The Girl in Green (22 page)

‘That's certainly—'

‘Unique and special, yes? Oh, I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Please, continue.'

‘I was going to say “different from what I'd planned on doing today”, but your description is also apt.'

‘So it is a date, then? Good. It is now about five-thirty in the evening here in Iraq. And we are two hours past GMT. So perhaps, when your day is done in a few hours, you will join me for an evening walk — what they call in Italian a
passeggiata.
Do you have a word for this in Great Britain?'

The term ‘pub crawl' comes to mind, but Charlotte decides to keep it to herself.

‘I … ah … sure.'

‘Wonderful,' says Miguel, with what sounds like genuine enthusiasm. ‘I look forward to talking to you again and showing you our world. Meanwhile I will follow up with Märta to see where he is, and together we will find him. He will be so happy to see you here. Perhaps the battery on his phone has run down, and he doesn't have a car charger. It happens all the time. But with the VHF handset, we'll be able to find him. And then we can bring all these worlds together, like back when the continents were one. Do you know about this? Our continental drift?'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘Yes, I do.'

20

Benton drops his phone out of the car window when the bomb detonates seven car-lengths ahead of them at an official roadblock with a heavy police presence. They are in the right lane, moving slowly in the direction of Mosul on Route 1. To their right is rocky desert. To their left is rocky desert with shrubbery. Sand has collected on the side of the road. Up ahead are black smoke and people shooting.

‘What part of “turn around” don't you understand?' Arwood says.

‘We'll get stuck in the sand. This isn't a 4×4.'

‘I'll take my chances. Turn around. And downshift, would you? What it is with you fucking Arabs and fourth gear?'

Benton grabs the front headrest with both hands, and slides forward in his seat as two men wearing black headscarves walk up the midline of the road.

‘Jamal, try,' says Benton. ‘If they're looking for foreigners, they'll kidnap or kill us when they get here. If we try to get away, it'll be the same, but we might get away.'

‘OK, OK, I'm going.'

‘We should let Adar out of the car,' Arwood says. ‘They might not care about her.'

He says this too late. Jamal has already turned the wheel to the right and has pressed the accelerator.

‘Downshift! Into first,' Arwood yells.

‘The wheels will spin. The wheels are bald.'

‘Do you have a gun?' Benton asks Arwood as the black-scarved men start to jog toward them.

‘There are a dozen arseholes out there with assault rifles. I'm not Jason Bourne. That's not the only play left.'

The car skids into the sand and onto rock. The lower gear pulls them over the first hill, as Arwood said it would, but the wheels slip. There's no purchase. The angle is too severe.

‘Put it in third, like on ice,' says Benton. ‘Like on ice.'

‘Ice? There is no ice. What ice?' Jamal yells.

The men with the rifles and black headscarves come closer, looking into cars, slapping people, looking at wallets and family names. Some people are yanked from cars. They all look the same — hands up, shoulders up, helpless. There is the sound of occasional gunfire at the front of the line.

Benton hears Arwood say into the phone ‘… no matter what you do', but his own heart is racing too fast and pounding in his chest too loudly, and it blocks his ears from anything that doesn't send signals to the most primitive part of his brain — the part that knows to run from beasts and hide in shadows. He cannot focus on what Arwood is saying.

With his remaining time, Benton lifts the video camera and spins it around until he finds what he's looking for: a second SD memory card from a side slot.

‘They are coming. They see us,' Jamal shouts.

The car is stuck. They're spinning their wheels.

The chip is hard to remove. Benton tries pulling it, and it doesn't give. He looks for a button, but doesn't find one. He needs some pliers.

‘Push it,' Arwood says, seeing Benton's trouble.

‘I want to pull it, not push it.'

‘Pushing it does pull it. Trust me.'

Benton pushes the thin edge of the chip, and when he releases the pressure, it clicks and rises a bit higher than it was. He removes it and shoves it into his shoe.

Adar has assumed a foetal position, and is holding her hands against her ears as the car lurches forward, then back, then forward again as Jamal tries to rock them over some kind of scar in the earth.

The men outside are ten metres away. They're interested in the Toyota now. Their car is the only one that has tried to get away. The men are pointing and yelling at them. Benton doesn't understand. They wear tan clothing. They have beards but no moustaches, and on their heads are black scarves.

‘Whatever you're going to say,' Benton says to Arwood, ‘you'd better say it now. Because we're in big trouble.'

The shots are not loud; they are pops absorbed by the sand. The invisible bullets blow out the wheels of their car. The radiator is pierced, and scorching water sprays over their windscreen.

The men yank open the doors. They shout at the passengers. Their eyes are doey-brown and have a faraway look, as though they are going through a routine that holds no surprises for them. There is nothing immediate in their eyes — nothing present or soulful or reachable.

No, not nihilists
, thinks Benton as he is dragged from the car and thrown to the ground.
These people are filled with purpose
.

The only other time Benton has been dragged from a car was in Lebanon in 1982. There was no al-Qaeda in those days. In Beirut there were complex but learnable codes of conduct that made the landscape more stable and traversable. The leadership was better maintained, though the number of factions was staggering. He was released when they learned he was a journalist. Back then, no one wanted bad press.

He often thought that his feelings of safety in Beirut had been irrational until, during a visit to Bangkok in the late 1980s, Benton fell into a casual conversation with an Israeli eyeglass designer named Ari who was in Thailand for scuba diving. He'd served in Lebanon, and agreed with Benton. ‘When I was there, I knew why people were angry, so I could avoid the violence. When I visit my cousins in Los Angeles … who knows?'

