Lethal Shot

by Robert Driscoll

  Luckily for him he was unarmed each time we arrested him.

  ‘You won’t be smiling if I ever catch you with a weapon,’ I said. ‘Then you’ll see what I’m allowed to do. Then you’ll see justice.’

  Of course, the insurgents were well aware that if we saw that they were armed, then we could stop and arrest them. Shoot them if they didn’t co-operate. Yet they always seemed to have a gun to hand to shoot at us when we least expected it. How were they doing it? We got an idea during one patrol when Mac found something hanging from a tree. It wasn’t a body. It was a loaded AK-47. The rifle wasn’t there by accident. It could be reached easily from the road.

  It explained the ‘shoot and scoot’ practice – when a moped carrying two young men could race past us one minute and then those same men could be blasting at us with automatic weapons a minute later. They’d drift by, casual as you’d like, produce a weapon from a hole in the ground or behind a particular bush, take a few pot shots, then wheel over to the next hidey-hole. It was cunning. Unless we were actually to shoot them we would never find them with weapons.

  And what were we doing in return? Compared with hiding serious military hardware in trees, something passive, you could have bet money on that. And the insurgents knew it. One of the initiatives we rolled out was to post letters through every compound door asking for help from the locals in hunting down the Taliban terrorists. We offered the full protection of the British war machine.

  And the insurgents just pinned these letters on local men’s backs and sent them back.

  That’s when they were being respectful. On one patrol we found a hundred or so paper aeroplanes littering a narrow track. They were all made from our charming little peace proposals.

  ‘They’re laughing at us,’ I said.

  No one could disagree. But what could we expect? We were applying Western standards to non-Western culture. We expected Afghans to react in the way that we knew citizens of Canterbury or Hamburg or Bruges might respond. I don’t think that our masters – the analysts and planners – paid any heed to what pushed the buttons of this very different breed of people.

  * * *

  Achieving justice, or making our mark on the enemy who had terrorised us for so long, was becoming more important to all of us with every passing day. Someone needed to pay. We weren’t even that fussed who it was. We’d take any win by then. A guy presented himself at the CP one day claiming compensation for a bullet wound for which he said we were responsible. I felt he was probably right. But part of me was thinking, I’m glad you got shot. I bet you deserved it, as well.

  One day there was an ‘ops box’ command from Shazaad. The American Special Forces were initiating a raid so we were ordered to avoid a certain area for twenty hours. The assault, when it came, was of biblical proportions. Two attack helicopters have the firepower to level a building. The combination of Tankbuster and Spectre Gunship planes levelled a huge area. Then two helicopters dropped a squadron of SF guys into the zone to hoover up the pieces. There was bombing, machine-gun fire, and fireworks to rival the Fourth of July. For ninety minutes we had the best seat in the house, watching and listening. Then it was all over. The helicopters returned, the SF went home – and the dead stayed dead.

  The next day we were commissioned with a recce to confirm the numbers killed. It was as impressive as it was horrific. Where six compounds used to stand there was just rubble. Bodies and limbs were strewn everywhere. For the first time I actually saw something like fear in the eyes of the locals.

  ‘Why did you do this?’ they kept asking.

  ‘It wasn’t us.’

  But, I thought, I bloody wish it had been us.

  Our camp was attacked several times that night. It seemed fair, somehow. And it was expected. Maybe it was retaliation, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the insurgents really did believe that we were responsible for the huge onslaught. We were attacked most nights regardless. It was difficult ever to pinpoint a reason.

  * * *

  I don’t remember what day of the week it was. Maybe Monday, maybe Wednesday. I didn’t hear my alarm clock, but I did hear the shouts of my men on the perimeter. There were holes in the mud. Someone had been digging underneath the wall. By sheer chance an outdoor patrol had spotted it. When they traced it inside we realised the hole had almost broken through.

