Honour Among Thieves (48 page)

‘God
bless Kratz,’ said Scott.

Hannah
nodded and beckoned him to follow her again. She led him back into the corridor
and guided him quickly to the side door. Scott opened the door tentatively and
slipped out ahead of her. A moment later she joined him on the tarmac.

He
pointed to a group of palm trees halfway across the courtyard, and she nodded
once again. They covered the twenty yards to its relative safety in under three
seconds. Scott turned to look back at the building and saw the truck standing
up against the wall. He assumed that, in the panic, it was just something else
that had been left behind.

He
tapped Hannah on the shoulder and indicated that he wanted to return to the
building. They covered the ground at the same pace as before, ducking back
inside the door. Scott led Hannah to the main corridor, where they found the
front door was swinging on its hinges. He looked through the gap and pointed to
the truck, mimed to which side he would go and touched her shoulder. Again they
sprinted across the tarmac as if reacting to a starting pistol.

Scott
jumped behind the wheel as Hannah leaped in the other side.

‘Where
the hell -’ was Scott’s first reaction when he discovered the ignition key
wasn’t in place. They began frantically to search the glove compartment, under
the seats, on the dashboard. ‘The bastards must have taken the key with them.’

‘Simon,
look out!’ screamed Hannah. Scott turned to see a figure leaping up onto the
footplate.

Hannah
moved quickly into position to attack the intruder, but Scott blocked her.

‘Good
afternoon, miss,’ said the stranger. ‘Sorry we haven’t been properly
introduced,’ he added before turning to Scott. ‘Move over, Professor,’ he said
as he put the key back in the ignition. ‘If you recall, it was agreed that I’d
do the driving.’

‘What
in heaven’s name are you doing here, Sergeant?’ asked Scott.

‘Now
that’s what I call a real American welcome,’ replied Cohen. ‘But, to answer
your question, I was just obeying orders. I was told if you came out of that
door carrying a cardboard tube, I was to get myself back here and move the hell
out of it, but not under any circumstances to allow you to make a detour to the
Foreign Ministry. By the way, where’s the tube?’

‘Look
out!’ shouted Hannah again, as she turned and saw an Arab charging towards them
from the other side.

‘That
one won’t do you any harm,’ said Cohen, ‘he’s bloody useless. Doesn’t even know
the difference between a Diet Coke and a Pepsi.’ Aziz leaped onto the running
board and said to Scott, ‘I think we’ve got about another twenty minutes,
Professor, before they work out that there’s no bomb in the safe.’

‘Then
let’s get out of here,’ said Scott.

‘But
where to?’ asked Hannah.

‘Aziz
and I have already done a recce, sir. As soon as the sirens sounded we knew
that Kratz must have sold them the whopper, because they couldn’t move fast
enough to get themselves below. Soldiers and police first seems to be the rule
out here. Aziz and I have had the run of the city centre for the last hour. In
fact the only person we bumped into was one of our own agents, Dave Feldman.
He’d already sussed out the best route to give us a chance of avoiding any
military.’

‘Not
bad, Cohen,’ said Scott.

Cohen
turned suddenly and stared at the Professor.

‘I
didn’t do it for you, sir, I did it for Colonel Kratz. He got me out of jail
once, and he’s the only officer that’s ever treated me like a human being. So
whatever it is that you’re holding in your hands, Professor, it had bloody well
better be worth his life.’

‘Thousands
have given their lives for it over the years,’ said Scott quietly. ‘It’s the
American Declaration of Independence.’

‘Good
God,’ said Cohen. ‘How did the bastards get their hands on that?’ He paused
briefly. ‘Am I meant to believe you?’

Scott
nodded and unrolled the parchment. Cohen and Aziz stared in disbelief for
several seconds.

‘Right
then, we’d better get you home, Professor, hadn’t we?’ said Cohen. ‘Aziz will
take over while we’re in his neck of the woods.’ He jumped out of the cab and
the Kurd came running round to take his place behind the wheel. Once Cohen had
clambered over the tailboard, he banged the roof of the truck and Aziz switched
the engine on.

They
accelerated round the courtyard, drove straight through the barrier and out
onto Victory Square. The only other vehicles to be seen had long since been
abandoned, and there was no sign of anyone on the streets.

‘The
area has been cleared for three miles in every direction, so it will be a
little time before we come across anything,’ Aziz said as he turned left into
Kindi Street. He quickly moved the lorry up to sixty miles per hour, a speed
only Saddam had ever experienced before on that particular road.

‘I’m
going to take the old Baquba Road out of the city, travelling through the areas
where we’re least likely to see any sign of the military,’ explained Aziz as he
passed the fountain made famous by Ali Baba. ‘I’m still hoping to reach the
highway out of Baghdad within the magic two hours.’

Aziz
took a sudden right, switching gears but hardly losing any speed as he
continued through what gave every impression of being a ghost town. Scott
looked up at the sun as they crossed a bridge over the Tigris; in an hour or so
it would have disappeared behind the highest buildings, and their chances of
remaining undetected would greatly improve.

Aziz
swung past Karmel Junblat University and into Jamila Street. There were still
no people on the roads or pavements, and Scott felt that if anyone did see them
now they would assume they were part of an army unit on patrol.

It
was Hannah who spotted the first person: an old man, bent double, sitting on
the edge of the pavement as if nothing in particular had taken place. They
drove past him at sixty miles per hour, but he didn’t even look up.

Aziz
swung into the next road and found himself facing a group of young looters
carrying off televisions and electronic equipment. They scattered when they saw
the truck. Around the next corner there were more looters, but still no sign of
police or soldiers.

