I was going for an Oscar without a doubt-but a good percentage of what I was doing was for real. I was in real pain. It was a good catalyst for the reaction I wanted to portray. It was good to have this Israeli thing. Let’s keep on that and hopefully they’ll keep away from the other questions.
“I can’t help you, I just can’t help you.”
I heard a big sigh, as if he was my best mate in the world and there was nothing left he could do to help me. The sigh said: I am your contact; it’s only me that’s keeping everybody at bay.
“Then I cannot help you, Andy.”
As if on cue I heard another chair scrape and feet moving towards me. When I smelt the waft of aftershave, I just knew that the lad who was a dab hand with the rifle butt was on his way over to give me the good news.
He was, too. He really read me my horoscope.
I must have been getting used to being blindfolded because my senses of hearing and smell seemed to be more acute. I was starting to tell these people apart by their smell. The boy who was handy with the rifle butt wore freshly laundered clothes. Another one liked pistachio nuts. He’d put them in his mouth and chew, then gob the mashed shell into my face. The one who spoke good English smoked incessantly and had breath that smelled of coffee and stale cigarettes. When he launched into rhetoric, I got his spit all over my face. He also stank like a color supplement aftershave ad.
His chair would scrape, and I’d sense him moving around. He’d speak like a gatling gun, then he’d do the Nice Guy bit and give me lots of “Everything’s quite okay, it’s going to be all right.”
As he was chatting very gently, I could hear him getting closer and closer until we were nose to nose. Then he’d yell in my ear.
“This is no good, Andy,” he said. “We shall have to get this out of you another way.”
What worse way could there possibly be of doing it? We’d had intelligence reports of interrogation centers and mass killings, and I thought, Here we go, we’re going to get severely dealt with now. I had visions of concentration camps and electrodes clamped to my bollocks.
Two of the boys set to with rifle butts.
One particularly heavy blow caught me on the jaw, directly over my teeth. Only the skin of my cheek lay between the edge of the butt and two of my back molars. I felt the teeth crack and splinter, and then the pain of it hit me. I was down and screaming my head off. I tried to spit out the fragments, but my mouth was too swollen and numb. I couldn’t swallow. The moment my tongue touched the sharp, tender stumps I passed out.
I came to on the floor. The blindfold had fallen off, and I watched as blood poured from my mouth into a pool on the cream lino. I felt stupid and useless. I wanted nothing more than for the handcuffs to fall off so I could get up and deal with these guys.
They carried on, giving me some good stuff around the back with the butts, twat ting my head, legs, and kidneys.
I couldn’t breathe through my nose. When I screamed, I had to draw breath through my mouth, and the air hit the exposed nerve pulp of my broken teeth. I screamed again, and went on screaming.
It was getting outrageous.
They picked me up and put me back on the seat. They didn’t bother putting the blindfold back on, but I kept my head down anyway. I didn’t want eye contact, or to risk another filling in for looking up. I was in enough pain. I was a big, incoherent mess, honking away, sniveling to myself as I slumped on the chair.
My coordination was well and truly gone. I couldn’t even keep my legs together any more. I must have looked like Dinger’s double.
There was a long silence.
Everybody was shuffling around, leaving me to ponder over my fate. How long could I go like this? Was I going to get kicked to death here or what?
There was a lot more sighing and clucking.
“What are you doing this for, Andy? For your country? Your country doesn’t want to know you. Your country doesn’t care. The only ones who will really worry will be your parents, your family. We don’t want a war. It’s Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major. They’re sitting back there doing nothing. You’re here. It’s you that will suffer, not them. They’re not worried about you.
“We’ve had war for many years. All our families have suffered. We’re not barbarians, it’s you who are bringing in war. This is just an unfortunate situation for you. Why don’t you help us? Why are you letting yourself go through all this pain? Why do we have to do this sort of thing?”
I didn’t answer, I just kept my head down. My game plan was not to go into the cover story straightaway, because then they’ve got you. I was trying to make it look as if I was prepared to give them the Big Four and that was all. Queen and country and all that. I would go through a certain amount of tactical questioning and then break into my cover story.
They were talking between themselves in low tones, in what I took to be quite educated Arabic. Somebody was scribbling notes.
The writing was a good sign. It intimated that there wasn’t just a big frenzy going on, with them getting what they could and then topping me. It made it seem there was a reason for not shooting me. Was there some sort of preservation order on us? It gave me a sense of security, a feeling that some officialdom somewhere was directing operations. Yes, said the other side of my brain, but you’re getting further and further down this chain, and the longer this goes on the less chance you have of escaping. Escaping must always be foremost in your mind. You don’t know when the opportunity is going to arise, and you’ve got to be ready. Carpe diem! You’ve got to seize that moment, but the longer you are in captivity the more difficult it becomes.
I thought about Dinger. I knew he wouldn’t have substantiated any of this stuff about Tel Aviv. He would have done as much as he could, and when he decided that he’d physically had too much and was going to be kicked to death, he’d have started to break into the search and rescue story.
It occurred to me I might feel better if I could see my environment, absorb my surroundings. I looked up and opened my eyes. The Venetian blinds were down, but one or two thin shafts of light shone through.
Everything was twilighty and in semi shadow
The room was quite large, maybe 40 feet by 20. I was sitting at one end of the rectangle. I couldn’t see a door, so it had to be behind me. The officers were at the other end, facing me. There must have been eight or nine of them, all smoking. Smoke haze hung from the ceiling, pierced here and there by the sun coming through the blinds.
Halfway down the room, on the right hand side as I looked at it, was a large desk. On it were a couple of telephones and piles of normal office paper, books, and clutter. A big leather executive-style chair was empty. Behind it was the world’s biggest picture of Saddam in his beret, all the medals on, smiling away. I guessed it was the local commander’s office.
General admin notices hung on the wall. In the center of the lino floor and continuing under the desk was a large Persian carpet. On the left, facing the desk, was a large domestic-type settee. The rest of the walls were lined with stack able plastic chairs. Mine, the guest chair, appeared to be a plastic cushioned dining chair.
More tut-tut-tuts and sighs. People were talking to themselves as if I wasn’t there and this was just a normal day at the office. I rolled my head, and blood and snot dribbled down my chin. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear the agony in my mouth.
I worked out the options. If they started to fill me in again, I’d be dead by the end of the afternoon. The time had come to start spilling the cover story. I would wait for them to initiate it, and I’d go ahead.
When I had refused to answer their questions, I wasn’t being all patriotic and brave-that’s just propaganda that you see in war films. This was real life. I couldn’t come straight out with my cover story. I had to make it look as if they’d prized it out of me. It was a matter of self-preservation, not bravado. People sometimes do heroic things because the situation demands it, but there’s no such thing as a hero. The gung ho brigade are either idiots or they don’t even understand what’s happening. What I had to do now was give them the least amount of information to keep myself alive.