by McNab, Andy
‘Well maybe we’ll have a nice quiet ride today,’ the driver said cheerfully.
‘You don’t sound your usual self either,’ Dave said. The driver was famous for his gloomy predictions.
‘I’ve got mail in my cot. One from the missus and one from my bird. What more can a man ask for?’
‘Let’s hope you don’t meet your maker today, then, or everything you’ve got will get sent straight back to your missus unless I remember to pull it out first.’
The man’s face clouded.
‘Fuck it, I never thought of that.’ Then his expression brightened again. ‘But she can’t nag if I’m dead, can she?’
The incoming fire began the moment they arrived in the Green Zone.
‘Keep going,’ said the boss. The men on top cover returned fire.
They passed the point where the platoon had dismounted last time they were here. They passed the cannabis field. Dave thought he could smell it and when a roar went up from the lads in the back (‘We know where we are! Too fucking right we do! Got everything you came with, Mal?’), he was sure he could smell it. They drove towards the river crossing and the firing suddenly and mysteriously stopped.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Dave. ‘Go slow.’
‘If we keep our heads down and get moving we’ll be through it in no time.’ The driver was a lot less happy than he’d been ten minutes ago.
‘Oh, yeah? We’re supposed to have cleared this area. But they started firing the minute we got here. They’re telling us they’re back. Slow down so I can keep a sharp look-out.’
The driver slowed. There was still no firing.
‘The fuckers are behind us, so let’s just take a run at it,’ the driver said.
‘No. Slow down more.’
The driver barely slowed at all.
‘Slower!’ Dave yelled, his eyes fixed on the track ahead. He could see it start to rise about two hundred metres in front of them where the track became a bridge over the mighty Helmand River. He could smell the pollen of cannabis and other plants mixed in with the hot dust. Big, floppy leaves tapped gently against the side of the vehicle as they passed. Dave’s senses were so alert they seemed to be screaming at him. He did not blink and his eyes were dry with the effort of scanning the dusty track.
He thought: If I was a guerrilla fighter I’d let the army believe they’d cleared this crossing. Then I’d go back. I’d put an IED just before the bridge. I’d make sure no other traffic passed and pedestrians were kept away. An army convoy would come along and it would seem quiet here. The front of the convoy would be blown up. Everyone would stop. Then I’d ambush the rest from behind. So they’d be trapped . . .
Until now there had been a lot of detritus floating around in his mind: fragments of last night’s dream, the knowledge of Jenny’s letter on his cot, the information that his knee was hurting for no reason, the worry that Steve Buckle might never recover his mind, a curt warning from Major Willingham that he would have to interview Dave about the death of one wounded insurgent in a ditch. All those thoughts stopped now. The sudden certainty that the Taliban would have planted an IED in their path and in a place where it would cause most chaos sliced cleanly through all the other voices in his ear.
‘Stop!’ he yelled as they approached the bridge.
The driver responded to the volume and urgency of Dave’s instruction by slamming on the brakes. Behind them, they could hear the second vehicle screeching to a halt too, and the third behind that.
‘What’s going on?’ the boss demanded.
Dave didn’t reply. The Vector stood still, ticking in the heat, smelling of fuel, clouds of dust circling around it. The firing which had met their arrival in the Green Zone had stopped. Everything had stopped. There were no kids gathering in a cluster to stare at them, no old men in the nearby fields holding their aching backs as they straightened, no small cars bulging with big Afghan families travelling in the other direction. There was only silence.
Dave wondered if he should feel stupid. He had just halted a patrol which had orders to keep moving. He had done so on a hunch. He had no evidence for his suspicions.
The driver was looking at him. ‘You all right, Sarge?’
Dave stared ahead. It seemed to him that, between their stopping place and the rise where the bridge began, the dirt of the track lacked the patina of daily use.
He reported: ‘Suspicious ground at vulnerable point ahead.’
He looked hard at the track. If anyone was waiting to press a button at the other end of a command wire or a mobile phone, their only vantage point would be just inside the jungle on either side of them. There was visibility from nowhere else. He sent men down to search through the greenery. While they did so he leaned forward and stared at the track.
‘I think I see something ahead,’ Dave said. ‘Have the engineers got mine detection equipment?’
There was a groan from the engineers.
‘I take it that means no?’ Dave listened to the sound of his own voice. It sounded rough, as though he was still bumping along the rutty track.
‘No, we’ve got it, Sarge. Only we don’t have 4Cs any more.’
‘And?’
‘We’ve got an Ebinger but we’re not certain how to use it; we haven’t been trained on them yet.’
‘I’m sure the combined brains of 1 Section can help you work that out,’ Dave said. ‘Quickly.’
The men came back to the Vectors having found no trace of anyone close enough to both see and detonate a device. Dave began to have doubts. Then he heard the boss.
