Battleground

by Chris Ryan

  She had expected it to arrive five hours ago, but each time the helicopter had set off back towards base, it had been called out on some emergency to a different part of the province. It had only finally appeared in the sky minutes ago, like some huge black insect against the intense blue.

  The Chinook touched down in a swirl of sand and noise. Its tailgate opened like the mouth of a great iron beast; almost immediately several soldiers ran off, carrying with them a stretcher bed. Lying in the bed was a wounded man. Was he dead? Bel wondered. Probably not. He was being moved quickly: she guessed that meant he had a chance.

  All the soldiers being spewed out of the Chinook looked exhausted and dirty, weighed down by their packs and their weapons. As soon as they were all off, Bel heard a voice. ‘OK!’ it shouted above the noise. ‘Let’s load up. Dr Kelland, are you ready?’

  Bel looked over her shoulder. Privates Mears and Aitken – the two young soldiers who had been assigned to accompany her – also carried heavy bergens and standard issue SA80 rifles. They were thin and young, but looked a lot less battle-weary than the new arrivals.

  Bel nodded at them. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ she shouted, before following them up into the belly of the chopper.

  It took another ten minutes for the beast to be fully loaded. Ten minutes for Bel to think how nervous she was. Camp Bastion might have been strange and forbidding, but now that she was about to leave, she realized how safe it really was. As soon as the Chinook rose up into the sky, she would be at the mercy of any enemy insurgents who felt like taking pot shots at them.

  Private Mears seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘We’ll be flying high,’ he shouted at her. ‘Out of range of most of the enemy’s weapons.’

  Bel nodded curtly. At the tailgate she saw a soldier taking his position with what looked like a machine gun. The engines of the Chinook suddenly changed pitch and Bel felt her stomach lurch as it lifted up from the ground, swooped away from Bastion and – very sharply, very quickly – gained height. She found herself gripping the edge of her seat.

  Suddenly, from the rear of the chopper, she saw what looked like a firework explode in the air. ‘Oh my God!’ she shouted. ‘What was that?’ She looked around, unable to understand why nobody else seemed concerned.

  ‘It’s OK, Dr Kelland,’ Mears yelled over the noise of the engines. ‘They’re just countermeasure flares.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Countermeasure flares,’ he bellowed back. ‘We fire them from the back of the Chinook as we go. They confuse any heat-seeking missiles that are fired in our direction.’

  Bel blinked. ‘Right,’ she said, feeling herself going a bit green. ‘And does that happen a lot?’

  Mears smiled at her. ‘Not when we fire countermeasure flares it doesn’t,’ he said.

  They hadn’t been cruising for more than fifteen minutes when the Chinook started to lose height, again sharply and quickly – too quickly, Bel couldn’t help thinking. The soldiers didn’t look worried, though she noticed that the gunner at the back was still crouched in the firing position, ready to shoot at anyone who dared attack them from the ground.

  And then, as suddenly as they had taken off, they landed, surrounded once more by dust and sand. The soldiers ran down the tailgate into the fierce, burning heat. Bel followed. Once she was a few metres away from the chopper, she stopped to take in her surroundings. They were just outside a high mud wall with rolls of wicked-looking barbed wire perched on top. In the distance she could see high, craggy peaks and over to her right there was an entrance gate made from huge, solid sheets of corrugated iron. The men from the Chinook were already disappearing through the gate and as Bel watched, she felt someone pull on her arm. It was Mears.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted at her. ‘We can’t stay here. The landing zone could come under attack. Let’s get you into the safety of the base!’

  That sounded to Bel like the most sensible thing anyone had said all day. She nodded at the soldier, then followed him at a fast run through the iron gates. They closed behind her just as the Chinook rose once more into the azure sky above.

  Back at Camp Bastion, Major James Strickland had gone distinctly white. He held the satellite phone to his ear with one hand; with the other he wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow.

  ‘Disappeared?’ he said. ‘What do you mean he’s disappeared?’

