by Rob Aspinall
As usual, I couldn’t hit an oil tanker with a beach ball.
Philippe corrected my stance. “Stand with your legs shoulder-width apart,” he said. “Your stronger leg further back, weaker leg in front, both slightly bent.”
He kicked my legs into place. “Now draw your weapon.”
I pulled the gun out of my holster and held it out in front.
“Fully extend and then support the weapon with your weak arm bent,” said Philippe.
“That’s it,” he said. “Lean a little into the shot … Good, this is the stance we’ll use. You can stand square with both arms extended, but most of the time we’ll be shooting and moving, so keep it simple and stick to this technique.”
I fired my way through a clip and hit the target dead centre in the chest. I jumped for joy and held up a hand for a high five. Philippe left me hanging and moved the target back twenty feet.
I missed all over again.
8
Incursion
Back in the cabin at night, Philippe showed me how to dismantle and clean an assault rifle – just one of a few weapons he stashed under the floorboards.
“Hey,” I said, mid-clean, “do you ever get flashbacks?”
He paused, dust cloth in hand. “No.”
God, the man didn’t give you anything without a fight.
“Cos I get these voices, images, flashing up. A young girl. Asian. I don’t know, Arabic maybe. Ring any bells?”
“No,” he said, without looking up, hands running the cloth up and down a rifle barrel.
“Well, she doesn’t belong to me. So she must be one of—”
Philippe slammed the barrel on the table so hard I bum-hopped off my chair.
“What do you want from me?” he said. “You’re always … talking.”
He turned his hand into a little mouth, putting on a silly voice. “Yak, yak, yak. What’s this? What’s that? Why do we have to train? For once, Lorna, shut up and grow up.”
I stood up sharply off my rickety chair, knocking it to the floor.
“After all that’s happened,” I said. “Still being treated like a little kid.”
“Still acting like one,” he said.
I flew out of the cabin, blood boiling. The wind off the mountain was cool and strong, messing with my hair, the terrain mere black outlines against the sky. I plonked down on a log in front of a dying fire we’d made earlier to cook our supper, the portable cooking stove having run out of gas. I stared into the orange-flicker glow of the embers, picked up a stick and poked at the ashes. A pair of boots scuffed in the dirt behind me.
“Most of the time I work alone,” Philippe said, taking a seat on a log the other side of the fire.
Was that his idea of an apology?
He warmed his hands. Looked up at the stars, then back into the fire. “It was around four years ago. A raid on an Iraqi compound. A favour for some Langley official. A smash and grab on an IS general, Ahmed Alfarsi. A capture mission led by Nathan, before he got bumped upstairs. I was in the region on a job and stood in for a JPAC SF who’d fallen ill.”
“SF?”
“Special Forces.”
As Philippe told the story, the memories hit me thick and fast. Just like the dreams and the London warehouse, I felt like I was there.
“It was zero three hundred hours,” he continued.
As he told the story, I jumped in and out of flashback …
We crouched in single file, either side of the compound gates, dressed like Navy SEALs. It was a sticky, still night, a pungent smell of animal dung from the surrounding fields, sweat soaking my back.
We’d already cut the power to the street, disabling the compound’s alarm system and dart-gunned the guards in the watchtowers to the front and rear. Cyanide tipped. No chance of them waking up. Don’t know how I knew all that. I just did. Like I had the whole backstory stored deep in my memory.
One of the unit blew the lock on the gates with a quiet plastic explosive. Nothing more than a small puff of smoke. Another guy levered the gate open and we were in, moving tight across the courtyard between perimeter walls and house.
“A Black Hawk dropped off another team onto the roof,” Philippe said, picking up a mountain pebble and rolling it around in a hand. “We’d clear the ground floor, the others would clear the top level and we’d squeeze the enemy both ways using the stairs. Then, once we’d neutralised the remaining guards, we’d snatch Alfarsi. Routine stuff.”
