Man Down

by Nathan Burrows

  ‘Hello sirs, Kinkers,’ Lizzie said with a smile. ‘I take it you’ve told the boss about the dodgy filters then, Kinkers?’ Adams hadn’t realised that Lizzie knew the loadmaster, and he thought he caught them exchange a discreet smile. He could be wrong and if he was, it wouldn’t be the first time. She continued, ‘I heard that it was actually the pilot who — to avoid everyone finding out that he’s actually a bit shit — filled the sensor thing with sand!’

  ‘Yeah, not sure about that,’ Davies laughed. ‘It’s a good dit though. I’ll have to remember it for the next squadron Dining-In night. That should get him fined at least one bottle of port, if not more.’

  ‘What the hell’s a dit?’ Kinkers asked.

  ‘It’s slang for a story, and you should never let the truth get in the way of a good one,’ Lizzie said, raising smiles from them all. ‘So, what’s the plan then? We can’t go flying for a couple of days, so we should go out on the lash. What d’you all think?’

  ‘I can’t go out tonight, Lizzie,’ Adams replied, running his hand over his crew cut. ‘I’m washing my hair. Sorry.’

  ‘Have you lot had the guided tour of the hospital yet?’ Ronald asked Davies and Kinkers. They both shook their heads. ‘If you want to have a bimble round, I’ll give you the tour if you like?’

  ‘Great idea, mate,’ Kinkers said. They got to their feet and followed Ronald to the main door of the TRT tent. As they were walking through the flaps to the tent, Adams heard one of them talking in a theatrical whisper, ‘Is there anywhere to get a decent cup of tea in this place?’

  ‘Very funny,’ Adams said under his breath. He turned to Lizzie, who had sat down in one of the green canvas chairs. She had a serious expression on her face which hadn’t been there a few minutes before. ‘You okay, mate?’ he asked.

  ‘That casualty died on the way back to the UK,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘What, the head injury?’

  ‘Yep. Me and Ronald have just been to the paradigm terminals to check emails and what have you. I had an email from my mate on the critical care retrieval team. She’s in Ramstein.’

  ‘Why Ramstein?’ Adams asked.

  ‘They diverted there after the patient arrested mid-flight. They worked on him for ages, but couldn’t get him back,’ Lizzie replied. ‘To be honest, I don’t think they knew what to do once they’d realised that he wasn’t responding. It’s not happened before, losing a patient in the air, so they diverted to Ramstein to sort stuff out.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Adams said. ‘Is your mate okay?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. They’re holding there waiting for a flight back out here. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the helicopter crew because I know they bust a gut to get him back here. I guess they’ll find out anyway at some point.’

  Lizzie looked at Adams, and he saw she was on the verge of tears. ‘I just didn’t want to be the one to tell them that he didn’t make it.’

  ‘He was in a bad way though, Lizzie,’ Adams said. ‘You saw how badly injured he was. I’ve worked in Accident and Emergency for nearly ten years, and I’d never seen anything like that. If anything, he shouldn’t have survived as long as he did.’

  ‘That’s not the bloody point, Adams,’ Lizzie snapped. ‘He did survive. We got him here, alive. We got him here and into the operating theatre, alive. So, what the hell happened?’

  Adams knew that there was no answer to that question. People died, he knew that. So did Lizzie, but he figured that this probably wasn’t the time for that conversation. He wondered what the best thing to do was. His instinct was to give her a hug, but he didn’t want to tip her over the edge and make everything worse by trying to make it better.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea, mate?’ he said, not being able to think of anything better to say.

  ‘No, I don’t want a sodding cup of tea,’ Lizzie replied, looking up at him with tears now streaming down her cheeks.

  Adams crossed the room and knelt in front of her, putting his arms around her and drawing her towards him. She started crying hard, so he tightened his grip on her.

  ‘This is so shit, Adams,’ Lizzie sobbed. ‘Absolutely shit. They’re kids, and they’re dying.’

  Adams held her, saying nothing. He looked towards the doors of the TRT tent and caught a glimpse of Colonel Nick looking in through the windows at them both before the doctor turned and disappeared from sight.

