Authors: Roy David
Kowolski glanced at Alex. Flicking the fingers of her right hand against her thumb in a steady silent rhythm, he guessed it was her turn to test the nerves. He felt like putting a comforting hand on her knee but was sure it would be taken the wrong way.
They reached the main avenue of the Abu Ghraib complex. Kowolski checked his watch; the journey from the airport took twelve minutes. His budget was fifteen. Part of Saddam’s two-billion dollar display of profligacy lay in this sprawl of three palaces. Palm trees lined the wide boulevard like a guard of honour, some shading the 65-ton, uranium-armoured Abrams tanks lurking among them.
Alex gazed at the metal monsters. She wondered if the tank that fired on the Palestine Hotel a couple of weeks back was among them. Two journalists were killed in the attack on the media centre, several injured. She did not know the cameramen from Reuters and Spanish television who were killed. But she reckoned it must have been unbearable for their families to know they had died by the purposeful hand of their own allies.
Outside the main palace, Kowolski took Alex by the arm, surprising her. ‘Shall we do the grand tour together?’ he smiled.
She glanced across at him. He was difficult to work out. One minute the cold apparatchik, the next exuding a paradoxical degree of warmth.
They walked on into the main reception area. Alex disengaged from him on the pretext of wanting to take some pictures. Strolling arm in arm didn’t figure on her agenda. More that she wanted him at arm’s length. Snakes always felt smooth to the touch – but they could strike in an instant and some had a deadly bite.
Saddam Hussein’s ostentatious influence lay in every corner of the palace. His embossed initials stood stark on the black and gold jalousies of each ornate window in the building, sculpted on its many grand entrance columns.
‘Talk about obsessive grandeur,’ Kowolski said, running his fingers over the carvings. ‘And look at all this.’ He gestured at a couple of chandeliers, ripped from the ceiling by looters, then discarded.
He bent down to pick up a fragment. ‘You know, Alex,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘What you see is not what you get with Saddam.’
‘Plastic!’
Kowolski smiled. It was the same in all of Saddam’s palaces – tat and bling that would run Las Vegas close.
‘We launched cruise missiles on this palace when Operation Iraqi Freedom began – a pity Saddam wasn’t at home,’ Kowolski said.
Alex rattled off several shots of the substantial damage, one whole wing blasted to ruin. They made their way through a myriad of rooms, stepping over mounds of rubble. Lumps of pre-cast concrete hung at crazy drunken angles from the ceilings, their mangled steel rod innards hideously exposed like the intestines of a giant beast. Glass from shattered windows covered the floors, crunching like gravel underfoot.
‘Some place, huh?’ Alex said.
‘They’re all the same,’ Kowolski countered. ‘Most of them built while the UN sanctions were operative – oil for food, oil for medicine. He turned it into an oil-for-palaces charade for himself and his buddies. There are lots of places like this, dozens of square miles of one man’s vulgar obsession with himself – each one with a complex of underground bunkers.’
Kowolski felt a well of anger rise within him and kicked out at a piece of the plastic junk, sending it crashing across the floor.
‘The State Department did a survey three years ago that
reckoned he had as many as four dozen palaces. Can you imagine that? They came up with a count of twelve hundred buildings on these sites – mansions, villas, you name it. The ordinary Iraqi Joe Shmoe could kiss his ass.’
‘Not too loud,’ Alex whispered, ‘he might still have the rooms bugged.’
‘Yeah? Well we’re coming for you – you sonovabitch,’ he shouted, his words echoing eerily on the sad bare walls.
Returning to the main reception area, they were told Rumsfeld was now ‘off limits’ in a closed meeting with army commanders, so they gratefully accepted a coffee and wandered outside.
Kowolski closed his eyes and lifted his face up to the sun, taking a deep breath as if to cleanse himself of the depressing atmosphere of inside. ‘Say, do you fancy sticking around for a little while? There’s a little job that’s cropped up.’
‘I… don’t know,’ Alex said, suddenly nervous.
‘I’ll personally make sure the money’s good – top rates. That is, if you don’t have anything or anyone to rush back to.’
