Last Light

by Alex Scarrow

2.45 p.m. GMT M6 motorway, north of Birmingham

  The roadblock was only a dozen or so vehicles ahead of them; a row of orange cones placed evenly across all three lanes and the hard shoulder. Behind this meagre barrier, three traffic police Rovers were parked end to end. The six officers that had arrived in them to set up the roadblock were now having to deal with a growing crowd of drivers who had climbed out of their vehicles to find out why the hell the motorway was being closed like this.

  Jenny turned round to look out of the rear window of the taxi. Behind them, the traffic had backed up very quickly. They were wedged in a river of inert trucks, vans and cars that stretched into the distance as far as she could see.

  ‘We’re going nowhere,’ said Paul Davies, the man Jenny had met only hours ago, and who she was sharing the taxi with.

  ‘It looks like that, doesn’t it?’ she replied.

  Paul looked up at a driver who passed by them on foot to join the gathering crowd up ahead. ‘I’m going to find out what’s up.’ He opened the door and stepped onto the road.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ said Jenny, equally anxious to find out.

  Jenny walked single file behind Paul as he made his way forward, weaving through the parked cars and trucks, finally reaching a knot of bewildered drivers remonstrating with the policemen.

  ‘Can’t fucking well block it like this!’ a truck driver was shouting, ‘I’ve got a fucking load I need to deliver this afternoon. ’

  A traffic cop standing opposite him, behind the thin line of cones, shook his head sympathetically. ‘Sorry mate, the way’s closed until further notice. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

  ‘This is to do with that lunchtime press conference,’ a man standing beside Jenny said.

  She turned to him. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Did you not hear it?’ he replied with a look of surprise.

  ‘No, what happened?’

  ‘The PM? You don’t know about that?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It looks like we’re going to be totally screwed. He said they’re going to ration petrol and everything else.’

  Jenny could see the people around her were beginning to catch on to how serious the situation was getting. These weren’t just angry people, she could actually sense an undercurrent of growing panic, like a low charge of static electricity floating amongst them. Not good.

  ‘I got a feeling this is going to get pretty nasty,’ the man added in a hushed voice looking at her. ‘Somebody on the telly was saying we could all be starving by the end of the week.’

  One of the policemen pulled out a dash-mounted radio handset from inside one of the Rovers. ‘Everyone, please return to your vehicles!’ he said, his voice crackling over the loudspeakers on the roof of his car. ‘This motorway will not be re-opened. You will all need to go back the way you came!’

  A burly man at the front lost his temper and angrily kicked one of the cones aside. He stepped towards the policemen. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding!’ he said throwing a hand back to point at the jam behind him, ‘I’ve got eighteen wheels of articulated back there with a full fucking load. How the fuck do I turn that around, you stupid—’

  ‘Step back behind the barrier!’ shouted one of the policemen.

  ‘Or what?’ he shouted, his face inches away from the nearest officer. ‘This is bullshit!’

  Several other drivers advanced behind the trucker through the gap in the cones, as if that was an open door.

  ‘Everyone please step back!’ shouted the policeman on the microphone. ‘This is an official police line!’

  Jenny could see the truck driver continuing to shout, his words lost in the growing cacophony of angry voices. He raised a hand, balled into a fist and shook it near the officer’s face. It seemed the traffic cop decided that that was enough to be interpreted as a threatening gesture. He reached out for it and began twisting the truck driver’s arm into an arrest hold. The trucker’s other hand swung around, clasped into another fist and smashed into the officer’s chin, dropping him effortlessly. Jenny watched with growing alarm, as three of the other policemen rushed to the aid of their fallen colleague, whilst the vanguard of angry people that had surged through the gap in the cones increased in number.

  Paul turned to her. ‘Jesus, this is getting out of hand!’

