The Babylon Revelation Read online

  The Babylon

  Revelation

  Jack Fernley

  Copyright © 2014, Jack Fernley

  CONTENTS

  Baghdad: Thursday, April 10 2003

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty–Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Baghdad

  Thursday, April 10 2003

  The mob was forty strong. The usual petty thieves, hard men, pimps, smugglers - his crew, a few others to make up the numbers, but mostly his boys. He would have preferred Hassan to have been with them, still the toughest man in Saddam City, but he had taken his family to their village north of Baghdad. He’d be back tomorrow, but it would be all over by then. Still, he had Marek and his halfwitted brother Hussein who could be relied on if things got heavy with the police. Given the few hours’ notice he had to get everything together, he thought this was as good as could be expected. Certainly enough to get the job done.

  The visitor had left Sharif four hours earlier. It had been early afternoon; Sharif was in the barbershop with Marek and a few of the older men. On the pavement outside, a gaggle of boys, lolling around, waiting for errands to run, were picking petty arguments with each other about girls and football. Everyone was itchy, bored, waiting for the Americans to arrive. That little kid from Karada had said he had seen a tank already on the other side of the river, but no one believed him. The city was heavily pregnant with anxiety and anticipation. Most awaited the delivery of terror, mayhem, destruction, death. Sharif was looking forward to the arrival of opportunity. He was planning on using the Americans’ arrival to settle a few old scores and get his hands on some of that gasoline Marek knew had been holed up by the police in Qahira. He was almost giddy with excitement, desperate for it to happen. There was a rustle of excitement from the boys outside, like the low sound of an autumn breeze passing through trees, and then the man was walking into the shop.

  He walked straight in without saying a word, the confidence that came from hundreds of years of ruling exuding from his navy blue, Italian, pinstriped suit. Sharif’s men were taken aback by this appearance, caught off guard in a way that was unusual for men used to living with suspicion. As he strode into the shop, Sharif looked up and, for a brief moment, expected the worst, but the outstretched hand of the visitor calmed him.

  “Sharif El-Azaabar?”

  He nodded, attempting an air of nonchalance for the benefit of his boys. He sensed Marek, to the left, easing his hand along the baseball bat he kept close at hand to teach a lesson to any of the lads who stepped out of line.

  The visitor did not bother introducing himself. He was clearly a man who did not waste time on niceties. His outstretched hand had the cleanest fingernails Sharif had ever seen. He felt embarrassed to put his chicken greased fingers into such an elegant palm.

  He came straight to the point.

  “The Americans are closing in. Forget what you hear on the television or radio, Iraq is over, finished. The city will fall. Perhaps it will fall tomorrow, perhaps the day after, but whatever, it will fall soon. A new dark age will come to us. Certain things have to happen before the Americans arrive. There are things that need to be preserved for all Iraqis before the Yankee thieves take over. You understand?

  “We know you Sharif El-Azaabar. We have always known about you. We have watched you grow, develop your business interests. We have seen you bring order to these streets. We may even have helped you: a word here, an incident overlooked, turning a blind eye where necessary. You have done well. You have a good group of boys here, loyal to you, that’s important. You and your boys, you will be the new Baghdad, a new Iraqi nation that will arise from the ashes of this humiliation. The Americans are stupid. They do not understand the Iraqi people, they will never be able to control the Iraqi people. New leaders will emerge, strong men. You can be one of those men. You can control more than a few streets here in Saddam City, you could run the whole of Saddam City. Move from these stinking streets, with their beggars and cripples and fat whores. Why shouldn’t you have one of those walled palaces in Mesbah or even Mansour, with a swimming pool, palms, plasma screen television, French wine and Russian whores? Why not, Sharif? In this new world, everything is possible, nothing will be impossible in the new Iraq.”

  “Everything is possible, nothing is impossible!” Sharif was intoxicated by the visitor’s speech. He had done well, the man was right, why couldn’t he do even better?

  “Good! I knew you would understand. The new Iraq it starts today! It starts today, does it not, men of Saddam City?”

  The stranger threw his arms out, gesturing to everyone in the room, beseeching each of them to agree with him. There was a murmur of agreement that rose to cries of, “Today! Today!”

  Pleased with the response, the visitor walked back towards Sharif.

  “But, you’ll need some help, you’ll need some tools. And I am here to help you. Come.”

  The visitor walked out of the door. Sharif followed him.

  For a brief moment, he thought this could be a trap. Get him outside, away from his boys, bundle him into a car to the woods around Douvra, strip him naked, shoot him and leave him to the dogs, or a simple shot in the back of the neck, out on the street, in front of everyone. He had done both before.

