‘Looks like it might be interesting anyway,’ he said, pointing to the letter ‘E’ that he’d scribbled in line six. Wherever they were going, there was a good chance the enemy would still be there.
‘What’s your girlfriend’s name again?’ Lizzie asked him. ‘Is it Sandra?’
’Sophie,’ Adams replied. ‘But where did that come from?’
‘I was just thinking what a lucky woman she is, that’s all.’
‘Sorry, Lizzie,’ he replied with a frown. ‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Put a shirt on would you, Adams,’ Lizzie said, laughing. ‘You’re not exactly in the right sort of shape to be wandering around without one, despite what Sophie thinks of your physique.’
Adams patted his stomach. He didn’t have a six pack, but the last few weeks in the desert had seen him lose a few pounds. ‘I’m not in bad shape, thanks very much,’ he replied. ‘You’ve got more wobbly bits than me, and we’re the same age.’
‘Bugger off,’ Lizzie said. ‘We’re not the same age and I’ve not got any wobbly bits. I’ve not turned thirty yet, and I know for a fact that you did last year.’ She pointed at line eight, the ‘A’ indicating that it was a British soldier that needed picking up. ‘One of ours. Best we get a shift on, matey,’ she said. ‘Where’s the new Doc anyway? He’s obviously not close enough to hear the bloody phone.’
Adams looked at Lizzie and wondered about making some crack about the fact that although Lizzie was in the same room as the bloody phone she hadn’t heard it either, but on seeing her tense expression, he decided against it.
‘I’m sure he’ll hear the shout when the Ops Room puts it out over the speakers,’ he replied. ‘If he doesn’t, we’ll just go without him.’
He sat in the relative peace of the toilets with his trousers gathered around his ankles. Laid out on his bare thighs was all the equipment he would need, which he'd gathered together over the previous couple of days. Often, he had picked it up in plain sight of other people working in the hospital complex and no-one had questioned him in the slightest. Why would they?
He rearranged the needles, syringes, and ampoules carefully on his legs. He didn’t want any of them to fall to the floor and start rolling around the toilet. Picking up the small plastic ampoule of normal saline, which was essentially just sterile water, he checked the expiry date of the ampoule. This was one of the checks that was always done before anyone used ampoules like this one, and while it was done by two people, the checks were often perfunctory. Particularly in the busy Emergency Room which is where he wanted this one to be used. Even so, if the ampoule was out of date and someone noticed, all the work he'd done so far would have been a waste of time as it would be thrown away. The worst case was that the arsehole Quartermaster would be informed and go off on one, smug little prick that he was.
Satisfied that the ampoule was in date, he grabbed two sterile needles and carefully unpeeled the paper wrappers. Taking the hard plastic sheath off one the needles, he pushed them both through the bottom of the plastic ampoule before unwrapping a syringe and attaching it to one of the needles. He held the syringe in front of him and pulled back on the plunger, noting with satisfaction the contents of the ampoule emptying into it. At the same time, he could see bubbles entering the ampoule via the other needle which was letting air in to replace the fluid. He’d found this out by trial and error. The first time he tried the substitution he’d only used one needle, but when he withdrew the saline from the ampoule, the plastic container just collapsed in on itself.
When the syringe was full and the ampoule empty, he twisted the syringe off the needle and squirted the contents between his knees and into the toilet with a satisfying splash just as the door to the toilet block opened. He quickly checked to make sure that there was nothing on the floor that could be seen through the gap under the cubicle door apart from his dusty boots and trousers around his ankles. After listening to the other occupant use the urinal, he grimaced when he heard them leave without washing their hands.
‘Dirty bastard,’ he muttered. People like that were the first to complain when the whole camp went down with norovirus. Turning back to the task at hand, he picked up the box which had been an absolute stroke of luck to get hold of. He'd been down at the pan, the area where aircraft were loaded and unloaded, a couple of days ago to collect a parcel when he noticed a box in the disposal area with a red cross on it, and a large label with the text ‘Out of Temperature Range. For Destruction’ written in marker pen.
