by Zoe Sharp
“Well, we’re a…bust now. These lads are evac’ing…us back to base.” He could hardly manage the breath to speak. “The MERT helo will be here in…how long?”
Although he didn’t address the question to any of us in particular, I had the countdown clock to the arrival of the Medical Emergency Response Team running inside my head.
“Forty minutes, sir.”
That made the newcomer, the sergeant, flick his eyes in my direction, but no more than that.
Without a word being said between them, the others moved in to help carry their colleagues. The sergeant stepped in close to me, reached for the corner of the bivouac sheet we were using as a sling for the officer. I held fast.
“I can manage.”
The sergeant stilled. “Never said you couldn’t,” he said sharply, “but he and I need to have a chat on the way to the HLZ, so get that stick out of your arse and move over, soldier.”
I relinquished my corner immediately and hurried out of his way. And I was suddenly glad of the darkness to hide the mortified flush of colour in my cheeks.
We reached the Helicopter Landing Zone far enough ahead of time to be able to secure it. Captain MacLeod spread our lads out to keep a watchful eye on the perimeter. The sergeant who’d taken my place helped put down his load and went without a word to the other members of his team. I didn’t know what he and the wounded officer discussed during their chat en route, but neither of them looked particularly happy about it.
MacLeod jogged over to me for a sit-rep.
“ETA nine minutes, sir,” I said. I hesitated a moment, then nodded towards the huddle the sergeant made with his boys. “Who are they?”
“Far better you don’t know that, Charlie,” he said, and there was a tightness to his voice I’d come to both recognise and be wary of. He didn’t know much, either, I gathered, and was frustrated as hell by the fact.
It wasn’t entirely by chance, then, that the pair of us were still close by the wounded officer when the sergeant returned, with his team a couple of paces behind him.
“We’re going to stand on,” he said without preamble. “For the op.”
The officer was desperately trying to move around the pain now, unable to keep still, but twisted by it when he failed to do so. His hands clutched at the side of the sheet until I thought the bones would crack through the skin. Sweat and grime coated his face, and the front of his combat jacket gleamed dark with blood.
Corporal Brookes was frowning as he pumped another morphine shot into him. I saw him catch MacLeod’s eye and give a fractional shake of his head, and realised why he wasn’t worried about overdosing his patient.
“Don’t be fucking…stupid, man,” the officer managed, more gasp than speech. “Half the team’s…gone. You don’t have the men…or the expertise.”
“If it wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be here,” the sergeant said. “We all of us knew this wasn’t going to be an easy ride.”
“You still…don’t have—”
“What we haven’t got, we’ll borrow or steal as we go.”
“No, sergeant! That’s a…fucking order.”
“I’ll take your order under advisement,” the sergeant said flatly. “Face it, you’ll be dead before the MERT gets here. Unless you want your last act to be that of a coward, you’ll order me to go on with the job and you’ll go out like a fucking hero instead.”
And with that he turned away and stalked into the darkness. The other three gave the officer a last blank stare, then turned and followed without a word.
He was not, I judged, one of those officers his men would have followed anywhere. The sergeant, on the other hand, could have led them to hell.
Perhaps that’s where they were heading.
I kept in touch with the Chinook pilot on the way in. When we heard the distinctive double thump of his rotors, MacLeod ordered the flares lit. We were still close enough to the burning Lynx for that to be the bigger draw, but it always ratcheted up the odds of a contact. The Chinook was at its most vulnerable for the period it was on the ground, even with a pair of AgustaWestland Apaches riding shotgun.
As the Chinook set down, we crouched as close to the landing zone as we dared, huddled over the wounded to protect them from the twin rotors’ punishing downdraught. It pounded us viciously, whipping my combat jacket and shirt up so the sand grit-blasted my back.
The crew had the rear loading ramp coming down before the big helo was even on the ground. We ran out with the wounded, bent double, breath held against the powdered dirt, up into the belly of the Chinook. The rear load bay smelled of Avgas, canvas and rubber.
Corporal Brookes did the handover to the medical personnel riding with the helo. He had to shout to be heard over the roar of engines, talking fast but clear so there’d be no confusion, no mistakes. The taut efficiency was at odds with his usual laid-back attitude. There was nobody else I’d trust to keep my heart pumping if I went down in the field.
Last man in was the wounded officer. The men from the second Special Forces team carried him, with care but no particular reverence. It was only as they loaded him in I registered that he’d stopped writhing.
Stopped moving.
Stopped breathing, too.
As they set him down, the last thing the sergeant did was flip the cover of the bivvy sheet over the officer’s face. Then he jogged back down the loading ramp, even as it was starting to rise.
The Chinook lifted off quickly, rotating as it climbed, and blasting us with more dirt and grit. The pair of Apaches buzzed around it like attendant wasps, bristling with armament, ready to sting.
We pulled back fast after the helos peeled away, slipping into the darkness and leaving the flares gradually dwindling on the rocky ground.
I trotted along in MacLeod’s wake as he caught up with the Special Forces team. They had formed a huddle and were taking stock of their equipment. They’d supplemented their own gear with whatever they’d been able to scavenge from their fallen colleagues, I noted, and were now refilling magazines and reorganising their packs.
