Mission Compromised (70 page)

All of this ate up precious time, however. Samir had said that there was an Army garrison at Dayr Az Zawr. They didn't want to transit that stretch of water in daylight and they knew that they would soon have to conceal themselves from police and military units using the highway that ran parallel to the river.

Here the Euphrates became much narrower: a twisted sluggish stripe through the desert, snaking through the geography of the area and, turning back on itself several times each mile. For the two fugitives, this was also the most dangerous place on the river because it was impossible to see much more than a kilometer ahead—everything always seemed hidden behind the next curve.

Samir sat by the outboard motor and steered the small boat from one side of the river to the other, trying to enhance their view of what lay ahead. At the same time, he was praying aloud in Arabic. Newman couldn't understand him but figured the man's piety couldn't hurt.

As the boat rounded a wide curve, the sun burst over the horizon on their right like a searchlight shining across the Euphrates valley. They could now only hope that someone looking for them would be unable to distinguish them from the dozens of other small craft on the water. Newman squinted in the morning light as the sun's rays illuminated a rise about two kilometers ahead. He could make out a
town at the west edge of the river, and just south of the town a number of trucks were lined up alongside the riverbank. Newman could also make out the figures of men standing, and walking around, by the trucks.

When they were less than half a kilometer away, Newman's blood ran cold. The trucks that he had seen were Army trucks, and the men were soldiers. He motioned to Samir to slow the boat so they could assess their next action. Two boats that had been a little way ahead of them going up the river were being hailed over by soldiers who had commandeered four larger boats. It appeared that the Syrian Army was stopping all river traffic going north.

Samir stopped the boat in the middle of the river as they tried to gauge whether they should go forward or not. Newman shook his head. “These guys know what they're doing. They've got one part of their force on the highway with machine guns facing the river … and some of their men on the river checking the boats to see who's in them. We can't go ahead. We've got to turn around.”

Samir made a wide turn and headed back downstream, increasing their speed as they went. Someone on the riverbank saw them and fired his rifle at them. Then another did the same. The machine gunner next began firing.

They got as low in the boat as they could. Samir tried to maintain speed, peeking occasionally over the low gunwale at the riverbank to their right. As the Syrian troops found their range, bullets began striking the water and snapping over their heads.

One of the Syrian soldiers must have had something more accurate than the standard Soviet-bloc AK-47, because bullets—big ones it seemed to Newman—began striking the boat, not in bursts, but one at a time. Water began to fill the boat. Newman grabbed one of the empty
plastic gasoline bottles, cut it in two with the survival knife, and began to bail—even as the boat started to settle deeper in the river.

The firing continued until they maneuvered around a bend in the river. When they were once again obscured by the riverbank, Newman called out to Samir, “Steer for the east side of the river. Their trucks and troops are all on the west side of the river. There are no soldiers on the east side. If we can make it across before this boat sinks, we can make a run for it in the underbrush over there.”

Samir did his best, but they sank about fifteen feet from shore. The two men jumped into the water and half-swam, half-scrambled to the water's edge, then ran up the muddy slope and into the heavy underbrush.

Samir started to head south, but Newman stopped him. “They'll expect us to go south. They'll be looking for the boat until they get the bright idea that it must have sunk, then they'll start combing both sides of the river—hopefully from here south.” Samir nodded his assent, too out of breath to speak.

They had lost almost all of their supplies and what little equipment they'd had when the boat sank, but Newman had managed to save the old National Geographic map. He stopped beneath the shade of a tree, opened the well-worn page, and pointed to a bridge just north of the garrison at Dayr Az Zawr. “Samir, is this bridge still here?”

The younger man looked at where Newman was pointing on the map and said, “Yes, it is a railroad bridge. It also has a pipeline beside the tracks across the Euphrates. I have never seen it guarded before, but then I have never seen river roadblocks before either.”

“Well, let's hurry and see if we can cross there. They won't expect us to come back to their side of the river,” said Newman, already starting a dogtrot.

