The Protector (15 page)

‘Inside,’ Mallory shouted as he hurried around to the other rear door. Kareem was already climbing in behind the wheel and as Farris jumped into the front passenger seat Mallory slammed his door. Kareem let out the clutch and the car screeched away.

Farris looked back at his car. It slumped at an angle on the scruffy verge, steam issuing from its radiator grille. Farris said something to Kareem who shrugged as he gave what appeared to be a philosophical reply. But Kareem had other things on his mind. The team was not yet out of danger. Kareem was a naturally aggressive driver and Mallory had been nagging him from day one not to draw attention to the car by driving recklessly. Kareem’s excuse was that that was the way everyone in Iraq drove, which was not far off the mark. Still, Mallory had kept him on a tight rein. On this occasion Kareem was in his element and with a combination of skill and attack he worked his way down the side of the line of traffic, passing cars by a hair’s breadth. There was a chance that someone had seen them and telephoned their descriptions ahead. Since there was only one direction they could go, an ambush could be waiting for them at the next overpass - a favourite tactic of the local insurgents.

Kareem, Farris and Mallory stared up at the overpass as they approached. Traffic was moving across it: a vehicle could stop at any time and let the enemy debus into firing positions.As it turned out, they passed safely beneath it and Mallory looked back through the rear window as they sped away.

‘Where to?’ Kareem asked as he emerged from a cluster of cars to find the road clear ahead.

‘Gate twelve,’ Mallory said.

Kareem responded by swerving hard over to the outside lane and clocked over a hundred mph as he drove towards a broad Y-junction, taking the left fork up a ramp that led away from the motorway. There were hardly any vehicles on this stretch of road because it led directly to the Green Zone and a major checkpoint, with only one other turn-off - into a residential area - beforehand.

‘Slow down,’ Mallory warned as they sped along the broad empty road. ‘Let’s not scare anyone else into shooting at us.’

The checkpoint appeared up ahead and Kareem reduced speed swiftly so as not to unnerve the soldiers manning it.

Stanza was no longer moaning and yelling but his expression remained a picture of agony.

‘Stanza?’ Mallory said.

Stanza did not react. Mallory wondered if the man had lost consciousness and took hold of his ear lobe and pinched it hard. ‘Stanza?’ he repeated.

Stanza winced and opened his eyes, blinking hard as he tried to focus on Mallory.

‘Stay with us,’ Mallory urged. ‘Don’t go to sleep. We’re almost at a hospital.’

Some kind of response that Mallory read as positive flickered in Stanza’s eyes. He thought about giving the man some painkillers but decided against it. There were other priorities at that moment. Mallory was confident that Stanza was going to be OK.The bleeding appeared to have stopped and the journalist would have been in a lot more obvious pain if his pelvis had been shattered. Mallory gripped Stanza’s thumb and pressed the nail before releasing it.

It remained white for a second before returning to a normal pink colour as the blood flowed back - a good sign that Stanza’s blood pressure was in fair shape.

Mallory turned his attention to the next obstacle, the Green Zone checkpoint, and pulled his DoD identification pass from his pocket. It was an illegal ID since he was not working for an Iraq reconstruction contractor. But there was a healthy black market operating among those western security companies who were permitted to issue the highly prized certificates without which no civilian could enter the Green Zone. Mallory had paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for his but it had been worth it. The Green Zone was the only place he could shop in an American PX store or take a break from the bad hotel food and have a burger or pizza, all in relative safety and sometimes in the company of colleagues, former bootnecks who were also working as security advisers.

Kareem slowed the car to a crawl as they approached the first set of low concrete blast walls arranged in a tight chicane. He halted in front of a ramp where a stop sign in English and Arabic ordered all vehicles to obey or be fired upon. Half a dozen American troops beyond the next concrete chicane eyed the car with caution. It wouldn’t be the first time a suicide bomber driving a car filled with explosives had tried to see how far he could get before detonating his load. An Abrams tank was parked behind the soldiers, its barrel pointed directly at the car. A high-explosive artillery shell would be in the breech: one word from the checkpoint commander and the tank gunner would - literally - blow away Mallory and the others.

Mallory held his DoD pass out of the car window while a soldier inspected it from a distance, using a pair of binoculars. The other soldiers relaxed a little as he told them that the card was in the hands of a white man: so far there had been no white suicide bombers. One of the soldiers waved Mallory forward, stepping closer to a blast wall and gripping his assault rifle while concentrating on the car and its occupants.