  People surged past Jenny as she watched the policemen wrestle with the truck driver on the ground. A young woman started picking the traffic cones up and moving them to the central aisle, whilst a portly middle-aged man wearing an expensive-looking suit decided that someone needed to take the initiative and back the police Rovers out of the way so they could all pass. He opened the driver-side door of the nearest one and climbed in, started the engine and began reversing it slowly across the motorway to the hard shoulder to clear the way forward.

  The policeman holding the microphone barked an order, ‘Stop the vehicle immediately and get out!’

  What happened next seemed to occur too quickly; all in a matter of seconds.

  One of the traffic police, pulled out of the struggling scrum of bodies, stepped smartly to the back of his Land Rover, opened a door and swiftly produced what appeared to be a firearm. For the briefest moment she thought, assumed, hoped, that everyone had seen the weapon; the brawl would instantly break up, and the person behind the wheel of the police car would stop, and sheepishly step out.

  He has a gun . . . a traffic copper with a gun. Jenny thought that should be enough to bring everyone to their senses, instantly.

  But that didn’t happen.

  The policeman levelled the gun at the moving police car and fired. One of the headlights exploded. The sound of the gunshot stopped everyone in their tracks; the squirming trucker on the ground, the three policemen holding him down, the young woman collecting cones, and everyone else milling around nearby - they all froze as if someone had just hit a magic pause button.

  The man with the smart suit inside the police Rover raised his hands.

  ‘Get out of the vehicle!’ shouted the traffic cop on the microphone.

  He stepped out of the Rover, his hands timidly raised above his head.

  And that really should have been the conclusion to the little drama. But it wasn’t.

  The gun went off a second time.

  The man in the expensive-looking suit staggered backwards as his nice, smart, crisp, white business shirt exploded with a shower of dark crimson. For a moment Jenny couldn’t believe what she was seeing, for a moment thinking someone in the crowd had inexplicably decided to shoot the man with a paintball gun.

  He slumped back against the car and then slid down to the ground.

  The traffic cop holding the gun looked like he had gone into shock, his jaw hung open, his face ashen. Jenny could see this wasn’t meant to have happened. It was an accident; he’d been holding the gun in a way he shouldn’t - finger resting too heavily on the trigger, the weapon not aimed down at the ground as it should have been. These men weren’t trained to use firearms, that was obvious, they were out of their depth, these guys were panicking.

  ‘Shit. I didn’t mean to . . .’ the policeman with the gun cried loudly, staring at the body in disbelief.

  One of the crowd of drivers standing near to him, a big man, recovered his senses and broke the static tableau; he reached for the gun and snatched it out of the policeman’s hand.

  Replaying this in her mind later, Jenny suspected this big man, was removing the gun from the policeman in shock, not to use it on anyone, merely to take a dangerous element out of the equation.

  But in the highly charged atmosphere of the moment, the gesture was misinterpreted.

  The policeman with the microphone, whipped a second gun out of his car and aimed it at the man. Amidst the noise of people crying out and shouting, Jenny wasn’t sure whether a warning was called out before the traffic cop fired. His shot clipped the man, who dropped to his knees clutching his upper arm.

  The crowd that had been
surging forward began to scatter in all directions. Paul grabbed Jenny by the arm and led her back towards their taxi, the driver standing beside the vehicle craning his neck to see what was going on.

  ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘This is going to get worse.’

  Jenny looked back at the blockade. The other traffic police had pulled back to their vehicles and produced their guns and were, thankfully, firing shots in the air to scatter the crowd, and not aiming at them instead.

  This is Britain still, right? Not apartheid-era South Africa, or Tiananmen Square? Jenny’s racing mind asked in disbelief as she and Paul hastily made their way back from the police line.

  They’re just trying to disperse the crowd, that’s all.

  But then she heard the loud growl of a diesel engine beside her, and a large container truck lurched forward, effortlessly shunting aside the cars in front of it. As the truck pushed forwards towards the blockade, the traffic cops trained their weapons towards it, and they all fired.

