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

We added our signatures on various contracts and filled in bank details for our salaries. We had both gone through the complicated process of setting up US dollar offshore accounts, which is not as easy as you might think and had hardly seemed worth the effort at the time. Now we were in Iraq, it was eminently sensible. We also signed insurance policies. The monthly premiums were paid by Spartan. If I got greased Krista would get £250,000.

‘Best not to let her know that,’ Jacky said. ‘She can hire a hitman here to take you out for a hundred dollars.’

‘For fifty I’ll do it myself,’ said Les. ‘Bit of all right, is she?’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said. ‘She’s got taste.’

I guess we were becoming mates.

We went back to our rooms. I grabbed a shower to get rid of the sweat of two days’ continuous travel and the vestiges of the driver’s cigarette smoke. Passive smoking in Iraq was as big a risk as friendly fire. As I was getting dressed, Seamus came in with a Motorola radio and a spare battery.

‘Here’s your comms, mate, stick it on channel two. Put your name on it with tape and every time we come back in just stick it in the charger in the front room.’

‘Callsigns?’ I asked.

‘Just our first names for the minute. Our team callsign is Sierra Five Zero and the Ops room here is Sierra Zero. Obviously if Zero Alpha comes up on the net that’s Adam.’

‘Do we have a team medkit?’

He pointed at a bin-liner next to my bed. ‘Every expat has a standard trauma pack◦– do you know how to put an IV line in?’

I did. I upended the bin liner on to my bed with the kit in my daysack. I checked the medkit, then put it back in the bin-bag, rolled it up and stuffed it into the daysack. I added a pair of ear defenders, which I had thought to bring out, the radio battery and a large plastic bottle of water, which I’d snagged from the carton of bottles in the dining room. In the top pocket of the daysack I put a Maglite torch, Silva compass, my passport, wallet and digital camera. I dug around in my baggage and found another three army-issue field dressings and zipped them in my fleece pocket.

Seamus watched me pack, nodding thoughtfully.

‘We need to get you and Les some MCI phones, but they’re limited at the moment, I’ll tell you about it down on the range,’ he said. ‘I’ll get booted and spurred and meet you in the front hall, Ash.’

MCI was an American cellular phone network set up to ease comms within the city because they had trashed the entire Iraqi comms infrastructure during the war.

Seamus was cut from the same piece of fabric as Les, a Colour Sergeant who had spent fourteen years in the Parachute Regiment. Like Les, he also ran marathons, each always trying to beat the other’s best time. I wouldn’t have laid a bet if you put the pair of them in a boxing ring.

I slipped into my Kevlar vest, took it off and adjusted the straps. The last guy to wear it must have been one fat bastard. It sat just above my pistol holster, but my mag pouches on the other side were digging into me. I undid my belt, readjusted them and retightened the belt again. I put my fleece on over the whole lot, including the vest, buckled on my bum bag with the AK mags, grabbed my rifle and daysack and headed for the front door.

Seamus appeared with Les and I followed them through a door marked ‘Ops Room’. Inside was a well-ordered operations room with several radio base stations, a scattering of telephones and a large-scale map of Baghdad on the wall. Angus sat there with an Iraqi, also called Hayder. He was wearing a neat shirt and a tie.

‘We sign out here every time we leave the house,’ Seamus said.

He pointed at a white board with a grid taped to it. With a marker pen he noted our first names, destination ‘AA range’, the vehicles we would be taking and the time we were heading out.

‘We call in when we arrive at the location, and when we set off on our way back, as well as giving the Ops officer a rough trace of our route.’

It was like being in the army.

Seamus walked over to the map of Baghdad and pointed out Spartan HQ. It was marked by a red pin in the middle of the city, inside the clearly marked Green Zone, just north of a massive loop in the Tigris river. The Tigris made a large oxbow loop in the shape of a penis with a huge bulbous head, pointing from east to west. Seamus pointed to a large complex just above the penis. ‘This is the CPA or the Green Zone where we are. This is the main CF base in the area, the centre of new government and is well defended by armour and troops.’

‘There’s the PX for shopping and you can eat in the canteen in the CPA palace itself, but first of all we need to sort you out some CPA passes.’

He then indicated a swathe along the body of the penis. ‘This is Karrada. It’s relatively upmarket and is supposed to be the best place in the city for shopping.’

Angus came and joined us at the big map. ‘The route we take today is to familiarise you with this section of Baghdad,’ Seamus continued. Angus was following the route. ‘We’ll head south, straight down over the 14th July Bridge, over this bit of Karrada,’ he indicated us cutting south over the body of the penis, ‘straight over the roundabout and the next bridge and past Dora refinery. Then we’ll take the six-lane highway and come off here at the range.’

There was a large motorway running east–west just south of the city and it looked like it was a major route.

‘On the way back we might take a detour through Karrada, maybe stop off at a couple of shops and pick up some stuff for dinner.’

I fixed the major landmarks in my head, two sections of river running east–west. The boundaries would be the highway to the south and the refinery to the east.

‘Dora is a bloody great oil refinery and an excellent landmark,’ Seamus told us, pointing at a spot to the south of the city. ‘It has a tall tower with a massive flame at the top, which is bloody useful at night.’

We headed out to the parking lot and mounted up. We were off to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Seamus and Cobus took Les in the lead car, an Opel. I mounted up with Hendriks and Etienne in a Nissan 4 × 4. That way we would have at least two people in each vehicle who knew their way around the city. The South Africans could track through the bush. Baghdad was a piece of cake.

Etienne was behind the wheel and I sat in the passenger seat next to him. We cocked our weapons as we drove out of the gate.

‘Hello, Sierra Zero, this is Sierra Five Zero leaving your location now, over.’

Seamus’s voice boomed out of a radio handset clipped to the sun shade under the roof.

‘Sierra Zero, Roger out.’ Angus’s voice came through loud and clear.

‘Ash, this is Les, radio check, over.’

‘You’re good to me, over.’

‘Roger, good to me, out.’

Our new radios worked. That was one worry off my mind. They seemed quite small though, and I wondered about their range.

‘These work through rebroadcast stations, right?’

‘ Ja ,’ said Hendriks from the back.

The most common threat at the moment was being shot up from behind by another vehicle, so Hendriks was facing to the rear of the 4 × 4 with an RPD resting over the back seat. I would be in the passenger seat for as long as it took me to get used to the city and its landmarks.

‘Sometimes the comms are kak ,’ he added. ‘You can be standing next to someone and not get him on the radio because the signal do not go straight to him, it go out to the tower and then come back. If the tower is out of range, or you are in a dead spot, then it is kak , man.’