by Zoe Sharp
“Ah, when you put it like that…”
I sighed, sobered. “Look, I wasn’t prepared to kill them in cold blood and I didn’t know what else to aim for that would have any effect.” I scowled at him. “No doubt you would have done things very differently, of course.”
“Probably would have,” he allowed. He regarded me stonily for another beat, then a smile snuck all the way across his face. “I have to say, though, you may have shrieked like a girl, but I’ll call it a battle cry and let you off, because putting out their campfire like that…well, I never would have thought of it in a million years, but it was fucking inspired.”
With a last nod, he nudged his horse into a jog trot and re-joined Posh in front, leaving me staring after him with my mouth open.
“Bloody hell,” I said after a moment. “Is it just me, or was that actually faint praise?”
Brookes grinned in response. “From him, I get the feeling that was as close as you’re going to get to a standing ovation.”
17
I’d been expecting one prisoner. Scary and Posh, ever the over-achievers, came back with three. When they returned from the village to our current location in the hills just above, they not only had the elderly Afghani chief with them, but also two other men I didn’t recognise.
Mind you, it’s hard to recognise anyone when they have torn strips of fabric bound across their eyes, obscuring half their faces. I only knew the chief by his clothing and the amount of greying beard trailing out beneath his blindfold.
The other two, judging from what bits of scrappy beard I could see, were much younger. The harsh conditions of this country tended to batter anyone into early-onset old age before they were thirty. Still, something about their clothing rang a bell. They’d certainly been present when our guys had been handed to the Taliban. But then, so had half the village.
“Was there a ‘buy one, get two free’ offer going there or something, pal?” Ginger asked Scary.
Scary shrugged. “It was either grab the lot or abort.”
When he yanked the blindfold away from the chief’s eyes, the man allowed himself a moment of naked panic before a kind of calm acceptance overtook him. On his knees, with hands tied behind him, he must have already come to terms with his fate.
Scary and Posh had gone in just before sunrise, timing their snatch raid just as the old man finished his fajr morning prayers. By the time anyone was likely to have realised he and the other two men were missing, they were all long gone.
From what Ginger let slip, the village chief, Zameer, was a veteran of the Mujahideen, the ragged bunch of disparate Islamic fighters who’d taken up arms against the Soviet invasion of 1979 and battled one of the world’s superpowers to humiliating stalemate during a decade of conflict.
Now, the skinny old man faced Scary, who was managing to live up to his nickname without overt threats of any kind. He stood watching Zameer with impassive eyes, arms folded across his chest. Tate was at his shoulder, ready to translate.
When the faces of the other two prisoners were uncovered, they proved younger than I’d initially thought—little more than teenagers. They kept their heads bowed, as if by avoiding eye contact they might pretend somehow that this was not happening and we did not exist.
The Spec Ops boys loomed around them, ready to quell any display of resistance. The rest of us stayed close enough to listen, far enough away to keep an eye on our perimeter.
Sooner or later, someone would miss them.
And then they’d come looking.
“You betrayed us,” Scary said to the chief, via Tate.
Zameer denied it, but without conviction.
“You handed us over to the Taliban, knowing what they would do with us.”
“He reckons he didn’t have a choice,” Tate said.
Scary glanced at him. “Don’t give it to me second-hand—I don’t want your interpretation of what he says. I want his exact words. You with me, soldier?”
Tate stiffened and only just prevented himself from coming to attention. “Yes, sarge.”
Scary nodded, turned back to Zameer. “There’s always a choice.”
This time, Tate spoke as if channelling the chief, stumbling at first, then getting into his stride. “You…you do not know these men—what they would do to us.”
“Whereas you clearly know them very well.”
“Of course. Many of them he—er, I—fought alongside, like brothers, against the Russian invaders. Still they would kill me, my family, if they knew I had allowed you to be given shelter.”
“So you were just protecting your family, were you—both by offering us help and then handing us over? Playing both sides against the middle?”
“Word of your arrival had already reached Al-Ghazi’s ears. He knew you were coming. If I had tried to deny it…” Zameer waited for Tate to finish speaking, then shrugged. The shrug spoke volumes.
“But he didn’t learn of our mission from you?”
“I risked everything by contacting you. Why would I invite suspicion into my house?”
“Somebody betrayed us, Zameer. If it wasn’t you, then who else?”
Zameer’s gaze remained resolutely on Scary. A little too resolutely, for my liking. I realised he was trying very hard not to look at either of the two young men who’d been taken captive alongside him.
That alone made me study them more intensely. As if aware of the scrutiny, they shifted on their knees, almost squirming. What was it about them…?
I stepped in closer. The nearest of them threw me a sideways glance and tried to cringe further away, as if a glimpse of my face might infect him with something distasteful. Infidel was one thing, clearly, but infidel and female were too much for him to bear.
“I remember these two,” I said abruptly as the memory unfolded. “They were on the roof—the ones who signalled to the Taliban before you were captured.”
Scary regarded me for a moment without comment, then jerked his head to Zameer. “Who are they?”