After making sure that he couldn't be seen by the Quartermaster who he could hear doing something in the next tent, he had sliced open the box using his Gerber pocket knife to see what was inside — correctly figuring that it must be drugs of some sort or another — and rummaged through it. When he had seen the contents of the small white boxes, one of which he now had with him in the toilet, he'd quickly gathered them together and put as many as he could fit into the large side pockets on his combat trousers. Resealing the box with some gaffer tape, he had walked back through the store tents and back onto the pan, nodding a greeting at the Quartermaster as he went past him.
He shifted his weight slightly on the toilet and tried to ignore the sweat dripping down his back — the toilet block wasn't a priority for one of the limited air conditioning units on camp despite the God-awful smell — he opened the small white box and took one of the glass vials out. I don’t need to check the date on this one, he thought as he snapped off the glass top and put the tip of the syringe into the vial to empty it. After repeating this procedure with the rest of the vials in the box, he used the full syringe to refill the plastic ampoule.
Once the syringe was empty and the ampoule full of what was now something much more harmful than normal saline, he gathered all the empty packaging and ampoules together and put them away in his trouser pocket. He held the plastic ampoule in front of him and dabbed the bottom of it with the nozzle of the superglue he'd bought earlier in the NAFFI shop, sealing the holes from the needles and making sure that none of the precious contents would leak out. After a final check to make sure there was no rubbish on the floor, he carefully put the ampoule into a side pocket and pulled up his trousers.
He flushed the toilet just in case and washed his hands. Better safe than sorry.
Lizzie Jarman ran her fingers through her short brown hair, the ends tinged with blonde from the desert sun, as she and Adams sat in the Land Rover outside the TRT tent with the engine idling. Her hair wasn’t anywhere near as short as his, but it was still a lot shorter than it would be back home in the United Kingdom. She reached behind her head and tied what she could up into a crude ponytail, knowing that in a few minutes’ time she’d be wearing a Kevlar helmet.
‘Where the hell is he?’ Lizzie said, glancing across at Adams in the driving seat. ‘It’s his first bloody shout — you think he’d be a bit more enthusiastic about it.’ She twisted around in the passenger seat and looked back at the entrance to the tent. ‘Any minute now he’s going to run out of there like sodding Mr. Ben coming out of his closet.’
‘You’re showing your age there, mate,’ Adams replied. ‘No, hang on. I’m showing my age. There’s no way you’re old enough to remember Mr. Ben.’
‘You’re right, old timer. My dad used to tell me about Mr. Ben and all his adventures in the cupboard. When I was at school,’ Lizzie replied. ‘Primary school,’ she added, for effect.
‘Well, if Mr. Ben doesn’t pop out of his cupboard within the next thirty seconds we’re going without him. Even he is a Colonel.’
‘Lieutenant Colonel,’ Lizzie replied, with only a hint of irony.
It was fair to say that Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas ‘Call me Colonel Nick’ Hickman hadn’t exactly endeared himself to either Adams or Lizzie when he’d arrived at Camp Bastion a little over two weeks ago. It wasn’t about Colonel Nick being in the Army — neither Adams nor Lizzie cared about that — it was more about the way that the Colonel arrived as if he wanted to be noticed. He�
�d been sent out to replace another Army medical officer who’d been sent back as a compassionate case due to the man’s wife choosing the exact moment that he’d been deployed to have a complete and utter meltdown. Lizzie had told Adams that she was convinced that he’d planned the whole thing with the wife so that he’d get the medal and a bar for being in theatre during the fun times even though he wasn’t, but Adams was less sceptical. He wasn’t married, although he hoped he might be before too long, but he’d seen the effect that deployments had on the people who were left at home.
‘Call me Colonel Nick’ as an opening line marked the original medical officer’s replacement out as a bit of a cock in Lizzie’s mind, not helped by the new arrival’s public school accent and slight resemblance to Hugh Grant. As she explained to Adams, he wasn’t even a proper Colonel.
‘He’s a Lieutenant Colonel. Not a bloody Colonel,’ Lizzie had said. ‘There’s a difference. A whole rank’s difference. A Colonel is a Group Captain, a Lieutenant Colonel is a Wing Commander. So why does he want to be called “Colonel Nick” when he’s not a Colonel? You don’t go around saying “Hi — I’m Flight Lieutenant Adams. Call me Squadron Leader Adams.” Do you?’