Inside the house, it was a maze of dark narrow spaces and low ceilings. We worked our way up the stairs, stepping over strewn bodies, fresh out of life. The other team met us on the middle-floor landing and we blew our way in through a steel panic door, shouting in Arabic for the soldiers to surrender their weapons. Except there were no IS fighters. In the dusty rods of our rifle lights, there was only a lone woman strapping a suicide vest to a small girl, a detonator controller attached to a wire in the woman’s hand.
It was the flashback girl.
“The intel was bad,” said Philippe, joining me in raking the ashes with a stick of his own. “Alfarsi wasn’t there, but he’d left us a gift …”
“Hold your fire,” Nathan said, raising a clenched fist. He spoke to the woman in Arabic, lowering his rifle. “Put the detonator down slowly,” he said.
The woman prayed rapidly under her breath, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Nathan aimed his rifle at her heart. The rest of us refocused behind our laser-guided sights, all in a line like a firing squad. Me next to Nathan in the centre.
“Last chance,” Nathan said.
“Put the detonator down or I cut your feckin’ head off,” said an Irish guy to my immediate left, not even bothering to speak the woman’s language.
She prayed louder and faster, thumb quaking over the detonator button. The child shook with terror. Fingers itched on triggers. Until her mum finally ended her prayer.
“Boyle, take the shot,” Nathan said calmly.
There was a flash and crack from my left. Blood sprayed out of the back of the woman’s head as Boyle put a bullet through it. She hit the whitewashed stone floor, face down. The child screamed and cried, Mother!
We stepped forward as a line, still conscious of the explosives taped to the child’s vest. If the bomb went off, it would take half the compound with it.
The detonator rolled out of the woman’s limp fingers and stopped at the feet of her young daughter.
Nathan put out a hand. “Little girl, no—”
Too late, the girl stooped and picked up the detonator. She held it up and out in a trembling left hand, a thumb now hovering over the red button.
“Shit,” said Nathan.
“What do we do, sir?” a soldier to the far right of the line asked.
“Permission to take the wee bairn out,” said Boyle.
“Negative,” Nathan said. “Come on, sweetheart. Put the detonator down. Don’t make us do it.”
“I’m telling you, sir,” Boyle said, “she’s gonna blow us all to shite.”
“I don’t get it,” I said to Philippe, tying my hair back out of the ravages of the wind. “Why did Nathan hesitate? He didn’t bat an eyelid in Oslo.”
“Nathan’s always been ruthless, ambitious. But Boyle was a sociopath,” Philippe said, tossing his stick on the embers, sparks snapping and dancing into the night sky. “For Nathan, it’s just business. For Boyle, it was fun. He had that look.”
Nathan glanced across the line both ways, then back at the girl, his beaky nose protruding out through his mask, his beady blue eyes doing a lot of thinking. The girl was crying, in mourning. She muttered something about revenge.
Nathan nodded at Boyle. “Let’s get this over with.”
A red laser dot danced on the forehead of the girl, hair stuck to her face with sweat. Boyle cracked his neck one way and then the other, savouring the moment. Suddenly, I stepped out into the line of fire, blocking Boyle’s shot.
“What are you doing, Vasquez?” Nat
han said. “Get back here.”
I didn’t stop, didn’t answer. The girl tensed up another notch as I walked slowly towards her.
“Permission to fucking end Vazquez,” Boyle said.
“Careful, Boyle,” I heard a South African soldier say. It was Vin Diesel – I remembered the voice from the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. “That’s the devil you’re about to shoot in the back,” he said.
“No one’s shooting anyone,” said Nathan, putting an end to the argument.
As I edged forward, I lifted my rifle in super slo-mo and brought the strap up over my head. I held out a placating palm in the air.
“The fucker’s crazier than the ragheads,” said Boyle. “He’s gonna get us all killed.”
I was only a couple of feet from the girl now. She was breathing fast and shallow, swallowing hard, her eyes darting everywhere, tears running off her cheeks and spotting the floor.
