We drove for about an hour and a half. My sense of direction had gone to rat shit as soon as we’d come out of the camp and turned left, and I didn’t have a clue where we might be. I was pissed off with myself again.
When we finally stopped, we could have been in Timbuktu for all I knew.
They dragged us out of the vehicle, and I was put back into what I sensed was the same room as before. I had the feeling the guards were still in bed. Somebody pushed me to the floor and handcuffed me to what I assumed was part of a bed. It was actually quite comfortable. I wasn’t crunched up in the back of a vehicle, my knees weren’t up around my ears, and my arm wasn’t chained high up in the air. I sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to sort myself out, trying to tune in. I sensed that I was facing the wall. I tried putting my head right back so I could see past the bridge of my nose. I couldn’t see anything except a bit of the glow from the paraffin heater.
I sat there for an hour, the scenarios rushing around my head. We had definitely been going through a built-up center of population when the bombs fell. Was it Baghdad? Why take us to Baghdad? So that people could see us? To be part of a human shield? Would the Allies bomb a position where prisoners were? Damned right they would. Schwarzkopf would hardly stop the war effort because Dinger and Andy were held in a radar center. Who were we going to get handed over to? Would we make a video? I wouldn’t mind. I wanted people to know that I was still alive.
I could hear two sources of slow, regular breathing. To test if they were asleep I leaned forward and rested my head on the bed. Nothing happened. I slid over onto my right side and got my head down on the carpet. Still nothing. I put pressure on the blindfold against the carpet and managed to slide it down a little. I was indeed back in the same room.
I tried to work out what had happened to the others. Were we the only two survivors? Would they say if people had got across the border? I didn’t come up with any answers, but it was good mental exercise. I might have to be doing a lot of that. I was already pacing myself for a long capture. It would obviously be nice to get released as soon as the war was over, but I couldn’t really see it at this stage. There would most likely be a hostage period to come after this, lasting perhaps a couple of years.
I thought back to the American POW. He had endured years in solitary, and everybody back home assumed he was dead. It was only because an exchange took place that the truth came out. There was a US sailor that the Viet Cong had taken for a bit of a bonehead and used for menial tasks like mopping up. He was released because he was just an able seaman of no consequence who had fallen overboard-the classic gray man. In fact this character had taken it upon himself to remember the names, ranks, and numbers of over 200 prisoners. When he came back he reeled them all off. Our POW was among the names. It was a traumatic discovery for his family. I was trying to relate my experience to his, and there was no comparison. A year or so was bugger all. I’d only start worrying after two.
My hands were agony. I tried to work them out of the cuffs, but it was futile. They were far too swollen. I considered waking the guards up and asking to be released for a while, but they wouldn’t have the keys -and they certainly wouldn’t bother going and getting them.
My thoughts turned to Jilly. I wondered what she was doing.
Two hours later the boys came back with their Tiny lamps. Just as before, they undid my handcuffs and picked me up and dragged me back into the cold. It was a nice feeling on the body; I kidded myself I was about to start a long country walk or ski a good mountain.
Nobody talked. I hoped and prayed that Dinger was coming too, but I couldn’t hear him. I was put in the same position at the back on the right-hand side, behind the seats, legs up around my head. This time I took the precaution of arching my back to make space for my sore hands, so that I wouldn’t have to make the movement later on and earn myself a whack on the head.
“No talk or shoot,” the driver said.
“Okay.”
“Yeah, okay mate,” said Dinger from beside me.
I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was as relieved to hear me as I was to hear him. But the relief was short-lived. Just as we were setting off, somebody leaned into the vehicle and said: “I hope that Allah is with you.”
I didn’t know if it was said to spark me up, but if it was, it succeeded.
We got the same bad driver as before and were soon being flung around all over the place. There was no music this time, just small talk between the blokes in the front. Occasionally a window would go down as one of them snot ted up a grolly and gob bed it, or shouted a greeting at somebody in the darkness. We stopped on one occasion while the driver had a long conversation with somebody in the street. I got the impression he was showing us off. I heard giggles from two or three people outside the car, then hands came in and tugged our mustaches and slapped our faces. I clenched up. It pissed me off more than the kickings. That had been tactical questioning, and I could understand the reasons behind it. But these dickheads were having fun at my expense, pure and simple.
We drove on in silence. We were going further and further from the border, but I was just about past caring. I was too worried about my hands. They were swollen to nearly twice their normal size, and I had no sensation left in the fingers. I could feel nothing beyond the wrists, where the handcuffs had dug in so deeply that I was bleeding. The pain was becoming unbearable. I feared that at this rate I was going to lose the use of my hands for ever.
I tried to think of the positives. At least I wasn’t dead. It was now about twelve hours since my capture, and I was still alive.
I started to think about the patrol as a whole. What would the Iraqis know about us? I had to assume that they’d link us with the contact at the MSR. They would know how many of us there were, because they would have found eight berg ens They would have found the LUP as well, with the cache of water and food.
What would give us away in the berg ens Because of SOPs, I knew there wouldn’t be any written details of codes or our tasking. What about the equipment? How would we get around the explosives, timing devices, and detonators? I’d say they were area protection devices-they would have found the claymores, which would add weight to my story. Perhaps they wouldn’t even know what the timing devices were. And maybe the jundies would have been so busy looting the berg ens that all that kit would have disappeared anyway. I almost giggled when I imagined them rifling through the berg ens in darkness and sticking a finger straight through one of the plastic bags of shit.
One thing I could be sure of was that nothing remained that was compromising to the task. We always refold our maps so that they aren’t on the part we’ve been using, and we never put markings on them. Everything was in our heads.
I was feeling confident-at this stage about the lack of knowledge they’d have on our equipment. If they knew more than I expected, we’d just have to waffle our way through and make excuses. The only problem really was that we didn’t exactly look like your aver age search and rescue team. But by this stage we didn’t exactly look like anything anyway, apart from total and utter bags of shit.
The vehicle stopped, and by the sound of things there was a reception committee waiting. I’d started to feel secure in the car: I’d got adapted to it, and now we were starting all over again.
They were talking in a low mumble, perhaps because it was the early hours of the morning. As the back doors opened there was a rush of cold air. We were pulled out and marched across a courtyard at quick pace. The cobblestones were agony. The cuts reopened, and my feet were soon slippery with blood. I stumbled and started to fall, but they grabbed me and kept on going. We went up a step, turned right along a veranda, and came to a door. I stubbed my foot on the doorframe and cried out. There was no reaction from them at all. They were very professional. It was all well rehearsed.