Kareem halted the car alongside the soldier who leaned down far enough to study the occupants, scrutinising the two Iraqis in front before looking in the back at Mallory and at Stanza who was lying awkwardly in the corner.

‘We had a contact on Route Irish,’ Mallory said, using the military designation for the BIAP road.

The soldier, a fresh-faced lad who seemed little more than twenty years old, was unfazed by the bloody trauma dressing and Stanza’s wound. He took a closer look at Mallory’s badge, comparing the picture to the man holding it. ‘These guys with you?’ he asked in a Southern drawl, indicating the two Iraqis.

‘They’re my drivers,’ Mallory said. ‘We left a car back on the BIAP. I’d like to get this guy to the CASH if I can.’ He pointed to Stanza. Mallory was overly polite and respectful, in his experience the best way to communicate with soldiers. The youngster would let them through if and when he wanted to, no matter what condition Stanza was in, and being rude or trying to apply any kind of pressure was usually counterproductive.

‘He got any ID?’ the soldier asked, referring to Stanza.

‘He just arrived in country,’ Mallory replied. ‘He’s a US citizen. He has a passport somewhere.You want me to dig it out?’

Stanza managed a timely moan as the soldier took another look at him and his bloody thigh. ‘Welcome to Baghdad,’ the soldier said, a thin smile on his lips. ‘You can go ahead,’ he said before stepping back and waving to his commander who was standing between them and the tank.

‘Thanks,’ Mallory said as he tapped Kareem on the shoulder. ‘Go,’ he told him and Kareem pulled slowly away.

They drove through the last chicane, over a speed ramp and passed the massive sand-coloured tank, speeding up as they drove onto a wide empty road.

The Green Zone was an area that had been traditionally blocked off to locals even during Saddam’s time. It was several miles square and contained palaces and important government buildings, including Saddam’s equivalent of the Pentagon with an elaborate bunker system.The Zone was traversed by broad roads that had been designed with military parades in mind and had more than its fair share of ornate arches, sculptures and heroic statues. Much of it was still intact although its former splendour was scarred by thousands of towering interconnecting concrete blast walls lining roads, fronting buildings and forming protective entrances to numerous checkpoints.

Ten minutes after entering the Zone Kareem steered the car in through the emergency entrance of the large US military hospital and stopped outside the main building. Mallory jumped out and had a quick word with a guard who called for an orderly. A few minutes later a couple of relaxed, experienced medical staff were easing Stanza onto a gurney and wheeling him into the hospital.

Mallory watched Stanza until he disappeared inside. With some relief he turned to face Kareem who was standing by the car. Farris was still in the front passenger seat.

‘Farris needs to get back to his car, right?’ Mallory asked.

‘Farris would like this,’ Kareem agreed.

‘Stanza’s baggage is in the back,’ Mallory reminded him.

‘
Inshalla
.’ Kareem shrugged.

God willing indeed, Mallory mused. The luggage would still be there only if the car had not yet been ransacked.

‘I’m gonna hang around here. Go sort the car out before the army blow it up as an IED,’ he added, if they hadn’t done so already. Farris would be compensated by the newspaper if his car had been trashed. He would even make money on the deal, something that he and Kareem would discuss on the way back to it, no doubt.

‘How you get back hotel?’ Kareem asked.

Mallory took a moment to think about the logistics of that minor problem. The hotel wasn’t far away but it was in the Red Zone, a designation for anywhere in the country that was not inside a coalition-protected compound. ‘You won’t be able to get back into the Green Zone without a pass,’ Mallory said, thinking out loud. ‘I’ll figure something out,’ he said finally. ‘Go get Farris’s car.’

Kareem nodded and was about to walk away when Mallory stopped him and jutted his chin towards Farris. ‘How is he?’ he asked, his voice low so as not to be overheard.

Kareem glanced at his colleague and gave a shrug. ‘He was frighten. Me too,’ he said, a grin forming on his face.

‘You weren’t the only ones,’ Mallory said. ‘You did well today. It was good to have you there.’

Kareem nodded, trying to disguise his glee at having his bravery recognised.

‘I’ll catch you later,’ Mallory said.

Kareem climbed into the car, started it up and drove away.