“Easy,” I said in Arabic, in Philippe’s voice. “We’re not going to hurt you … are we?”
I looked over my shoulder at the firing squad. They shook their heads in unison. I turned back to the child and bent at the knees, placing my weapon gently on the floor. I knelt in front of the girl, down to her eye level, making myself smaller and less of a threat.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” I said. “It was an accident. We’re all very sorry, aren’t we?”
Again I glanced back to the rest of the squad. They all nodded furiously.
“My name’s Philippe. What’s your name?”
“What is this,” Boyle said, “fuckin’ Sesame Street?”
“Boyle, be quiet,” Nathan said.
“Meena,” the young girl said. “My name’s Meena.”
“And how old are you, Meena?”
“Nine.”
“I bet you like ice cream, don’t you, Meena?”
“Yes,” she said, wiping away a glisten of snot from under her nose with her free hand.
“What’s your favourite?”
“Banana.”
“Banana?” I said, smiling. “Me too … Hey,” I said, “how about if you give me that thing in your hand and we get you some banana ice cream?”
“Sod this paedo shite,” Boyle said. “I’m taking the shot.”
I heard a thunk. I turned to see Boyle’s body on the floor, Nathan’s hand hanging in a karate chop.
“Carry on,” Nathan said.
I looked into Meena’s big, innocent brown eyes and held out a gloved palm, flat and steady. She looked at my hand. At the button. At her mum on the floor.
“You’re a good girl, Meena. You don’t want to do this.” I reached out a little further. “Now give me the detonator and we’ll go and get that ice cream.”
The girl’s thumb wavered over the button again as her watery eyes lingered on her mother’s body on the floor, blood pooling black in the darkness. I could tell she was struggling to breathe under the vest, strapped tight around her torso. The entire room held its breath. For a split second, I thought she was going to hand the detonator over.
“I saw it in her eyes first,” Philippe said, his entire face tightening as the memory burrowed its way out of him. Her thumb came down on the detonator button.
9
Demons Out
Before Meena’s thumb could push all the way down on the button, I drew a sidearm from the holster on my belt and shot her in the right side of her head. Her thumb rested dead on the detonator, paralysed. I holstered the gun and caught the girl as she fell forward. I laid her down gently on the floor, her big, terrified eyes burning memories into mine. She only had a few seconds of life left in her.
I spoke softly. “I’m sorry.”
She whispered something, barely audible. I leaned in close.
“Am I dying?” she asked.
Before I could lie to her, she stopped breathing. Her eyes glazed over.
Along with Auntie Claire, the news about Dad and then Mum leaving, this was the worst memory ever.
I closed Meena’s eyelids with forefinger and thumb as the rest of the unit stood down. Nathan spoke into his helmet mic, requesting evac and telling someone on the other end to let the locals know we were there.
“Search the house,” he said to us. “Bag any hard drives, files, papers, phones. Anything we might be able to use. We’re out of here in two mikes. Oh, and someone wake up Boyle.”
Unlike me, Philippe didn’t sprout a single tear. He just stared unblinking into the fire as he told me the rest of the story.
“My unit went to work searching the other rooms, leaving me to dismantle the vest,” he said. “I prised the detonator from the fingers of the girl and traced the wire back to the vest.”
Philippe shifted uncomfortably on his log, gazing at the tips of his army-issue boots. “But …” he said.
I knew what he was going to say. The memory was already teed up, like one of Giles’s Storm Warning slides. Still, I let him say it.
“The connecting wire,” Philippe said. “The mother hadn’t attached it properly. The detonator wasn’t operational. The girl died for nothing. I killed her, for nothing.”
I didn’t know what to say. I reckon I’d tasted only the fun-size snack version of his pain. It was a deep, deep cut and there was no stitching it up. What could I say?
“The choppers lifted off seconds before a band of militia arrived,” Philippe continued.
