Seventy-Two Virgins Read online

  The economy was shot to hell, the Baathist police wouldn’t turn up for work; and almost the worst thing of all was the food. Wasn’t this meant to be the Fertile Crescent? Surely this was a place so rich in alluvial salts that it had first occurred to mankind to scratch a bone in the earth and plant seeds.

  And all they could get to eat was shoarma and chips, chicken and chips, shoarma and chips, chicken and chips. And you know what the Iraqis really loved, their number one smash hit recipe? They called it Khantooqi Fried. It was funny: back home, people complained about the imposition of American values on an ancient civilization.

  Well, there was one delicacy that every Iraqi short-order chef could produce, and that was the brown-grey salty batter in which they caked the corpses of their poor, scraggy, underfed roosters. Long before General Tommy Franks, there was one American military figure who had conquered Iraq, and that was Colonel Sanders.

  After a while McDonald’s did arrive in the barracks. They installed Coke machines. The troops’ skin began to suffer. All the guys were getting seriously homesick, and they were only allowed five minutes per week on the phone.

  All of it might have been tolerable, however, had it not been for the streets. He hated the streets, walking among these skinny and malnourished people as though you were from an alien planet. You felt like Judge Dredd, with your big padded helmet, your flak jacket, your chest a kind of mobile drugstore: watch, radio, aspirin, scissors.

  Always there was the heart-thud of anxiety when the cars cruised towards your station. Everyone was afraid of the guys with the mad eyes, who ran in from the crowds and pop pop pop they fired or ka-boom they blew their killer waistcoats. No damn good a flak jacket was going to do you, not against a man who really wanted to whack you.

  Pickel had been standing on the mound outside the Al-Mansouria Palace, watering his geraniums. Actually, he wasn’t watering them, he was Diet Coke-ing them, since some clerk’s error in the Pentagon meant they were supplied with more Diet Coke than bottled water. The geraniums liked Diet Coke, even if it was bad for people, and Jason just loved the way they grew, the way they responded to him. He loved their geranium smell when he broke their stalks, to make them grow better. He stroked their pinks and reds and whites that mimicked his sunburnt Germanic skin. He marvelled at their long woody stalks, and thought how much bigger they were than the geraniums at home.

  Thing was, he was worried about how things were at home. He hadn’t talked to his wife for more than twenty minutes in the last month, and he missed her.

  Anyhow, he was Diet Coke-ing the blooms, when the Humvee with Jerry Kuchma rolled up. They were already yelling for help as soon as they came in sight, and when they braked poor Jerry Kuchma’s helmet rolled out into the yellow dust of the street. There was a big nametape stitched to the brim, as if he were at school, saying that it belonged to Kuchma, blood type A neg. But Jerry wasn’t going to be needing a transfusion now. You only had to look at the exit wound in his back, when they rolled him over, to see that the blood wouldn’t stay inside him.

  Pickel was so horrified that he just stood there, and the only thing he managed to say was ‘Hey’. He said ‘hey’ because at one point he was worried that the stretcher guys were going to damage his blooms.

  But the worst bit was when the English journalist came. Why the hell he had been picked to come to London he did not know. He’d told his superiors.

  He’d explained how it left him with a rancorous feeling of resentment towards anyone with one of those smooth-talking freaking British accents. If Jason Pickel had been asked to do a word association test, and you had said the word ‘British’, he would have said ‘rat’ or ‘fink’ or ‘shithead’.

  So he was on geranium patrol, a week after Jerry Kuchma died, and it was meant to be extra-tight security because of some pow-wow or shindig inside. A lot sheikhs and mullahs and fat Iraqi businessmen were trying to sort out some blindingly obvious problem, that should have occurred to the Administration before it invaded the country, such as who was going to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of Iraq, and who was going to set monetary policy, and who was going to be in charge of the Iraqi army, now that it had been routed, and who was going to be Foreign Minister, now that Tariq Aziz was being held out at the airport, or how they were going to get the air con back, that kind of thing.

