Fire Hawk Read Free Page B

captors had forgotten to replace the hood at first. For the first time since his arrest he could see his surroundings. The room was some sort of store, large and bare, its windows blacked-out with cardboard. And for the first time too he had seen the faces of his tormentors.
    Sandhurst, he’d finally realised, was the creature with the Saddam moustache who’d arrested him at the Rashid, dressed now in a dark green uniform which bore no insignia. The guard who’d carried out the beatings on Sandhurst’s orders had been the second man at the arrest.
    And there’d been a third person in the room, a man whose presence he’d been unaware of until then. A commanding figure sitting a few feet away from the others, motionless and silent, eyeing him with a brooding intensity, his dog-like face leathery and lined, his hair and mournful moustache a distinguished sandy-grey. This was the man in charge. The man who controlled his fate.For several seconds he’d felt the intensity of his gaze, the commanding presence. This sand-blasted figure was a veritable Saladin of a man. And it was him, this one, he’d decided, who was so desperate to discover what the messenger had whispered to him.
    Suddenly the Labrador eyes had turned angry, the man’s chisel chin jerking forward involuntarily. He’d shouted at his subordinates. He’d been seen by the prisoner and didn’t want to be. The hood had been jammed back on.
    Then, two days ago, Packer had had the feeling they were giving up, that he’d defeated them. Yesterday there’d been no interrogation session at all and they’d let him sleep out his exhaustion. At the end of the day they’d disconnected his arm from the heating pipe to which he’d been shackled, moved him from the stinking toilet of a cell whose vile, shit-caked confines he’d defined through touch on day one of his incarceration, then never again, and hosed him down with icy water. After that they’d let him eat something that tasted like food instead of sewage, and given him a room with a bed instead of a stone floor. He’d felt absurdly relieved. Almost euphoric.
    This morning, however, when his guard told him he was being moved, his fear had returned. Something new was in store and they wouldn’t say what. A show trial perhaps? Some travesty of a court process? A spy hearing for which there was only ever one sentence in Iraq?
    It was hot in the back of the truck now. The tyres had hummed for what seemed like hours. If it was Abu Ghraib they were heading for, they should surely have arrived already. But if not Abu Ghraib, where else? The road they were on sounded smooth and felt straight. The only route from the capital that he knew personally was the motorway to Jordan. With no flights, all commercial visitors to Iraq had to take the ten-hour drive from Amman. But there were other main roads from Baghdad– north, south and east. They could be taking him anywhere.
    If you lucky this finish quick for you.
At that moment the guard’s words had only one meaning for him. Death. The noose over the head, the tightening at the throat, the floor dropping away. He ordered himself not to think about it.
    From time to time during the past days he’d felt intense, bitter anger at his masters at SIS for failing to get him out of there. What were they doing in London? There’d been nothing from the world he knew. Not a word. And Chrissie – surely to God she would have moved heaven and earth for him.
    From time to time, too, he’d ruminated on what madness it was that had made him want to be a spy in the first place. A thirst for excitement had been one motive, and as he lay there in his own filth in the bare cell it had seemed a damned stupid one. But there’d been more to it than that – a fundamental belief that the dissemblers of this world needed sorting out and that he should be one of those to do it. For now, however, the