Читать книгу: «Sandstealers»

1
Post-Liberation Iraq, August 2004

Danny Lowenstein had a premonition he would die that day. It wasn’t unusual for him to foresee his own death: such thoughts went with the territory. The main thing was not to take them too seriously, otherwise he’d never get out of bed in the morning.

He cursed the sun, which had barely been born into Iraq’s morning sky. Already a sapping heat was rising from the tarmac and soon the temperature would hit a grotesque 50 degrees Celsius. He daren’t translate it into Fahrenheit. As he stood at the petrol station, the road to Iskandariya shimmered ahead of him. Danny wondered if the surface might evaporate before his eyes.

For now he was still fresh. He had sprayed himself with so much deodorant it almost choked him, but his skin felt good beneath the linen shirt he’d bought at Heathrow and his favourite pair of chinos. They were the pseudo-military sort, with extra pockets on the thighs which bulged with a notepad, assorted pens, a small Dictaphone—another terminal purchase—his US passport and press accreditation, some scrunched-up dollar bills and chewing gum for when the day started to drag him under.

Danny knew that, before long, the same skin that was now so pleasantly clean and dry would be soaked in sweat. Little streams would crawl down the valley between his shoulder blades towards his waist, where they’d meet his tightly buckled belt and form an irritating reservoir. The fresh clothes would start to cling to him like cloying dishcloths. His rigorous dawn shower back at the hotel would be redundant and he’d wonder why he’d bothered to make the effort at all: he might as well have just put back on what he’d worn the day before. By dusk, he’d be drained of whatever energy he’d woken up with.

‘God, sometimes I hate this country,’ he told Mohammed, who was only half listening.

‘Don’t say bad things, Mr Daniel. I think you would miss us.’

‘I’d miss you, Mohammed, of course I would, but not a whole lot else.’

‘There is not another story like it, not anywhere in the world. You told me so yourself.’

‘Yeah, I know, our Vietnam and all that. But Heaven help your country if that’s all you’ve become—a story. The thing is, I’m just so…’

‘Tired?’

‘No, not tired. Exhausted. Sorry if I’m kind of grumpy.’

‘Woman trouble?’

‘You could say. And this heat, and this war and this…I mean, just take a look around us.’

He waved towards the sprawling strip of charmless shops just beyond them, many selling satellite dishes, fridges and all the other consumer electricals that had flooded in after liberation. Snapped power cables drooped down around them mockingly. On the road ahead, battered cars jostled one another amid a cacophony of horns, most of them unheeded. It seemed to Danny that the traffic, like everything else, was getting worse.

‘You know, I remember the day I got my first visa for this place: 19th April 1990. I’d never wanted anything so much. Now? Two Gulf wars and a fucked-up occupation later, I don’t think I’d care if I never came back.’

Mohammed stood next to him and surveyed the scene, not with Danny’s weariness but the alert eyes of an intelligence officer: scrutinising faces, analysing cars, studying young policemen behind their sandbags—were they really police, or insurgents in impeccable disguise? Nothing was as it seemed.

A teenage pump attendant slid in the nozzle.

‘Can’t believe you forgot to fill up last night,’ said Danny.

‘I told you, it was Farrah’s birthday.’

Danny felt bad. He should have sent her a present. He’d remembered with all Mohammed’s other kids.

‘But even so, I mean, for fuck’s sake.’

Danny hated it when things went wrong. It made him feel the whole story, the whole day, might be cursed. He glanced at his watch. They were already running late for the rendezvous with Abu Mukhtar, and he was uneasy.

‘How long till we get there?’

‘Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.’

‘I hope you can find this al-Talha, or whatever they call it. It’s not even on the map.’

‘No problem—we ask people.’

As a rule, Danny liked to have a ‘chase car’, a second vehicle following behind, which could rescue them if they broke down in the badlands. Today, Saad, who usually drove it, was sick with an upset stomach—or claimed he was. Either way, it meant they were travelling alone.

First the chase car, then the petrol. Bad omens, thought Danny.

Mohammed’s hawkish eyes continued their search for anything that was different or out of place. It was how he lived these days, even in his own street in Karada—always watching.

