Lethal Shot

by Robert Driscoll

  A few minutes passed and Fergie said, ‘What’s he playing at? Want me to go and check up on him?’

  He’d barely finished speaking when the door to the ops room flew open and Space Cadet burst in.

  ‘I can’t get this bastard to work,’ he said. ‘Can you check it?’

  As he went to hand it over to me, he must have flicked the switch. There was a fizz and then an explosion and then the bloody thing took off. It smashed against four walls before zooming through the window. For the next thirty seconds all we could hear was rocket-powered mayhem going on in the compound.

  How the hell the three of us in that room weren’t injured I’ll never know. But Space Cadet was about to be. Fergie launched himself at the youngster. He had him by the neck before the noise outside had even subsided.

  ‘You—’

  I managed to get between them. If I hadn’t been the boss I’m not sure that I would have done, though.

  Needless to say, there was no threat outside. And Space Cadet kept his distance from me and Fergie for the next few days.

  * * *

  The night after Space Cadet’s son et lumière stunt, the sentry out by the road reported another noise. This sentry I trusted.

  ‘What do the thermals say?’

  ‘Hang on, we’re getting something.’ Then a pause. ‘Oh shit. Incoming!’

  A second later there was a smash in the compound. I waited for the explosion that never came. It took a few seconds but I recognised the shattering sound. It was an empty bottle. It was harmless.

  This time. We all knew it could have been a grenade.

  We lit the perimeter up and spied a group of kids running off towards the bridge. They weren’t exactly terrorists but they’d shown themselves fearless enough to get past our defences. In the dead of night the sangar boys would have been within their rights to have opened fire.

  I didn’t want it to come to that. Not for kids or anyone else. The next morning we fitted some fake cameras that I’d ordered on Amazon before we left the UK. Don’t ask me why, but I was glad I had. We erected them at various points around the wall where there was no obvious surveillance. And we took our time doing it, as well. I wanted to get the message over to whichever mysterious group was watching that we were protected.

  That night, as well as doubling the guard, I toured the various sentry points then walked around the whole wall listening out for insurgent activity. Sod’s Law that I was at the point furthest from the gate when the sentries radioed that they could hear people outside. By the time I had run back they reported that no one had been spotted. The next morning, though, there was a trail of blood outside coming from the barbed wire.

  That, and all the dummy cameras were missing.

  The following night was a similar story. This time it was kids again. They threw metal at the sangar and laughed as it bounced off. It took an enormous amount of self-will for the guys not to respond with the level of violence permitted by Card Alpha. In genuine fear for our lives, we were permitted to respond with force.

  It struck me that the kids didn’t know what we were capable of, but the adults behind them almost certainly did. They also knew that we would never act.

  On the previous Herrick tour, soldiers and marines had been issued with the order to follow a policy of ‘courageous restraint’. Violence, it said, was to be used strictly as a last resort and only when an enemy had struck first. You may as well play Russian roulette. Will this unidentified object lobbed over the wall kill me or just smash harmlessly? How everyone managed to deal with the illogical terms of that policy is a source of pride to me. Like many others, I personally struggled with it. When I heard that one American strategist had gone so far as to say – and this is quoted online – that he would rather lose ten US soldiers than kill one innocent Afghan, I realised that we were fighting a war with at least one hand tied behind our backs.

  Not that the brass accepted that there was a war.

  What, I wondered, will it take?

  * * *

  A couple of nights after the thrown bottle incident, things escalated. Again, it was dark. This time the menace was not glass but lead. A number of bullets thudded into the compound wall, while many passed over the top. Although these fell harmlessly beyond the other perimeter, the threat was clear. The whole CP stood to, but no one knew where the attack was coming from. Not that time, anyway.

  Night after night we endured some form of harassment. They weren’t exactly attacks, although even the bottle had been capable of causing serious harm if it had hit someone. I considered each event as the insurgents testing our capabilities and perhaps our standard responses. What they didn’t realise was that we were testing ourselves. It’s one thing practising during training in the UK, it’s another on operations under duress. The boys acquitted themselves brilliantly during this period. Even Space Cadet. He didn’t cry wolf once.

  I knew that, should things move up a notch, they wouldn’t let me down.

  * * *

  Whether what we were engaged in was classed as a war or not, I do know that it was serious enough that there was no day of rest. Sunday, 15 May, was no exception. We went out on patrol that morning, successfully arrested a couple of people thrown up by the biometrics as persons of interest, then returned for some well-earned shade, water and rest. That is, except those who went straight onto sentry duty. I personally had a couple of hours of liaising with command at Shazaad to look forward to.

  Our ops room wasn’t well equipped by Shazaad standards, and compared to Bastion it ran on clockwork and pulleys, but we had enough tech for me to follow what was going on in the region. I knew, for example, that part of Lima Company, 42 Commando, were out with the Afghan National Security Forces doing a raid along a stretch I knew fairly well, the Loy Mandeh wadi in the Nad Ali district of Helmand, north-west of Lashkar Gah and not far from our area. I decided to keep an eye on it, as I would any bit of action.

