Operation Certain Death

by Kim Hughes

  He sensed her stiffen slightly at the last part, like a cat poised to leap on a mouse. Shit, he hadn’t meant to say that. Now she was bound to write ‘mad fucker’ in his file.

  ‘Inside his head how?’ she asked.

  He found himself answering, despite his usual reticence on the subject of Nick to anyone but army buddies. ‘Whenever I think of that day, I’m not an observer. Or a bystander. It replays as if I am him. It is me defusing the bomb, me who sees the command-pull wire, me who…’

  He stopped. Yes, he was Nick Steele except for the fact that his old friend wouldn’t have known a shrike from a shitehawk. That bit was all genuine Dominic Riley.

  ‘You get the picture,’ he said.

  Ms Carver nodded. ‘It is a common scenario in cases of PTSD for—’

  ‘I don’t have… PTSD.’ He managed to edit out the word ‘fucking’ at the last moment.

  It was her turn to stay silent.

  ‘And if I have, it’s under control. It’s got nothing to do with why I reamed out the trainee.’ It was lazy labelling. Every soldier who served had to have some degree of PTSD these days. Just like every struggling kid at school had to be ‘on the spectrum’. Soldiering was brutal, dirty, often thankless work, always had been. It fucked you up, although the exact recipe was different for every individual. Of course, defusing IEDs as a career added its own piquancy to the mix.

  Ms Carver’s face showed no response. ‘We’ll come to him in a moment. Tell me more about being Nick.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Can you try? How does this transference manifest itself?’

  ‘Transference?’ He knew what she meant. He was stalling for time.

  ‘Being inside his head.’

  ‘It’s weird.’

  She gave a rare, albeit brief, smile. ‘We’re used to weird.’

  He took a deep breath. In for a penny. ‘I can see me. That’s what is so strange. I can actually see and hear me.’

  ‘Go on.’

  He didn’t want to ‘go on’. He wanted out of there. But, as that wasn’t an option, Riley steeled himself and explained how, as Nick, he could go back to the hours leading up to the incident, back to when he had been listening to off-colour jokes about Moe the terp. It was beyond bizarre that as ‘Nick’ he could observe ‘Dom’. If he thought about it too much it was a total mindfuck. This bizarre Nick/Dom chimera – him but not really him – would relive how they had cleared the lines from the ICP, marking the safe path with yellow spray paint. The laying out of the initial kit (trowel, brush, snips, camera) and making sure that the man-bag containing the other gear – such as the remote-operated ‘flying scalpel’ to cut wires, det cord and plastic explosive for controlled detonations – was in easy reach. Then he was examining the IED. Discovering that this one was a cut above your normal piece of crap. Brushing, probing. And then… seeing the command-pull wire.

  It meant someone had been lying in wait, maybe just a few metres beyond the rough culvert, ready to tug the cable that would set off the bomb and kill or maim an ATO. Riley often wondered if the string-puller had got the bounty. Because Nick certainly died that day.

  ‘After the blast, I’m back in my skull. I’m watching his final moments. The explosion threw him into the ditch,’ Riley said. ‘Then all hell let loose from the murder holes in the compounds and the maize field where the bomber must have been hiding. AK-47s, a couple of RPGs.’

  ‘Were you hit?’

  ‘No. I was pinned down. I couldn’t move.’ He cleared his throat. This still hurt, like a wound that refused to scab over. ‘Couldn’t help Nick.’

  His instinct had been to run straight across to where his friend lay. But he couldn’t. He had another set of instincts, army-instilled. Although the IEDs between him and Nick had been clearly marked with the red paint, he had no idea if they were the only bombs on that road. The safe paths were yellow-sprayed corridors and there were only two of those, both leading from the bombs to the Mastiffs and the Incident Control Point. Besides, the air was fizzing with rounds. The infantry crouched by the Mastiffs were returning fire, too. Even crawling on his stomach, there was a good chance of Riley being shot by one or both sides. Or blown up by an unmarked IED. So, against what every neuron in his brain was screaming, he had stayed put.

