Honour Among Thieves (52 page)

When
Scott could no longer see the road in front of them, he went over his plan for
the last time. All of them accepted that their options were limited.

The
nearest border was forty-five miles away, but Scott now accepted the danger
they could bring to any village simply by passing through it. He didn’t feel
his plan was foolproof, far from it, but they couldn’t wait in the hills much
longer. It would only be a short time before Iraqi soldiers were swarming all
over the area.

Scott
checked the uniforms. As long as they kept on the move, it would be hard for
anyone to identify them in the dark as anything other than part of an army
patrol. But once they reached the highway, he knew they couldn’t afford to stay
still for more than a few seconds. Everything depended on how close they could
get to the border post without being spotted.

When
Scott gave the order, Aziz swung the jeep onto the winding road to begin the
three-mile journey to the highway. He covered the distance in five minutes, and
during that time they didn’t come across another vehicle. But once they hit the
highway, they found the road was covered with lorries, jeeps, even tanks,
travelling in both directions.

None
of them saw the two motorcycles, the tank and three lorries that swung off the
highway and headed at speed down the little road towards Tuz Khurmatoo.

Aziz
went as fast as he could, while Cohen remained seated on the back behind the
gun. Scott watched the road ahead of him, his beret pulled well down. Hannah
sat below Cohen, motionless, a gun in her hand. The first road sign indicated
that it was sixty kilometres to the border. For a moment Scott was distracted
by an oil well that kept pumping away on the far side of the road. Nobody spoke
as the distance to Kirkuk descended from fifty-five to forty-six, to
thirty-two, but with each sign and each new oil well, the traffic became
heavier and their speed began to drop rapidly. The only relief was that none of
the passing patrols seemed to show any interest in the jeep.

Within
minutes the little village was swarming with soldiers from Saddam’s elite guard.
Even in the dark, it took only ten bullets and as many minutes for them to find
out where the Cadillac was, and another thirty bullets to discover the unfilled
graves of the four dead soldiers.

General
Hamii listened to the senior officer when he phoned in with the details. All he
asked for was the radio frequency of the jeep that had been in Tuz Khurmatoo
earlier that evening. The General slammed down the phone, checked his watch,
and keyed in the frequency.

The
single tone continued for some time.

‘They
must still be looking for a truck or a pink Cadillac,’ Scott was saying when
the radio phone began ringing. They all four froze.

‘Answer
it, Aziz,’ said Scott. ‘Listen carefully, and find out what you can.’

Aziz
picked up the handset, listened to a short message, then said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in
Arabic, and put the handset down.

‘They’ve
found the Cadillac, and are ordering all jeeps to report to their nearest army
post,’ he said.

‘It
can’t be long before they realise it’s not one of their men driving this jeep,’
said Hannah. ‘If they don’t already know.’

‘With
luck we might still have twenty minutes,’ said Scott. ‘How far to the border?’

‘Nine
miles,’ said Aziz.

The
General knew it had to be Zeebari, or he would have responded with the elite
guards’ code number.

So
now he knew what vehicle they were in, and which border they were heading for.
He immediately picked up the phone and barked another order. Two officers
accompanied him as he ran out of the room and into a large yard at the back of
the building. The blades of his personal helicopter were already slowly
rotating.

It
was Aziz who first spotted the end of a long queue of oil tankers waiting to
cross the unofficial border. Scott checked the inside track and asked Aziz if
he could drive down such a narrow strip.

‘Not
possible, sir,’ the young Kurd told him. ‘We’d only end up in the ditch.’

‘Then
we’ve no alternative but to go straight down the middle.’

Aziz
moved the jeep out into the centre of the road and tried desperately to
maintain his speed. To begin with he was able to stay clear of the lorries and
avoid the oncoming traffic. The first real trouble came four miles from the
border, when an army truck heading towards them refused to move over.

‘Shall
I blast him off the road?’ said Cohen.

‘No,’
said Scott. ‘Aziz, keep going, but prepare to jump and take cover among the
tankers, then we’ll regroup.’ Just as Scott was about to leap, the lorry
swerved across the road and ended up in the ditch on the far side.

‘Now
they all know where we are,’ said Scott. ‘How many miles to the customs post,
Aziz?’

‘Three,
three and a half at the most.’

‘Then
step on it,’ said Scott, although he realised Aziz was already going as fast as
he could. They had managed to cover the next mile in just over a minute when a
helicopter swung above them, beaming down a searchlight that lit up the entire
road. The radio phone began ringing again.

‘Ignore
it,’ shouted Scott as Aziz tried to keep the jeep on the centre of the road and
maintain his speed. They passed the two-mile mark as the helicopter swung back,
confident it had spotted its prey, and began to focus its beam directly on
them.

‘We’ve
got a jeep coming up our backside,’ said Cohen, as he swung round to face it.

‘Get
rid of it,’ said Scott.

Cohen
obliged, sending the first few shots through the windscreen and the next into
the tyres, thankful for the light from above. The pursuing jeep swung across
the road, crashing into an oncoming lorry. Another quickly took its place.
Hannah reloaded the gun with a magazine of bullets that was lying on the floor
while Cohen concentrated on the road behind them.

‘One
and a half miles to go,’ shouted Aziz, nearly crashing into lorries on both
sides of the road. The helicopter hovered above them and began to fire
indiscriminately, hitting vehicles going in both directions.

‘Don’t
forget that most of them haven’t a clue who’s chasing what,’ said Scott.

‘Thanks
for sharing that piece of logic with me, Professor,’ said Cohen. ‘But I’ve got
a feeling that helicopter knows exactly who he’s chasing.’ Cohen began to
pepper the next jeep with bullets the moment it came into range. This time it
simply slowed to a halt, causing the car behind to run straight into it and
creating a concertina effect as one after another the pursuing jeeps crashed
into the back of the vehicle in front of them. The road behind was suddenly
clear, as if Aziz had been the last car through a green light.

