style="font-size:15px;"> ‘That’s what I read, sir.’
Barlow couldn’t help himself. He went back to Joe of the USSS.
‘Excuse me. I think you really ought to let me through, because I was elected to serve in this building, and you have absolutely no jurisdiction here.’
‘I know, sir,’ said the human refrigerator, and he touched the Curly-Wurly tube in his ear and mumbled into the Smartie on his lapel. ‘I’m not disagreeing with you, sir, not at all. I have no doubt that you are who you say you are, and I really apologize for this procedure. But my orders say clearly that I don’t let anyone through today without a pink P form, and if anyone gets through today who shouldn’t get through today, then my ass is grass. I’m not history, I’m not biology, I’m physics. Wait, Joe, who are those guys?’
Everything without a pass was being sent up Victoria Street, but now an ambulance had drawn up at the checkpoint. The linebacker was staring at it, but Roger wanted his attention.
‘May I see your ID?’ he said. He knew he was being a pompous twit, but honestly, this was London …
With great courtesy, considering what a nuisance the Brit MP was being, the American Secret Service man opened his wallet and produced a badge. It had a blue and red shield within a five-pointed gold star, and on the roundel was inscribed ‘United States Secret Service’.
‘There you go, sir. Is that OK?’
Roger couldn’t help it. These credentials should mean nothing to him, not on the streets of London. But he felt a childish sense of reverence.
‘Er, yes, that is … OK.’
‘Just wait here, sir,’ said the American, and he strolled towards the ambulance driven by the man whose passport said he was called Jones.
‘How are you guys today?’ he enquired, removing his shades, the ones with the little nick in the corner, and holding out his hand for their papers.
‘At the next junction, turn left,’ said the female Dalek of the ambulance satnav.
‘What’s that?’ said Matt the USSS man.
‘She is a machine,’ said Jones. ‘She is stupid. She is nothing.’
As Roger Barlow saw the Levantine-featured fellow hand over a pink P form, a thought penetrated his mental fog of guilt, depression and self-obsession.
‘Oi,’ he said to the American, but so feebly that he could scarcely be heard above the chanting. ‘Hang on a mo,’ he said, almost to himself.
‘Joe,’ called the vast American to one of his colleagues, ‘would you mind checking in the back of the van here? You don’t mind, sir,’ he said to Jones, ‘if we check in the back of your ambulance?’
‘It’s an ambulance, Matt,’ said Joe.
‘I know, but we gotta check.’
The queue behind set up a parping, and down the Embankment the noise of the protesters reached an aero engine howl.
All the Americans were now touching their trembling ears, and the men from the Met were listening on their walkie-talkies.
‘Joe,’ called Matt, as his colleague approached the rear of the ambulance, ‘we gotta clear this stretch of road more quickly. We got the cavalcade in around twenty minutes. We’ve got POTUS coming through.’
‘POTUS coming through,’ said Joe, and slapped the flank of the ambulance as if it were a steer. ‘You boys better git out of the way.’
‘Hang on a tick,’ said Roger Barlow, a little more assertively. ‘You know it really isn’t possible,’ he murmured, as the ambulance went slowly round the back of the green and came to a halt at the traffic lights. ‘I saw those guys a few moments ago.’ Another thought half-formed in his depleted brain.
Jones stowed the forged pink P form on the dashboard and touched the accelerator.
Six miles away the cavalcade circled the Hogarth roundabout, and the first Permanent Protectee shifted in the bulletproof undershirt he had been forced to wear. He looked out of the window and was startled to see a trio of English children, aged no more than eleven or twelve, leering in at him from the side of the road. They were ‘thugged up’ in their grey tracksuit hoods. They were spotty. They were giving him an enthusiastic two-fingered salute.
‘I guess those guys would rather Saddam was still in power,’ said the second Permanent Protectee indignantly, and took her husband’s hand.
And now Bluett’s top man, the sharpest sharpshooter in the US Army, was looking out from his eyrie across Parliament Square and trying to wish the bad feeling away.
Here and there across the crowd, the bleats were turning into an anti-American chorus; and it took Jason Pickel back to the rhythms of the cretinous song the Iraqis sang, the song of adulation of a man who had tortured and killed thousands, some said hundreds of thousands, of his own people.
‘Yefto, bildam! Eftikia Saddam!’
After that statue had been pulled down, on the day of the ‘liberation’, they had briefly and obligingly changed the lyric.
‘Yefto, bildam! Eftikia – Bush!’ they sang, ingratiatingly. But it didn’t have the same swing. It didn’t last.
The trouble with Baghdad was that the fear never let up. You couldn’t sleep at night because it was so hot, and they couldn’t fix the air con in the Al-Mansouria Palace, one of Uday’s little pied-à-terres, a hideous place constructed of marble, crystal and medium-density fibreboard. And even if they had been able to fix the air con, they wouldn’t have gotten no electricity, because no one seemed able to get the generators to work; and even if the generators had worked, the juice wouldn’t have made it across town, seeing as people kept ripping up the copper cables, and barbecuing off the plastic, and melting down the metal. And then the self-same looters, or their relatives, came and screamed outside your compound, and cursed America.
And when you had to go on patrol, in your Humvee, the crowds of protesters would part sullenly, and the sweat would run so badly down your legs that you would get nappy rash, even if you never got off the Humvee, and no one, to be honest, was very keen to get off the Humvee.
‘We’re going into the Garden of Eden, boys,’ his commanding officer had told them as they flew over Turkey in the C-130s. ‘It’s the cradle of mankind, so I want you to treat the place with respect, and remember that these are an ancient people, and they want our help.’
Garden of Eden? thought Jason after he had been there for three weeks. Call it hell on earth.
The economy was shot to hell, the Baathist police wouldn’t turn up for work; and almost the worst thing of all was the food. Wasn’t this meant to be the Fertile Crescent? Surely this was a place so rich in alluvial salts that it had first occurred to mankind to scratch a bone in the earth and plant seeds.