When
Aziz spotted the first dark-green uniforms he swerved quickly right, down a
side street that on any other Wednesday would have been packed with shoppers
and where a vehicle would have been lucky to average more than five miles per
hour. But today Aziz managed to keep the speedometer above fifty. He turned
right again, and they saw some of the first of the locals who had ventured back
onto the streets. Once they had reached the end of the road, Aziz was able to
join the main thoroughfare out of Baghdad. The traffic was still light.

Aziz
eased the truck across into the outside lane, checking his rear-view mirror
every few seconds and complying with the speed limit of fifty miles per hour.
‘Never get stopped for the wrong reasons,’ Kratz had warned him a thousand
times.

When
Aziz switched his sidelights on, Scott’s hopes began to rise. Although the two
hours had to be up, he doubted that anybody would be out searching for them
yet, and it was well understood that with every mile out of Baghdad the
citizens became less and less loyal to Saddam.

Once
Aziz had left the Baghdad boundary sign behind him he pushed the speedometer up
to sixty. ‘Give me twenty minutes, Allah,’ he said. ‘Give me twenty minutes and
I’ll get them to Castle Post.’

‘Castle
Post?’ said Scott. ‘We’re not on a Red Indian scouting mission.’

Aziz
laughed. ‘No, Professor, it’s the site of a First World War British Army post,
where we can hide for the night. If I can get there before -’ All three of them
spotted the first army lorry coming towards them. Aziz swung off to the left,
skidded into a side road, and was immediately forced to drop his speed.

‘So
now where
are we
heading?’ asked Scott.

‘Khan
Beni Saad,’ said Aziz, ‘the village where I was born. It will only be possible
for us to stay for one night, but no one will think of looking for us there.
Tomorrow, Professor, you will have to decide which of the six borders we’re
going to cross.’

General
Hamil had been pacing around his office for the past hour. The two hours had
long passed, and he was starting to wonder if Kratz might have got the better
of him. But he couldn’t work out how.

He
was even beginning to regret that he had killed the man. If Kratz had still
been alive, at least he could have fallen back on the tried and trusted method
of torture. Now he would never know how he would have responded to his
particular shaving technique.

Hamil
had already ordered a reluctant lieutenant and his platoon back to the basement
of the Ba’ath head ... quarters. The lieutenant had returned swiftly to report
that the safe door was wide open and the truck had disappeared, as had the
document that had been hanging on the wall. The General smiled. He remained
confident that he was in possession of the original Declaration, but he
extracted the parchment from the cylinder and laid it on his desk to
double-check. When he came to the word ‘British’, he turned first white, and
then, by several degrees, deeper and deeper shades of red.

He
immediately gave an order to cancel all military leave, and then commanded five
divisions of the elite guard to mount a search for the terrorists. But he had
no way of knowing how much start they had on him, how far they might have
already travelled, and in which direction.

However,
he did know that they couldn’t remain on the main roads in that truck for long,
without being spotted. Once it was dark, they would probably retreat into the
desert to rest overnight. But they would have to come out the following
morning, when they must surely try to cross one of the six borders. The General
had already given an order that if even one of the terrorists managed to cross
any border, guards from every customs post would be arrested and jailed,
whether they were on duty or not. The two soldiers who were supposed to have
closed the safe door had already been shot for not carrying out his orders, and
the Major detailed to supervise the moving of the safe had been immediately
arrested. At least Major Saeed’s decision to take his own life had saved Hamil
the trouble of a court martial: within an hour the Major had been found hanging
in his cell. Obviously leaving a coil of rope in the middle of the floor below
a hook in the ceiling had proved to be a compelling enough hint. And as for the
two young medical students who’d been responsible for the injections, and who
had witnessed his conversation with Kratz, they were already on their way to the
southern borders, to serve with a less than elite regiment. They were such
nice-looking boys, the General thought; he gave them a week at the most.

Hamil
picked up the phone and dialled a private number that would connect him to the
palace. He needed to be certain that he was the first person to explain to the
President what had taken place that afternoon.

S
COTT HAD
always CONSIDERED his own countrymen to be an hospitable race, but he had never
experienced such a welcome as Aziz’s family gave to the three strangers.

Khan
Beni Saad, the village in which Aziz was born, had, he told them, just over 250
inhabitants at the last count, and barely survived on the income it derived
from selling its small crop of oranges, tangerines and dates to the housewives
of Kirkuk and Arbil.

The
chief of the tribe, who turned out to be one of Aziz’s uncles, immediately
opened his little stone home to them so that they could make use of the one
bath in the village. The women of the house – there seemed to be a lot of them
– kept boiling water until all of the visitors were pronounced clean.

When
Scott finally emerged from the chief’s home, he found a table had been set up
under a clump of citrus trees in the Huwaider fields. It was laden with strange
fish, meat, fruit and vegetables. He feared they must have gathered something
from every home in the village.

Under
a clear starlit night, they devoured the fresh food and drank mountain water
that, if bottled, a Californian would happily have paid a fortune for.

But
Scott’s thoughts kept returning to the fact that tomorrow they would have to
leave these idyllic surroundings, and that he would somehow have to get them
all across one of the six borders.

After
coffee had been served in various different-sized cups and mugs, the chief rose
from his place at the head of the table to make a speech of welcome, which Aziz
translated. Scott made a short reply which was applauded even before Aziz had
been given the chance to interpret what he had said.

‘That’s
one thing they have in common with us,’ said Hannah, taking Scott’s hand. ‘They
admire brevity.’

The
chief ended the evening with an offer for which Scott thanked him, but felt
unable to accept. He wanted to order all of his family out of the little house
so that his guests could sleep indoors.

Scott
continued to protest until Aziz explained, ‘You must agree, or you insult his
home by suggesting it is not good enough for you to rest in. And by the way, it
is an Arab tradition that the greatest compliment you can pay your host is to
make your woman pregnant while she sleeps under his roof.’ Aziz shrugged.