The Protector (5 page)

Mallory got to his feet and several minutes later heard the distant drone of an aircraft engine. A minute after that he thought he could see a black speck in the sky to the west and although he could not be sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him his ears were in no doubt. As the sound grew louder the suspicious speck became larger and formed into two separate objects which shortly after became silhouettes that he recognised: Blackhawks.

They flew towards him, one close behind the other and then they suddenly split up, one chopper dropping height while the other moved into a circling pattern above. Mallory knew that the higher craft would have a heavy machine gun mounted in its doorway to provide covering fire if the pick-up point came under attack.

The incoming craft covered the remaining distance in seconds and when the dust kicked up as it came into the hover Mallory ran towards it. Several figures jumped out of its side when it was a couple of feet off the ground and while two knelt in firing positions the others ran forward, took hold of Mallory and unceremoniously guided him back to the craft.

Seconds later they were all aboard and the helicopter lifted off and accelerated away.

‘You OK?’ one of Mallory’s rescuers asked in an American accent.

‘Fine, thanks,’ Mallory replied in his parched voice. They were US Special Forces - Delta, he suspected - though the Yanks also had guys who trained specifically for hostile extractions. One of them handed Mallory a bottle of water which he practically drained on his first hit.When he sat back, clutching the empty plastic bottle, his hand drifted to his thigh map-pocket and felt the bundle of money inside.

Thirty minutes later they had landed somewhere near Baghdad airport and Mallory was on his way to his accommodation. Worried about the bundle of money he had concealed in his pocket he had not mentioned his injury and expressed a desire to go to his basher where - he said - he badly needed the toilet and to change his clothes before his debrief, hinting that he’d had an accident in his trousers that needed to be taken care of. As soon as he’d secreted the money in his backpack by cutting into the padding and placing the cash inside to be stitched up later he had a shower, got changed and then made his way to the sickbay to have his wound seen to. After a hearty meal Mallory attended a debrief after which he was exonerated of any blame for having been left behind and, since no one had suffered any serious injuries and his crew’s Sea King had returned with only minor damage, the affair was quickly forgotten. The war was coming to a speedy end and the powers that be were preoccupied with preparations for the occupation.

Within five days Mallory was on an RAF flight back to the UK and his unit, where he was immediately sent on leave after being congratulated by his RSM for his war efforts.

Mallory arrived at his apartment to discover that most of his furniture, including his television and stereo, had been cleaned out - not by burglars but by his former girlfriend. Under normal circumstances Mallory would have been annoyed enough to go and look for her and demand an explanation since it was his money that had bought everything. But he decided to forget about it as he placed the bundle of dollars on the kitchen table, made a cup of tea, sat down and stared at his money. Chasing after Jenny would have been a hassle anyway and he preferred to focus his efforts on more important matters.

Mallory had checked the exchange rate at the first opportunity and calculated that his dollars were worth just over six thousand pounds sterling. Another calculation revealed that it was more than the Royal Marines had paid him after deductions for the period he had been at war. All he had to do now was find a way of changing it to pounds without drawing any attention to himself and then spend it. The best idea he could come up with, and quite an attractive one at that, was to go on holiday to the United States - Orlando, for instance - have a good time, buy some new technical stuff from the duty-free shop, change the rest to sterling on his way home and then buy a TV and some furniture. There wouldn’t be much left after all that and Mallory wished he had stuffed another couple of bundles into his pockets.

Mallory thought about the ammunition box filled with money that he’d buried in the cemetery in Fallujah: a million dollars just waiting for him to dig up and bring home. But the only way he was going to be able to do that was to get over there - and that would require some planning.

