Chris Ryan (10 page)

tremendously close. To me, she seemed the perfect child. Of course my opinion may have been prejudiced by the fact that she looked very much like me, with clear blue eyes, and hair that gradually turned darker as she grew older. But from an early age she was exceptionally well behaved. We only had to tell her once not to do something, and she never did it again. She was never afraid of the dark, but slept right through the night without any light on. Best of all, she was always glad to play on her own. She seemed to have inherited my gift of wanting to get on with life, and to try her hand at everything. Although so good, she had an independent mind, and would happily spend hours on her own, drawing, painting and singing away to herself. She was also a bit of a tomboy, and was often covered in cuts and bruises from falling out of trees or off climbing frames. I smiled to myself as I thought how she would sit in the dog-basket, cuddled up with Jessie, our other Staffordshire bull terrier, reading her picture-books . . . Up in the rocks, something near me stirred, jerking me back to the Euphrates. I sat up and looked round, holding my breath, listening. Goats? A dog? A human? In a moment or two I was reassured; there seemed to be nothing close to me, and the movement had been only that of the wind. But thank God � at last the light was starting to fail. It wouldn't be long before night came and I could continue on my way. What I had no means of knowing was that, during that day, the other guys in the patrol had been captured close to the river at a point about 100 kilometres nearer to the Syrian border. As a result of contacts with them, some 1,600 Iraqi troops had been deployed to look for other coalition soldiers on the run, and the civilian population along the river had been alerted: not only the men, but the women and children too had been ordered to turn out. I came out of my hiding place not long after dark, and began heading north-west, keeping as close as I could to the 130 The One That Got Away edge of the cultivated land, where the going was easiest. I was walking more carefully now, because I was in a popu�lated area. I was probably down to three or four kilometres an hour. Occasionally, for a change, I rested the 203 over my shoulder, but for most of the time I held it in both hands, with the weight taken by the sling of paracord round my neck. That way, the weapon was less tiring on my arms, but it was also at the ready: I could have aimed and fired a shot within a second. Soon I found that there were amazing numbers of Arabs out and about. Every half hour or so I'd come across a group standing or sitting around, chatting in quiet voices. Several times I picked up the glow of a cigarette and had to box round it. Often I just smelt smoke, either from cigarettes or from a fire or stove, and pulled off without seeing anything. (The smell of Arab cigarettes is harsh and distinctive.) I didn't know what the norm was, but it seemed odd that so many citizens should be out of doors on a freezing winter night. Again and again I saw or sensed people ahead of me, brought up the kite-sight for a better look, and had to make a detour. In the end my lack of progress became quite frus�trating, and I started to think that if things were going to be like this all the way to the border, I would never get out. I would become too weak from lack of food, and would end up getting captured. During that night I was on the move for eight hours, and must have covered thirty or forty kilometres, but I made only about ten kilometres towards the frontier. I would walk gently forward for a while, see someone, back off and box them. Immediately I'd come on someone else, box them, and carry on. It was zig-zag, zig-zag all the time, five or ten steps sideways for every one forward. I found it incredibly difficult to maintain concentration for any length of time. Wild animals like antelopes and deer, which are preyed on by carnivores, have the ability to remain on the alert for hours on end � and in fact their lives depend on it. But humans have lost the knack, and it takes conscious effort to stay at a high pitch of watchfulness. Boxing Clever 131 Often I found I was having silent conversations with myself. `I'll walk as far as the top of that hill,' I'd say. 