The Protector Page 14

  Kareem halted the car alongside the soldier who leaned down far enough to study the occupants, scrutinising the two Iraqis in front before looking in the back at Mallory and at Stanza who was lying awkwardly in the corner.

  ‘We had a contact on Route Irish,’ Mallory said, using the military designation for the BIAP road.

  The soldier, a fresh-faced lad who seemed little more than twenty years old, was unfazed by the bloody trauma dressing and Stanza’s wound. He took a closer look at Mallory’s badge, comparing the picture to the man holding it. ‘These guys with you?’ he asked in a Southern drawl, indicating the two Iraqis.

  ‘They’re my drivers,’ Mallory said. ‘We left a car back on the BIAP. I’d like to get this guy to the CASH if I can.’ He pointed to Stanza. Mallory was overly polite and respectful, in his experience the best way to communicate with soldiers. The youngster would let them through if and when he wanted to, no matter what condition Stanza was in, and being rude or trying to apply any kind of pressure was usually counterproductive.

  ‘He got any ID?’ the soldier asked, referring to Stanza.

  ‘He just arrived in country,’ Mallory replied. ‘He’s a US citizen. He has a passport somewhere.You want me to dig it out?’

  Stanza managed a timely moan as the soldier took another look at him and his bloody thigh. ‘Welcome to Baghdad,’ the soldier said, a thin smile on his lips. ‘You can go ahead,’ he said before stepping back and waving to his commander who was standing between them and the tank.

  ‘Thanks,’ Mallory said as he tapped Kareem on the shoulder. ‘Go,’ he told him and Kareem pulled slowly away.

  They drove through the last chicane, over a speed ramp and passed the massive sand-coloured tank, speeding up as they drove onto a wide empty road.

  The Green Zone was an area that had been traditionally blocked off to locals even during Saddam’s time. It was several miles square and contained palaces and important government buildings, including Saddam’s equivalent of the Pentagon with an elaborate bunker system.The Zone was traversed by broad roads that had been designed with military parades in mind and had more than its fair share of ornate arches, sculptures and heroic statues. Much of it was still intact although its former splendour was scarred by thousands of towering interconnecting concrete blast walls lining roads, fronting buildings and forming protective entrances to numerous checkpoints.

  Ten minutes after entering the Zone Kareem steered the car in through the emergency entrance of the large US military hospital and stopped outside the main building. Mallory jumped out and had a quick word with a guard who called for an orderly. A few minutes later a couple of relaxed, experienced medical staff were easing Stanza onto a gurney and wheeling him into the hospital.

  Mallory watched Stanza until he disappeared inside. With some relief he turned to face Kareem who was standing by the car. Farris was still in the front passenger seat.

  ‘Farris needs to get back to his car, right?’ Mallory asked.

  ‘Farris would like this,’ Kareem agreed.

  ‘Stanza’s baggage is in the back,’ Mallory reminded him.

  ‘Inshalla.’ Kareem shrugged.

  God willing indeed, Mallory mused. The luggage would still be there only if the car had not yet been ransacked.

  ‘I’m gonna hang around here. Go sort the car out before the army blow it up as an IED,’ he added, if they hadn’t done so already. Farris would be compensated by the newspaper if his car had been trashed. He would even make money on the deal, something that he and Kareem would discuss on the way back to it, no doubt.

  ‘How you get back hotel?’ Kareem asked.

  Mallory took a moment to think about the logistics of that minor problem. The hotel wasn’t far away but it was in the Red Zone, a designation for anywhere in the country that was not inside a coalition-protected compound. ‘You won’t be able to get back into the Green Zone without a pass,’ Mallory said, thinking out loud. ‘I’ll figure something out,’ he said finally. ‘Go get Farris’s car.’

  Kareem nodded and was about to walk away when Mallory stopped him and jutted his chin towards Farris. ‘How is he?’ he asked, his voice low so as not to be overheard.

