by Zoe Sharp
“Going to do what?” Ginger queried. “If we attempt to go in there, the chances are they’ll have killed the second lot of hostages before we’re halfway to freeing the first.”
“Can’t we go for both at once?”
Sporty let out a snort. “This is not the movies, and though I can understand how you might think so, neither of us is Rambo.”
“This kind of op calls for three teams,” Ginger said. “Two for the insertion—”
“—and the third for overview,” I finished for him. “Yeah, I think I can work that one out.”
“Where we’re down to two men, never mind two teams,” Sporty said.
I lifted my head away from the stock. “Excuse me?”
“OK, two and a half.”
“Up yours.”
“Knock it off, will you?” Ginger said tightly. “What it means is, we may have to…prioritise.”
The sudden dryness in my mouth had little to do with the last time I’d taken a sip of tepid water from the plastic canteen attached to my webbing. “You mean…rescue one lot and not the other?”
“If we have to.”
“What are you going to do—toss a bloody coin?”
He sighed. “What choice have we got? Either die trying to get them all out, or fanny around and wait for those bastards to kill them?”
While I was still searching for the voice to answer, Sporty said, “So, who wins tonight’s star prize?”
“Ah, fuck. You know that as well as I do, pal.”
“You’re going to go for your sergeant, aren’t you?” I realised.
And Tate, of course. He was a fellow squaddie. Someone I’d sat around with, heard stories about his family, seen pictures of his girlfriend. He was someone I would normally have done my utmost to fight alongside and whose rescue I would have celebrated with the rest.
But if it was a toss-up between him and Brookes… Brookes was closer to being a real friend. There wasn’t anything going on between us, but under other circumstances maybe there might have been. Losing him would hit me, and hit me hard. And what about Posh—one of their own team?
“You think it’s an easy decision?” Ginger demanded, as if privy to my thoughts. “I wish there was a way around it, but there fucking isn’t. And if we sit here with our thumbs up our arses whinging about it, they’re all for the chop.”
“Surely…” my brain went surging ahead, desperation firing the synapses like the rotary barrels on a GE-Minigun, spitting out thoughts, facts, suggestions. “Surely,” I began again, more confidently this time, “if the positions were reversed and they’d grabbed you two instead, what would you be doing in there right now?”
I heard a rustle from Sporty that might have been a shrug in the gloom. “Trying like a man possessed to get loose, I expect,” he said. “But they used those plastic zip-ties. They’ve got a phenomenal breaking strain on ’em. Why d’you think we use ’em ourselves?”
I glanced at his bulging biceps. “Supposing you did manage to get free. Then what?”
Another rustle—another shrug. “Wait for an opportunity to make an escape, either evading the guards or grabbing a weapon from one of them. Get to the others if I could. Get the fuck out of there if I couldn’t.”
“So?” I encouraged.
“So if we go in there the chances are we’ll meet them already on the way out,” Ginger said, his voice strengthening as the idea took hold.
I nodded. “Then we provide overview, for which—as has been pointed out—you’re only two men down.”
Sporty’s head turned towards me and I caught the faint gleam of his teeth in the darkness. “Nah, I think you’ll find we’re only one-and-a-half men down, mate.”
14
I was getting pretty fed up of lying in the dirt. My joints ached from too little activity, and my eyes ached from too much. It was the low hours with dawn still a long way off. The dozy hours, much favoured for raids by police and soldiers alike.
I was still keeping obs on the camp, but now I was alone in the crow-black night. Through the enhanced vision of my scope, I watched the two figures of Ginger and Sporty, moving smooth as liquid over the terrain that separated us from the prisoners’ tents.
For all their macho talk, when it came down to it I could see clearly that the guys were shit-hot at what they did. It was hard to remember they were working in the dark. Their movements had the air of free climbers, shifting their weight from one fingertip hold to the next, delicate as a dance, utterly intent on covering the loose ground without stutter or stumble to give them away.
Under other circumstances, it would have been a pleasure to watch.
Now though, the tension had my stomach twisting into knots. Under my fingerless tactical gloves, my palms slid with sweat as the two men skirted the camp, using the tent Scary and Tate were in to shield their approach from the guards.
Perhaps a dozen men had been left on watch. Half of them sat huddled close to the fire, despite the ruinous effect the flames would have on their natural night vision. I guessed from their desultory manner that their leader had gone with the advance party, otherwise discipline would have been tighter. As it was, they talked and spat and drank a spiced tea called kahwah, flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and saffron, and sweetened with honey to the point it made your teeth itch. The smell of it drifted downwind to me on the gentle flutter of breeze. I’d found kahwah far too sickly when I’d tried it. Now I longed for a taste.
Because their own view of the guards was blocked by the tent, I was acting as Sporty and Ginger’s eyes on scene. Mainly this consisted of issuing stop/go commands whenever any of the guards shifted position, or went to take a piss at the edge of the camp.
It took the two Special Forces men an agonising half hour to cover the distance to the rear of the tent. I saw Ginger crouch by the back wall and ease a combat knife out of its sheath.
“Wait one.” I was struggling to keep my voice from emerging as a squawk.