'Then I can have a rest.' Soon I'd ask, 'How the hell did you get yourself into this mess? And where have the others got to now?' Casting ahead in my mind, I wondered what the border with Syria would look like, and how I'd cross it. People and personalities from my past kept drifting into my head: my mum and dad, my brothers, my schoolteachers. I'd wonder what they'd be doing at that moment � and I longed to tell them where I was. I imagined how surprised they'd be if they knew what I was doing. Often I heard their voices, and these became so real that I'd forget about my own security and pay no atten�tion to my surroundings. Suddenly I'd come to and realise that I'd covered a kilometre or more in a dream. Whenever I passed a house, the dogs would start barking, and the noise would ricochet down the valley: one lot of dogs would alert the next, and they'd start up before I even reached them. Those tell-tale alarm calls progressed along the river ahead of me, and to my ears they sounded as loud as the wail of a siren. The dogs were an infernal nuisance. As I was skirting one village, above me on a mound, I looked up at the houses � square, dark silhouettes with flat roofs and no lights showing � and saw a whole pack of them coming down, barking their heads off. Through the night-sight I watched them make straight for me. One ran up to within 10 feet, with three or four more close behind it. If I stopped, they would stop, and also they'd stop barking. But the moment I threatened them or moved, they'd bark like hell again and creep on some more, stalking me. I kept looking anxiously up at the houses, expecting lights to come on at any second. I felt like the Pied Piper, with all the dogs following me. I kept thinking furiously, 'Oh, for God's sake, SHUT UP!' I stopped, picked up a rock and hurled it. The pack ran away for a few metres, only to close in again. As I cleared the houses, they followed for a couple 132 The One That Got Away of hundred metres, then stopped, and stood or sat, watching and barking until I was out of their sight. Then, when my nerves were well in tatters, they'd turn back and troop home. The one saving grace was that their owners seemed to pay no attention whatever. So far as I could see, nobody ever came out of a house to investigate the cause of the com�motion. For a while I stayed as close to the river as I could, partly for navigation, partly so that I could get more water in due course; but then, deciding I was too close to the inhabited stretch, I drew away to the south again and returned to the edge of the desert, where sharp, bare rock seemed to pre�dominate. There I started cross-graining through the wadis, which were running down towards the Euphrates at right-angles to my line of advance. All the time I was trying to find a safe compromise, far enough from the river and its habi-tations, but at the same time out of the wadis, so that I wasn't forever scrambling up and down. By five in the morning I was starting to worry about find�ing somewhere to lie up for the day. At 5.30 it was still fully dark, but when I came to the top of a cliff looking out over the river, something made me decide to scramble four or five metres down the face. There I found a ledge, and at the back of it a nice flat area, with a crack going back underneath the cliff. That seemed as good a refuge as any, and I lay in it until day broke. When the light came up, I found I could look straight down into the river on my side, and that on the opposite bank there was a small village. The houses were simple, single-storey structures, mostly built of breeze blocks, with flat roofs. They stood in areas of dirt, with not a sign of a gar�den. Soon, as I watched through binoculars, people started to come out and walk up and down, going about their daily tasks. There seemed to be very few men, but plenty of women, all dressed in black robes from head to foot and heavily veiled: groups of them came down to the water's edge to fill their buckets. Surprise, surprise, the place was alive with dogs. I watched the comings and goings out of Boxing Clever 133 sheer interest, but also I was looking for any abnormal activity which might suggest that the area was on the alert �military vehicles driving about, or troops on the move. I was annoyed not to have the camera which I'd left in my bergen: with it, I could have taken pictures of the village and the river. Two men spent the whole day fishing, paddling up and down in a boat, dropping off gill nets, going round, and pull�ing in fish. On each pass they let themselves drift maybe a hundred metres downstream. The speed at which the boat picked up confirmed that the current was strong, and I felt all the more glad that I hadn't tried to swim across. In day-light the water looked a dark-brown colour, and a good deal of rubbish was floating about inside my bottle; but the sight of the shining fish reassured me: if they could live in the river, I thought, the water couldn't be too bad. All that day � Monday 28 January � I lay on the ledge, with my webbing under my head as a pillow. Up there in my van�tage point, under the overhang of rock, I felt secure, almost peaceful. It was the sort of place, I thought, in which an eagle or a peregrine falcon would nest. My main enemy was boredom. I spent hours studying my map, trying to work out exactly where I was. Again I managed to convince myself that I was well to the west of my true position, and a great deal nearer the border. Throughout all the hours of daylight there was never a movement close to me, either above or at the sides � just the activity