Spoils of War, page 2
The men backed her up against the iron wall of the hangar. They let her slump against it, dazed with shock, and stood on either side of her. There were three or four other Iraqis moving about the building, but there was no sign of Ghani.
After a minute another man came through the doorway. He was the one who’d been sitting in the Cadillac. The shoulderboards of his uniform were smothered in gold braid and he carried a short cane bound in leather. He looked Noura up and down, then reached out and pulled off her hijab, making her flinch. He took her by the chin and turned her face into the light, studying her features dispassionately through dark, heavy-lidded eyes. He said calmly: ‘Ya-aanisa, you had better tell me exactly what your part has been in this.’
She wanted to reply. There was something so cold and forbidding about this man that her instinct was to placate him, to spill out the truth. Besides, she owed no loyalty to Ghani now; but fear had brought a choking sensation to her throat and she couldn’t find the words. The man went on watching her, slapping his palm with the cane once or twice in a studied show of impatience. Then, without warning, he lashed out with it at her face. It struck her hard across the left cheek, slamming her head sideways. The pain was immediate and agonizing, making her cry out.
‘So you do have a tongue in your mouth,’ the man said. ‘At least that is established. In time you will use it to explain why you were stealing gold from the Iraqi state treasury.’
Noura stared at him incredulously through tear-filled eyes. She could feel her face swelling, her left eye starting to close. She found her voice at last.
‘I know nothing of this. Please believe me. Find the man who brought me here. Ask him.’
‘What man?’
‘He’s one of you. I don’t know his real name. Tonight he calls himself Ghani. He was to help me leave the country.’
The Iraqi looked around him in mock surprise. ‘And where is this Ghani now?’
‘I don’t know. I think he ran away.’
‘You don’t know his name, and you don’t know where he is.’ There was a trace of amusement in the Iraqi’s voice. He paused for a moment. ‘Well, that’s what happens when you put your trust in a thief. Whatever he told you, that plane is so heavy with gold that I doubt there would have been room for you.’
‘Let Ghani answer to you,’ Noura said.
‘I wish he could. It might save me a lot of trouble.’ The man sounded almost playful now. ‘You see, Ghani is my name. Your friend is evidently someone else.’
Noura was speechless again. She had thought she was escaping from a nightmare, but now she knew it had only just begun.
Part One
1
When Jack Rushton told Alison he was thinking of going back to Kuwait for a few days, she made one of her faces. It was a play of features that he had once found quite appealing but that now vaguely irritated him, a slight upward twisting of one side of her mouth that seemed to express scepticism and disapproval at once.
‘What for?’ she said.
‘To get our money out. You know the banks have just reopened.’
‘They won’t let you have very much.’ Alison read the newspapers just as avidly as he did. ‘They said they’d only be releasing a few thousand dinars to begin with.’
‘That’s better than nothing, isn’t it? Nearly everything we’ve got left is still out there.’
‘Don’t I know it? You could arrange to have it sent by post, surely?’
‘That could take weeks. Maybe months. Things still seem pretty chaotic. If I’m on the spot perhaps I can find a loophole in these new regulations.’
‘We can’t afford the air fare, Jack. Not for something that isn’t essential.’
‘I thought you might be glad to get rid of me,’ he said flippantly, then qualified the statement with a gesture around the sitting room. ‘After eight months of being cooped up with me.’
They didn’t argue any further. They’d become frightened of arguments, which had a way these days of suddenly turning personal and nasty. They also upset the twins, who were getting just old enough to sense an unpleasant atmosphere without understanding it. Jack went ahead with his plans, though not without a certain sense of guilt. Alison had been right: his journey wasn’t really necessary. It was an expensive excuse for getting away.
Kuwait airport still wasn’t taking any commercial traffic so he would have to travel via Saudi Arabia. It took a few days to renew his visas and he left London on Good Friday, 29 March, one month and a day after Operation Desert Storm had driven the Iraqis out of Kuwait. He flew to Riyadh and then on to Dhahran, where he stayed overnight with his friends Eric and Sylvia Patley.
