Conspiracy

by Adrian Wills

  ‘Put your foot down. There’s a roundabout ahead. Take the first left.’ Fletcher glanced over his shoulder to check on the captain, who’d gone worryingly quiet. He was frozen in his seat, the colour drained from his face. ‘Are you okay?’

  The captain nodded. It was a hell of a welcome to Basra.

  Fletcher tried the long-range radio. Maybe he could summon up a couple of Challenger tanks to see them to safety. He grabbed the handset, but the radio was dead. At least there was still the back-up mobile phone in his pocket. He checked the handset in the full knowledge he wouldn’t get a signal inside the heavily armoured Land Rover. And yet he was still disappointed to have it confirmed.

  Instead he tried the close-range radio. ‘Hopkins, how’re you doing back there?’

  He was relieved to hear a crackle and the sound of Private Hopkins’ voice. ‘We’re okay, Sarge. We’re keeping tight on your tail.’

  ‘Copy that. Stay close.’

  The shooting never relented for a second. Bullets ricocheted off walls, kicked up sand on the road, and battered the two vehicles. The occasional RPG rocket found its target too, although many more went wide in the hands of the untrained insurgents.

  ‘Roundabout up ahead,’ Fletcher said, pointing through the filthy windscreen.

  Stone had already seen it and was throttling the engine hard, pushing it to its limits. The map showed three exits, but as they approached they saw they’d all been blocked off by more abandoned vehicles and oil drums.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Stone, slowing down.

  It was clear the insurgents wanted them to head back the way they’d come, through the shooting alley to face another hail of bullets and rockets. They’d been fortunate so far that the Land Rovers had sustained limited damage, but Fletcher wasn’t convinced their luck would hold out on a second run.

  ‘They’re trying to funnel us back,’ said the captain, incredulous.

  Fletcher had no answers.

  Stone hit the roundabout at speed but had to dab the brakes to make the turn. Fletcher scanned the map looking for something he’d missed.

  Okeke yelled in the back, and then there was another explosion, followed by an agonising scrape of metal on asphalt as Stone battled with the steering wheel.

  ‘They’ve hit a front wheel!’ Stone said as the vehicle slowed to a crawl. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  The Land Rover lurched to a stop as a gunman in jeans, white t-shirt and a red-checked keffiyeh wrapped around his head stepped out in front of them and fired his AK-47 at close range, his bullets peppering the windscreen. Then he turned and ran, disappearing into a narrow alley between two buildings.

  ‘Everyone out,’ ordered Fletcher. ‘Defensive positions!’

  He took a deep breath, threw open the door and rolled out onto the road as the second Land Rover screeched to a halt behind them.

  Fletcher scrambled onto one knee, lined up the sights of his rifle and began scanning for threats as the soldiers finally knuckled down for the fight.

  They were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded on all sides. What they needed now, more than anything else, was some kind of miracle.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  In the end it wasn’t a miracle that saved them but better training, superior weapons, and a desperate will to survive. The seven men bundled out of their armoured Land Rovers without hesitation as an unrelenting barrage of rounds pinged over their heads, and within a few minutes had wrenched back some control of the situation.

  Fletcher, with one knee planted in the dirt and his heart pumping like a Gatling gun, checked along the line of his men, each with their rifle locked into their shoulders and their eyes pressed to the scopes looking for the targets who’d shrunk away momentarily as the soldiers began to return fire.

  ‘Keep tight and try to pin them back,’ he yelled.

  Despite its protective armour, Fletcher was glad to be out of the Land Rover. A handful of men crowded inside a stranded vehicle made an easy target. On their feet, at least they could run, squat, lie flat and hide. And it didn’t take long for the patrol to score its first kill. An insurgent, who must have thought he was invincible, stood reloading a rocket launcher on a balcony overhanging the road and paid for his stupidity with a 5.56 NATO round through his neck. His lifeless body fell into the street below.

  Fletcher rattled off a three-bullet burst as a head popped up over a wall on the far side of the street, then scrambled behind the first Land Rover. He skidded onto his backside in the hot dust with his rifle in his lap and sweat running down his back.

