The Protector Read online

  Stanza removed his jacket and after a brief study of the flak jacket’s configuration he put an arm through an opening and heaved it on as if it were a saddle.

  ‘I thought these things were lighter nowadays,’ Stanza said.

  ‘They are but the Herald can’t afford ’em,’ Mallory replied as he put his shirt back on and buttoned it up. ‘That one must be ten years old.’

  Stanza zipped up the front of his armoured vest and, clearly unable to get his jacket back on over the top, stood and waited for Mallory’s next command. It was all so very foreign to him. ‘As long as it works,’ he said, trying to sound relaxed.

  He watched Mallory pull out of a bag a rifle that he guessed was a Kalashnikov, load a magazine, cock the gun loudly, apply the safety catch and put the weapon on the floor beside the front passenger seat. Beside it was a large pouch with several spare magazines protruding from it. The sound of two more weapons being cocked startled Stanza - the noise was accentuated in the cavernous place - and he looked around to see the drivers casually placing semi-automatic pistols into their hip holsters, which they then covered with their jackets.

  Stanza’s discomfort became more palpable.

  ‘You set?’ Mallory asked Stanza, a serious tone to his voice. ‘A quick brief, then.’

  The drivers came over to Mallory, the confidence of those familiar with their responsibilities evident in their relaxed yet alert body language. Stanza remembered his wallet in his jacket pocket and decided to put it in his trousers.

  Mallory looked at him. ‘This is mostly for you,’ he said, sounding like a schoolteacher.

  ‘Oh, right,’ Stanza said.

  ‘You’ll travel in the back of my vehicle,’ Mallory said to Stanza. ‘I’ll be in the front. Kareem will be in that car following behind. His job is to tail us at a distance without looking as if he’s with us. If anything goes wrong, if we get hit and our car fails - flat tyre, whatever, anything that stops us - Kareem will pull in front of us and we’ll debus into his car. If we run into a contact, a firefight or an IED - improvised explosive device - we’ll try and push through if we can.You get your head down but be ready to act if I tell you. Just do whatever I say, OK? If we have to debus you stay close to me. D’you understand all that?’

  Stanza nodded since it was all he could do. He didn’t feel as if he had any time to think. He had questions but didn’t want to appear nervous or overly concerned. He knew they were driving to the hotel but he was not prepared for these warlike precautions. He felt as if he was taking part in a military operation.

  ‘What route do you want to take?’ Mallory asked Farris.

  Farris shrugged to indicate his indifference as he glanced at Kareem for his thoughts. ‘Blue four, seven, then railway red two,’ he said, more in the tone of a suggestion than a statement.

  Kareem also shrugged. ‘That’s good,’ he agreed. ‘My brother he called, said IED one hour past at black nine flyover. There may be ’nother so we not go there.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Mallory said. Then, to Stanza, ‘You done a hostile environment course of any kind?’

  ‘A what?’ Stanza asked, looking confused.

  ‘Your paper not send you on a course to prepare you for here?’

  Stanza shook his head. He’d heard of courses for journalists that taught them about weapons effects, military and insurgent tactics and how to be a hostage but they were not cheap, whereas Patterson was.

  ‘How about a medic course?’ Mallory said.

  ‘No. Nothing like that,’ Stanza said, adding a feeling of inadequacy to his growing nervousness.

  ‘The medic bag’s on the back seat. If we have to get out under fire or for any reason, if you can remember, bring it with you. OK?’

  Stanza nodded as he looked inside the back of the car at the black bag with a small red cross on it on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

  ‘I don’t s’pose you know how to use a weapon, either?’ Mallory asked.

  Stanza shook his head and was about to say he didn’t approve of them anyway, which he did not. But at that moment it felt like a pretty lame thing to say.

  ‘I’m not saying you should carry one,’ Mallory said. ‘But if I was lying next to a gun and a crazed insurgent was coming at me to slit my throat I’d want to know how to use one. You have a financial value to some of them but not to everyone.’

