Battleground

by Chris Ryan

  All his muckers had performed the same manoeuvre. As a single body of men, they had taken cover in the ditch. ‘Is anyone hit?’ Andy shouted as he propped the end of his rifle against the edge of the ditch. ‘I said, is anybody hit?’

  ‘Negative!’ came the reply. And then: ‘They’ll have to do a bit better than that!’

  A wave of relief crashed over Andy. He was responsible for the men in his platoon. If any of them died, he’d live with the guilt for the rest of his life.

  The British soldiers returned fire, and for a moment the air sounded like Bonfire Night. Andy’s ears went numb from the sound of his own weapon and everybody else’s.

  A minute of sustained fire from both, and then the guns fell silent.

  Andy was out of breath; sweat poured from him. The shooting might have stopped, but they were still in the enemy’s sights. Moving out of that ditch was a no-no – they were pinned down, easy pickings for any snipers in the enemy compound. Keeping his head low, he crawled on all fours, past six of his men to where the commanding officer was stationed.

  As he crawled, however, there was a screaming sound in the air.

  ‘RPG!’ someone shouted, and Andy pressed himself face down in the ditch once more. The grenade exploded somewhere behind him – too close for comfort. Andy stayed put as he counted five more grenades being fired, one after the other in quick succession. By some miracle, none of them found their target.

  Andy pushed forward another twenty metres. Major Graves had his back against the wall of the ditch, a map of the area opened out in front of him. To his side, a radio operator was speaking coordinates into his communications system.

  ‘I’m calling in an artillery strike on the compound,’ Graves told Andy.

  ‘Roger that,’ Andy replied. He turned to the radio operator. ‘Time till impact?’ he asked.

  The radio guy held up one finger as he listened to his earpiece. ‘Forty-five seconds,’ he said.

  They waited. In one corner of his mind Andy found himself praying that the artillery shells hit their target accurately. The enemy compound was only a hundred metres away. It didn’t leave much room for error.

  A boom in the distance. Then another.

  Andy held his breath and covered his ears.

  Impact.

  The whole ground shook as though a sudden earthquake had hit them, and from the direction of the compound there were two terrible explosions.

  ‘Three more coming in!’ the radio operator yelled. Andy tensed up and waited for them to hit. The shells slammed into the compound with three brutal booms just as the acrid smell of cordite drifted towards them.

  Then, silence.

  Major Graves spoke. ‘Andy, we’re going to advance on the compound and clear it. Your platoon to flank round to the south; we’ll take the north.’

  Andy nodded. He pushed himself to his feet and then, keeping his head low, ran back down along the line, gathering his men and preparing to advance on the enemy – or at least what remained of them.

  When the artillery shells had hit, Amir was a long way back from the front wall. He had been in enough battle situations to know how it would go. They would exchange fire for a while, then the hated British soldiers would call on their more powerful assets to bring the contact to an end, like cowards. It did not make his brothers any less eager to fight, but Amir feared for their weapon. If some kind of ordnance hit it, the explosion would be bigger than anyone expected. Amir did not care about losing his life – that was in the hands of forces greater than himself anyway; but the green zone of Sangin was not where anyone wanted the bomb to go off.

  They had different plans for that weapon. Very different plans.

  So it was that he had strapped the suitcase bomb to his back and was preparing to leave the compound when the stunning blast of the first artillery shell threw him to the ground, knocking the wind out of him and causing a shower of rubble and shrapnel to fall painfully onto his body. He gasped as a big hunk of metal, twisted and contorted into a lethal weapon, landed inches from his head.

  A second shell thumped into the ground. From somewhere in the compound he heard the sound of screaming. Amir pushed himself up with difficulty – the suitcase bomb was weighing him down – and looked towards the other side of the compound.

  He counted three dead men, and one more who looked like he wouldn’t last more than a minute or two. The man’s arm had been blown off and was lying on the ground, metres away, while blood gushed from the open wound. The screams – bloodcurdling and fierce – came from his strangled throat. They were growing weaker, though.

  Amir had only been on his feet for seconds when the remainder of the shells hit, throwing him back to the ground once more. Suddenly the compound was full of smoke – Amir coughed and choked, unable to see his hands in front of him. For a moment, he hugged the ground. In the back of his mind he was aware that the screaming had stopped, and he knew what that meant.

  He pushed himself to his feet again. The smoke was settling, but Amir still coughed and spluttered. The whole compound was littered with dismembered bodies now. He didn’t stop to identify them and he’d have had trouble doing so anyway: the faces of the dead were burned away and mashed up by shrapnel. There were, however, three other men standing. Their faces were bleeding; one of them had a wound to his arm. But their eyes were bright and they looked to Amir for instructions.

  ‘The soldiers will be coming!’ he barked. ‘We must get the weapon away from them. We must leave this area.’

  The three men nodded. They immediately headed for the compound gate.

  ‘Wait!’ Amir shouted.

  The others stopped and turned. Amir looked meaningfully at a locked door towards the back of the compound. ‘The children,’ he said.