“Am I to understand your boss changed his mind?” MacLeod asked, his tone mild.
The sergeant slapped the magazine he’d just loaded against his free hand to seat the rounds, tucked it into a leg pocket and straightened, meeting MacLeod’s gaze flat and level. “Well, it would certainly seem that way, wouldn’t it?”
The silence stretched between them until at last MacLeod let his breath out in something close to a huff and said, “OK then, what can we do to help?”
It was only then, after the decision was made and they’d seen the way the cards had fallen, that I realised what a knife-edge we’d been balanced on.
I blinked, and the scene was suddenly different. The weapons that had seemed so casually rested were now carefully located that bit closer to each man’s hand than I’d noticed before. All the men were crouched rather than sitting, so they were ready to move in an instant if it went against them.
The sergeant’s shoulders dropped a fraction and the tension eased out of the rest of his team. His eyes flicked to mine and narrowed slightly. He knew what I’d seen, I realised, and didn’t like it much. Maybe he thought they’d been trained to be more subtle than that.
What was it that drove them, I wondered, to be so focused, so intent, that they were prepared to go against their own side to accomplish their goal?
“We’re going to need to borrow a couple of your lads—the fittest you’ve got. Preferably your medic, if you can spare him, and anyone who speaks Pashto or Dari.”
I felt my heart stutter a little. I wasn’t a medic, and I didn’t speak either of the main Afghan languages beyond the usual hello, how are you? thank you, goodbye. No chances for me there. Was I disappointed, or relieved?
MacLeod hesitated. “This op—?”
“I can’t tell you, sir. I’m sure you appreciate that.”
“I wasn’t going to ask. What I was going to ask was—since these lads are under
my command and in my care—is it as high-risk as your boss seemed to suggest?”
The sergeant gave him a grim smile. “More, if anything. More important, too, otherwise we wouldn’t be standing on for it. We have a small window of opportunity. Lot to lose. Lot to gain.”
“Even after the cost so far?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
“Then tell them as much as you can and I’ll offer them the chance to volunteer,” MacLeod said. “With no comebacks if they say no. Good enough?”
The sergeant looked like he’d say more but then he just nodded. “Good enough.”
6
“It’s a shit deal I’m offering,” the sergeant said, “but it is what it is.” He glanced at the others, who stood spread behind him. There was no fidgeting. Only their eyes tracked constantly and were never still.
I’d listened like an outsider as he made his case with no frills, no obvious exaggerations or evasions. He gave them the bare bones, stark and clear. It was a risky but vital op, and regardless of volunteers or the lack of them, he and the three other Special Forces lads were going on with the job. Take it or leave it.
I watched the effect his words had on the rest of the patrol, as their meaning and the possible repercussions penetrated.
Corporal Brookes needed telling least of all. He’d been tasked with mopping up operations gone bad in the field often enough that he didn’t need it spelled out for him. And besides, he’d just had one of the men he’d be replacing die under his care.
He shrugged, apparently blasé, but I saw the muscles work in his throat before he said quietly, “OK, I’m in.”
The sergeant nodded to him without speaking. It said more than words.
Across from me, Tate shifted restlessly. He spoke enough Dari to get by, but his Pashto was good—far better than any of the rest of us.
He gave a big sigh. “OK, yeah, fuck it. Why not?”
The sergeant nodded, rolled his shoulders like the two of them had just lifted a weight off him.
“Thank you,” he said, like he meant it. “Savour that, lads, because it’s the last kind word I’m going to give you until this is all over. Before then, I’ll push all of us until you’ll wish you’d never joined this man’s army, let alone stuck your neck out for it.”
“Christ, don’t oversell it, whatever you do,” Tate muttered.
“Anything else?” Captain MacLeod asked. The sergeant looked up, met the eyes of one of his men and gave a slight shake of his head. The other man glared at him. I could almost hear the silent argument going on between them. What was it they also needed, I wondered, that he was so reluctant to ask for?
The other man was as tall as the sergeant, but bigger all round—his combat jacket sleeves fit tight around his bulging biceps. He was the only one of the group entirely clean-shaven, and looked like he spent most of his down-time pumping iron.
He continued to glare and eventually the sergeant seemed to give in. Without much hope in his voice he asked, “Who’s your best shot? Not just good, I mean, is anybody outstanding? I’m talking sniper level.”
I felt my breath catch in my chest, clog in my throat. My eyes darted to the captain’s, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.
MacLeod shook his head, still avoiding eye contact with me. “No way,” he said shortly. “Nothing doing there, I’m sorry.”
The sergeant’s eyebrows had risen sharply. “What happened to putting the choice to the lad in question and letting him decide for himself?”
“Because it’s not a ‘lad’ at all,” MacLeod said, ducking his head in my direction. “It’s Charlie.”
There was a long pause after that. The information wasn’t news to any of my own patrol, but they held their breath anyway while they waited to see what the Special Forces team would do next. If they were hoping for something dramatic, they were disappointed. These boys kept everything under control, even their professional disbelief. For the most part, anyway.
The man with the muscles gave a grunt. “OK, so who’s second best?”