Mallory faced the hospital entrance, pausing to consider Kareem’s question about how he was going to get back to the hotel. There were a number of people he could ask for a ride home. But that would have to wait until he was finished at the hospital and there was no telling how long that would take. His job was to look after Stanza. The first call he would have to make would be to the
Herald
in Milwaukee to let them know what had happened. He would put all the blame on the PSD convoy although in truth the contact could have been avoided if Farris had pushed his way to the inside lane when Mallory had told him to. The good news was that they were all alive. Mallory’s next call would be to his boss in London: he’d give him the same story.

He sighed as he dug his phone out of a pocket, hit the memory key, scrolled to the
Herald
’s Milwaukee number and pushed the ‘send’ button. Seconds later the recorded voice of a young Iraqi girl declared first in Arabic and then in English that the number he was dialling was incorrect. Mallory cancelled the call, frowning. The girl’s voice was the most hated in Iraq. The Iraqna mobile system was useless, to put it mildly, the service often shutting down for days at a time. At its best, calls were sometimes unavailable for hours and one of the system’s most irritating features was the girl’s voice informing the caller that the number they were dialling was wrong when it was clearly correct.

Mallory put the phone back in his pocket, mounted the steps and entered the hospital. He’d survived another day in Iraq.

5

Tasneen’s Dreams

After a brief discussion with the hospital receptionist who was too disorganised to be much use to him, Mallory was sent to another desk where a clerk told him to wait in the lobby until someone came to see him.Twenty minutes later a man who might have been an orderly or even a doctor - he didn’t introduce himself - informed Mallory that Stanza was not in any serious danger. The journalist was being X-rayed at that moment and would head into surgery at the first opportunity. The man could not say how long it would be before an operating theatre became available and since Stanza did not have a priority wound he was low on a list that could fill up at any time without notice. Mallory understood and was directed to a waiting area where someone would eventually tell him when Stanza was ready to leave.

Mallory found the waiting room but only after exploring two long corridors that met at an L-shaped junction. Countless doorways led off to a variety of rooms and offices and eventually he ended up not far from his starting point. The waiting room was small, narrow, empty, uninviting and it was easy to see why he had overlooked it in the first place.There were two rows of uncomfortable wooden chairs facing each other, a dozen in all, and only when Mallory sat down did he notice a small television bolted to the wall high up in a corner above the entrance. Its volume was muted.

He sat on a chair near the door and looked up at the screen that was displaying a US Army-sponsored broadcast of a sports update. Mallory looked around for the remote but if it was in the room its whereabouts were not obvious. Uninterested in getting up to search for it he rested the back of his head against the wall and stretched his feet out under the chair opposite. As he watched the muted screen where the picture had changed to a jolly army chaplain playing a harpsichord he considered getting up and fiddling with the controls on the front of the set to find another channel. But that would have required him to stand on a chair, an action that struck him as not worth the effort.

Mallory pulled his phone out of his pocket to try the newspaper’s foreign desk again and pushed the redial button. After a long silence he concentrated on trying to make out what a faint voice that sounded as if it was at the other end of a tunnel was saying.

‘Excuse me,’ a girl’s voice said.

Mallory looked up, unaware that someone had entered the room. He instantly pulled back his legs and sat upright to let an extremely pretty girl pass by. ‘Sorry,’ Mallory said as he watched her.

Tasneen smiled politely as she sat down on the furthest seat on the row opposite to Mallory.

Mallory stared at her, unable to avert his eyes. She glanced at him, smiled embarrassedly and looked away.

Mallory looked back down at his phone, conscious of his rudeness, but he had been unable to control his reaction to her. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen - or, at least, that was what it felt like - and he could not resist taking another glance at her. When he looked back at the screen of his phone he saw that he had accidentally dialled a wrong number. He cancelled it, found the
Herald
’s number again and hit ‘send’, stealing just one more sideways glance at the girl as he waited for the call to go through.

It was not so much how pretty she was as that a girl so beautiful could be alone with him in a room in Iraq. It was simply the complete unpredictability of it. Her lustrous black hair had a slight curl to it as it fell over her shoulders, her face was an utter pleasure to gaze upon and her large dark eyes were captivating. She was petite, wore tight trousers that accentuated her shapely bottom and legs and, although the colourful blouse she wore beneath a tailored jacket was modest, it did not completely hide the fullness of her breasts. The only women that Mallory had seen up close in Iraq so far had been the hotel chambermaids but they were all middle-aged and wore frumpy clothing. This girl was in a completely different league of attractiveness and poise.