  ‘Shit. Another few inches and they would have been in. Why do you think they stopped?’ No one knew. The best we could come up with was ‘luck’.

  A few days later it happened again, but on the other side of the compound. This time they didn’t get as far. It was obviously laborious work and they’d been interrupted. I wasn’t sure we’d be so fortunate a third time.

  The men were agitated, even jumpy. Considering how wired we were, anyway, through lack of sleep, this only magnified matters. We were all concerned about having our throats slit in our beds.

  ‘Just as well we never get to sleep then, isn’t it?’ Robbie said.

  He had a point. Even so, despite getting barely three hours of shuteye in every twenty-four, I found myself taking my pistol to bed. I put it under my pillow. It wasn’t enough to be able to roll out of my trench and into the ops room or the sangar. I wanted to be able to take an insurgent out with me. It was lucky I couldn’t hear my alarm clock, because I’d most definitely have taken that out as well.

  The tension within the team was already strong, overwhelming even. Discovering those tunnels so near completion tipped us over the edge. Without ever discussing it as a group, we all realised that we would rather die than risk capture by the savages that were the Taliban. As a result, we hatched a plan to place explosives all around the CP. In a critical emergency we’d activate one bomb, which would trigger a chain reaction, bringing the entire compound in on itself and taking with it anyone inside Daqhiqh.

  We called it the last line of defence. What it really was – and what everyone acknowledged – was a giant suicide bomb. We all preferred to die at our own hands than be tortured, maimed and strung up as trophies.

  * * *

  The decisions you make in 50-degree heat and 70 per cent humidity, when you’re dead on your feet and feeling increasingly powerless. It didn’t help that Sunray couldn’t prise any further reinforcements from Bastion. He sounded as frustrated as I was. It was almost as though the new command didn’t believe we had a war on our hands. Perhaps, with 42 Commando HQ moving across to Sagin, it was because we were now under 45 Commando’s HQ.

  But plenty of people knew exactly what we were facing on the ground. One day I got a message from a camp further in towards Shazaad. As far as I knew, they hadn’t seen any action at all in six months.

  And that, it turned out, was the point.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of signallers here, Rob,’ the commander of the CP said. ‘They really want to get their hands dirty. Can they join you for a couple of days?’

  Honestly, at that point I would have taken anyone apart from our former medic. The more bodies the better. Just a couple would allow two of my guys to close their eyes for more than forty winks.

  It began to happen a lot. Men who hadn’t seen any kinetic action were signing up to join us for a few days. They’d arrive, we’d patrol, get shot at and respond. Then we’d come home, write reports and do it all again the following day. Forty-eight hours later the visitors would return to their CP with their still fresh uniforms and their stories of derring-do. ‘War Tourists’ I called them. I meant it derogatorily, but I think they may have saved our sanity, if not our lives. For every ‘bullet backpacker’ we got, my guys scrambled an average of one hour’s extra kip. When you’re being shot at or bombed every single day, the currency of sleep tops the exchange rate.

  People who drive on motorways when they’re exhausted experience the phenomenon of micro-sleeps. They don’t know how they reached their destination. Or they suddenly realise they’re bouncing over the bumps of the hard shoulder. My men went through that every waking minute. ‘Waking’ being the ope
rative word. I realised the hollowed-out men I had seen all those months ago at Camp Bastion weren’t ghosts. They were zombies. They were the undead. Men who’d forgotten how to sleep. That’s what it felt like, anyway.

  * * *

  At some point during late August we lost sight of our mission. Hearts and minds were in short supply among the locals we encountered. How could we hope to win what we couldn’t find? With just over a month of the tour left to complete we were focused on a policy of ‘kill or capture’. The emphasis was not on ‘capture’.

  I decided to take the men to the place where we’d have the best opportunity. Green 13 had caused us all sorts of problems in the past. It was where we had finally realised, once and for all, that we were the rodents in this grown-up game of cat and mouse. It’s where I knew that, if any killing was going to happen, it would be there.