  Then this guy walks down the street towards him, a white guy, wearing one of those special Giraldo Rivera war-zone waistcoats, with the pouches. Except that he had nothing in the pouches, and he was wearing stained chinos and trainers.

  Thing Jason really noticed about him was his hair. His hair was like an Old Testament prophet, all silvery and swept back. But the detail that mattered, the thing Jason fixed his eye on with almost romantic excitement, was what was clamped to his ear.

  ‘Yuh, yuh,’ the man was saying, ‘OK, I’ll file 400 words about the scene of the American torture orgies. OK I understand. Listen, if you’re tight for space, I’ll just do 300.’

  The reporter hung up, and then directed a look at Jason that was grave and charming. Jason knew he was going to be corrupted.

  ‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ began the reporter.

  ‘No trouble at all,’ said Jason.

  ‘My name is Barry White, and I am a reporter for the Daily Mirror of London, and I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me.’

  ‘I’ll surely do what I can,’ said Jason.

  ‘I’m trying to track down General Axelrod — hang on,’ —he pretended to consult his notes — ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant Axelrod Zimmerman.’

  ‘I am afraid I don’t know Lieutenant Zimmerman,’ said Pickel. ‘You’ll have to consult with the media department if you want to arrange an interview. You need to go back to the football stadium.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ said the Moses-like reporter. ‘I’ve just come from the media department and they said that Lieutenant Zimmerman would be expecting me here.’

  ‘Sir, I am afraid I can’t let anyone in here.’

  ‘This is Uday’s palace, isn’t it, the one they call the love-nest?’

  ‘It surely is, Mr White sir, but like I say, if you want to see that stuff, you’ve got to get clearance. Haven’t you all done that torture story, anyhow?’

  ‘Well, there’s just a detail I’d like to check, and I was told that Lieutenant Zimmerman… Tell you what, I’ll ring them up now, and you can talk to them . .

  Jason Pickel felt his mouth go dry. He knew he was in the presence of a pusher. It was six days since he had talked to Wanda. Anyway, he needed to know about the soccer matches his kid was playing in, that kind of thing.

  The Brit was dialling the number, and then he was offering the phone to him. Jason could see the screen lit up, the plump rectangles indicating a full battery, a clear signal. It was a Thuraya, a satphone. Jesus, he ached for a quick conversation.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but my regulations state that I may not talk in public on a civilian telephone. One of our guys was killed doing that.’

  ‘But that’s absurd,’ said Barry White, with the look of a headmaster uncovering a case of fourth form bullying. ‘Why don’t we just nip in there and you can use the phone in private?’

  That was when the disaster happened, said Jason to Indira, as they sat on the duckboards, on the roof of the House of Commons, surrounded by pigeonshit.

  What disaster? asked Indira. But Jason looked brooding, and in her imagination she supplied the answer.

  It was the usual thing. Soldier rings home unexpectedly. Crack of dawn. Wife picks up. Sleepy male voice in background.

  Before this conversation could go any further, there was another noise, said Jason, outside the gatehouse he was supposed to be guarding. It was like someone quickly popping bubble wrap next to your ear. It was the shooting, and cheering.

  And then there was someone else yelling, almost screaming, in English, that unless someone else stopped now, and got out of the car, he was going to open fire. />
  By this time Barry White was running back outside, and Jason Pickel was following. When his ex-wife was later to sue the US Department of Defense for traumatic stress, it was on the grounds that he had failed to terminate the conversation, and she heard the whole thing.

  But now there was a new noise in Parliament Square. The first BMW 750 motorbike had arrived at the traffic lights by St Margaret’s, the forerunner of the precursors of the harbingers of the outriders of the cavalcade. A blue light flashed weakly in the sun. The cop waved a gauntleted arm.

  Indira was glad of the interruption.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  0854 HRS

  And now that he could actually hear the police sirens, Dragan Panic began to wonder whether he had chosen the right place for succour.

  The Serb tow-truck operative looked at the men standing around him on the building site. They observed his face, pasty, sweaty, the moles like fleshy Rice Krispies that were the legacy of the air pollution that had been part of childhood in communist Eastern Europe.