The first step would be to find out which commando unit was going next to Iraq, specifically Baghdad, and then explore the chances of it making a trip to Fallujah, something which would probably be difficult if not impossible to find out in advance. He would then need to apply to join that unit, which of course he might not be permitted to do. And there was another even bigger problem. The Yanks were in the centre and north of Iraq and the Brits were in the south, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that those positions were unlikely to change. Even if by some remote chance Mallory could get to Fallujah he would still have to slip away from the rest of his troop without them knowing, dig up the box without being seen, conceal its contents and keep it secure until he was finally moved back to the UK. Each phase was fraught with impossible difficulties and if he was caught at any stage he could end up in jail for his troubles or at best lose the cash.

Mallory gave a long sigh as the possibilities of ever getting his hands on the money shrank - at least while he remained in the Marines.

As soon as the implication of that thought sank home it struck him that the only way he was ever going to get hold of the money was as a civilian. He needed freedom to go where he wanted, when he wanted, to go to Fallujah on his own terms, take as long as he wanted and decide how he was going to get out of the country with the money. The burning question he needed to answer was whether he really wanted to leave the Royal Marines and end a career that he had set his heart on since he was a boy.

Mallory got up and looked out of the window onto the field below where several youngsters were playing football. The thought of quitting the Marines didn’t sit comfortably with him. He had planned on doing his full twenty-two years of service up to retirement before seeing what else the world had to offer. But now, out of the blue, here he was contemplating his resignation with only a quarter of his time done. It was a gamble on so many levels, not just on whether the money would still be in Fallujah when he got there but on whether that was more important than quitting his chosen career. But a million dollars was a lot of money, to be sure, enough to buy a damned nice house as well as a damned nice car.

Mallory decided to explore all the pros and cons and only when he was satisfied that he had covered everything would he make a decision. It had to feel right and at that moment the notion of leaving the Marines did not. Perhaps it was just fear of the unknown.

But the period of indecision was not easy for Mallory. He tried at first to forget about the money - which turned out to be impossible - and then took to concentrating on the negative aspects of leaving a fine career in the Royal Marines simply to pursue a pile of cash. But the thought of the box in the graveyard would not let him go and tormented him endlessly. He didn’t take the holiday to Orlando in the end. In the back of his mind he knew that if he did decide to leave the Marines he would need to finance his Fallujah operation.

When Mallory returned to work he was told to report to Recce Troop, the position he had originally longed for. But the satisfaction was no longer there. Finally, a month after his return from Iraq, he made the decision to resign. The money or the adventure of retrieving it dominated his thoughts and he knew that he would remain restless until he did something about it. It was only after he committed himself, when he walked into HQ Company, met with the duty clerk and asked for the necessary papers, that the thought of the cash in the graveyard stopped pestering him and he set about planning his expedition in earnest. But he was soon to acquire a whole new collection of concerns.

Mallory’s initial research had already revealed that his mission was going to be more complicated than simply arriving in Iraq, digging up the box and leaving with it.The struggle between the various religious and political factions in the country as well as the general resistance to the coalition occupation had begun.There was an increase in crime and banditry due to the absence of law and order. Further research revealed that westerners were not permitted visas to enter the country unless they were employed by a certified Iraqi reconstruction contractor. But the Marines were not going to let Mallory go for another ten months anyway, by which time he hoped Iraq would be back to normal. With luck, he could then go there on holiday, hire a car, buy a shovel, dig the money up at his leisure, take a tour of the country, go out by road through Turkey or Jordan and start spending his cash on a relaxing drive back through Europe.

Mallory saw it all as a great adventure and began to feel more relaxed about the whole thing. He started enjoying his work once again and appreciated the company of his colleagues more than ever, knowing that it was all soon to come to an end. And, of course, he spent many hours contemplating the delightful problem of how he was going to spend the money. What finally made everything much more worthwhile was the realisation that whatever happened, even after he’d got the money, he could always rejoin the Marines and pretty much take up where he’d left off. There’d even be an amusing exploit to tell his grandchildren. Mallory would be a winner whatever happened: he looked forward with relish to revisiting Fallujah and concluding the greatest adventure of his life.