‘You are sure you want to go there?’ Mohammed asked Danny for at least the third time. ‘You’re risking your life, you know.’

‘Sure I’m sure. I risk it whenever I leave Baghdad—or the hotel, for that matter. Sometimes I feel so damned incarcerated.’

‘No, no! Liberated!’

Mohammed was a fervent supporter of the invasion and endearing in his optimism. Just look at it like this, he’d insist: we’re an abused child, and abused children can be ungrateful. They need time, and a little love from their foster parents. You Americans, you must stay however long you want! Danny would reply that he didn’t see them as ‘his’ Americans at all.

‘At least when the old man was in charge I could walk the streets, day or night, without being bundled into a car and decapitated on the Internet,’ said Danny.

‘So why have we come here?’

‘Because I guess it’s worth the risk. I have cast-iron guarantees.’

Now it was Mohammed’s turn to be cynical.

‘You know what they say about such guarantees in my country? The cast iron is always full of bullet holes. I don’t want to die.’

‘Me neither, you idiot.’

Danny put an affectionate arm around him.

‘You are a single man,’ said Mohammed. ‘Me, I have a wife and five children. Nothing can happen to me.’ Mohammed had got into the habit of kissing each member of his family whenever he left home, in case he never returned.

‘And nothing will, my friend, nothing will.’

‘Maybe you should have some children of your own, Mr Daniel.’

Children! Why was it people were always telling him to have them? Didn’t they realise a free-wheeling, fast-moving war correspondent like him couldn’t be weighed down by a family? And anyway, who the hell would want to be his son or daughter? What kind of burden would it be to have a father who might come home one day in a coffin? It didn’t mean Danny disliked kids—actually he rather enjoyed them. But other people’s, not his own.

Danny thought about the happy moments he’d shared at Mohammed’s home. His last visit there had been a journey to an Iraq that was desperate to retain the appearance of normality. In his garden, Mohammed had barbecued masgouf, the delicious fishy smoke of it wafting around him as his wife Sabeen sprinkled it with lemon juice. Soon she had the table sagging under a relentless supply of her other favourite dishes: fasolada soup, baba ghanoush, eggplant salad, falafel, pitta and houmous, all washed down with a bottle of ferocious arak. Before they ate, Mohammed had sat on a red plastic garden chair while, one by one, his offspring piled on top of him until the legs buckled and they all toppled on to the grass in a hopeless, giggling heap.

Danny had entertained all five children, especially Farrah—six years old, the youngest and cutest. Under a lemon tree, he’d held her hands and swung her round so that she flew like a plane, horizontal and in dizzying circles. She’d screamed in ecstasy, and everyone applauded but now, in his anxiety about the trip to al-Talha, he had forgotten little Farrah’s birthday. It was something else to trouble him. Danny liked to lavish gifts on Mohammed and his family. Every time he flew into Baghdad, he’d bring back copies of the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, which Mohammed devoured. He was a former paediatrician who’d trained at Great Ormond Street. He’d only given up medicine because the foreign press paid him ten times what he’d been earning in his hospital, and he needed the money. Another triumph for the occupation, Danny told anyone who’d listen.

The first thing people noticed about Mohammed was his unfortunate resemblance to the fallen dictator: fatter and older, but with the same darting eyes and the signature moustache. When a bounty was put on Saddam’s head, strangers would come up to him and laugh: ‘Americans, we’ve found him. We claim our reward! Death to the despot!’ Mohammed would smile along with them, but the joke became tiresome and he felt he deserved more respect.

Now he wandered away from the petrol pump, his pot belly wobbling affably. He struck up casual conversations with a couple of shopkeepers and idle, jobless men who gossiped and fiddled with their worry beads. He was trying to get a feel for the area ahead and to pick up anything they might have heard about Abu Mukhtar and his boys. Of course it might only put them in more danger, tipping off hungry wolves that tasty meat was on its way. In Iraq, there were pros and cons to every move you made and death lurked around every corner. A couple of dirty street children hawked trayloads of cigarettes and fizzy drinks. Kids like these had been known to pass word that ‘foreigners’ were about, and Mohammed kept an eye on them.