Four pick-up trucks skidded to a stop outside the compound, militia jumping out and flooding the main house. We were high up above the town by then, faint, rumbling shadows in the night. A voice crackled in Nathan’s radio. An American female fighter pilot. ETA any moment.
“Missile away,” she said. “Hold on to your hats.”
A few seconds later, the compound went up like an explosion at a fireworks factory, barbecuing everyone inside.
This war on terror thing seemed like a game with no rules and no way to win. I really didn’t see the point. Life was short and fragile enough. Whatever happened to live and let live?
The Black Hawks flew low and fast between mountain ranges, men and equipment packed in tight, with doors locked open, presumably for fast pick-up and drop-off.
I stared out into the blackness, feeling scraped-out hollow. Nothing left but a whisper on the rotor wind. Am I dying?
Boyle was awake and talking, feeling the side of his neck where Nathan had knocked him out.
“See, I told you she’d push it,” he said. “And I told you we didn’t need another fella tagging along.”
“To be fair, mate,” said Vin Diesel, sitting across from Boyle in the centre of the cabin, “he did put the girl down … Good shot as well, my friend,” he said to me. “I didn’t have time to blink.”
“Yeah, but we can’t be doing with soft lads,” said Boyle, getting up out of his seat and leaning over me. He seemed to take it as a personal insult that he wasn’t the cock of the psycho walk.
“Boyle, I really wouldn’t—” Nathan said, sitting next to the opposite doorway. Boyle ignored him, bent over with his face close to mine, his rifle still strapped over one shoulder. His lips curled at the edges.
“There’s no time for that namby-pamby shite here,” he said. “You’re runnin’ with the big boys now, sunshine. The wee raghead slag had it comin’ and you shoulda—”
Without warning, I seized the strap on Boyle’s weapon and levered him out of the chopper, his body vanishing into the gloom, fresh food for mountain animals. I guess on the way down he knew he was going to die. Just like little Meena.
The entire SF unit were stunned into silence.
“Well, never mind,” Nathan said, pulling off his helmet and gloves.
“Sir,” Vin Diesel said, “he just threw Boyle out of the fucking chopper.”
“No he didn’t,” Nathan said, smiling cheerily.
“But, sir,” another of the unit said.
“The floors on these Hawks are treacherous,” Nathan said, rubbing the sole of his boot forward and back. “Look. T
errible. They really should do something about it.”
Vin Diesel grunted and shook his head.
“He slipped,” Nathan said again, examining every face inside the rear cabin. “Everyone clear?” he asked, without reply. “Marvellous.”
Philippe got to his feet and faced out towards the valley. He hadn’t told me about the Boyle-hurling incident in the chopper. And I wasn’t about to mention the fact that I knew about it. Being around Philippe was like hanging out with an animal of prey. It seemed harmless, and maybe, once in a while, it would let you stroke it. But you never knew quite what it was thinking. And it could kill you with a swipe of its paw. Long story short, I didn’t want to get thrown down the mountain. So I kept my trap firmly shut.
Philippe made a guttural noise, like he was expelling a demon. “You’re the first person I’ve told about that … Huh,” he said, sounding surprised, “it feels good to tell someone.”
“Yeah, actual talking,” I said. “Who’d have thunk it?”
After an awkward silence, I did some spilling of my own. It just came out.
“You know, I was really horrible to my auntie before she died. Before all of this, I mean.” I ran a finger along the hard edge of my scar under my green army tee. I felt a weight on my chest as I spoke. “She died thinking I hated her. And after she gave me so much.”
I walked over to where Philippe stood, facing out across the valley.
“I saw how she looked at you in that barn,” he said. “She knew you didn’t mean it.”
“How do you—?”
“Type A’s are trained to observe, not just kill,” he said. “Trust me, she knew.”
Facing away from the fire, the night was so black. You couldn’t see three feet in front of you. Philippe was just a voice in the dark. Under a moonless sky, the valley seemed like a void. The world a place without a soul. But, tomorrow, the sun would come up again. Like always.
