Battle Lines

by Andy McNab

  Leanne, sniffing loudly, nodded. ‘I just hope I can leave Steve and get to work. It’s the only thing which keeps me sane. And they like me! The customers like me! Shit, I’m going to be late, sorry, Adi.’

  ‘Leanne, when Steve comes home, we’ll all help.’

  ‘Oh Ads, I’m dreading it. I wish they’d keep him longer. It was awful before he went to Bastion; he was yelling all the time. But ever since the second explosion …’

  ‘Darling, that was the worst luck.’

  ‘… since then he’s just been in this quiet depression. I don’t know what he’s thinking, I don’t know if he’s thinking anything. It scarier than when he’s angry.’

  ‘I’ll help and Jenny’ll help …’

  At the mention of Jenny’s name, Leanne’s face changed. Her tears stopped.

  ‘No thank you! I don’t need Jenny Henley’s help.’

  Adi pursed her lips. ‘She’s your friend.’

  Leanne began to dry her face fiercely with the ragged tissue.

  ‘Yeah, well, Dave’s been good to us and I don’t like the way Jenny’s treating him. Steve and I can’t talk about much but we talk about that. And it makes Steve really livid.’

  Adi looked lost, or maybe she was pretending to. ‘What makes him livid, Leanne?’

  ‘Did you look out of your window last night when Jenny went home?’

  ‘Well … I don’t think so.’

  ‘His car was parked right outside. General YouTube was there for about an hour.’

  ‘Leanne, they work together.’

  Leanne rolled her eyes significantly. ‘Yeah, right, they work together,’ she sneered. ‘And they were working together at the theme park when Tiff saw them. They were working together last night. Jenny does all this overtime and it’s because they’re working together. While her man’s on the front line. You can believe they’re working if you want to, Adi, but no one else in camp does.’

  As they approached the poppy fields, they once again came under small-arms fire. The convoy bumped on along the rutty tracks, past a knot of women and children who were stumbling with bags of shopping and a goat on a leash.

  ‘Incredible the way they keep firing despite the presence of civilians,’ said Chalfont-Price over the radio.

  Dave doubted the boss was talking to him but he replied anyway: ‘Poppies are worth more than people to the Taliban.’

  But Chalfont-Price exclaimed: ‘Just look at this!’

  As Dave neared the fields he, too, saw the huge carpet of poppies stretching out as far as the eye could see. They were still green and many weeks off flowering but it was plain that here was industrial agriculture, a crop planted by large machinery. It was evenly spaced in rows and the rows were evenly spaced too. It looked like something growing in Wiltshire, far from the patchwork of small fields and animals he was used to here.

  ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘What’s the street value of that?’

  He wasn’t speaking to anyone over the radio in particular but Chalfont-Price replied: ‘Millions, probably.’

  ‘They needed some bloody big machinery to get it in the ground.’

  ‘Make no mistake, this is as big an agricultural business as you’ll find in the UK,’ agreed the boss.

  ‘The compounds are evenly spaced around the edges. They must have been built to guard it.’

  ‘Probably. Even before the Americans decided to eradicate the crop they had enough people trying to steal it.’

  Dave was so busy staring at the poppies that it was a few moments before he realized that he and the boss had just held something which might pass as a normal conversation. For the first time.

  Each of the huge, green American tractors unfolded the sprayer it carried behind like a great metal butterfly opening its wings. They spread out across the field and began their work. The spray nozzles were angled directly at the ground and the air was still but nevertheless there was a fine chemical film, like a spider’s web, all around the machinery.

  ‘I can smell it,’ said Bacon from the top of the Mastiff.

  ‘No way! They’ve only just started!’ Sol told him.

  ‘I can smell it too. It’s fucking horrible,’ said Slindon. ‘Makes me want to puke.’

  Finn rolled his eyes. ‘Listen, mate, you’re new so you don’t know this, but there’s a puking order around here and Binman always goes first. Got it?’

  Slindon looked nervously at Binns.

  ‘You want to puke?’ he asked.

  Binns’s face was pale as usual. He nodded silently.

  Dave spoke into their ears.