  With limited ammunition, he was all too aware that they needed a better defensive position. He wiped a sheen of dust from the screen of the mobile phone he plucked from a pocket and dialled the only number pre-programmed into the device.

  ‘Hello?’ said a friendly voice against a background hum in the Ops Room.

  ‘Contact! Contact!’ Fletcher shouted over the roar of gunfire. ‘This is Sergeant Ryan Fletcher. We’re under heavy fire, pinned down by at least a hundred gunmen with RPGs. Requesting urgent extraction.’

  The soldier on the other end of the line called for hush in the office and calmly asked for their location. ‘Okay, I can get a QRF to you, but they’re at least twenty minutes away.’

  ‘We’re putting down suppressing fire, but we can’t stay here.’ A bullet fizzed past Fletcher’s ear and buried itself in a sandstone wall over his helmet. ‘At this rate we’ll take heavy casualties before they make it.’

  ‘Rest assured we’ll do our best for you. Keep me advised on your location and I’ll keep this line clear.’

  Fletcher dropped the phone back in his pocket and rose on his haunches with his finger curled around the trigger of his rifle. The insurgents had begun to regroup, and as they regained some confidence seeing the soldiers exposed in the open, began popping up in windows, on roofs and behind walls, swarming around the stricken patrol like sharks attracted across the ocean by the scent of blood. Fletcher needed to move his men out of there, and quickly.

  His biggest fear was running short of ammunition, a thought almost too horrific to contemplate. Stories had reached the regiment of four American contractors who’d been killed and burned in their cars in an ambush in Fallujah. Insurgents had dismembered two of the men. The charred bodies of the other two had been hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Fletcher wasn’t about to let any of his men succumb to that kind of barbarity. He owed that to them and their families.

  The crackle of Anthony Okeke’s Minimi light machine gun masked the sound of the captain skidding across the sandy ground clutching his helmet and wincing as an RPG exploded harmlessly to their left. ‘What’s your plan, Sergeant?’ he shouted in Fletcher’s ear.

  Fletcher steadied his rifle, focusing on a first-floor window twenty-five metres to his left where he thought he’d caught movement. Sure enough a dark shadow appeared clutching the unmistakable shape of an AK-47. A single shot put him down, the bullet ripping through his chest as a star-shaped muzzle flash from his own gun lit up his face.

  ‘Did you get through to the Ops Room?’

  ‘The QRF’s on its way, but they’re twenty minutes off.’

  ‘Twenty minutes?’ Fear was written all over the captain’s face. It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome to the city.

  ‘We have to move,’ said Fletcher. ‘Can you stay with the men while I scout around?’

  The captain nodded.

  ‘And remind them to go easy on the ammo.’

  Fletcher waited for another burst from Okeke before scrambling to his feet and hurrying towards the narrow alley where an insurgent had vanished shortly after their Land Rover had been knocked out.

  Out of the sun, it was several degrees cooler. Fletcher crabbed forward, focusing on the rectangle of light at the end of the alley. He moved lightly on his toes with his rifle raised high, listening to the battle growing distant. He hated leaving his men, but if they were going to make it out alive he had to find s
omewhere safer for them to hole up.

  The alley opened up into a quiet backstreet overshadowed by high ochre-coloured walls. A narrow pavement was cracked and broken. Overhead, a spaghetti tangle of power lines ran between metal poles, and the stench of rotting garbage was thick in the oppressive heat of the afternoon. An emaciated, flea-bitten dog looked up from a ripped plastic rubbish bag. It regarded Fletcher briefly with mild interest, before trotting on with its tail wagging.

  Twenty metres to his right, a pair of solid metal gates revealed the entrance to a two-storey house. Fletcher ran the short distance with his boots thudding along the road and was surprised to find the gates unlocked. They swung inwards with a high-pitched squeak when he twisted a rusty handle. Inside, a courtyard was shaded by a luscious palm tree, its green fronds like multiple pairs of welcoming arms. Perfect.