  Kareem glanced at his colleague and gave a shrug. ‘He was frighten. Me too,’ he said, a grin forming on his face.

  ‘You weren’t the only ones,’ Mallory said. ‘You did well today. It was good to have you there.’

  Kareem nodded, trying to disguise his glee at having his bravery recognised.

  ‘I’ll catch you later,’ Mallory said.

  Kareem climbed into the car, started it up and drove away.

  Mallory faced the hospital entrance, pausing to consider Kareem’s question about how he was going to get back to the hotel. There were a number of people he could ask for a ride home. But that would have to wait until he was finished at the hospital and there was no telling how long that would take. His job was to look after Stanza. The first call he would have to make would be to the Herald in Milwaukee to let them know what had happened. He would put all the blame on the PSD convoy although in truth the contact could have been avoided if Farris had pushed his way to the inside lane when Mallory had told him to. The good news was that they were all alive. Mallory’s next call would be to his boss in London: he’d give him the same story.

  He sighed as he dug his phone out of a pocket, hit the memory key, scrolled to the Herald’s Milwaukee number and pushed the ‘send’ button. Seconds later the recorded voice of a young Iraqi girl declared first in Arabic and then in English that the number he was dialling was incorrect. Mallory cancelled the call, frowning. The girl’s voice was the most hated in Iraq. The Iraqna mobile system was useless, to put it mildly, the service often shutting down for days at a time. At its best, calls were sometimes unavailable for hours and one of the system’s most irritating features was the girl’s voice informing the caller that the number they were dialling was wrong when it was clearly correct.

  Mallory put the phone back in his pocket, mounted the steps and entered the hospital. He’d survived another day in Iraq.

  5

  Tasneen’s Dreams

  After a brief discussion with the hospital receptionist who was too disorganised to be much use to him, Mallory was sent to another desk where a clerk told him to wait in the lobby until someone came to see him.Twenty minutes later a man who might have been an orderly or even a doctor - he didn’t introduce himself - informed Mallory that Stanza was not in any serious danger. The journalist was being X-rayed at that moment and would head into surgery at the first opportunity. The man could not say how long it would be before an operating theatre became available and since Stanza did not have a priority wound he was low on a list that could fill up at any time without notice. Mallory understood and was directed to a waiting area where someone would eventually tell him when Stanza was ready to leave.

  Mallory found the waiting room but only after exploring two long corridors that met at an L-shaped junction. Countless doorways led off to a variety of rooms and offices and eventually he ended up not far from his starting point. The waiting room was small, narrow, empty, uninviting and it was easy to see why he had overlooked it in the first place.There were two rows of uncomfortable wooden chairs facing each other, a dozen in all, and only when Mallory sat down did he notice a small television bolted to the wall high up in a corner above the entrance. Its volume was muted.

  He sat on a chair near the door and looked up at the screen that was displaying a US Army-sponsored broadcast of a sports update. Mallory looked around for the remote but if it was in the room its whereabouts were not obvious. Uninterested in getting up to search for it he rested the back of his head against the wall and stretched his feet out under the chair opposite. As he watched the muted screen where the picture had changed to a jolly army chaplain playing a harpsichord he considered getting up and fiddling with the controls on the front of the set to find another channel. But that would have required him to stand on a
chair, an action that struck him as not worth the effort.

  Mallory pulled his phone out of his pocket to try the newspaper’s foreign desk again and pushed the redial button. After a long silence he concentrated on trying to make out what a faint voice that sounded as if it was at the other end of a tunnel was saying.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a girl’s voice said.

  Mallory looked up, unaware that someone had entered the room. He instantly pulled back his legs and sat upright to let an extremely pretty girl pass by. ‘Sorry,’ Mallory said as he watched her.

  Tasneen smiled politely as she sat down on the furthest seat on the row opposite to Mallory.

  Mallory stared at her, unable to avert his eyes. She glanced at him, smiled embarrassedly and looked away.

