Once Jerry had finished talking Arabic to the dad, we filed through the gap and turned left between two huge, newly installed concrete walls. Directly ahead was the rear door of an AFV [armoured fighting vehicle], its engine rattling. In front of it was a solid line of nylon containers the size of skips, each filled with sand. Its .50 cal was manned.
We turned left again just short of it, down the road that separated the two hotels. This one was blocked by an M60 tank, also bunkered in behind nylon skips, with a cam net over the top to keep the crew out of the sun. It faced on to a huge roundabout, beyond which I could see the blue domes of a mosque.
I recognized the area at once from news footage. In the middle of the roundabout was a large stone pedestal, all that remained of the giant statue of Saddam that had been toppled symbolically at the end of the war. The roof had given a grandstand view of the shock-and-awe bombing of the government buildings just the other side of the river. Every one of Saddam’s men had moved out of them long before, but it looked great on TV.
I could see now why everyone had got such great pictures: they hadn’t even needed to move off their hotel balconies.
The secure area between the hotels was teeming with news crews jumping in and out of 4x4s, sweating buckets after a day in helmets and body armour. The word ‘Press’ was stencilled just about everywhere there was space.
The Palestine wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Moscow slum. It was sixteen storeys high, rectangular and very plain. A few single-storey sections, probably ballrooms and restaurants, jutted out from the base. Every room seemed to have a balcony, no matter whether you were looking out over the Tigris, the garden or the roundabout, each protected by an ugly concrete section that looked like the wings on one of Darth Vader’s imperial fighters.
Satellite dishes the size of flying saucers were mounted on the roof, and smaller ones sprouted from almost every balcony. Cables were strung everywhere.
A German news reporter in body armour was doing his piece to camera, with the tank, the mosque and the roundabout as a backdrop. A convoy of Hummers screamed round the roundabout, looking very warlike, machine-guns and M16s sticking out all over the shop. Jerry was wearing his bad-smell face. ‘Look at this bullshit. Give me Nuhanovic any day.’
We followed the driveway up to the hotel and went in through a set of big glass doors, past the security, a couple of Iraqis with AKs. Not that they checked us. Maybe it was too hot for them.
Thronging the lobby were the guys you’d find in any big hotel in any trouble spot: the fixers. Drink, drugs, guns, cigarettes, women, you name it, they’d get it for you. At a price, of course.
The inside of the hotel was just as 1970s as the outside. The dark marble floors had seen a few years’ hard polishing. I’d heard that during the sanctions all these places stank of petrol. It was much cheaper than water, and used to clean the floors.
US soldiers in uniform wandered in to buy cans of Coke. Others had their PT kit on, blue shorts and trainers and a grey T-shirt with the word ‘Army’, just in case we hadn’t guessed from the M16s slung over their shoulders.
Overweight men in suits and khaki waistcoats had monopolized every available sofa, while their BG stood a discreet distance away. It looked as if it was pretty much business as usual in Baghdad. Soldiers, businessmen, BG, journalists: everyone was in on the act.
A sign on the desk announced that rooms were ‘$60 US’ a night, no ifs, no buts. A deposit covering half your stay was required up front and always in cash. In this neck of the woods, it said more about you than American Express ever could.
Jerry counted out a week’s worth of dollars in cash. I wanted to be on the first floor – a jumpable height if we needed to get out in a hurry – but everything was full. The closest to the ground we were going to get was the sixth.
We took the lift. Our rooms were next to each other, and whoever had stayed in mine had left about ten minutes earlier and not told the housekeeper. The place reeked of cigarettes and sweat.
There were two single beds. The veneer was lifting off every chipboard surface, and the carpet was scarred with cigarette burns. The walls had been sprayed with concrete and were now a lumpy, faded yellow. The tiny bathroom had a toilet, basin and shower. I tried turning on the tap. Nothing happened. Maybe later.
I dumped my kit on the bed, which was covered with old, mustard-coloured, furry nylon blankets. No sheets, and a couple of saliva-stained foam pillows without cases. B-and-B owners in Margate and Blackpool would have been proud of this place, charging so much for so little.
I went and pulled open the glass sliding door to the balcony and was mugged by the noise of the city. The Tigris lay in front of me, glittering in the mid-afternoon sun. Apart from the mosques and a few surviving government buildings, all I could see was miles of middle-class housing, little blocks of concrete fighting for space among the towers. Further out, on the edge of the city, was the Baghdad I knew.
It suddenly felt like yesterday that Gaz, Rob and I had been mincing about on the north-eastern edge of the city during the ’91 war. It was a slum, a massive township of crumbling buildings, a world of poverty and shit. The Shia who lived there were forced to call it Saddam City. Finding the fibre-optic cables that ran beneath it on the way from Baghdad to the Scud teams in the Western desert had been a fucker, but it had had to be done. If they weren’t destroyed, the Scuds could still be fired into Israel. The Israelis would have joined the war, and the coalition’s alliance with the Arab states would have been over.
I looked out into the heat haze beyond the city. It had been about this time of day that I would give my orders for the coming night’s fuckabout, and my four-man patrol would start preparing. We would stay in the sewer under a market square until last light, then slip out to do the night’s work. It was more or less the same each time, checking the power lines leaving the city, checking any communications towers still standing after the last twenty-four hours’ air attacks.
When my patrol finally located the cables, it was almost an anticlimax. All they needed was one good tap with a two-pound ball hammer and that was it.
Looking down, I could see that the garden area was surrounded by a low wall and some pretty serious rush fencing. A couple of guys were drinking coffee inside a cabana in what looked like a small oasis. The war seemed a million miles away. There was even somebody cutting the grass with a petrol mower.
Then two Blackhawks came screaming across the river, so low I could have headbutted the pilots, but nobody took the blindest bit of notice.
29
One of the single-storey rooms jutting out from the ground floor seemed to have been taken over by CNN. All its windows had been sandbagged, and their logo hung from a small shed where the security guy was sitting. Just outside, on the grass, were a black leatherette sofa and chairs that would only get sat on once they were in the shade. The place was heaving with important-looking cables and antennae. Beyond it, a guy in shorts, T-shirt and trainers was sprinting along the bottom of an empty thirty-metre swimming-pool. Each time he got to one end he did a shedload of sit-ups, ran to the other, did some burpees, then back again for more press-ups. It was making me sweat just watching him.