Bodyguard (6 page)

I had taken a blow to the head – my left hand and right arm were bleeding from the almighty blast. I couldn’t account for any of the team at this point. With the shock I had hit the deck. Robotically, I picked myself up again. I’d been out for seconds. Did I actually hear the noise or had the shockwaves sent me reeling into blackout? I don’t know, but even the echo of the aftermath was louder than fuck. Did I see the bomb? Yes, for that nanosecond. What made me look in that direction? I don’t know. Years of training which hones into instinct or a stroke of luck? Pass.

Thank God I was still alive. I knew immediately what had happened.

I knew that sound. This time, I didn’t have those two to three seconds.

Special Forces on the ground had described the target. Less than a kilometre away, we had been charging towards Iraqi tanks engaging with 173rd Airborne. We had been about to wander into that. From the sky the target had become the T-junction, the mass of vehicles and the abandoned Iraqi tank. The pilot had simply got it wrong.

I dove to the side of the bank to my left and lay there. I found Tom with another Peshmerga gibbering away, blood running down his head from an intake of shrapnel. I kept asking if he was OK but he just stared at me, glazed in shock.

Tom’s mum had heard it all.

I screamed at him as he ran down the bank towards another small sand bank. He had to hit the deck now because most planes on attack come round twice.

I grabbed Tom’s phone because mine was in the car. I had to tell London. ‘There’s been an own goal.’ I had known straightaway. ‘The Americans have dropped a bomb on us. Tom, Giles and I are fine. I’ve gotta go. I’ll give you an update when I know more.’ 

I hung up. There was still no sign of John and the others. I had to get to work. I got up and ran to the vehicles, searching each for bodies. The impact had been less than twenty metres from our vehicle – it was like a scene from a movie, except this was very real. There were bodies everywhere – the flames and the ammunition within them stunk. Some people were burned to a crisp; others were still alive but heading that way. I’ve seen plenty of bombs and bodies over the years, but that stench never leaves you.

‘They’re fucking dead,’ I told myself. But I stayed calm and
level-headed
. Surely, there was no way in the world that I could find John, Fred, Dragan and Kameron alive. If that were true, so be it. I wasn’t thinking emotionally or as an undercover reporter. In my military head, and as BBC security advisor, I had to account for them in whatever state I discovered them. I would take it one step at a time.

As I was sorting through the vehicles, I realised I was heading back the way we came. This was the wrong thing to do. If I was going to find them, the impact was behind me on the right – that’s where the American SF jeeps had been. ‘Check every body,’ I told myself repeatedly. ‘Account for everything.’ I wasn’t looking to save other lives or bury bodies. I was employed to protect John Simpson and I had no idea where he was. I began to call out for Fred. I was probably shouting too loudly because of the blast to the head. Who knew what perception of sound everyone still alive now had?

Still there was nothing. And then, in a moment as surreal as Tom’s mum tasting the sound of freedom while wishing him birthday
greetings
, three heads popped up comically from behind the bank. They were safe, and in one piece.

‘It’s an American own goal,’ I shouted at them.

John was livid. ‘It’s coming back’ he shouted. ‘I saw the fucking bomb. I saw the fucking bomb.’

Fred had a gash to his head; John had lost a trouser leg so he was full length on one side and wearing shorts on the other, with shrapnel 
hanging out of him; Dragan had a bad cut to the ankle. They were all sufficiently OK for now to continue. There was no sign of Kameron. Nobody had seen him.

‘Have you called your friends off?’ John shouted to the Americans. I had never witnessed him like this before. ‘The world has a right to know what you know,’ he told our ‘friends’.

‘Stay here, John,’ I ordered. ‘And stay together. Here’s my phone. Call London and do what you have to do. I’ve got to find Kameron.’

I don’t know if finding John meant the show had to go on or not. If he had been dead, I would still have looked for Kameron but it gave us all renewed purpose. I could hear John shouting to Fred to ‘shoot this’. He was straight back into work mode and, my God, he knew as we all did that this was one of the biggest stories of the war. As soon as we’d established we were all fine, we were in our element. I didn’t give two hoots about Abdullah – he wasn’t part of my remit. I was concerned for Kameron, but the story was unravelling before us. As I would do many times in the future, I walked that line between story first and danger second.

‘I’m doing a piece to camera,’ John told Tom Giles, what felt like seconds later. ‘Fucking morons,’ he cursed the Yanks before miking up.

At the same time, I found Kameron lying on the bank. The American medics were running down with trauma packs on their back, helping whoever they could.

‘Come over here,’ I shouted to them, but it wasn’t looking good. His foot had been completely sliced off and blood was pouring out of his leg. He, too, made that gurgling sound that I had come to associate with death.

Some of the medics went towards John and the guys but he was already live on the Sat Phone to Maxine Mawhinney on News 24.

The medic told me to apply two tourniquets on Kameron’s legs above the wound to stop the blood loss – that surprised me. Only one leg was injured but he wanted both doing. I assumed he was more medically qualified than I was so went ahead and made it tight. I then 
got out my knife to cut Kameron’s shirt but I couldn’t see any wound. Still he carried on fading and gurgling.

‘Have you ever put a Given Set in?’ the medic asked me.

This was a saline drip, and all I had to do was to get a vein up and slide a cannula in. The medic had already made one up.

‘I can’t get a vein,’ I shouted over to Tom.

Kameron’s veins had collapsed. I knew he wasn’t going to make it.

He was convulsing. The grumblings were getting louder. I asked Tom to sit with him as I had with Stuart. I told him to talk to Kameron and just keep him company but I knew I couldn’t do any more and I had to start to clear the area. Our vehicles were now on fire.

