Ultimate Weapon (34 page)

Jed could feel himself tiring. His muscles were aching, and his breath was starting to shorten. Looking ahead, he’d lost sight of Nick. The old man had been some yards ahead, but he must have been dragged downstream. Or under. It was impossible to tell. He took a deep breath, and put his head down, trying to swim underwater for
a few yards, avoiding the debris. As he burst back up to the surface, he could feel the thick foam sticking to his hair, as if he had been dipped in slime. Taking a lungful of air, he looked around. The water was pitch black. Nothing. Not even a glimpse of the shore. ‘Nick,’ he hissed. ‘Where the fuck are you, man?’

Jed paused, waiting for the reply, and sensing this was way beyond him. He could feel the water closing around him, and for a moment he felt cold with fear. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ he repeated, risking raising his voice.

Silence.

He kicked his legs hard into the water to propel himself forward. A twitch. Jed could feel it in the back of his thigh. ‘Bugger,’ he muttered. He’d had cramp before, and knew how to recognise its first signs. He could make another hundred yards, but not much more. He looked ahead, peering into the darkness. He’d lost track of how far he’d come, and how far he still had to go. There were no lights visible from either shore, no matter how hard he looked. Maybe the debris has knocked me off course, Jed told himself grimly.
Fuck it, I might even be swimming the wrong direction by now.

Reaching out, Jed grabbed at a large object floating by. He needed something to keep himself afloat, so he could use all his strength to kick back with his legs and propel himself forward. He gripped it with both hands, steadied himself, then pushed out. The cramp in his leg was starting to ache, the pain creeping up into his back, but he still had movement. Ignore it, he told himself. Succumb to the pain, and you’re a dead man.

Jed looked at the object he was clinging on to. A glassy eye was staring back at him, cold and sad and dead. Shit, he thought. I’m holding on to one of the corpses the Iraqis have tossed into the river. The body was bloated, the stomach and lungs waterlogged and swollen, allowing it to float easily on the surface of the river. His hands were gripping the man’s stomach. The skin was peeling away, and the body smelt of a vile mixture of decomposing eggs and rotten meat. It was slimy to the touch, and the single eye looking back at him was already starting to loosen from its socket. The smell was making Jed’s stomach heave, but he had to hold on tight to the body, his nose just a few inches away from the decomposing intestines.

He kicked furiously with his legs to push himself forward. In the next instant, a burst of anti-aircraft fire lit up the sky. Through the hazy blue light thrown up by the guns Jed could see a shape. It was like a thin, wavy line looming up out of the darkness. A shoreline.

Land.

It was eighty yards away, he judged. One more heave, and I can make it.

‘Jed,’ shouted Nick.

Jed’s head spun round. The older man was thirty yards downstream, clutching on to what looked like a piece of a sentry hut that must have been blown off the destroyed bridge.

‘Meet me by the riverbank,’ he yelled.

A furious light suddenly illuminated the city, as if a bulb had been turned on in a dark room. Jed realised
a missile had just struck. Maybe two miles downstream. You saw the light first, then waited a few seconds for the sound of rolling thunder to reach you. Jed kicked. Sixty yards to go. The noise of the missile strike suddenly hit the river, followed by a wave that rolled along its surface. The water rolled up over the corpse, and over Jed’s head, briefly submerging him. As he came to the surface again, he took a deep breath. He’d swallowed some of the water that was seeping out of the corpse, and his stomach was heaving. He kicked once again. Thirty more yards now, he told himself. That’s all.

A fire was burning a couple of miles downstream. It was impossible to say from here what the missile had struck, but whatever it was, it had set off some impressive fireworks. An oil depot maybe, thought Jed. Or a munitions dump. Sparks and flames were leaping up into the sky, spreading a dull orange glow across the city, and Jed could already hear the sound of sirens as fire trucks rushed towards it.

Ten more yards. Jed pushed the corpse away, and dug his arms into the water to move himself forward. Seven yards … Six.