‘It’s not the same, Lizzie,’ Adams replied. ‘That’s just the way that they do things. The Army’s got the history, don’t forget — apparently, the RAF hasn’t.’
‘Well I’m not going to call him Colonel Nick,’ she replied. ‘He’s Lieutenant Colonel Hickman as far as I’m concerned. And a little birdie told me that he’s only got acting rank for the deployment.’
‘You’ll just piss him off, Lizzie,’ Adams sighed.
‘I know,’ Lizzie replied with a wry smile. ‘I know.’
The passenger door of the Land Rover flew open, making Lizzie spill the Coke which she’d finally managed to blag off Adams after five minutes of trying. She’d tried being nice, then she’d tried being flirty, which was difficult given the circumstances and was probably never going to work anyway. Then she’d tried ‘give me a can of Coke, or I’ll make your life shit for the rest of your tour’ which, to her surprise, appeared to work. He had given her a strange look as he handed over the lukewarm can, dusted as it was with hair clippings, but she figured that she was the one with the can of Coke, so she’d won that small battle. Ignoring the wet feeling in her lap, she turned to Colonel Nick and fixed him with a look.
‘About bloody time, sir.’
‘Oh, okay. Sorry, bit late,’ Colonel Nick replied, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head towards the back of the Land Rover. Lizzie stifled a laugh, thinking for a minute about making a Hugh Grant joke before deciding against it. The head tilt was obviously a practised move, but she had to admit to herself, it worked a tiny bit.
‘If you’d been here earlier, you could have had the front seat,’ she replied, tilting her own head at the back of the vehicle before adding a less than deferential, ‘sir.’ Lizzie watched him as he went around to the back of the Land Rover. She heard him swearing as he struggled with the latches on the rear flap before throwing his medical bag in and climbing up after it. The Land Rover dipped at the additional weight in the back.
‘All aboard the happy bus,’ Lizzie muttered, more to herself than to anyone else.
Adams glanced across at Lizzie, smiling when he saw the frown on her face. Unfortunately for him, she caught him smiling and fixed him with a glare that he’d seen before. He looked away and put the Land Rover in gear, aware that she was still glaring at him which just made him want to smile again. Discretion is the better part of valour, he thought as he decided against it.
The Land Rover lurched forward, wheels spinning for a moment in the soft gravel of the rough roadway outside the tent. Adams accelerated towards the Main Drag, the rough road which led from the hospital down to the flight line some two kilometres away. He crunched through the gears, the Land Rover complaining with each change, until they reached its terminal velocity of around sixty miles an hour. It was fast enough over the rough ground, and Adams could hear Colonel Nick in the back cursing as the vehicle bounced over every bump. Adams glanced in the rear-view mirror, smiling at the Colonel’s predicament. As Lizzie had said, if he wanted the front seat, he should have got there earlier.
When the Land Rover sped past Camp Bastion’s headquarters building, Adams and Lizzie noticed the portly Garrison Sergeant Major striding from the front door toward the road, waving frantically at them to slow down. Adams and Lizzie both waved back as they sped past him, and then started laughing as he and his oversized moustache disappeared in a cloud of dust and sand.
‘He did that last time,’ Lizzie said. ‘I thought you’d had a word to let them know why we’re in a hurry.’
‘I did,’ Adams replied. ‘I spoke to the Commanding Officer of the base after the formal complaint last week, and he just told me to crack on. He said he’d have a word with the GSM and then muttered something about how getting a bloody blue light and siren would be useful.’
‘Well, if Brigadier Foster’s going to pay for it, great. I can’t see the CO of the hospital stumping up for that,’ Lizzie said. ‘Besides, even though we haven’t got a blue light, you still couldn’t drive it. It’s an emergency vehicle.’
‘Yes, I can. We’ll play paper, scissors, rank — and I’ll win.’