  Outside a few of the lads were staring at a silver, A class Mercedes. Its freshness contrasted with the grubby, underfed faces of the boys surrounding it, the paintwork blinding them more than the bright spring sunshine. Amid the general dust and plastic detritus of the street it appeared even more beautiful than it must have looked when it had first been wheeled out of the showroom, impossibly beautiful to the urchins standing transfixed in front of it. The visitor’s confident stride and urbane elegance exuded a confidence that the spotty pimps of Saddam City, with their laughable hip swaying, copied from American gangsta videos, could never aspire to. This was a different kind of class altogether. A suit like this, that’s what I need, Sharif thought. If I’m going to be taken seriously, I need to get out of this dishdasha and start dressing the part.

  The crowd parted as they approached the car. Another smartly suited man dropped out of the driver’s car, obeying a short hand signal from the visitor, and walked to the rear of the car, opening the boot. The visitor gestured towards Sharif to have a look. The day was now wearing its heat heavily, but Sharif noted how the visitor remained cool in his suit. Class, he thought. That’s what breeding brings you. That’s what they mean by cool.

  The boot sprung up and the driver pulled out a blanket to reveal the biggest arsenal of fresh and gleaming guns Sharif had ever seen. These were not the scratched, dulled and remodelled Russian weapons he and his boys were used to handling. These were new, unused, well-oiled and straight from a factory in China or even the US itself.

  “Take them”, the visitor said, gesturing at the cargo. Sharif in turn waved at Marek and Hussein to come over. They collected a half dozen AK-47s, several boxes of ammunition and a collection of grenades.

  “A capo needs something special,” the visitor said, and he pulled out a Glock-22. “It’s a gift from me to you. Bu
t if you do a very simple job for and on behalf of the Iraqi people, then I will pay you with another boot full of weapons. And you, my friend, will be ready to lead your people into the future.”

  So four hours later Sharif was leading a motley convoy out of Saddam City and east across the Tigris. It was unusual for him to be leading the boys these days, but this was clearly something that he could not rely on the others to deliver. Not when he had been set a specific task with such specific rewards.

  He had never been to this neighbourhood before, the wide avenues, marked with mulberry trees, apartment blocks built with Soviet money for the bureaucrats of the Ba’ath regime in the early 1970s. Until a few days ago, these streets would have been patrolled by security, turning away ragged imposters from Saddam City. Not now. Now these streets were open to anyone. He and the boys would be back here soon, climbing the walls, tearing open the shutters, taking whatever they wanted. But that was for another day.

  And now they were close to their target.

  Ahead of them the reproduction of the Assyrian Gate marked the entrance to the National Archaeological Museum. He had never been here before. It may have been one of the most famous museums in the world, but what interest was that to a man who had to raise a family in the rough streets of Saddam City? Few of his men, he suspected, had even heard of it, let alone visited it.

  Three security guards stood outside the entrance, Sharif could see they were hopelessly unprepared and unwilling to stop what was about to ensue. He made a big deal of pulling his white Toyota pickup across the entrance in an arc, throwing up a cloud of dust in the direction of the guards. He jumped out and waited while the other cars and trucks pulled in and the boys piled out. Deciding a moment of leadership was called for, he jumped onto the hood of the Toyota and addressed his boys, armed as they were with clubs, knives and sledgehammers.

  “Lads, listen to me. This museum contains treasure you can only dream of. Everything in here is worth more than everything in your home, even the stuff that looks like old bricks and rubbish. We have little time before some other bastards hear about what we’re doing and decide they fancy a bit of it, so let’s go in and take what we can, quickly. We need to be out before the police arrive, so no messing about.”

  The three guards at the front of the building were all armed with rifles, but as he walked towards them, Sharif could see there was only one likely to cause any trouble, the other two looked like they had already wet themselves. All the proper security staff had been sent out of the city days ago to halt the American advance. If there was any security worth having in the city they were trying to save Saddam’s arse or more likely their own, not standing in front of a museum.

  “What do you think you are doing? This is government property and if you don’t return to your vehicles, we will take action!”

  Sharif sized the man up momentarily. He couldn’t afford to lose the momentum here, couldn’t lose time. He raised his new Glock in his hand, lengthened out his arm, took aim and shot at the man. He didn’t even break his stride. The man’s body fell back towards the ground - the shot had gone straight through his eye. Its exit had thrown skull and brain tissue over one of the other guards who had started to vomit.