in the village across the water, with the odd car com�ing in and out, and the people going steadily about their business. From among the ploughed fields below came the constant sound of an irrigation pump � a distinctive dyoot, dyoot, dyoot, dyoot, the only noise in the valley. It was great to have a live cabaret to watch. I tried not to think about food, but inevitably, with all that time on my hands, it had become a major preoccupation. Every one of those houses opposite had food in it, even if it was only flour or bread. But for the dogs, I could nip into one under cover of darkness and steal a loaf. In my mind I kept 134 The One That Got Away seeing the sachets of fruit that I'd left in my bergen. What wouldn't I give for some pineapple in syrup? 'When I get out of here,' I thought, 'I'm going to eat a gallon of ice-cream.' All the dogs made me think of Turbo, my Staffordshire bull-terrier. What a character! What chaos there would have been if he'd been with me! He'd have fought every dog along the Euphrates, and sent the whole lot packing. A friend in the squadron had got him for me. He was sup�posed to have been eighteen months old when he came; but he already had grey hairs on his muzzle, and healed-over scars on his face � which made me think that he was a good bit older than he was supposed to be, and also that he'd been entered in fights. His official documents turned out to be extremely elusive, and we never did establish his age pro�perly. When we first had him, he couldn't pass another dog without looking for a fight. If I took him walking on a lead, and we met another dog, Turbo would apparently pay no attention. But the moment I let him off, he'd turn back, go like hell and get stuck in. In this way he managed to start dozens of battles � although after a while he seemed to settle down. Alas, he came to a sad end. When we moved house, the change of routine seemed to upset him. Until then he had always been the cleanest dog you could imagine, but now he began to wet indoors � and when Jan came home with the infant Sarah, he growled at the baby. That put us in a fix. We couldn't give him away, because we couldn't be sure how he would behave with someone who didn't know him; even though he meant no harm, he was strong enough to knock small children over, and generally be a nuisance. So we decided with great sorrow that we would have to put him down. Remembering how my father had always shot dogs when they became too old or in�firm to carry on, and hating the idea of taking Turbo to the vet, I resolved to do the deed myself. So I got a pistol and drove out to the range � but then I looked at him and thought, 'Jesus, I can't do this.' So I reprieved him and brought him home. Boxing Clever 135 All too soon he growled at the baby again, and I decided his time had come. I drove him out into the country with a .357 pistol in my trouser pocket. But when I jumped out of the car and said, 'Come on, Turbo!' he just sat bolt upright, gazing ahead. Normally he'd rush out at the first oppor�tunity, but he knew something was up. In the end I shouted `Cats!' and out he hurtled, between my legs. I put one round straight down into the top of his skull but he stayed on his feet, his tail wagging against my knees. A split second later I gave him another, and then, as he was still standing, I put one between his eyes. Poor Turbo! I brought his body home and buried it in the garden. From my perch on the cliff face, I watched the shadows lengthen in the village opposite. Gradually the grey-brown fields beyond the houses faded into the dusk. As evening came on, I began itching to get going again, and had to hold myself in check. When darkness fell at last, I moved out, climbed to the top of the cliff and started walking. That night, thank goodness, activity seemed to cease as people disappeared into their houses, and after dark there was no�body about. But to keep out of the way, I pushed up towards the wadis, between a line of pylons and the main road. Up there, I found myself in steep country. I kept coming to what looked like small quarries, so that I'd have to climb down, walk across a flat floor, then scramble up again and along the top. It was really tiring, and my feet had become seriously sore. After my prolonged study of the map, I thought I'd identified the spot I'd reached � a big bend in the river with a village on it. This looked only about a day's walk from the border � a fact which lifted my morale and gave me strength. Again I walked all night. The occasional car went along the MSR, which was three or four hundred metres down to my right. Some had headlights on, others were driving blind. At some point late in the night the headlights of a car illuminated a motorway-sized sign. I was too far away to read the names, but I got the idea of moving down to the road so that I could check what the sign said. 136 The One That Got Away It was then that I saw the only wild animal in the whole of my
