Killing for the Company

To call it a road was overstating things. It was a neglected, stony, bumpy track. Luke took it slowly. The car wasn’t up to much, and the last thing they needed was to stop to make running repairs. It had a lot more work to do yet.

They followed the track for ten klicks before going static. The pick-up pulled up a few metres behind them. It was fully dark now, and Luke killed the lights while Finn pulled off his headdress to reveal a mop of black hair, high cheekbones, a black beard and a fake tan just like Luke’s. Good-looking and he knew it. They climbed out of the car.

The moon was low and bright, with clouds drifting occasionally past. It lit up the surrounding desert. Luke looked back the way they’d come. He could just make out the headlamps of the occasional vehicle on the main road. At right angles to that road was the Iraqi border. It looked to the two soldiers like a dome of light in the dark desert sky, and beyond it Luke could see more lights in the desert: Iraqi border-control vehicles, no doubt, patrolling the frontier. Get picked up by one of them and they’d be enjoying Saddam’s hospitality before they knew it — assuming they survived the initial arrest.

This was still Jordanian territory, though. They needed to find somewhere to cross into Iraq.

The driver of the pick-up joined them. Nigel Foster — Fozzie — was a tall man with a nose that had been broken in two places and a balding head. He was wearing civvies — ripped jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt — and he grinned at Finn. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Finn ignored him and removed a kite sight from the boot of the Toyota. The unit had studied the imagery and the intelligence long enough to know that the border was marked by a berm — a low ridge of earth constructed to stop vehicles crossing — as well as, in places, a barbed-wire fence. But they also knew that there were places where the border could be breached. Black-marketeers smuggled their goods into Iraq at these locations. Every border was porous, if you knew where to look.

The night air was still, but suddenly an unsettling noise reached their ears, like a baby screeching. Luke knew that wild dogs roamed the area in packs, lean and hungry. Impossible to tell how close they were — sound travels in strange ways in the desert. But Luke had the distinct impression that they were looking for dinner.

Which wasn’t a bad idea. Fozzie returned to the pick-up. Luke got back into the Toyota and got some food down him — a foil pouch of sausage and beans, cold and stodgy — while Finn scanned the border with the kite sight. Every twenty minutes they swapped. The temperature dropped and a chill wind started to whip around the car.

‘Nothing,’ Finn said after an hour. ‘Looks like Abu Dune Coon might be spending another night with the goats before we get to him. Hope he likes the smell of shit.’ He handed the kite sight to Luke. ‘I hate the fucking desert.’

Luke shrugged. ‘There’s worse places than this.’ He started scanning the border again, running through their objectives in his mind. Abu Famir was an Iraqi academic who had been educated in the West and was an outspoken anti-Baathist. Given Saddam’s penchant for disappearing anyone who disagreed with him, Abu Famir had done well to survive this long. Plenty of men with similar politics had ended up rotting away in Abu Ghraib prison or at the bottom of a mass grave.

It was clear the Americans were closing in on Saddam. Nothing to do with his human rights abuses, of course. He’d been happily torturing and killing people even back in the day when the Yanks considered him an ally. No, the politicians had reasons of their own for an invasion. If and when Saddam was deposed, they’d need a new government in place — a government they’d be able to control.

Which was where Abu Famir came in.

War was only weeks away. That was an open secret. The UN weapons inspectors currently combing the country for WMDs weren’t looking for evidence; they were looking for excuses — excuses for a war that was going to happen anyway. Half the Regiment was already behind enemy lines, scouting, gathering intelligence, paving the way for an invasion. Luke’s unit had a more specific objective: locate Abu Famir, currently in hiding in the Al-Anbar region of western Iraq, and smuggle him back across the Jordanian border. When Saddam and his psychotic sons had gone the way of the dodo, the invaders could bring in Abu Famir and men like him to construct a new administration. The Regiment’s target was the man the coalition had earmarked as the new prime minister of Iraq once the regime had been changed.

That was the theory. But first they had to find him.