That had to be sorted immediately but at the back of my mind was our conversation earlier about the money, and for a moment, I felt bad that he would die alone. My rare compassion was not for another victim of war – I just wish my last conversation of substance with him had been different. Crucially, even though his leg had borne the brunt of it, Kameron was one of the few in the car without a flak jacket. We didn’t have enough to go around. That was the mistake. It was the sandals all over again.

As we loaded Kam onto the vehicle, I knew he was gone.

‘This is a really bad own goal by the Americans,’ John was live and just in earshot. He was raging inside, but as cool as a cucumber when the red light was on.

(Weeks back, we had offered to give our co-ordinates to The Pentagon but they simply weren’t interested. It would be nice to think this wouldn’t have happened if we’d been embedded, but then we wouldn’t have been chasing Barzani across Iraq.)

Just then, someone spotted a body in the back of one of our enflamed vehicles. That awoke something inside me to save the 
story, let alone the body. I ran to my car to discover it was a
sleeping
bag wedged against the back window, but I had to rescue the remaining broadcast equipment. There was no point at all us being here if the videophone and all the footage were going up in smoke.

I managed to get the hatch open but it was like a furnace in there. I climbed inside to cut the rope to free the two spare jerrycans. I ran to John, threw them just to the right of the camera, then turned and went back to the other vehicles through the flames. Fred shouted to me to save his gear.

All the cars were burning now – the third one looked seconds away from explosion as I grabbed our personal bags along with John’s diaries, notebooks and fucking Tilley hat. It was like a barbecue out of control but the smell was horrendous – nothing is more ghastly than the smell of burning fuel and smouldering flesh combined. I blocked it out of my mind and concentrated on the vehicle. All our lives were in those trucks – my focus was now totally on preserving the story and not human life. The guys I was concerned about were safe; the gear was not.

John was raging again when he finished the live. ‘There’s gotta be a fucking inquest into that,’ he yelled to everyone and no one. ‘Was that OK?’ he turned to Tom. John had been better than OK. He was at his best, flicking an internal switch from anger and disgust to smooth calm.

It had been a disgraceful error. Forty-five had been injured, sixteen lives lost. The Americans were worried there was more incoming and wanted to evacuate.

Some of the gear was damaged. Most importantly, John’s Tilley hat now had a hole in it. Some twenty-five minutes later, my concern was still the vehicles. Despite that toxic mix of fuel and flames, I could see one of the Peshmerga guys trying to steal the third vehicle; the other two were burned to shreds.

‘Fuck off – this is our vehicle!’ I screamed at him. 

In the back, he had placed his weapon along with some ammo. I found a hand on one of the seats. I told John to stay with the vehicle as I began to move everything into this car, piling stuff on the roof and clearing the glass from the seats. I had no windscreen left.

By now, all the traffic was coming towards us – the rest of the media had got wind of the story and were piling in our direction. All we wanted to do was leave, heading back down to the original checkpoint.

‘What about Abdullah?’ John asked.

We agreed to have one last look.

Checking under the vehicles and charred corpses in this scene of devastation, we found nothing except the truth. He hadn’t even bothered to stick around. That was the final straw for me with him. If he wasn’t my responsibility before, he certainly wasn’t now. It was time to go. In every sense. Even for battle-hardened souls like Fred and me, it had taken its toll.

‘That’s it, I’m off,’ the American announced through the dust and wind in the front of the Land Cruiser. But he meant off and out of the country. It was time for him to get back to California to see his little baby. This was just the wake-up call he needed to get off the adrenalin rush and back to the real world.

‘Yeah, that was a close call,’ I agreed.

It all showed what a difference a day could make, and indeed a week. On the same day that Kaveh was being buried, we nearly met the same fate. Just a few hours ago we had been buddying up with the very guys who called in the airstrike – and I’d been reminiscing about old times with them. The SF had told me none of theirs had died but I don’t believe that to be true. I saw them towing away a Land Rover in which I knew one of their men had gone down. Meanwhile Waji Barzani was helicoptered out of there to hospital. His brother fell into a coma.

Despite his war fatigue, Fred continued to film out of the glassless window, the camera always on his knee. But he understood now and he meant it – it was time to go and see his baby. He had 
come straight from a month in India. All he knew professionally was putting his life on the line for the story – but when it became this real, he’d had enough. And even though I was the ex-military guy, the tough man in all this, we both knew it was an epic event to walk away from. It’s not every day John Simpson wipes blood from a TV camera lens minutes after a 1,000 lb bomb has fallen a few yards away from you, dropped by an F14 on your own side, tearing across the sky at close to 500 mph. For now, enough was enough.

Oggy met us at a checkpoint ninety minutes down the road. He told us Abdullah was on the way to the hospital with shrapnel in his neck and thigh. He asked us if we were OK to carry on driving, but we knew we had to complete. He also told us that Kameron had died. It was only what I’d expected.

By 16.00 we were back in Arbil. Word had spread that a BBC team had been bombed. I was shattered by the time I unloaded the gear into the hotel lobby – there was nothing left in the tank – but the warmth in the locals’ hearts was genuine. It was one of those surreal moments where people still have compassion, even when there’s a war on and you have to put yourself first.

Someone sorted a car to take Fred to the UN medical facility at Ankawa on the other side of Arbil – his head badly needed dressing. As I saw him off, I sat down outside the hotel with another
security
guy called Steve Musson to talk it through and I realised just how fucking lucky I had been. I wasn’t in delayed shock; I didn’t get emotional; yet this was the closest in all my scrapes that I had come to meeting my maker.

Suddenly I found a conscience and thought the right thing was to go the hospital to see Abdullah. It was chaos. Waji was in there too and the locals knew it. For once, our hotel manager played a blinder and got me straight through to the doctor, who checked me over. I really wasn’t sure if my hearing was still in one piece. Thankfully, I was given the all clear.