“One is my nephew, Dil,” came the reluctant response. “The other is Ramin…my son.”
“You are blessed with a large family,” Scary said without apparent sarcasm. “Tell me, did they know we were coming, and what for?”
There was a long pause while Zameer absorbed not only the question, but the implications that went with it. His shoulders drooped a little as he nodded slowly and murmured his assent.
Scary flicked his head to Sporty and Ginger, who closed in on the two younger men and hauled them to their feet. They had already begun to drag them away before the pair thought to react, to resist.
Zameer half-rose in protest. Scary pushed him back onto his knees. Not rough, but firm enough to discourage a further attempt. The chief’s eyes followed the two until they were taken out of sight beyond a rocky outcrop.
“Please,” Zameer said. “They are young…foolish.”
“They are old enough to fight.” The implication was clear.
Old enough to die.
The old man’s gaze turned pleading, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to beg. Not yet.
Posh cleared his throat. “Clock’s ticking,” he said to Scary. “We really don’t have time to get into a prolonged bout of haggling. Al-Ghazi could appear at any moment, and when he finds we’ve flown the coop the first thing he’s likely to do is spirit away those engineers.”
Scary let his breath out fast down his nose, almost a snort. “Yeah, OK. Let’s get this over with.”
“Hang on!” It was Corporal Brookes who spoke up. He took a step forward. The two Spec Ops boys paused again and Brookes swallowed. “Look, you can’t just…”
“Can’t what?”
Brookes flushed. “Can’t…you know…well, kill them.”
Scary straightened, pulled back his shoulders, rotated his neck a fraction, and the slow deliberation of his movements was a threat all by itself.
“Oh?”
“Hey, if he was coming at me with an AK,
I’d be the first to slot him straight off, don’t get me wrong,” Brookes said quickly. “But this—” he gestured to the man’s bound hands “—this is an execution.”
“Yeah,” Scary said, his voice cold and hard. His eyes flickered over me, as if waiting for further protest. It took everything I had to stand still and say nothing. “And what do you think they’re going to do to those engineers if we don’t get to them first? At least I’ll make it quick.”
Into the humming silence that followed, Zameer spoke and was quickly translated by Tate.
“The men you speak of—these engineers. They are being held in the mountains. It is a secret place. I have sworn never to reveal it.”
Scary seemed to consider this for a moment. “We’re not asking you to reveal any secrets,” he said. “We just want the men returned safe to their families.” He paused, added carefully. “Isn’t that what anyone would want, if a relative had been…taken?”
The emphasis was not lost on Zameer. Scary didn’t even have to let his gaze drift after the two young men. The chief’s head drooped in capitulation.
“If this could be…arranged,” he said at last, “you would be…merciful?”
Scary nodded without making any promises out loud, one way or the other. Zameer waited, as if hoping for a firm confirmation he must have known wasn’t coming, then he inclined his head. “This will be done.”
“How?”
“Release my son, with a message. He can—”
Scary didn’t let Tate finish his translation before he cut him off.
“No. Your nephew can carry the message. Your son—he stays with us.”
18
“Next time I’m issued with a set of combats, I swear I’m going to get a size over and line the front with foam padding,” I muttered. I was lying on stony ground again, heat leaching up out of the earth and into my body until I was greasy with sweat.
“You could always just put on a few pounds of your own padding,” Brookes suggested.
I lifted my cheek away from the stock of the rifle long enough to say, “Up yours, corp.”
He laughed, but quietly. The two of us were halfway up what was either a large hill or a small mountain, overlooking the valley floor. Opposite us, down below, what was either a large stream or a small river spilled out onto a plateau caused by some passing glacier aeons ago.
The source of the flow was way up in the mountains, and had gradually cut a deep channel between them on its way to the bottom of the valley. It was now a steep-sided ravine, not unlike the one where the Spec Ops Lynx had crash-landed. The similarities were not lost on me.
Somewhere further up the ravine lay a path that led to the cave where the engineers were being held hostage.
Any more detail than that, we didn’t know.
Zameer had sent his nephew, Dil, back to the village with a message for the men holding the engineers. I’d no clue what the message said, but between Scary and Zameer, with Tate as go-between, they’d worked out something that obviously convinced them to co-operate. I gathered that the guards were men from the village rather than hardened Taliban. Everyone subcontracted when shortage of labour demanded, it seemed.
Either way, the captors were more inclined to listen to their village elder than some distant fundamentalist doctrine. They would not allow us to go and fetch the engineers, but would bring them down to more neutral territory. The only thing that worried all of us was time.
If we didn’t get clear with our hostages before the Taliban returned with Al-Ghazi in tow we’d be up to our necks in the brown smelly stuff. This had already taken longer than any of us had envisaged spending out in the field.
Besides anything else, if it came to a choice between supporting us—foreigners who were here one day and gone the next—and jihadi brothers who were somewhat closer to home, it didn’t take a genius to work out where their loyalties would have to lie.
Hadn’t Zameer already proved that?