The banks in Kuwait City had been open for only a few days and apparently were still being besieged by their customers. Over dinner he made a joke out of the purpose of his journey, telling the Patleys he’d never expected to have to stand in a queue to collect his life savings. Eric took him seriously though, insisting there was no need for that, offering to lend him whatever he needed. Eric was one of those spontaneously generous people you found among the long-term expatriate community. He and Sylvia were a childless Canadian couple in their sixties who shared a splendid penthouse with eight or ten tiny dogs. They had befriended Jack and Alison during a holiday weekend in Bahrain and ever since had doted like surrogate grandparents on their twin girls. Apart from that there was nothing sentimental about Eric, who had knocked about the Middle East for thirty years, quietly making a fortune in a number of slightly dubious financial enterprises. Eventually, with the blessing of Aramco, the Saudi-American oil giant, he had set up in Dhahran as a freelance investment broker, finding good homes for the tens of millions of surplus dollars that the company’s foreign employees saved every year from their tax-free earnings.
Jack refused the offer. He wasn’t broke, at least not yet; and perhaps an uneasy sense had grown in him lately that he wasn’t the right kind of person to lend money to. However, he did accept Sylvia’s invitation to borrow her car for a couple of days and save the cost of hiring one.
He set off at five the next morning, with daylight just creeping in over the placid waters of the Gulf. The artificial garden city that was Dhahran quickly gave way to desert; almost the only feature along the level, monotonous road to the north was the Tapline oil pipe that kept it company for a hundred and fifty kilometres before turning off to travel to the Mediterranean. The road was already busy with military traffic, though, and he had to stop at half a dozen checkpoints – the Saudi soldiers seeming not quite sure who or what they were supposed to be checking – so it was nearly nine o’clock before he reached the border.
Well before that he had seen the smoke from the burning oil wells, thick black pillars of it, already familiar from the television pictures, rising hundreds of feet above the desert ahead before thinning out and drifting towards the coast on the light westerly breeze.
A long convoy of American military vehicles was being waved through the border post at Al-Nuwaisib, but for him there was the usual wait while the Saudi immigration and customs officials argued languidly with each other over the validity of his visa and the documents of the borrowed Ford Granada. They got done with him eventually and he passed through the arched concrete gateways on the Kuwaiti side, where the formal arrangements seemed to have broken down. There were no passport officials in sight, just a military detail beside the customs office and an animated crowd of soldiers who surrounded the car, ignoring his proffered passport and asking if he had cigarettes to spare. They weren’t begging, they were willing to pay for them, showing him fistfuls of five- and ten-dinar notes, explaining that the Iraqis had stolen the cigarette stocks along with everything else.
Jack shook his head, regretting that he hadn’t had the foresight to bring a few cartons to distribute. It was Ramadan, when tobacco was supposedly forbidden, but many Muslims smoked to ease the hunger pangs of their dawn-to-dusk fast. The soldiers didn’t seem to mind. They were Bedouin, the stateless Arabs whom the Kuwaitis relied upon to fill the ranks of their army.
‘Liberation, but no cigarettes, no nothing,’ a corporal grinned. He had a lapel badge of President Bush stuck in his beret. ‘You American?’
‘British.’
‘Reporter?’
‘No, businessman. I was living here.’
‘Coming back now? Good. Mabruk. I congratulate you.’
‘Mabruk on your liberation,’ Jack said, sidestepping the question.
‘Go in God’s protection.’
He drove on. Past Al-Nuwaisib village the smoke was thicker, floating across from the Wafra oilfield and hanging in the air like a greasy fog. Through it there was just an occasional glimpse of a pale, lemon-drop sun. In the distance the fires started by the Iraqis burned with fierce orange flames against the empty landscape, giving the bizarre impression of an industrial disaster visited upon a wilderness. Already their toxins had begun discolouring the spring flush of grass in the yellow-grey desert beside the road. Here, too, were the first signs of the destruction the allies had wrought on the invaders: the carcasses of a pair of tanks, scorched by high explosive to a reddish-brown colour so they looked as though they’d lain rusting here for years.
