James Ashcroft - Making a Killing - The Explosive Story of a Hired Gun in Iraq

‘Officer?’ he asked.

‘Captain, Duke of Wellington’s. Been out five years. And you?’

‘Staff Sergeant, Royal Engineers. I came out twelve years ago.’ He had an accent I would come to learn was a Derbyshire accent.

We were quiet for a moment. He looked reliable, tough and competent. I was glad I was heading over the border with him. As for his opinion of me, I couldn’t tell.

The moment passed and I went to check out. I paid by credit card. I had changed £50 into JDs and seemed to have spent the lot on nothing.

Mohammed arrived and loaded our bags into the taxi. It was bitterly cold out, colder than London. England had been balmy. Krista had been wearing a sleeveless dress when she’d left me at Heathrow.

‘Five hours,’ Mohammed grinned, showing off his three remaining teeth.

‘To Baghdad?’ I asked, surprised.

‘To the border. Then five, maybe six hours to Baghdad.’

Les and I looked at each other, then shrugged.

‘Not being rude, mate, but do you mind if I catch up on some sleep?’ I said to him.

‘Fill your boots. I’m going to do the same.’

We snuggled into our fleeces, the driver shut the windows, put the heating on full and lit up the first of about four hundred cigarettes. I closed my eyes. One of the things you learn in the army is to catch your sleep when you can. It seemed like no time at all before Les was nudging me in the side.

‘Wake up, Jim, we’re at the border. Momo here needs our papers.’

I cracked an eye and looked out. A beautiful dawn was breaking over the desert. We were parked up in a big line of lorries laden with goods; the UN sanctions had been lifted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. The car was throbbing with Arabic music and thick cigarette smoke. It was like a nightclub in Manchester.

‘Jesus wept.’ I stepped out and stretched, filling my lungs with good fresh diesel fumes. After the inside of the ashtray that ingeniously functioned as our taxi I felt as if I were breathing in the finest Highland mountain air. Les got out the other side and we both coughed up enough tar to coat the motorway back to Amman. I felt a bit more alive now. We gave Mohammed our passports.

‘Let’s see where he goes with them,’ I said.

‘Roger that.’

Mohammed set off into the main building. We followed and the noise when we entered the passport hall hit us like a wall. There must have been a hundred or more Arab truckers standing in crowds and stretched out on rows of old wooden chairs. It was a bare concrete room with a million fag butts flattened in the dust on the floor. The smoke was so thick it made your eyes water. Mohammed pushed his way through the shouting throng to the chaos at the front of the wooden counter at the far end of the room. He shoved our passports together with his through the grille with a fat wedge of dinars. The official looked bored as he stuffed a few bills in his top pocket and passed the remainder with the passports to some underling who disappeared into a back office.

Les and I stood at the back studying the drivers. They lit cigarettes from the butts of their cigarettes and stared back. They didn’t seem belligerent, just curious. Still, they were a good-sized mob and there were only the two of us out there in the middle of nowhere.

We wandered back outside. We weren’t sure if we were at the Jordanian or Iraqi passport control. Some of the buildings were whitewashed, most were just concrete blocks stripped to the bare essentials. No clues there, until I saw a soldier with a Beretta assault rifle and wearing a beret the size of an aircraft carrier’s landing deck.

‘Jordanian,’ I said.

‘Then we’ll have to do all this again on the other side.’

We popped our heads in and out of the passport hall during the course of the next hour and a half. I had no idea how the system worked but every so often an official who sounded like he had a sore throat would appear with a handful of passports and start shouting out names. A dozen truckers would push their way through to the front of the counter and claim their documents.

We visited the toilets, which were bog-standard holes in the ground jobs, went back to the car and had breakfast. I offered to share my lunch with Les but he pulled out an identical package from his bag.

‘Room service,’ he said, ‘PPP. Prior Preparation and Planning.’

We munched our sandwiches while the sun rose higher and began to throw out a bit of heat.

Les removed the new Oakleys he’d bought at Heathrow the day before. They were bright silver with icy blue mirrored lenses: very cool. I looked at them enviously and reminded myself that I was not going into a fashion show as I slipped on my black mountaineering shades. Shit. His definitely looked better.

Eventually Mohammed retrieved our passports. We drove forward about a hundred yards and stopped under a massive concrete awning. Mo turned and made dragging motions as he fired away in Arabic. I glanced out the side window. Between each lane of the highway there was a concrete ledge about waist high and three feet wide. In the next lane an Arab family was pulling the bags from the roof of their car and laying out the contents on the ledge where an official poked about looking for anything worth having.

‘Do they need to check our bags?’ I asked Mohammed.

‘ Na’am , yes. Bags.’

Les and I got out and hauled our kit on to a similar ledge under the awning. An official came over, went perfunctorily through our belongings and waved us through without touching anything.

‘Waste of fucking time,’ Les commented as we drove on.

They hadn’t bothered to check the car boot and we could have smuggled anything in under the mess of bags and jackets on the back seat. We passed along a barbed wire chicane and approached a group of cement buildings. Snapping in the wind above us was a red, white and black flag with green stars and ‘God is Great’ in Arabic script.

We were in Iraq.

Two fresh-faced American soldiers checked our baggage thoroughly and efficiently when we stopped under the awning. As we drove on to another, smaller building, we saw several heavily armed GIs watching the traffic with weapons ready, although they seemed more concerned with administrative duties than foreign fighters concealed among the traffic.

I didn’t know whether that meant that the threat level was low in this region or whether they were poorly trained. I said as much to Les and we agreed to be optimistic and say that the threat level was low.

As there had not been a substantial influx of American soldiers since the war ended, it was highly likely that these guys had seen active combat fighting their way through Iraq. They would be on the ball and, if they had thought for one minute that there was a threat out on the border, they would have been looking more wary.

We showed our passports and were disappointed when they were handed back without ‘IRAQ’ stamped on the pages. It would be a few months before the Iraqi government had a functioning immigration service and even then it only occurred because some sharp minister had seen an opportunity to make money out of the growing volume in cross-border traffic.

Another car was waiting for us on the other side of the border with four Iraqi escorts from Spartan HQ. They were from the same tribe and wore matching shemaghs folded stylishly around their heads, Ray-Bans and dish-dashes, a floor-length shirt with a small collar, usually grey in Iraq, always as white as snow when worn by the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia. We could see AK-47s on the seats next to them.

The leader came out and introduced himself to us as Hayder. He had a pistol tucked into his belt.

‘Fred Karno’s fucking army,’ muttered Les under his breath.