“What?”
Panning rapidly across the camp, I said, “Guards are restless.” I shifted further to the right. “Something in the other tent. Go now.”
Not without effort, I brought my gaze back across to the first tent, kept it there long enough to see Ginger slit the back wall. The blade sliced through the coarse fabric, clean and quick, like it was silk. He melted inside, leaving Sporty to watch his back.
I panned to the second tent again—the tent where Posh and Brookes were being held—trying to remember to breathe. Two guards were approaching, cautious, AKs in their hands. Their gait was jerky with tension, voices high and harsh. I was close enough to hear them and, not for the first time, wished I understood more than the odd word of it.
When the guards were only a few metres away, the front canvas wall of the tent suddenly billowed outwards as if punched. They both reared back in shock, uttering what could only have been curses, then each checked that the other hadn’t clocked the reaction. To admit to fear was to lose face. Bravery in every situation was a cultural necessity for these men. It was their strength and their weakness.
There was a pause like an indrawn breath, then both men opened up. The noise seemed amplified by the darkness, shocking and brutal. With the Kalashnikovs on full auto, each kept the trigger held hard until the magazine was empty and there was nothing left of the second tent but tatters.
15
I don’t remember shouting, but the outburst of swearing from Ginger and Sporty over the net told me I must have begun yelling into their earpieces.
The two guards who’d destroyed the tent swung towards my location. The ones who’d been by the fire began to scramble for their own weapons. I rolled sideways moments before the first rounds hit, pinging off stones and kicking up spurts of dust as they sizzled past into the night.
I sprawled into a new position, trying to wedge my elbows in firmly to stop my arms shaking with adrenaline. I was cursing inside my head now, furious with myself for doing something so bloody stupid.
The guards leapt into action. They seemed to move too fast for me to track, never mind get a decent lock onto. After a few futile efforts I muttered, “Sod this,” and put one silenced round into the tea urn suspended above the fire.
The high-velocity round ripped through the metal container. It split apart, sending a gush of steaming tea cascading down onto the flames and dousing them almost at once.
The light given out by the fire snapped off as if someone had thrown a blanket over it. Not only that, but the water produced clouds of smoke that stung their eyes and clawed at their throats. The scene through my night scope cleared and sharpened. I saw the guards stumble as their own ability to see was compromised.
And because of that, I saw the figure with the knife flow up out of the terrain behind one of the men, engulfing him in much the way the water had engulfed the fire, washing him down and back. He struggled briefly, then went limp, allowing the AK to be plucked from slack fingers.
The man who’d been alongside him, less than a couple of meters away, never realised anything was amiss until his comrade’s gun was turned against him. A short burst later he, too, lay dead on the ground.
The other guards who’d been near the fire had dived for cover behind rocks at the edge of the camp that were large enough to shield them completely. Muzzle flash streaked over the top of the rocks, but I couldn’t get a line on the men behind. After a moment I realised they were crouched down, firing blindly over their heads without bothering to aim.
The next time a barrel appeared, I took a careful bead on it and loosed another single round. I saw the AK buck violently as the wooden fore grip shattered in the man’s hands. He threw down the useless weapon and ran blindly into the darkness, injured arm cradled to his chest.
I let him go.
The silence that rolled in after the short sharp gunfight was exaggerated by the contrast. Shadows emerged and solidified, moving slow and cautiously. I centred on each one, checking off their identity before moving on.
Ginger and Sporty were easy to spot. They still had their full gear and NVGs. Somehow I was not surprised to find that it was the Special Forces sergeant, Scary, who had dispatched the two Taliban guards with such deadly efficiency. Tate came edging out from cover
Ginger’s voice in my ear called me in. I rose stiffly, walked towards the camp with the L115 heavy in my arms. I didn’t want to look at the crumpled remnants of the second tent—the one where Posh and Brookes had been held—but like a bad smash on the opposite side of a motorway, somehow I couldn’t quite tear my gaze away.
It was Sporty who moved in close, though, who scuffed about with the toe of his boot and lifted folds of canvas with the end of the muzzle.
“You didn’t think we were still in there, did you?” asked a voice. We turned. Posh appeared from the direction of the rocks. There was a combat survival knife in his hands and as he spoke he wiped the blade clean on a piece of rag.
“Where the fuck did you get to, mate?” Sporty demanded.
Posh jerked his head back the way he’d come. “Oh, just cleaning up after you, as usual,” he said. He held the knife up as if inspecting a blade he must hardly have been able to see. “Took care of your stragglers.”
“Where’s Brooksy?”
The question had been on my lips but Tate beat me to it. I shut my mouth again and tried to steel myself for the answer.
“He’s back there,” Posh said, nodding towards the rocks again.
I ran, stumbling, rounded the rocks and froze.
There was a man lying on his back, limbs jittering in a way I’d seen before, when the conscious mind has ceased to provide instructions and what’s left is instinct and a nervous system, winding down.
A figure bent over the dying man, hands at his throat. My heart launched into my own throat as my feet took me forward.
Then I faltered as what I was seeing was finally decoded by my brain.