  And then Nick had appeared.

  He had pulled himself up out of the rancid sewer by his elbows, enough so that his upper body was visible. His face was relatively unscathed by the blast, but Riley could tell from his expression that his pal was in great pain. Riley yelled at him to get down, but taking cover wasn’t foremost in Nick’s mind.

  ‘Look after Teej,’ he yelled. At least, that’s what Riley later decoded. At the time it was closer to a scream of agony, with some fractured words along for the ride. His head had drooped and his right arm disappeared and for a second it looked like he might slide back into the ditch. But he heaved himself further up with his left arm and when his right came into view again, Riley saw that Nick was holding his Sig sidearm. His hand was shaking with the effort, as if it was the heaviest pistol ever invented. He could barely lift it to his temple.

  ‘No, stop, Nick, medics are en route!’ Riley had no idea if that was true, but it was likely. No matter whether the call had gone out or not, he had to convince Nick the medivac was on its way. Had to make him believe it was worth hanging on. ‘Stay with us, pal. We’ll get you out!’

  But Nick was no longer listening. The sound of a bullet cracking through bone snapped across the desert floor, striking Riley like the tip of a whip across the face.

  THREE

  Nottingham’s latest shopping and dining plaza, Alan Sillitoe Circus, was officially opened by a (living) local celebrity author on a Tuesday. Conditions weren’t ideal, grey and overcast, with persistent drizzle and a snatching wind, but the writer made the best of it with some jokes about football, the Sleaford Mods and D. H. Lawrence, and read part of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

  Come the Friday after the unveiling, though, the promised spring had arrived with the new plaza’s polished limestone flooring reflecting a thin but welcome sunshine and some of the hardier children stripping off to play among the water spouts that formed the central feature. The Circus was a sweeping circle with two arched entrances opposite each other, the circumference lined with bars and shops. Those who feared yet another parade of chains had been mollified by the council’s decision to offer a rates holiday to any locally owned business. So it wasn’t all Lush and River Island. The Starbucks was busy, but Notts Coffee was busier, and the most anticipated opening was SteakHolder, modelled on the popular Hawksmoor chain in London, but cheaper and rumoured to be funded by an ex-Notts County footballer.

  At ten minutes to midday, in front of the Bugg Bar stood a white-shirted waiter, a Spaniard who was riding the ripples from the uncertainties of Brexit, proudly surveying his fiefdom of tables, as if he was working on Las Ramblas, rather than an out-of-town shopping centre in Nottingham. He looked over at a glum-looking woman who had been nursing a coffee for thirty minutes, staring off into space.

  She was just entering her mid-thirties, but she was already widowed, and was now remembering when she and her late husband – a victim of knife crime during a botched robbery – used to visit the Royal Oak which once stood on this spot. On several occasions during the half-hour she had been on the plaza, she felt as if the old shabby pub was still there, and her husband had merely slipped inside to the lavatory and would be back at any moment; but mostly she felt like an amputee, a victim of phantom-limb syndrome, wanting to stroke and itch an appendage she no longer had.

  A young man brushed by her table and worked his way into the centre of the plaza, where he put down his rucksack. He was dressed in light-coloured chinos, deck shoes with no socks, and a grey T-shirt. His hair, thick, dark and luxuriant, almost touched his shoulders.

  There were now seventy-one people on the plaza, including six female students – two w
earing hijabs – four middle-aged Dutch tourists, a group of hung-over Liverpudlians in town for a mate’s stag weekend, a lone teenager, looking around anxiously to see where her friends had got to and wondering whether this apparent shunning has anything to do with her new boyfriend, and three local businessmen, discussing plans for two of the still-empty shops. A member of a local crime syndicate was with them, listening carefully, working out what percentage of interest they could tolerate, and how easy it would be to use these men to launder some of the drug money his group had squirrelled away around the city, waiting for a legitimate home to wash it clean.

  Plus, lost in her thoughts and her still-fresh grief, the widow.

