Dorothy Mcintosh - The Witch of Babylon

The memory of what Corinne had told me about Hanna Jaffrey came back to me. That she’d been stoned, her face battered almost beyond recognition. And now Lazarus, entombed in his pyramid of rocks, had met the same fate.

“Throw the stones back, Shim. Might as well give him a decent burial,” Ward said grimly.

They did pry me loose after all. I was too emotionally drained at that point to wonder why. I limped behind them. We turned left at the T-shaped intersection and saw the source of Mazare’s light, the one he’d persuaded us had been used by Tomas. It was a large floodlight sitting on the floor. I saw no electric wires so assumed it had a powerful battery. Mazare had destroyed it by kicking the glass in when he fled.

This tunnel ran at what I judged was a forty-five-degree angle to the main passageway we’d followed. We had no idea where it led, but Mazare had taken it so an exit had to be ahead. Ward coughed continuously on our way back. Our one jacklight began to flicker. If we found no way out, soon we’d have to feel our way through. After trudging along for a stretch, Eris pointed to a faint circle of illumination ahead that grew brighter as we approached. It turned out to be one of the holes we’d seen in the cliffs when we first arrived at the village. We burst into the sunlight, took a moment to get our bearings, and made for the car.

The Merc was gone, of course. They’d left the blue van but we had no keys. Eris got to work breaking into the van and hot-wiring the ignition while Ward fumed and Shim stood guard over me. Ward’s sat phone had survived the ordeal unscathed; he made a quick call on it before we left. He told Eris to get in the passenger side while he drove. Shim waited until I got in the back and stuffed himself in beside me. I wondered whether Eris had lost her little trove of chemicals but decided I’d rather not find out at this point.

Ward’s white-hot rage at being bested by Tomas was so pronounced you could cut the atmosphere inside the car with a knife. Mazare had lied, double-crossed Ward, and remained loyal to Tomas after all. The prospect of gaining a lot of money had been a ruse that he and Tomas knew Ward would swallow. It gave me some satisfaction to see the confident professor, always in control, coming apart at the seams. Away from his comfortable life in New York he was on shaky ground and he knew it.

Deeply ashamed over falling into the trap, Ward kept an angry silence all the way, breaking it only once to comment, “Once we’re in Iraq everything will change. We’re the ones holding the cards there.” He’d made one gargantuan mistake with this foray into Turkey. I hoped his certainty that he’d succeed in Iraq would prove as baseless.

We drove to Erkilet Airport outside the city of Kayseri, where the plane was waiting for us, and flew into Amman. After a couple of hours stalled there we got the go-ahead to proceed to Baghdad. This surprised me. I’d assumed we’d drive in from Jordan. Ward’s connections with the powers that be must have been in pretty good shape.

When we arrived in Baghdad the plane sat for at least an hour on the landing strip. A stern American official in uniform entered, took a good look at me, checked my passport, and left. I assumed he was clearing me to enter the country. We stepped off the plane into a blast furnace and onto a paved area full of cracks and peppered with weeds. It had to be over one hundred degrees. How soldiers could bear this heat in full battle dress, carrying eighty pounds of gear, I couldn’t imagine. I sucked in a breath and got a mouthful of grit. A white Humvee with tinted windows waited for us, the vehicle dented and battered and covered with dust.

Two musclemen occupied the front seat, modern barbarians wearing helmets and ACU jackets over sweat-stained undershirts and khaki jeans. ID tags flopped on chains around their necks. Both were clean-shaven and had buzz cuts. One wore a series of patches in a row on his left sleeve. They carried weapons that looked dangerous enough to destroy whole buildings.

I glanced over at Ward. “Who’s the advance guard?”

“Private contractors. You can’t survive around here without them.”

“They look kind of young.”

“What are they going to do, get some low-life job back home?

You’re looking at a thousand a day here.”

“So exactly where are we going?”

“To the al-Mansour Hotel. You can’t complain. It’s a five star.”

A hotel? That was a surprise. I’d feared it would be some kind of detention center. If Ward was forced to be my jail warden, I guessed he wanted as much comfort as possible.

“You won’t be cuffed when we go into the hotel. Stay beside us. Our friends here will walk behind all the time, so it definitely isn’t worth making any stupid moves. If you try to venture out anywhere beyond the hotel you’ll walk straight into a firefight.”

We roared out of the airport onto a stretch of highway. How many times had Samuel traveled this exact route into the city? I pictured him whiling away the night in the teahouses, drinking chai, eating sweet flatbread and sizzling kabobs. Admiring the glittering domes of the mosques. Sauntering beside the slow-moving brown waters of the Tigris, sitting out in the sharayua —the little riverside parks. Spending time with his cherished friends in the souks and the old Jewish quarter.

“The city has a way of seducing you,” he once wrote to me. “When you leave her you think of your acquaintance as a brief fling, a transient attachment. But you find her returning again and again to your thoughts. Before long you’re devising ways to get back. She appeals only superficially to the intellect; her real attraction is carnal. Like a mistress you’re incapable of releasing no matter how much trouble she causes. And for me there is also the history.”

I wondered what he would say now, seeing the wreck she had become.

The window looked out onto stretches of bleak terrain interspersed with islands of greenery, each one with a clutch of farm buildings. Closer to the road, the landscape resembled the backdrop for a Mad Max movie. Mangled guardrails; craters; piles of cinder and rubble from holes blown in the asphalt; a dead donkey, the stink of the carcass reaching us even through our closed windows; crumpled trucks and cars; the hulls of destroyed tanks. Dust and ash covered everything. People in traditional dress shuffled tired feet along the ditches, searching for God knows what. At one point I thought I could see a patch of blackened, dried blood on the pavement.

We drove through the outskirts of the city to its denser core, passing many ruined buildings. In some the first floor was perfectly intact, the large Moorish windows and buff bricks entirely unscathed. In stark contrast, the upper floors were a nightmare tangle of charred wood and tortured girders. I’d see long lines of buildings mostly intact punctuated by one that had been completely destroyed, like a missing tooth in a perfect row. Fetid heaps of garbage lay everywhere.

We entered what must have once been a Parisian-style roadway with a grand boulevard separating the lanes. The center partition had at one time been graced with rows of majestic date palms. Most of them had been hacked apart, their trunks sticking up like javelins rammed into the ground, their brown fronds rotting in piles. I noticed Ward looking at them too. “What happened there?” I asked.

“They had to take them down. Too much cover for the insurgents. This route from the airport is one of the most dangerous strips of highway in the entire city.”