  “That was some shot,” thought Sharif, “very impressive, I liked that.” He walked past the prone body and straight towards the front doors. The third guard grabbed his vomiting comrade and the pair stumbled off as Sharif’s lads, cheering and shouting, exhilarated by his single act of violence, charged past them and into the museum.

  Sharif entered. There was an open courtyard in front of him and he paused to wait for Marek and Hussein. The boys were streaming past, running off with their plastic bags and sacks, one of them had had the foresight to bring a wheelbarrow, he noted with pleasure. The footsteps and shouts overpowered the screams of the female museum assistants who were running from the building.

  “We’re ready boss, I have the explosives,” it was Marek. Sharif had trusted only him and Hussein with the real mission at hand. The other men had been told to collect as much as possible from the museum and head back to Saddam City, where he had arranged for Ali to meet him at eight o’clock to buy whatever they had managed to loot. The visitor had helped him arrange this, but he himself was not interested in anything except for one item which was held in the museum’s basement, behind a steel door. This was the prize he was to exchange for a further cache of weapons. Sharif and his boys could help themselves to anything else they wanted.

  “This way, boys,” he said and turned to the left. They entered a long gallery. Along the walls were giant wall carvings, fifty metres tall, giant winged bulls with human faces. Even in his haste, he was taken aback by their size, strength and power. To the left one of those idiot sons of Chakri had smashed the head of a terracotta lion with a sledgehammer and a woman was screaming abuse at him. They walked through the gallery. Two more of the lads were snatching gold and silver jewellery from a skeleton in a broken glass case. One of them jokingly threatening the other with the skeleton’s leg bone.

  At the end of the gallery there was a small staircase leading to the basement. At the bottom, there was a single wooden door. It was locked. Behind it there was the sound of frenetic skittering. Sharif stood aside and gestured for Hussein, who pulled up his sledgehammer and struck the door. It took two blows for a hole to be smashed through it and for Hussein to push the door open.

  They were in the Museum’s director’s office, the director himself stood before them with a young assistant. Both wore the cheap beige linen suits and well-trimmed moustaches the state bureaucracy took as their badge of office. Surprised by the intrusion, neither knew what to say. The three visitors paid no attention to them at first, Sharif looking around for the steel door which held their quest. There was the slightest smell of patchouli in the air. Now the younger man pushed past the director and began screaming: “Thieves, you’re destroying our people’s culture, what for? To sell it for a few dinars to the Americans? Have you no shame?”

  “Shut the fuck up or I’ll put this in your face!” Hussein bawled in return holding the sledgehammer up close to the young man’s nose.

  “Professor, open this door!” Sharif pointed to the steel door which dominated the far wall. The older man failed to respond. Sharif could see he was terrified, he was staring back, open mouthed, like one of those war veterans who hung like ghosts around Tahir Square.

  “He will not, we will not!” the younger man shouted out.

  “No matter then,” Sharif replied. “Marek, the explosives.”

  As Marek moved towards the steel door, the younger man ran to stop him.

  Hussein gave him no chance. Spinning the sledgehammer in his arms, he cracked it against the man’s shin. The crack of the iron against his bone soon replaced by the man’s screams as he fell to the floor.

  “I warned you!” spat Hussein.

  Sharif turned to the director who was rooted to the spot in shock, “Professor, we mean you no harm, but I suggest you and your boy get the fuck out of here before my man loses his temper.”

  Without replying, the older man pulled the younger man, still screaming, along the floor and out of the office. Marek, unaffected by the commotion, finished setting the charge, gave a simple “OK” and the trio followed out of the office and up the stairs. Within seconds, the ground shuddered, a few vases crashed to the ground and a cloud of grey mist ran out from the office and up the staircase. “Come on, this is going to be something special!” said Sharif as they ran into the mist and back down the stairs.

  The steel door had buckled under the explosion, revealing a room much like a bank vault. The walls were lined with shelves filled with boxes, each no bigger than a shoebox, all uniformly beige and the same size. Sharif was surprised to find that was all the room contained, just these unimpressive shoe boxes, not the Aladdin’s cave of treasure he had imagined. Still, it was one of these boxes he was after.

  “Box Twenty-eight, that’s the one lads, the only one that matters. X-X-V-I-I-I. Let’s find it and get out before the police get here.”

  Each box had a hand written label on its side with its number written in Latin figures. Sharif would not have recognised the meaning if the visitor had not painstakingly explained it to him. The boxes were organised numerically, there was little problem in finding the box they required.

  Marek pulled it down. “Here it is, boss.”