  The number swelled further when a striking young woman in a vintage Prince ‘symbol’ sweatshirt and ripped jeans wandered over from Monsoon and asked the waiter for a flat white. She then selected a seat, making sure she was in the sun, and turned an already bronzed face towards the sky. Several of the Liverpudlians looked over and appraised her, their expressions and the comments they shared under their boozy breath conveying the nature of their lascivious thoughts.

  Ten minutes passed. One of the businessmen left to carry out a surprise audit on one of his phone shops (he suspected the manager was stealing from him). More coffees and beers were ordered, keeping the waiter busy but not overworked.

  The Liverpudlians started arguing and, in order to placate them, the waiter suggested another round. They agreed. By the time the waiter emerged with the beers, the scene had altered. The Prince symbol girl had gulped her coffee, thrown down some coins and departed. The young man with the thick black hair was about to do the same. He had left his rucksack on a chair. He pointed to it and gestured, asking in sign language if the woman in black would keep an eye on it. She nodded.

  The waiter watched him trot over towards the shops. He served the Liverpudlians their fresh pints, suggesting as he did so that they perhaps ought to eat a meal to help soak up the drink, and then looked back at the rucksack. Something about it worried him. He, at least, had stayed awake during the security drills all staff had been made to attend before the Circus opened for business. At that moment a magnesium-bright star flared from the spot where the bag was sitting, and even before the sound reached him, there came a shock wave that drove the waiter back through the bar’s window.

  The blast had fatally damaged his internal organs anyway, but a triangular shard of glass opened up a vein in his neck and the compressed air sprayed the bar’s interior with droplets of blood. One of the tiny spheres of red liquid punched its way into the eye of the barman inside, who was also hurtled backwards, landing spread-eagled in the centre of the shelves of bottles.

  The blast wave would later be identified as having an O-dE – an Omnidirectional Effect – meaning it spread equally in all directions, creating casualties in 360 degrees. It was filled with particles travelling at supersonic speed and it killed the Liverpudlians instantly. The blast wind followed, negative pressure that crashed heads together and fused skull to skull as well as tearing off two arms, depositing them dozens of metres away. This hyper-compressed air, as solid as a moving brick wall, slammed into the Dutch tourists, leaving little external damage but emulsifying their insides into a pink sludge.

  The lone teenage girl was picked up and flung across the street towards Starbucks, her clothes burnt off her back, her bones snapped, her broken body flailing as if she had been filleted.

  Outside the immediate centre of the detonation, eardrums burst as the air pressure stretched them beyond breaking point and airways filled with blood – the so-called ‘blast lung’. When the first phase of the detonation had passed, twenty-six people lay dead, with many more injured in some way. Gobbets of flesh began to rain down onto the immediate area, making a wet plopping noise that the shocked and dazed onlookers – at least those whose hearing was still functioning – would never forget. Shoes, handbags, phones, glass, crockery, coins and twisted sections of furniture that had been swept up in the blast also fell to the earth, often striking the living and causing a second wave of injuries.

  The motion-sensor systems inside the alarms of nearby cars shook violently as the concussion of over-pressurised air reached them, triggering an uncoordinated display of flashing sidelights and adding a Greek chorus of honks, whines and whoops to the scene. Soon that racket would be joined by the more authoritative sirens of police, ambulance and fire as the first responders arrived.

  A rope of black smoke rose from the shattered café, blessedly – albeit temporarily – obscuring the most sickening scenes of carnage. From the gritty miasma of debris at ground level one woman emerged, half-staggering, her dress ruined, her hair standing up as if she had received an electric shock, her skin blackened, a trickle of blood snaking from her nose, but otherwise unharmed. The young widow would never understand why, in the midst of such horror and sorrow, she, already dead inside, had been spared.

  FOUR

  Riley paused, staring out of the window of the old shoe factory once more, gathering his thoughts before he carried on explaining to Ms Carver that, in fact, Nick never got the chance to pull the trigger of his Sig. He clearly intended to – who wouldn’t, given his injuries – but Terry Taliban beat him to it. It was hard to say whether the shot that killed him was deliberate or not. The Taliban had a few Russian sniper rifles left over from a previous war, but most of them had AK-47s, which they used on fully automatic. It was more like spraying with a lethal and particularly lively garden hose than anything resembling accuracy. So it was probably a lucky shot that entered through Nick’s right ear and saved him the trouble of committing suicide.