She looked Arab but if Mallory had been told she was Italian or Brazilian he could have believed it. But despite appearing more liberated in her style of dress than most girls he had seen in Baghdad she still possessed that certain timidity or measured aloofness characteristic of well-brought-up Arab girls. Wherever she came from - and Mallory had not ruled out heaven itself at that point - just being in the small room with her was a complete treat as far as he was concerned.

He realised that a girl’s voice was jabbering away in his ear and he fought to shift his concentration to the phone as the recorded Arabic response changed to English to inform him that he had dialled the number incorrectly. He ended the call, put the phone in his lap and stared at it as he contemplated what other ways he could contact the newspaper in Milwaukee. But the angel a few feet from him was spoiling his concentration.

Mallory was not what anyone who knew him would describe as a lady’s man. He was by no means a complete failure in that department but chatting up girls had never been easy for him. He’d been a late starter in the pursuit of the fairer sex and by his mid-twenties he had decided that his chat was so bad that he had more chance of success by shutting up and hoping that a girl he fancied would talk to
him
. When he reflected on the girls he had successfully dated they had all been either friends of friends or he had met them in situations where they had grown to know each other over a period of time.

Mallory had never considered a relationship with an Arab girl before and certainly not while he’d been in Iraq. But finding himself close to such a beauty, the fact that when all was said and done he was a man and she was a woman could not be overlooked. As there was a distinct possibility that they might share the room for some time, Mallory didn’t think that it had to be in silence.With no realistic ambitions beyond a conversation he shouldn’t have felt intimidated. But as he drummed up the courage to say something he experienced a familiar apprehension.

He stared at his phone, wondering if he should just scrub round the whole idea, when, as if another part of him had suddenly taken charge of his personality, he announced emphatically, ‘The voice.’

Tasneen glanced at him with a blank expression on her face before looking back down at her hands.

Mallory felt awkward at the outburst but decided to continue now that he had started. ‘The voice on the phone,’ he said, holding it up.‘The girl. It’s a great voice but it’s gotta be the most irritating one I’ve ever heard.’

Her only response was a brief, polite smile.

‘I’m talking about the girl on the mobile phone,’ Mallory persisted. ‘The one who tells you that you can’t get through because you’ve dialled the wrong number when you know you haven’t.’

‘Yes,’ Tasneen said politely.

Mallory put the phone back in his pocket as the bullying presence in his head that had propelled him this far urged him to keep going. ‘Would you like me to put the television volume on?’ he asked, indicating the TV high in the corner.

Tasneen glanced up at the screen.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mallory said. ‘There I go, assuming you can speak English.’ He felt silly and decided to shut up.

‘You can turn it up if you want,’ she said, her accent as sweet and soft as her voice.

Mallory looked at her, pleased that she had responded and even more pleased she could speak English - although the impression remained that she did not particularly want to. ‘I just wondered if
you
did,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

The girl’s gaze dropped to his hands and he followed her stare to the several large bloodstains on his trousers and the similar blotches on his hands and the sleeves of his shirt. He’d forgotten all about cleaning up and suddenly felt like a scruffy clod.

‘Excuse me,’ Mallory said as he got to his feet and walked out of the room.

Tasneen was glad that he had left. Normally she wouldn’t have minded a conversation, especially with a westerner: they could sometimes be interesting, depending on what they did and where they were from. But on this occasion she was distracted by so many things, all of them to do with her brother and none of them remotely comforting.

Abdul was out of any danger from the wound itself. There had been an infection but the antibiotics had taken care of it. He had been lucky, or at least that was the view she was taking. After several days of silence Abdul had eventually told Tasneen how the squad had argued over some money that they had found and that one of them had gone insane and hacked off his hand with a single blow from a machete, something that the man had apparently not meant to do. She suspected there was far more to it than that but was thankful that the blow had not been to Abdul’s head. She could not understand why they had threatened to kill Abdul if he told the chief but it was conceivable they were afraid of losing their jobs at a time when work was hard to come by. But with all the time she’d had to reflect on the event, hours spent in the same waiting room while Abdul lay in his hospital bed, she was certain that she had seen something behind his eyes that had warned her he had not been truthful and that the danger was far from over.