  I was plotting with Mac the route for our next patrol when suddenly all the comms in the room went black. That is to say, all non-tactical communication switched off. Local radios were up but emails and welfare phones were down.

  ‘Generator?’ Mac said.

  I shook my head. ‘I wish it were. Someone’s been killed in Loy Mandeh. Or as good as.’

  Standard military procedure when there’s a fatality in theatre is to shut down all non-essential communication in the region until the facts are known. Otherwise, half of Taunton could suddenly learn about a serious injury, or worse, before the marine’s family. Hence the blackout. Hence my knowing that something terrible had happened.

  It came out that evening. The wadi raid had turned toxic. A fire-fight had broken out and during the action a young marine from L Company, had detonated an IED. He was killed instantly. Disengagement was the only option. I could only imagine the horror of his mates at having to gather his body to take back home. It’s the least his family would expect.

  This was in mid-May. We had been in theatre since March and it was 42 Commando’s first fatality during that time. My lads all took a moment to reflect on the loss. I hadn’t known the marine who’d died in the IED blast, but I was friends with plenty of the others who’d gone out with him that day. In that respect we’re all brothers.

  The fact that he was killed barely three miles from where I was sitting didn’t shock me as much as it seemed to surprise the voices at Bastion. In my next report they seemed convinced the violence was a one-off.

  Mac, sitting next to me, heard it all.

  ‘It’s like they’re listening but they don’t want to hear,’ I vented afterwards. ‘You can’t tell me these are isolated incidents. Something’s definitely kicking off and this is just the start. I can feel it.’

  * * *

  For the next few days I began to wonder if I’d let my imagination get the better of me. We patrolled every day, made a number of clean, satisfying arrests thanks to the biometrics, got some good intel from a shura and basically felt we w
ere getting to grips with the territory. Then it was our turn to get our first serious test. Information from a concerned citizen fingered a guy near Taalander as part of the insurgency. Shazaad processed the intel and coordinated a response. At 0300 hours one morning I moved my full multiple – Robbie, Fergie, Mac, Space Cadet, Jonathan, Matt Kenneally, Jenny our Navy medic, and the others – out towards our next-door CP. The going was slow. When you can’t see your feet it’s hard to follow in anyone’s footsteps.

  There was a maize field directly to the north of the compound where the suspected insurgent lived. That’s where we were headed. Our role was to hide in the field and be ready in case the target or targets tried to escape that way. Two other multiples took up a similar positions on the south and east sides of the property. A fourth team, led by Ollie Augustin, would be the ones doing ‘the knock’.

  It took me back to my SFSG days. Except this time we weren’t securing the perimeter for the SF lads – we were doing it for the Afghan police.

  It’s to NATO’s credit that they kept persevering with the idea that the local force could be a tool for good. On the ground we knew otherwise. So, while the order from Shazaad was explicit – namely, that the Afghans would arrest the suspects with Ollie and co. as support – no one trusted them not to sell the information beforehand to the interested party, or at least not to blab it out innocently. And so, on the morning of the raid, a section of OMLTs collected the police from their station and marched with them to the compound. Only when they stopped did the Afghans learn the location.

  Apart from my work with the Special Forces I’d done so many missions that promised more than they delivered that it was hard to get too excited. So imagine our delight when, as dawn broke, Ollie et al. stormed the compound and we got the shout over the radio, ‘They’re heading out north.’

  By May, a maize crop has grown to above waist height. After several hours of lying in the field completely hidden from view, it felt extremely liberating to be able to stand up. It felt even better to cock our weapons.

  The two guys running towards us just stopped dead. You could see them thinking, Where the hell did you guys come from?

  Faced with twelve SA80s aimed in their direction, the Afghans did the only possible thing.

  And dived for cover.

  That could have been very bad for me. With the crops at waist height they could quite comfortably have crawled away and been lost forever. The inquest into the mission would ask: ‘Why didn’t you take them out before they had the chance to escape? Do you know how many British and American lives you’ve put at risk because you didn’t fire?’

  I was annoyed, although not because we hadn’t fired on the two Afghans. I was proud of my boys for showing restraint. Mind you, our Victorian principles of fair play are fine when you’re winning. For a moment that didn’t look to be the case. If those Afghans got away to kill innocent troops another day, all the principles in the world wouldn’t make it right.

  ‘We need to find them!’

  There was a hell of a lot of shouting in English and broken Afghan as we fanned out to cut off any escape routes. John’s voice was the one that mattered. He could explain coherently what was going on. It worked. Suddenly from exactly the spot the two Afghans had disappeared, four hands appeared above the tops of the maize.

  ‘Hold fire!’ I yelled. ‘They’re surrendering.’

  After they were arrested the suspects maintained that they’d been framed by a neighbour who was after their fertile land. I have no idea whether their story held any water. What I did know is that my lads had shown a level of control that would make anyone back at the CTC proud. Card Alpha was safe in our hands.

  * * *

  The reputation of the Afghan police was second only to their behaviour. Some days later we were in a village following up a lead as a combined British-Afghan force and the compound owners actually requested my men search their property, rather than their compatriots.

  Via John I said, ‘This is not the way our partnership is meant to work. We are here to train the police.’

