The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  A burst of gunfire. She concentrated, trying to work out where it was coming from. It must be Frank or Dillon. Weren’t they both further ahead? The static of radio talk. One of them must be near her. Silence. The swish of water as she crawled forward, the tumble of a dislodged stone, deafening. How far was she from the compound? She had no idea. She paused to listen. Nothing. Her stomach convulsed, bringing bile to her throat.

  She crawled on. Ahead, the field ended abruptly. Open ground beyond. The compacted mud yard was scattered with cut poppy stalks, spread out to dry in the sun. On the far side, a small mud house, surrounded by a low boundary wall. Dillon was lying along the near side of the wall, his weapon in his hands. She crept to the edge of the field. Dillon was readying his weapon, raising his head a fraction above the wall. He started to fire. She pulled herself to her feet and ran across the open ground. She seemed to hang there, exposed, forever, her legs pumping like a cartoon character. She thudded beside Dillon against the wall. He’d kept up a steady stream of fire. The walls of the building were pitted with marks, mud smoke hanging in the air all round it.

  Dillon ducked his head below cover again. He looked shaken.

  ‘Enemy fire,’ he said. ‘That building.’

  He was staring at her, his eyes unnaturally wide.

  ‘You sure?’ she said.

  ‘You wanna knock?’

  A crash. Something smashed against the other side of the wall. Further down. An explosion and a shower of mud. Fragments struck her helmet. The wall was so thick, it absorbed most of the blast. Dillon’s face was ashen. He frantically motioned her back, sending her, scuttling, away from the blast, crouched low along the shield of the wall. Adrenalin propelled her forward. As they ran, bent double, the radio crackled. Dillon’s voice, thin and breathless, gave their position. He was so close, his breath was hot on her neck. They half ran, half tumbled together along the wall, fell back into the ditch, crawled down towards the lower field.

  When the jet roared overhead, they were pressed flat in the ditch. Ellen had one hand against the ground, the other pressing her helmet down on her head. Her face was in soil, steeped in the fetid stink of earth and rotting vegetation. Her limbs were shuddering with fear. The whistle of the bomb through the air. The moment stretched. Silence. An almighty explosion. It seemed to blow out her eardrums, shake the ground beneath them. Blast waves ran through her body, ripples through water. She lay rigid, too stunned to move. Mud and dust flew across her body, rattled against her helmet, filled her mouth, nose, ears. Silence. Stillness. Her chest moved under her. Air. She was still breathing. She forced herself to tense first her hands, then her feet. Thank God. Relief flooded her. Her body was intact.

  The dust had turned the daylight to premature dusk. A swirling fog of dirt engulfed them. Dillon’s warm, solid body at her side began to shift and move. He dislodged clumps of dirt and they pattered to the ground. He was raising himself onto his hands and knees and peering forward into the chaos. His jaw strained with concentration. A moment later, it loosened into a boyish smile. A single word: ‘Bullseye!’

  The bomb had hit the side of the building, reducing three of the four walls to piles of rubble. Dillon rose cautiously to his feet. He shielded his mouth and eyes from the swirling dust as he crept forward. He checked the ditches round the edges of the yard. Frank climbed out too and stood, peering into the debris, his weapon raised. All around them, dust was settling. Shapes were starting to form, emerging like ghosts out of the haze. Ellen, lagging behind them, walked on unsteady legs, blast-drunk. She pulled out her camera, trying to focus with shaking hands.

  The back of the house was scattered with sour straw. Frank was kicking at something. The tail and back leg of an animal. Frank kicked it again. A goat. Lifeless. He pushed away the mud bricks round it. He prodded the inert body of another goat beside it. A third, more deeply buried, was still alive. Its hindquarters, crushed under the debris, twitched quietly, without hope. Frank put his pistol to its head. He looked away as he pulled the trigger.

  Dillon sat on a mud boulder and lit a cigarette and Frank went across to join him. Their shoulders had slackened and their tone shifted as they talked in low voices. Frank let out a short laugh. They had half turned their backs on the site as if, for them, the bombing was already in the past. The radios spat static.