Beside them a goat sniffed its way through a heap of rubbish. Lamp posts lay broken and some plastic bags were caught up in fencing, ensnared like fleeing prisoners. A burnt-out vehicle was nearby, charred and cannibalised, and a pool of stagnant water stretched across the street. It smelt as if, on closer inspection, it might well turn out to be an open sewer.

Danny climbed back into the Pajero and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked as worn out as he felt. Grey was advancing rapidly around his temples and wrinkles had multiplied around his eyes. He could almost hear the whispered questions from the twenty-somethings of the Baghdad press corps, people half his age, another generation: was Lowenstein really still the ‘operator’ that he had been, or just another ‘veteran’ past his sell-by date? Oh sure, he’d won a Pulitzer, but that was years ago, wasn’t it? I mean, Bosnia—who even remembers what that war was all about? The doubts weighed down on him. He felt a rookie insecurity, the same draining need to prove himself as when he’d first hit the road a quarter of a century earlier.

He could have shared the Abu Mukhtar interview and all its dangers with his fellow Junkies, but in Danny’s book you had to get away from the crowd to stand out from it, even if the ‘crowd’ included your oldest friends. Of course it could be a trap, and his general rule in Iraq was never to make appointments with people he didn’t know. On the other hand, these days the concept of a clandestine rendezvous with any kind of insurgent leader—even a middle-ranking one—was intoxicating. Abu Mukhtar wasn’t a celebrity terrorist like al Zarqawi; in fact, hardly anyone beyond the cognoscenti of US army intelligence would have heard of him. Even so, according to Asmat Mahmoud, Mukhtar had passionate opinions he wanted to pass on to the world. Danny could write it hard, with plenty of topspin to tickle the fancy of even the most blasé, battle-weary, war-numbed reader. My God, he thought, if I’m bored of it all, what must they be? Mukhtar’s views, however mundane, would ultimately be processed into front-page news. In his head, he had already written the story’s most important line: ‘…told me in a secret and dangerous meeting, deep inside the bandit country of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad…’ It was just a case of filling in the rest. He would sell it easily to his old paper, the New York Times, or perhaps turn it into a wider, more rambling piece for Rolling Stone magazine or Vanity Fair. And it would make at least a couple of pages in the memoirs he was struggling to complete.

Still, the premonition returned. Mohammed had reawakened it.

‘So, Mr Daniel, we go on?’

Why did he have to keep asking? Danny was already queasy with uncertainty. Even now he could call it off, he only had to say the word. He remembered all the moments in his career when he had faced dilemmas such as this, and each time he had picked the harder road. He remembered the twenty-somethings too. He couldn’t afford to relax and he certainly couldn’t afford to put down roots or have children. Danny breathed in deeply.

‘Absolutely, we go on!’

‘No problem!’ Mohammed smiled unconvincingly, a chubby Saddam-smile.

‘You’re a good guy, the very best.’

A few hundred yards away, men in a rusting white-and-orange taxi studied them both through binoculars with a hatred that was entirely sure of itself, and open to nothing so frail as doubt.

It is another two miles before the turnoff on to a narrower road. Danny wonders if it is one of the insurgent ‘rat runs’, as the Americans like to call them: a phrase, he has noted in one recent piece, that implies the enemy will be destroyed—just as soon as someone can come up with the right kind of pest control.

The wheels blow up a dust cloud.

Quiet roads. Danny seems to have spent a career travelling along them, wondering what they have in store for him: the story of a lifetime, or the end of a lifetime.

A small, mangy dog emerges from nowhere and starts to cross in front of them. It is limping badly.

‘Watch out!’ Danny screams at Mohammed, who is driving hard and fast and doesn’t see it till the last minute. His attempt to avoid the wretched animal is too half-hearted. There is a thud and slight crunch, and they carry on.

‘Did you really have to do that?’ Danny can’t bring himself to look back at the body, yet another corpse in a country overflowing with them. Has life here got so cheap that it’s not even worth the casual movement of a wrist to save a life? It’s more bad karma, another jinx on his day. First the chase car, then the petrol, now the dog.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he mutters to himself.