‘No, you won’t,’ Lizzie said. ‘You’re not blue light qualified, so you’re not allowed to. You might cause an accident,’ she said, smiling at Adams.
‘Yeah, right,’ Adams replied, looking at the empty road ahead of them as they sped across the crushed gravel. ‘The traffic’s shit.’
As the Land Rover pulled up towards the edge of the helicopter landing site, they could see the Chinook with its rotors already turning. Parking up, Adams and Lizzie went to the back of the Land Rover to get their personal kit. Colonel Nick had jumped out of the vehicle the minute it had stopped, and Adams had to reach in to retrieve his and Lizzie’s grab bags. He mentally cursed the Colonel for not passing them out as he struggled to reach the equipment. Half running to catch up with the others, he noticed the fourth member of his team, Corporal ‘Ronald’ MacDonald standing on the ramp at the back of the Chinook. Ronald was making a circular motion in the air with an extended index finger — the signal for ‘we’re going now’. Adams broke into a run at the same time as Lizzie did, and when the Colonel realised that they were both running towards the helicopter, he got the message and did the same.
When Adams got to the ramp with Lizzie, Ronald leaned towards them both and shouted to make himself heard over the noise of the large rotor blades whirling a few feet above their heads.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Ronald said. ‘The casualty’s been upgraded to a Cat A. We need to get moving sharpish.’
Adams looked across at Lizzie and saw her biting her bottom lip. Category A was the most urgent category there was. As they walked into the bowels of the Chinook helicopter to take their seats, Adams wondered what they would find when they got to wherever it was in the badlands they were going.
3
Staff Sergeant Partridge and his platoon had managed to drag Thomas, who had come around enough to swear profusely, about eight hundred metres away from the spot where he was hit. Partridge figured that they were far enough away from the building where the shot had come in from to be out of range of most small arms, and if Thomas had been hit with a sniper rifle then he wouldn’t be swearing as much as he was. He’d be dead.
There was still no sign of any backup from the Forward Operating Base, so Partridge made sure that the radio operator had called back in with the updated coordinates for the pick-up. Fingering the smoke grenade he was going to put down the minute he heard the distinctive sound of the Chinook approaching, Partridge glanced around the area with a practiced eye. He wasn’t bothered about the smoke grenade giving their position away as the insurgents knew damn well where they were, and a sodding great big, loud, slow-moving helicopter would certainly give the game away. The advantage of the Chinook w
as two-fold as far as he was concerned; the first advantage were the two machine guns mounted on it, one on the back and one on the side. The second advantage was the fact that the minute it touched down and the rear ramp went down, there would be a significantly larger amount of firepower available as the Force Protection team on board the helicopter hopped off.
A few yards away, Partridge could see that Rowley was becoming increasingly concerned about Thomas. A few minutes ago, Thomas had been effing and blinding like the squaddie that he was, although Partridge figured that he was probably allowed to swear a bit as he had taken a round not too long ago. He’d now gone quiet again, very quiet, and was almost unresponsive. Partridge watched as Rowley went back through his immediate action drills with a concerned frown on his face. If Rowley — who was a medic — was worried, then so was Partridge.
What Rowley, or indeed Thomas, didn’t know was that when the bullet had smashed through the body armour, it had nicked the lining of Thomas's lung as it travelled through his shoulder. It was only a tiny nick, but every time Thomas took a breath in, a small amount of air entered the space between the two linings of the lung. Every time he breathed out, this hole closed like a one-way valve, and the air in the middle of the linings stayed where it was. As the air built up between the two linings, the amount of space that the lung had to expand got less and less. The effect of this was quite simple, brutal, and completely silent. Thomas's lung was being squeezed hard, drastically reducing the amount of oxygen getting into his bloodstream, and each breath he took increased the pressure.
‘Staff, I’m not happy at all with this,’ Rowley said to Partridge. ‘There’s something wrong — he was swearing his head off ten minutes ago, now he’s not saying anything at all.’
‘Of course there’s something wrong with him,’ Partridge replied. ‘He’s been fucking shot.’
‘How long is the helicopter going to be, do you think?’ Rowley said. ‘He needs a proper medic to have a look at him, not me.’
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