Spoils of War, page 32
The lieutenant was still pretending to speak no English and wouldn’t tell him where they were going. This time the journey in the stifling, windowless van seemed interminable. Once it was clear of the city traffic it travelled smoothly and fast, but another two hours went by before it turned off and halted twice at what Jack supposed were checkpoints. When it made a final stop and the doors were flung open he found he was far out in the country, on a breezy plain beneath a moonlit sky, with the lights of a town twinkling in the distance. Closer to hand were the control tower and buildings of what could only be a substantial military air base.
It was twenty minutes to midnight but the place was buzzing with activity. A dozen or more troop carriers were lined up at the front of the main building; when Jack was led inside he saw that it was filled with soldiers in camouflage fatigues, wearing the red armbands that he now knew identified the Jandarma, squatting and sitting among their piles of gear. Through the windows facing out on the apron three big transport planes were visible, their holds being loaded with cargo.
The military police escorted Jack down a side passage and the lieutenant knocked on a door at the end. It opened to reveal a plain little waiting-room, furnished only with a bench that ran along three of its walls. Facing the door, between two guards of her own, sat Dale.
She leaped to her feet with a look of delight that turned to alarm at the sight of his arm.
"Jack! They didn’t tell me you were injured!’
‘You should have seen the other fellow,’ he said with a grin. ‘Well, you did see. This isn’t serious. Really.’
She ran forward, hugging him and kissing him greedily on the mouth. Then she held him by the shoulders and studied his face. She looked tired but not distressed, her green eyes bright in spite of the shadows around them. She had got her luggage back too, and had changed into a wide skirt of dark brown tweed and a knitted cream top.
‘What the hell is going on, Jack? They kept me locked up for six hours, grilled me as if I was Patty Hearst and then rushed me out here as though they couldn’t wait to get rid of me.’
‘Likewise. I know about half the story. I’m hoping General Delkin will tell us the rest.’
‘Well, it’s wonderful to see you, anyway. I thought you were dead when that car went for you.’
‘I thought you’d been shot.’
‘Then there you were, getting up and walking like Lazarus while I stood there like a dummy . . .’
‘I saw them pushing you into the van and wondered if I’d ever see you again . . .’
They stood exchanging reminiscences for a minute and then sat down together, with two MPs for company. The ones who had escorted Jack had left.
‘I guess this place counts as the VIP lounge around here,’ Dale said. ‘How come we’re suddenly in favour with these people?’
He repeated what Captain Yekta had told him about the admissions made by Issa Shakir. Her own captors in the barracks across the Bosporus hadn’t explained any of this, but had at least been more forthcoming than Yekta about what was in store for them now. They were at the Eskisehir air base, she said, two hundred-odd kilometres east of Istanbul. They would be travelling to Van in the south-east on a transport plane carrying reinforcements to the border region; then they would be taken on to Delkin’s headquarters at Hakkari.
‘Of course I objected at first,’ she said. ‘Like you, I was screaming about my rights and demanding to see my consul. But when they told me you were going anyway I agreed to come along. Still, I don’t quite see what Delkin wants us there for. The information we’ve given must have been relayed to him, plus everything they’ve screwed out of this Issa. What more can we tell him?’
Jack had thought a good deal about this on the way out from Istanbul. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘The man who questioned me talked about further complications, so maybe something else has changed. On the other hand, it could be a convenient way of keeping us out of circulation for a day or two. They can tell our consulates, hand on heart, that we’re not being treated as suspects and are co-operating with their enquiries. But, since we’ve had to be moved out of Istanbul, we’re not available to be seen. Hence, less pressure on them to release us. I don’t think they can afford to let us go.’
‘In case we blab to the newspapers or something?’
‘Well, the whole thing is pretty sensitive. I’m sure they’ve tipped off the British police about this Iraqi in London who arranged the kidnapping of Karim and then sent his goons after us, and they won’t want to risk letting that become public knowledge. Beyond that, I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, seeing Delkin is an opportunity to find out once and for all what really happened to Colonel Jalloul.’
‘You’re going through all this just to satisfy Hamadi?’
‘I suppose there’s a bit more to it than that,’ he said.
He had wondered about that as well, back in the van that had brought him here. It was curiosity more than anything that drove him on now, he had concluded, a simple need to see things through to their conclusion. In the nine days since he had had that conversation with Hamadi in his garden in Kuwait, this project had taken over his life. Until it was over with he could think of almost nothing else.
They went on waiting for nearly an hour, which seemed to confirm the impression that Yekta and his colleagues had been anxious above all to get them out of Istanbul. Then the door opened and another young Jandarma officer came in. He said he would be escorting them on the flight, and he led them out through the concourse to a door opening on to the apron. Soldiers were formed up in three long lines and were boarding through the rear doors of the planes, but Dale and Jack were taken to a gangway that led up to a forward crew door. Just behind the cockpit was an area curtained off from the main cabin, where they were invited to take two of the eight or nine seats. The aircraft had turned out to be an ageing American Hercules; its fittings were utilitarian but the seating was comfortable enough, and Jack wasn’t surprised when the other seats in what passed for first class were taken by senior officers. A glance back through a gap in the curtain showed the young Turkish soldiers being packed like sardines into the cabin.