The undercarriage scrapes some chunks of rock and now it’s Mohammed’s turn to curse aloud, though with incomprehensible Arabic expletives.

Danny notices another car up ahead. It is a Toyota, red with a distinctive white roof. Shock smacks him hard around the face. He knows this car, he’d know it from a mile away. Two people: the journalist inside, someone else—the driver—kneeling on the ground, changing a tyre. There is very little time to think. Has Asmat Mahmoud flogged the same story twice? Is the enigmatic Abu Mukhtar actually just some media tart?

‘I don’t believe it—they’ve crashed our fucking interview!’

Danny’s first inclination is to drive straight on, but he can’t ignore them. He leans from his passenger window and talks to the other journalist. The words are venomous, the anger mutual. Danny’s foul mood has just got much, much worse, but after he has said his piece, he manages to calm himself.

‘Anyhow, I’m pushing on,’ he says, drawing a line under the argument. ‘How’s everything up there? Okay?’

The question is carefully calibrated. With this perfunctory request, Danny makes it clear he’s not interested in striking some last-minute bargain on the story, he’s merely seeking reassurance on what lies ahead.

His fellow Junkie says nothing, responding with…with what, exactly? Some vague movement of affirmation, or is it merely the absence of something—a prohibitive hand or a piercing cry that says: Jesus Christ no, Danny! We’ve just been shot at! Don’t go up there, don’t go another yard!

Whatever it is or isn’t, the biggest mistake of Danny’s distinguished career is to take it as a yes. Before any further complications can spoil his story, he turns to Mohammed: ‘Jalah, jalah!’ And obediently, Mohammed speeds away.

Still, Danny’s head is dizzy with doubt. In his younger days, he was never afflicted by the curse of hesitation. The life he led then was charmed: bullet-proof, blast-proof, death-proof. Shit happens, but not to me. Friends died, fallen soldiers on the battlefield, until it seemed he’d attended more funerals than weddings, but somehow it was always them who fell, and always him at the lectern in the home-town church, delivering the Bible readings and moving eulogies, the well-judged words of comfort for the grieving parents or partner, the final tears as the coffin was eased into the earth. Danny seemed agreeably immune to death, as though it were a ritual for him to observe rather than take part in. Chechnya showed him that. Against all the odds, he had survived it, though not entirely unscathed. Death had touched him there, laid its chilly fingers upon his face as he stood by and watched a good friend’s life drain away. He’d always expected that one day the gods would punish him. Perhaps part of him thought they should.

Yet now, as they regain speed, he feels the rush of the warm air on his face from the open window, the scent of eucalyptus trees, and there it is once more: the hit, the buzz, the drug. He might as well have rammed a needle in his vein. No, I’m not tired, he thinks, not exhausted, not settling down. And by the way, I’m not finished yet either.

Nearby, an Iraqi shepherd boy wanders aimlessly with his scrawny, filthy sheep. A few of them have broken away from the flock and are running around the road in panic. Like some reporters, it occurs to Danny: terrified of getting separated from the pack.

And then it is only them, on this the loneliest of roads. No more sheep or shepherd boys. The words of his Hostile Environments instructors at Walsingham, where the rolling Norfolk countryside had been transformed into a war-zone training ground, come back to him: ‘Just ask yourself, where are all the people? If they’ve smelt danger, so should you. And if there’s no oncoming traffic, you should wonder why.’

The story is sucking him in, though, as it always has. It’s just a little further on, down the road and over the bridge. It’s always just a little further on.

Only about half a mile now. Swallow hard, Danny boy, breathe deep. Relax! Enjoy!

As they come round the bend he sees, a few hundred yards on, the rusting oil drums spread across the narrow road. Clustered around them are the insurgents, six in all, different-coloured kafiyehs wrapped around their faces: orange, red and black. Fat sunglasses cover their eyes. They are armed with a menacing assortment of pistols and AK47s.

Mohammed stamps on the brakes.

‘Who are they?’