The sergeant silenced him with a brief look, and persisted. “Put it this way, who made the shot that took out the pick-up full of Talis?”
It was Corporal Brookes who answered. “Yeah, that would be Charlie,” he said dryly. “Moving target at best part of a thousand metres. Still want our second best shot, eh?”
I shifted uncomfortably, aware of every eye on me. “Don’t exaggerate, corp. It wasn’t anywhere near a thousand metres,” I muttered. “It was more like seven hundred.”
The sergeant raised one eyebrow, just a fraction. “But you took out the truck rather than the driver,” he said. “Luck or intent?”
“How do you know what I hit?” I demanded, stung by the tone of his voice as much as the question.
“Because we had eyes on the target ourselves.”
“So why didn’t you take out the driver, if that was the better option?”
“We were too far out,” he admitted. I played back the time to the team appearing at the crash site, and worked out they couldn’t have been much further away than I was.
“And I’m not saying what you did wasn’t the right choice. Just want to know why you made it.”
I let my breath out fast down my nose, tried to keep my voice calm and level. “Because if I’d just shot the driver, what was to stop one of the others kicking him out and taking over the wheel himself? Shoot the driver and lose one enemy gun. But shoot the truck and lose all of them.”
And if I was retro-fitting the reasoning to the action, I hoped the conviction I injected into my voice now would obscure it. I looked at the sergeant’s unsmiling face and couldn’t say for certain if he was taken in by my bravado. Probably not.
“So, the real question is, Charlie, if I told you we were hoping to make use of the pick-up as transport, and that shooting the driver would allow us to do that, would you have the balls to pull the trigger?”
I didn’t respond immediately. In truth, I didn’t know for sure. I’d been in firefights, sure, but that was a far more visceral experience. Somebody fired at you and you fired back. Not to do so would be suicidal. I’d had targets in my sights and watched them fall, but they had always been trying their best to kill me or my fellow squaddies at the time. In truth, I couldn’t say if I’d been the one to drop them or if it was somebody else. And they had never been so far away it qualified as assassination.
Eventually, aware of all eyes on me, I shrugged. “Well, we’ll just have to burn that bridge when we come to it, won’t we?”
The sergeant gave me a shrug of his own by way of reply, but the man with the muscles made a sound in the back of his throat that might have been a growl.
“Oh, come on—”
The sergeant silenced him with a look more effective than any punch.
“What—you’d rather she gave me some bullshit answer and then cried off?”
The searing look flicked in his direction told me the man with the muscles thought I’d likely cry off anyway, regardless of whatever answer I gave.
“It’s a moot point,” MacLeod said, his voice hard. “She’s not going.”
“Thought you were going to give everyone a chance to make up their own minds,” the sergeant said. And if the question was for MacLeod, his eyes were on me.
“Yes, but—”
“But what? The army’s equal opportunity now, hadn’t you heard?” His voice was quiet, dangerously close to jeering. “Every parent has the right to bury a daughter, not just a son.”
MacLeod opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again, gave a gesture that was half exasperation and half defeat.
“OK, Charlie—up to you. Nobody can order you into combat, but if you choose to go, well…”
He was frowning as he let the words trail away. As if I was about to disappoint him. As if I was about to make the wrong decision, and by doing so prove that I wasn’t ready for this—that I wasn’t suitable and never would be.
That came as a shoc
k after all his apparent open-mindedness over my role. The realisation slid down my spine in a cold slither, that lumping me in with the rest of the “lads” was a form of avoidance rather than acceptance.
And if I was still wavering, his next words took away the last shreds of my uncertainty.
“You might want to bear in mind, though, what the Tali are likely to do to you if you’re captured.”
“I shouldn’t imagine what they’re likely to do to any of us would be much fun, sir,” I said, and it wasn’t merely bluster. At that age—at that time—you tend to think you’re invincible. I did, that’s for sure.
I looked at the three guys behind their sergeant, saw them as individuals for the first time. Big, dark, his face outlined by a scruff of beard growth, the man with the muscles gave off an air of utter confidence in the ability of his own body to drive him forward, no matter what, to overpower and overcome.
The other two I had yet to hear speak. One was small, tight and compact, with the pale translucent skin of the natural redhead, a spray of freckles visible above the cam cream smeared across his face, and pale lashes framing pale eyes.
And the last, taller, slimmer, with an arrogance to his stance, head back so he was using a long nose as a gun sight, aiming right at me, unnerving. I kept my eyes on the sergeant. Not the easy option, by any means. There was something about him that made me wary to the tips of my fingers, and I had a feeling he knew it.
“Is that the kind of thing you need me to do?” I hedged. “Take out the driver of a truck, I mean.”
He gave another shrug. “Won’t know for sure until it happens. We need someone for overview rather than close-quarter, if that makes you feel any better about it. Someone to watch our backs. But as and when anything does kick off, you can’t hesitate. If you’re going to bottle it, you’re no use to us.”
The man with the muscles scowled. “We don’t have time for this!”
“Not every soldier has the stomach to be a sniper, Charlie, no matter how good a shot they are,” MacLeod put in. “No shame in admitting that.”