  As soon as he had gasped ‘Where is police?’ he saw their burning eyes, hook noses and hairy black eyebrows that joined in the middle. He knew who they were.

  They were Skiptars. They were Muslims, almost certainly from Pristina. And they knew who he was.

  He was a Serb.

  ‘Here is not police,’ said the leading asylum-seeking brickie, whose family farm had been torched in a place called Suva Reka.

  They pressed round him, breathing silently, as a bunch of bullocks will press round a terrified picnicker, and drove him backwards.

  Handsomely rewarded under the terms of the Private Finance Initiative, the gang of Skiptars had efficiently driven in the piles of the new ministry. They had sunk huge corrugated sheets of steel into the grey loam of London, and now they were pouring lagoons of concrete between the sheets. Towards one of these pits of gravelly slurry they now herded their enemy.

  ‘What do you want, Serb?’

  Dragan saw it all. In fifty years’ time this building would be torn down for reconstruction by the next lot of asylum-seekers, from China, or Pluto, or wherever, and they would break up these concrete blocks to find his whitened bones.

  He dodged and ran. Then he tripped, and fell face first in the mud, and then he was up and running again, back down Horseferry Road towards the sirens and the chugging of another helicopter.

  Of course he wouldn’t admit it, not even to Grover, but Deputy Assistant Commissioner Purnell was deeply cheesed off by the arrival of the Black Hawk.

  It was his airspace. He had sovereignty. But the Black Hawk had somehow bullied away his Twin Squirrel, in a humiliating vindication of their brand names.

  ‘Are we going to tell them about it?’ asked Grover. He was thinking of the ambulance.

  ‘Let’s just concentrate on finding the thing.’

  Stuck in the gummy shade of London’s plane trees, the ambulance was waiting at yet another traffic light, this one at the back of Parliament Square by a statue of Napier. It was getting hotter in the cabin; the rusty metallic smell of freshly spilt blood rose from the back, and Jones was conscious of a sense of mounting disorder.

  Despite their enormous breakfast, Habib was now eating a tub of hummus, spooning it down with a tongue depressor he had found in the glove compartment.

  ‘Why do you eat it now?’ asked Haroun.

  ‘Show me where it is written a man may not eat on the eve of battle.’

  ‘But we are all about to die.’

  ‘We’ll be lucky,’ said Jones bitterly.

  He tried to concentrate on all the things he had to get right in the next five minutes.

  On leaving Parliament Square, the plan was to turn left up Whitehall, and then, just before the Cenotaph, to turn right at the Red Lion pub. There Dr Adam would supply them with a parking permit.

  It was very important, when they saw Dr Adam, that they acted their parts convincingly. The man called Adam knew something, but he did not know everything.

  The only person who knew everything was Jones.

  Then the lights changed and in defiance of the satnav they trickled forward to the last set, and came once again in full view of Roger Barlow — had he chanced to look that way.

  Not that anyone in his right mind would look at an ambulance, when he could behold the face of Cameron MacLean.

  He watched her come towards him across the road, and the crowd parted around her like a zip. She looked like a character in a hairspray ad, with glossy evangelical skin and lustrous eyes. She was twenty-four, full of energy and optimism, and she had the dubious honour of being Roger’s research assistant.

  Not for the first time, Barlow was seriously impressed by her efficiency. If his memory served him right — and he kept a vague eye on her romantic career — she had been off in Brussels last night, and here she was in less than five minutes.

  He beamed. He knew that Cameron had long ago lost any reverence she may have had for him or his office, but what the hell.

  ‘Your wife left a message on my mobile. It must have been while I was on the Tube.’

  ‘My wife?’ Barlow felt a prickling in the roots of his hair.

  ‘Yeah. She sounded kind of pissed.’

  ‘Pissed?’ Roger’s mind boggled. It was less than an hour since he had left home.

  ‘I guess you guys would say pissed off.’

  They sorted out the pink pass, and Barlow entered the security bubble.

  ‘Did she say what about?’ he asked, thinking as he did so what a foolish thing it was to ask.