Soon he caught up with the vast American convoy, petrol and water tankers and big Mack trucks laden with food cartons, hospital equipment, pumps and generators, a whole life-support system for a sick city. Steadily overtaking the vehicles, passing the turn-off to the beach resort at Al-Khiran, he was seized by a sudden feeling of despondency.
It had nothing to do with the present condition of the country in which he had lived for five years. At least, not directly. Jack didn’t know whether to consider himself lucky or not that he and his family had been back in England last August when the Iraqi tanks had rolled into Kuwait City. Relieved that Alison and the twins were safe, but not so sure about himself. Conscious that friends and fellow-expatriates were facing mortal dangers, taking risks for each other, while he mooned about the house in Banstead contemplating the failure of his company and the shaky state of his marriage. Gentlemen in England now abed. Guilt and frustration in equal measure.
At least he had known more or less what to expect when he came back. Like everyone else he had followed the war and its aftermath obsessively on television and in the newspapers. He had gone through the usual catalogue of responses, from amazement to anger to dismay, and yet had discovered that he was experiencing these things at a distance that was more than physical. He wasn’t detached from them; he simply had no passionate involvement in them. Lacking the sense of affinity that old Gulf hands like Eric Patley had, Jack sensed that Kuwait had become part of his past. He had enjoyed his life here, but had not grown to love the place for itself.
The feeling that afflicted him now was more personal. However, he had shaken it off by the time he reached Umm-al-Haiman, where the road swung towards the coast and met up with the Fahaheel Expressway. There was more evidence here of the one-sided conflict that Saddam Hussein had called the Mother of All Battles: abandoned troop carriers bulldozed into the sand, and the wreckage of coastal artillery, blown out of its concrete emplacements, twisted into bizarre shapes and scattered along the beach like displays of metal sculpture. The sky was growing darker. A canopy of smoke hung over the Gulf and new, thicker clouds of it were rising from the Burgan and Al-Ahmadi fields to the west. The sulphurous fumes seeped in through the car’s ventilators, catching in his throat. From Al-Misila, most of Kuwait City could normally be seen; all that was visible now above a vast grey smudge were the great, minaret-shaped water towers on the promontory and the tops of the taller office blocks.
In the suburbs, in Jabriya and Hawalli, the only people he glimpsed on the streets were gathered, with plastic buckets and bowls, around the American water tankers. By half-past ten he was in the city centre, driving round Safat Square in an eerie twilight with his headlights on. There wasn’t much damage immediately visible, but the atmosphere suggested a place that had been struck by the plague. Uncollected rubbish was piled in the streets beneath withered palms and orange trees. What few electric lights there were shone from the bigger commercial buildings that had been provided with generators. Soldiers lounged at every corner and civilians drifted about in a dazed and aimless way, the men in their pale dishdashas looking like ghosts wandering in the dark.
There was a more purposeful air, however, about the people who stood in long queues outside the banks. With their reopening, a new currency had been issued to replace the old dinars that had been looted in their hundreds of millions by the Iraqis. Jack guessed he was in for a long wait. He considered putting off his business and going to see what had become of his apartment, but decided that would be too unpleasant a beginning.
His own branch of the Gulf Bank of Commerce was in Abdulla Al-Salim Street, across from the warren of little alleys that comprised the Gold Market. He parked the car and walked back, passing a noticeboard outside the bank where a crowd of merchants stood with sheafs of currency, anxiously comparing the serial numbers with those listed as stolen. Behind them the queue reached halfway up the street. Rather self-consciously he went and joined it.
