As they drove in silence the columns grew fatter and more ominous.
* * *
In the late afternoon Rem held his first ‘three-point’ briefing. Southern-CIPA had divided Route 567 into zones. Zone B15 included Camp Liberty and would be monitored by Rem’s team. The men were to build two blockhouses out of sandbags and set chains across the road. Signals would alert them of the convoys heading to Amrah City. The plan would become operational immediately.
Markland had specified that all vehicles holding potentially looted goods should be stopped, searched, and held. Rem looked about the group from man to man. ‘If you see anything, step out of the way. Let the people at Zone 14 or Zone 16 deal with it. We can’t hold people here, and we don’t have any kind of authority.’
Clark had a different idea on what was causing the trouble, discussions roiled with conspiracies peeled off the internet. Pakosta agreed. ‘Sixty per cent of the oil that’s shipped overland is stolen. Fact.’
Amer Hassan had stories from other translators. ‘There’s no gas,’ he said. People queue all day in Baghdad, in Nasiriyah, even in Kurdish Mosul. Families risked breaking the curfew to get in line early, and violence while waiting, snipers who would shoot at the cars for sport. ‘It’s no easier buying fuel on the black market.’
Chimeno couldn’t see the logic. They’d seen the convoys on YouTube, the dirty silver tankers in long heavy lines. How was this possible? ‘Just yesterday on CNN, an entire caravan of thirty trucks with Iraqi Ministry of Oil logos was hijacked. It was nothing if not brazen.
Amer Hassan concurred. He’d also heard of this and knew it not to be uncommon.
‘You don’t stop anything,’ Rem repeated. ‘Leave it to the military.’ If there was going to be any activity, he warned, anything which threatened them, it would likely come at night.
Rem held his hands up for silence. ‘Two days. At most. That’s all we have to get through. The highway will be repaired, guaranteed, in two days.’
A groan passed through the group at the word ‘guarantee’. HOSCO, Southern-CIPA, they all knew, were not dependable.
* * *
After the briefing, Rem contacted Geezler and left a message explaining their circumstances. While he didn’t ask, he made it clear that he wanted advice. Geezler’s misgivings about them working for CIPA now made sense. ‘I’m concerned that we’ve worked ourselves into a situation we can’t manage.’ He spoke briskly wanting his concern to sound controlled and confident. At the same time he didn’t want Watts to hear him.
* * *
Rem joined Pakosta, Kiprowski, and Santo for the first shift. The men held back behind the sandbags and allowed the traffic through.
‘Looks like everyone’s moving house.’ Kiprowski couldn’t quite believe his eyes. Anything that could be pilfered was being pilfered, and in the first night they saw flatbed trucks loaded with bathroom fixtures, toilets, baths, slabs of ceramic tiles, metal rebar hammered out of concrete, metal doors and window frames. One vehicle crammed with the entire contents of a hotel room: a television, telephone, self-assembled furniture, in another, mirrors and bed frames, doors and shower units. A whole truck of dried semolina, a cloud of flour, white from the distance as the top bags were split. Semis came toward them as a hard vibration, a mirage unwrinkling on the road, approaching and promising strangeness as they passed.
‘Guess what we have in this one. Just guess.’
The road brought everything. It brought the dead and the living. It brought people and livestock; oil, kerosene, diesel, and petrol. Hospital equipment, scanners, beds, cots, mattresses, dentists’ chairs. Crates marked ‘popcorn’, ‘peppercorn’, and ‘processed meat’. Milk and honey, and every type of foodstuff. It brought CDs and DVDs. Concrete and tar, stone, brick, clay, paint, and bales of material, canvas, cotton, and silk, stuffed into family cars. Cars, and cars towed by other cars, cars on trailers, car parts, and motors. Machines to break down buildings, military supplies and vehicles. Humvees and Bradleys. One car stuffed entirely with socks and baby clothes stolen from a department store, with the driver lodged into his seat. It was a road of wonders. At dawn, Kiprowski watched a painted stone head with a silent pursed mouth and wide blue eyes agog at the desert, with thin spangled hair flapping in streamers behind it, strapped to the roof of a family car. There were cars with other pieces of cars and sheet metal welded and battened to them for protection, and there were the SUVs black and clean with tinted windows.
Hassan told stories of how women were taken from their houses and brought across the border to Syria or Jordan. Clark had heard similar news on the British World Service. There were hotels in every border country where women were set up as cleaners and prostituted. It was hard to guess how many were involved. Hard also to say what happened to the women who escaped or returned.
The idea was especially repugnant to Kiprowski, who compared everything back to his own family, his three sisters, his mother who’d raised him. He pestered Amer with questions. How could such a thing be conceived? And Amer said that there was always worse, always one more degradation possible. It would be better, he said, that they should die. Amer Hassan instructed them. They should not speak directly to the women, only the men.
* * *
Later that night Clark and Pakosta pulled over two black sedans. With the cars stopped off-road Pakosta called Kiprowski and Rem to come immediately. In total there were three men and seven women, all young. Their passes showed the men and women to be unrelated.
Clark shone his torch into the back of the first vehicle and one of the women shielded her eyes and shied away. Clark shook his head, he just didn’t feel easy about the situation. They separated the three men, took them out of the cars. One of them spoke English. Pakosta later described his manner as servile: the man was a snake. Kiprowski and Clark spoke with the women through Amer Hassan. Hassan translated in a calm voice so that he seemed to defuse the problem. The conversation, with many pauses, was oiled by smooth and conciliatory OKs.
Clark asked why two of the women were from Baghdad and the others were from Sadr. The women claimed to be related, but did not know each other’s names. They all gave the name of their driver as Mohammed.
Hassan asked where he was heading and why. The man replied, astonished: ‘Because I am leaving.’ His papers showed that he came from Egypt, and was a businessman in imports and exports, but gave no particular detail. Hassan repeated his questions and they slowly learned that the women’s families had paid for them to be to be taken out of the country to safety: instead of kidnapping, these women were being taken to a safe house. They were all married, and were being sent ahead of their husbands for their own safety.
As the men climbed back into the cars, one of them looked for a long time at Amer Hassan.
‘He knows me,’ Hassan said. ‘That man knows who I am. Word will get back that I am working with the Americans.’
Kiprowski asked who would know that he was working here, and how that would matter. Amer said that there were many people who could not leave. His family were still in Baghdad, and if word got back to them there would be trouble.
‘What do they think you are doing?’
‘They think that I am finishing my studies in Damascus.’
Pakosta held up his gun and tracked the vehicle as it disappeared. He could solve the problem, he said. Hassan only had to give the word.
* * *
The next morning Cathy received a reply from Marianne Clark.
Dear Cathy,
It was very good to hear from you. I live in St. Louis, although I have family in Aurora and have spent some very happy times in Chicago. I don’t want to presume anything, but I was very pleased to hear from you as an earlier message had me a little confused. I am new to the internet, and much happier with the telephone if you should ever want to talk. It would be nice to talk and please do not hesitate if you should like to call me. It was a great comfort to hear from you and know that there are others in our situation.