  ‘Lads, we’re running along the edge of the field now. If there’s any trouble we’ll need to get between the tractors and the compounds and that means driving across the irrigation ditches. So expect one shitty, bumpy ride.’

  ‘Great,’ said Sol miserably. ‘Now we’ll all be puking.’

  ‘This smell is disgusting!’ moaned Streaky. ‘I can feel it scratching the back of my throat. It’s like a hand with claws.’

  Sol rolled his eyes. ‘Mal, is the smell affecting you?’

  Mal grinned. ‘Nah. Nothing affects me.’

  ‘Get up there on the gimpy instead of Bacon then,’ Sol said and the men scrambled to change positions.

  The firing which had accompanied their arrival at the fields ceased as the crop spraying started. But within five minutes the Mastiff slowed. A small group of men, their loose clothes fluttering behind them, was rushing towards the vehicle. The man at the front was waving his arms for them to stop.

  ‘That’s nice. It’s the welcoming committee coming to offer us a cup of tea,’ said Dave.

  ‘They’re offering something but it’s not tea. Where’s the terp?’ demanded the driver.

  ‘Coming up behind,’ said Dave. ‘But it’s the Afghan National Police we need, if this lot want to argue. It’s not our job. Where the fuck are the ANP?’

  ‘Guarding the flatbeds with the chemicals,’ said the driver.

  Dave radioed for the ANP but the Afghans had surrounded the Mastiff now and were all gabbling simultaneously. Dave told Sol to organize cover and Jamal the interpreter appeared. In the absence of anyone else, Dave got out of the cab to join him. Jamal was trying to go through the usual Afghan pleasantries but these men were having none of it. They surrounded the interpreter, stabbing their fingers in the air, their voices rising.

  ‘Let me guess. They want the spraying to stop?’ suggested Dave.

  ‘They say that these crops are everything they have. If they don’t take money for this poppy then many families are hungry. But most of all they need to sell the poppy to the Taliban. This is because, see, the Taliban lended to them the money to buy seed from which this crop grows. And if they don’t pay money back to Taliban, big trouble follows.’

  Dave looked around the thin faces of the men. Their skin had been turned to animal hide by the intense sun and the merciless winter cold. Their eyes surveyed him hopefully, as if he could tell the sprayers to stop. He thought: Poor bastards. They’re just trying to scratch a living in the only way they know. They probably get paid a pittance for growing the Taliban’s drugs.

  ‘Er, Sergeant Dave, please, I explain this crop is very bad and illegal and Afghan government not allow them to grow it?’ offered Jamal.

  ‘OK. But it won’t help.’

  In the distance, along some other track, two crops away and behind some trees, Dave glimpsed movement. A truck. A motorbike. It was the group of men who had confronted them earlier returning with the body of the dead lad who had detonated the IED. And then they were gone. They had disappeared inside the baked mud walls of the village. They would be picking their way through the labyrinth of compounds, tracks and alleyways known only to the locals.

  At that moment an Afghan National Police Land Rover pulled up.

  ‘We are representatives of the drug-eradication programme,’ said the first to climb out, adjusting a shabby uniform. ‘You must leave this discussion to us, please.
But please I ask you to protect us while discussion takes place, please.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Dave. Jamal said a few words to the Afghans and a heated debate took place in Pashto between the farmers and the police. Dave watched them for a while and then climbed back into the wagon. Chalfont-Price demanded to know what was happening and Dave explained that they were offering protection to the ANP, who were involved in a confrontation with the locals.

  ‘Get back to Tractor 3 as soon as you can,’ said Chalfont-Price. ‘2 Section can’t cover two tractors.’

  Dave wanted to reply that firing was unlikely while the farmers were all clustered in the poppy field. It would probably start a few minutes after they returned to their compounds. But, as usual with Chalfont-Price, he judged it better to remain silent.

  Tractor 3 roared past them, shaking the ground, destroying the drainage ditch as its great wheels crossed and leaving behind a strong aroma of bittersweet chemicals.

  ‘Oh yuck, yuck, fucking yuck,’ Dave could hear from the wagon.