  ‘No, Roger.’ He scrutinized her. Was that contempt? Was that pity? Who could tell?

  Roger was indebted — England was indebted — to Cameron’s former political science tutor. This was a languid Nozickian with whom she had been in love and who had baffled her, candidly, by his refusal to sleep with her. At the end of her last winter term she had come to see him in his study. The snow was falling outside.

  ‘What shall I do, Franklin?’ she had asked him, stretching her long legs on his zebra-skin rug. ‘Where shall I go?’

  ‘Go work in Yurp,’ he said, meaning Europe. ‘Go to London. Why don’t you go work for one of those British Tories? They’re in a whole lot of trouble right now.

  So she’d written to about ten MPs whose websites proclaimed them to be interested in North America. Barlow was the only one to answer, with a laconic scrawl, inviting her to appear for work in December. Eight months later, Cameron was finding that her political convictions were somehow wilting under prolonged exposure to Roger Herbert Barlow MP.

  Her first job had been to sign all his Christmas cards. These were late.

  ‘Uh, Roger,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what style you want me to use. Do I say Mr and Mrs or do I say Justin and Nell? Or what do I say?’

  ‘Tremendous, tremendous,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll catch you later.’

  ‘But what do you want me to say? Best wishes Roger, or Love Roger, or Happy Christmas from Roger and Diana?’

  ‘Yup yup yup yup,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’

  Since this was among her first meetings with Roger, she hardly dared say what she felt: that it was grossly rude to treat friends and constituents in this way.

  So she knuckled under, and signed 500 cards ‘Mr Roger Barlow Esquire MP’ in that flagrantly American piggy-knitting handwriting, with the r like a Russian ya sign. It would have been more believable if she had written ‘David Beckham’.

  When, inevitably, there was a revolt in his constituency about this breach of etiquette, he was so low as to seek, somehow, to blame her.

  ‘Oh Gaaad,’ he said, groaning and running his hands through his hair, to the point where she felt like kicking him.

  Just what kind of a Conservative was this guy, anyhow? It was soooo disappointing. She’d been with him at a meeting in a church hall in Cirencester, and someone had stood up and said, ‘Mr Barlow, do you agree with me that there is far too much gratuitous and offensive sex
on TV? And will you’ — the man’s hands were shaking as he read out his question — take steps to ensure that Ofcom protects children from the current tide of filth?’ Barlow had given an intelligent answer, about the difficulties of censorship, and the watershed, and that kind of thing, and then thrown it all away with some flip aside.

  ‘Of course, I tend to rely on my children to tell me what it’s safe to watch, ha ha ha . .

  Cameron felt her stomach contract with irritation. Didn’t he understand that these guys cared about this question? He was their servant, paid with their tax dollars, to represent their views in Parliament.

  A young lady had asked him about abortion, and his answer had been protozoan in its invertebracy. It was all about ‘grey areas’ and ‘moral continuums’. The nearest he came to a statement of principle was to say, ‘Frankly it’s all a bit of a tricky one, really.’ But the worst thing had been his answer on gay marriage. Now Cameron had graduated from Rochester University NY (motto: Meliora, or Better things) as a pretty straightforward moral authoritarian neoconservative. In the run-up to the war on Iraq, she had stuck a poster in her dorm, saying, ‘Let’s bomb France’.

  At the height of Francophobia she had moved a motion in the student body. Many American colleges were to rebaptize French fries as ‘freedom fries.’ She wanted to go one better.

  In honour of Tony Blair, she said Rochester should call them ‘chips’, like they did in Britain. The motion did not attract much support, but her Nozickian professor gave a wan smile.

  Before she arrived in London, she had presumed that if Barlow were a Tory, he would be sound; he would be staunch; he would stand full-square and broad-beamed in favour of family values and all the rest of it.

  By the time of the church hall meeting, barely a month ago, she had put up with a lot: his political evasiveness, his moral evasiveness, and indeed, dammit, his sheer physical evasiveness. Half the time he would give her some great project and then evaporate, muttering about the ‘whips’ or the ‘1922’ or ‘Standing Committee B’.