She found herself thinking of a raft of excuses why she couldn’t stay in Iraq. Each reason abruptly countered by her inner self. What was facing her at home? She had no work lined up. Only the dreary state she’d slid into. And the endless lonely nights.
Kowolski could see he’d struck a hopeful chord – she hadn’t refused outright. But could he trust her not to blab if she did turn him down? ‘Look, can I tell you something in complete confidence?’
She shot him a hesitant glance and let out a sigh. ‘Okay,’ she said, feeling her resistance crumbling. ‘Shoot.’
Kowolski eyed her seriously. ‘This is not for publication, right?’
‘What? You caught Saddam and you want me to capture his best side?’
‘Cut the bullshit, Alex.’
Kowolski outlined the job. She would be embedded with the crew of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, recording their daily duties in and around the Green Zone, going out with them on patrol.
‘I want you to focus on one man in particular – a young lieutenant, Matt McDermott, a great kid, totally committed to this cause.’
‘Why him?’
‘Because, before much longer, he’s going to be the biggest thing since buttered bagels.’
‘Really?’ She could not help but notice the sudden look of fierce determination in Kowolski’s eyes.
‘Really,’ he said emphatically. ‘There won’t be anyone back home who won’t know the name of one Lieutenant Matt McDermott.’
* * *
Carl Whittingham, a senior aide at the Defense Department, leant against the huge sandstone pillar outside Abu Ghraib palace, watching Kowolski approach. They had attended the same university and that intimacy had added an extra layer to their working relationship.
‘I got two minutes, Gene. The boss is due out soon. What gives?’
‘Just an idea I’ve been running through my head. But I don’t want it to look as though it’s come from me, so if you’re game…’
Whittingham was not slow on the uptake, immediately realising there could be something in it for him, the chance of a Brownie point or two. ‘Fire away.’
‘We’ve got this kid, right here in Baghdad, a young lieutenant. First assignment, he goes out and bags fifteen Hajiis, a haul of AK-47s, RPGs, the lot. Now imagine this. We bring him home, turn on the lights, he meets the President, front page of
Time Magazine
, every goddam magazine, television… you name it. What’s that going to do to the President’s popularity?’
‘Sends it skywards.’
‘And, boy don’t he need it right now. I mean, the Columbia space shuttle tragedy, all this shit here. This lieutenant fits the bill, too – Joshua William College, West Point.’
‘Joshua William?’ Whittingham whistled softly. ‘Wow.’
Kowolski extracted a sheet of paper from his briefcase. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, handing it over. ‘And it’s your idea, Carl. One hundred per cent, okay?’
‘Sure. Thanks, buddy. I’ll have to wait for the right moment to float it.’
‘Right. Attaboy.’ Kowolski gave him a slap on the back, then watched him saunter off with a noticeable spring in his step.
* * *
Later, Alex said she’d accept the job. Despite initially trying to argue herself out of the commitment, deep down she hoped it made sense. Keeping busy might help her forget her troubles and, of course, she needed the money. But it had been a close-run thing.
Because she was afraid of what she might be letting herself in for.
5
Their car snaked through heavy traffic, heading east of the city for the al-Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris. Kowolski let out a sigh of relief. The day had gone as well as planned.
‘I would have put you up in the Al Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone but our boys threw the press out when they took it over a couple of weeks ago. So you’re in the Palestine with the rest of the world’s media.’
Kowolski was saying something Alex already knew. Greg Spencer, an Australian writer pal who was based at the El Rashid, called her at the time grumbling about the move.
Alex studied the set-square haircut of the driver’s fat neck in front of her. Army precision down to the last hair. ‘Is it safe now at the Palestine?’
‘Sure, we’ve set up a buffer zone between the Palestine and the Sheraton.’
‘I didn’t mean from the opposition.’
He shot her a glance.
Feisty, jeez
. Was she spoiling for a fight? ‘That was an unfortunate event – deeply regrettable.’
‘Yeah, the tank commander didn’t know this eighteen-storey building, standing out like a sore thumb against the landscape, was home to the world’s press. You telling me he didn’t have the co-ordinates and that someone looking at them through binoculars from a fifteenth floor could have simply been a journalist?’
‘They thought he was a forward obs man for the enemy. The military said shots came from the direction of the hotel.’