  The confrontation ended when the ANP climbed, jaws clenched, back into their Land Rovers. The farmers shouted abuse after them and then, following a final flourish which was probably very rude in Pashto, they turned and made their way back to the compounds. Throughout the conversation their eyes had followed the mesmerizing progress of the giant sprayers up and down their crop. Five minutes later, firing started.

  Tractor driver 3 had covered his face with a balaclava but his fear was still easy to detect from the way his body hunched behind the wheel.

  ‘Are we protecting Tractor 3?’ came the boss’s voice.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Dave over the net. Over PRR he said: ‘Hold on tight, lads.’

  The men on top were put on rapid fire and, pitching up and down over the drainage channels, firing fiercely back at the compound, they cut through the poppies towards Tractor 3.

  ‘Please stop 1 Section behaving like pirate buccaneers, Sergeant,’ said Chalfont-Price. ‘The object of the exercise is to suppress enemy fire, not to destroy the local farming population.’

  ‘Slow your rate of fire,’ Dave told them.

  There was no appreciable change.

  ‘Sol, pull the lads back. That means you, Angry, and you, Bacon. We’re trying to warn them off, that’s all.’

  There was silence in his ear as they were tossed up and down by the drainage ditches through the poppy field. But Chalfont-Price hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘I hope I didn’t see you attempting to engage with the locals back there, Sergeant,’ he said. Dave thought that, since they were under a lot of fire, this was a bad time to have this conversation and he wanted to say so. Instead he replied: ‘No, sir, I simply got out of the vehicle to explain that we were waiting for the Afghan National Police.’

  ‘You had specific instructions not to get out of the vehicle. It is very important that in an operation like this, we show only the Afghan face.’

  Fuck off, thought Dave, as an RPG whistled past. Tractor 3 ground to a halt so abrupt that its sprayer bounced dangerously behind it and the masked driver was almost lying on the steering wheel. The Mastiff driver stopped too.

  ‘We need to get out, Sarge,’ said Sol.

  ‘Yeah, do it,’ agreed Dave.

  They sat still in the open, flat field, their bodies shielded by the Mastiff, returning fire, and at a fast rate. The tractor driver, shouting, suddenly jumped out and ran to the comparative safety of the Mastiff. Dave craned his neck.

  ‘What stopped him?’ he demanded.

  His driver eased forward alongside the tractor, inch by inch. ‘Will you look at that!’ he said.

  In front of the tractor, sheltering down in an irrigation channel just centimetres from its mighty wheels, were three Afghan women.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Dave. ‘They nearly got a lot of horse power through those headscarves.’

  He jumped out and ran, bent double, all around the tractor, gesturing for Finn and Mal to follow. The drainage channel was full of water. The women, who were standing in it up to their waists, their clothes drenched, looked miserable. They were carrying washing and had evidently been on their way back to the village from the river when the sprayers had arrived. Dave shouted to them to get behind the tractor and they stared at him as if he was the scariest thing of all. He saw that one was carrying a baby.

  ‘Come here!’ he roared. ‘You’ll get killed if you stay there.’

  They hung back in that demure Afghan woman way, treating him like a monster who had come for rape and pillage instead of a man who was trying to save their lives.

  ‘Fucking civilians won’t move!’ said Dave to Billy Finn and Mal.

  Finn leaped into the ditch behind them. ‘Goooo on, goooo on, get up there!’ he cried, as if they were frightened horses. The women seemed rooted to the spot. Finally, amid bouncing rounds, they scrambled rapidly up the bank, their wet clothes clinging to them.

  ‘Some very fine arses hidden inside these baggy old burqas, boys,’ Finn announced.

  Mal immediately jumped into the ditch behind him.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ growled Dave.

  He gestured to the women to shelter under the tractor. They looked very young, their eyes wide with terror.

  ‘Think she’s the baby’s mother? Or elder sister?’ Dave asked Mal.

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Christ, how old is she, Finny?’

  Finny took little time to consider. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘She’s fifteen.’

  There was a shout from Mal. ‘IED!’

  He was still in the ditch.

  ‘What? Right where they were standing?’ said Finny.