  There was a brief pause before one of the men – bigger than the others, with a fresh wound across the side of his face and a bandolier of ammo across his back – stepped forward. His name was Anuar, and Amir always suspected he fought not for the cause, but because he liked it.

  ‘If the soldiers come,’ he said, ‘they will find them. And if they find them, they will learn about the weapon.’ He sniffed, then looked Amir straight in the eye. ‘Leave it to me,’ he continued. ‘This is my task to fulfil. I will kill them now.’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘No!’

  Amir’s voice was firm. It made Anuar stop in his tracks. ‘What is wrong?’ the man with the wounded face demanded. ‘Do not tell me you have suddenly gone weak, Amir.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Amir spat. ‘They are no use to us dead. We need to take them with us.’

  ‘But they will slow us down,’ Anuar said. ‘We cannot risk it.’

  Amir narrowed his eyes, then stepped forward and grabbed Anuar by the throat. ‘You will take your orders from me. Is that understood?’

  Anuar’s lip curled, but he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he hissed. ‘It is understood.’

  ‘Good. I am leaving now. I can move more quickly by myself. You take the children. Meet me in the caves behind Sangin. We will be able to hide there while things quieten down. Then we will continue our journey.’

  Anuar nodded, a surly look on his face. He turned and headed towards the place where the children were imprisoned while Amir, the suitcase bomb still strapped to his back, moved swiftly across the compound. He needed to get out of here, quickly, before the British soldiers arrived.

  Ben and Aarya didn’t know what had been causing the explosions, but they knew it was something big. Each time the shells hit, the ground shook and they were showered with dust from the cracks that were appearing on the ceiling. Aarya had screamed, but the sound was minute compared to the noise of the explosions. Ben’s ears hurt so much he had to touch them to check they weren’t bleeding. His whole body was trembling from the shock of the impact.

  And then the silence. In some ways it was worse than the noise.

  ‘What was that?’ Aarya breathed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ben replie
d. ‘Whatever it was, I’m glad we weren’t right underneath it.’

  It struck him that the force of the blasts might have weakened the door. He ran over to it and gave it a sturdy kick. Nothing. He was about to try again when, suddenly, it opened.

  Three men entered. One of them had a bleeding wound on the side of his face and a bandolier of ammo; all of them had stern, unfriendly expressions. No one spoke. Two of them grabbed Ben, while the man with the bleeding face took Aarya. A rough piece of cloth that stank badly was wrapped around Ben’s mouth and tightly tied at the back and his hands were tied again. Aarya received the same treatment before they were hustled from the room and out into the central courtyard of the compound.

  Ben couldn’t believe the destruction. Or the death. Bodies lay all around on the ground, disjointed and disfigured. Blood was everywhere, and for a moment Ben thought he was going to be sick. To his horror, he saw the dog that had approached him when they arrived sniffing at the dead bodies, and even licking the blood from one of the faces. Ben shuddered.

  Their captors, however, didn’t give them any more chance to take in the sights. They were clearly in a great hurry, and before they knew it Ben and Aarya were dragged out of the compound.

  They found themselves on a rough pathway, high compound walls on either side. There was no sight of anyone else. That figures, Ben thought to himself. I reckon I’d have got the hell out of here too. The three men didn’t hang around. With their guns pointing, they forced Ben and Aarya to the left, then continued through a maze of compound walls. They went quickly and were, Ben sensed, running from something. Or someone.

  Maybe he should shout – alert people to their presence. If there were British troops in the area, surely the sound of an English voice would make them come running. But one look at the man with the bleeding face soon put him off that idea. The terrorist had something about him. An aura. Ben believed he would fire that rifle given half the chance – and he didn’t look like the kind of guy to waste his ammo on a warning shot.

  They ran along tree lines, through fields and in ditches – anywhere that gave them cover. The sun beat on Ben’s head like a hammer and sweat trickled down the nape of his neck. There was no let-up. If either of them stumbled – and they often did – they were just pulled roughly back up again; if they slowed, a rifle was poked into their guts. Ben’s chest burned with exhaustion; he could only imagine how Aarya felt.

  Suddenly the greenery stopped. Ben found himself looking out over a bleak desert landscape. Ahead of them were hills, rising sharply into the near-distance. They were sandy, craggy and forbidding. Ben and Aarya were forced to run towards them.

  They didn’t climb the first hill they reached, but instead skimmed round the foot of it so that they were no longer in view of the green zone. Only then did the men allow them to reduce their furious pace, and not by much. They started to climb. Ben had to help Aarya, who was stumbling more than he was. From somewhere in the far distance he heard the booming sound of artillery, but none of it was directed towards them.

  Not yet, at least.

  They climbed and climbed. At the brow of one hill they dipped down, but only to then climb another. There were no paths or landmarks, but the men seemed to know where they were going. Nor did they seem to be affected by the heat in the same way as Ben and Aarya, who were weak with exhaustion.

  When a plane flew high overhead, Ben stopped and waved manically to it.

  Bad idea.

  A brutal kick behind the knee knocked him to the ground; he was grabbed by the hair and pulled up again. The man with the wounded face didn’t speak, but his look told Ben all he needed to know: Do that again, and you’re history.

