The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  She’d never liked Snatches. The rough ride didn’t bother her but they were poor protection, nicknamed ‘metal coffins’ for a reason. If they hit anything now, an IED or a mine, the flying shrapnel would slice them to mince. What was that expression the lads in Iraq used? Everyone gets a bit.

  They were wedged tightly into this one, thigh against thigh, knee scraping knee. She’d pushed the team over quota; five, instead of four in the back, sharing the same stale air. Packs and boxes were piled round their feet. The soldiers sat in silence, their faces tight with concentration. The young soldier opposite her, Frank, was looking everywhere to avoid catching her eye. He was barely twenty but thuggish, with the heavy forehead and thickset nose of a fighter. She wondered where in the UK he came from and how much military action he’d seen. Her eyes fell to the weapon, an SA-80, across his lap.

  Two more lads were riding top cover, cut off at the chest; head and shoulders sticking up out of the vehicle, out of sight. When she tried to look forward, her view was filled by their broad thighs. Their scrambling feet kicked out wildly for support every time the Snatch rocked and pitched. Dillon, the lad next to her, kept getting a boot in the groin as they felt for footholds. He swore under his breath. She squeezed herself further into the corner to give him more room.

  A sudden stink broke out in the hot air. Dillon flapped his hands in front of his face wildly.

  ‘Hold it in, Moss.’ Dillon gave one of the top cover guys a sharp poke.

  The young lad, Hancock, riding top cover with Moss, ducked his head down for a second, caught the whiff and gave a snorting laugh. Dillon kicked out at him before he straightened up again. Ellen watched the way they argued, jostled for position. They were only kids. She’d spoken to Hancock, the quietest in the group, in the darkness before they set off. He was eighteen, he said, keeping his voice low. He’d joined up in January and been sent out here right after training. He looked shell-shocked already.

  ‘Sorry, Ma’am.’ Frank, embarrassed.

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t be.’ I’m harder to offend than you realize, she thought. And I’ll be safer if you think of me as one of you. ‘And call me Ellen.’

  The Sergeant Major, invisible to her in the front, barked something into the radio sets. Frank sighed and started scrabbling under the seats, checking wiring or groping for a piece of kit.

  Dillon leaned towards her, knocking knees. ‘Sergeant Major says you’re famous. Like Kate Adie.’ His eyes were full of life. A cheeky lad, good humoured and excited.

  ‘Like who?’ Frank, pausing in his grovelling on the floor, had lifted his head to listen, watching her with new interest.

  ‘Nothing so glamorous,’ she said to Dillon. ‘I’m with a news magazine.’

  ‘He said you’ve covered more wars than he has,’ Dillon went on. ‘That true?’

  ‘I don’t keep count.’

  ‘Cool.’ Dillon looked impressed. ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Crimea?’ said Frank, and sniggered like a schoolboy.

  Dillon kicked out at him. ‘Don’t be so bloody rude, you.’ A vicious bounce of the Snatch knocked him off the seat onto the floor. He cracked his shin on the metalwork of the back door and swore. Frank doubled up with laughter. Dillon, trying to regain dignity, crawled through the kicking legs to a box and handed her back a bottle of water. ‘Don’t mind him,’ he said, nodding at Frank. ‘Tosser.’

  Ellen turned her face to the square of bulletproof window and watched the swirls of dust they were throwing up behind them, blurring the outline of the next heaving Snatch in line. There was a dull red glow in the sky beyond. The night was starting to bleed back into day. It was so cold, it was hard to believe that in a few hours, once the heat built up, they’d all long for the chill of night again. The stuffy darkness of the Snatch, with its swaying, crashing motion, and her nervous apprehension about what lay ahead, made her dull with sickness as they drove on across the desert and the light outside whitened into morning.

  They stopped. Frank unbolted the back door and climbed out over her, weapon readied. Then Dillon. A moment later they came back for her. She dropped out of the back, weighed down by her flak jacket and helmet. The dry desert air was a relief. She stood for a moment, enjoying the escape from the petrol fumes, getting her bearings.

  ‘What next?’ she said to Dillon. He shrugged, looked away. Frank was already walking towards a mud-walled compound where other soldiers were sloughing off their packs. Dillon turned and followed him.