2

Abdul’s Dilemma

Abdul Rahman stood beside his hand-painted white and blue Iraqi police Toyota pick-up parked near a busy road junction outside one of the north-west entrances to the Green Zone that were heavily guarded by the US military. The elaborate checkpoint, protected by layers of interconnecting sections of concrete blast-walls, was overlooked by the majestic historical monument known as the Assassins’ Gate. It was also one of the locations where a year previously jubilant Iraqis had unceremoniously pulled from its plinth a statue of Saddam Hussein in celebration of his defeat by the US-led invasion forces.

The afternoon was a normally busy one despite the thousand-pound vehicle bomb that had gone off the day before directly outside the checkpoint. The death toll eventually totalled more than twenty people after the most severely wounded had failed to survive the night. One man had been killed almost a kilometre away while shopping in an open market after a piece of the artillery shell that had made up part of the bomb landed on his head. Seven of the dead were at the time inside the van which was ferrying workers who lived in the city into the Green Zone. The only person in the vehicle aware of the explosives packed under the seats and in boxes in the back was the driver. As instructed by his religious guide, he had picked up his passengers after explaining to them how the normal taxi had broken down and, since the replacement van belonged to him, he would be taking the driver’s place until the other one was fixed. As they arrived at the checkpoint and waited in line to pass through a security inspection he flicked the two arming switches, cried, ‘
Allah akbar
’ - and pushed the final firing button.

The large crater over a foot deep and surrounded by a wide black scorch mark was a few metres in front of Abdul near the centre of the junction. Like most of the other bomb holes in the city it would not be repaired in the foreseeable future, thus adding to the increasing deterioration of road conditions.

Abdul was holding the butt of an old AK47 against his hip, resting the tip of the barrel on the ground. The tattered, knotted shoulder strap attached at either end of the weapon had broken twice since he had been issued with the gun and it was too heavy to carry all day. He wore black trousers and the sky-blue long-sleeved shirt of the Iraqi Police with the letters ‘IP’ stencilled on a white band tied over his left shoulder. Abdul had been a police officer for three months after completing a six-week training course in Amman, the capital of Jordan, followed by another week at the Stadium School, the former international football arena, near the centre of Baghdad.The training fell short of the Academy’s pre-war standards but the necessity to produce high numbers of officers and get them onto the streets as quickly as possible was paramount. But lack of proper skills and discipline among the police was only one of the problems causing Abdul anxiety in his newly chosen profession - which, it had to be said, had never exactly been a vocational ambition for him. In his younger days Abdul’s main feature had been his bright, cheerful smile and although he was a quiet-spoken, introverted young man who tended to daydream when he should have been listening, the little he had to say suggested an above-average level of intelligence. But the smile had rarely been seen since the war and probably not at all since he had joined the police.

The main reason for Abdul’s glum feelings while at work was the poor quality of some of the other police officers: there had been a marked lack of vetting procedures when they’d been selected. This was no more evident than in the squad of which he was a member. Abdul’s immediate colleagues on the force were, to a man, all Ali Babas, crooks and villains, and one or two of them were possibly far worse than that.

Abdul had been brought up as a good Muslim - the word itself meant ‘one who submits’, a concept which he fully embraced - and by his late teens he was by far the most religious member of his family, the only one who prayed five times a day. But since the war his faith had slipped, at least as far as his regular acts of worship were concerned. This dilution of his belief was also at the core of his distress since, much as he wanted to re-establish a full commitment to Allah, possibly even in a more active way than before, he felt unable to. For Abdul believed that he was no longer worthy of Allah’s attention. He had allowed an obstacle to come between him and God and was too weak to do anything about it. This obstruction on the divine path was a result of allowing himself to be drawn into a perk of the job, for want of a better term, that had seemed innocent enough at first but had developed into something that in his heart he wholly disapproved of, a disapproval shared by the person he admired most in his life, his sister.