  As she climbed over the debris, the heaps of broken mud shifted and settled under her weight. Her vision was jumping. She wanted to sit still with them, to concentrate on breathing evenly again and thank God she was alive. But she knew she must keep moving and capture what she could while the scene was still raw. She started to photograph the wreckage, looking for detail, for human clues. The fourth wall was still almost intact, the interior exposed, naked, to the outside world.

  A cracked mirror in a simple wooden frame hung crookedly from a nail. Scattered hairgrips and a comb sat in the narrow shelf that stuck out from the bottom of the frame. Long black hairs were snagged in the comb’s teeth. A dark bag and a woman’s bright red scarf hung from a second nail to one side. She examined the scarf, without touching it. It was cheaply woven, the thread coarse, a typical rural tikrai, large enough to cover head and shoulders. It was thick with dust now but still carried the memory of heavy, spicy scent–homemade, perhaps. More pungent than the gentle rose-water that Jalil’s mother liked to wear. She took a step away and photographed it all, item by item.

  She climbed on, sensitive to the shards of broken wall and dirt as they crunched and gave way in sudden shifts under her boots. More photographs; remnants of possessions. The protruding corner of a battered metal trunk. The leg of an upturned wooden stool. A piece of cloth, a filthy shirt or torn tunic, lying limply. The page of a book, cheaply printed, splattered with grit. Then she stopped. She lifted the camera away from her face to look with her own eyes.

  Sticking out of the great heap of broken brick, blown up against the remaining wall, was a hand. A small hand, the nails minute, the palm soft and pink. A dusty bracelet, a bangle that might have been silver or tin, showed at its wrist. The rest of the body was hidden.

  Dillon and Frank, cigarettes in hand, had fallen silent. They were watching her but she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t look up, couldn’t lift her eyes from the hand. A child. Maybe one of many buried beneath her boots. They’d cleared the area, they’d said. She breathed hard. They’d warned the civilians to leave. The small hand shimmered as she blinked and stared, as if its fingers were reaching towards her, begging to be clasped. She couldn’t move.

  A moment later, Dillon’s feet crunched on the mud behind her. His step sounded businesslike, almost jaunty.

  ‘You all right?’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

  She lifted her camera, zoomed in on the hand and took one picture, then another. She was preserving the hand as efficiently as she could, before the men took possession of it. Dillon, close behind her now, swore. He turned away and spat into the dirt, gestured to Frank.

  They took her by the shoulders and made her stand clear as they prised away the top rocks with their hands, sending them tumbling down the tower of rubble. She stood, watching them, as they worked methodically. Corpses were slowly emerging at their feet, small bodies, with dust-encrusted hair, their limbs bloody and crushed. The girls’ scarves pinned them in the earth, their necks and chests stretched back to boulders, the material twisted and filthy, slipping through the men’s hands as they struggled to tug it free. Thick, clumsy fingers playing with dolls.

  Dillon stopped, straightened up, looked across to Ellen.

  ‘We were taking fire.’ His voice was tense. ‘You saw.’

  He picked out a stout piece of wood to use as a lever. They prised off the larger boulders, sending them tumbling down the rubble. The stones were grinding under them. Sweating, they heaved and pushed. Deep in a crack, a flicker of movement.

  ‘Stop.’ She raised her hand, craned forward. Frank and Dillon stood side by side, tense and motionless. In that moment of silence, it came again. A
low moan. A sound so faint she sensed it more than heard it.

  She lifted her eyes to the two men who were focused on her, their nerves strained.

  ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Someone’s alive.’

  The woman had been trapped under an overturned bed-frame, one of the low wooden cots so common here. It had formed a pocket, protecting her upper body from the falling debris. She was still conscious when the lads dug her out. One of her legs was crushed, bloodied and split to the bone. Dillon covered the wound with a field dressing and strapped the leg to a piece of wood, a makeshift splint to keep her going until they could get her out to a medic.

