For a few minutes I stood there with a ring of guards around me. As I looked straight ahead, there was a meta led road going to a block about 300 feet ahead. Looking around from left to right, I saw barrack blocks to the right, following the line of the wall, and a small clump of trees.
Then I saw some poor bastard lying on the grass, trussed up on his stomach like a chicken, his ankles and wrists tied together. He was trying to lift his legs to take the pressure off his head. He’d obviously been given a good hammering. His head had swollen up to the size of a football, and his kit was torn and covered in blood. I couldn’t even see the color of his hair or whether his clothes were camouflage-pattern. For a moment, as he lifted his head, we had eye-to-eye, and I realized it was Dinger.
The eyes give so much away. They can tell you when a person is drunk, when he’s bluffing, when he’s alert, when he’s happy. They are the window to the mind. EHnger’s eyes said: It’s going to be all right. I even got a small smile out of him. I grinned back. I had a fearsome dread for him because he was in such a bad state, but it was wonderful to see him, to have somebody there to share my predicament. Selfishly, I was chuffed I wasn’t the only one to be caught. The slagging if I got back to Hereford would have been unbearable.
The down side of seeing him was the realization that it was my turn next. He was really in a bad way, yet he was much harder than me. It occurred to me that I could be dead by the end of the afternoon. If so, I just wanted to get it over and done with.
A couple of boys with weapons were lounging against a tree near Dinger, smoking cigarettes. They didn’t stop when two officers and their little entourage came out of their office and walked halfway up the road to meet us. I just stood there, playing on the injuries, working on the principle that you don’t know anything until you try. Mentally I prepared myself for another filling in. As the officers approached, I clenched my teeth and pressed my knees together to protect my balls.
The local military had incurred a lot of casualties, and it was clear that these well-dressed officers, a mixture of commando officers in DPM and ordinary types in olive green with stars on their shoulders, were not impressed. My head was pushed up, and one of them took a swing. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the next punch. It didn’t come.
Another officer was jabbering away, and I opened one eye just enough to see what the conversation was about. The rupert who had hit me had a knife in his hand now and was walking towards me. Here we go, I thought, he’s going to show the jundies how hard he is. He jabbed it under the bottom of my smock and ripped it upwards. The smock fell open.
The jundies were told to search me, but they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They must have heard weird stories about exploding suicide devices or something because they were paranoid. In my pockets they found two pencils and inspected them as if they contained arsenic or rocket fuel. One soldier cut off my ID tags and took them away. I felt suddenly naked without them. Worse than that, I was sterile, a man with no name. Removing my tags was as good as removing my identity.
Two others took the Syrettes of morphine that were hanging round my neck and went through the motions of sticking them into their arms. They were cock-a-hoop and would obviously be shooting it up later on. I had a toothbrush in a pen pocket in the sleeves of my DPM shirt, but they refused to touch it. Maybe they didn’t understand what it was doing there. Maybe, if the smell of the mob outside had been anything to go by, they didn’t even know what a toothbrush was. Whatever, they weren’t taking chances. They made me take it out myself.
The body search was from the top down, but it was badly done and they didn’t even make me take off my clothes. They removed my boots and looted every item of kit. They behaved like old ladies at a jumble sale. We always use pencils rather than pens because pencils always work, even in the rain. I had a couple of three-inch stubs, sharpened at both ends so that if I was writing and one end snapped, I’d just have to turn it around and on I’d go. They went as souvenirs. So did the Swiss Army knife and a Silva compass I had in my pocket, both on lengths of para cord Every bit of kit is attached to you securely. There was a notebook, but it had nothing in it. I’d destroyed its contents at the first LUP. There was my white plastic racing spoon from an American ration set, and that, too, was tied on a length of para cord in my pocket. My watch was around my neck on cord so that I couldn’t be compromised by the luminous glow and it wouldn’t catch on anything as I patrolled. Even the spare plastic bag I had in case I’d needed a shit while on patrol was snaffled.
Around my waist, however, on a one-inch webbing belt, was today’s star prize: about 1700 pounds in sterling, in the form of twenty gold sovereigns we had each been given as escape money. I had fixed my coins to the belt with masking tape, and this created a major drama. They jumped back, shouting what I assumed was the Iraqi for “Let him go! He’s going to explode!”
A captain arrived. He couldn’t have been more than about 5’2” tall but must have weighed over 13 stone. He looked like a boiled egg. He was aggressive, speaking good English quickly and brusquely.
“Okay, what is your name?”
“Andy.”
“Okay, Andy, what I want you to do is give me the information I want. If you don’t, these men will shoot you.”
I looked around me. The soldiers were standing in a tight cordon; if they fired, they would wipe each other out.
“What is the equipment you have there?” he asked, pointing at the masking tape.
“Gold,” I said.
That word must be as international as jeans or Pepsi, and in every army in the world the soldiers like the chance to make a little earner. Everybody’s eyes lit up-even the jundies.” This was their chance to make more money in one hit than they probably earned in a year. I could see them planning their holidays and buying their new cars. I suddenly remembered a story I’d heard about one of the US soldiers who was among the troops who invaded Panama. In an office belonging to President Noriega he found three million US dollars in cash-and the knobber actually got on the radio and reported it. It was taken off to regimental HQ, and that was probably the last anybody ever saw of it. The bloke who told me the story said he couldn’t sleep at night just thinking about the opportunity that had been thrown away.
The ruperts were taking no chances. They dragged me away to another office and told me to put the belt on the table.
“Why do you have gold?” the fat man barked.
“To pay people if we run out of food,” I said. “It’s bad to steal.”
“Open it up.”