He thrust his legs down, looking for the ground. It felt sticky and muddy, but he was grateful to have anything he could stand up in. Wading, Jed completed the last few yards of the journey, throwing himself down on the pebbled shoreline. For a moment, he just lay on the ground, exhausted and frozen, breathing deeply as he tried to recover his breath.

‘What the hell are we hanging around for?’ said Nick, standing over him. ‘A bus?’

Jed slowly picked himself up: every muscle in his body was aching and frozen. Reaching into his kitbag, he took out some water, swilling it around his mouth and spitting it out to clean the river from his mouth.

‘Christ, man, don’t waste water,’ said Nick. ‘Maybe we’ll see if they’ve got a nice hotel you can check into.’

Jed looked up. Nick looked in as bad shape as he did. His hair was covered with a thick layer of greasy foam, and his veins were blue and bulging out of his skin. There were some cuts and splinters to his hands, where he had been hanging on to the wood, and which could well turn septic if he didn’t clean them up properly. He had no top, and no shoes, and water was still dripping from his trousers: even the clothes in the kitbag would be wet through.

‘We’ve got an hour of darkness left,’ Nick persisted. ‘Let’s move while we still can.’

Jed pulled his top back on, and slipped his boots on to his feet. Nick was already scrambling along the riverbank. There was a six-foot embankment that led directly on to the road running alongside the south bank of the Tigris. So far as Jed could see, there was no traffic, but two miles away he could see the flames rising up from the missile strike. Nick was already moving his hands along the slippery, wet walls of the embankment, looking for grips he could use to climb over it. ‘Where the hell are you going now?’ snapped Jed.

‘To find Sarah,’ said Nick grimly, not even looking round.

‘Then get a fucking grip, man,’ hissed Jed. ‘You’re running around like a bloody madman.’

‘Maximum speed, maximum aggression, that’s the Regiment way of doing things,’ said Nick.

He turned away from the wall. Removing his kitbag from his back, he took out his boots and started to pull them on to his wet feet. He looked up at Jed. ‘But maybe the Regiment’s gone soft,’ he said quietly. ‘Maybe that’s not the way things work any more.’

‘There’s plenty of bloody aggression,’ said Jed. ‘Just maybe a bit more brains as well. We need to think about what we’re doing.’

‘I’m in charge of this mission,’ said Nick.

‘Nobody’s in sodding charge.’

‘I’m twice your age, and I’ve got twice your balls as well.’

‘You nearly got us both bloody killed trying to swim across that river,’ growled Jed. ‘Now you’re about to charge into the centre of Baghdad half naked, just asking to get yourself shot. That’s not bloody helping anyone, is it?’

Nick pulled his T-shirt over his head. Water from the river was still dripping from his chest. ‘I’m in charge, and I say we get in there and start searching for Sarah.’ He put his kitbag over his shoulder, and started hauling himself up the side of the embankment. ‘Or we die trying.’

Jed dug his fingers angrily into a crevice in the wall. The skin scraped against the rock, and he could see some blood smearing against the side of his hand. He
winced at the pain, then dug his fingers in harder, kicked his right foot into the wall and started to climb. Bugger it, he muttered under his breath. Unless the old sod calms down, he’s going to get both of us killed before dawn.
And who’s going to help Sarah once we’re both dead?

The presidential compound was clearly visible even from half a mile away. Jed stood at the side of the street, and glanced up at the building. Like an architectural oasis, it nestled into the banks of the Tigris, surrounded by tall palm trees and lush grasses. The main complex was surrounded by high, ornately carved colonnades, while inside there was a network of buildings and underground bunkers. At the centre, the huge green dome of the Republican Palace rose up into the sky, its polished surface glistening in the morning sun. Next to it, the high towers of the Palace of Peace and the Palace of Flowers, two massive administration blocks that housed the planners and staff officers of Saddam’s regime.

Despite more than a hundred cruise missiles crashing into the city, the thing, although damaged is still standing, thought Jed.
And so is the bugger inside.