  They ran for an hour, maybe more, before the scenery started to change again. Up ahead there was a craggy, cliff-like structure dominated by the wide open mouth of a cave. They were quite high up now, and behind them Ben could see the green zone from which they had just run, a mile or two in the distance, with a river snaking lazily through. He didn’t get the chance to stare for long, however, because they were forced towards the cave at gunpoint.

  They were still several metres from the mouth of the cave when the air grew colder. Ben didn’t know whether to be relieved by the drop in temperature, or scared by the strangeness of it. They stepped into the cave’s mouth, out of the burning brilliance of the sun, and he felt as though he had been blinded.

  It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the gloom. The cave walls were high and craggy. A little way from where he was standing he saw a bed of ash where a fire had recently been lit – clearly this place was no stranger to humans and in one corner of his mind he wondered if animals lived here too.

  ‘Get further into the cave!’

  It was Amir’s voice. Ben spun round to see the man standing just behind him. His face shone with sweat, his milky eye bulged and he had placed the suitcase bomb at his feet. He untied their hands before instructing, ‘Both of you. Now! Further!’

  Neither Ben nor Aarya could speak because of the rough, stinking gags round their mouths. They had no choice, though, but to do as they were told. Ben took Aarya’s hand and, timidly, they crept towards the back of the cave.

  ‘Wait!’ Amir hissed.

  They stopped.

  Their captor walked up to them. ‘These caves do not end,’ he said. ‘If you try to run away, you will be wandering around them for the rest of your lives. Which will be very short, without light, food or water.’

  Ben narrowed his eyes as menacingly as he could. He pulled Aarya away and they continued walking into the caves while the men started talking in low voices. He could tell from the sound of their voices that they were discussing their next move.

  He looked over his shoulder as they walked: ten metres, twenty metres. Amir was right: the cave seemed to go on for ever and the light from its mouth did not penetrate very far. Near-darkness soon engulfed them. When he was sure they were out of sight of the men, however, Ben stopped. He turned Aarya round and untied the gag from her mouth.

  ‘Ben—’ She started to say something, but he just pointed at his own gag. Moments later, that too fell to the floor.

  ‘Quick,’ Ben whispered. His voice was like sand paper. ‘They’ve just got us out of the way because they don’t want you to overhear what they’re saying. They’ll come and get us any minute.’ He peered into the darkness. There were openings off to either side – mini caves. It looked like Amir had been telling the truth. If they tried to escape, they’d get hopelessly lost.

  ‘What can we do?’ Aarya asked in a small voice.

  Ben set his jaw. To flee into the unknown darkness of these caves would be madness, but there was no way he was going to give in to this without a fight. He drew a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. They couldn’t fight these men with guns. No way. They’d have to be cleverer than that. More subtle.

  The beginnings of an idea started to form in his brain. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot they had . . .

  The pieces of cloth that had been used to bind their mouths were lying on the cave floor. Ben picked them both up. ‘Wait there,’ he told Aarya.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just wait.’ He headed further into the cave system, dropping one piece of cloth about fifteen metres away from where Aarya was standing, then continuing and dropping the other one even further in. He ran back to her and looked at his work. He could only just see the first piece of cloth; the second was obscured by the darkness of the cave.

  ‘If you were one of them and saw that,’ he whispered to Aarya, ‘what would you think?’

  Aarya’s eyes widened as she understood what Ben was doing. ‘That we had gone further into the caves.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Come on then,’ he said. Together they ran quickly into one of the smaller caves to the side.

  It was impossibly dark in there. Thick, velvet blackness. ‘We need to hold hands,’ Aarya breathed. ‘If we are separated, we’ll never find each other again.�
�� They grasped each other’s hands; Ben used his free arm to feel his way in the darkness, touching the side wall of this new cave as they moved away from its entrance to make sure he knew where they were. In his head he counted paces. Five, ten, fifteen . . . They were twenty paces from the opening of the cave mouth before they stopped.

  ‘We’ll wait here,’ he said, speaking so quietly he could barely hear his own voice. ‘With a bit of luck they’ll follow the bits of cloth and not look here.’

  ‘With a bit of luck?’ Aarya said. She didn’t sound too convinced.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben replied. ‘I reckon we’re due some, don’t you?’

  ‘And what then? They will not leave the bomb unattended. Someone will stay at the entrance to the cave.’

  ‘I know,’ Ben said. ‘But if we can get them to split up, that’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it?’

  ‘They have guns, Ben. All of them.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve got a better idea, Aarya, I’m all ears.’

  ‘Do not be cross with me, Ben,’ Aarya scolded. For a moment she sounded for all the world like Ben’s mum. ‘I am trying to make sure we have thought of everything.’

  Ben nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But come on – we won’t have much time before they realize we’ve pulled a fast one. If you’re going to think of something else, think fast.’

  A silence. Aarya clearly didn’t have a better idea. ‘I hope you are right about this, Ben,’ she said finally.

  ‘I really hope you are right.’

  ‘Me too,’ Ben breathed. ‘Me too.’

  They waited.