  While the lads were dressing the leg, Ellen poured water into her hand and washed dirt from the woman’s nose and mouth. Her skin was leathery and lined by the harshness of the desert, but Ellen put her age at about forty. She had a determined face, her skin loose over strong cheekbones. Her lips were chapped and coated with dirt. Her hands, now motionless at her sides, were heavily calloused and ended in thick horn fingernails, as if she laboured outdoors. Ellen cleaned off her face, then dripped water into her palm and trickled it from between her fingers into the woman’s mouth.

  The woman’s eyes opened. For a moment, they stared at each other. The woman’s eyes were striking, a startling green, brilliant against her light brown skin. The woman’s lips fluttered open and closed, dribbling with water, as if she were trying to speak. Ellen lowered her head to listen. The woman’s breath rose sourly. She saw the woman raise her head a little, the veins in her neck bulging with effort. Then she spat. The woman’s spittle fell back, splattering her lips and the side of her mouth and hung there, glistening. Her head sank back to the ground, as if the effort had exhausted her, her eyes again fallen closed.

  Ellen watched her for a moment. Then she wiped the spittle gently from the woman’s face and sat, crouched over her, stroking her limp hand between her own, until they brought a stretcher to carry her out.

  7

  By late afternoon, the troops had taken the village. They walked in through dirt streets that were rutted with cartwheels and pitted with stones. The place was deserted. The shoddy metal gates of the high-walled mud compounds hung open, banging emptily against the walls inside. The villagers had fled. Tethered cattle, hungry and thirsty, stamped in frustration.

  Ellen and the other soldiers followed a convoy of Snatches into a large compound. Paint was peeling off the rusting metal gates. The mud walls were thick and about twenty feet high. As the vehicles drew to a halt, Ellen was engulfed in rising dust and the animal smell of fouled straw.

  She went with the men to a corner. She brushed away loose stones and rolled out her sleeping bag on a flat piece of ground, littered with chicken shit. Dillon and Frank and the boys were already unpacking their rations. Ellen dug out antiseptic wipes and ran one round her face, neck and hands. It came away black. A headache was gathering behind her eyes. She sat for a while in the shade, sipping water, feeling suddenly limp. Her nerves were jangling, playing out the memory of the assault, unpicking the noise, the fear. When she closed her eyes, she saw again the small pink hand, reaching for her through the rubble.

  After some time, she swallowed down aspirin, pulled out her notebook and went to look round the camp.

  A third of the land inside the compound was taken up by a house with smooth walls, mud bricks rendered with a plaster of liquid mud mixed with straw, making it a foot or two thick. It was topped with a softly undulating mud roof, sculpted into a row of domes. To one side, a pile of burnt poppy, a jumble of blackened pods and dead branches, was quietly smouldering. The softly dispersing smoke turned the air acrid. Someone had made a hasty departure, she thought. And a recent one.

  A dim tunnel ran the length of the building, forming a central corridor with doorways off to the sides. She walked through, peering into the dingy rooms that led off it. They were cool and smelt of animals and dust. In one of them, two Afghans, wearing cast-off army jackets, were setting out their bedding. Translators, perhaps. They looked up in surprise when they saw her in the doorway. She nodded and greeted them, hand on heart: ‘Salaam Alaikum.’ They hesitated, stared. As she walked on, the younger of the two called after her with a stumbling reply. Chickens ran past her legs in frenzied zigzags. A goat was tethered in a dark corner, chomping at straw.

  Beside the building, soldiers had prised the cover off the well and were winding up wooden panniers of water. In the corners, more spent poppy lay in bundles like brushwood, their desiccated pods split where the resin had been drawn.

  In the far corner, behind the gate, Moss and Hancock were digging. She crossed to them.

  Hancock looked elated, buoyed up by survival. ‘Shit pit,’ he said, pointing to their work, and sniggered. Another soldier was banging in posts and hanging camouflage netting as a primitive screen.

  The soldiers had been allocated the main part of the compound. Officers were congregating in the flat mud area in front of the house. Vehicles were pulling up with extra kit, mosquito nets and tarpaulin. Young privates were running to and fro, carrying wooden staves and building structures.

