‘Go to the town?’ I suggested, and I made driving motions. ‘You have a vehicle?’
Again he nodded and pointed. What he meant, I soon found out, was that we should start walking down the road towards the town and hitch a lift.
With the water and tea inside me, my body seemed to have switched back on. I felt sharp again, as if there was nothing wrong, as if I could do the whole walk again. Everything seemed so relaxed that for a while I just sat there, recovering.
The old man came back with his goats and stood looking at me. Then, to get some action, I dug a sovereign out of my belt and showed it round. I started saying ‘Felous, felous’ — ‘money, money’.
As soon as he saw the gold, the young man clearly wanted to go into town. Maybe he thought that if he took me in I would give him the money. Soon everyone was staring at the sovereign. Another girl came in, and somehow I knew she said, ‘He’s got more on him somewhere.’
The old man appeared with a gun — some ancient hunting rifle. ‘More,’ he said. ‘More.’ By gestures he showed he wanted another coin, to make the girl a pair of earrings. Then he started demanding gold for the other girls as well.
‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘This is for goats, clothes and stuff. No more.’
The Arabs began muttering to each other. For half an hour things remained tense. I lay with my feet against the oil fire, warming up. It was the first time in a week that I hadn’t felt half frozen. I had begun to hope that I could sleep in the farmhouse that night. But the young man had become determined to go into town, and indicated that I should come outside.
I decided not to wait any longer. To look less aggressive, I took off my webbing and smock, so I was left wearing my dark green jersey and camouflage trousers. Using sign language, I asked the man for some sort of bag. He produced a white plastic fertilizer sack, and I put my kit into that. I slung the sack over my shoulder and we set off along the dirt road.
Then I thought, It’s hardly the thing, to walk into a civilian town carrying a rifle. So after we’d gone about two hundred metres, I broke my weapon down in two and put it in the bag. I still had my knife, but in this situation I could have done with a weapon that was easy to hide, like a pistol.
The young man was walking quite fast and I shuffled behind him, in too much pain to move quickly. Every minute or two he stopped and waited for me to catch up. Then, seeing I was in difficulties, he took the bag off me, and without the weight I made better progress.
‘Tractor?’ I kept saying. ‘Where’s a tractor?’
He answered me in Arabic. I think he was saying, ‘One’ll come soon.’
Wagons were rolling out from the town, and after a while one of them stopped. It was a Land Cruiser loaded with bales of hay. The driver could speak a little broken English. He said he was a camel farmer, and asked who I was.
‘My aircraft’s crashed,’ I told him.
‘Your aircraft? Where is it?’
‘Over the hill, over there. I need to go to the police.’
‘OK. I’ll take you.’
He swung his vehicle round, and I got into the middle of the front seat, between him and the young man. I soon regretted it, though, because he started making aggressive comments. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘This is our country. This is a bad war.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied, and kept as quiet as possible.
When we hit the edge of town, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I’d been imagining a fairly built-up place, with banks and shops. There was nothing here but crude houses made of grey breeze blocks, with heaps of rubbish lying round them. No vegetation. No sign of gardens. Burned-out cars in the streets. To my surprise, the Syrians looked quite European. I even saw two men with flaming, carrot-coloured hair, one of them with a red beard.
My driver pulled up outside a house on the left-hand side of the road and beeped his horn. Out came an Arab dressed in a black dishdash. They spoke, then the driver said something to the young farm lad, who got out of the truck. He looked frightened, but I felt helpless because I didn’t know what was happening.
‘Everything all right?’ I asked, but the driver spoke sharply to the lad, who set off walking, back towards his home.
The two of us went on into town, and the driver started having a go at me again. ‘You want to go back to Iraq?’ he said, and roared with laughter. ‘I should take you back.’
‘No, no!’ I said. I brought out the letter, written in Arabic as well as English, that promised £5,000 to anyone who handed me safely back to the Coalition. The driver snatched it and began to stuff it into his pocket, as if it was actual cash.
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I have to be with this piece of paper. Me and the paper at the same time. You only get the money if the two are together.’ I took it back from him and put it away.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK.’ At least he had stopped talking about taking me back across the border. But then he asked, ‘You have gun?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No gun.’
We came to a petrol station, and he pulled up. On the other side of the pumps was a car with a gang of young lads round it. The driver touched my bag, with all the kit in it. ‘What is all this?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, nothing. Just my things.’
He reached over to pat me on my stomach, to feel if I had a weapon concealed about me.
‘No,’ I protested. ‘I’ve got nothing.’
Suddenly he called out to the lads by the pump, and one of them came over. The boy stood by the window. He didn’t look at me, but straight at the bag. The driver went on talking to him — until suddenly he ran off into the building.
There’s something going on here, I thought. There’s going to be a lynching party coming out. They’re going to do me for my weapon, or put me back across the border.
It was time to go.
I opened the door, grabbed the bag and began to get out. At that moment the driver seized my left arm, trying to hold me back. I dragged him across the front seat and half out of the vehicle. When I kicked the door shut, it caught his head in the opening and he had to let go of me. He let out a yell, and I took off.
Fear boiled up in me again, almost worse than before. Away I went, running up the street, with the plastic sack in one hand. At least, I thought I was running — but when I turned round I saw a load of old guys easily keeping up with me. I was running in slow motion. I couldn’t go any faster.
Soon there was a big commotion, and a crowd of over a dozen people coming after me. They were barely thirty metres behind me and closing fast. Somehow, these Syrians knew I had a weapon in that bag. They were out to get it, and then to throw me back into Iraq, or worse. The pavements were full of people, and the ones on the other side of the road were all looking, alerted by the noise. Ahead of me, more pedestrians were staring. I kept hobbling and staggering along, hampered by the plastic sack in my right hand. I couldn’t even wave my weapon in threat, because it was stripped down. To put it back together would mean stopping for at least a minute, and by then the mob would have been on top of me.
Then, as I turned a corner, a miracle: there stood a man with an AK-47, wearing chest webbing. He was right next door to a pillar box, obviously on duty. It flashed into my mind that this might be the Iraqi border post, but it was too late to worry.
‘Police?’ I shouted. ‘Police?’
I don’t know what the guy said. I’m not sure he said anything at all. He just pulled me through a gateway and into a walled garden. I saw bunting of triangular flags over the entrance, greenery all around, and a big bungalow. He had me by the arm and the scruff of the neck, and ran me into this enclosure, out of reach of the crowd in the street, who by then were yelling for my blood. What his motives were, I’ll never know. He may have been trying to save me from the mob, or he may just have thought he’d grabbed a prisoner.