It was another twenty minutes, a little after one o’clock in the morning, before the doors were finally closed and the four big engines roared into life. The plane rolled on to the runway and paused for a moment, then trundled forward, gathered speed and lumbered heavily into the night sky.
For nearly three hours the Hercules droned above the plains of Anatolia. Jack and Dale both got some fitful sleep but were awake for the last fifteen minutes of the journey, looking down on the black expanse of Lake Van as the plane descended towards the glow of the town on its eastern shore.
It made a bumpy landing in the dark and taxied to a point well away from the terminal. In spite of that it was obvious that the place was just as busy as Eskisehir had been. The two other Hercules had already landed, several more planes were parked some distance away and endless convoys of trucks were waiting to receive soldiers and cargo.
Jack and Dale were escorted down the gangway ahead of anyone else. There was a sharp chill in the air, reminding them that they were deep in the interior of western Asia now, nearly a thousand kilometres from balmy Istanbul. As the young officer led them round past the nose of the Hercules they made a more surprising discovery. A big helicopter painted in military camouflage was parked twenty metres ahead of them, with its doors open and its navigation lights winking.
‘We’re going in that?’ Dale exclaimed.
‘Unless you want to ride for four hours in a truck?’ the officer said drily. ‘I think the general expects you sooner than that.’
By the fight from the perimeter lamps Jack could see that it was no ordinary helicopter. There were two doors on its left side; one gave access to the cockpit and the other, just behind it, had been slid back to reveal the snout of a large-calibre machine-gun poking out through the opening. On either side of the aircraft, just above the skids, pods holding clusters of rockets were mounted. Three crewmen in dark flying suits were lounging beside it.
‘That’s a gunship, isn’t it?’ Jack said.
‘Agusta two-oh-four,’ one of the crewmen confirmed with a grin. ‘It’s the only way to travel around here.’
‘Are you expecting trouble?’ Dale asked.
‘This is Kurdistan, my friends. But the Kurds have their own problems at the moment and shouldn’t bother us. Are you ready?’
They clambered awkwardly aboard through the opening where the machine-gun was mounted, ducking beneath the door arch and the low cabin roof and taking the seats they were shown just behind those of the pilot and one of his crewmen. Their luggage was stowed under the seats. The third man moved aft to occupy a swivel chair behind the machine-gun.
The one who spoke English was the pilot. Fitting on a white helmet, he jerked a thumb at the open doorway. ‘You’ll find it noisy and a little windy,’ he said, ‘but it’s only for an hour. Strap yourselves in, please.’
While they fastened their seat belts the pilot spoke briefly on his radio to the control tower. He went through a complicated ritual of checking and turning on overhead switches, then started his engines. A low rumble grew into a piercing whine as the rotor blades began to spin and then picked up speed. The gunship shuddered and strained, rose slowly from the apron and then executed a swift banking turn. Cold air from its slipstream whipped in through the doorway. Dale was exhilarated, smiling at Jack and turning to stare out through a porthole. It struck him that there were many things he still didn’t know about her, including the possibility that she was turned on by danger.
Day was just breaking, a paleness in the sky against a high, jagged line of mountains to the east. They were gaining altitude steadily and within a few minutes the level ground below them had turned from black to misty grey. To the south loomed another forbidding wall of mountains, and they were heading straight towards them.
When the sun came up it revealed peaks smothered in snow, deep gorges and eroded valleys with faint tracks winding through them. Below the snow line the land was rocky and almost bone-dry, with little vegetation and only scattered signs of human settlement. These were the mountains of the southern Taurus that Zakarios had talked about, a bolt-hole for Kurdish guerrillas and a gateway to refugees and smugglers from Iraq, a yellow-grey wilderness that it was hard to imagine anyone choosing to inhabit.
The helicopter was contour-flying, skimming past the peaks and hopping from one pass to the next, so it was only occasionally that they got a wider view, now and then glimpsing the road to the east that wound laboriously up from Van. The cold was numbing and the air had grown thin, making it hard to breathe until Jack and Dale strapped on the oxygen masks they were shown. The crew remained alert but casual in a studied way, the pilot holding crackling conversations on the radio and occasionally shouting descriptions of landmarks to his passengers over the howl of the turbojet engines. Down in that gorge was the Botan River, a tributary of the Tigris. Over there was Cilo Dag, at over four thousand metres one of the highest mountains in Turkey.
When they had been flying for forty minutes he called over his shoulder: ‘We have a little time to spare. You want to see our most spectacular sight?’ Without waiting for an answer he spoke a few words into his radio and altered course slightly to the west.
The landscape remained much the same for the next few kilometres. Then a valley appeared ahead, opening up between the flanks of the mountains to become wider than the others they had seen. The gunship descended into it, following the southward course of a narrow river swollen by melting snow and tumbling over rocks. There was suddenly a stark little village on its left bank, and a short way further on was a narrow road, clogged by a long, stationary line of civilian trucks. They were all facing to the west, all heavily laden with people or baggage, and were apparently blocked by one that had broken down. The helicopter was past the spot in a flash, still heading on down the river. Puzzled, Jack tried to ask the pilot what they were supposed to be looking for but he shook his head and raised a hand in a gesture that said: wait and see.