  Riley used the word ‘lucky’ advisedly. When they eventually got to him – after the Taliban had withdrawn, knowing that an airstrike by either A-10 Thunderbolts, remote-operated Reaper drones or Apache gunships would have been ordered up – they discovered that most of Nick’s lower half was missing. He couldn’t have survived and if he had… Well, knowing the kind of guy he was, Riley reckoned he would have gone for the Sig sooner or later anyway.

  Nick was also fortunate that, once they had located what was left of his legs, there was a decent, recognisable amount to put in the body bag to take back to Tracey-Jane, his widow. That wasn’t always the case with IED victims. Sometimes there was more Afghan dust than person in the coffin.

  Riley had to remind himself that Nick wasn’t the only casualty that day. One of the soldiers lost an eye, thanks to an unlucky ricochet off one of the Mastiff’s steel hulls. And poor Moe, the young terp, caught an AK round in the head. The Taliban got him anyway, despite the scarf around his face.

  ‘So, Sergeant Riley, thank you for your honesty. I know that can’t have been easy to share. Now, you do appreciate why you are here?’

  ‘Because of the complaint,’ he said, trying to avoid showing his irritation at the whole situation. ‘When I got back to my barracks at Loughborough, the CO at the Felix Centre had been speaking to my CO. They decided that I was due either a disciplinary board or should undergo psychological evaluation to see if…’

  He hesitated. Ms Carver obliged. ‘If the anger issues have anything to do with possible PTSD.’

  I don’t have PTSD, he wanted to repeat. Just a normal reaction to picking up pieces of your dead mate after you’ve seen him cut in half by a charge deliberately designed and placed to kill him.

  ‘I was angry. Angry that this boy… sorry, man, was clearly not suitable for the High Threat course.’

  ‘Why don’t we start at the beginning? It is my understanding you were invited to…’ she checked her notes. ‘The Felix Centre?’

  She had framed it as a question, so he answered. ‘It’s the main training site for ATOs,’ he said. ‘Where we learn the skills and drills we’ll need in EOD. Bomb disposal. Using both practical exercises and in lectures. I was there to deliver one of the latter.’

  She gave a thank you smile for his explanation and looked down at her notes again. ‘Specifically, to pres
ent a briefing about conditions on the ground and in particular…’ She had to check once more. ‘TTP acceleration.’

  TTP was Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. The ‘acceleration’ part referred to how insurgent groups learned from each other and shared information, for instance between Iraq and Afghan. It meant that the intervals between new developments of ever-more sophisticated approaches to killing British soldiers became shorter and shorter. Like the rest of society, the world of insurgency seemed to be speeding up.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you rather took against one member of the audience.’

  ‘It wasn’t personal. Rather, he kept raising stupid questions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘About our treatment of the Afghans as human beings.’

  ‘And what do you think about that?’

  He sighed. ‘Of course Afghans are human beings. But some of them were trying to blow my arse up out of the top of my head. You can’t afford to… humanise them. They are the enemy. You just have to think about what they are trying to achieve on that day, in that place. Not whether they’ve got clean drinking water at home.’

  ‘Although you agree that is important, Staff Sergeant.’

  ‘Not as important as deciding if the wire you’re about to cut is part of a collapsing circuit on the IED.’

  The wannabe ATO had also raised the issue of how Britain was treating those who had worked for the army or air force and were now facing reprisals at home. That was politics, Riley had explained. He was bombs, disposal of.

  ‘So how did the complaint make you feel?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pissed off.’ Understatement. Thanks to the objection from the trainee, Riley had spent almost a month doing ‘admin’ at Loughborough – shovelling bullshit into ever-greater heaps of ordure – rather than something useful. Like saving lives. No more Explosive Ordnance Disposal until the trick cyclist finished with him. And then only if she gave him a clean bill of mental health.