  Bearing in mind what happened to us every time we ventured that way, it would take some planning, some skill and some luck not to be on the receiving end again. I spoke to Tom Phillips and we brokered a joint initiative to move up there together. But first, I said, I want to get some eyes on the place.

  ‘Are you sure? You’ve been ambushed every time you’ve gone anywhere near.’

  ‘I have a cunning plan …’

  Early one morning, eight of us used the little stream in the compound to swim out, just as we’d done in Toki. We still had to cross Route Cornwall, though. As we stood poised to rush across, the remaining lads in the CP set off smoke grenades and fired several rifle rounds. The distraction worked. We bolted across Cornwall, dived into the canal and waited to hear what the ICOM had to say.

  Plenty about the smoke grenades – but nothing about nine marines trying to be invisible.

  ‘Perfect.’

  We made our way carefully. It was slow going. Some of the rat runs that afforded the best cover weren’t the most direct. It was worth following them, though. Concealment was the key. Barely a metre of track passed without our being reminded of what had happened on previous visits. There were crops still bent from our trampling through. Walls scarred with bullet holes. Patches of flattened grass where we’d dived for cover.

  All the subterfuge paid off. We made it to within a building’s depth of the infamous junction. Turning left or right would bring us directly onto the road.

  ‘What’s it going to be, Rob?’ Fergie asked. ‘Left or right?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said.

  ‘Are we staying here?’

  ‘No. We’re going up.’

  We always have collapsible ladders on us, but the building protecting us had New York-style fire escapes running up the wall. Two minutes later we were all lying prone on the flat roof, barely able to contain our laughter. How the fuck had we managed to get so close? In the past we’d been shot at just for thinking about Green 13. It made no sense.

  We waited for ten minutes. When I was convinced our high-level sortie had gone undetected – the ICOM was the litmus test, as always – I inched on my belly towards the ridge of the roof, which, according to my maps, should overlook the crossroads. Fergie and Matt were right behind me.

  The picture I saw below was pretty much as the intel had shown. A bustling junction on Route Devon, barely 2 kilometres from Taalander, full of mopeds and other small vehicles zipping up and down and across the junction, this way and that. Devon itself was lined with not exactly shops but booths or lock-ups. Whatever they were, dozens of young men were sitting on chairs outside them drinking Coca-Cola and smoking. Like any other men enjoying a sunny day without a care in the world.

  ‘You could almost think these bastards didn’t want to kill us,’ I said.

  ‘What do you think they’d do if they knew we were here?’

  ‘I don’t know, Fergie. Shall we find out?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I decided to sit up. The lads with me did the same. It felt weirdly naughty, as though we were mischievous schoolboys up to no good. In a way we were. Given everything we knew about the insurgents, about the ruthlessness of their tactics, about their expertise in navigating the warren of streets in the vicinity, it bordered on madness to get their attention.

  Put it this way: I wouldn’t have done it in March, April, May, June or July. But, after five weeks of being shot at, bombed or cornered close to IEDs nearly every single day, you start thinking differently. Seriously differently.

  When the men below failed to notice us I decided to up the ante. Again, you won’t find this in any training manual. But we were there for a recce. I wanted to see what we were dealing with.

  ‘Morning, boys,’ I called down. ‘Lovely day for it, isn’t it?’

  In the street below us a couple of lads sipping coffee looked at each other. It was beautiful to watch. Above the din of the mopeds and the general chat and laughter they’d heard something. They couldn’t put their finger on it. What was it?

  You could actually see the penny drop.

  English!

  A ripple like an electric current went through the groups of men relaxing with their Cokes or cups of coffee. It was like watching dominoes fall. One by one they all got the message that something was wrong. They looked left, they looked right.

  And then they looked up.