It had taken us a morning to reach this place, and it would take us another half a day to get to our safe extraction zone. Unless we were prepared to ride our borrowed horses into the ground. I was possibly the only one who didn’t fancy that option. Already I was fretting about what might happen to my faithful little mount, Mones, after we’d gone.
For now, we had left some of the horses on the other side of the mountain under Posh’s watchful eye. He was also guarding Zameer’s son, Ramin. Both horses and prisoner were tethered, to one degree or another.
“Here we go,” Brookes murmured from behind binoculars. “Movement to the north. Our guys, by the looks of it. Hang on, no—there’s only four of them.”
I shifted position, swivelling the L115 on its front bipod feet so I could track the arrivals as they picked their way along the side of the river.
It wasn’t hard to recognise Scary in the lead. Something about the set of his shoulders, the way he canted his head slightly. Behind him was Tate, the smallest figure of the bunch, his fatigues subtly different. Then came Ginger, his shock of pale hair and the stubble on his chin bright even under the brim of his hat. Sporty brought up the rear.
“What have they done with Zameer?” I wondered aloud.
“Probably not something we want to know,” Brookes said. I felt rather than saw him turn his head to glance sideways at me, considering. “D’you reckon they’ve slotted him already?”
“That makes it sound like you think it’s a foregone conclusion that they’re going to,” I said, evasive.
He shrugged. “Can they afford to let him go, after what he did before?”
“You heard what he said. He didn’t have much of a choice.”
“And I heard what Scary’s answer was to that as well—that there’s always a choice.”
“Rather depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?”
“So you’re happy with it, are you?” he persisted. “If they kill the old man after promising to release him?”
I was glad to have my face up behind the scope, so I didn’t have to meet his eye.
“What I think doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s not my decision to make.”
“Ah, the old ‘I was only following orders’ routine, huh?”
I let my breath out fast in an annoyed spurt. “What do you want me to say?” I demanded. “Either I’m appalled, in which case I’m an emotional female who’s not fit to be a frontline soldier, or I say nothing in which case I’m a hard-hearted bitch. Either way, I can’t win.”
“I spoke up. What does that make me?”
“Ah, but it’s different for you. It’s part of your job as a medic to save people, as much as it’s your job as a soldier to kill them.”
“Well, nobody said the path to wisdom was going to be easy, grasshopper.”
I sighed, more gently this time. “This is a war zone, and people do things in war they’d never contemplate in a million years otherwise.”
“You talking generally now, or personally?”
I said nothing.
After a moment, Brookes said, “Only, you had the opportunity to take out at least a couple of those guys who were holding us, before they had a chance to react. The more of them who survived, the more likely they’d be to go for us. Which was exactly what they did do, in fact.”
“You mean they tried. You were already out of that tent before they shot the shit out of it.”
“Yeah, and you didn’t know that.”
OK, he had a fair point there.
“No, I didn’t, but I had to trust that you and Posh wouldn’t sit there and wait to be rescued—that you’d do your utmost to get yourselves free. So, I did the best I could in the circumstances. The best I could come up with. Sometimes the most effective option is not always the most obvious one.”
Whatever Brookes might have been about to say next was cut short by movement along the ravine we were watching. We saw the kicked-up dust before anything else. Then a couple of riders appeared, dressed in the manner I’d come to recognise
—baggy shalwar trousers and long, loose kameez shirts, layered with waistcoats and coats that included everything from old military gear to what looked like a modern ski jacket. They wore an assortment of shapeless headgear, from traditional turban to flat-topped pakul, and everything in between. Their horses trotted surefootedly down the narrowest of rocky trails.
They stopped a dozen metres or so from our guys. Tate had halted close to Scary so he could translate for him. Ginger and Sporty pulled out wide onto either flank.
We were way too far away to hear even an echo of the conversation, but I could imagine how it was going. The Afghanis would most likely be asking where Zameer and his son were. Scary, in turn, would want to know about the engineers. A standoff in the making.
For several minutes nothing happened as the talking went on. The horses of the men who’d come down the mountain were skittish in response to the tension of their riders. They stamped and swished their tails and tossed their heads, unsettled. The men spoke with their hands, gesturing in a manner it was difficult to categorise as threatening or friendly.
We watched the group, but both of us also scanned the rocks behind them, looking for the first glimpse of something that didn’t look like landscape. Looking for the first sign of a threat.
I don’t know what Scary said to the men, but suddenly one of the riders rose in his saddle and waved to some hidden watcher further back up the ravine. I caught the dust rising a moment or two before more horses appeared. I panned across them instantly, slipping my finger inside the trigger guard of the rifle as I checked for weapons raised and ready. Finding none seemed so wrong I went back and checked again.
It took a moment before I processed what I was seeing enough to realise the mounted men approaching were not only unarmed, but they were westerners in civilian dress.
Alongside me, Brookes swore softly under his breath. “I don’t bloody believe it,” he said. “It’s the engineers. Zameer’s guys stuck to the bargain.”
“Looks that way,” I said. “My only worry is, did we?”
