Sandstealers
Ever wondered what it is like to work in a war zone? ‘We live more in one year than most people do in a lifetime,’ is Danny Lowenstein’s simple retort. Set in a world where life is cheap, vengeance is long and betrayals can be deadly, “Sandstealers” is a masterly thriller – infused with a deep knowledge of modern war and its witnesses.Danny Lowenstein is a big shot war correspondent with the world at his feet. But when an interview goes wrong and he's ambushed on a lonely road in Iraq, questions are asked. Was it a set-up? And was he deliberately sent to his death by one of his own – the tight-knit group of adrenalin-addicted journalists who are supposed to be his best friends? Rachel, Becky, Kaps and Edwin are ‘The Junkies’: together they’ve been through thick and thin and seen the horrors of war. Yet theirs is also a tangled web of intense relationships and dark rivalries. Could one of them have become Danny’s killer?All’s fair in love and war. Including the murder of a friend…
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BEN BROWN
Sandstealers
For Geraldine
‘We live more in a year than most people live in a lifetime.’
DANIEL L. LOWENSTEIN, war correspondent
Table of Contents
Post-Liberation Iraq, August 2004
Danny Lowenstein had a premonition he would die that day. It wasn’t unusual for him to foresee his own death: such thoughts went with the territory. The main thing was not to take them too seriously, otherwise he’d never get out of bed in the morning.
He cursed the sun, which had barely been born into Iraq’s morning sky. Already a sapping heat was rising from the tarmac and soon the temperature would hit a grotesque 50 degrees Celsius. He daren’t translate it into Fahrenheit. As he stood at the petrol station, the road to Iskandariya shimmered ahead of him. Danny wondered if the surface might evaporate before his eyes.
For now he was still fresh. He had sprayed himself with so much deodorant it almost choked him, but his skin felt good beneath the linen shirt he’d bought at Heathrow and his favourite pair of chinos. They were the pseudo-military sort, with extra pockets on the thighs which bulged with a notepad, assorted pens, a small Dictaphone—another terminal purchase—his US passport and press accreditation, some scrunched-up dollar bills and chewing gum for when the day started to drag him under.
Danny knew that, before long, the same skin that was now so pleasantly clean and dry would be soaked in sweat. Little streams would crawl down the valley between his shoulder blades towards his waist, where they’d meet his tightly buckled belt and form an irritating reservoir. The fresh clothes would start to cling to him like cloying dishcloths. His rigorous dawn shower back at the hotel would be redundant and he’d wonder why he’d bothered to make the effort at all: he might as well have just put back on what he’d worn the day before. By dusk, he’d be drained of whatever energy he’d woken up with.
‘God, sometimes I hate this country,’ he told Mohammed, who was only half listening.
‘Don’t say bad things, Mr Daniel. I think you would miss us.’
‘I’d miss you, Mohammed, of course I would, but not a whole lot else.’
‘There is not another story like it, not anywhere in the world. You told me so yourself.’
‘Yeah, I know, our Vietnam and all that. But Heaven help your country if that’s all you’ve become—a story. The thing is, I’m just so…’
‘Tired?’
‘No, not tired. Exhausted. Sorry if I’m kind of grumpy.’
‘Woman trouble?’
‘You could say. And this heat, and this war and this…I mean, just take a look around us.’
He waved towards the sprawling strip of charmless shops just beyond them, many selling satellite dishes, fridges and all the other consumer electricals that had flooded in after liberation. Snapped power cables drooped down around them mockingly. On the road ahead, battered cars jostled one another amid a cacophony of horns, most of them unheeded. It seemed to Danny that the traffic, like everything else, was getting worse.
‘You know, I remember the day I got my first visa for this place: 19th April 1990. I’d never wanted anything so much. Now? Two Gulf wars and a fucked-up occupation later, I don’t think I’d care if I never came back.’
Mohammed stood next to him and surveyed the scene, not with Danny’s weariness but the alert eyes of an intelligence officer: scrutinising faces, analysing cars, studying young policemen behind their sandbags—were they really police, or insurgents in impeccable disguise? Nothing was as it seemed.
A teenage pump attendant slid in the nozzle.
‘Can’t believe you forgot to fill up last night,’ said Danny.
‘I told you, it was Farrah’s birthday.’
Danny felt bad. He should have sent her a present. He’d remembered with all Mohammed’s other kids.
‘But even so, I mean, for fuck’s sake.’
Danny hated it when things went wrong. It made him feel the whole story, the whole day, might be cursed. He glanced at his watch. They were already running late for the rendezvous with Abu Mukhtar, and he was uneasy.
‘How long till we get there?’
‘Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.’
‘I hope you can find this al-Talha, or whatever they call it. It’s not even on the map.’
‘No problem—we ask people.’
As a rule, Danny liked to have a ‘chase car’, a second vehicle following behind, which could rescue them if they broke down in the badlands. Today, Saad, who usually drove it, was sick with an upset stomach—or claimed he was. Either way, it meant they were travelling alone.
First the chase car, then the petrol. Bad omens, thought Danny.
Mohammed’s hawkish eyes continued their search for anything that was different or out of place. It was how he lived these days, even in his own street in Karada—always watching.
