We tried to make up game plans for what we would do if we got caught in a VCP (Vehicle Checkpoint). We didn’t know what we’d do. We couldn’t try to barge through a checkpoint barrier on the road. That might happen in films but it’s fantasy stuff; permanent VCPs are made to stop that sort of thing. The vehicle draws fire every time, and we’d end up as perforated as Tetley tea bags I’d probably just have to brake as fast as I could, and we’d pile out and do a runner.
Unfortunately, we were reading air charts, not an AA road atlas. The roads were very confusing. Legs directed me to take junctions that went generally west, and I constantly checked the mileometer to see how far we’d gone.
The first major location we came to was the pumping station area. There were military vehicles and blokes milling around, but no checkpoint. Nobody took a blind bit of notice of us as the cab chugged past.
We had to look as though we knew where we were -going. If we looked lost it would arouse suspicion, and people might even come over and offer to help.
We came to yet another set of junctions. There was nothing going west and the best we could do was to turn north. It was a normal two-way road instead of the single-track ones we had been moving on. It was busy with convoys of oil tankers. We pulled out to overtake, but military vehicles were coming the other way. Nobody else was doing it so we had to play the game to blend in. At least we were moving, and the heater was going full blast. It was blissfully warm.
The convoy stopped.
We couldn’t see why. Traffic lights? A broken-down vehicle? A VCP?
Legs jumped out and had a quick look but could see nothing in the darkness. We started inching forward. We stopped again and Legs got out.
“Military vehicles at the front of the convoy,” he muttered. “One of them has crashed or broken down.”
Squaddies were hanging around on foot and in Land Cruisers, and cars and trucks were maneuvering around them. We started to drive past, and I held my breath. One of the blokes directing the traffic spotted us and started to wave us on. Mark, Bob, and Dinger pretended to be asleep on the back seat; Legs and I grinned like idiots inside our shamags and waved back. As they disappeared in the rearview mirror, we laughed ourselves silly.
We hit a built-up area. Statues of Saddam stood outside public buildings and pictures of him were plastered on every available space. We drove past cafe bars with people milling around outside. We passed civilian cars, armored cars, and APCs. Nobody turned a hair.
Sometimes the roads and junctions funneled us in totally the wrong direction. We did a touch of north, then east, then south, then west, but ensured we were generally keeping west. Mark had the Magellan on his lap in the back and was making attempts to get a fix so that if the shit hit the fan, we would each have the information we needed to get us over the border.
Dinger was smoking like a condemned man enjoying his last request. I was considering whether to join him. I’d never had a cigarette in my life, and I thought: By tonight I could be dead, so why not try one while I have the chance?
“What’s the score on these fags?” I asked Dinger.
“Do you drag all the smoke down, or what do you do?”
“You’ve had one before, have you?”
“No, mate-never smoked in my life.”
“Well, you ain’t going to start now, you wanker. You’ll flake out and crash the car. Anyway, do you have any idea how many people die of lung cancer each year? I can’t possibly expose you to that sort of risk. Tell you what, though-you can have a bit of passive.”
He blew a lungful of smoke in my direction. I hated it, as he knew I would. When we were on the Counter Terrorist team together, Dinger used to drive one of the Range Rovers. He knew I loathed cigarettes so he’d be at it all the time, keeping the windows wound up. I’d go berserk and open them all, and he’d be laughing his cock off. Then the windows would go up and he’d do it again. He had a tape called something like “Elvis-The First Twenty Years.” He knew I hated it so he’d put it on at every opportunity. We were driving along the M4 one time, and I’d wound down the window because he was smoking. Dinger put the cassette on and grinned. I pressed Eject, grabbed the cassette, and chucked it out of the window. War was declared.
I had my own tapes which I took with us on long drives, but the difference was that it was good music-Madness, usually, or The Jam. One night, many weeks later, I put one of them on and closed my eyes as I complained about his smoking and farting. Before I realized what he was doing, he ejected the tape and sent it the way of Elvis.
I waved away the cloud of Iraqi cigarette smoke.
“I hate it when you do that,” I said. “Do you know, for every nine cigarettes you smoke, I’m smoking three of them?”
“You shouldn’t honk,” he said. “It’s cheap. You’re not paying, I am.”
The road signs were in English as well as Arabic, and the blokes in the back had a map spread out on their laps, trying to work out where we were. Nothing actually registered. The built-up area stretched all along the Euphrates, and there were no place-names.
All things considered, we were doing rather well. The mood was quietly confident but apprehensive. They must have found the people at the hijack site by now and would be on the lookout for the yellow cab. Compared with what we’d been through in the last few days, it was quite a funny time, and at least it was warm. The car fugged up, and our clothes started to dry.
There were more convoys, consisting of about twenty vehicles at a time. We tagged on behind. There were civilian cars everywhere. There was no street lighting, which was rather good. We tried our best to hide our weapons, but there had to be a compromise between concealment and being able to get the weapons up to bear in the event of a drama.
We rounded a corner on the open road and got into another slowly moving jam. Vehicles had come up behind us, and we were stuck. This time Legs couldn’t get out or he’d be seen by the people behind. We’d just have to bluff it out.
A soldier with his weapon slung over his shoulder was coming down the queue on the driver’s side, the left-hand side as we were looking. People were talking to him from their cars and trucks. There were two more squad dies on the right-hand side. They were mooching along more slowly than their mate, weapons over their shoulders, smoking and chatting.
We knew we were going to get compromised. The moment the jundie stuck his head inside and had a look at us, he’d see we were white eyes. There was no more than a 1 percent chance of us getting away with it.
Big decision: What did we do now? Did we get out straightaway and go for it, or did we wait?
“Wait,” I said. “You never know.”
Very slowly we tried to get our weapons up to bear. If we had a drama, we would have to get out of the car. Every handle had a hand on it, ready for the off.
Mark quietly said, “See you in Syria.”
We’d try to keep together as much as possible, but there was a strong chance we’d get split. It would be every man for himself.
We waited and waited, watching these people slowly working their way down the line. They didn’t look particularly switched on: they were just killing time. Mark tried to get a fix on the Magellan to find out how far we were from the border, but he ran out of time.
“Let’s just go south, and then west,” I said.
That meant jumping out on the left-hand side of the road, firing off some rounds to get their heads down, and running like mad. As far as I was concerned, this was our most dangerous moment since leaving Saudi.
The blokes at the back had got their weapons up. Legs had his 203 across him with the barrel resting on my lap.
“If he comes up and puts his head through, as soon as he ID’s us, I’ll slot him,” he said.
All I needed to do was keep my head out of the way. Legs would just bring the barrel up and do the business. – “We’ll take the other two,” Bob said.