trek. As I dropped towards the road I looked through the kite-sight, and there, on top of a mound, stood a big fox, staring down at me. I knew what he was from his sharp-pointed face and sticking-up ears. For a whole minute watched him, and he never moved; then I went on, and left him in possession of his territory. In that fox I recognised a fellow creature of the night. I bet that, like me, he lay up all day and came out only when darkness fell. He can't have been as short of food as I was, but I found it hard to imagine what he lived on, because never in all my time on the move or lying up did I see any form of rodent. Closing on the sign, I peered up at it and made out the legend � in English as well as Arabic � AL QAIM 50; NEW ANA 50. New Ana was behind me, and I'd known for some time that I was heading for Al Qaim � but 50 kilometres! That was a massive blow to morale. I'd imagined I was almost at the place. Sitting there in despair, I thought, 'I'm never going to finish this damn walk.' When I got out the map and pinpointed my position, I saw I was still 80 or 90 kilometres from the border � at least two days short of the spot I thought I'd reached. I couldn't believe it. I felt as if I'd had a kick between the legs, and sat down on the side of the road, staring at the sign. But the evidence was there, and everything fitted together, as I worked out where I was and where I'd been. The reality was intensely depressing. There was nothing for it but to keep going. Weighed down by exhaustion, thirst and fear, I started moving along the line of the MSR. I was only a hundred metres from it when I heard a drone from somewhere along the road behind me. I went to ground and lay listening. The noise was coming from miles away to the east, but it grew steadily until it seemed to fill the night. Presently a four-ton wagon went past � but still the heavy drone was increasing. I moved down to the edge of the road and hid in some rocks, looking along the highway through the kite-sight. For minutes I couldn't see anything. Still the noise built up. Then, as I Boxing Clever 137 scanned for the twentieth time, I saw a black dot, which grew bigger and bigger until it resolved itself into a massive vehicle, filling the sight. With a tremendous roar it came level, and suddenly I realised I had a Scud going by me. The TEL vehicle was a huge articulated truck, with the missile canopied-up under tarpaulins on its trailer, and a convoy of smaller trucks behind it, all heading out towards the Syrian border. In one of them, with an open back, I could see a whole gang of squaddies. `Jesus!' I thought. 'That's what I'm here for � to find Scuds!' I never imagined I'd get as close to one as this. Should I have opened fire on it? I couldn't have destroyed the missile, but a grenade from the 203 into the front of the truck might have put the launcher off the road. Yet I would have marked my position, and the guys in the convoy would have been on top of me. If only I could report back what I'd seen: this was exactly the information the coalition needed. I whipped out my TACBE, switched on and spoke into it, but as usual got no response. I was left with the mortification of hearing the drone of the engine and big tyres gradually fade into the dis�tance. I imagined the drama of a couple of A-10s coming in to take the launcher and missile out � but it was not to be. Then again I felt crushed by the disappointment of find�ing myself so far from safety. How could I have mis�calculated so badly? I cursed the wretched, useless map. On the move once more, I crossed the MSR, so that I was between the road and the river, which at that point were maybe fifteen kilometres apart. Now the ground was really flat, and again I started crossing ploughed fields. It was time to look for a lying-up position, but here in the farmland I couldn't see any rough, broken areas. So I planned to move back across the road and regain the higher ground beyond. Then I came to a culvert, about six feet high and eight wide, underneath the highway, obviously built for pedestrians and animals to walk through. I was feeling so knackered and let-down that I decided to lie up in the tunnel. It was a bad decision, but I can see why I 138 The One That Got Away took it. I was thinking, 'You're going down. You're not going to last much longer. Why not take a vehicle and drive to the border?' The culvert would make a good base for such a hijack. I sat there in the tunnel having this discussion with myself. My lazy side was saying, 'Just do it: grab a vehicle and drive out.' The other side was saying, 'What happens if there's two people in it? How are you going to make them stop? What if there's only one man, and he just drives on? Once you've been seen and reported, that's you finished.' I went through the scenario again and again. I imagined myself standing on the road, putting one hand up, levelling my weapon � and the car accelerating past. Then I'd have