There was only one other thing ruining my otherwise comfortable visit to Kuwait: fear. In particular, fear of the immediate future. The overwhelming luxury of the Marriott, with its designer minimall, sushi bar, colonial-style tea lounge, and American steakhouse, made the thought of going out into the desert even worse. I remembered what Brock had told me in Xtreme 19: “By the looks of this list, you’re gonna be sleeping in shit every damn night.” I tried to fight the adrenaline with Earl Grey and Marlboro Lights. But they only seemed to make it worse.
I called The Times at midday, Kuwait-time, even though it was still early in London. I didn’t have anything better to do. It was also a good excuse to test the satellite phone Fletcher had given me in London. Before dialing, I had to extend the chunky antenna and point it out the window, as the phone tried to locate the Thuraya satellite. When it locked on, I felt like a secret agent.
The phone rang in long, distorted electronic beeps, a sure sign the call was going to cost a fortune. Someone in London had told me that the international satellite rate was ten dollars per minute, but I didn’t want to listen.
“Foreign new-ews?” said a familiar nasal voice.
I looked at the screen of the Thuraya to make sure I’d dialed correctly: I had.
“Martin… Barrow?” I asked.
“Your lucky day,” said Barrow. His sarcasm, it seemed, was powerful enough to withstand a return journey into space.
“Don’t you work for business?”
“Not anymore,” Barrow revealed. “Couldn’t bear to be without you, Chris. I’m a distinguished member of The Times’s foreign staff now: I’m a card-carrying intellectual. Yesterday we debated the small print of the Kyoto Treaty for a full forty-five minutes. So what are you doing in Kuwait City, Chris? Knowing your luck, there’ll be a war or something. Did you see lots of people running in the opposite direction when you landed at the airport? Do they know about the curse?”
Barrow was laughing so hard he temporarily lost the ability to talk. I held the receiver away from my ear for a second.
“I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” I said. In some warped way, Barrow was actually making me feel better.
Finally he calmed down. “So what are you offering today?” he asked, meaning war-related news stories.
Nothing, as it turned out. The Kuwait Times didn’t provide much lift and view material. As for the al-Jazeera news channel, I couldn’t understand a word of it because it was in Arabic. Besides, it seemed to broadcast only pictures of dead Palestinians. So I offered to rewrite a few stories from the wire services—which I could get via Yahoo! on a twenty-minute delay, using the computers in the Marriott’s business center. Barrow wasn’t interested. After all, the foreign desk already had a “proper” war reporter working from Kuwait: Daniel McGrory, who had coauthored a book in 1999 about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, called Brighter than the Baghdad Sun. It was clear I was a backup plan: a substitute, kicking my heels on the bench. This, however, was reassuring: Fletcher clearly hadn’t changed his mind about embedding. He still regarded it as an elaborate publicity stunt. Later, when I bumped into McGrory in the hotel lobby, he did his best to be polite, but I got the impression he shared Fletcher’s view. (McGrory has since told me that this wasn’t the case; he simply didn’t want to be with the military. As the American humorist and occasional war correspondent P. J. O’Rourke said: “One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you’re not in the Army. The whole idea of putting you in the Army and not giving you a gun—gee, no thanks.” O’Rourke compared embeds to the “dumber kind” of conscientious objectors in Vietnam.)
With nothing to write and nothing to do, I decided to pretend I was in Los Angeles. So I made an afternoon appointment with the Marriott’s penthouse-level health spa and fitness center. Then I went shopping.
If this was war, I could live with it.
My eighty-three-hundred-mile journey from Los Angeles to Kuwait, via London, hadn’t gone smoothly. It all went wrong when I visited The Times’s office in London to pick up my satellite phone, first-aid kit, flak jacket, and helmet. The problem was luggage space. I had openly flouted the Pentagon’s rules and packed twenty pairs of Calvin Klein boxer shorts, in the hope that my stint in Iraq would last less than a fortnight. I had also packed my electric toothbrush, badger-hair shaving brush, shaving foam, several rolls of double-quilted toilet paper, and dozens of tubes of SPF-40 sunblock and other essential ointments along with a selection of fashionable yet outdoorsy combat outfits. “Have the Marines ever met a metrosexual?” Alana had asked me at one point, holding up a fifteen-dollar tube of Clinique oil-free moisturizer. I gave a humorless grunt, inaudible from deep within the black cavern of the rucksack, where I was trying to re-create my West Hollywood bathroom cabinet. I tried to dismiss the nagging thought that my girlfriend was probably better suited to life on the front lines than me.
Eventually I managed to close the drawstrings at the top of the backpack, but only after I transferred my bright yellow Two-Man Xtreme 19 Mountain Adventure Pod to a separate bag. Weight was also, admittedly, a problem. I couldn’t actually lift my rucksack, but I could drag it across the floor—as well as my tent bag, laptop case, and A4-sized waterproof travel wallet—for a few agonizing seconds at a time, using a bent, shuffling movement. The thought briefly entered my head that I might actually have to march with all this stuff, but I quickly dismissed it: Surely no one marches in modern warfare. I imagined leaving my gear at a desert Marine base and taking short, safe trips to the front lines in an Apache attack helicopter.
By the time I got to London, I knew I’d made a catastrophic packing error. I didn’t realize I would have to carry another bag for my flak jacket and helmet—unless, of course, I wanted to wear them on the plane. To make matters worse, the flak jacket, being made from bulletproof Kevlar, was slightly heavier than a Ford Focus. Body armor, it seemed, hadn’t changed that much since the Gilbertese Islanders in the South Pacific used to clad themselves with protective vests made from coconut hulls. The Kevlar helmet wasn’t much lighter—also, it didn’t fit me properly, sitting awkwardly above my receding hairline, creating a deep, red, circular imprint on the rim of my skull. When I took it off, I looked like the victim of a failed lobotomy. The first-aid kit, meanwhile, was a miniature hospital ward in its own right. It even came with a dozen horse-sized, self-injectable canisters of nerve gas antidote.
Before I left the office to get my injections, one of the foreign desk’s office assistants shoved a thick, cream-colored envelope into my hand. I opened it and saw an immaculate bundle of new one-hundred-dollar bills.
“What’s this?” I asked, taken aback.
“It’s five thousand dollars,” said the young, blonde assistant. “An advance against expenses.”
“What for?”
“Bits and bobs,” she replied with a Kensington laugh. “You know, if you get into any, er, trouble. That kind of thing…”
I stared at the envelope. Then it dawned on me: ransom money. The Times thought I would get kidnapped.
“Is this for kidn—” I began to ask, but she was gone.
I put the envelope in my back pocket.
My luggage-related problems worsened when I emerged from the News International medical center after my vaccinations. My right arm had a circular pattern of bleeding puncture marks in it and felt as though it had just been pumped full of every Third World disease known to man—which, in a way, it had been. I could barely carry my passport, never mind three hundred pounds of combat equipment. Somehow I managed to get my gear into the back of a taxi, which drove me to the Kuwait embassy to collect my visa. As the cab grunted down Kensington High Street, I spotted a shop called the London Luggage Company. I suddenly had a brilliant idea. “Pull up here for a second,” I told the driver, and jumped out. I reemerged a few minutes later carrying a Chinese-made metal dolly, featuring a folding frame, elastic strap, and four rickety casters. It was perfect for my luggage. I just hoped it was combat-proof.