  Stanza began to imagine such a scenario but it was all too heavy for him to hold a train of thought. He was beginning to feel as if he had arrived on another planet.

  ‘OK. Let’s saddle up,’ Mallory said as he unzipped a butt pouch hanging below his navel, took out a pistol and cocked it.

  Stanza climbed into the back of the vehicle, an awkward manoeuvre thanks to his bulky vest - which had him wondering just how far he could run in the damned thing anyway. There was some comfort, however, in the knowledge that his torso was protected against bullets.

  Mallory sat in front of Stanza, closed his door and tucked his pistol under his thigh for ease of access. Farris climbed in behind the wheel, started the engine and drove slowly out of the narrow parking bay between a pair of heavy pillars. He turned a tight corner towards the exit.

  Kareem allowed them to get some distance ahead before driving out of his space and following some way behind.

  ‘Kareem, this is Bernie, check,’ Mallory said into his hand-held radio which he kept low on his lap so that no one outside could see it. There was no reply. ‘Kareem. Diswamy?’

  ‘I hear,’ came Kareem’s tinny voice.

  ‘That’s good to me too,’ Mallory said before tucking the radio out of sight.

  ‘Is this car armoured?’ Stanza asked.

  ‘Your door would weigh quarter of a ton if it was,’ Mallory replied. ‘And the glass would be more than an inch thick . . . The Herald can’t afford armoureds,’ he added.

  Stanza should have known better than to ask. He looked around the vehicle, wondering what protection they did have. ‘So there’s nothing to protect us?’ he asked, hoping Mallory had some good news.

  ‘Just your flak jacket,’ Mallory replied.

  ‘And this can stop all weapons?’ Stanza asked.

  ‘No. Yours is level-three armour. The Herald won’t buy level-four,’ he added in a tone that emphasised his contempt for how cheap their employers were. ‘It’ll stop AK rounds maybe, and low-velocity stuff such as pistol ammo. But I wouldn’t worry about it. A lot of the shooters out here use AP - armour-piercing.They’ll go through the car and you and me like they would through butter. Anyway, IEDs are our biggest threat and one of those’ll disintegrate this crate in a second if we’re close enough. That, or turn it into a fireball. Your body armour’s about all they’ll find of you in the wreckage,’ he added dryly.

  Stanza wondered if this was another wind-up attempt, although it sounded all too realistic. Either way, he wished he hadn’t bothered enquiring. ‘Any good news?’ he asked, forcing a smile, deciding to try and sound a little more cavalier about it all.

  ‘I haven’t finished with the bad news yet,’ Mallory said. ‘Didn’t think you’d want to hear it all in one go.’ Then, deciding to be a little lighter-hearted, he went on: ‘There’s always a bit of good news. Chelsea beat Liverpool last night.’

  Stanza didn’t find that amusing and looked out of the window as they left the car park. They burst into the sunlight and rolled through a small checkpoint, Mallory waving at the Fijian guard without stopping, and picked up speed as they joined the broad three-lane airport perimeter road still within the heavily guarded confines of the airfield. Stanza suspected that Mallory’s bad news, as he put it, was an example of sick Brit humour. He realised that his palms were sweating and he rubbed them on his trousers, tried to get comfortable in his armour and his seat and exhaled deeply in a futile effort to relax.

  Mallory adjusted a second passenger rear-view mirror that he had stuck to the windshield for his own use and took a look at Stanza. He couldn’t help thinking that he’d
just got rid of one wanker, Stanza’s predecessor, and suspected he now had another.

  Mallory moved the mirror again, this time to look at the road behind. Apart from Kareem it was empty as they followed the tall perimeter wall that shielded any view of traffic from beyond the airport grounds.

  Mallory thought about telling Stanza that he was not going to get a handover brief from the journalist he was relieving as he might be expecting. But he decided to leave it until they got to the hotel. Mallory reckoned Stanza would have enough on his mind, especially if he was a first-timer - which Mallory assumed he was. The previous journalist, a twit named Jed from California, was supposed to have waited at the hotel for Stanza to arrive so that he could give him a situation brief prior to leaving the following day. But the man had left a couple of days early after his nerves had finally snapped, coming up with some bullshit story about urgent family matters that he had to get home and attend to right away.