Abdul was a dichotomy. He had never been very strong, physically or mentally, but there were occasions when he was painfully contrary and displayed such levels of determination as to cause suspicion among members of his family, his father in particular, that, as a baby, the boy had been exchanged for an impostor. These moments of defiance were seen as uncharacteristic by everyone else but it was his beloved sister, Tasneen, who was always supportive and read them as evidence of Abdul’s great potential. He always showed promise when it came to family duties and honour, motivated as he was by his heritage: tribal, ancestral and, of course, religious. He was unaffected by politics. But it was the ordinary pressure of everyday life that revealed Abdul’s character flaws and lack of force-fulness and independence of thought. Those were the qualities of Tasneen, the only other surviving member of his immediate family. Abdul cherished her deeply. She was not just his older, wiser sister. After the loss of their parents she took on many of their functions.

But Abdul often resented her for those very reasons. The strengths she possessed only highlighted his own weaknesses, revealing them not only to others but to himself. Still, he loved her and remained guided by her but only until, he assured himself, he broke through to true manhood.

Abdul had been born on 23 September 1980, the day after Iraq invaded Iran, in Baghdad’s Yarmuk Hospital, and was brought up in Al Mansour, one of the city’s more affluent districts on the west side of the Tigris river. He was a Sunni Muslim, the same religion as that of his country’s leader, Saddam Hussein, a factor that gave Abdul’s father undeniable advantages in his business dealings at home and abroad. Abdul’s full name, a legacy from twelve successive heads of family, was Abdul-Rahman Marwan Ahmed Mussa Akmed Dawood Sulaiman Abdullah Abdul-Kader Abdul-Latef Abdullah Maath Dulaimy Al Aws.‘Dulaimy’ was the official tribal name since ‘Al Aws’ was the name of one of the two main tribes that the Arabs had divided into around the time of Mohamed, the other main tribe being the Al Kharaj. The Dulaimy tribe originated in Saudi Arabia and during Abdul-Latef ’s reign in the last quarter of the nineteenth century they emigrated to a village called Ana in the open desert region of Al Anbar some four hundred kilometres due west of Baghdad on the Jordan road. Two generations later, Abdul’s several-times-great-grandfather Sulaiman fought against the Turks during the great Arab revolt under the leadership of Prince Feisal with the aid of the famed British soldier, Lawrence of Arabia.

The Sunnis were a minority in modern Iraq at around thirty-five per cent of the population. Take away the Sunni Kurds in the north who constituted some twenty per cent and that left the former ruling class in Iraq now holding a considerably smaller percentage.

Abdul had enjoyed a comfortable upbringing and it was not until his early teens that he began to worry about reaching his eighteenth year, when he would be eligible for military conscription.The very thought filled him with dread. Having a well-connected Sunni father might have held some advantages for him when it came to avoiding the draft but unfortunately for Abdul his father believed military service to be an obligation of every young Iraqi. The Sunni - or, to be more precise, Saddam Hussein’s family and friends - occupied practically every important position in the government and military.Thinking that it might bolster the rather tenuous advantages of the Dulaimy tribe’s somewhat remote connection - Hussein’s tribe were the Tekritis from north of Baghdad - Abdul’s father also regarded his son’s term in the army as a wise and necessary insurance for the boy’s future. But Abdul had nightmares about becoming a soldier and the closer that day came the greater grew his desperation to find a way of avoiding it, without attracting scorn from his father. In fact, Abdul was unlikely to be able to avoid his sire’s disdain. But he still preferred parental abuse to three years under arms.

His first and most simple plan to delay conscription was to enrol in a university and embark on a long and difficult degree course. He chose computer technology, normally a four-year programme. But, even so, after it he would still have to join the army. His second delaying tactic was to drag out the degree course for as long as he could by failing examinations. There was a limit to how long Abdul could use this technique and by year six his father began to suspect his son’s plot. He warned Abdul that if his next results were not a satisfactory pass he would take him out of university and enrol him in the army himself. Abdul did not take his father seriously enough, perhaps, because to do so would have been unthinkable and maybe he hoped that his father would eventually realise how important his studies were to his son. When Abdul failed to make the grade yet again his father was furious and delivered his ultimatum: join the army or leave the house for ever. His father also made it clear that if Abdul chose the latter course he risked losing all claim to his inheritance.