  ‘You will never train them not to steal from our homes,’ came the reply. ‘We trust the British with our possessions, not the police.’

  You couldn’t blame them. On another patrol we came across a roadblock. Through John, I asked the policeman in charge what they were looking for. He said, simply, ‘Insurgents.’

  ‘Have you had a tip-off? Is that why you’re blocking the road?’

  ‘Yes. Very bad men are coming this way.’

  Something about his demeanour didn’t sit right. I went with John over to one of the cars that had just been released. The driver said he’d been forced to hand over all the money from his wallet.

  I said, ‘Why? What reason did the police give?’

  ‘They said it was a tax.’

  I could have arrested the lot of them there and then, but I knew it wouldn’t go down well in Bastion. Every time I reported bad operations I was told they were the result of teething troubles. We must persevere. Trust in the programme. The programme I could believe in. The Afghan police? Not so much.

  * * *

  What with the bottle, the bullets and the blood trail from the barbed wire, the mood back at Mulladad was one of heightened awareness. It was no longer just me who sensed something in the air. The general air of peace and quiet had been gradually shifting for a while, ever since harvest finished. The attack on Steve’s convoy had been the first salvo, as far as I was concerned. I fully expected more. I just didn’t know how or when.

  For all the training we marines get, the thing I found myself relying on most in mid-May was my instincts. And they were saying – screaming in fact – ‘Something has changed.’ We went out on patrol one day and the village elders we came across blanked us. These are men who barely a week earlier had shared tea at one of our shuras. A few minutes later an angry farmer came up to John and demanded compensation for the destruction – by us, he said – of a significant swath of his crop. The fact that he approached John showed how familiar he was with us. The fact that he lied through his teeth about the degree of devastation proved that something was amiss.

  We had a flat fee for crop damage: US $20. For death or injury to cattle it was higher. We were authorised to pay any such claims on the spot. For any higher claims we wrote a chit for the claimant and told them to take it up with Shazaad. For some reason, on this particular day we were inundated with vociferous Afghans desperate to prise their pound of flesh from ISAF. There was something off about the whole situation. Why would an entire village suddenly have a problem with our work? We’d physically helped many of them in one way or another during our time in the area. It didn’t stack up.

  Fergie nailed it. ‘Shit’s happening,’ he said. ‘And we’re going to find out the hard way.’

  Never a truer word …

  The day got worse. A couple of men with whom we’d previously had decent contact almost went out of their way to get my back up. One in particular was doing his damnedest to provoke a reaction. I say ‘men’ because kids stop being kids much earlier in Afghan, but this guy was fourteen, fifteen and just would not stop irritating us. One minute he’s trying to touch our weapons, the next he’s running in between us, pretending to go in for a wrestling hold then pulling out at the last minute. I was amazed Space Cadet didn’t ask to shoot him on the spot. But then, he’d been very restrained recently.

  John approached the teen’s dad to ask him to intervene and was shot down in flames.

  ‘Why are you working with them? Why are you betraying your own kind? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  This was a guy who’d previously fed us intel – quality intel. It was as though the guy and his boy were trying to provoke some kind of physical response from us.

  Today is not the day, I decided.

  I also noticed women virtually running away from us when we approached even their vague direction. Again, many of them were known to us. Some had given us info. Wh
y, suddenly, were they obeying the harsher reading of Islamic law and shunning strange men, when they’d never done so before?

  The whole atmosphere was one of distance. I’ve never felt more unwelcome or more alien in any company. There was nothing we could do that made a difference. It was as though they wanted to put cultural miles between us. For what purpose I couldn’t imagine.

  * * *

  The following day began as most of them did, with us on patrol. The only difference was that we set out at the crack of dawn so we could avoid the harsh midday sun.

  We biometrically tested a few people, reported a couple of odd situations back to Shazaad, then made our way back to the CP. Like almost every other day so far there were no arrests and no gunfire. I was beginning to think I’d imagined the potential threat against us.

  We were actually just walking through our compound gate when we heard it. Somewhere not too far away there was a firefight going on. A real one. A loud one. I could make out the distinctive sound of machine-gun fire. I had a map of the whole region in my head, for by now we’d walked every square yard. Concentrating, I managed to pinpoint the firefight’s source. North-west of us.

  ‘Lads, Kamiabi is under fire!’

  A buzz went round the group. Yes, some of our colleagues were under attack. Yes, we had no idea of how serious it was. And, yes, it could end badly for some marines. But we all knew in our hearts that we’d swap places with H and his guys at Kamiabi in a heartbeat. This is what we’d trained for. As I looked round the group the vibe among everyone was unmistakably one of excitement. Even though we weren’t involved.

  Yet.

  I got on the radio to speak to HQ. Major McCulley was thinking along the same lines as I was.

  ‘I know you’ve just got back but the Kamiabi lads need help. Can you get there?’

  ‘We’re on our way.’

  My guys were chomping at the bit. Any thought of tiredness or boredom from the day’s exertions had vanished. We couldn’t get going quickly enough. Unfortunately, I could see that one or two of the lads were running on fumes. Telling them to stay back was one of the hardest decisions I’d made. Two fresh pairs of legs joined the fray instead.