H.M.S. Unseen Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the city. Food was easy to find, and he purchased grilled lamb and rice with extra pita bread from a street trader. He refilled his water bottles from a hose at a gas station and slept on a bench in a dark corner of the bus depot. So far as he knew, only the curbside cook had seen his newly bearded face, and even then he had kept his head well down, mumbling his order and offering no conversation.
    Eilat left before dawn, following the river as it swung east away from the city toward the Iranian border. His little map marked the spot 80 miles farther on at the oasis settlement of Ali Al Garbi, where the wide stream would turn southward again, toward the Gulf—and the marshes.
    For four more days and nights he walked and slept intermittently, both under the raging desert sun and through the unbearably hot and clammy nights. He saw few travelers, spoke to no one, and ate and drank only what he carried with him. His ration was three pieces of bread and four pints of water every twenty-four hours. Twice each day he would move down to the river and immerse himself in the waters. Then he would walk on, in cool but heavy robes, which dried out all too quickly.
    He arrived exhausted and dehydrated in Ali Al Garbi just before midnight on July 5. He located a water pump in the middle of the town and stood drinking alone in the dark for almost ten minutes. He filled his water bags again and found an abandoned market stall on the sand, where he slept until dawn. He was two days away from al’Amarah, which was a much bigger town, but there was nothing along the route. Thus Eilat could not leave Garbi without replenishing his food supply. And he hoped there would be a café that opened early.
    His luck, which had held for a long time, ran out there. Nothing opened until nine, and Eilat was obliged to wait around for three hours. He finally ate breakfast, drank copious amounts of fruit juice, and found another shop to buy bread for the journey. Because of the heat, he was wary of taking even prepacked meat, but he risked a few tomatoes and some tired green local lettuce leaves. In the second shop he had noticed a newspaper which carried a front-page photograph of a burned-out Army jeep, under the headline:
    IRAQI SOLDIERS DIE REPAIRING ARMY VEHICLE.
    It took him another three and a half days to reach his turning point at Qal At Salih, deep in the eastern marshes, only 30 miles from the Iranian border. It was easily the most hellish part of the journey. The unforgiving sun beat down from morning to night, the days grew hotter as he went south, and the humidity became worse. He was now 16 pounds below his regular weight, and the insects that hovered above the still waters were vicious. Eilat used his spray sparingly, when the mosquitoes were at their worst. He stuck to the river, and he knew that out to the east were the surviving ancient lands of the Madan, the Marsh Arabs.
    Away to the right, on the west side of the river, Saddam Hussein had drained hundreds of square miles of the marshes right down to the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. For hundreds of years those wetlands had provided a haven for slaves, Bedouins, and those who had offended against the state. The area was accessible only by small boats, and no army, however determined, had ever successfully operated in that treacherous swampland. Saddam had a solution to that. He diverted the rivers and built a couple of gigantic canals to cut off the water supply to the entire al’Amarah Marsh. The result was a dry, arid, silted-up land, in which an entire ecosystem was decimated. A huge range of wading birds, storks, pelicans, and eagles—not to mention another vast range of fish, small mammals, and people—lost their homes.
    Marsh Arabs, whose families had lived there for thousands of years, were forced to leave, as the Army of Iraq in the 1980s drove through the dried-up swamps, laying down great causeways for armored vehicles to move more easily to the east, to