  The expression on their faces when they saw eight British Royal Marines waving down at them was priceless. A second later it was as though a powder keg had gone off. They leapt out of their chairs. Some ran inside the buildings. Some into the road. Mopeds were flagged down and cars were stopped.

  ‘I think that’s our cue to leave,’ I said.

  We scrambled down the ladders and dashed back along as close to the exact route we’d followed on the way in. The odds of its having been contaminated by IEDs when none of the insurgents knew we were there were slim. Amazingly, we made it back unscathed. There wasn’t even a firefight. In fact, the loudest noise for the entire journey was the ICOM having a fit. One particular call sign was broadcasting virtually non-stop.

  ‘Someone’s not happy,’ John laughed. ‘Those boys are all getting it in the neck.’

  That night our CP was targeted with grenades, machine-gun fire and any other shit the Taliban could muster. It didn’t matter. Inside those mud walls we felt untouchable.

  Amazing what sleep deprivation can make you do.

  The next day I started hatching a plan to go back to Green 13 in force. HQ agreed to have air support on standby and feed Shazaad’s intel directly to us. Tom Phillips would lead a patrol from Taalander.

  ‘Maybe a bit less kamikaze stuff this time, though?’ HQ added.

  We moved out in exactly the same manner that had proved successful before. We got across the canal and sneaked our way to the last compound between us and Green 13. To the north-west of us Tom Phillips was doing much the same thing. There was no ICOM chat and we saw no bonfires lit en route. Yet for all our stealth, to achieve anything we had to cross Devon. And we knew exactly what would happen when we did.

  The shooting began the moment Robbie set foot outside the compound wall.

  Click-click-click.

  Click-click-click.

  But he was ready. We all were. We knew exactly where the shooters were because the PGSS camera had picked them out. Robbie dropped to a kneeling position, cool as a cucumber, fixed the direction of fire and responded in kind. Moments later he was joined by Matt, me and the rest of the snake’s tail, all raking fire at our enemy.

  Now it was the attackers’ turn to be caught out. The wall they were hiding behind was solid but our wall of lead was already making inroads. A few more minutes and it would be more holey than a Swiss cheese.

  I radioed the camera operator at Shazaad.

  ‘Status?’

  ‘They’re moving.’

  I almost got him to repeat it. After six months of being shot at, being made the target in this lethal game of cat and mouse, we’d never once got the locals on the run. Until now. I hoped I could remember what to do.r />
  We were to the north of the insurgents. Wherever they went it had to be south. A couple of minutes went by, then Shazaad came back on line. ‘They’re in compound 155.’

  I checked my map. We were outside 157.

  I gave the order to advance. It was slow. We had to be prepared for other shooters to pop up. Judging by the ICOM that was a possibility, although it wasn’t happening yet. In any case, I had every faith that our eyes in the sky would give us the nod.

  Although I was exhilarated to have the back-up I found myself wondering, Where was all this support during the last six months?

  Knowing your target’s location and getting to it are two very different things. They fired, we returned fire, they shifted position, we followed, and the process continued. The longer it went on the more confident I felt in getting a result. Since a flat roof had been useful on our last visit I decided to go up high once again and try to smoke them out. Four of us climbed up on to a roof. We could make out the movement the other side of the wall and fired on sight. The problem was, they could also see us. For a few minutes it was like a proper cowboys-and-Indians rifle shootout. What’s more, we were winning it.

  ‘They’re getting thrashed,’ Fergie said. ‘I don’t know why they don’t use their RPGs.’

  The words had barely left his mouth when a grenade flew over our heads and into the building next to us.

  If their aim was anything to go by, we had them rattled. They ran to another compound, then another. Thanks to the running commentary from our man on the camera at Shazaad we were never more than a minute behind. Each time they deluged the ICOM with pleas for back-up.

  ‘The Americans have us cornered. We need the Big Thing. Send the Big Thing.’

  They were scared. They were panicked. If they knew Tom Phillips was a hundred metres from joining in they’d have been terrified.