  ‘Just that,’ replied the voice at the other end – an official from the Ministry of Defence in London. ‘The village is being scoured as we speak, but there’s no sign of him.’

  Strickland closed his eyes. This was all they needed.

  ‘You need to inform the boy’s mother,’ the official continued. ‘Rotten job, I’m afraid, but as you’re the liaison officer—’

  Strickland interrupted him. ‘For crying out loud,’ he said briskly, ‘I don’t mind telling her. But I can’t. Not now. She’s not at Bastion.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘FOB Jackson, north of Sangin on the other side of the riverbank. She’s there for forty-eight hours. Maybe longer. I can try and get her back sooner, but frankly the choppers are flat out.’

  A silence. When the official spoke again, his voice was grim. ‘Can you get word to her?’

  ‘Negative,’ Strickland replied. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If she thinks something’s happened to her son, she’ll go ballistic. We need our people to be thinking clearly and acting rationally. I can’t guarantee that she’ll do that, and I can’t risk her being a liability to our troops on the ground. I’ll give her the information about her son when she’s back in Bastion, not before.’

  Another silence. And then, ‘Roger that.’

  Strickland sniffed. He didn’t like it when non-military people used military language and there was something about this official, safely behind a desk in London, that brushed him up the wrong way. ‘What you need to do,’ he said, as if he was addressing a very junior soldier, ‘is make sure you find that kid.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, Major Strickland,’ the MOD official said rather primly. ‘You deal with things on your side of the fence, we’ll deal with things on our side. Is that clear?’

  Strickland took a deep breath to hide his irritation. ‘Roger that,’ he said, with a little more meaning in his voice than he perhaps intended . . .

  Night fell.

  As Ben and Aarya’s prison grew dark, the girl quietly took a blanket from the bed. ‘What are you doing?’ Ben asked.

  ‘What I should have done this morning.’ A calmness had descended over her. She laid the blanket on the ground, then lowered herself to her knees and bent her head to the floor. Ben watched quietly as she started muttering to herself in prayer. A strange sense of peace filled the room; and even though Ben could not understand the words that came from Aarya’s mouth, he could tell they were said with quiet honesty.

  When she had finished, she silently stood up again, folded the blanket and turned to Ben. ‘I am supposed to do that five times a day, unless there is good reason not to.’ She looked towards the door. ‘I think they are good reason.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘I think you can say that again.’

  Looking through the hole in the wall, Ben could see the moon rising and the sky brilliant with stars.

  ‘What do you think they are doing?’ Aarya said.

  Ben shrugged in the darkness. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But look . . . that bomb . . . it’s got to be something big. Some kind of terrorist thing. We’ve got to warn someone.’

  They fell silent again. Somehow, locked in that room, their chances of escaping seemed pretty remote – plan or no plan.

  They heard voices outside. Ben pressed his ear to the wall, desperately trying to get some sense of what they were saying. But to him, the language was gobble-degook. He couldn’t even make out the individual sounds, apart from one word that they kept repeating, and that made no sense to him: ‘Kahaki.’

  �
��“Kahaki”.’ He repeated the word to himself a couple of times. ‘What does that mean, Aarya?’

  Aarya shook her head. ‘I do not know,’ she replied. ‘I do not recognize it. Perhaps it is a name, or perhaps a place . . .’

  Ben wanted to bang his hand against the wall with frustration. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You listen. Can you hear what they’re saying?’

  She put her ear to the wall. ‘Not well,’ she replied. ‘I think maybe they are preparing to leave.’

  Ben felt his stomach twisting. It was bad enough in this strange, dark room; but the alternative was worse. And it came soon enough. There was a scratching sound as someone unlocked the door and then pushed it open. A figure stood in the doorway, one of their abductors, silhouetted against a crackling fire in the middle of the compound. He gave a harsh instruction, which Aarya translated. ‘He says we should follow him.’ Her voice trembled.