The valley continued to widen out. The river had grown broader too, and shallower, and the gunship was flying low enough to churn up the water with the downdraft from its blades. A short way ahead the river turned to the east, into a defile where the mountainsides became suddenly steeper. The pilot followed it, edging over to the left bank as they rounded the bend.
And then they did see.
The whole side of the mountain that rose from the right bank was smothered by people and their possessions. From the river’s edge up to a height of several hundred metres the bare slopes were covered by a great mass of humanity, moving and standing and sitting among a litter of tents, blankets, sacks, cardboard boxes and sheets of polythene formed into makeshift shelters. The smoke from hundreds of small fires hung over them, blending with the morning mist off the water and drifting across it to where the Turkish soldiers stood on the opposite bank, on guard against any attempt to cross the river.
The sight was not what the pilot had called it, spectacular; it was chaotic, grotesque, almost unbelievable. There must have been tens of thousands of people just here who had spent the night in the open; others, the luckier ones, were no doubt inside the shelters, and more could be glimpsed beyond the next bend in the river, an entire nation uprooted and set down on this unwelcoming frontier. Drab grey and brown clothing was relieved by the outlandish pinks and blues of women’s dresses and headgear. The ground beneath them was churned into mud and what few trees there were had been stripped down to their trunks for firewood; it was as though the refugees had taken over a Great War battlefield.
The pilot had reduced his speed and was flying low, close enough for the Kurds to be seen no longer as a blur but as individuals. Their faces were turned up to the helicopter, most of them looking indifferent but some shaking their fists at it. Mingled smells of woodsmoke, cooking and excrement wafted in through the gun door.
What must once have been an unmarked frontier was now defined by new, shining coils of barbed wire on this side of the river. A road ran parallel to it, choked with a mixture of military and civilian vehicles. A kilometre or so further on it reached a junction giving access to a low concrete bridge, and the pilot gained some height and went into hover above it for a minute. There was a semblance of a border post here, with a small customs building and a striped boom across the road on the Turkish side, but clearly all civil functions had been taken over by the army. An open truck laden with bulging sacks had just crossed the bridge and was slithering up the muddy slope, chased by a swarm of refugees. Some tried to clamber onto it and were fended off with the rifle butts of Turkish soldiers sitting on the cargo. When it finally stopped, the troops began opening the sacks and throwing flat loaves of unleavened bread into the crowd, who scrambled and fought over them like animals.
‘We do what we can for them,’ the pilot shouted at his passengers. ‘We try to feed them, but there’s never enough.’
Dale was shaken by what she was seeing, no longer getting a charge out of the experience. ‘Why can’t you let them in?’ she demanded. ‘Give them temporary shelter, at least?’
‘Many thousands have already come in. Then we had to close the border. They say there may be a million of them in these mountains. How can we take them all?’
The road on the Iraqi side was also jammed with cars and trucks. Some were being allowed across the bridge; others had been turned back, several of them getting stuck in the mud beside the road while trying to reverse, adding to the confusion.
The gunship surged forward and continued its journey. It banked away from the river and gained more height, returning to flit among the icy peaks which now seemed tranquil and almost welcoming. After a few minutes Hakkari came into view, a jumble of low buildings perched on a rocky plateau. Although the sun was well up now, the town still lay in the shadow of the Cilo Dag mountain. The military base took shape as a rectangle of high metal fencing enclosing ramshackle barracks and rows of tents, set up no doubt as emergency quarters for the extra troops that had been drafted in.
Half a dozen helicopters were parked on a paved square marked out with white circles. The gunship hovered above one of these, eased itself down and settled on its skids. The pilot disengaged the rotor and cut his engines; suddenly the unearthly scream that Jack and Dale had somehow got used to was gone, replaced by the whip of the decelerating blades and beyond it the eerie silence of the mountains.
Clambering out of the helicopter, stiff and cold, they found another officer of the Jandarma waiting to meet them. He was a young captain who introduced himself as Brigadier-General Delkin’s aide-de-camp. The notion that they were still prisoners seemed to have been forgotten, for he gave them a smart salute and shook their hands before helping them with their luggage and leading them off to meet the general.
30
He didn’t look the way Jack had imagined he would. For one thing his appearance, like that of a small minority of Turks, was more European than Middle Eastern; for another, it wasn’t soldierly. He had a pale, chubby, clean-shaven face and black hair edged with grey, and he wore glasses with old-fashioned Buddy Holly frames. Beneath the quilted combat jacket and thick khaki pullover, his body looked soft and paunchy. If anything, the uniform emphasized the want of a military bearing; General Delkin might have been an out-of-shape businessman paying to take part in some weekend war game.
Nevertheless, to have reached such a rank at his age, which was the early forties, he must have some outstanding quality. At a guess, it was his intelligence. His English was excellent, and for half-past five in the morning his manner was energetic by anyone’s standards.