given my position away and lost all the advantages I'd so painfully built up. Suddenly I thought that if Stan had still been with me, the idea would have been even more tempting � but even if we got a vehicle, the chances were that we'd drive into a control point. I decided not to risk it. But I'd landed myself in a hell of a place. While I'd been dithering, the sky had begun to lighten, and it was already too late to move on. Safe or not, the place was horrendously uncomfortable. The wind was blowing straight through that culvert as if from the North Pole. Soon I was absolutely frozen. I tried moving rocks to make a little shelter, yet still the wind whistled through the gaps. In the gloom I could see that bushes were growing in the floor of the tunnel, and I thought that maybe I could pile some into a barrier; but when I grabbed one, I got a handful of vicious thorns. There seemed to be no way of improving my shelter, so I lay down, determined to stick it out. Just at full daylight, I heard the sound I wanted least in the world: goat bells. I'd had enough of goats and goatherds already. Looking through the tunnel towards the river, I saw the lead animal come into view, heading confidently into the culvert, obviously on its way through. I just had time to scoot out the other end of the tunnel and up the sloping embank�ment of the MSR. As I ran towards the top of it, a car was approaching at speed, so I flung myself into a shallow ditch which led down the bank at an angle from the road-edge. Boxing Clever 139 There I lay on my back, trapped, looking straight down over my boots to the top of the culvert exit. In a few seconds the lead goat emerged below me, not three metres away. More and more goats came into view, pushing and jostling. Their stink rose all round me. Last came the goatherd, an old man wearing a long, woolly coat over several other layers, with a white shamag wrapped round the top of his head. He was leading a donkey, which had a blanket over its back, and five or six dogs jostled at his heels. As he walked out, the top of his head was barely three feet below my boots. I lay rigid, with the 203 down my front, praying that he would not look back, and that the dogs would not get wind of me. Had they done so, I'd have had to drill him. Little as I wanted to kill an innocent civilian, I was desperate. If I had shot him, I would have been in a dire position: I'd have had to run off into the wadi system with the pack of dogs after me, and even if I'd made a temporary getaway, the old man's death would have put down a great big marker. Obviously he came out that way every morning, and people would be ex�pecting him back. How the dogs failed to smell me, I still cannot imagine �unless my scent was obliterated by the stink of the goats. I held my breath as the party moved slowly away, up into the wadis. The old man never looked back, and the jingle of bells faded among the rocks. I couldn't go back into the culvert, because it was clear that at some time during the day the flock and their keeper would return. Equally, I couldn't move down anywhere below the road, because the farmland was too open, and too full of people at work. Besides, I felt sure that there must be a village, or at least a few houses, not far off. I lay still and watched the goats until they were out of sight. My mind was racing. There was only one way I could go � up into the wadis. But traffic had started to build up on the motorway; every other minute a vehicle came past, and if I began moving up on to the high ground, there was every chance a driver would see me from the vantage-point of the elevated embankment. I kept imagining what would happen 140 The One That Got Away if somebody spotted me and raised the alert. The hunt would be on, and, because it was still just after dawn, the searchers would have all day to catch me. I decided to take my chance and make a go for it between cars. I rolled over on to my belly, slung the 203 on my shoulder, slithered down the embankment and began craw�ling up a dry river bed. Every time I heard a car coming, I went to ground, scared stiff that I would be seen. After a hundred metres I came up into a crouched stance, scuttled upwards and got round into the beginning of the wadi system, maybe 500 metres from the road. Then I walked until I found a hollow in the ground, and lay down in that. There I was, stuck again for the hours of daylight. As a hideout, my hollow was far from ideal. Although I couldn't see the road, I had a reasonable view downhill maybe 200 metres, but behind me the outlook was blocked by a mound. If anyone had come along, I wouldn't have seen him until he was on top of me. This kept me fully on edge. Any sound made me whip round, even if it was only the wind passing over the rocks. My entire world was one of barren, grey, broken rocks, with nothing but the occasional withered bush to break the monotony, and nowhere to hide in an emer�gency. I calculated