The Circuit (10 page)

The night before, we’d asked one of our military hosts at the hub if he could find us some weapons. He said he’d see what he could do. Martin also phoned one of his infantry contacts operating in our vicinity to see if he could help us out.

After a quick wash with the ‘man wipes’ Martin and I headed to the canteen for a brew and breakfast. The hub kindly supplied us with ration packs; something I hadn’t tasted for nine years. Sadly, they hadn’t changed. After breakfast, our lot improved quickly. One of our hub ‘hosts’ came through with two 9 mm pistols with magazines and ammunition. I told Martin I felt better but I’d feel a whole lot better if we could get our hands on assault rifles. Someone’s ears must have been burning because no sooner had I said it than Martin got a call on his satellite phone; it was his contact, an ops officer operating locally with a British military unit. He told Martin he had something for him.

We drove a couple of miles north of the hub to where the British military had set up a FOB, forward operations base. The ops officer was very busy but he found time to shake our hands and chat briefly about the war. We asked him when he thought Basra might be taken. He said the Brits could have done it already but politics, specifically American agendas, were dictating the timing of the invasion. He said he hoped it would be a matter of days and not weeks, then handed us a heavy blue mail bag.

I looked inside the bag; there were two AK47s in very good condition with twelve magazines full of ammunition. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning – Martin and I were beaming. We thanked the ops officer profusely. There he was busy fighting a war with his own lads to look after, and he still found time to help us out. He was a very good Rupert (officer) indeed.

We were anxious to get out to the incident area to start our investigation, but first, we had to test-fire our new weapons. There was a track off the main highway near the area which we wanted to recce, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and fire our weapons there.

The track was made of gravel and dirt and moved east in a straight line from the highway to a small industrial park three miles away. The first third of the track was bordered by irrigation ditches which by that point had become filled with pools of thick, black tar that had seeped in from the canals surrounding Basra. In addition to setting the oil pipelines on fire, the Iraqis had also dumped oil in the canals with an eye towards igniting them once the British launched a full-scale invasion.

Driving down the track, I felt like we were slicing through two realities; to our left the billowing soot from burning oil pipelines consumed the sky like a creeping black cancer. To our right, the sky was big, blue and blindingly clear. After about half a mile, we passed a group of Red Crescent volunteers whom we identified from the crimson emblems on their shirts. They were pulling dead Iraqis out of the irrigation ditches. The oil-soaked corpses were a gruesome sight, but I thought at least the bodies had fallen into shallow pools where they could be seen and recovered. Had they been disposed of in deeper canals, no one would ever know for sure what had happened to those people.

After two miles we pulled over onto a patch of broken ground. We got out of our vehicle and scanned the area to ensure that no one was in viewing distance. It looked good. We couldn’t even hear the traffic from the main highway. Improvising targets from tufts of weeds and debris, we test-fired our weapons and magazines and zeroed the sights to our eyes. To our delight, everything worked perfectly. I tucked my pistol inside the front flap of my body armour where it would be hidden from view but close at hand. Martin and I then positioned the AKs inside the vehicle where we could get to them quickly. Finally, we wrapped the extra magazines in small grab bags and tucked them between the seats.

The weapons sorted, we headed back up the track. Before we reached the highway, we decided to stop and search the irrigation ditches. We couldn’t rule out the possibility that the bodies of Fred and Hussein had ended up there. Martin scanned the murky water to one side of the road while I trolled the other. After a few minutes, we noticed dust rising from a vehicle driving towards us from the highway. There was no activity at the industrial park so it was very possible that the vehicle had turned down the track for the sole purpose of checking us out.

I stayed on the road while Martin returned to our 4x4 to cover me with the AK. As the vehicle got closer I could see it contained four passengers, all male. I wondered what they were up to. If their intentions were innocent perhaps they’d be willing to talk. They could have information that could help us.

The vehicle slowed to a crawl twenty yards short of where I stood. The men were sizing me up, as I was them; they were all dressed in black and ranged in age from early twenties to mid-thirties. All the windows in their vehicle were rolled down.