  She sat on a ledge, her back against the mud wall and wrote notes, trying to capture the bustle of the camp, the rush to make order from chaos and to secure the surrounding area before night fell. She caught snatches of banter between the men, the laughter that came from relief after their earlier fear of the assault. She wrote too about the bombed house, the digging out of the three children’s corpses and the rescued mother.

  When the lads gathered and started to cook their rations, she went to join them. She sensed them watching as she sorted out her burner and lit it, dug out a foil meal and set her mess tin boiling. She’d had a few days with the Americans in Iraq and there’d been endless discussion about the pros and cons of the food each nation was issued. The US got chocolate and gum and self-heating Meals Ready to Eat and couldn’t believe the British were still expected to boil up, the old-fashioned way.

  Dillon was sitting with young Hancock, their backs against their packs. He squeezed army-issue jam out of a tube onto brown crackers, his hands engrained with filth. The trauma of the day, the bombing, the children, all firmly set aside. He brandished a cracker at Hancock. ‘This, mate,’ he said, ‘is living the dream.’

  She fished out her sachet meal, tore it open and started to poke into it with her fork. Thick steam enveloped her, a chemical version of cheese.

  Dillon called out to her. ‘Like the scoff?’

  ‘My favourite.’

  He grinned, nodded. ‘What’re you gonna write about anyway?’ he said. ‘About us?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She looked at his eager young face. ‘What do you think I should write about?’

  ‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘About me? Me Mam’d like that.’ He looked her over, thoughtfully, chewing. ‘Why d’you do this anyway?’

  ‘It’s a job.’ She smiled to herself. ‘Been doing it a long time now.’

  He nodded, considering. He was very young and she wondered what he made of her. War was still very much a man’s world. She’d spotted one or two women supporting the assault, signallers or medics. No fighters.

  ‘You married?’ He was looking at her ring with curiosity.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Doesn’t really fit the lifestyle. You?’ ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Not me.’ His voice was light. ‘Only Moss over there, lard boy. He’s hitched. Got a kid and all.’

  They fell silent. She wondered if he too were thinking of the dead children who sat like ghosts beside them as they talked and ate.

  The sun was bloodied and falling when Mack came striding across the compound, kicking up small stones with his boots. A sudden tension. The lads nearby stopped eating and looked up. Mack bent down to her.

  ‘Care to join me?’ He nodded back over his shoulder towards the compound building. ‘Not awfully civilized. No cocktails. But I could stretch to tea.’

  She followed him back across the sand, rich in the mellow light. She cou
ld feel the soldiers raising their eyes to watch as they passed. It was like being invited to the headmaster’s study. Only here, she thought, I’m the same age as the headmaster, not the class.

  An aide rushed forward to unfold a canvas camp chair for her. A cluster of junior officers had gathered with mess mugs of tea under the canopy of a camouflage net. The air was cooling, seeping its daytime heat. The cluster of junior officers looked up, nodded to her as they approached. Mack directed his aide to draw their chairs away from the group. She took a seat next to him in the deepening shadows.

  ‘Bad business,’ he said. His eyes were intent. ‘That bomb.’

  ‘Yes.’ She let the silence between them lengthen, testing his comfort with it.

  He waited longer than most men would, his eyes resting on her face, his elbows on the camp-chair arms. He made an arch with his splayed fingers. His fingernails were neatly cut, ridged with the dirt of the desert.

  ‘The boys are upset,’ he said at last. He tapped his arched fingers against his lips. ‘Very upset. When a child gets killed.’ He paused. ‘Affects everyone.’

  ‘I’d hope so.’

  He inclined his head. The aide bustled forward, handing them both mugs of weak tea, then retreated.

  ‘It gets to me,’ said Mack. His voice was low, drawing her towards him to listen. He smelt of sunscreen and lightly burnt skin. ‘You know why?’

  ‘Because you have children of your own?’ She heard the cynicism in her voice.

  ‘An old line?’

  ‘Very.’

  He nodded, unsmiling. ‘That’s not it. And actually, I don’t.’