The dying man was not Brookes. He was Taliban, from his dress. It was the figure leaning over him who was in standard Multi-Terrain Pattern combat gear. And the hands he had to the man’s neck were not strangling him, as I’d first feared, but doing their best to stem the blood flow from a gaping throat wound.
Brookes looked up, the head torch he was using flaring in my night-sight goggles. I flinched and shut my eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, automatically, looked down again at his patient. “I…I’ve lost him.” He let go and sat back on his heels, defeated. “Fuck.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Posh said, “if he’d lived we’d have had to kill him anyway.”
“No, as a matter of fact,” Brookes said, weariness in his voice, “it doesn’t make me feel any better at all, thanks.”
“Wait a moment. Can we back up a few steps? How the hell did the pair of you get out of that bloody tent?”
“Move first, talk later,” the sergeant, Scary, said abruptly. “Find your gear and grab your horses. It’ll start getting light in a few hours and, trust me, we want to be long gone from here by then.”
16
“A mate of mine’s a copper,” Brookes said. “Last time I was home on leave, he was telling me about some teenage toe-rags he arrested for breaking and entering. He and his oppo nabbed a bunch of them—enough that they ran out of standard handcuffs and had to use the PlastiCuffs type on the rest.”
We were heading back towards the village where the local chief had welcomed and then betrayed our advance party. I wondered what kind of a reception we’d receive when we got there this time. Meanwhile, listening to the corporal’s story was a good way of taking my mind off what might be to come.
We were both riding one horse and leading another. Scary had insisted we take whatever spare mounts were left with us. Better than leaving them tethered in the middle of nowhere or turning them loose. He had visions of them returning to their home base and raising the alarm. I didn’t think it worth mentioning that in my experience most horses did not have the homing instinct—nor the brains, in most cases—of the average pigeon.
Brookes, like the others, had been knocked about by his captors, but nevertheless he wanted to check everyone else over before we moved off. Scary overruled him, on the grounds that we needed to put as much distance between us and what remained of the camp before the survivors who’d fled into the night regrouped, or the rest of the Taliban contingent returned.
So, I rode alongside him on Mones. The little chestnut jogged and pulled faces at the horse I was leading, occasionally laying back his ears and bunching his hindquarters to show he was boss. So much for giving him a name that meant ‘friend’.
“Anyway, they put the bigger lads in the steel handcuffs, although the plastic ones have a hell of a breaking strain,” Brookes went on. “He said they never thought for a moment any of them would get loose.”
“But they managed it.”
He nodded. “The smallest, puniest one did. He was out of them in less than a minute. Turned out he untied the laces on his trainers, threaded the ends through the cuffs and reknotted them. Then all he had to do was pump his feet up and down, yeah? The laces built up enough friction to melt through the plastic, and he was off like a rocket.”
“He got away?”
Brookes laughed. “Nah, the daft sod forgot he’d tied his laces together. Tripped over his own feet before he’d made it ten yards and fell flat on his face.”
“I assume they secured him with something a bit stronger second time around?”
“Had to use another pair of PlastiCuffs—they didn’t have anything else—but they made all of them give up their shoelaces.”
I grinned at him. “And you did the same thing in the tent—sawed through the zip ties, I mean, rather than falling flat on your face?”
“Yeah.” He ducked his head in the direction of Posh, riding up ahead with Scary alongside him. “He was just finding us a way out of the back of the tent when the guards started kicking off.”
I laughed out loud, awa
re as I did so that I was more amused by the story than I should have been. The relief at still being alive—at all of us still being alive—made the story seem funnier. On the eastern horizon the first flush of new day was beginning to dawn, the colours brighter and the smells more vivid than they seemed the day before.
Ahead, Scary wheeled his horse and circled back to us.
“You OK?”
I wasn’t sure which of us the question was aimed at, but I gave a wary nod. “I could ask you the same question.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about me. This is all in a day’s work for me,” he said, unsmiling. “But I understand you had a bit of a wobble back there.”
Reminded of my involuntary yell, I flushed and threw a quick glare in the direction of Sporty and Ginger. They’d both dropped back far enough to be immune to my best hard stare, even if they’d been paying attention.
“I know it’s hard to watch and do nothing,” Scary said. He slid his gaze sideways over me. “Harder still to act, sometimes.”
“I did act,” I said, keeping my voice even.
He made no reply, just rode alongside me for a few paces, face giving nothing away.
Eventually, I let out an exasperated sigh. “What—you think I should have fired at those two guys before they ever got a shot off, and to hell with the rules of engagement?”
“As soon as they picked up their weapons and moved towards our guys, then as far as I’m concerned unarmed prisoners were in ‘imminent danger’ and all bets were off. You should have known that, Charlie.”
“Should I?” I threw back. “Maybe I’m not used to bending the rules as much as you are, sergeant. And maybe I’d be given a damn sight less leeway if I did.”
To my surprise, he nodded. “So you decided their tea kettle was posing an immediate threat to life, did you, and shot that out instead?”
“Have you ever tried that kahwah stuff? Half a cupful and you fall into a diabetic coma. Definitely a threat.”