I looked at Martin and he nodded back at me. I felt a whole lot safer knowing he had me covered. I kept my arms at my side and away from the flap of my body armour; I didn’t want the men to think for a second that I might be armed.

As the vehicle drew level with me, I offered a traditional Arabic greeting. ‘Sabah al khayr. Salam alay khum.’ (Good morning. Peace be upon you.)

The men looked at me without smiling and greeted me back. My heart was thumping as my eyes bounced between them, searching for any hint of a weapon. If I saw one, I was ready to drop to one knee, take out my pistol and fire. With my magazine of thirteen rounds I could double-tap each one of them and still have five rounds left.

The vehicle passed me and crawled to Martin’s position. They gave him a short wave, then picked up speed and continued down the track until they disappeared into a patch of dead ground.

I returned to our vehicle and asked Martin what he thought of the men. Martin said they didn’t look friendly and it wouldn’t surprise him if they were Fedayeen out on a recce.

Our first potential surveillance by the Fedayeen underscored just how challenging our investigation would be. Inspecting the scene of an incident in an active war zone is infinitely more difficult than conducting a forensic investigation in non-hostile circumstances. For example, there’s no police tape to prevent people from tampering with evidence, not to mention looting it. The biggest difference, however, is time. When you’re operating in an active war zone, you don’t have all day to do your job. The longer you’re on the ground the more you expose yourself to danger.

Martin and I reckoned we’d be operating in the same defined area for several days. Though we were trying our best to remain low profile, two Brits driving around in a well-supplied 4x4 on the outskirts of Basra still stuck out. It looked like the Fedayeen could already be observing us, assessing our movements, possibly with the intent to kidnap or kill. Martin and I were in Iraq to look for the missing, not to join them. With that in mind, we estimated we could spend fifteen to twenty minutes tops per day at the incident area without compromising ourselves or our mission.

The day before we’d done an initial cast thirty metres out from Terry’s vehicle. Today, we wanted to get a good look up close, not only at Terry’s 4x4 but at the Fedayeen truck as well. We also wanted to push out on both sides of the highway to see if there were any blood trails or signs of the missing men’s bodies.

We pulled off the main highway across from Terry’s vehicle. The road was busy with traffic; lorries, cars, people on bicycles going about their business. At times it was hard to believe there was a war on. Down the road, some forty metres south, a group of kids aged six to sixteen were playing around the burnt-out hulk of an Iraqi military truck. It looked as if the truck had been bombed from the air, and Iraqi artillery shells were strewn around the area. Some of the kids were playing with the live ammunition; kicking it, picking it up and aiming it at each other. That ammunition was incredibly delicate, having been burnt and then lying around in the hot sun. I said to Martin if one of those kids drops a shell the ground is going to shake. The kids were completely unaware of the dangers involved in what they were doing. It pained me to watch them. Martin and I desperately wanted to intervene but we were in no position to wander down the road and sort out a bunch of reckless kids. We had a job to do and we were already attracting enough attention just sitting by the side of the road.

We needed to be as inconspicuous as possible so we made the call to leave our AKs in our 4x4 and walk to the incident area armed only with concealed pistols.

We began by focusing on Terry’s 4x4. It was so bullet ridden, it looked like a sieve. As we walked toward it, we noticed many fresh footprints on the surrounding ground, indicating that we weren’t the first people to check it out. Being so badly shot up, the vehicle must have been a magnet for looters and curious onlookers. We approached our investigation systematically, beginning with a 360-degree survey of the wreckage. We found the number plate. Although badly burnt, enough remained for us to positively identify the vehicle as Terry’s.

As we circled the 4x4, I kept two lists in my head; one containing details of Daniel’s version of events and the other what I was seeing with my own eyes. We noted scorch marks on the roof of the vehicle which supported Daniel’s description of the fuel cans exploding. But there was one key element of Daniel’s story that wasn’t adding up. He had seemed adamant that only the Americans had fired on them. But the vehicle before us had clearly been fired on from more than one direction.