  The figure turned and walked into the centre of the compound. Ben took Aarya’s hand and led her outside. The only light was from the fire, and he was aware of a number of dark figures milling around the outskirts of the compound, watching them. From behind, someone approached. ‘Get back into the truck,’ a voice said, and Ben recognized it as Amir’s. Somehow, he just knew that the terrorist would have a gun pointing in his direction.

  They stumbled out of the compound to where the trucks were waiting for them, huge and sinister in the darkness. The engines were running, but Ben noticed that the headlamps were not switched on. They were about to make a journey in the dark without being seen. The door of the rear truck was wide open, and Amir pushed them towards it. Ben entered first, purposefully making sure that Aarya could sit nearest the door. Amir took his seat opposite them, resuming his guard-like vigilance with his gun pointed in their direction.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘Silence,’ Amir replied. The door was shut, and moments later the vehicle started to move.

  It was very dark in the truck, but it didn’t take long for Ben’s vision to adjust. He could see Amir’s white eye, wide awake, flicking from Ben to Aarya, then back to Ben again. The stony earth crunched underneath them. Ben pictured the view he had seen from their prison. Featureless. Nothingness. Stuck out in the desert by themselves they’d be in just as much danger as they were now. If they were going to escape, they had to do so while they were near the compounds. The inhabitants might not be friendly, but at least they could try and break in, maybe steal food and water. At least they’d have options. Pretty slim options, but options all the same.

  He glanced over at Aarya. She was clearly waiting for that glance. Waiting for the sign they had arranged; the sign that signalled their attempt to get out of here.

  Ben coughed.

  He sensed her holding her breath.

  He coughed for a second time.

  His hand was in his pocket. He grabbed a fistful of the dust he had collected from the compound floor.

  And then he coughed for a third and final time.

  Aarya didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the barrel of Amir’s gun and pushed it upwards. The terrorist shouted, and Ben half expected to hear the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the inside of the vehicle. The sound didn’t come, though. He pulled his hand from his pocket and hurled the dust straight into Amir’s face. Their captor choked loudly; he dropped his weapon and put two hands up to his stinging eyes. Aarya moved quickly to the door of the truck and opened it while Ben pulled the fuel-soaked rag from his pocket and lit it with the cigarette lighter. A flame rose slowly up the rag and he threw it onto Amir’s lap. It wouldn’t be hot enough to hurt him, but when he got his vision back it would make him panic and buy them a few precious extra seconds.

  By now, Aarya had the door open. Ben threw himself towards it, grabbed her hand and they both jumped from the moving vehicle.

  ‘Now!’ he hissed. ‘Run!’

  The two of them sprinted together away from the convoy and into the blackness of the desert night.

  Ben didn’t stop to take in the scenery. He just wanted to put as much distance between them and the trucks as possible. Aarya was slower than him, but he kept to her pace, vaguely aware of shouting behind them. Ahead of them, in the distance, he could see a faint glow: the compound, he assumed. They kept running towards it, even though it seemed like a very long way off.

  Bang!

  He heard the gunshot almost at the same time that he felt it: a ringing sound that filled the air, and then a sickening whoosh as the round zoomed past his head. Two more cracks of gunfire followed it in quick succession, nauseatingly loud and uncomfortably close. One of them went over his head; the other kicked up a cloud of dust as it hit the road to his side. ‘They are shooting at us!’ Aarya wept. ‘They are shooting at us!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben hissed, still running at full pelt. ‘I kind of noticed.’ And with that, they both hit the dirt and started scrambling to the side of the road like demented crabs. Ben looked around desperately for some kind of cover – a rock, a ditch, anything. But all he could see in the light of the moon was a vast expanse of nothingness; all he could hear was the sound of angry voices, and of footsteps sprinting towards them.

  The voices were louder now. ‘They are coming!’ Aarya gasped. ‘Ben! They are coming!’

