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

I glanced at Hendriks. ‘Ready?’

‘ Ja, kom uns gaan ,’ he replied, indicating that we should go.

It wasn’t that likely that insurgents were going to make a raid on the hospital, but our job was to make sure that if they did we were ready for them. We set off anticlockwise, weapons held with the butt just touching the shoulder, ready to be brought up into the aim position in an instant.

I watched as Les led the surviving vehicle from Jacko’s team out of the gateway. He tooted his horn and then they were gone, swept away in the mid-morning traffic. Officer training teaches you to be thinking about everyone’s safety, every eventuality. I was wondering if Les had thought about the route he was going to take to the CPA. With a bomb going off in Karrada there was a good chance that the road we had just driven down had now been blocked off by Coalition Forces and all the streets in the area would be choked with angry Iraqi drivers. Les would need to head northeast and come in from the Assassin’s Gate at the northern entrance to the CPA. He’d work that out for sure.

The wall around the hospital complex wasn’t that high and a platoon from the Dukes would have gone over it in full kit without breaking sweat. From what we had seen of Iraqis they were astonishingly lazy. There was a good chance that if the bad guys were coming they would go for the obvious entrances to the compound, the front and rear gates.

We passed an Iraqi guard sitting at the side door with an AK across his lap. With the equipment and drugs in the hospital they needed guards to prevent the local community from looting it into an empty shell. They would have robbed the building in an orgy of greed and destruction and then the next day they would have complained bitterly that the Coalition Government wasn’t providing them with the medical care they needed. It was the same with the electricity supply, the same with many things. The people seemed to be able to live with this paradox and it startled me every time I came across this maddening concoction of the familiar interspersed with episodes of totally alien reasoning.

We reached the rear gates. They were chained and padlocked. Good. One less thing to worry about. On the far side of the hospital, the wall belonged to the neighbouring block of apartments that stretched back to the main road. There were a few narrow windows, but no one was going to be coming from that angle unless they rappelled down from the roof.

The sound of voices grew louder as we approached a ring of dusty trees halfway back up towards the front gate. Crows circled high above where the voices were coming from.

‘Fok, YISS!’ hissed Hendriks.

We had stumbled across what was serving as the hospital morgue, a bare patch of concrete behind the administration offices. According to Muslim tradition the dead should be buried within 24 hours. A dozen bodies were laid out in a row below the shade cast by the trees. Nothing much in Iraq was neat. Nothing was put straight, tidied up, kept in order. Except the bodies. They were always in precise rows. Here there were weeping relatives wailing and howling over them.

The dead bodies were undoubtedly the civilians killed in the bomb attack on the Spartan convoy. We could see that the wall was clear all the way back up to the front of the hospital and I didn’t want to intrude and make their misery worse.

‘Let’s pop in here.’

We said salaam alaikum to the armed guard sitting at the entrance to another door and he seemed pleased that we paused long enough to show him our ID cards. He probably thought we were just going to barge in and this moment of courtesy demonstrated that he wasn’t beneath our notice but actually had some authority. It was good PR. It made him look good in front of the Iraqi office workers smoking in the corridor behind him.

I looked back at the women in black, kneeling and screaming over the bodies of their men and children. The crows continued circling high above. I followed Hendriks inside.

The hospital was filthy. Not just dirty. This was ancient filth. This was biblical. The germs in that hospital would survive nuclear fallout. The corridor leading to the front of the building was packed with Iraqis squatting on the floor smoking. I couldn’t tell whether they were visitors, staff or patients. There were no smiles here. Sullen stares followed us all the way to the main door. I smiled politely, looking for hostile intent in the body language of the people we passed. Hendriks had his expressionless killing face on. His icy eyes flicked across clothing and bodies, looking for concealed weapons.

As we reached the entrance, I saw a woman with blood oozing through her bandaged head being pushed in a wheelchair down another hallway. The crowd made way for her with far more animation than they did for us.

We followed behind and saw Seamus and Sammy talking with a bunch of Iraqis, two of them wearing white coats. To my surprise one of them was a woman; female Iraqi doctors◦– this one was a surgeon◦– were a rarity.

‘The place is clear,’ I said to Seamus. ‘There are four local guards with AKs on all the doors coming into the building. As long as we stick together I think we’ll be OK.’

‘OK. Hendriks, if you stay with Cobus out here. We’ll go and see how Steve’s getting on.’ Seamus pointed at Cobus and the 4 × 4.

Hendriks nodded and left. I watched Hendriks speak to Cobus before sitting on a low wall, rifle ready, in a position where he could see the exposed side of the hospital building. Cobus stood relaxed behind the bonnet of the Nissan watching the passing traffic over the front sights of his RPD.

Seamus and I followed Sammy and the doctors into the hospital.

‘Did the Yaapies recover all the weapons and radios?’ I enquired.

‘Yeah, they’ve got them in their wagon,’ Seamus replied.

These questions need to be asked and these things have to be done, even when colleagues have been killed and wounded. More so. You’ve got to stay cool, keep a clear head, work the drills. You don’t want to add losses to your losses by making errors.

‘How did they catch it up?’ I asked Seamus.

‘They were in the usual order of march, Brit wagon in front, South Africans behind. The Yaapies saw them swerve around a car in the street, obviously a setup. The device detonated under them. The shrapnel got Steve and Jacko in front, but didn’t touch Badger. It went off under the engine block and most of the blast was deflected sideways into the crowd. That’s why they’ve got a dozen civvies dead.’

‘We need armoured vehicles in this environment,’ I said.

‘Damn right we do. I’m going to give Adam an ultimatum on it, mate.’ Seamus handed me his MCI phone. ‘I gave HQ a sitrep on the Thuraya but we haven’t been able to get hold of Mad Dog,’ he added. ‘Try him again while I speak to the surgeon.’

A sitrep is a situation report. They had the report at Spartan, but it was more urgent to get the information to Colonel Hind or Colonel McQueen at the CPA so that they could organise a casevac.

We’d reached the operating theatre. A rusty assortment of unidentifiable medical equipment from the 1950s sat around the place like a museum of junk. The room was cramped, hot and full of flies. Swarms of flies. Small ones that bit and big ones that aimed for your eyes. The power was out. What lighting there was came from a lamp with wires trailing from the window out to a generator that throbbed like an old metal fan. The air from the window shifted the cigarette smoke in swirling clouds and a crowd of people stood around the room like spectators at a show watching us as if we were part of the performance◦– two doctors, two white guys, Sammy with a gold Beretta in his belt. The people carried on smoking, dropping their ash on the floor, watching, always watching.