If they hadn’t posed such a threat, they would have looked laughable in their big, baggy suits with turnups, white socks, and swept-back hair.
“Believe it or not,” the official went on, “the soldiers out there are protecting you.”
It was ironic. I saw the soldiers stop two other men in suits from coming in. You could tell by the body language that there was obviously some friction between them. Rumors were already circulating that fifty generals had been executed after a failed attempt to change the system of power.
We walked through the foyer.
“When you go into this room,” the official pointed, “you must stay there. If you want to move outside, one of us must be with you.”
A Red Cross girl was sitting in a chair, blocking the door. She was quietly reading a book, and on the floor by her side she had a small bottle of wine, a bit of bread, and some cheese. Brave, unbelievably brave.
Four or five people were on stretchers. I recognized Joseph Small and Troy Dunlap and waved. Then, looking along the line, I saw Mark.
“I gave them everybody’s name to see if any of you were here,” he grinned.
I wanted to hug him and say “Great to see you,” but the words wouldn’t come out. I shook his hand instead.
“What happened to you?” I said, hardly containing my amazement.
He was wearing a dish-dash. His body looked wasted, and he still bore the bruises and scars of severe beatings.
“When we had that last contact and we both went down, I went left and got caught up in fire. There were people all over the place. I ended up lying in a small drainage ditch. They were following up and were a foot away from me at one stage. Then I moved off a bit, trying to edge my way out of it. After about half an hour I saw some torches, and as they were fanning about, they caught me in the beam. There was a big cabby, and I got shot through the foot and across the elbow. Look.”
He lifted the dish-dash. The round had skimmed all the way around his elbow. He was incredibly lucky. A 7.62 round could have taken his arm off.
“The foot wound fucked me up,” he said. “I couldn’t move. They gave me a good kicking, dragged me onto a truck, and took me to a location. It was fucking hideous. My foot was just bouncing up and down on the wagon floor because I had no control of it, and I was screaming my head off. They thought it was hilarious. They were laughing their bollocks off.”
Mark lost a lot of blood and thought he was going to die. He received no medical attention for his foot; the gaping wound was just bandaged and left to heal by itself. He was handcuffed naked to a bed all the time he was in prison, and basically left to rot. He went through the same system of interrogation as the rest of us, the only difference in his case being that the interrogation took place in his room.
“They’d dig at my foot,” he said, “and shake my leg so my foot rattled around. It was grim. But one funny thing was, they’d piled my clothes on the floor by my bed. Every day I looked down at the gold, wrapped up in the masking tape, and the fuckers never found it until halfway through my capture. I still had my escape map and compass and all.”
He had two blokes that used to come in and take him out for a shit. He called them Health and Hygiene because they were such dirty, minging old things. When he was on his own, he used to get the pitcher of water and try to clean his wound. The actual hole was clogged up with human skin and gunge, trying to heal itself over. His foot was swollen to the size of a marrow.
“Sometimes I’d call out that I needed a shit, and they’d come in and put a bowl under my arse and leave me for hours. Piss was going everywhere because I can’t organize myself, and there was shit up to the brim of this little bowl.”
He got filled in by the guards quite a few times. The blokes would come in and play with his foot and generally give him a hard time. All along, he kept up the same old story as the rest of us. During one interrogation, somebody recognized his New Zealand accent. He was accused of being a mercenary, working for the Israelis.
I told him that Dinger and Stan were away and should be in the UK soon, and gave him our theories of what we thought had happened to the others. As we talked about events, he reckoned he could have been in the same prison as us: it certainly took direct hits at exactly the same time.
The Red Cross were knocking out sheds of coffee for us, and then a cooked dinner turned up.
Mark had lice, like we all did, and generally stank. But his stink was something special, and he was worried that it could mean gangrene. We talked about the possible scenarios that could happen now, but kept drifting back to swapping horror stories, each of us trying to cap the other.
I was just telling Mark about the situation outside with the secret police when one of the Red Cross guys came around and said that there was a delay. We couldn’t go until the next day because of the aircraft: it had gone to Saudi to pick up prisoners for an exchange, but because of adverse weather it wouldn’t be coming back until the following morning.
The Red Cross people were tense. They posted sentries in the corridors and at all the entry points, and armed them with candles and food. It was obvious that they were expecting this to be a rough night.
Mark and I had a beer and then turned in. I planned to kip on the floor next to his stretcher in case of trouble. That was the plan but it didn’t happen. I went back upstairs to get some food and chocolate and fell asleep in a chair. Red Cross people, awake all night, sat among us in groups of two and three.
I woke up early. An official appeared and announced with a grin that it was time to go home. Mark and I had a problem now of security, because men from the Regiment are required to keep their faces out of the press at all costs. I went up and saw the pilots, and explained my concerns to the Red Cross.
“No problem,” they said. “At the same time as the coach comes to the front of the hotel, ambulances will be going to the back because we can only get the stretchers out through the service area. You can go in one of the ambulances with your friend.”
The aircrew agreed to put on a diversionary show for the media, pulling their jumpers over their heads to get the cameras clicking. Footage of these camera shy “Special Forces” lads was broadcast all over the world.
We moved off in a convoy. We had two Red Cross guys in the front of our ambulance, and as we drove along, one of them said, “We’ll give you a tour of Baghdad, if you like. If you look to your left,” he said, adopting the voice of the typical tour guide, “this is the Ministry of Information. It was a whole system of buildings, and just one building was dropped. Talk about precision bombing. And on your right you have the Ministry of…”
Posters of Saddam and the symbol of the Muslim crescent were on every street. There was devastation everywhere, but by the looks of things the precision bombing had indeed been excellent. Without a doubt they’d been hitting their military targets. Civilian buildings right next door to the ruins were relatively II unscathed.
He started talking about the Iran-Iraq prisoner exchanges that he’d been involved in. He said they’d been exchanging prisoners in their twenties who looked over forty, they’d had such a terrible time of it. Their life was gone. Some of the injuries were horrific, open wounds that had been left to fester.
“This is actually the most successful exchange yet,” the bloke said. “I think that’s because of pressure from the military, who probably want their manpower back. There is a lot of concern about stability. A coup seems imminent. The sooner we get you out the better.”
“I’ll second that one,” Mark said.
I read the road signs towards Baghdad International, and as the kilometers ticked down, I felt my apprehension building. There seemed to be a lot of administrative cock-ups because we’d drive a little way, then stop, then drive on, then stop. I couldn’t see any aircraft.