  She put her hands on her hips, breathed deeply and scanned the terrain. They’d stopped just short of a natural ridge. Behind them, the way they’d come, lay a desiccated brown landscape of dirty sand, rocks and low scrub. Its lines were broken by simple mud-brick houses, each set apart from the others and enclosed in its own protective boundary walls. No people were visible. The only sign of life came from a pack of scavenging dogs. They were trotting, lean and mangy, across the plain.

  Ahead, far below, the slow snake of a river drew a glistening line through a valley. Beyond it, thickly planted corn waved from fields, scored through by the lines of trees that defined the green zone. She narrowed her eyes against the light. The outline of a village was visible a few kilometres in, high on the hill. That must be the first target.

  Thick dust, stirred up by the convoy of military vehicles, was billowing in filthy clouds all around her. More Snatches were pulling up, filling the air with fine grit, disgorging soldiers. The day’s heat was gathering. The men streamed towards the compound, bowed under the weight of the packs on their backs, shoving, talking in low voices, lighting cigarettes. She hesitated, watching them, then pulled off her helmet, as they had done, and followed.

  Dillon, Frank and the others were settling against a low mud wall, smoking, rucksacks dumped at their feet. They looked tense. Freshly arriving soldiers streamed past them, competing for a place in the shade. To the side, a knot of officers was forming. They were talking in glassy public school voices. Binoculars hung from their necks. Radios squawked like parrots. Behind them, yet more vehicles were coming crashing over the desert, raising clouds of dust.

  The young officers straightened up and lowered their voices. Mack appeared amongst them, not the tallest in the group but the oldest and broadest. She noted the way the other men shifted to accommodate him, deferring to him as the pack’s Alpha male. Mack exchanged a few words as he passed through, then barrelled straight towards her. Heads turned, following him.

  ‘Enjoy the ride?’

  He leaned forward to speak to her. She caught the scent of army soap on his skin, undercut by adrenalin. As he opened his mouth to say more, a jet screeched overhead. A minute later, a flash of fire ignited out in the corn, on the far side of the valley. Smoke rose. A few seconds after that, a delayed boom.

  ‘Five hundred-pounder?’ she said.

  Mack nodded. ‘Air offensive’s starting.’

  The smoke was starting to disperse in black clouds across the corn.

  ‘Is it clear of civilians?’

  ‘We’ve issued warnings.’ His body was hard with tension, his face serious. She sensed Dillon, Frank and some of the other lads looking over at them.

  Mack pulled a satellite map from his pocket and spread it out on the sand. She picked out the villages from the office map, several of them, and, in the fields, dozens of small squares that showed individual Afghan compounds. They’d be good defences, thick mud walls that could withstand artillery. They’d been built for war. The country had seen little else.

  Mack started to brief her, pointing with a long finger. ‘That’s the river.’

  She made her own calculations, fitting the map to the scene below them. The distances weren’t great but the terrain had its own natural fortification. The dips and ridges. The river and the steep rise beyond. And the scattered compounds. No wonder the Taliban had managed to hold it for the last few years. She felt a sense of foreboding, wondering how many failed assaults there’d been.

  Heavy digging equip
ment was already being shunted into position at the waterside. Soldiers in the tan and brown of desert camouflage were waving their arms, signalling to the men inside the vehicles.

  ‘The engineers are throwing a basic bridge across. Then the men go in on foot.’ Mack traced their route on the map. ‘Up the far bank, through the fields, storming the compounds, one at a time. Then up there. That’s the first village we’ll head for.’

  ‘Think you’ll secure it today?’

  He shrugged. ‘Depends what we find.’

  He always said ‘we’, not ‘they’, she noted. He seemed to be a man who identified with his boys.

  ‘You can watch the progress pretty well from here,’ he was saying. He fingered the binoculars round his neck, lifted them to his eyes to scan the valley. He seemed to be looking forward to it, as if he’d bagged her a good spot at the races.

  She looked past him. Moss, the fat one, and Dillon were hunched over their mess tins, boiling up foil sachets of food. Hancock, the young lad, was lolling against the wall, his eyes closed. He had an iPod stuck in his ears, his head trailing wires like a badly made bomb. He looked stressed as hell. She wondered why he wasn’t eating. No one seemed to have noticed.