  ‘Maybe they planted it.’

  ‘No way!’

  Mal was insistent. ‘I can see it! In a wooden box thing.’

  Firing from the compound had become frantic and it was all falling in Mal’s direction. Dave radioed for the Mastiff to drive forward further to protect them.

  ‘So I’m half in the fucking ditch? And half out of it?’ demanded the driver disbelievingly.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dave.

  When the Mastiff was in place, he and Finny joined Mal in the ditch.

  ‘See, Sarge, they were going to try to blow up the tractor.’

  Mal pointed to a box, covered in earth but just visible above the waterline of the drainage ditch.

  ‘It can’t be an IED. They never would have left their women sitting in front of it.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t like those particular women much,’ suggested Finny.

  Protected from the battle, Dave began to pull at the earth around the box. It gave way easily. The box had only recently been buried here.

  ‘If it’s an IED we’re all dead,’ said Finny.

  ‘It isn’t,’ Dave assured him. He glanced back at the faces of the women. They no longer looked frightened, just angry, or even sulky. They didn’t want him to open the box. Suddenly he remembered hiding Jenny’s green dress in the box he had made to look like a book and placing it on the bookshelf at home. Jenny. In the green dress at the Dorchester Hotel, looking like a movie star, smiling for the cameras. He started, as though the memory had teeth and had bitten him.

  ‘Open it,’ he told Finny.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘I’VE MADE YOU a cup of tea,’ said Jenny, carrying two mugs into the light, bright office.

  Eugene smiled. ‘Thank you, Jennifer.’

  She smiled back. ‘I spoke to the builder about the tiling on the stable block; he says he can start in a week.’

  ‘That’s good. Normally we have to wait months for him to do anything.’

  ‘I told him that the roof was going to collapse on the horses’ heads if he didn’t get here soon. He likes horses so he’s coming.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘I phoned Barclays to ask for replacement statements for the missing tax years. They will supply them, but they’re charging.’

  Eugene grimaced. ‘They would.’


  ‘If I show you online banking, then it won’t happen again.’

  The general looked unenthusiastic.

  ‘And Robin Douglas-Coombs called to say that he needs you to check the last committee minutes as soon as possible. The date of the next meeting’s been changed; I put it in your diary. And he said to remind you about the deadlines, so I printed them out and pinned them on the noticeboard.’

  ‘You exhaust me, Jennifer. I don’t know how you get so much done.’

  Jenny sat down at her own desk. It was antique and covered in ancient marks and blemishes which all told their own story. Jenny did not feel entitled to be part of the story so she’d brought a coaster from home to put under her hot mugs of tea.

  ‘I can do it for you,’ she said. ‘I just can’t do it for me. My house is a complete mess.’

  Eugene watched as her fingers clattered over her keyboard.

  ‘Maybe I should send Linda to give you a hand with your housework …’

  Jenny laughed. ‘I’m a sergeant’s wife; I do my own housework. Otherwise they court-martial Dave.’

  Eugene didn’t seem to understand that Linda was devoted to him alone and would never agree to help Jenny. But he laughed too and they both settled down to their work. Eugene was writing something in longhand on a large, lined pad and Jenny clattered out emails. There was a tap at the door and it burst open. Linda stood at the threshold, looking from Eugene to Jenny and back again. Her face was red, as though something had embarrassed her.

  ‘Morning!’ Jenny said cheerfully.

  Linda threw Jenny her habitual look of hostility. ‘Post’s arrived, General Hardy.’ She handed it to him.

  ‘Thanks, Linda.’

  When she had gone, Eugene muttered: ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Linda does everything quickly.’ Linda’s token knock had given them no time to prepare for her entrance. Her face had been flushed with embarrassment at what she might find.

  But Linda had found nothing. Because there was nothing to find. Why, thought Jenny, does everyone think a man and a woman can’t simply enjoy working together? Why is everyone so suspicious?

  ‘Right, this is for John Cardingham.’ He stripped a page from the pad, swivelled in his chair and threw it in her direction. It floated gracefully towards Jenny’s desk and she caught it neatly.