  In his defence, it had to be said that Jed had fallen into the deep end from the get-go although that had been his own stupid fault. He’d never listened to anything that Mallory had said about security since he was one of those types who thought they knew it all. A week after Jed arrived in Baghdad, one bright sunny morning he decided to take a walk around the hotel complex to familiarise himself with the neighbourhood - something that Mallory had previously said was inadvisable. It was not a particularly dangerous neighbourhood but unfortunately Jed ran into a bunch of locals just returning from the funeral of a relative who had been shot by US troops. They decided to take it out on Jed by giving him a good kicking. If it hadn’t been for a local shopkeeper and his sons who didn’t agree that violence against a lone individual was the right way to express their objections Jed might have been seriously hurt, or worse.

  He didn’t step out of his room for a week after that and even a ride to the convention centre a mile away had him sweating. A few weeks later, when Mallory thought that Jed was at last settling in, the journalist took Mallory aside to tell him that he suspected the drivers were planning to set him up to be kidnapped. He asked Mallory to get rid of them. Mallory explained that they needed drivers who knew the city well and if they didn’t use Farris or Kareem they would only have to employ two other Iraqis. Jed’s response was to say that in that case they should leave their guns at home when they were working with him. Mallory tried to convince him that the drivers needed their guns for their own protection since they were risking their lives by associating with westerners. He added, probably unwisely, that the drivers wouldn’t need guns if they wanted to do Jed harm anyway. They’d just drive him to a bunch of insurgents who would take care of him from there. This only served to increase Jed’s paranoia. Mallory could only imagine what crap he was writing for his newspaper. Jed had been Mallory’s first experience of a journalist and now this replacement wasn’t looking too bright either.

  ‘How long will it take us?’ Stanza piped up.

  ‘To get to the hotel?’ Mallory asked.

  ‘That’s where we’re going, right?’

  ‘Depends on traffic, roadblocks, checkpoints. If there are no big delays then half an hour should see us home. Traffic’s getting worse every day, it seems.’

  Stanza nodded as he studied a group of US vehicles parked alongside the road on the other side of the meridian where a dozen soldiers were milling about as if one of the vehicles had a flat tyre. ‘How’s the hotel?’ he asked.

  ‘Delightful,’ Mallory replied.

  Stanza recognised the sarcastic tone.

  Mallory wondered how much longer he would have to spend in this shit-hole of a country. He’d been in Baghdad for two months now and it didn’t look as if he was any closer to getting to Fallujah than he’d been on the day he’d arrived. The clock was ticking and the pressure to get on with his plan was increasing. The London-based company he worked for was already asking him to provide them with his return date so that they could organise the rotation of his replacement security adviser.

  Mallory’s initial plans to catch a flight into Baghdad or drive over the border had been stymied by heavily enforced coalition regulations that refused foreigners entry into the country unless they were employed by a licensed Iraq-reconstruction contractor. There were ways to get across the border but the risks were great and the chances of Mallory surviving on his own inside Iraq were slim. The conflict was getting more violent by the week and movement within the country for a single westerner was highly dangerous and tantamount to suicide. The obvious change he had to make to his plan was to examine ways of gaining legal access, which basically meant getting a job. There were, however, obvious advantages to that, especially if he could get employment in Fallujah.

  Having decided that a bona fide job was the way ahead, Mallory spent the final weeks before his departure from the Marines compiling a list of security companies that operated in Iraq. Considering his background and his limited experience in other ‘reconstruction’-related skills, he reckoned that employment as a security adviser was the best way to proceed. He needed a job in which he would have some freedom to move around on his own. But all the companies he found either provided security for large convoys that ferried clients or equipment between locations across the country, or supplied static guards at installations or compounds. The convoys were usually manned by trigger-happy teams of security personnel who hardly got out of their vehicles between their home base and the delivery point. That was not going to work for Mallory and he widened the scope of his search. Using contacts he’d acquired through former Marines already working in Iraq he eventually found a small ‘boutique’ company in London that provided security advisers to businesses and media organisations operating in hostile environments.At the time it seemed like a perfect solution, especially if he could work the media angle: he knew that reporters sometimes travelled all over the country.