  ‘I’ll go in with the first wave,’ she said.

  Mack lifted the binoculars away from his eyes. ‘I really don’t—’

  ‘My risk.’ She looked him full in the face. ‘That’s fine. I need to be up close.’

  His expression was thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure I can allow that,’ he said. ‘I know you’re—’

  ‘Come on, Mack.’ She nodded at him, trying to camouflage her nerves and sound breezy. He was a senior officer and she was pushing her luck. ‘Sure you can.’

  He paused, considering her closely. ‘I’ll see,’ he said at last, and walked off.

  When Frank and Dillon stubbed out their cigarettes and got to their feet, she crossed over to them. The Sergeant Major appeared, fastening his helmet. He looked at her for a second, then pushed his eyes past her.

  ‘Lids on, lads,’ he said. ‘Time’s up.’

  ‘Fucking hope not,’ said Dillon.

  Hancock, beside him, looked grey with nerves.

  They tightened their body armour, fastened helmets, swung their packs onto their backs and picked up their weapons. They lined up in single file, ready to head down the hill, a tense, silent group. She stood beside them, waiting.

  Just as they seemed ready to set off, Mack reappeared. He spoke in a low voice to the Sergeant Major and they both turned to look at her. Their faces were stern. She wondered what they made of her. Once upon a time, when she started all this, soldiers used to stare because she was long-limbed and attractive and they couldn’t take her seriously. Now she was pushing middle age and they must think her a liability, an oddball maiden aunt who might need rescuing when the shit hit. She shrugged her flak jacket to a new position on her shoulders, switching bruises. She could move a lot faster without the damn thing. It didn’t even fit properly.

  Mack beckoned her towards him. ‘Go if you want to,’ he said. His eyes were thoughtful. ‘But it’s your risk.’

  He spoke quietly, acknowledging that they both understood what might lie ahead.

  ‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  The men around her were starting to move. She hesitated for a moment, steeling herself, then forced herself to press forward and join them before she could think any more about it. Mack stood, unsmiling, and watched her, binoculars idle on his chest. She fixed her eyes on Dillon’s broad back and fell into step, stretching her stride to match her footprint to his. Hancock was behind her, his breathing as shallow as her own.

  They threaded their way down the hillside and reached the bridge. The soldiers grouped there, the bridge builders, ran their eyes over her as she mounted the treads. The rush of the river rose from below. A broad, fast-flowing river. The Taliban must have thought an attack from this side was impossible. Her boots rattled on loose metal. The scream of a jet and a dull boom from the hillside ahead told her the bombs were still falling. When she reached the other side of the bridge, her boots hit earth again and silence.

  She followed Dillon into the first field, into thick curtains of corn. It was high, ready for harvesting, stretching up above her head. Visibility was terrible. The corn cloaked everything. There could be a whole army out there, low against the ground. She steadied her breathing. The corn stank, a bland, cloying smell of dry grass. Flies were buzzing round her face. Her helmet slipped heavily back and forth as she moved her head, tugging at its chin-strap. Diagonally, through the crops, she could see muddy irrigation ditches. Good hiding places for fighters who knew the ground. Her ears thumped with her own blood and the swish of corn against her boots and body.

  Dillon ducked suddenly to one side and she flattened herself into the corn behind him. The firm earth was a relief and absorbed the shake in her limbs. She thought of the layout of the satellite map. They should be approaching the first compound. Ahead, someone fired a shot. Silence. The scratch of a voice on Dillon’s radio. He started creeping forward again, bent double. She followed, keeping close to him.

  At the edge of the field, the land opened out. The next field was full of rows of low bushes. A dull, mud-walled building rose beyond it, a primitive house with a single round hole for a window. The walls looked thick. It must be black as night inside.

  The Sergeant Major and Moss were crouching behind the low compound wall with their weapons trained on the black rectangle of the doorway. The Sergeant Major was hollering something in a Lancastrian version of Pashto. ‘Raw-ooza! Raw-ooza!’

