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

In that case I still needed to move this stuff away from the det. My next order of business was to remove all the plastic explosive from the pump. I could see five lumps of the stuff moulded in at joints along the pump with det cord running through each one. If the bomber had been trained by the British Army, he would have knotted the det cord in the middle of each lump of explosive.

With my knife, I sliced through the plastic along the line of the det cord, opened it up and, sure enough, there was a knot tied in the centre. Good man , I said. I made another mental note for later. I cut slices all around the knot to make sure the det cord was not attached to anything else hidden within the PE and then lifted it out. There was nothing.

It took me about five minutes, which seemed like an hour, and I could feel the sweat pouring off me. I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. One bastard done. Four more to go.

Just because there weren’t any nasty surprises hidden inside the first chunk of plastic didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any in the next. I moved carefully but with a bit more confidence and ten minutes later, I had removed all the det cord from the other four chunks of plastic. The main pump was still ringed in det cord. If detonated, it would still damage the pump.

It was highly unlikely that there was a high-tech sympathetic wire running parallel to the det cord. I looked it over again for strange bulges that might have been disguised dets, but there was nothing. Having gone this far, I went the rest of the way and cut away as much of the cord as I could. Finally, all I was looking at was the initiation device itself: the telephone, the little circuit board, the detonator twelve inches away on a thin wire and the duct tape holding it all together. There were a few clumps of det cord sticking out from the duct tape around the phone. If they did go off, I thought, all it would do was make a scorch mark on top of the pump and blow the telephone. It might take a man’s hand off, but no more than that.

I had done the donkey work. I didn’t know anything about mobile phone techniques and the guys from the bomb squad would be able to deal with it, maybe even just stand back and shoot it with a shotgun, the most common way of dealing with initiation devices. It is destructive, but leaves the main body of the explosive inert. I lumped the plastic explosive together, five balls, each about the size of an orange and covered now in dust. It would have filled a shoe box, enough PE to blow the pump and all the pipes to pieces for a considerable distance.

My heart was beating like a drum. My hands were wet and I was surprised to realise that the dish-dash was drenched in sweat. I retrieved the camera, took a shot of what I’d left for the EOD Team, then slumped down behind the wall to catch my breath. I’m not getting paid enough for this, I thought. Krista can never ever, ever find out.

Now I’d gone this far, it wasn’t the moment to get slotted by some keen-eyed sniper. I hid the camera, spent a minute arranging the shemagh, stuck the AK lazily over my shoulder and, like Robert De Niro method acting, shuffled back up the road to the office.

The tic on Seamus’s neck was vibrating like crazy.

‘Did you fucking fall asleep up there, you cunt?’ he demanded. ‘What the fuck have you been doing for twenty minutes?’

So I told him.

He dropped down in a chair. ‘Good on you, mate, fucking well done. But don’t do it again,’ he warned.

‘Is there any tea, mate? I’m gasping.’

‘Get this man some fucking tea,’ Seamus said, and all the Iraqis in the office scurried about trying to look busy.

I exchanged clothés , as Sammy called them, and someone appeared with syrupy sweet chai . Now that the adrenaline was wearing off my hands were shaking slightly. I took a cigarette to calm down and amused the Iraqis in the room as I coughed my way through it.

We chatted with Ra’eed, the shift supervisor and the guard captain about the work at the plant. The guards needed new jackets. They’d all been issued with at least two, but they’d lost them, or sold them. We told them we were getting new Czech bullets for the AKs and assured them that the pay would be on time this month. It had been late over Christmas and late pay made unhappy guards.

At around seven, with the sun slipping behind the apartment buildings, the Americans turned up, four Humvees with at least five guys in each. Two EOD guys, a warrant officer and another guy, came in the office looking exhausted. They’d been on the road all day. The warrant officer was quietly spoken and, like many specialists, wasn’t too gung ho. I briefed him on what I’d done. He raised his eyebrows without making any comment, but when I showed him the before and after shots on the video he whistled out through his teeth. ‘Good job. That’ll be no problem at all. No problem at all. We got a GSM jammer transmitting right now in the Humvee.’

Along with Spartan and the Iraqi guards, we now had twenty fully armed Americans with .50 cals and Mk19s. The guys in the turrets on top of the vehicles were panning the surroundings and looked deadly serious. One of them told me that EOD techs were being actively targeted by the resistance, just as I had suspected. I was definitely not going near any more demolitions ever again.

The warrant officer felt confident and wandered off on his own to the pump. He’d only been gone about two minutes when he returned holding the telephone and the detonator separately. It was just what it had appeared to be, no traps, just the phone hooked up to the detonator. Fuck it, I thought, I could have saved him the bother.

We went out, everyone shook hands, and the Americans drove off to the next job.

Colonel Faisal turned to me and Seamus. ‘Fucking people,’ he said.

‘The Americans?’ Seamus asked.

‘No, my fucking people.’

It turned out that when he’d inspected the guards he’d discovered that out of a shift of fifty men, eight were absent and twelve weren’t even on the books at all. It was the usual Iraqi corruption at work. Twenty men had been missing and when the site captain had realised that we were coming to investigate the IED, he had run around trying to find bodies. It was possible that the twelve strangers were who they said they were, relatives of the real guards. They had the ID cards of the missing guards, and Iraqi ID papers confirming the same family name. We did know that in Iraq it was common for brothers or sons to come in and cover for absentees, but we strongly forbade it since we could imagine the chaos if someone carrying Spartan ID and weapons shot some civvies.

The problem was the missing eight men. The shift supervisor had signed his morning return to confirm that there had been 100 per cent attendance at roll call. It was always possible that he just did not want to pass on bad news to his bosses, a common Iraqi trait amusingly similar to Donald Rumsfeld’s staff, but more likely they were ghosts in the system. They were either nonexistent employees and he was pocketing the pay, or they had ‘bought’ the jobs in return for a kickback to the supervisor of, say, $20 a month, to sign them in for every shift so they never had to actually turn up and could have full-time jobs elsewhere.

We had had the same problem just that week when trying to hire a cook. We’d grown bored with cooking our own evening meals. We interviewed and accepted an old man but a complete stranger turned up the next day. It turned out that the old man did not want to work evenings, but accepted the job because it was a potential source of income he could sell to someone on the street.

We sat the stranger down and informed him that we were not happy and his employment would depend on passing our security vetting. He agreed. We put a guard with him to make sure he didn’t poison us, showed him the fridge brimming with food and told him to cook dinner for seven men; if he had any questions he should just use the phone to the office. When we got in at 8.00 p.m., we were starving and there was no dinner. The cook had spent the whole day sitting smoking fags and doing nothing because no one had actually specified what it was we wanted him to cook for dinner. The phone was right next to him but he hadn’t thought to call us. Also the guard had been told, ‘He is going to start cooking, watch him’, but seemed to think it completely normal that the cook then sat down for seven hours and smoked four packs of cigarettes without doing anything.