  ‘Fuck this!’ said Paul changing direction and heading towards the metal barrier beyond the hard shoulder. She watched him go and then, as the truck crashed into the blockade of police cars, she turned back to watch as the policemen peppered the truck with shots as it rolled past.

  ‘Are you coming or what?’ said Paul, swinging his other leg over and dropping down on his haunches on the other side of the barrier. She heard another burst of gunfire behind her.

  Oh shit.

  She followed him across the hard shoulder, lifted her light cotton skirt up and swung her legs over the barrier. On the other side, a grass verge descended down towards a field. She dropped down to a crouch beside him, and together, stooping low to keep their heads below the corrugated aluminium barrier they stumbled down the verge, away from the motorway, towards the lumpy, uneven field of waist-high luminous yellow rapeseed.

  Behind her, she heard the rumble of several other trucks starting up, and the crunch of other vehicles being pushed forward. The sound of gunfire intensified.

  She wondered if any of this would have happened if properly trained armed response units had been manning the roadblock. Maybe, maybe not. It was all so sudden, the escalation from an unintended shot to this.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she gasped.

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t want to stumble across any more highly strung, untrained cops carrying guns they can’t handle. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  They staggered across the uneven, muddy field of rapeseed, Jenny stopping once or twice to look back with disbelief at the roadblock behind them, wondering if that really did happen, or whether she was going mad.

  CHAPTER 33

  10 p.m. local time Al-Bayji, Iraq

  Andy watched as Lieutenant Carter put a hand to his ear and silently listened to the communication coming in on his headset. Eventually he whispered an acknowledgement and then turned to the fourteen men left of his platoon, gathered in a silent group in front of him. He had a man up on the front wall keeping an eye on the street, and three more were outside the compound, scanning the route they were going to have to take - they’d gone over the wall a few minutes earlier. The route they were planning to take back out of town was the one they had taken that morning. Andy suspected that in the dark, the twists and turns of these little streets could lose some of them.

  ‘And try and remember the way we came this morning,’ whispered Carter.

  ‘If you get lost lads, just keep heading north-east,’ added Andy quickly. ‘You’ll hit the river eventually.’

  Carter nodded. ‘S’right. And hopefully you’ll be able to see the bridge from wherever you emerge.’

  The young officer took a few deep breaths, looking around at the men in front of him.

  Andy looked at his watch anxiously. ‘We’ve got less than an hour.’

  Carter nodded, ‘Yeah you’re right. No point messing around then. We’ve got an hour to make it a mile across town and over that bridge. Our ride’s arriving at eleven, and they won’t be hanging around for us for long.’

  The men nodded.

  ‘Okay, you all know what groups you’re in. You all know where we’re headed, and how long you’ve got. Five minutes between each group. If you lose your way, like he says,’ said Carter, nodding towards Andy, ‘just keep heading north-east, you’ll hit the edge of town.’

  The young squaddies nodded.

  ‘Right then. First group ready?’

  The platoon medic, Corporal Denwood, stood up, and marshalled the men that would be with him; five soldiers, the Ukrainian engineer, Ustov, and the young Iraqi driver, Salim.

  ‘We’ll dispense with this platoon’s usual call-sign protocol, Corporal, since we’re all mixed up with civvies. For the next hour, you’re call-sign Zulu, understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Okay then, off you go. We’ll see you on the other side of the bridge.’

  Denwood beckoned for Ustov and Salim to join his men. Ustov clasped hands with Erich, Mike and Andy muttering a farewell, whilst Farid patted the young Iraqi lad on the back.

  Denwood climbed up on to the wall, swung his legs over and was gone. The other men followed suit and within a minute call-sign Zulu had departed.

  Carter started his stopwatch. ‘Five minutes, then your group are up next, Private Tajican.’

  The Fijian acknowledged that and gathered the men in his group to him.

  To Andy it seemed the next five minutes passed unbearably slowly. And then with a nod from Lieutenant Carter, the next group, call-sign Yankee, which consisted of Tajican, five other soldiers and Erich, went quietly over the wall.