  Hands. Big, rough, calloused hands all over them, pulling them to their feet. Ben felt a blow to his stomach, so painful that it even masked the distress he felt that their escape attempt had failed. He doubled over, just as he heard Aarya being slapped hard across the face. A fist grabbed his hair and, still gasping from the punch, he was dragged towards the trucks and bruisingly thrown back into the hard metal shell of that moving prison. A distraught Aarya joined him, and then Amir. His ugly face was curled into an expression of absolute loathing, and as he retook his seat he poked the butt of his gun into Ben’s belly.

  ‘You are lucky,’ he hissed. ‘If you had been shot we would leave you bleeding by the roadside. If I see you move again, that is what I will do.’

  One look at his captor’s eye told Ben that Amir meant it.

  The trucks rolled on, and so did the night. Amir was like a warrior owl, never closing his eyes, never moving his gun. At Ben’s side, Aarya nodded from exhaustion, but Ben was determined to stay awake. Or maybe he was just too scared to fall asleep.

  Towards morning, the temperature fell and he found himself shivering. His limbs became numb and weak. If Amir was cold, he didn’t show it, nor did he give Ben any sign of sympathy – not that Ben was expecting it. He was hungry and his mouth was dry with thirst: he really didn’t think he could cope with being in this vehicle much longer.

  ‘Are we going to stop soon?’ he asked. His voice surprised him – it was thin and rasping.

  Amir sniffed and looked like he was deciding whether or not to reply. He shrugged. ‘Before sunrise,’ he said. ‘We have people expecting us in a nearby village. They will give us shelter while we wait once more for the cover of night.’ He sneered – an expression that suited his face. ‘These people are our friends. We have friends all over the country. They help us in our struggle against the hated Americans and British. You should not try any foolishness – they will not be forgiving if you try to escape.’

  Ben tried to moisten his lips with his tongue. ‘Are you going to leave us there?’

  Amir spat to one side. ‘Of course we will not leave you there. We have taken you for a purpose.’ He grinned – a singularly nasty expression. ‘You should be glad that you are useful. If not, you would be dead.’

  ‘What’s so useful about us?’ Ben demanded. ‘What can we do that you can’t?’

  ‘Nothing!’ Amir announced. ‘It is not what you can do, but who you are that is important.’

  ‘But you just kidnapped us at random. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you do not understand. You are just a stupid child.’ Amir’s lips curled again. ‘You are both stupid children. Stupid, because you think you can escape from us. And stupid becau
se you know nothing of how our war is fought. Nothing.’

  ‘Then why not enlighten me?’

  For a moment Amir was quiet. Ben shrugged, as though it made no difference to him whether his captor carried on talking or not. Amir, though, could clearly not resist. ‘Where we are going,’ he said, ‘there are many foreign troops. But they are not true fighters. Not true fighters at all. If they think there are’ – Amir searched for an unfamiliar word – ‘if they think there are civilians with us, then they will not attack us with their aeroplanes and their bombs. And if they think one of the civilians is British . . .’

  Amir’s smile grew broader than Ben had yet seen it. Triumphant, as though he had just made the winning move in a game of chess. Ben looked at him in horror, then over at Aarya. Her head was still nodding, and there was nothing to suggest that she had heard anything Amir had said. One small part of Ben wished the same could be said of him too. He felt sick as the full implication of what Amir had just said sank in. He didn’t know where they were going or what they were about to do, but what he did know was this: he and Aarya were travelling in a convoy with a group of terrorists in charge of a nuclear suitcase bomb, and they were being used as human shields. And as long as they were being held at gunpoint by the fanatical terrorist in front of them, there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

  Chapter Nine

  Tuesday became Wednesday. Ben didn’t know whether to be relieved or frightened when the convoy came to a halt again. His body was bruised from the juddering journey; he was weak with hunger and dry with thirst. Aarya looked even worse.

  Amir ordered them off the truck and they stepped weakly down, finding themselves once more on the outside of a compound. Ben could tell that day was not far off, but the grey light of morning had yet to break through the darkness as the silent, shadowy, dark-robed figures dragged them roughly into the compound itself.