‘Don’t worry; just a poxy roadblock.’ Danny wants to make them both feel better. He’s a connoisseur of roadblocks, from Sarajevo to Somalia to Sierra Leone—the well-organised, polite ones; the drunken, chaotic ones; the downright dangerous ones, manned, or rather boyed, by 11-year-old African kids, sky-high on weed, with manic eyes that say killing a white man can be quite fun when you’re bored out of your mind.

‘Roadblocks, I could write the book on them,’ he sighs.

When the first shot is fired, he realises of course that he could not. The bullet blows out a front tyre and one side of the Pajero lurches down on to the road, like a horse gone lame. Danny’s desperate hope is that the men in kafiyehs are just trying to scare them.

‘Shit. Don’t they understand we’re only here because their own leader wants to talk to us?’

He sees another of the men raise his Kalashnikov, aiming higher now, straight at them. It’s gone wrong so quickly, too quickly, and yet in slow motion too.

‘Oh fuck! Reverse, Mohammed. Let’s get out of here now. Now, I said!’

The driver’s corpulent body will not move. Terror has paralysed him and for once he disobeys his master’s voice.

‘Reverse, Mohammed. Will you do as you’re told and fucking well reverse?’

As Danny shouts, a burst of fire hits the windscreen. Instinctively, he ducks as he has done before—all those times when death has, arbitrarily, turned its attentions elsewhere.

He is about to bark more orders when he sees that Mohammed is thrust back against his headrest, blood spreading out evenly in two distinct patches on an otherwise spotless white dishadasha: one around the middle of his sternum and the other a little to the left. The eyes—Saddam’s eyes, as everyone used to joke—are wider than Danny has ever seen on any man’s face before, peeled back and accusing. The mouth is open, as if it meant to say one last thing.

‘Oh shit no, sweet Lord, no! Fuck, no; oh fuck me, no!’ Daniel L. Lowenstein, master of reportage, reduced to a rhythm of profanities.

He has slipped from his seat into the footwell, curling up there like a foetus clinging to the womb. Rationally, he knows this is no strategy. Part of the survival lore they’d drummed into him at Walsingham was the fact that bullets can cut through the chassis of a car almost as easily as they penetrate human skin. Between bursts of automatic fire he can hear the insurgents’ bloodcurdling cries of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’

If only there were some peace and quiet, thinks Danny. If only he had stopped to talk to the occupants of the Toyota rather than launch into an argument. If only he’d never come down this road. If only he’d been warned of what lay ahead. If only he’d listened to his premonition and Mohammed’s unspoken fear. If only he’d taken no notice of the worthless assurances of Asmat Mahmoud in Baghdad. If only he’d ‘settled down’, as he’d been urged to, had children and stayed at home with them—a happy brood of little Daniels and Daniellas. If only he’d never become a war reporter. If only he’d never become any kind of reporter…

The shooting and shouting stop for a while—a minute, maybe only 30 seconds—but to Danny, it’s an eternity. He can make no use of it, for now he’s as crippled by fear and indecision as Mohammed was. Poor Mohammed. Five children without a father, a wife without a husband, a reporter without a friend. Nothing can happen to me. Farrah flies more rings around the lemon tree, Sabeen garnishes the masgouf. Danny cannot bring himself to look at him again.

Instead he stares at the scraped plastic and mud marks on the bottom of the passenger door. Mud from his lucky boots, bought from Silvermans on Mile End Road before the first Gulf War in 1991. He’s survived that and every subsequent hellhole he’s ever been in, so how could he ever trade them in for another pair, even when they’ve walked across mass graves, through refugee camps riven with disease, not to mention putrid, Third-World hospitals? God alone knew what dangerous microbes inhabited those worn-out rubber treads, but every time the cab delivered him safely back to his apartment, he would lovingly put the boots back in their box, ready for the next time, certain they had kept him alive. Some worship the cross, Danny worshipped his lucky boots. They’d still be on his feet when his body was discovered—even though, if he were dead, it would surely represent their catastrophic failure. Not so lucky now, his friends would chuckle callously, as they stood at the boot-end of his body to identify it.

