War Torn

by McNab, Andy

  The zap numbers of the casualties had been relayed to the Medical Emergency Response Team at Camp Bastion where the doctor would already be in a Land Rover heading for the helicopter, maybe already receiving details of the casualties’ blood groups and allergies on his hand-held. But for the Chinook to get here, the contact had to be over. And it showed no sign of ending. If anything, now that the convoy had been halted, the ambush was more intense.

  Dave had found a good firing position inside the ruined hulk of the Vector. He had also found Jordan Nelson’s machine gun wedged between a slab of armour plating and a brown mud wall. He grabbed it without hope and was amazed when it worked. Far away, in a second-storey window, across two walls and the yard which they protected, he caught a glimpse of movement. Feeling a surge of satisfaction, he fired. A body slumped from the window.

  He glanced up, wondering where the air support was. Eight minutes must have passed by now and the casualties needed to get out of here. The boss had also requested help from A Company, who were currently installed at the FOB and scheduled to leave this evening. Maybe they were too busy packing.

  Dave moved around to the side street just as Sol and the lads emerged from it, pushing two prisoners. Jamie Dermott had the RPG – with the grenade removed – and an AK47, mag off and made safe.

  ‘Get those fucking bastards moving,’ Dave yelled.

  One of the fucking bastards wore long blue robes, now clotted with blood. The man’s leathery face was twisted in pain and fear. His leg dragged. His left leg. A leg for a leg, Dave thought. Fair one.

  The firing was deafening now. The enemy seemed to have trebled in number.

  A couple more lads followed with a second prisoner. He was younger than the first and more resistant. He treated Dave to a sullen glare and he dragged his feet deliberately slowly through the fire fight, confident of his own safety and exposing his captors as long as possible.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Dave roared. He jammed the prisoner in the back with his weapon. He felt angry. In one second Steve’s life, Leanne’s and the kids’ lives had all been changed. Nothing would ever be the same for them. He wished he could shoot the man. Feeling the weapon in his back, the prisoner jumped forward, as if he’d read Dave’s mind.

  Suddenly, the air support emerged from an empty sky and flew so low that Dave could see the helmeted pilot at the controls. He’d been jumped by Harriers before but it was still impossible to prepare yourself for the intensity of the noise, for the sheer violence and physicality of such a massive tonnage of metal moving at the speed of sound only metres above your head.

  Then, when the head and heart of every man on the ground was fit to burst, the Harrier evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared. The roar of its engines melted into the thudding heartbeats of those beneath.

  Dave continued to watch the sky. The Harrier was no bigger than a distant bird of prey now, hovering over the faraway hills. Dave waited. Sure enough, after only a few breaths, it was right above their heads again, dimming the sun, screeching over the town in a vengeful fury, cracking the mud walls and shaking the ground.

  And then it was gone.

  It left a deep silence. Wherever the enemy was hidden, they did not move and they did not fire. The soldiers were still too. The whole town was motionless.

  When rotor blades beat the air, the boss talked the Instant Response Team down into a square, maybe a market place, just ahead of them. Before it had touched the ground Mal and Angus were running Steve on a stretcher, two men from 3 Section close behind them with Jordan, to the hot tailgate of the Chinook.

  The doctor and his team were waiting. A rear gunner watched over them with a GPMG. Once the casualties were handed over, the medical team’s focus was immediate and total and there was nothing for the lads from 1 Platoon to do but return to the convoy. The platoon watched in silence as the thudding blades hauled the big machine into the air. They glimpsed the doctor at work as the Chinook rose and turned for Kandahar.

  The A Company team appeared. Dave wanted to say something sarcastic about their late arrival but they were leaving today after countless similar contacts and he guessed thoughts of home must be overwhelming their will to rush into battle. They towed out the mangled Vector and the rest of the convoy started to follow them to the FOB.

  Dave was about to jump on board when he saw something lying in the dusty street. Something familiar. He grabbed Steve’s leg, tucked it under his arm and leaped into the back of the last Vector as it pulled away.

  Except for the boss updating HQ on the net, nobody spoke. Finally, as they neared the FOB, Dave asked about the casualties. He was relieved to hear that they were still both T1s. If either had reached the point where no one could help them, they’d have slipped down the emergency agenda to T4.

  He remembered the way Steve’s leg had sailed so gracefully through the air. It must only have taken a few seconds but he remembered it in slow motion, as though it had taken an hour. And at the end of the hour, two bodies lying in the street.

  Jordan Nelson had recently joined 1 Platoon from another battalion. He was liked, but not yet fully integrated with his new section. He was unmarried but had talked about his family in Watford a lot. He was the oldest of three boys. Or was it four? Jordan talked about his younger brothers as though he was their father. Dave imagined the mother and brothers answering the doorbell, standing in a hallway full of muddy football boots and hooks piled with too many coats. He tried not to think about the silence in the hallway when the Families Officer told them the news.