  As soon as Mallory left 42 Commando’s barracks for the last time he mailed a slightly exaggerated CV to the London-based security company, along with a letter in which he said how well he knew Iraq, specifically Fallujah and the dreaded Sunni triangle, since he’d served there during the war.

  A few days later he received an invitation from the company to travel to London for an interview. In his account of his military experience Mallory had included a stint with 42 Recce Troop, omitting to reveal how little time he’d actually spent with the more elite group. But the detail proved to be helpful to his cause when the company’s operations officer came to assess his ability to work independently. To Mallory’s surprise he was offered a job on the spot as a security consultant to a media organisation and was asked when he could leave for Iraq. He replied that he could go at any time, with a few days’ notice - something else that the operations officer wanted to hear.

  Mallory later found out that one of the reasons he had been offered a position so quickly was that the company had a shortage of personnel - quality security companies were having problems finding adequately qualified people despite the number of applications pouring in. People with no military experience whatsoever - or those with only short stints in the Territorial Army, for instance - were applying for work, lured by the relatively high pay and pretending to have the know-how required.

  Mallory was contacted a few days later and received his instructions and flight details the following week. Unfortunately for him that was the week when violence in Iraq increased significantly and Baghdad became a much more difficult place in which to operate, especially for the media. The insurgents had embarked on an enthusiastic campaign to kidnap any westerner they could get their hands on, either to cut off their heads or ransom them for financial gain. It was not immediately clear to Mallory how this was going to affect his plans to get to Fallujah but he found out within a few days of arriving in Baghdad. He was basically locked down and unable to move except to safe meetings within the Green Zone, the ministries and one or two other secure locations. But, worse than that, there was big trouble brewing in Fallujah, which
had become a fortress town for Sunni rebels led by the new leader of the Iraqi resistance, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Several PSD teams had been shot up and blown to pieces while driving through the town, their charred and dismembered bodies hung from lamp-posts and bridges as a warning to all westerners. To make the prospects for Mallory’s little scheme even worse, it also looked as if the Americans were soon to mount a serious full-scale military operation against Fallujah to flatten the place.

  Mallory had successfully convinced his company in London that since it was his first visit for them three months would be a good spell for him to get his teeth into the job. But that deadline was now only three weeks away.

  Mallory considered the option of going home soon and having a go at reaching Fallujah on his next trip. Things might even have calmed down a little by then. But in Iraq it was impossible to predict even the next day’s events, never mind months into the future.There was a saying in the country that if you thought you were having a bad day, just wait until tomorrow.

  But one positive communication that arrived via the office e-mail system that morning was a letter to all media representatives from a military media-liaison officer attached to the US Marine Corps unit based in Fallujah.The threatened assault on the town was no secret and the Marines were taking applications from reporters who wanted to join the news pool for the campaign if and when it kicked off. There were, of course, pros and cons with that option. A news pool meant a mixed bag of media personnel all being carted around within the security structure of a military unit - which meant no freedom to go where they wanted. The military were strict about that rule, describing it as a safety feature although most journalists saw it as a way of restricting what they witnessed.Another problem for Mallory was that he might not be able to go along anyway since he was technically not a media person. But there were ways around that, such as pretending to be a cameraman or producer. That would depend on how well he got on with this Stanza guy. The man might turn out to be another chicken-shit operator like Jed and refuse to go to Fallujah anyway. For Mallory’s retrieval scheme to work he would have to be with the unit that actually passed through the area of the graveyard and then have the time and privacy to carry out the excavation. Frustration was building in Mallory as the situation looked like becoming impossibly complicated. Fallujah was little more than half an hour’s drive up the motorway but it might as well have been on another world.