  He pulled the gate shut and scurried back to his men with his day sack rattling on his back. The battle was raging as fiercely as when he’d left, but he was pleased to see the soldiers had remained in a tight formation, and that they were all still alive.

  ‘There’s a house,’ said Fletcher, flinging himself to the ground next to the captain. ‘Down the alley and twenty metres west. Can you lead the way?’

  The captain nodded and rose in a low crouch. With a whistle and wave, he beckoned the men to follow him. One by one, the soldiers rose from their positions and darted into the alley, with Fletcher bringing up the rear.

  At the gates of the house, the men fanned out in a defensive arc, waiting for further instruction.

  ‘What are you waiting for? Get inside,’ Fletcher screamed.

  Okeke went in first, leading with his machine gun.

  ‘Keep your heads down and your traps shut,’ Fletcher said, breathing hard. ‘We’ll wait here for the QRF but stay alert.’

  The soldiers spread out, finding shade under the palm tree, clutching their weapons nervously. All apart from the captain, who showed more interest in a pale blue Nissan parked in the drive. He peered through the driver’s open window with his rifle slung across his back, as if the car was for sale and he was pondering making a casual Saturday afternoon offer to buy it.

  Fletcher pulled a map from inside his tunic, identified their location, and was about to call it in to the Ops Room when a head appeared over the wall.

  ‘Contact! Contact!’ screamed van Dijk. He fired at almost point-blank range, taking out most of the man’s skull. The man dropped like a Bergen from the back of a recruit beasted on the moor.

  Fletcher felt the gate shake as a second figure appeared, scrambling to hook his leg over the top. Stone put a grisly hole between the man’s eyes, as a roar of a gathering crowd rose up from the road outside.

  ‘Shit!’ said Fletcher, as a third head emerged at the far end of the courtyard.

  Dobson pirouetted on his backside and fired three shots to take the man down. Fletcher realised any hope they could sit and wait it out quietly had evaporated. He wheeled around, looking for options, fearing he’d made a terrible mistake. At least on the main street there were places to take cover. Here, in the courtyard, they were pinned into a confined space and easy targets to pick off.

  His gaze ran past the old Nissan on the drive and settled on the front door of the house.

  ‘Right, everyone inside,’ he ordered. ‘On the double!’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  When Fletcher burst through the door, the wood splintering around the frame, he was startled to find five faces staring back at him. A woman, robed from head to foot in black and her face covered, stood slightly behind a grey-haired man with a thick beard. Her husband, Fletcher presumed. Three young children were gathered around the woman’s skirts looking scared. A girl, about ten years old, and two boys, with lustrous black hair, dirty faces and eyes full of wonderment, who appeared to be several years younger.

  Fletcher lowered his rifle and held up a hand of apology as his men poured into the house, filling up the room with an urgent energy. The front door slammed closed and Okeke and Stone wasted no time picking up a threadbare sofa to barricade the entrance. It was the final straw. The woman flew at Fletcher, screaming at him in Arabic and wagging a finger under his nose. And then to add to the chaos, her husband started yelling too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Fletcher, trying to calm the situation. It was the last thing he needed. ‘I promise you’ll be compensated for any damage to your home.’

  He’d wonder later whether he could have handled things differently. Maybe in those first manic moments when everyone was shaken and scared, he could have taken better control of the situation. Perhaps then things may have turned out very differently.

  Okeke set up the Minimi at the window and yanked the curtains off a rail as Stone smashed out the glass with the butt of his rifle. A hail of gunfire from outside pinged off the walls and the two young boys began to wail. Their father jabbed a finger at Fletcher’s armoured vest, watched by the little girl who stood motionless with a determined stoicism behind her eyes.

  The captain pushed Fletcher out of the way and shoved his sidearm into the woman’s face. ‘Sergeant, are you going to get these fuckers to shut up? Or do you need me to do it for you?’

  The woman cowered behind her husband, grabbing his arm for support, her eyes wide with fear.