  A Families Officer would also be standing on Steve and Leanne’s doorstep back in Wiltshire in a few hours. The other women in the street would be at the window; they’d see the Families Officer ring the bell and fear the worst. Dave’s wife Jenny would be sure to see. Leanne and Steve lived right across the road. Sol’s wife Adi was a few doors up but she would know, because she always knew everything. Jamie’s wife, Agnieszka, who lived up a side street, would probably guess what was going on, even though her English wasn’t that good. And like all the others, she’d cry. Both with sadness for Leanne and relief for herself because it wasn’t her own husband who was maimed for life.

  ‘You all right, Sarge?’ Jamie Dermott asked quietly.

  Dave was thinking how only the stoppage in his weapon had brought him down into the Vector just before the bomb had exploded. A few seconds earlier and it would have been him flying through the air to the left while his leg flew to the right. The stoppage had saved him. It had cost Steve his leg and maybe his life.

  ‘Sarge?’ said Jamie.

  Dave’s escape today had been the narrowest. It should have been him. And at this moment, thinking of Steve and Leanne and the twins, he wished it had been him. He shut his eyes.

  He said: ‘I’m fine.’ His throat was so dry the words scratched their way out of his mouth. He imagined his home, in a quiet street in the quiet camp in England. It seemed nearer than Afghanistan. He knew that, in a few days, the madness of Helmand Province would be home and quiet Wiltshire would be some strange, faraway place.

  The Vector proceeded to the Forward Operating Base in total silence.

  Chapter Two

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JAMIE BEING AROUND AND JAMIE NOT BEING around was that everything went wrong the minute he walked out of the door. The dishwasher had spluttered to a halt before his plane had even landed in Afghanistan. It had been the same with Iraq: the washing machine had stopped, the bathroom pipes had been blocked and the phone had gone kaput within three weeks of his departure.

  Agnieszka could cope with the dishwasher because in Poland she had managed without one. But now it was the car. There was a clunk from deep within its bowels. It was the kind of noise you couldn’t ignore, the kind which said the car would stop on the motorway just when she was taking Luke to the hospital tomorrow. It was the sort of clunk which said that Jamie had gone and nothing was going to be right until he came back.

  So now she was on her way to the garage. Sh
e’d shovelled the big pushchair into the back. Luke was crying. And halfway there she realized she should have rung first. Which would have meant speaking on the phone. Which she hated because communicating in English over a phone line was about fifteen times harder than when she could see people pulling their faces into shapes which filled all the gaps in her understanding.

  There was nowhere to park at the garage. There was nowhere to park in the road outside. She hovered, wondering what to do. A car hooted behind her.

  She drove slowly around the block. Only one parking place, a whole street away. Luke was asleep now. She would wake him if she lifted him into the pushchair and then he would cry again. And she would arrive at the garage and they would say: ‘Well, where’s the car?’ Then they would probably give her an appointment in two weeks.

  Agnieszka put her head on the steering wheel and wept. When Jamie was at home, loving her, adoring Luke, taking him when he cried, holding him while he had a fit, fixing broken gutters and unblocking pipes, looking after them both, then life was good. But he never was at home. There had been Catterick, Canada, Iraq, Kenya and now Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Just the word made her cry. It sounded like Pashtu for sadness.

  Even after the sobbing stopped, the tears kept falling silently.

  She finally managed to pat her face dry and check her makeup. Her mascara hadn’t run because she had forgotten to put any on. Good. She reached into her bag, shook the tiny tube and rolled the brush under her eyelashes. She watched herself in the mirror. Despite the tears her eyes had retained their penetrating blue. Her long lashes curled around the mascara.

  ‘You don’t need that stuff,’ Jamie had told her the first time he saw her putting on her makeup.

  ‘I need for give me confidence,’ she said.

  She disentangled the feat of engineering that was Luke’s pushchair, smoothed the sheepskin liner and lifted him into it very, very gently. At first she thought she had completed this manoeuvre without waking him but then he opened his eyes wide, stared at her and screwed his face into a tight ball. She braced herself. A second later, his roars of displeasure began. Tears burst out of his face like a sprinkler. She hoped he wouldn’t have a fit.

  She walked towards the garage. By the time she got there Luke was still shrieking. She knew any discussion about the car would be impossible so she kept on walking. She walked around the block. When she passed the plumbing supply shop, someone inside wolf-whistled. Perhaps she had imagined it. But then she glimpsed herself in the tile-shop window. Her legs looked very long today; it was amazing how they seemed to change length. So maybe the whistle had been for her. She flicked her hair back over her shoulders.

  Back at the garage, Luke was still wailing so she decided to walk around the block again. This time, as she passed the plumbing supply shop, the whistle was unmistakable. It came during one of the pauses in Luke’s cries. She kept right on walking as though she hadn’t heard, murmuring a few words to Luke to show that she was oblivious to it.

  By the time she reached the garage again, Luke was quiet. Should she go in now? What if his tears came in bursts like her own and he started up again? She decided to walk around a third time.