They had gone less than a kilometer when Samir signaled a stop. He was out of breath and panting heavily.

Newman slowed down and plopped himself in the shade of a scrubby pine. Samir fell to the ground, exhausted from the run, gasping for breath. They both lay there for at least five minutes before Newman stuck his head up just enough to look across the river at where the soldiers were positioned. His hunch had been right; they were sending several truckloads of soldiers south from the checkpoint down the highway that paralleled the river on the west side. The trucks drove slowly, with soldiers standing in the back, their rifles pointed toward the river, looking for the boat that had fled. But when the trucks were about two kilometers downstream, the soldiers must have realized that the boat could not possibly have gotten that far and they stopped.

Though they were too far away to make out the shouted commands, Newman and Samir watched as officers ordered the men out of the trucks. The desert khaki-clad Syrian soldiers dismounted and began to walk back north along the riverbank, sticking their bayonets into every thicket. Then, as the two fugitives watched from across the muddy watercourse, a third truck came south from the checkpoint. It halted where the other two had disgorged the troops, but this one didn't have soldiers aboard.

Newman and Samir watched as the soldiers unloaded a large rowboat. Again, the indistinct sound of shouted orders, and a squad of soldiers boarded the boat and started to row across the water to the eastern side of the river, just a few hundred meters downstream from where the two men were hiding.

“If they walk north when they get to this side, they'll find us in ten or fifteen minutes,” Newman told Samir. “We need to get to that rail-road
bridge across the river. If we can get across the bridge and into Dayr Az Zawr, we'll stand a lot better chance than here by ourselves.”

“With God's help, I am ready,” Samir told him.

The two men climbed up from the riverbank onto the well-worn footpath between the water and the macadam highway that ran parallel to the river's eastern shore. There was no traffic on the road, and as they walked and ran north, they confronted only a few other locals, who paid them little heed, despite their now filthy garments.

Newman estimated that they had at most a ten-minute head start on the soldiers before they discovered their foundered dhow. The officers would take a few minutes to find their muddy footprints on the riverbank and figure out which way he and Samir had gone before they continued their pursuit. By now the sun was fully up, and the heat was bearing down. Samir kept up fairly well, but was gasping again by the time they had reached the brush along the eastern side of the railroad bridge.

As they crouched in the small copse of trees, they could hear a roaring sound coming from the river to the south. Newman looked out from their concealment and saw two MI-8 helicopters coming slowly up the river, one helicopter flying over the water along the right side shoreline and the other along the left. As Newman watched, the helicopter on their side of the Euphrates went into a hover, and he could see an arm extending from the troop door pointing down toward the water. Someone aboard had spotted their sunken dhow and was trying to signal the Syrian soldiers along the shore or in the boat.

“Quickly Samir, we must hide before they get here!” said Newman as he scrambled up the embankment and toward an animal pen and shed not far from the tracks. Samir, barely recovered from their last run, sprinted after the Marine, and they bolted into the abandoned
shed about ten feet from the tracks running across the bridge into Dayr Az Zawr. The rusted rails of a siding served by the switch just outside the building ran off to the east, parallel to the main tracks for about one hundred meters or so.

“There is nowhere to hide in here,” said Samir.

The livestock shed was about fifty feet long and ten feet wide. As the sound of the helicopters grew louder, Newman noticed a small office in one corner of the shed. As one of the MI-8s approached the shed from the river, they ran into the little office. It was empty except for an old train schedule tacked to the wall, a few loose papers on a heavy old wooden desk, and a dented metal trashcan on the floor. The two windows facing the tracks were cracked and caked with grime.

The helicopter was directly overhead. Roaring engines and the downwash of its rotor made speech impossible. The air inside the enclosed space was filled with dust and dirt that poured in through cracks in the walls. Samir motioned to Newman to push the battered desk up against the door.