He was standing next to Nick on the corner of a busy street. They had walked this morning from the Tigris, taking the two miles from where they had come ashore up to the edge of the presidential compound with extreme care. They kept to the backstreets, and walked separately to avoid drawing any more attention to themselves than
they had to. The streets were in chaos. Glass had been shattered out of the shop windows, and was now lying in splinters all over the roads. Schools had been closed, and so had most of the offices and factories: only the military admin blocks were open. A few fires were still smouldering, and they passed dozens of damaged and burnt-out buildings. The fire service was concentrating on a handful of major missile strikes, while the rest were left to burn themselves out, or were brought under control by neighbours armed with nothing more than buckets of water. Most people were still hiding in their houses, but a few had started to drift out on to the streets, gawping like tourists at the slow destruction of their city.

‘We’re going in,’ said Nick, nodding up towards the compound.

Jed laughed. ‘You’re a bloody madman.’ Sod the Iraqis, he thought. The next man he was going to be taking out was Nick. ‘You’re just planning to knock on the door, say you’re from Britain and ask to have a look around, are you?’ he said.

Nick didn’t answer. He was looking up and down the street. There were a few cars driving along, and a couple of shopkeepers were trying to reopen their businesses, even though there wasn’t much to sell. On the other side of the street, a woman was shouting at passers-by, asking them if they had seen her husband. ‘We’ll find a way in,’ he said. He turned to Jed. ‘All I know is the Firm reckons Sarah’s been taken into that compound, and if we want to find her, that’s where we have to go. If you’ve got any better ideas, I’m listening.’

They started walking. In the rest of the city, law and order had been abandoned since the missile strikes began, but the presidential compound was still under close protection. There was a thick concrete and barbed-wire barrier two hundred yards out from the main ten-foot wall of the compound, and surrounding that was a circular cordon of army trucks, each one filled with a dozen or more troops. Some of them must be pretty badly shaken up by now, Jed reckoned, but none of them showed any signs of abandoning their positions. To get through, you’d need a fully equipped battalion, Jed thought. And even then, you’d have a nasty fight on your hands.

They walked the circumference of the compound, a distance of a mile and half in total. They kept a couple of side streets away to stop the troops paying any attention to them, but it was clear that there was no easy way through. There were no breaks in the line. And the Iraqis were building new defences all the time: at three different points, they saw sandbags and gun emplacements being dug into position for the defence of the city’s inner ring. For all their bluster and bravado, it seemed to Jed that the Iraqi high command didn’t rate their chances of holding the south of the country very highly. They might not even hold the outer ring of Baghdad for very long. But here at the compound, they’d make their last stand.
And it would almost certainly be a bloody one.

Jed looked at Nick. ‘Did you learn any Arabic during your last time here?’

Nick nodded, his expression grim. ‘A few essential
phrases,’ he said. ‘ “Stop frying my balls, mate” and “Go easy with the thumbscrews, old fruit”.’ He smiled. ‘That kind of thing.’

They were standing on one of the streets running away from the compound, about three hundred yards back from its first defensive perimeter. A few people had glanced in their direction, but Jed was surprised by how easily they could pass through the streets. Since the war started, the whole city was so wired up, tense and edgy, nobody appeared to be paying any attention to anything but themselves. So long as they kept their heads down, they should be OK.

The trouble was, that wasn’t going to get them inside.
It wasn’t going to help Sarah.

‘They’re letting guys in and out,’ said Jed, nodding towards the compound.

He’d been watching as they paced the outer ring of the compound. There could be ten thousand or more troops inside, a couple of battalions at least, and there was a constant stream of men pouring through the three main entrances. It was a working military and administrative headquarters, not a sealed camp. ‘If they think you’re Iraqi, they’ll let you in.’

‘The Firm’s kitted us out with some uniforms,’ said Nick. ‘We’re going in as soldiers – Iraqi soldiers, that is.’ A sly grin spread out over his lips. ‘We’ve just signed up for the Iraqi Army, mate,’ he said. ‘The pay’s crap, the food is shit and none of the kit works. I reckon a couple of blokes like us will fit right in.’