that this was Tuesday January 29, and a map check showed that I was still at least 70 kilometres from the border. Working backwards, I realised that due to hypother-mia Stan and I had miscalculated on our last night together, and we'd gone in a much more northerly direction than we'd supposed. By this stage even keeping still had become painful. Because of the cold, I had to maintain a foetal position, with my knees tucked up to my chest, lying on one side or the other, and I'd lost so much weight that my pressure points had become very sore. I could see that the day was going to be a long one. six ECHOES OF AFRICA There was something spooky about my surroundings. The wind blowing through the rocks of that huge wilderness took my mind back to another desert, another time. Africa . . . the Kalahari. My thoughts floated away to the time when 'B Squadron was deployed on a three-month training exercise, my troop staff sergeant was killed, and we all became caught up in what felt like voodoo or black magic. For the various parts of the exercise, the squadron had spread out over a wide area. The Air Troop went free-falling; the Boat Troop splashed around in the swamps which were ideal for their purposes; the Mobility Troop drove around the Kalahari desert; and the rest of us went climbing in the Tsodilo Hills. That was my first trip abroad with the Squadron, and the fact we lost one of our guys within days brought home to me how dangerous and close to the mark our training was. On our first evening in the country, before the troops split up, we had a brief on snakes from an African called Lazarus who'd been a sergeant in the police force. Later we realised what a bullshitter he was when he told us that his skin had originally been as white as ours, and had gone black from exposure to the sun. But when he first started releasing snakes from a sack to show us the various kinds which we might come across, we didn't know what to make of him. He brought out a spitting cobra, holding it by the throat, and said that if you gripped it like that, it couldn't spit. `Watch that bloody thing,' growled the SQMS, 'because if it does spit, and the stuff gets in your eyes, you'll have prob�lems.' Sure enough, as Lazarus came past me the cobra spat, and although I closed my eyes, some spit landed on my arm and the side of my face. I wiped it off immediately, but 142 The One That Got Away wherever a drop had touched it took the pigment out of my skin. I was left with pale dots all over my cheek, and a patch the shape of the British Isles on one arm. As a grand finale Lazarus produced an Egyptian cobra � a massive creature, twelve or thirteen feet long � which he set down on the ground. We were gathered round in a circle, and he said, 'Stand still, and let it go through your legs.' All was well until one guy moved � whereupon the cobra chased him. The man ran up on to a water bowser, and the snake wrapped itself round one of the axles, baring its enormous fangs as Lazarus heaved on its tail, trying to drag it off. In the end he got it back into his sack, but it was amazing that none of us had been bitten. After that little introduction, our troop moved up to the Tsodilo Hills. Our camp was maybe half an hour's walk from the base of the biggest hill � an outcrop of bare, blue-grey rock which rose abruptly in tiers out of a dead-flat plain. From a distance the hill looked strange but not parti�cularly impressive: only when we got closer did we realise that some of the tiers, which went up in vertical rock faces, were 100 or 200 feet high. In the evening, as we sat round the fire, one of the guys said, 'I'm going out shooting � does anyone fancy coming?' Nobody could be bothered. So he went out on his own, and presently he came back with a small, furry animal, about the size of a hare. A few Botswanan soldiers had been attached to us for training, and when he offered the animal to them, there was a big commotion. The Botswanans were with some Bushmen, who became very agitated. The little men raised a hubbub, rushed about and began lighting more fires. Via the Botswanans, the message came back to us strongly that we shouldn't kill any more animals as it was dangerous, and would provoke the spirits who lived on the mountain. Next morning we had a brief on the climb. Ian, our mountain guide, had worked out that rain was probably going to come in during the afternoon, so he told everybody to be off the rock by midday. Then he split us into climbing Echoes Of Africa 143 pairs, and sent us off. I was with Ian himself, and when we reached the first of the rock faces, he began showing me how to use various aids, particularly devices called friends, which expand and lock themselves in position when you hammer them into crevices. The mountain rose in a series of well-defined vertical faces and horizontal ledges, almost as sharp as a huge staircase. Joe Farragher � a staff sergeant and a big, heavy man of about 17 stone, strong as