.

‘Welcome to the land of Gilgamesh,’ was how the green suited senior guard at the airport greeted us. His soft, educated accent seemed out of place after the guttural tones of the Iraqi guards who’d escorted us in a hot, white minibus from our plane to Mosul’s concrete airport terminal.

‘I lived in London for five years,’ he said, before he handed us back our passports.

‘Have a nice day!’ were the words that echoed after us as we crossed the passport hall.

And it was hot, brutally hot. The air was as thick as oil. There were air conditioning units on the walls of the terminal at various points, but for some reason they were turned off.

I felt a crawling sensation under my skin. There were guards standing around, but few travellers. And the guards were standing well back from us, as if they were waiting for someone to blow themselves up. They were all wearing ill-fitting green camouflage uniforms, with black patches on their arms with yellow lion head insignias on them, and soft peaked caps.

Within a minute of leaving the airport building my shirt clung to my skin as if I’d showered in cola.

We were being escorted towards a camouflaged Hummer by two young guards barely out of their teens, with tufts of wispy hair on their chins. The Hummer was parked beyond concrete barriers about two hundred yards from the terminal building. Peter was the only one of us who was carrying anything. He had a black Lowepro knapsack over one shoulder. Everything else was back on the plane.

The Hummer’s door opened as we came up to it. A man in a crumpled cream suit stepped halfway out, waved at us. Then he got back in.

When the Hummer’s doors closed behind us I understood why. The air inside was as cool as a refrigerator’s. It was like being in heaven, compared to the heat outside. I undid some shirt buttons, let the cool air slip over my skin.

‘Got any water?’ I said.

The man in the left-hand driving seat who’d waved at us, the only occupant of the vehicle, opened a black refrigerator box that sat in the front passenger footwell. He passed me a bottle of the coolest water I’d ever tasted.

As I took my first sip, I noticed he had put his hand on Isabel’s arm. She had climbed into the front seat next to him. She slapped his hand away.

‘Nice to see you too, my dear,’ said the man. The Hummer started with a roar.

‘Sean meet Mark Headsell, one of our…’ she hesitated, as if she was debating with herself how to say what he did, ‘representatives in Mosul.’ She spat out the word representative. ‘He’s an old friend.’

‘Good to meet you, Sean. Don’t mind Isabel. Welcome to the front line’

‘I thought the front line was in Afghanistan,’ I said.

‘We’re still busy here, I can tell you,’ said Mark.

Isabel was looking out the side window. Peter was outside on his phone. He was standing with his back to us.

He finished his call, jerked the door of the Hummer open. ‘How is your personal hellhole these days, Mark?’ he said, loudly. Then he slapped Mark’s shoulder.

‘Wonderful, if you don’t mind sewage pipes that back up, gun-toting locals with grudges, and fleas as big as rats.’

‘That sounds like progress,’ said Peter.

‘You’re heading for Magloub, right?’ said Mark. ‘Where that crazy Greek priest is digging?’

‘How long will it take to get there?’ said Peter.

‘Well, if we don’t get blown up or have to take a lot of stupid detours, we should be there in less than two hours. It’s only fifty miles or so.’

At the exit from the airport there was a checkpoint. It was manned by bearded security guards wearing the same yellow lion insignias. They also had black bulletproof vests on. Mark told us they were from a new Golden Lions security force that had taken over after the last US Marines had left. A sign nearby in English and Arabic read Deadly Force Area. After an exchange of words between Mark and one of the guards, we were waved on.

We travelled for a while in silence. I was soaking up the sights outside the tinted windows. The road from the airport was wide and dusty. There were one or two wrecks of houses, but most of the buildings looked untouched by the years of war. There was even some building work going on.

There were small craters on the road occasionally, probably where IEDs had gone off. We passed a big petrol station a few minutes after leaving the airport. It was surrounded by cement walls, except for a small entrance manned by security guards. There was a queue to get into it.

Then we passed a cluster of low houses at a crossroads. Some of them had sandbags piled haphazardly near their doors. One had a cement wall in front of it. They looked deserted.