  ‘Captain, please…’

  ‘Get the fuck down on your knees,’ he yelled. He gestured to the ground and dragged the little girl roughly to the floor by her arm.

  ‘This isn’t their fault, Sir. Go easy on them,’ said Fletcher.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of taking —’

  ‘What part of get down on your fucking knees do you not understand?’ the captain screamed. ‘Fucking ragheads.’

  The adults dropped to the ground holding their hands up in submission.

  ‘Look, we don’t want to be here either.’ Fletcher wasn’t sure they understood a word he was saying. ‘But right now you need to keep your heads down or you’re going to get hurt. Okay?’

  ‘Hands on your heads.’ The captain waved his gun erratically between the woman and her husband. The sound of heavy feet thudding across the floorboards in a room above was followed by the crash of breaking glass. ‘Right, Sergeant, do you think you can handle things from here?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’ Fletcher watched the captain march out of the room, hitching his Browning back in its holster. He beckoned to Jake Stone. ‘Find somewhere to put them,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just get them out of my sight.’

  Stone forced the family to stand and herded them with his rifle towards a flight of stairs that descended into a dark basement. One less problem for Fletcher to worry about and leaving him free to drift through the building identifying entry and exit points for a hurried departure and where the enemy might try to breach their defences.

  Kyle Hopkins was already at the back of the house, in the kitchen guarding a door that opened onto a covered courtyard. Opposite the kitchen, an archway led into a windowless dining room dominated by an oval table surrounded by six high-backed chairs. In the middle of the house, a concrete staircase spiralled up to the upper floor and opened onto a landing where Fletcher found an upholstered chair shoved up against the wall. He collapsed into it, dropping his rifle in his lap, and pulled out the mobile phone to make a call. The same guy in the Ops Room answered, except there was no background noise this time. Only an intense silence.

  ‘Sergeant Fletcher?’

  ‘Where the fuck is the QRF?’

  An explosion rocked the house.

  ‘It’s on its way. What’s your position?’

  A volley of AK-47 gunfire was matched by the crackle of rifles from inside the house and the fearsome belch of Okeke’s Minimi. Fletcher winced at every shot. He checked the map, read out the grid reference, and made the soldier on the other end of the line repeat it back to him. Too many fuck-ups had happened when co-ordinat
es had been taken down incorrectly. It always paid to double check.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘They’re on their way, Sergeant. Ten minutes. Fifteen at most.’

  Another rocket hit the house. Dust fell from the ceiling. Fletcher wiped grit from his eyes. ‘Just tell them to get a fucking move on or there’ll be no one left to rescue.’

  Fletcher hauled himself out of the chair and crept into a front bedroom where Dobson was kneeling close to an oversized mahogany wardrobe that was too big for the room. He was sighting through his rifle scope, scanning left and right through a window he’d smashed open.

  ‘Are they coming?’ he asked, casting a brief glance over his shoulder when he heard Fletcher’s footsteps.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Fletcher, squeezing past an unmade double bed covered in a fine layer of dust. ‘How many rounds do you have left?’

  ‘Fifty. Sixty, maybe.’

  Dobson lowered his rifle from his shoulder as a disquieting silence fell during a brief respite in the shooting. He stared out of the window, squinting into the intense afternoon light.

  ‘I don’t like killing them,’ Dobson said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Fletcher took a deep breath. He didn’t doubt the commitment or courage of any of his patrol, but it was a fallacy that soldiers took satisfaction from killing. They did what had to be done to survive or to fulfil their mission. You’d have to be some kind of psychopath to derive pleasure from shooting a stranger, even if they were trying to kill you. Most of them coped by detaching themselves from the reality of what they were doing, until, of course, it came back to haunt them in their dreams.

  ‘I know,’ said Fletcher. ‘But we didn’t start this.’

  A shadow passed across the window, and out of nowhere a gunman appeared, standing on a narrow balcony with his lips curled and his rifle slung low on his hips. Bullets ripped through the room, tearing through soft wood and taking chunks out of the plaster as the man snatched the trigger. Somehow, he managed to miss both of the soldiers.