Inside the bungalow a man sat behind a desk, smoking. He was wearing a black leather jacket. So were the other men in there — black leather bomber jackets and jeans — and they all seemed to be smoking. Nobody spoke a word of English. There was a lot of pointing.
‘I’m a helicopter pilot,’ I said. I started making chopper noises, whirling my hand round to indicate rotors, and then diving it down to show that I had crashed.
Very soon they’d opened my bag and got out the 203, together with my webbing. Then the driver who’d given me the lift rushed in and started shouting in Arabic, jabbing his finger in my direction.
I felt another surge of fear, and motioned to the bomber-jacketed guys. ‘Get him out!’ I pleaded. They bundled him into another room.
These guys in leather obviously had no time for the driver, but they didn’t like the look of me either. I couldn’t blame them. My hair was matted with dirt; my face was thin, my eyes staring. I had ten days’ growth of beard. I was filthy and stinking. I was also an infidel.
They started stripping my kit, and pulled out the two white phosphorus grenades. One of the guys, who was smoking a cigarette, held a grenade up. ‘What’s this?’ he asked in Arabic.
‘Smoke,’ I told him. ‘For making smoke.’ I waved up clouds of the stuff in mid-air.
They started lobbing the grenades round, one to another, catching them like cricket balls. The safety pins, which I’d loosened before our first contact, were hanging out. I knew that if one of the grenades went off, it would kill us all; so I made to stand up and grab them. That didn’t go down well. The instant I was half-upright, three guys pulled pistols and levelled them at me, yelling at me to sit down. So I sat back, and everything gradually calmed down. The man who’d finished up with the grenades brought them over, and let me push the pins back into place.
By then the others were ripping out all my kit: the night-sight, my little binoculars. All my stuff was disappearing, and I thought, I’m not going to see any of this again. None of it was particularly valuable, but I’d become quite attached to it, having carried it all that way. Now it was being stolen in front of my eyes.
After about twenty minutes I was taken through a door into another room. In came a man of fifty or so, wearing a grey suit. He sat me down at a table with a piece of paper and said, ‘Details? Name? Birthday? Country?’
I wrote down: ‘Sergeant Chris Ryan, 22 Turbo Squadron, Para Field Ambulance,’ followed by my date of birth, and left it at that. 22 Para Field Ambulance didn’t exist, but I thought that if I finished up in a prison camp, and the number, combined with the word ‘Turbo’, reached the Coalition, somebody would click on to the fact that I was a medic in 22 SAS. I gave my rank as sergeant because I knew it would command a bit more respect than if I said ‘corporal’.
While I was writing, I was given a cup of coffee. It was thick and bitter, Arab-style, and made me feel thirstier than ever. The man took the paper, went out, then came back in and beckoned me to follow him. Two other guys were waiting outside. They grabbed me by the arms and pulled me into a different room. There they pointed down at a white dishdash and motioned me to put it on.
Now I was really scared. What were they doing, making me dress up like an Arab? The dishdash came down to my feet. Someone then came in with a shamag and wrapped it round my head. At first I could just about see out, but then they pulled it right down over my face.
Nobody told me where I was going or what was happening, and I felt panic rising. I had handed myself over to these people, and they now had complete control of me.
I saw my bag of equipment go out the door ahead of me. A Land Cruiser pulled up outside. Two men armed with AK-47s came in. I was passed over to them and marched out. One man climbed into the driver’s seat, I was pushed into the middle, and the second man got in on my right.
As we drove out of the police station, I held my breath. I felt certain that if we turned right, we would be on our way back to Iraq. If we turned left, there was a good chance that the Syrians would be keeping me.
We turned left. I breathed again.
We sped off, along rough streets full of kids playing. The driver didn’t stop for them; he just kept going, with one hand on the horn, swerving in and out of the vast potholes. After a while the passenger made signs to ask if I was hungry.
I nodded a yes.
The driver stopped and waited while his mate ran out, returning with a bag of apples. When I ate the whole of the one he gave me — core, pips and alclass="underline" everything except the stalk — both Arabs stared at me. The one on my right hadn’t touched his apple, and he gave it to me. So I ate that too, core and all again.
On we went, missing hundreds of dogs by inches. We swerved to avoid lots of dead ones too. Next we cleared the town, came onto a metalled road and down into a big valley. Then we were out in the desert, on a road that ran straight for miles.
I knew my bag was in the back, but I couldn’t tell how much of my kit was still in it. I tried talking, and asked where we were going. ‘Damascus?’ I suggested. ‘Damascus?’
No answer, so I shut up.
After a while, we came to two dark blue Mercedes parked on the side of the road, with a group of six men standing round the cars. As we came towards them, my escorts started talking to each other. Obviously this was some pre-arranged rendezvous. We began to slow down. Fifty metres short of the cars, I could see that one of the waiting men had a pistol in his hand. Suddenly the guy on my right pulled up my shamag, quite roughly, so as to blindfold me, and grabbed hold of my arm.
It’s an execution squad, I thought to myself, and my blood ran cold.
We came to a halt. I was dragged out, run up to the back of one of the Mercedes and thrown down on my knees. Somebody pushed my head forward and I sensed someone standing behind me.
Silence.
Nobody moved or spoke.
I thought I was going to die.
Until then I’d always reckoned that if anything like this happened to me, I’d make a last-ditch run for it. But I was physically incapable of running. I just knelt there, waiting for him to shoot me in the back of the head. It was a terrible feeling, to be on my knees, expecting someone to do that to me.
The silence seemed to last for ever. In fact, it was probably less than a minute. Then there was a movement. I was pulled to my feet and thrown into the back of a car. The doors slammed and we drove off again.
Now I had three escorts, all in Western civilian clothes. On my left sat the youngest, a skinny fellow with a thin, weaseley face and a straggling moustache. He struck me as a weak character. The driver was quite a big fellow — dark, good-looking, maybe my own age, and wearing a black leather jacket. His front-seat passenger was about forty: chubby, and going thin on top, he wore a green safari-type jacket with patch pockets. All three had ties, but they had pulled the knots loose, and their appearance was scruffy.
Who were these guys? Police, I hoped. But why were they messing about so much? In my state of exhaustion and confusion, I didn’t know what to think. I considered trying to take them out. I still had my knife on me — but the car was travelling fast, probably at 70 or 80 mph for most of the time. Also, there was another car escorting us, and police outriders. The desert we were going through was very open, with nowhere to hide.