The easy flat of the road beneath his feet is becoming more unpredictable, a landscape now of ragged rock. He’s being taken further from the car, from the reassurance of everything he’s ever known.
The hood has ramped up his fear. He is dizzy, one moment feverishly hot, the next perishingly cold. His chest is compressed, a dead weight pushing down on it, like a cardiac arrest. Lower down, there is only slush and mush, Edwin’s curry from the night before. He has lost control of his bowels. Rewinding back to infancy, or spooling onwards to senility, his sphincter widens. He tries to clench his buttocks, but then surrenders. The first trickle of shit starts to ooze into his boxer shorts. He is beyond embarrassment. Nausea is rising up through him and he needs to vomit, but nothing emerges, merely the foretaste of it in his throat. He remembers the toilets when he’s been embedded with the army, the ones marked ‘D & V’, set apart, as if for lepers, to accommodate troops afflicted with diarrhoea and vomiting.
Just as his body will no longer obey him, neither will his mind. The committed atheist who has spent a lifetime scorning religion is now praying with holy zeal: Please, oh Lord, I promise I will always worship you. I have sinned but am ready to repent. Oh merciful Lord, just get me out of here. Right now, and I mean right fucking now! I’ll never set foot in a war zone again, or get on another plane, or write another story, so help me God. Amen.
But he knows that this time there’ll be no last-minute reprieve, no scoop, no prize. Instead of the award ceremony, there’ll be the funeral. He has pushed his luck one story too far, taken one chance too many, and he wishes more than anything he’s ever wished for that he could step back into that refreshing, effervescent hotel shower and start this day again.
Deprived of sight, all Danny can see are his alternative futures. Will it be the one that lasts for just a few more seconds, with a cursory bullet to the back of his hooded, anonymous head; one more death among so many in the catastrophe of Iraq? Or will it drag on for weeks, with the perpetual terror of incarceration in a cage, broken only by video appearances, paraded bowed and broken, begging for his life? And will it end, as it has for so many others, with a screaming madman’s knife hacking at his neck, captured in Technicolor? Images flash before him: Nick Berg being slaughtered by al-Zarqawi in person; the four American contractors, shot, burnt, mutilated, and their remains hung from a bridge in Fallujah.
This time he’s not reporting the story, he is the story. Other journalists will circle over his carcass. He pictures it—cold, blue and flabby—lying on a slab in a mortuary full of flies. The morgue is familiar to him; he’s been there countless times in Baghdad, Grozny, Gaza, Mogadishu—all the visits blend into one. He has counted more corpses than any man should have to—hundreds, probably thousands, of them, and now he can add one more. It’s wearing the clothes he put on that morning, when he was getting dressed to die, including those lucky, lucky boots.
He sees the funeral too. Who will come? The Junkies, of course; his adopted family, addicted to their work, their drugs and each other. Rachel inconsolable, yet still so fuckable in her sleek black dress. Becky, for once not laughing. Edwin and Kaps, his brothers in arms. Others will be there too—the media glitterati, and some of the Great and the Good who have admired his work: politicians, editors, novelists. There will be generous obituaries, mini hagiographies. Failures and excesses will be discreetly airbrushed out; there’ll be no mention of his many sins. All in all, his death will be an ego trip. Too bad he won’t be able to enjoy it.
Rough hands force him down on to his knees. A rifle butt smashes his mouth. The shock of it reminds him of his boyhood: Lukas hitting him, Camille watching. He tastes his own blood, sour and sickly. His tongue discovers a couple of uprooted teeth and briefly probes the holes they’ve left behind.
The final act. One more collective shout of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ from his kidnappers, a kind of choral harmony to signal that the time has come. The hood is ripped from his head but he cannot look; his eyes are screwed shut.
The end of a gun is shoved into the nape of his neck. The trickle of faeces becomes a torrent now, running down his legs. Danny is shaking so hard it looks, perversely, as if he’s laughing. There are no more memories or predictions, no more thoughts—rational or otherwise. No more hypocritical prayers. His kneeling, hooded body is heaving backwards and forwards with such convulsions that he barely hears the trigger.
Jamail, the avuncular hotel manager, had assigned them the ‘Presidential Suite’. He said he’d persuaded the owner they could have it for nothing, though it was usually empty in any case. The suite, rather like the country itself, had seen far better days and no self-respecting president would go near it. It sat atop the taller of the Hamra Hotel’s two towers with a sweeping view of the city, but the threadbare carpet was blighted by wine and coffee stains, and there were cigarette burns on both the sofas. Rachel and Becky sat on one of them, staring at a dreary painting on the wall—a waterfall surrounded by forest on some other continent. At first they had cried till their throats ached, but now they simply sat in shock. A pair of mosquitoes strafed their ears, taunting them in their grief.
Edwin and Kaps busied themselves at the kitchen table, studying a map of Fallujah, trying to pinpoint where it was that Danny had been ambushed. Edwin, tank commander turned war reporter, was in his element, applying with military precision the various coordinates the US Army had given them. He smoked a Marlboro right down to its butt as fingers, rulers and pencils roamed purposefully around the American map he’d stolen from the Green Zone.
‘Look, it must have been here, around this bridge.’ Edwin lit another cigarette from the old one, doing it without even looking.
‘But why would he have been there?’ argued Kaps. ‘Where would that road go that would interest anyone, let alone Danny?’
‘Oh, stop it!’ Rachel shouted. ‘What does it matter where the fuck it happened? It’s not going to bring him back, is it? He’s dead, isn’t he? Even if they’ve kidnapped him, they’ll put him in an orange jumpsuit, stick him in a cage and…’
The others knew she was right. Thoughts of death were consuming all of them; not just Danny’s but potentially their own. It could so easily have been one of them and so there was a guilty, furtive exhilaration. They were still alive.
Becky had been first to hear the news. She’d just finished lunch when ‘Dancing Queen’ had rung out on her mobile. It was Adi, the diplomat. Ever since she’d met him at a drinks party in the embassy, he’d pestered her with calls in an effort to ‘like…maybe get to know you better’. She remembered with mild disgust how the folds of fat rolled off him and fumes of halitosis wafted from his mouth. The ring on his chubby finger told her there was a loyal wife—poor, deluded dear—waiting for him back home in the Washington suburbs. However desperate Becky might become, however much she yearned for warm flesh to wake up with, she made herself promise she would never, ever sleep with him. Why couldn’t one of his colleagues have propositioned her instead? One of those clean-cut diplomats with perfect partings and bright white teeth, the Paul Bremer clones who looked like the stars of commercials for hair restorer or denture cleanser.
‘Hey, Becky—Adi here.’ The sound of his voice made her heart sink. She began assembling implausible reasons why she would be busy every night for the next three weeks of her tour of duty.
‘Oh, I…Adi, I was just…’
‘Listen to me carefully. There’s been a bad shooting on some road south of Baghdad. Near Iskandariya. I’ll get straight to the point: it’s Daniel Lowenstein. He’s a friend of yours, I believe?’
‘Yeah, course he is. Oh my God.’
‘Look, I’m really sorry, but his car was ambushed a few hours ago. Shot up pretty bad