  She glanced surreptitiously into the plumbing shop as she drew near. A young man, tall with a shaven head, grinned at her familiarly from behind the glass. As if he knew her. When all she had done was simply pass his shop a couple of times. She didn’t smile back. She found herself blushing. Supposing he thought that she was walking past deliberately again and again?

  This possibility was so shameful that she felt she owed a few Aves to the Holy Virgin. Muttering them under her breath she returned to the garage. Luke was fast asleep now.

  Hesitantly she pushed him into the dark workshop. A car was raised high on a ramp. A man stood underneath it.

  ‘Erm . . . I bring my car here because . . .’ Her voice sounded small in this great cavern of a place. Someone in the corner was spinning tyres on a machine which sounded like a gun firing.

  ‘You shouldn’t be in here! Reception’s around the side!’ the man shouted. The machine-gun noise did not stop. Agnieszka did not understand. She hesitated.

  The man gesticulated angrily. ‘Round the side!’

  She nodded, certain he was telling her to leave, uncertain where to go. Another small humiliation. Until she’d met Jamie, just going into a shop and asking for something was a humiliation. She emerged from almost any situation red-faced, struggling to understand English people and their language. Then along came Jamie and everything changed. When he wasn’t away in Catterick, Canada, Iraq, Kenya or Afghanistan.

  She walked around the building heaving Luke with difficulty between cars and over kerbs. Then she saw a door and somehow manoeuvred the pushchair inside. This must be the right place. It smelled of workshop but aspired to be an office. The scent of oil and car parts reminded her of her father back in Poland. He had worked in a small engineering firm until his death.

  A man behind the counter discussed a bill with a customer, who was running his finger down the invoice, pausing at each figure. Agnieszka did not care to listen. It was almost summer but she was cold in her T-shirt and it was warm in the office. She closed her eyes and the men’s voices sounded like a radio station broadcast from far away in a foreign language. It would be easy to imagine she was in her father’s workshop now, a child again, warmed by the brazier, lulled by that comfortable oily smell, falling asleep in her nest of rough blankets while adult words and adult voices washed over her.

  The previous customer was leaving, pinning himself against the wall in order to navigate around the pushchair.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked the man behind the desk. She opened her eyes.

  ‘Like to sit down?’

  He smiled at her and gestured to a tiny waiting area with a couple of dirty armchairs, a coffee machine and last week’s free newspaper. ‘You look knackered standing there with your eyes shut.’

  Agnieszka stared at him.

  ‘Come on . . .’ His face was friendly. ‘I’m having a tea; I’ll get you one too.’

  Agnieszka found herself squeezing into the waiting area and sinking onto one of the chairs. She glanced at Luke. He slept deeply. His head had fallen to the side.

  ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  She nodded. A moment later the man handed her a plastic cup, stirring its contents vigorously. He removed the spoon and the tea continued to turn in slowing circles.

  The man sat down in the other chair, his hands cupped round his own tea. The two chairs were so close together that it was hard to avoid his legs. Agnieszka swung hers out to the side.

  ‘Now, what can we do for you?’

  ‘My car not working.’ Her voice was hoarse. The cup warmed her hands.

  ‘Won’t it start?’ He sounded as though he knew how your whole day was ruined when your car didn’t start.

  ‘It start but it make terrible noise and smell not too good,’ she said. ‘I think it stop any minute, maybe on motorway.’

  ‘Yeah, in the fast lane, that’s when they usually let you down.’

  ‘I go on motorway tomorrow morning to hospital so I think I come this afternoon to get car fixed but maybe you tell me not today. Also, no parking. So my car is far away.’

  ‘Which hospital then, the Prince of Wales?’

  ‘Yes. My baby see specialist at Prince of Wales Hospital.’

  ‘That sounds like a bit of a worry.’

  Yes it was. Tomorrow the specialist would ask questions and take notes without smiling. Jamie was in Afghanistan. Her mother was ill in Poland. Her parents-in-law barely spoke to her. The dishwasher was broken. Now the car was planning to stop the moment she got into the fast lane of the motorway. It was all a bit of a worry. It was enough of a worry to make her cry. She did not trust herself to speak so she just nodded.

  ‘How far away is this car of yours?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  ‘The car? In Afghanistan?’ The man rais
ed his eyebrows and grinned at her so comically that suddenly she felt herself smiling.

  ‘I thought you said how far away my husband is!’

  ‘Oh, he’s in the army, is he?’

  She nodded. ‘Husband in Afghanistan. Car in street that way. Not in first street. Next street.’

  ‘Elm Road?’

  She wasn’t sure but she nodded.

  ‘Well, let’s go and see if we can’t sort this problem out. Then you can get to the hospital tomorrow no trouble.’

  He stood up, smiled at her again and she smiled back. Here was a good man. Agnieszka felt the same relief she felt when Jamie came home. Everything was going to be all right.

  Chapter Three

  AS THEY JUMPED OUT OF THE VECTORS EACH MAN STOOD STILL AND felt the silence. No firing. No vehicle noise. No movement.