  Mallory looked back down at his phone, conscious of his rudeness, but he had been unable to control his reaction to her. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen - or, at least, that was what it felt like - and he could not resist taking another glance at her. When he looked back at the screen of his phone he saw that he had accidentally dialled a wrong number. He cancelled it, found the Herald’s number again and hit ‘send’, stealing just one more sideways glance at the girl as he waited for the call to go through.

  It was not so much how pretty she was as that a girl so beautiful could be alone with him in a room in Iraq. It was simply the complete unpredictability of it. Her lustrous black hair had a slight curl to it as it fell over her shoulders, her face was an utter pleasure to gaze upon and her large dark eyes were captivating. She was petite, wore tight trousers that accentuated her shapely bottom and legs and, although the colourful blouse she wore beneath a tailored jacket was modest, it did not completely hide the fullness of her breasts. The only women that Mallory had seen up close in Iraq so far had been the hotel chambermaids but they were all middle-aged and wore frumpy clothing. This girl was in a completely different league of attractiveness and poise.

  She looked Arab but if Mallory had been told she was Italian or Brazilian he could have believed it. But despite appearing more liberated in her style of dress than most girls he had seen in Baghdad she still possessed that certain timidity or measured aloofness characteristic of well-brought-up Arab girls. Wherever she came from - and Mallory had not ruled out heaven itself at that point - just being in the small room with her was a complete treat as far as he was concerned.

  He realised that a girl’s voice was jabbering away in his ear and he fought to shift his concentration to the phone as the recorded Arabic response changed to English to inform him that he had dialled the number incorrectly. He ended the call, put the phone in his lap and stared at it as he contemplated what other ways he could contact the newspaper in Milwaukee. But the angel a few feet from him was spoiling his concentration.

  Mallory was not what anyone who knew him would describe as a lady’s man. He was by no means a complete failure in that department but chatting up girls had never been easy for him. He’d been a late starter in the pursuit of the fairer sex and by his mid-twenties he had decided that his chat was so bad that he had more chance of success by shutting up and hoping that a girl he fancied would talk to him. When he reflected on the girls he had successfully dated they had all been either friends of friends or he had met them in situations where they had grown to know each other over a period of time.

  Mallory had never considered a relationship with an Arab girl before and certainly not while he’d been in Iraq. But finding himself close to such a beauty, the fact that when all was said and done he was a man and she was a woman could not be overlooked. As there was a distinct possibility that they might share the room for some time, Mallory didn’t think that it had to be in silence.With no realistic ambitions beyond a conversation he shouldn’t have felt intimidated. But as he drummed up the courage to say something he experienced a familiar apprehension.

  He stared at his phone, wondering if he should just scrub round the whole idea, when, as if another part of him had suddenly taken charge of his personality, he announced emphatically, ‘The voice.’

  Tasneen glanced at him with a blank expression on her face before looking back down at her hands.

  Mallory felt awkward at the outburst but decided to continue now that he had started. ‘The voice on the phone,’ he said, holding it up.‘The girl. It’s a great voice but it’s gotta be the most irritating one I’ve ever heard.’

  Her only response was a brief, polite smile.

  ‘I’m talking about the girl on the mobile phone,’ Mallory persisted. ‘The one who tells you that you can’t get through because you’ve dialled the wrong number when you know you haven’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tasneen said politely.

  Mallory put the phone back in his pocket as the bullying presence in his head that had propelled him this far urged him to keep going. ‘Would you like me to put the television volume on?’ he asked, indicating the TV high in the corner.

  Tasneen glanced up at the screen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mallory said. ‘There I go, assuming you can speak English.’ He felt silly and decided to shut up.

  ‘You can turn it up if you want,’ she said, her accent as sweet and soft as her voice.

  Mallory looked at her, pleased that she had responded and even more pleased she could speak English - although the impression remained that she did not particularly want to. ‘I just wondered if you did,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

  The girl’s gaze dropped to his hands and he followed her stare to the several large bloodstains on his trousers and the similar blotches on his hands and the sleeves of his shirt. He’d forgotten all about cleaning up and suddenly felt like a scruffy clod.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mallory said as he got to his feet and walked out of the room.

