The DA wrote down some details of what I’d told him and brought in one of the communications clerks, a girl, who encoded a message and sent it off to the UK command centre at High Wycombe.
Once the message was sent, I reassembled my weapon and secured it, together with my ammunition, grenades, TACBE and night-sight, in the strong room. Then they told me that I could spend the rest of the night in the Meridien Hotel, just down the road. They felt that the hotel would be secure enough, but they told me to stay in my room and to order meals through room service. They said they’d put me on the British Airways flight to London the next day.
London! That wasn’t what I wanted at all. My only concern was to get back to Saudi and find out what had become of the rest of the patrol. But I realized that if I did fly in to London, I’d only have a very short time there — the Regiment would want me straight back in Saudi, for debriefing.
The embassy guys offered to get a taxi down to the hotel, but as it was only a couple of hundred metres away, I said I could walk. Yet when the DA set off at a normal pace, I couldn’t keep up with him. I padded slowly along the pavement, and anyone I passed looked down at my stockinged feet in some surprise. As we arrived at the hotel, the porters standing around in the lobby also glared at my feet.
‘We may have a bit of trouble here,’ the second secretary said, ‘as you haven’t got a passport. They don’t normally let anybody book in without identification. But I’ll see if I can square it away.’
Sure enough, the guy on the desk wasn’t amused. ‘No, no,’ he kept saying. ‘No passport, no room! He cannot book in.’
The second secretary began muttering about going back to the embassy and spending the night there. He said that to get a passport made out he’d have to contact the chargé d’affaires. A photo would have to be taken, and it couldn’t be done until next morning.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a telephone number from the police. The boss guy said if I had any trouble, I was to ring them.’
‘No, no,’ said the defence attaché hurriedly. ‘You can’t do that. Don’t ring them. Don’t involve them any more. In fact, we’ve got a cellar bedroom in the embassy, and you can sleep down there.’
‘No,’ said the second secretary. ‘The place is filthy. He can’t go in there.’
‘Nonsense!’ barked the DA. ‘He’s just roughed it for eight days. He’ll be all right.’ Then he added, ‘At a pinch, he can have my bed.’
We didn’t seem to be getting far, so the second secretary said, ‘Where’s that telephone number?’
He got on the phone to my friend in the secret police, and within five minutes two Mercedes screeched to a halt outside. A swarm of men ran in. It looked like a raid by the SS in a Second World War film; some of them were wearing long black leather trench coats.
With them was the interpreter. He came running up to me, grabbed me by the arm and moved me to one side. ‘Chris,’ he said quietly. ‘In two minutes, you’re going to sign the book. Sign with a name that you can remember, and give any address you can remember. Everything will be all right. If you get any more trouble, ring me again.’ He then had a word with the second secretary.
I turned round, and there were three blokes giving the hotel manager behind the desk a hard time. His eyes were going round in circles, and he was nodding like a robot.
‘I’ll see you later,’ said the interpreter, and then the secret police party walked out.
I went back up to the desk.
‘Yes, yes. Sign here, please. Anything I can do for you, sir?’
I gave my surname as Black, and made up some address near Newcastle. The man snapped his fingers for a porter, and two guys grabbed my bags. The diplomats said, ‘We’ll see you in the morning,’ and up I went.
By then it was after 2 a.m. and the past twenty-four hours had been the longest of my life. I’d really been looking forward to getting into that room. Once I close the door, I thought, I’ll be free of worry and danger for the first time in ten days. I’ll be able to lie down, chill out, and go to sleep.
But it didn’t work out like that. As soon as I was alone, I started worrying about the rest of the patrol. I’d hoped that some of the guys would have escaped into Syria ahead of me. Either that, or they would have been lifted out by chopper, back into Saudi; but now these possibilities seemed unlikely. If the five had been rescued, and three guys had still been missing, the Regiment would surely have alerted the Syrians to look out for us, and warned the Damascus embassy. I’d come up like a bad penny, but nobody else had. What had happened to the others? Were they dead, or hiding up somewhere? Were they still on the move? If they were, they must be in a bad way by now.
I was so wound up that I felt I was still on the run. I got out my notebook and began scribbling reminders about what I’d done. I’d brought the book with me in case I had to take down a radio message or compose one. Until then, I hadn’t made a single entry, for fear that I might be captured. But now I went back one day at a time, logging details to refresh my memory, and working out where I’d been at various times.
At last I got my head down. But still I was tossing and turning, my mind full of disturbing images — of my comrades wandering in the desert, or worse still being killed.
In the end, though, I fell asleep — only to be dragged back by the phone ringing just after 3 a.m. It was the defence attaché on the line, speaking in hushed whispers.
‘What happened to the Charlie Oscar Delta Echo Sierra?’ he breathed.
‘What?’
He repeated himself.
‘What are you on about?’
‘What happened to the codes?’
Suddenly I realized that he was trying to be covert, spelling out ‘codes’ like that. Also I realized that it must be High Wycombe who were asking for the information. Whenever we encrypt a message, we put it into code, then burn the cipher and smash the encryption device. In fact, Legs had carried our cipher equipment. He had burned the codes and smashed the device when we were first compromised.
‘One of the other lads had them,’ I said. ‘He burned them. I never had them at all.’
‘OK,’ he said, and rang off.
That was when I knew for sure that nobody else had come out.
In the morning I ordered breakfast from room service, and ate some fruit salad and a roll. I still didn’t want anything substantial, but I drank pints of fruit juice and tea. Compared with the day before, I felt quite good. Then the Brits came to collect me, and I hobbled back to the embassy, shuffling along the pavement in my stockinged feet, with my shoes under my arm.
By the time we arrived, the place was full of people. The chargé d’affaires had appeared, and there were two British girls on duty, one dealing with communications, the other a typist. I chatted to them for a while, then they put me up against a wall in my shirt and tie to take a black-and-white passport photograph with a Polaroid camera. ‘Better be careful,’ somebody said. ‘We’ve only got two frames left.’ But the first shot came out well, so they trimmed it, stuck it into a blank passport and stamped it. There I was, fixed up with a ten-year passport. The whole thing seemed so amateurish that I felt I was being given a Second World War escape kit.