They had just completed the task when the building stopped vibrating from the wind created by the rotors, and the screaming engines of the helicopter dropped to a low whine as the MI-8 landed in a cloud of dust in the corral.

Inside the office, Newman motioned, and both men sat on the floor with their backs to the wall and their feet braced against the desk. Suddenly outside the office, where they had both been just seconds before, they could hear the sound of men moving about, the occasional clink of what Newman knew was a weapon. And then, over the sound of the engine, they could hear voices, speaking in Arabic.

Samir whispered, “Palestinians.” But before Newman could respond, the doorknob rattled as someone outside tried to open the
door. When it didn't budge, the person trying to get in put a shoulder to the ancient wood and tried to force it open. As the battering continued, Newman and Samir pushed hard with their feet against the old desk and hoped that whoever it was would think that the door was locked, and that he wouldn't just start shooting. If that happened, the bullets would blow right through the wooden wall in front of them and the old desk wouldn't offer much protection.

Then, someone outside shouted in Arabic and the battering stopped. Newman and Samir could hear footsteps on the flooring outside and then a shadow filled the window over their heads, above where they were sitting on the floor.

Again, another voice, this time from further away, also in Arabic, but with an accent. Newman thought it was Russian but couldn't be sure. The shadow disappeared. There were a few seconds of silence and then the pitch of the engine's whine increased, the roar resumed, and they could feel the building shake again as the MI-8 took off and flew back to the west, toward the river.

The two men, bathed in sweat and covered with dust, didn't move for a full minute after the helicopter left. Then, their legs shaking, they very quietly got back up off the floor, listened again for any sounds and finally, when they were absolutely certain that no one had been left behind for ambush, moved the desk away from the door, and slowly opened it. The other part of the shed and the corral were empty. But only after creeping outside did they breathe a sigh of relief.

“Come on, before they come back, we have got to get across that bridge and into the town,” said Newman to Samir. The younger man could only nod his assent.

Much to their surprise, as they approached the bridge, there was a virtual traffic jam. To Newman it was as though the helicopters had
awakened the neighborhood, and now the railroad bridge had become a pedestrian thoroughfare across the Euphrates. Even though there was no footpath on the bridge, the locals were using the rail bed and pipeline supports as a way to transit the river.

Samir and the Marine fell in, about twenty meters behind a family of five, and walked with them across the Euphrates as though they had made the same trek a thousand times. As they made their way from one railroad tie to another Newman asked, “Where do these tracks go?”

“They are for the Taurus Express. You may remember it when it was named ‘The Orient Express,' and it used to go from Aleppo to Baghdad. But east of here, across the border with Iraq, much of the track was destroyed in the Gulf War, and Saddam has been slow to rebuild. Syria has kept up the tracks, as you can see, and there is a train that runs from Dayr Az Zawr to Aleppo,” Samir explained.

“Does the train stop here to pick up passengers?”

“Yes, my father and I have taken it many times. The station is just over there”—Samir pointed ahead, in the direction they were walking—“just outside the town.”

“If I take this train to—What is it? Aleppo? How far is that from the Turkish border?” Newman asked.

Samir said, “Not far. But let's look at the map.” As the two men walked side by side, he showed the Marine, whispering so that passersby would not hear them speaking English. “If you take this train to Aleppo, you can take another train to Turkey. That train stops at Elbeyli on the other side of the border and then heads through the mountains to Iskenderun, then goes up the coast to Adana, then—”

“Did you say Iskenderun?” Newman asked.

“Yes, you would have to change trains in Aleppo, but the second stop in Turkey is Iskenderun.”

“Perfect. My bet is that they think I want to get to Incirlik—you call it Adana—by following the Euphrates all the way. I'll let them think that's where I'm headed, but if you can help me get on that train to Iskenderun, that's a much better way to go.”

“Yes, I can do that. The route up the river is winding and treacherous. And, as we have learned, now they have helicopters. But the railroad can be dangerous too. They may have police or soldiers inspecting the trains,” Samir whispered.