The car door is opened so that Danny, pressed hard against it, tumbles out. There’s a another gratuitous chorus of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, so familiar from al-Qaeda snuff videos just before they execute the hostage. He cannot bear to look, but finally allows his eyes to meet those of the two gunmen screaming at him loudest. One has unwrapped his kafiyeh, careless now whether he shows himself, and this alone spreads an extra layer of dread over Danny.

The young man’s face tells no special story. He is like so many Iraqis Danny has met down the years: bearded, brooding and with fingers welded to his weapon. He is unusually tall, and a scar across his forehead distinguishes him. It is a gruesome burn that makes him look as if he’s been branded. He shoves the barrel of his Kalashnikov just below Danny’s nostrils, the ring of grey metal hot upon his skin.

‘Please, you don’t understand—Abu Mukhtar, your leader, Mukhtar—I’ve come to see him. Al sahaf. Interview? Asmat Mahmoud arranged it—you know, big politician, Baghdad?’

Another ‘if only’. If only he had learnt better Arabic. He’s spent enough years of his life here, but lazily relied on Mohammed, and now his doctor-cum-driver-cum-translator-cum-friend is no good to him, staring manically at the shattered windscreen.

Then—a gift from the heavens. The one with the scar and the muzzle of his gun in Danny’s face is muttering something in English.

‘You people. So stupid. You come in one car and we shoot. You come in another car and we shoot again.’

‘Great! You speak English. Oh, thank you, thank you so much. Now listen, I need to explain. You don’t understand…’

‘No talk.’

‘But you see, I’m a journalist and…’

‘We know who you are.’

‘Good. That’s really good to hear. So I’m a journalist and I’m here to see—’

‘No talk!’

Danny decides his best hope is to co-operate. A surge of optimism. They know him. They know English. They must be reasonably intelligent. Shooting Mohammed was a blunder—some trigger-happy idiot who’ll have to be disciplined. They won’t make the same mistake again, or else there’ll be hell to pay with Abu Mukhtar, not to mention Asmat Mahmoud, Danny’s gold-plated, copper-bottomed contact.

Anyway, Danny has been this close before and every time it’s been the prizes that have come his way rather than the wooden box and the grave that no one can ever quite find the time to visit. Near escapes run through his mind: the mock execution by Serbs on the road to Vukovar; the mob who wanted to set fire to him on a street corner in Kigali, as if he were some heretic to be burnt at the stake. And Chechnya, of course. Always Chechnya.

Now, as then, he is terrified, but it would show disrespect to death not to be: total, all-consuming fear is the price you pay if you want to claim the prize. Inevitably, hours or even days of captivity lie before him, but in due course will come the negotiated release. The mighty Abu Mukhtar, embarrassed by his overzealous foot soldiers, will apologise profusely and beg forgiveness.

The crack of a rifle butt on his head snaps him from these reveries. He mutters again about Abu Mukhtar, but now it’s more of a low groan than a statement. Either they don’t understand what he’s saying or they’re not interested.

The leader gestures with his Kalashnikov, jerking it upwards to show he wants the infidel up and away from the car. There is, thinks Danny, something alien about the clarity with which people like him see the world.

As he obeys, he looks again at the small mountain of Mohammed’s slumped paunch, the patches of blood on his pristine white gown now merged into one. His progress is not quick enough for his captors; the tall one with the scar and another gunman grab his arms with such force he worries they’ll rip them from their sockets. He should yell out in agony as they drag him away, but his fear leaves him silent, a quiet hero. They search the deep pockets of his chinos, and when they find the passport they study it briefly before hurling it aside. It spins through the air and lands at an angle in the sand. It feels as though they have discarded his identity. In that moment, Daniel Leon Lowenstein, born 17th June 1955, has ceased to exist.

A hood is thrown over his head, the dazzling sunlight of the Iraqi day switched off. It is some sort of hessian sack, Danny guesses, rough and scratchy against his skin, and with a musty smell that pollutes his nostrils. It reminds him of a farmyard. The hessian brushes against his lower lip and then his tongue, so that he can taste it too.

His assailants frogmarch him, screaming at him all the while and lashing out with kicks when he fails to respond to their unfathomable commands. Like a drunk in the dark, Danny stumbles, his balance and bearings lost, guided by the shoving and poking of their guns.