The threat, particularly its disinheritance component, proved to be more painful to Abdul than his hatred for the military and he finally accepted the inevitable. The day he left the university he registered himself as eligible for conscription and within a week he had received his marching orders. He was sent to a training outpost in the western desert not far from his tribal home of Al Anbar, which was not a coincidence. He arrived at the camp along with four hundred other recruits at six a.m. Within a couple of hours they had received an induction speech, followed by a severe haircut, and were then lined up outside the barracks where their training team introduced themselves. The recruits were invited to lie down on their stomachs, whereupon the instructors went around kicking and hitting them with a level of enthusiasm that went far beyond even Abdul’s expectations. The beatings were immediately followed by a gruelling run without water in the midday sun where they continued to receive kicks and blows for no apparent reason. After a brief rest and a paltry meal the abuse was resumed. By four p.m. the recruits were ordered to return to their barracks and, expecting more of the same the following day, two dozen of Abdul’s fellow conscripts conspired to desert.Abdul needed little encouragement to take part in the mutiny and as soon as darkness fell he joined the others at a hole in the perimeter wall through which they filed. Then they dispersed.

Abdul arrived home late that evening, walked into the house and went directly to his father who was horrified to see him. Abdul attempted to relate his terrible experiences but before he could begin his story his father demanded that he return to the camp immediately.Abdul found the strength to refuse abjectly to obey, pleading to be heard and swearing that no matter what punishment his father inflicted he would not go back. His father responded promptly by ordering him out of the house, never to return.Abdul continued to make his pleas but his father shouted violently for him to leave, even picking up a cane at one point to beat him. In a storm of shouts and screams Abdul ran out of the room, bundled some of his things into a bag and left the house.

But Tasneen was waiting for him in the street, having already made a plan to help her little brother. She led him to a friend’s house nearby and arranged for him to stay in a small room there. She personally ensured that he was well fed while she embarked on a subtle crusade to change their father’s mind. Abdul’s world had turned utterly on its head and he believed that Tasneen’s task was an impossible one. He was convinced this was the end of the family for him and so he concentrated on how he was going to manage life on the run from the army while making a living. But he could not come up with anything: he slipped into a deep depression and became absorbed in self-pity.

Four days later Tasneen woke him up with the announcement that she had come to take him home. Abdul could not believe it at first, then quickly wanted to know how and why their father had changed his mind. Tasneen gave her brother no explanation, appearing neither pleased nor disturbed by whatever had happened, and simply told him to come back home with her.

When they walked into the house she stayed by the front door and told him to go into the living room alone. Abdul became nervous, not knowing what to expect. The only encouragement Tasneen gave him was an assurance that it would be all right. Abdul believed her but as he approached the living-room doors his doubts grew and he reached for the doorknob with a shaking hand.

When he entered the room his father was standing at the window, looking through it with the kind of empty gaze that suggested he was not so much looking outside as inside at his own thoughts. To Abdul’s surprise, when his father turned to face him there was not a trace of anger in his expression. Instead, there was a deep concern and, unless Abdul was mistaken, a trace of fear.

Abdul’s father gave a strange kind of slight smile that unnerved Abdul further, although it disappeared as soon as the man sat down and bid his son to sit in the chair opposite. Abdul did not say a word, unable even to begin to guess what his father was about to say to him.

‘Abdul, my son,’ his father finally said. He was looking down at his hands at first but then he looked up into his son’s eyes. ‘Do you still refuse to go back to the military?’

Abdul could feel the heaviness of his father’s heart. But despite his inability to find a solution for his own plight during his past few days’ seclusion one thing he remained certain of was his future regarding the military. ‘I will not go back, Father. I cannot. They are animals. I—’