The dim flickering light of oil lamps came from a few of the shops in the Gold Market, but most of them seemed closed. The adjacent Souq-al-Harem, where black-robed market women had crouched over their stocks of mysterious herbal medicines, was quite deserted. It seemed unbelievable that for more than a month this great bazaar of a city had been without currency, without anything to buy or sell.
His thoughts went back to the strange surge of depression that had afflicted him as he drove here. He knew it had been set off by the sight of the road leading to Al-Khiran.
In their first years in Kuwait, when the girls had been babies, Alison and he had spent some of their best times there. They would drive down from the city to a rented chalet at weekends to swim or fish in the Gulf, or just to laze about in the heat. Sometimes they travelled with friends but more often they were alone. They seemed to have been content with each other’s company then, long before the destructive arguments over money had begun, the heavy silences, the diminishing of common interests to the point where almost all they could talk about was the children. One day not long ago he had woken up to the realization that he was living with a stranger.
To friends in England, and to Eric and Sylvia last night, he had repeated what he had told Alison about coming back for the money that had been frozen in his bank account since the invasion. The other reasons were not entirely clear even to him. He was forty years old. He was a business consultant whose business had folded, which was a bit outlandish when you thought about it. Possibly in getting away from Alison he was hoping to find out if he could live without her. Perhaps, with a chequered career behind him and an uncertain future ahead, he was trying to take stock of his life.
It was an hour before he made it through the doors into the opulent marbled interior of the bank. A generator hummed in the background and the strong electric light made him blink after the darkness of the street. There was air-conditioning as well, providing instant relief from the fug of oil smoke. The queue ended at a roped-off barrier, and at every counter customers were arguing with harassed clerks who endeavoured to explain the state of their accounts and the regulations governing the exchange of new dinars for old.
Mr Latif, the assistant manager, was in attendance at one of the counters. He spotted Jack and welcomed him with an astonished grin and a vigorous handshake.
‘It’s good to see you, sir! How are you?’
‘I’m all right. But how have you been?’
‘Oh, I’ve survived. That is something to be thankful for. I’m glad to be back at work, but, as you see, it’s chaos here, absolute chaos.’ Mr Latif gestured hopelessly at the crowd. He was a small, busy Palestinian, gossipy and always anxious to please. His manner seemed more nervous than usual, perhaps because of the hostility his people were encountering over the way some of them had collaborated with the Iraqis. Jack could not see Mr Latif in this role. He had lived here for more than twenty years and seemed quite uninterested in politics. He dressed nattily in business suits and took a flattering interest in his Western customers.
‘You’ve just come back, Mr Rushton?’
‘Only temporarily, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, dear, that is a pity.’ Mr Latif had handled Jack’s business account as well as his personal ones, and was well aware of the problems he’d been facing. ‘No chance that you could start up again? KIC wouldn’t take you back as a partner?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Under Kuwaiti law a foreign business could hold only a minority stake in a local one. The Kuwait Investment Company, fifty per cent government-owned, had been in partnership with Jack’s firm until it had pulled out of the arrangement last July. ‘If they didn’t want me then, I can’t see them wanting me now.’
‘Somebody else, then?’
‘Frankly, I can’t afford to hang around waiting to see.’
‘Then what can I do for you?’
‘I’m afraid I have to close my private accounts.’
Mr Latif disappeared into a back room and returned with printouts of Jack’s statements. They showed roughly what he had expected. He had just over eight thousand dinars on deposit and seven hundred in his current account. That made a total of about fifteen and a half thousand pounds sterling. Together with the five or six thousand he had in London, it was his total cash worth after the winding up of his company. It wasn’t much to show for five years’ work.
‘There’s some interest still to be computed on that,’ said Mr Latif. ‘Unfortunately, under the new regulations, I can’t let you have it all at once. You’re allowed to withdraw only four thousand dinars immediately – about seven thousand pounds. I can probably manage to give you a sterling draft later today, if you wish. After that you’re restricted to withdrawing four thousand dinars a month, so it will be another two months before you have it all.’