‘One
mile to go,’ shouted Aziz as Cohen swung round to concentrate on what was going
on in front of him and Hannah reloaded the automatic gun with the last magazine
of bullets. Scott could see the lights of a bridge looming up in front of him:
the Kirkuk fortress on the side of the hill that Aziz had told them signalled
the customs post was only about half a mile away. As the helicopter swung back
and once again sprayed the road with bullets, Aziz felt the front tyre on his
side suddenly blow as he drove onto the bridge.

Scott
could now see the Kurdish checkpoint ahead of him as the helicopter swung even
lower on its final attempt to stop them. A flurry of bullets hit the jeep’s
bonnet, ricocheted off the bridge and into the windscreen. As the helicopter
swung away, Scott looked up and for a second stared into the eyes of General
Hamil.

Scott
looked back down and punched a hole in the shattered windscreen, only to
discover he was faced with two rows of soldiers lined up in front of him, their
rifles aiming straight at the jeep.

Behind
the row of soldiers were two small exits for those wishing to enter Kurdistan
and two entrances on the other side of the road for those driving out of
Kirkuk.

The
two exits to Kurdistan were blocked with stationary vehicles, while the two
entrances had been left clear -although no one at that moment was showing any
desire to enter Saddam’s Iraq.

Aziz
decided that he would have to swing across the road and risk driving the jeep
at an acute angle through one of the small entrances, where he might be faced
with an oncoming vehicle – in which case they would be trapped. He was still
losing speed, and could feel that the rim of the front left-hand wheel was now
touching the ground.

Once
they were within range, Cohen opened fire on the line of soldiers in front of
him. Some fired back, but he managed to hit several before the rest scattered.

With
a hundred yards to go and still losing speed, Aziz suddenly swung the jeep
across the road and tried to steer it towards the second entrance. The jeep hit
the right-hand wall, careered into the short, dark tunnel and bounced onto the
left-hand wall before lurching out into no-man’s land, between the two customs
posts.

Suddenly
there were dozens of soldiers pursuing them from the Iraqi side. ‘Keep going,
keep going!’ shouted Scott as they emerged from the little tunnel.

Aziz
was still losing speed as he steered the jeep back to the left and pointed it
in the direction of the border with Kurdistan, a mere four hundred yards away.
He pressed his foot flat down on the accelerator but the speedometer wouldn’t
rise above two miles per hour. Another row of soldiers, this time from the
Kurdish border, was facing them, their rifles pointing at the jeep. But none of
them was firing.

Cohen
swung around as a stray bullet hit the back of the jeep and another flew past
his shoulder. Once again he fired a volley towards the Iraqi border, and those
who could quickly retreated behind their checkpoint. The jeep trundled on for a
few more yards before it finally whimpered to a halt halfway between the two
unofficial barriers that the UN refused to recognise.

Scott
looked towards the Kurdish border. A hundred Peshmergas were lined up, their
rifles now firing – but not in the direction of the jeep. Scott turned back to
see another line of soldiers tentatively advancing from the Iraqi side. He and
Hannah began firing their pistols as Cohen let forth another burst which came
to a sudden stop. The Iraqi soldiers had started to retreat again, but sensed
immediately that their enemy had finally run out of ammunition.

Cohen
leaped down off the jeep and quickly took out his pistol. ‘Come on, Aziz!’ he
shouted as he rushed forward and crouched beside the driver’s door. ‘We’ll have
to cover them so the Professor can get his bloody Declaration across the
border.’

Aziz
didn’t reply. His body was slumped lifelessly over the wheel, the horn sounding
intermittently. The unanswered radio phone was still ringing.

‘The
bastards have killed my Kurd!’ shouted Cohen. Hannah grabbed the canvas bag as
Scott lifted Aziz out of the front of the jeep. Together, they began to drag
him the last few hundred yards towards the border with Kurdistan.

Another
line of Iraqi soldiers started to advance towards the jeep as Scott and Hannah
carried the dead body of Aziz nearer and nearer to his Kurdish homeland.

They
heard more shots whistle past them, and turned to see Cohen running towards the
Iraqis screaming, ‘You killed my Kurd, you bastards! You killed my Kurd!’ One
of the Iraqis fell, another fell, one retreated. Another fell, another
retreated, as Cohen went on advancing towards them. Suddenly, he fell to his
knees, but somehow he kept crawling forward, until a final volley rang out. The
Sergeant collapsed in a pool of blood a few yards from the Iraqi border.

While
Scott and Hannah carried the dead Kurd into the land of his people, Saddam’s
soldiers dragged the body of the Jew back into Iraq.

‘Why
were my orders disobeyed?’ Saddam shouted.

For
several moments no one around the table spoke. They knew the chances of all of
them returning to their beds alive that night had to be marginal.

General
Hamil turned the cover of a thick file, and looked down at the handwritten note
in front of him.

‘Major
Saeed was to blame, Mr President,’ stated the General. ‘It was he who allowed
the infidels to escape with the Declaration, and that is why his body is now
hanging in Tohrir Square for your people to witness.’

The
General listened intently to the President’s next question.

‘Yes,
Sayedi,’ he assured his master. ‘Two of the terrorists were killed by guards
from my own regiment. They were by far the most important members of the team.
They were the two who managed to escape from Major Saeed’s custody before I
arrived. The other two were an American professor and the girl.’

The
President asked another question.

‘No,
Mr President. Kratz was the commanding officer, and I personally arrested the
infamous Zionist leader before questioning him at length. It was during that
interrogation that I discovered that the original plan had been to assassinate
you, Sayedi, and I made certain that he, like those who came before him,
failed.’