‘Our interpreter has just picked up some enemy chatter which indicates there could be an IED . . .’
‘Got the detectors sorted?’ Dave demanded. ‘Come on! We’re sitting ducks here! Just because no one’s firing at us doesn’t mean they’ve all gone home for a nice cup of tea.’
The engineers dismounted and Dave sent men to cover them on the ground. The engineers stood arguing over how the machine worked but at last one of them put in an earpiece and began sweeping his way slowly forward.
Dave watched him. He had a sudden memory of a beach on the south coast of England soon after he had met Jenny. The first time they’d spent the night together, they’d gone down to the sea before dawn and watched the sun come up across the ocean. They’d lain close, tired but relaxed, on sand which retained the coolness of the night. Then, suddenly, they were surrounded. Old men with metal detectors were sweeping the beach at first light for treasure.
Dave sighed and turned from the memory. It had no place in this hot, hostile world.
The engineers advanced slowly along the track. About five paces before the bridge, they stopped. The first passed the machine and earpiece to the second. He nodded. They began to dig with the machine, brushing the sand gently from side to side.
‘Got something?’ Dave was hot and tense. Were they being watched? Or were the enemy firing positions right behind the Vectors, waiting to prevent their escape?
After a few more minutes, the engineers shook their heads. ‘Just an old bolt buried in the track.’
‘Can we come back now?’ asked the younger engineer.
‘Nope,’ Dave said.
‘There’s probably a hundred old bolts between here and the bridge. They probably dropped them when they built it.’
‘Move ahead with caution,’ Dave said. ‘The bolt might have been dropped. Or it might have been planted there.’
The engineers shrugged. It didn’t seem so surprising to them that an old bolt was buried in the track. But Dave had heard enough stories in Bastion to know that the Taliban could make men lazy with false readings so that by the time they reached the big one they were completely unprepared.
After a few more paces, he saw that the engineers had detected something else.
‘Another fucking bolt,’ they muttered, looking around anxiously.
‘Careful, careful!’ Dave knew they felt vulnerable out there, despite the cover. He could see tha
t they were digging less cautiously now, with the perfunctory attitude of men ordered to do an unnecessary job.
The boss said: ‘Our interpreter is picking up a lot of chatter from the enemy. She thinks they’re close.’
‘I’ll bet they are,’ Dave said.
Suddenly one of the engineers stopped. He pulled the other over to look and they both peered down into the hole. There was a pause and then, simultaneously, they turned back to the Vectors. Dave couldn’t see their expressions, but something about the angle of their heads and the tension in their bodies told him all he needed to know.
‘OK, get back in the vehicles. Now!’
He reported to the boss: ‘They’ve found the IED ahead.’
‘We’ll need EOD to clear it,’ the boss said.
‘We’ll need to get out,’ Dave said. ‘Before the Talis trap us here.’
But it was already too late.
The engineers were nearing the Vectors when the first shots bounced around the vehicles. The men ran the last few paces and jumped aboard as the ambush kicked off. The enemy weapons, including first machine guns and then RPGs, started almost simultaneously. They had been in position. They had been watching. They had been waiting for this order.
The weight of fire was so intense that it would not be safe to drive through it. The boss reported briefly while the drivers realigned the Vectors in a defensive position. Dave only wished they’d stopped further back. He guessed they’d be fighting here for a while and there were better places to do that than under a hundred metres from an IED waiting to explode.
Chapter Twenty-four
INSIDE THE VECTORS, THE MEN LOOKED AT EACH OTHER AND HELD their weapons closer as the noise erupted around them and they were thrown around by the vehicles’ frantic manoeuvres.
Streaky Bacon thought at first it was raining outside. Then he wondered if maybe someone was throwing money at them. Finally he realized it was raining rounds. Without warning he felt waves of nausea running through his body. He caught sight of Binns’s face, blanched white, and he realized that Binman felt like throwing up too.
So this was it. A real fire fight against a real enemy. Streaky had played Call of Duty 4 often and well; he’d impressed his instructors at Catterick and if anyone had asked him what he was looking forward to in Afghanistan apart from rapping he would have said fighting.
Since arriving he’d been on patrol and he’d heard the other lads’ stories and knew that men at other FOBs had been under fire daily. He’d been disappointed that so far he’d seen very little action. But now they were being ambushed by a real enemy whose object was to kill them. There was no screen between himself and the action and at the end of this game a dead man didn’t get up to fight again.
The Vectors found their defensive positions and stood still. The engines were switched off. The firing intensified and, without the engines to mask it, the sound was more frightening. Binns and Bacon exchanged wide-eyed looks. They tried without success to hide their terror.
The machine-gunners were operating at warp speed overhead.
‘Section! Rapid fire!’ Sol said and their rate of fire doubled. The enemy responded in kind.