We were beginning to build up a picture of what had really happened but we needed more evidence. Martin and I aligned ourselves with Terry’s vehicle facing west where the US tanks would have been positioned some two hundred metres away. The remains of the Fedayeen pickup truck were right behind us. That placed Terry’s 4x4 in a direct line between the Fedayeen and American forces. From where we stood, it looked like Daniel had definitely got it wrong; it wasn’t just the Americans who had shot at them; the poor ITN lads had got themselves caught in crossfire.

We found further evidence of crossfire inside the vehicle. On the floor we picked up 7.62 mm long and 5.56 mm bullet heads – standard American issue. We also found 7.62 mm short bullet heads, a Russian-made calibre used by the Iraqis.

It didn’t surprise me that Daniel could have got such a crucial detail of the incident wrong. The odds of surviving brutal crossfire are poor indeed. Martin and I were astonished Daniel had managed it. The whole episode must have left him in a state of deep shock.

With the clock moving against us we walked across the highway to see what the Fedayeen vehicle could tell us about what had really taken place. The Fedayeen pickup truck was only partially burnt. The wheels had been stolen but, as we’d noted already, it still had a Russian-made medium machine-gun monopod mounted on the back. The angle of the monopod was aimed through Terry’s vehicle directly at the American tank position.

As far as we could tell the Iraqis had fought fiercely before succumbing to the Americans’ superior firepower. There was still a lot of dried blood on the ground near the pickup truck. Inside, we found bits of flesh and bone along with 7.62 mm long and 5.56 mm bullet heads. Loads of empty ammunition cases and link littered the back of the pickup and surrounding ground. That showed us that the Fedayeen machine gunner had managed to put down a fair weight of fire before they were taken out.

We extended our search beyond the pickup along the east side of the highway. There were sections of large drainage pipes big enough for a man to walk through running north intermittently along the road. In between the pipes was a series of partially dug trenches.

We searched the pipes and ditches for the bodies of the missing lads but found nothing; no blood trails, no clothing. We also kept an eye out for wildlife that feed on decaying flesh, such as vultures, dogs, etc., but there appeared to be no animals like that in the area.

We still had one more vital point of Daniel’s story to check out – one which we hoped would prove correct. We crossed back to the west side of the highway to search the area where Daniel had told us he’d seen Fred wave to him. There was a piece of dead ground where Fred could have taken cover; the area had a shallow puddle of water and scrub reaching eight feet tall. We searched the area as thoroughly as we could in the time we had remaining. We found nothing that could either prove or disprove what Daniel had told us.

By this point, we’d spent forty-five minutes on the ground; thirty minutes longer than we should have. We’d pushed ourselves to the limit for the sake of the two missing men, but it was time for us to get going.

CHAPTER 10

Day three of our investigation began with a heated exchange with a Rupert at the hub. Martin and I had spent another night sleeping on the ground next to our 4x4 in the vehicle holding area; which happened to be twenty yards from the communal toilets (upwind of course). Makeshift military toilets don’t offer a great deal of privacy. They’re basically a trench divided by screens tall enough to shield the lower half of the body. Not once in my entire twenty-three-year military career had I ever experienced a problem with this set-up. As far as I was concerned, any kind of toilet is a luxury in a war zone. A half-screened trench is better than a plastic bag (which was often my only option during Regiment operations).

Martin and I had just sat down to breakfast when a Territorial Army major started having a go at us. Apparently, a female soldier – also TA – had complained to him that we’d been staring at her while she went to the toilet that morning. The major told us we’d have to move from the car park and sleep in a tent with the rest of the media.

I was outraged and not just because Martin and I had been accused of being peeping Toms. We were sleeping in the car park because we felt it was vital to ensuring the success of our mission.

‘I thought we were in the middle of a war,’ I said to the major. ‘If that lassie feels uncomfortable, why don’t you put the men’s toilets at one end of camp and the women’s at the other, instead of picking on us?’