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

‘ Oui . Oui . You don’t have to say nothing. I do this one million times.’

Michel had a three-man team of Iraqi fixers waiting outside the safety zone. Most Iraqis weren’t allowed inside the CPA, naturally. The team had been engaged independently of Spartan by Michel’s news agency and included a reasonably good interpreter, a cheerful, middle-aged man with a pot belly named Assam, whom we immediately nicknamed Sammy. He had fine pale hair lacquered and backcombed over his bald spot and blue eyes. I thought at the time that this was something of a rarity, but Alexander the Great had marched through Babylon and his soldiers had left their mix in the gene pool. Sammy was with two surly young guys with dilapidated AKs. Their main task seemed to be to stand next to the Frenchman while he posed for photos.

I pointed at their weapons. ‘Just keep those out of sight. I’m sure you don’t have permits, and if the Americans see you they won’t leave a grease spot behind.’

‘Grease spot?’ asked Sammy.

I drew my finger in a line across my throat. He translated for his companions and reluctantly they slid their guns into the foot well.

Sammy pulled out an old dog-eared map and in his antiquated English stressed that we should avoid the highway and take the road through the desert. We were heading for the town of Fallujah, a hotbed of resistance and apparently too precarious for us to enter, even armed to the teeth. We were surprised since Spartan Ops had said the area was safe, but Sammy shook his head.

‘This place very bad, Mister. Very dangerous.’

My first instinct was that he was overplaying the danger either to squeeze out more money, or to separate Michel from us in order to flog him to the highest bidder. For some reason, Seamus said nothing and I decided to let it go and trust the man.

The revised plan was that we would take our principal to the outskirts of Fallujah, then Sammy’s team would escort him through the city walls. We were not entirely happy with the arrangement, but our job was to chaperone reporters and this is what reporters did when they were trying to make a name for themselves.

Delacroix lit a Gauloise and looked faintly bored as Sammy traced our route over the thin grey lines crisscrossing the vast featureless wilderness on the map. He knew the roads, he said, like the back of my hand , and told us proudly that as a pilot in Saddam’s Air Force, he had been based at the air force base close to Lake Habbaniyah.

He stabbed the map with a stubby finger and Seamus’s eyebrows shot up. Lake Habbaniyah was in the heart of the desert west of Baghdad in a place called al-Anbar Muhafazah and was fed by floodwaters from the Euphrates. The lake provided irrigation for crops and was the largest in Iraq, in fact one of the largest inland seas in the world. If you happened to be looking for a water pumping station, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Seamus pulled out the new digital camera Adam Pascoe had given the team and took a photo of Sammy looking over the map. He grinned. Iraqis loved having their photos taken.

‘For the family album?’ Sammy asked.

‘For the record,’ Seamus replied.

If our principal was kidnapped a shot of Sammy might turn out to be useful.

We didn’t have a radio for Sammy’s vehicle and went through our set of prearranged signals in case there was an incident; flashing lights and the horn-honking drills. We would remain a single packet; if one vehicle pulled off the road, we would all pull off.

‘Is that clear?’ Seamus asked.

‘Like the crystal,’ Sammy replied.

Sammy would lead the way, but if there was a roadblock or an attack, he would pull over and let us overtake. Our Coalition ID would allow us to speed through roadblocks; our superior firepower was the best remedy if nastiness raised its ugly head.

‘Is that clear?’ Seamus asked again.

Sammy saluted. ‘A OK,’ he replied.

I glanced at his decrepit yellow Toyota. ‘Is that thing going to make it?’

He looked mortified. ‘I beg your pardon, Mister,’ he said. ‘But I have cared for this car for ten years and it has never let me down. I love my car more than I love my women.’

‘Women?’

He took a breath and threw up his plump hands. ‘It is the burden I must abide. The women, they love me too much.’

I wasn’t interested in the old boy’s love life. ‘You have enough benzene?’ I asked.

He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Yes, Mister. No problem.’

We set off with the Toyota leading. Les was driving the Peugeot, Seamus at his side, me in the back with Michel. The Yaapies were bringing up the rear in the 4 × 4. We steered a course through the morning rush hour, slipped out of the path of a kamikaze with about two dozen women cowering in hijabs in the back of his truck and left the city limits, heading in a southwesterly direction.

‘Who are you going to interview?’ I enquired.

I spoke in French and he answered in English. He turned to look at me. ‘The other side,’ he said.

Delacroix waved his finger like a baton as he told me he had been against the war, that everyone in France had been against the war, and he thought the Coalition Forces were doing a shitty job in the post-war reconstruction.

‘The Americans came in with no plan to get out and you English follow like poodles. You should have been united with France and Germany and Russia. One man could have stopped the war and that one man wasn’t Bush.’ He paused to stab me in the chest. ‘That man was Mr Blair.’

‘I’m sure Mr Blair had his reasons,’ I said, not that I could think of any. It was obvious to anyone who could find their own arse with both hands that the CF were not going to find any weapons of mass destruction, even though that autumn they were hopelessly still looking.

‘This country is in chaos,’ Michel resumed. ‘Soldiers are dying every day. Iraqis are dying every day.’

‘That’s why we’re here, to try and make it better.’

‘You are an optimist,’ he spat.

Maybe he had a point. But the Brits in the car all had mates serving in the armed forces in Basra and we didn’t need a lecture. Delacroix told me he had excellent contacts among the insurgents in Fallujah and was going to tell their side of the story. Personally, I was worried that the next time we would see him was going to be on Al Jazeera in an orange jumpsuit; the terrorists had copied the Americans in Guantánamo and it was an effective PR coup when hostages appeared on TV dressed in that way.

We fell silent. The country roads were steeled in a thin layer of tar that blended into the landscape. The arid wasteland stretched to the horizon in every direction, not waves of sand in undulating dunes like you imagine from Lawrence of Arabia , but a dusty red rocky plain as old as time.

We zipped along at about 130kph for two hours without seeing another vehicle. When I caught my first glimpse of Lake Habbaniyah, I thought it was a mirage, a vast blue eye shimmering like a mirror. As we drew closer, I could see a flock of wading birds, their black wings draped over white bodies like capes; they had sharp elongated beaks and fragile pink legs. They turned their long necks to glance in the direction of the noise made by our vehicles. As they returned to their meditations, the tranquillity of this fleeting scene seemed almost surreal after the turmoil of Baghdad. I couldn’t at that moment have imagined anything better than plunging in the lake for a swim.

I suggested as much to Seamus and he laughed it off.

Sammy stopped at a water pumping station and Seamus went to take some photographs for Adam.

Les wandered off with Sammy towards the guards from the Facilities Protection Service (FPS). They were sitting bored out of their skulls in the hut by the main gate. Behind them were breeze-block buildings with tin roofs housing pumps and purifying equipment. The entire compound was circled by a rusting mesh fence.