  Tasneen was glad that he had left. Normally she wouldn’t have minded a conversation, especially with a westerner: they could sometimes be interesting, depending on what they did and where they were from. But on this occasion she was distracted by so many things, all of them to do with her brother and none of them remotely comforting.

  Abdul was out of any danger from the wound itself. There had been an infection but the antibiotics had taken care of it. He had been lucky, or at least that was the view she was taking. After several days of silence Abdul had eventually told Tasneen how the squad had argued over some money that they had found and that one of them had gone insane and hacked off his hand with a single blow from a machete, something that the man had apparently not meant to do. She suspected there was far more to it than that but was thankful that the blow had not been to Abdul’s head. She could not understand why they had threatened to kill Abdul if he told the chief but it was conceivable they were afraid of losing their jobs at a time when work was hard to come by. But with all the time she’d had to reflect on the event, hours spent in the same waiting room while Abdul lay in his hospital bed, she was certain that she had seen something behind his eyes that had warned her he had not been truthful and that the danger was far from over.

  Abdul had given the police chief a completely different story, telling him that he had been jumped by masked men on his way home and had had his hand cut off as punishment for being a police officer. But the chief wasn’t buying that story either and was pressuring Abdul for the truth.

  Tasneen’s concern was that if Hassan and his men knew about the police chief ’s interest, and they probably did, they might think that Abdul would eventually change his mind and report them. She had never met Hassan but after all the stories Abdul had told her about him in the past she believed he was capable of anything. It was a fear that had caused her many sleepless nights and the stress was beginning to wear her down.

  The obvious solution was to leave their home but where they could go was the question for which she had no answer. Iraq wasn’t like other countries where a person could leave their home and just move elsewhere. Apart from a cousin in Fallujah, Tasneen and Abdul had no close enough relations
outside Baghdad to make a safe move and the problems posed by religious and tribal differences were, as far as she could see, insurmountable. Lack of money was a major difficulty as well. Then there was Abdul himself and all his personal issues and since they were together his problems were hers too. He was an invalid now, a young man with only one hand, and the psychological strains of that alone were only just sinking in - for both of them. When the time came for him to step back into normal life among his friends it would only get worse.

  Abdul was already showing signs of becoming a recluse, spending most of his time shut up in his room. Even when he was in Tasneen’s company he hardly talked, staring into space as if he was in a dream state. She hoped that would change in time. But there was something else about Abdul that worried her. It was as if he had suffered more than the loss of his arm. She wasn’t sure, it was just a feeling, but it was as if he had been wounded far more deeply that night in a place that was not as visible.Tasneen’s suspicions that he was psychologically disturbed beyond what she would have expected were aroused not just by his brooding silence but by several odd things that he had said. They were mostly in the form of incomplete sentences and references that did not quite fit his story, phrases such as ‘It was my fault’ and ‘I should have done something.’ But when she asked him to clarify these comments he would shut down. Whatever was going on inside his head it was obviously deeply painful to him and therefore distressing to her.

  Mallory stepped back into the room.Tasneen raised her head and slipped out of her bleak thoughts as he took his seat again. A quick glance revealed that his trousers and shirtsleeves were wet and that he had made some effort to clean himself. It was obvious that he was at the hospital because someone he knew had been injured but she had no interest in knowing about it. Two weeks had passed since the morning when she’d brought her brother in with the help of the Americans for whom she worked in the Green Zone. She had spent practically every hour of that first couple of days in the hospital, a place filled with bad news and horror stories. Every day she had seen mutilated bodies wheeled in or evidence of the presence of such: bloody trails up the front steps and in through the main doors. And from the waiting room she had heard the screams of victims and their relatives and the shouts of medical staff reacting to the arrival of the latest casualties of the terrorist campaign that was being waged in her country.