The Istanbul Puzzle (7 page)

Peter was drumming his fingers on his armrest.

Isabel looked out the window.

A flash of sunlight in the corner of my eye made me turn and stare out the window on the right. What I saw amazed me.

The glimmer of sea that I’d seen in the distance stretched to the horizon now, where the continent of Europe should have been, and in the sky, flying parallel with us, was a silver-grey jet fighter, no more than half a mile away. It had the distinctive dual tail-fins of the F-35 Lightning.

We were being escorted by a state-of-the-art fighter jet. But why? And where the hell were we?

On the rounded top of a salt hill, an outcrop of the Zagros Mountains, a black-cloaked shepherd sat. His flock, fourteen thin black sheep, was foraging among skeletal dwarf oak trees. In the distance a layer of dust and pollution marked the location of the city of Mosul.

The Zagros mountain chain is a natural barrier between Iran and Iraq. It extends from north of the Straits of Hormuz all the way into Turkey. It’s a thousand miles long and its peaks are snow-capped. Its foothills resemble the hills of the US South West or the Highlands of Scotland. The city of Mosul, in the north of Iraq on the Tigris river, is near the ancient site of the city of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire. Uncounted armies have battled in this area.

The shepherd watched the white trail of a plane as it rose from Mosul airport. He thought about the warning he’d heard the night before. The evening star of Ishtar had risen late. The wizened crone who slept in a cave at the bottom of the hill had come into the village square to speak to them for the first time in ten years.

‘Not since Jonah warned the Ninevites has such a thing happened,’ she’d said in the pale evening light. Then she’d coughed for almost a minute.

Finally she’d continued, ‘Remember Jonah’s warning.’ She’d looked at every face. ‘Another great city will be destroyed.’

‘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.

I was reminded of the village in Kandahar where Irene had been murdered. It was similarly dusty, though the holes in the roads there hadn’t been filled in.

I met the officer who’d been with Irene in her last moments. It was the only good thing to come out of my visit to Afghanistan. He’d wanted to meet me, to tell me what she’d said right before she’d died.

And I envied him. Envied him that he’d been with her. And I’d been grateful too, that he’d wanted to see me. In the end though, the words he told me felt like knives plunging into my heart.

‘Tell Sean I love him,’ were her last words. And I could hear in my mind how she would have said them.

I closed my eyes.

I hadn’t thought about her last words in a while. I let them echo, the way they always did, then I sat up straighter and looked around.

The cars were similar here too, to Afghanistan: Japanese mostly, though the traffic was heavier. There were also old Mercedes here that must have had a million miles on them. They looked held together with dust. And there were even some new Toyota 4x4s.

Most of the cars kept their distance from us and some people at the side of the road turned and watched us as we passed.

Were we that obvious? Were Westerners still a target here? Whatever people said about the new Iraq, I didn’t feel safe. The chances of someone letting off an RPG, or sniping at us, were just too high.

In the distance there were hazy grey hills. A line of palm trees stood out on a low ridge. The wide tarmac strip we were driving on had dusty poplar trees lining it on both sides.

Mark drove the Hummer fast. Any time we passed through groups of buildings, an abandoned petrol station, a walled compound with smoke drifting behind it, he sped up. There were concrete slabs piled up at the side of the road occasionally, and stretches where a thick carpet of dirt had blown in from somewhere and never been removed.

Hard-faced men walked by the side of the road; Arabs in
jellabas
wearing headdresses, some more than shoulder length, and lean bare-headed men wearing dark baggy trousers. Other men, with weather-beaten faces, wore red and white checked
keffiyehs
wrapped around their heads. I saw women only once, a huddle of them standing by the side of the road as if they were waiting for something. Long black scarves covered their faces. Their ankle length black dresses must have been a killer in the heat.

Scraggy weeds grew everywhere. After a while we crossed a wide river. The concrete bridge looked as if it had been repaired recently. It had a checkpoint at the far side with guards asking for papers. Luckily the queue was short: two battered, empty flatbed trucks waited in front of us, then it was our turn. We were waved through by a green-uniformed guard as soon as Peter showed him something. These guards had no lion insignias, just black and white badges. I saw other hawk-eyed guards watching us from behind shoulder-high concrete barriers set up beside the bridge.

‘You ever seen the Tigris before?’ said Mark.

‘No,’ I said. I watched the muddy sluggish river flowing off into the flat hazy landscape.

Then we were travelling fast again, heading out into the countryside.

‘You know who came down this road before you?’ Mark asked, turning to look at me.

‘No.’

‘Only Alexander the Great, a couple of Roman Emperors, Persians, Muslims, Mongols, the Ottomans, English battalions, and the US Marines.’

‘Busy little road,’ I said.

‘Some of the locals claim there are
djinns
– evil spirits – in the hills around here who bring bad luck,’ said Mark.

‘That’s a bit pessimistic,’ I said.

‘The two sons of Saddam were cornered in that suburb we just passed. Human
djinns
are the only ones they should worry about,’ said Mark.

The road narrowed. It was winding up the foothills of the mountains that marked the horizon. On each side there were trees now, pine and oak. They grew thicker and greener the further up we went. The few houses we passed looked older, and they were made of stone and wood, rather than concrete or mud plaster. I saw a shepherd with a flock of fat-tailed dirty-looking sheep.

Finally, after slowing down for some hair-raising bends and turning off on to a rock-strewn single-lane track, we arrived at a flat open area, with stunted oak trees around it. Two yellow Hummers blocked the track. I saw the glint of weapons pointing at us.

Mark got out as soon as we stopped. He put his hands high in the air as he walked towards the Hummers. He’d left his door open. The heat and the noise of birds twittering rolled in. My skin prickled. Sweat broke out. Peter sat up straight.

‘Say nothing about why we’re here to these guys. I’ll answer any questions. You’re just along for the ride, Sean, OK?’ he said.

Thankfully, there was no need for any explanations. Mark had a few words with a soldier dressed in a bottle-green uniform, who I glimpsed in the door of his Hummer. The man could have been a local – he had a thick beard – but he could have been a European or an American too.

When he returned, Mark didn’t say a word. We all just watched as one of the Hummers reversed to let us through.

About half a mile further on, we stopped in a clearing beside a green Toyota pick-up. A mountain was towering above us now, craggy grey peaks, and up ahead there was a cliff of streaked white limestone. The streaks were like tears running down the cliff.

As I stepped out of the vehicle the first thing that hit me was that it wasn’t nearly as hot here as below on the plain. Then, on a puff of wind, I caught the scent of something decaying. There was a strange feeling about the place. We all looked around. Then someone shouted. A tall thickly-bearded, black-robed young man was running towards us with his hands in the air. At first I thought he was greeting us. Then I deciphered what he was saying.

‘You must go. You must go. No visitors are allowed. This is sacred ground. I will call the escort. You must leave.’

I felt a chill. What a welcome. Mark was the nearest to the guy, a monk, I presumed from the way he was dressed. Mark walked towards him. The monk still had his hands in the air and he was waving them about, trying to shoo us all away, as if we were foxes who’d strayed into his pasture. Peter, Isabel and I walked behind Mark.

‘You have been warned. You must go. Go now.’ He turned, as if he was finished with us.

‘I’m in charge of a project at Hagia Sophia,’ I said, loudly. ‘I need to see Father Gregory.’