Two men pull Benton into the hardscrabble earth by the side of the road. Looking up, he can see that Jamal's hands are resting on his head, his fingers locked together. His shoulders ride high, and his head is slumped, as though this might protect his brainstem from a 7.62 millimetre bullet.

Adar is pushed forward and onto her knees. One of the men is pointing to the ground. He wants them all to kneel.

Arwood does not kneel and instead makes his move, but not with a gun. ‘If you kill them,' he shouts, ‘they won't pay for us. It's all or nothing. If you want your money, if you want to get rich and stop taking these shit jobs, you will stop pushing them. No one pays for bodies.'

The mercenaries — the terrorists, the killers, the evil-doers, their captors, their executioners; there is no lexicon yet for such men — all look at each other. It is the first pause they have taken in their actions; the first indication that something unexpected or unusual is happening.

‘Jamal, translate for me,' Arwood says. ‘Tell them what I said.'

Without lowering his hands or turning around, Jamal says something. Maybe it's a good translation. Maybe it's not a translation at all.

The two men who are deciding whether to kill them are not the only gunmen here. There is a team at work. Civilians are starting to run away from their cars, and sometimes the killers let them. Sometimes they shoot one in the back.

As Benton is pushed farther away from the road, he has a better angle on what's going on farther ahead.

He sees smoke rising from the black shell of a burning car. Like zombies, the killers do not run in pursuit. They are unhurried in their movements and gestures. Bullets are fast enough for their purposes.

To his left, on the next hill closer to the bombsite, are three men kneeling on the ground with their hands over their heads, as Jamal is doing. One turns to look at Benton. His eyes are wide with fear. His lips are open, as if to share a thought.

Benton watches as the man is shot. The blood adds to the colour of the land.

The executioners are unceremonial. One is filming the murders on a smartphone of some kind. The other shoots the second man in the back twice; he falls forward. The same shooter turns the rifle on the third, who is also on his knees. He, too, is shot twice. His shoulder blades clench together as the scapula tries to protect his spine from further trauma. He tries to stand. He plants one foot and rises. He manages a second step. It is a bold instinct to survive. The gunman, for a moment, lets him — for a moment.

Adar sees this, too. It is too close not to see, too loud not to hear. She cries in terror and makes to stand up, but the man behind her forces her to the ground again. Her knees hit the dirt beside Jamal.

Benton looks at Adar in the sand, and sees Charlotte.

His heart is pounding. He does not want to see this. He does not want to see this little girl get shot again.

And then, as ever, Arwood.

Arwood drops his shoulders, straightens his shirt, and turns to face the terrorists with one hand up, making the universal motion for two bills being rubbed together. ‘We're journalists. Beloved, expensive, handsome, and rich European journalists, whose governments like to pay ransom, just so you guys never have to be without needed funds for killing people. If you shoot us, there will be no money — only bombs landing on your head. My video camera is in the car. Go look. Jamal, tell him.'

Jamal says something in Arabic.

There is more shooting in the distance. Some of the remaining police cower behind cars and ineffectually shoot back. They are not soldiers, and many of them are young and new to the job. Unlike their assailants, they aren't cold-blooded murderers, either. Most are regular people who need jobs or want to help Iraq, or else they are Shiites who are proud that their tribe is finally in charge of the government backed by the Americans.

As Arwood spouts more bullshit, Benton decides that his chances of dying in the next five minutes are very high. As Arwood said in the car, the only real choice left is how to face it. And since no one really knows, Benton decides it really comes down to only one issue.

‘Onto your feet, young lady,' he says to her delicately, as he reaches down and puts his right hand under Adar's arm, raising her up and supporting her weight.

What are these people?

Benton decides they are Stooges. So inspired, he dubs the larger one Larry and his shorter companion Moe. It is Moe who presses his rifle against Benton's chest.

Benton remains standing, holding Adar too tightly. He is hurting her. He doesn't know how to hold her more gently.

And yet they are on their feet, and the issue is resolved.

Waiting to be shot, Benton has an epiphany, and learns that the opposite of brave is not cowardly, but resigned.

This is a feeling clearly not shared by Arwood Hobbes.

‘That man, right there?' Arwood yells to Larry and Moe. ‘That's Ferris Bueller. You know who that is? You caught a big fish — well done. It's time to start placing calls. Luckily for you, I have the number.'

This, of all things, is what Jamal adopts as a good idea and chooses to translate. Benton hears him say something-in-Arabic, something-in-Arabic, something-in-Arabic, something-else-in-Arabic, Ferris Bueller, something-in-Arabic, and then
baksheesh
.

Larry and Moe look at each other. Arwood is smiling, and holding his hands wide open in the manner of P.T. Barnum.

After Arwood shot the colonel, Benton thought Arwood might be a sociopath. Now he wonders if he might be genuinely insane. Twenty-two years is a long time not to know what someone else has been doing.

‘So are we good here, or what?' Arwood asks.

Märta dials, dials again, and then dials again. There's nothing. Or Benton isn't answering it. There was definitely an explosion, though. She is new to the use of crowd-sourced real-time intelligence using humanitarian mapping software, but one of the interns has installed Ushahidi, and she's looking for SMS messages or tweets about any incident on the road that Benton is travelling. There is nothing yet, anyway. People might still be burning.

Märta feels claustrophobic, and needs both air and a cigarette. Taking her purse, she leaves the briefing and walks quickly to her Land Cruiser.

Dusk has arrived. The sun burns orange and heavy on the horizon. The sun does not fall here; it is pushed away by the night. Nothing yields power in Iraq, not even the day.