  Carter once more started timing.

  The next few minutes seemed to take an eternity, and then the young officer nodded at Lance Corporal Westley, to take his group over.

  ‘You’re X-ray. I’ll see you at the bridge,’ he said slapping Westley on the back.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ he replied.

  Mike turned to Andy and held out a hand. ‘Good luck.’

  Andy grabbed his hand. ‘See you in an hour.’

  Westley waited until the two soldiers in his group along with Mike and Farid had climbed over the wall, before following them. His call-sign were going to pick up the other three men already waiting quietly in the dark outside the compound.

  And now there was Andy, Sergeant Bolton, Lieutenant Carter, two more men, both bandaged from minor wounds, and another man on watch up on the wall, whom Carter quietly ordered over the radio, to join them.

  Andy looked at Sergeant Bolton, holding one hand protectively against his dressed wound, and in the other, a cigarette. ‘You know those things’ll kill you,’ he said.

  Bolton’s face creased with a wry smile. ‘Ha bloody ha.’

  Carter looked at his Sergeant. ‘You going to be okay?’

  Bolton grunted as he pulled himself up on to his haunches and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Just fine, sir.’

  ‘Okay, good. Mind your footing. Denwood said that dressing can only take so much.’

  The man who had been up on the wall, keeping watch over the boulevard, loped across the compound, the equipment on his webbing jangling in the silence. He squatted down beside Lieutenant Carter, and made a quick report.

  ‘Nothing going on out there, sir. It’s like a ghost-town. No lights, no noise. Nothing’

  ‘All right, time to go.’

  Carter went over the top first, and then with Andy and one of the other men helping from within the compound, they got Sergeant Bolton over and down on to the pavement on the other side managing, so far, not to unravel his field dressing, loosen the clamp and open the wound. He knelt down in silence, struggling with his breath, clearly in a lot of pain, and holding both of his hands over the wound.

  Crouching at the base of the wall, Carter looked through the scope on his SA80; a bulky attachment on the top of the rifle, above the magazine - called the SUSAT - that allowed limited night vision. He swept it around, quickly scanning the cluster o
f narrow street openings ahead. He squinted at the grainy green image he was seeing through the small circular lens.

  ‘You men see anything?’ he whispered.

  The other two soldiers, hunched over their weapons, staring keenly through their scopes and panning hastily left and right, were quick to answer that they could see no immediate threat.

  ‘All right, then. We’re heading up that street ahead of us. You see the one with the big old-style satellite dish sticking out on the first floor?’

  ‘Yeah,’ grunted one of the soldiers.

  ‘That’s the one we came down this morning. Let’s go.’

  Mike studied the grainy, glowing forms of the men in his group, through his weapon’s night scope. Lance Corporal Westley was squatting against the corner of the wall looking out on to the junction. This was the wide road they had entered Al-Bayji on. Right would take them into town, left would take them to the outskirts of town, through the market-place and to the single lane bridge over the Tigris.

  The other men were scanning the rooftops and both sides of the road, left and right, for activity.

  He could see Farid resting against the wall, staring up at the sky, the scope making his eyes glow a devilish lurid green, flickering every now and then as he blinked.

  Westley had put Mike in charge of the Iraqi man. The Lance Corporal didn’t trust the translator, but didn’t want to waste one of his men on the task of watching him.

  Westley rose to his feet, and with a beckoning gesture, led them out into the wider road, turning left, heading roughly north-east towards their rendezvous. In the distance Mike could see the taller buildings giving way to single storey, and the opening out that signalled the market area.

  And then there was a flicker of light up ahead.

  He saw Lance Corporal Westley stop and suddenly place a hand to his ear, an instinctive reaction. There was radio traffic coming in. He heard the young man’s rasping whisper.

  ‘Shit!’

  Westley listened to some more, and then turned round to his men.

  ‘There’s a search-party up ahead coming down this road. Big mob, torches, guns. They’re almost upon Zulu.’