‘And a hundred journalists at the hotel flatly refuted that,’ she said, studying his deepening frown. ‘You saying that the attack on the al-Jazeera Baghdad office that killed another journalist
and the one on the Abhu Dhabi television station were also accidents? All on the same day? Jesus.’
‘You seem well versed with events.’
‘What? For a photographer? Think I’m some dumb-ass happy snapper?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
She felt like sounding off on feminism, the rights of women, how men could be total pricks. But, knowing what little she did of him, she was pretty sure it would be a waste of time.
‘It’s laughable,’ she said derisively. ‘The US Army kills three journalists, so the Pentagon says news organisations should pull their reporters from the city – probably because some of their stories were not to America’s liking.’
‘But they haven’t.’
‘Damn right.’
An awkward silence prevailed as the car entered Firdos Square. Alex could see the Palestine Hotel overlooking the square’s giant roundabout. She gazed at the empty plinth which featured in that iconic picture of the war – the toppling of Saddam’s statue.
She couldn’t help but think how convenient it all was that the spectacular ‘image of freedom’, so quickly broadcast around the globe, happened right in front of the world’s media. Just two days after they had all been moved there from the Al Rashid Hotel.
Back in New York, she’d seen the wide-angled pictures of the same event. Most outlets chose to ignore them, preferring to use the medium shots and the close-ups of the statue falling.
The wide-angled pictures showed the square sealed off by tanks and only a hundred people or so in what the media called ‘this spontaneous outburst of support for America.’
She also knew many of the crowd celebrating the statue’s removal were from Ahmed Chalabi’s rag-tag ‘Free Iraqi Force’, a group of about 700 men who the Pentagon had flown into Kurdish-controlled Iraq only a day or two earlier.
Chalabi, one of the more prominent Iraqi exiles living in the US, wanted his men to lead the way into the country in the initial onslaught but, unarmed as they were, such aspirations were quickly dismissed by the military.
Alex thought she might ask Kowolski about it all sometime. It would not have surprised her to know he had had a hand in it.
Kowolski, too, had been thinking about the statue. Its removal had been the perfect piece of psy-ops, or what some colleagues at the Pentagon referred to as PPR, ‘political public relations’. The term was so much better than ‘propaganda’.
It had all gone smoothly until some schmuck had draped the head of Saddam with the Stars and Stripes, evoking an immediate image of an American occupation. Was it any wonder it did not go down at all well with 27 million Iraqis?
That one act, while it might have puffed out a few feathers at home, certainly did a lot to foster the current feelings of unrest here. Kowolski thought it was like many things in life; if you wanted a good job doing, you had to do it yourself.
Left entirely to him, it would have been an Iraqi flag.
Their driver stopped at a checkpoint. A soldier sauntered over to the car from the other side of a barrage of razor wire, a camouflaged tank behind him. Kowolski showed him his ID, told the guy they were on Pentagon business. The car was allowed through, stopping outside the hotel next to a row of Chevy SUVs.
Alex let the driver carry her bag, declining his offer to take her camera case and laptop. Before entering the reception, she glanced up at the façade of what was one of the country’s tallest buildings, saw its name emblazoned in large letters.
Yep, she said to herself, it sure was mighty hard not to spot.
* * *
The foyer was heaving.
It reminded Alex of a convention of shoe salesmen she’d once
covered in Oklahoma City in her early days. The same sort of squabbling noise. Not as many suits.
Instead, jeans and t-shirts, combat trousers, some people wearing scarves draped loosely low around their necks but which would be pulled up to their faces when driving downtown into the dust and sand of the city and its 5 million souls. A couple of guys, still wearing dark glasses, loafed around with macho machine gun belts slung across their shoulders.
A frenetic throng of journalists, TV and radio people, contractors, armed private security minders, soldiers, and home-based hustlers and fixers. One such of the latter group was holding court at the far end of the room, bearded and robed, but with a tailored Western jacket thrown over the shoulder of his long white thoub. A foot in both camps.
‘Here’s your key, Alex.’ Kowolski handed her the fob. ‘Don’t lose this – it cost a small fortune.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘In the next room. Just in case you get lonely.’ He laughed loudly, disappearing into the crowd.