Abdul had given the police chief a completely different story, telling him that he had been jumped by masked men on his way home and had had his hand cut off as punishment for being a police officer. But the chief wasn’t buying that story either and was pressuring Abdul for the truth.

Tasneen’s concern was that if Hassan and his men knew about the police chief ’s interest, and they probably did, they might think that Abdul would eventually change his mind and report them. She had never met Hassan but after all the stories Abdul had told her about him in the past she believed he was capable of anything. It was a fear that had caused her many sleepless nights and the stress was beginning to wear her down.

The obvious solution was to leave their home but where they could go was the question for which she had no answer. Iraq wasn’t like other countries where a person could leave their home and just move elsewhere. Apart from a cousin in Fallujah, Tasneen and Abdul had no close enough relations outside Baghdad to make a safe move and the problems posed by religious and tribal differences were, as far as she could see, insurmountable. Lack of money was a major difficulty as well. Then there was Abdul himself and all his personal issues and since they were together his problems were hers too. He was an invalid now, a young man with only one hand, and the psychological strains of that alone were only just sinking in - for both of them. When the time came for him to step back into normal life among his friends it would only get worse.

Abdul was already showing signs of becoming a recluse, spending most of his time shut up in his room. Even when he was in Tasneen’s company he hardly talked, staring into space as if he was in a dream state. She hoped that would change in time. But there was something else about Abdul that worried her. It was as if he had suffered more than the loss of his arm. She wasn’t sure, it was just a feeling, but it was as if he had been wounded far more deeply that night in a place that was not as visible.Tasneen’s suspicions that he was psychologically disturbed beyond what she would have expected were aroused not just by his brooding silence but by several odd things that he had said. They were mostly in the form of incomplete sentences and references that did not quite fit his story, phrases such as ‘It was my fault’ and ‘I should have done something.’ But when she asked him to clarify these comments he would shut down. Whatever was going on inside his head it was obviously deeply painful to him and therefore distressing to her.

Mallory stepped back into the room.Tasneen raised her head and slipped out of her bleak thoughts as he took his seat again. A quick glance revealed that his trousers and shirtsleeves were wet and that he had made some effort to clean himself. It was obvious that he was at the hospital because someone he knew had been injured but she had no interest in knowing about it. Two weeks had passed since the morning when she’d brought her brother in with the help of the Americans for whom she worked in the Green Zone. She had spent practically every hour of that first couple of days in the hospital, a place filled with bad news and horror stories. Every day she had seen mutilated bodies wheeled in or evidence of the presence of such: bloody trails up the front steps and in through the main doors. And from the waiting room she had heard the screams of victims and their relatives and the shouts of medical staff reacting to the arrival of the latest casualties of the terrorist campaign that was being waged in her country.

In a strange way, before her brother’s accident, Tasneen had felt separated from it all, as if she was not really involved and it was happening to everyone else but her. That was until the morning she opened the door to find Abdul lying on the floor and clasping his bloody stump against himself. She would never forget that sight for as long as she lived. In one awful, bloody second she became as much a part of this gross conflict as everyone else and from that moment all thoughts of escaping it had disappeared from her mind. Her little brother needed her and she could not desert him even if someone handed her an air ticket, money and a passport with visas for anywhere in the world.

If Tasneen was to be brutally honest with herself, that loss of the hope of eventual freedom was the true root of her depression. A deeper analysis of her feelings would have revealed a certain resentment towards Abdul, as if he was to blame for holding her back. It was not a new feeling. She had hoped that by this stage in Abdul’s life he would have found a wife. That would have released her from her self-imposed obligation towards him, one she had adopted even before their parents had died. But the dream that he would one day become self-sufficient and allow her to finally stretch her wings and fly away had withered in the past couple of weeks. It was as if she too had become an invalid, her wings clipped before they had even been used.

Mallory exhaled deeply as he stretched out his legs and rested his head back against the wall. He tried not to look at Tasneen, having decided to leave her alone, and glanced up at the TV that was now showing a large black US Army sergeant making clay pottery. He wondered if the programmers actually believed that legions of US soldiers were crowded around TV sets all over Iraq, watching this act of creativity in stunned silence. The desire to feast his eyes on the girl once more was too great and he turned his head slightly to have another look.