Streaky saw Binman’s eyes widen still further. There were dark circles beneath them and below the dark circles Binman’s skin was so white it looked like a mask.
Streaky would have liked to put his fingers in his ears but he closed his eyes instead. He could hear the thud of the enemy weapons. On top of one Vector was a GPMG and on the other were two minimis and if you closed your eyes and concentrated there was both a rhythm and a beat to the weapons. Streaky reached into his pouch for the stub of a pencil he always carried around with him and the creased piece of paper he wrapped around it and he tried to find some good flow.
fire liar cry die, retire to a nice quiet . . .
head dead sweat
scared . . .
What rhymed with scared? Did anything rhyme with scared?
There was a massive crash and a flash that leaped out of nowhere and for a crazy moment Streaky thought they had been struck by lightning. Then he heard Dave’s voice in his ear. It sounded strangely cool and distant inside Streaky’s hot, sweaty head, as if Dave was directing operations from some beachside bar a huge distance away: ‘Get out and get down.’
‘What happened?’ Another disembodied voice.
‘RPG hit a corner of the truck and bounced,’ someone said.
‘Everyone all right?’
‘Get out, now!’ Sol yelled.
And then men were piling out of the Vectors, their bodies crouching, slinking around the truck while all around them the orchestra of fire played in the theatre of war.
Streaky, waves of nausea running up and down his body, got behind the Vector and ducked.
Scared . . . unprepared!
That was it. Streaky felt for his pencil. Yes!
I’m scared, I’m unprepared man, for what may lie ahead man . . .
He sat down in the dirt and watched rounds bouncing all around the vehicle. It looked as if the ground was cracking. Overhead, the trees were cracking.
‘Fucking hell,’ Binman shouted.
‘Wish you stayed at Curry’s now?’ Streaky hoped he sounded ice cool but he knew his voice had emerged high and splintered like a kid’s.
They crouched down amid the flash and crack and thud of the battle.
Rapid fire, I’m not scared,
No I’m a liar, I’m unprepared
I want to cry, I start to sweat
Mama, I’m still a child inside my head,
Don’t want to show it, don’t want you to know it,
But if I shut my eyes I see me dead . . .
‘Get some fire down!’ Sol shouted.
Streaky looked up from under his helmet, trying to think of a rhyme for dead . . . bed, said, fed, dread . . .
‘What do you think you’ve got rifles for, to hang on the fucking Christmas tree?’ Finn yelled. ‘Use them!’
Streaky realized he and Binman were the only ones not firing.
He shuffled to the side of the Vector and looked out. He could see rounds flying down the track. One pinged off the Vector and then against his helmet like someone trying to wake him.
He ducked behind the vehicle again, pulled his rifle into position and looked through the sights. He was crouching too low to aim at anything except a snake. Reluctantly he got up onto one knee. Binman, at his side, did the same. A round ricocheted off the ground in front of them. Trying to ignore it, his finger shaking, Streaky released the safety.
The first time he fired he had no idea where the round went or where it landed. His hand would not stop shaking. He fired again. What was he aiming at? He was staring through the sights. But there was nothing to see.
He dodged back behind the Vector. He felt as though he had been exposed out there for an hour. Binman was still behind him. This was Binns’s chance to move forward and take up the firing position Streaky had vacated but he didn’t. His face was a ghastly white, like a vampire in a horror movie.
Since Binman was frozen to the spot, Streaky kept his head down, pointed the SA80 up the track behind them and fired intensively. When his shoulder began to hurt he paused. And then he fired some more. He felt his body relax a little. Inexplicably, he wanted to giggle. This wasn’t so difficult. Since the Taliban was invisible, you could aim anywhere and there was a chance of hitting one of them. He heard laughter and realized it was his own. He fired faster and faster to the sound of his own laughter.
‘Slow it down, for Chrissake,’ someone shouted, maybe Dave. Streaky paused and looked around. It was a relief to stop firing. Had he really been laughing? He saw that the men with the most firepower and the best positions were high up on the vehicles. But they were also the most exposed.
A shout came from Jamie on top. Streaky and Dave both turned in time to see him stagger.
‘Shit, come and help,’ Dave shouted to Streaky, scrambling to his feet and diving inside the ve
hicle. Streaky followed him. They found Jamie already there, his body doubled, hanging onto the side.
‘Sit down,’ Dave ordered. ‘What happened?’
Streaky helped Jamie down. Gasping for breath, Jamie managed to say: ‘A bloke standing over me with a fucking great sledgehammer brought it down right on my back . . .’
His face drained. He closed his eyes. He was going to pass out. Or was he going to die? Streaky felt sick.
Dave shook Jamie awake, looking desperate, as though he thought Jamie wouldn’t wake up if he lost consciousness.