The easy flat of the road beneath his feet is becoming more unpredictable, a landscape now of ragged rock. He’s being taken further from the car, from the reassurance of everything he’s ever known.

The hood has ramped up his fear. He is dizzy, one moment feverishly hot, the next perishingly cold. His chest is compressed, a dead weight pushing down on it, like a cardiac arrest. Lower down, there is only slush and mush, Edwin’s curry from the night before. He has lost control of his bowels. Rewinding back to infancy, or spooling onwards to senility, his sphincter widens. He tries to clench his buttocks, but then surrenders. The first trickle of shit starts to ooze into his boxer shorts. He is beyond embarrassment. Nausea is rising up through him and he needs to vomit, but nothing emerges, merely the foretaste of it in his throat. He remembers the toilets when he’s been embedded with the army, the ones marked ‘D & V’, set apart, as if for lepers, to accommodate troops afflicted with diarrhoea and vomiting.

Just as his body will no longer obey him, neither will his mind. The committed atheist who has spent a lifetime scorning religion is now praying with holy zeal: Please, oh Lord, I promise I will always worship you. I have sinned but am ready to repent. Oh merciful Lord, just get me out of here. Right now, and I mean right fucking now! I’ll never set foot in a war zone again, or get on another plane, or write another story, so help me God. Amen.

But he knows that this time there’ll be no last-minute reprieve, no scoop, no prize. Instead of the award ceremony, there’ll be the funeral. He has pushed his luck one story too far, taken one chance too many, and he wishes more than anything he’s ever wished for that he could step back into that refreshing, effervescent hotel shower and start this day again.

Deprived of sight, all Danny can see are his alternative futures. Will it be the one that lasts for just a few more seconds, with a cursory bullet to the back of his hooded, anonymous head; one more death among so many in the catastrophe of Iraq? Or will it drag on for weeks, with the perpetual terror of incarceration in a cage, broken only by video appearances, paraded bowed and broken, begging for his life? And will it end, as it has for so many others, with a screaming madman’s knife hacking at his neck, captured in Technicolor? Images flash before him: Nick Berg being slaughtered by al-Zarqawi in person; the four American contractors, shot, burnt, mutilated, and their remains hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

This time he’s not reporting the story, he is the story. Other journalists will circle over his carcass. He pictures it—cold, blue and flabby—lying on a slab in a mortuary full of flies. The morgue is familiar to him; he’s been there countless times in Baghdad, Grozny, Gaza, Mogadishu—all the visits blend into one. He has counted more corpses than any man should have to—hundreds, probably thousands, of them, and now he can add one more. It’s wearing the clothes he put on that morning, when he was getting dressed to die, including those lucky, lucky boots.

He sees the funeral too. Who will come? The Junkies, of course; his adopted family, addicted to their work, their drugs and each other. Rachel inconsolable, yet still so fuckable in her sleek black dress. Becky, for once not laughing. Edwin and Kaps, his brothers in arms. Others will be there too—the media glitterati, and some of the Great and the Good who have admired his work: politicians, editors, novelists. There will be generous obituaries, mini hagiographies. Failures and excesses will be discreetly airbrushed out; there’ll be no mention of his many sins. All in all, his death will be an ego trip. Too bad he won’t be able to enjoy it.

Rough hands force him down on to his knees. A rifle butt smashes his mouth. The shock of it reminds him of his boyhood: Lukas hitting him, Camille watching. He tastes his own blood, sour and sickly. His tongue discovers a couple of uprooted teeth and briefly probes the holes they’ve left behind.

The final act. One more collective shout of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ from his kidnappers, a kind of choral harmony to signal that the time has come. The hood is ripped from his head but he cannot look; his eyes are screwed shut.

The end of a gun is shoved into the nape of his neck. The trickle of faeces becomes a torrent now, running down his legs. Danny is shaking so hard it looks, perversely, as if he’s laughing. There are no more memories or predictions, no more thoughts—rational or otherwise. No more hypocritical prayers. His kneeling, hooded body is heaving backwards and forwards with such convulsions that he barely hears the trigger.