  A sudden movement to the side of the building. She swung and stared into the dopey brown eyes of a donkey as it stuttered into view from behind the corner. It reached the extent of its tether and was jerked back, its head jolted, its eyes rolling white, its long ears flattened in fright against its head. Dillon raised his gun and took aim. The donkey backed clumsily, as if it knew, and disappeared again with a toss of its head.

  The Sergeant Major fired a high warning shot. Two men had appeared in the doorway, walking forward into the earth yard. Their eyes were wide with terror, their hands high in the air. One of the men was elderly, tottering on bent legs. His beard was white and ragged. His lips were moving soundlessly, either in fright or prayer. The other man was stout and middle-aged, a fat belly bulging beneath his long kameez. Their clothes looked threadbare, pathetic. They shuffled forward in rope sandals, round hats perched on their heads.

  Ellen had reached the cover of the wall now and threw herself down against Dillon, her helmet banging round her face. A moment later, Hancock bumped up against her on the other side. He and Dillon stuck their weapons along the top of the wall and gave cover as the Sergeant Major and Moss went forward and pushed the Afghan men down on their knees. They pressed them against the outside of the building, their hands splayed palm-out against the mud above their heads. Moss patted them down. Nothing. The Sergeant Major was shouting for a translator, signalling the rest of them forward. The back of the old man was shaking violently as he crouched against the wall.

  ‘Clear.’ Dillon had checked the building, looking for people or weapons. The Afghan translator was barking questions at the two men. They were shaking their heads, eyes downcast, foreheads flush against the wall. The old man’s body was shaking so hard, he looked about to collapse. She thought of the whites of the donkey’s eyes as they rolled in its head.

  They left Moss guarding the Afghans and crept on. This time, Frank and Dillon were front men and she was in the middle, with the Sergeant Major and Hancock giving cover behind. They plunged back into thick corn. The sun was pumping out heat now, the warmth rising in shimmering waves from the ground. Her hair was slick with sweat, her helmet slipping forward over her eyes. Her hands were anxious fists at her sides, nails digging into palms. Her body was aching with the weight of the body armour and her rucksack. The fear took her in waves, as it had before in moments like this:
maybe this is the time, here, now, when my luck finally gives out. Maybe, for me, this will be it.

  They were steadily climbing, through gently sloping fields, cutting across irrigation ditches and mud ridges. The corn gave way to fields of stubble, thick-cut stalks standing low in the ground. They stuck her boots, bruised her ankles. At the sides, split pods here and there were littering the ground. She kicked them, then bent to look at them. Spent poppy.

  It was hard to look up and forward as they climbed. She kept her eyes on her footing. She was sickened by a sense of how exposed they were. The stillness ahead was invisible. Hidden eyes all around might be fixed on her. Anyone could be lying in wait in ditches and gullies above them. Anyone could be on their belly in the undergrowth, getting them in their sights, ready to pick them off. Her legs were juddering with tension. How many more compounds ahead? She couldn’t remember. The Taliban had controlled this ground for a long time. There’d be surprises to come. They were tough fighters. They never surrendered, even when the odds were hopeless.

  Her blood swarmed in her ears. The small flies, buzzing round her eyes and nose, were nipping her skin. She lifted a hand to clear a strand of hair from her face, a normal everyday gesture to steady herself.

  Just as her arm was moving back again, the ground to her left exploded with a sudden burst of fire and smoke. Instinctively she threw herself to the ground. A hail of debris rained down on her, pelting her helmet and back. Everything was bleached white. A pure light, couched in an almost holy silence. For a second, utter stillness. Life stopped. Then sound pitched back into her ears with a bang.

  Dillon, to one side, was shouting. His voice shot through with curses. She blinked hard, trying to clear the whiteness. Shapes again, blurred. The rich smell of earth. Poppy stalks were sticking into her. Her pack had crashed down on top of her like a dead man, knocking her into the ground, winding her.

  ‘Compound ahead. Enemy fire.’ Dillon was next to her, flat in the cut poppy. He was twisting back, staring right at her, signalling to her, motioning her to the side. She nodded, crawled to her right through the corn. Her ears were whining with the blast. She half crawled, half fell into a ditch, an irrigation channel with a few inches of water. The water soaked her clothes. Its coldness shocked her skin. She crawled forward up the ditch, propelling herself with her elbows.