Babylon's Ark by Lawrence Anthony

he was one of us!
    A few hours later the man was back. Not only did he have two
donkeys in tow but also the zoo’s “executioner.” His name was Kazim and he was the official ax man, able to kill a beast with one blow and quarter it as deftly as a master butcher. Kazim had slaughtered animals for fresh meat at the zoo for decades, and the Iraqis regarded him as one of the lowlier workers. But he was worth every cent I paid him. For obvious reasons, none of us wanted the grisly job of killing donkeys ourselves.
    Before we closed for the evening, the carnivores feasted on fresh donkey meat, the bears on the last remaining vegetables and some MREs. The boars, badger, and other creatures got a mixture of both. We also left out food for the foraging animals, baboons and monkeys that I had spotted hiding around the zoo grounds.
    As Husham placed some meat down in the open, little eyes were watching him. A starving desert fox had got the scent of the meat and come out of hiding, desperately waiting for Husham to move off so it could get to the food.
    Above me an Amazon parrot screeched loudly, perched incongruously in an eucalyptus tree, an alien in a desert country so far from home. We would never catch it and could only hope that it would return to its cage of its own accord.
    The next day the vegetables we had put out for the monkeys and baboon were gone. At least they had eaten.
    That night at the Al-Rashid I bumped into Alistair as I trooped exhaustedly up the stairs and he invited me to his room. The other DOD photographers were there as well and we started swapping yarns by candlelight. The men were getting to know their way around bullet-strewn Baghdad like veterans. If there was a deal somewhere, a crate of cold beers going under the counter, some Iraqi rugs or Arabic silverwork on special offer, they would be the first to dodge the gunfire and track it down. Although they had strict orders only to travel in military convoys, they preferred to work on their own, watching one another’s backs. It was too cumbersome to move with the military. They needed to be weaving in and out at the front lines of fighting wherever it was happening and as it happened. They even had their own car they had picked up at
the roadside for a few hundred dollars. The vehicle had been hired out to some journalists a few weeks before, but after an explosion hit the car and one of them had been killed, it had been abandoned. The one side of the car and the windshield were shattered, but it had a powerful engine that was still thumping and that was all Alistair and his fellow adrenaline junkies needed.
    While we chatted, the city’s nightly anarchy provided a spectacular pyrotechnic sideshow viewed from Alistair ’s seventh-story room. It would normally kick off with a stutter of AK-47 or light-arms fire, followed by a searing white illumination flare shot high into the air, billowing down in a blazing parachute, blinding in its intensity. Then there would be the slightly deeper crack of American M-16s seeking out the AK gunmen in the instant brightness. Tracer bullets tore up the sky in pencil-thin fire beams followed by the surly bass crump and flash of a mortar bomb or the distinctive double bang of an RPG hitting its target.
    Sometimes the flares would be of a different color and the military-trained DOD photographers would remark, “Uh-oh, that’s trouble. They’re calling for reinforcements.”
    Sure enough there would then be a boom-boom-boom of a Bradley firing. Then silence. And darkness. Supreme darkness, as there was no electricity in Baghdad.
    It would all start up a few minutes later somewhere else in the city. On some occasions firefights raged wherever you looked and the sky would flash madly as though some celestial wrench had maliciously sabotaged the heavenly power grid.
    Just as an exercise, I attempted to time how many bullets were fired each minute during one of the contacts. It was too rapid