  22

  Private Bill Mitchell, who was driving, and his passenger Lance Corporal Steve Ruffles were in the middle of what their Platoon Commander called a ‘reassurance patrol’. They were based in the Forward Operating Base in the district centre of Sangin, which was about five kilometres away from their current location. The whole base had been on lock-down for the last twenty-four hours since all the Chinooks had been grounded. They had to preserve everything — rations, water, ammunition — until the supply lines opened up. But, as their Commanding Officer had been quick to point out, there was still a need to make their presence felt in the area. If the insurgents knew that they didn’t have any re-supply, that would be a problem. They could just chip away at the FOB bit by bit until the troops inside eventually ran out of stuff. Sergeant Hawkins, the platoon commander, had been quite explicit when he’d said that it would be just like the fucking film Zulu all over again. Hence the patrol.

  The WMIK Private Mitchell was driving was one of a convoy of three vehicles picking their way around the outskirts of the village. It was a route that they’d done many times before, which concerned Lance Corporal Ruffles a lot. Although the vehicles were relatively well equipped with a fifty-calibre machine gun on the back, and a general-purpose machine gun on the front, predictability was not something that turned out well — generally speaking. Ruffles had tried to voice this at morning prayers, but Sergeant Hawkins was not as convinced as he was about the issue.

  The area was a maze of rough tracks, like the one that they were driving down now. Low slung mud walls and basic houses. It was crisscrossed with irrigation ditches which connected the poppy fields and provided an ideal way for the Taliban to move around undetected from the ground.

  ‘I don’t like this at all, Ruffles,’ Private Mitchell said in a thick Scottish accent. ‘Where the fuck is everyone? Last time we came down here we got stuck in a traffic jam of bloody goats.’ They were creeping their way down a lane with a mud wall on one side, and an irrigation ditch on the other. Beyond the irrigation ditch was a field full of discarded poppy heads, a sign that the opium growing season had finished for the year. The only life that they could see was a farmer standing at the door of his small hut on the other side of the field, who was just standing there watching them.

  ‘Alright Mitch, let’s stop here,’ Ruffles said. ‘I need a piss, anyway.’ He turned to the back of the Land Rover, where the remaining two soldiers of his four-man fire team were sitting on the thin rubber mattresses in the back of the vehicle. ‘Getting out in a minute, boys. Look lively.’ He held his hand out of the passenger window, palm up so that the vehicles behind him would realise that they were coming to a halt.

  Private Mitchell pushed down on the clutch and put the Land Rover in neutral, coasting forward for a few feet. He was relieved that they were stopping, although he probably wouldn’t admit that to the rest of the patrol, but he had a real sense of something not being right. They’d been down this track only a couple of days ago, and it had been packed. Goats had been the main issue, but there’d been children running towards them waving, no doubt hoping for sweets from the soldiers, the odd adult looking at them with suspicion. And more goats. Now, there was nothing apart from a single farmer watching them from a hut across the poppy field.

  ‘Signs of life, Ruffles,’ he whispered.

  ‘How’d you mean, Mitch?’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  The wheels of the Land Rover inched forwards until eventually — unseen by the occupants — the weight of the front wheel on the driver’s side forced two parts o
f a hidden pressure plate together. Once the plates touched, it completed an electrical circuit. The sort of circuit that in the shitty comprehensive school that Private Mitchell had gone to back in Glasgow would have lit up a small bulb.

  In this case the completion of the circuit didn’t provide current to a bulb. The wires led to a large anti-tank mine that the Soviets had left behind on their way out of Afghanistan after they’d finally realised that they couldn’t actually defeat the Mujahedeen. A mine that had been doctored with pressure plates made from aluminium cut from the sides of a can of Coca-Cola, soldered with some wires from a torch that didn’t work anymore, and powered by a battery from a smoke alarm that was ‘cheeping’ every couple of minutes. All scavenged from the bins of the FOB that the patrol was from. Apart from the mine. It was the Russians who had thrown that away.

  The last thing that Private Mitchell remembered was taking his foot off the accelerator of the Land Rover and moving it across towards the brake pedal. When the circuit completed, the chain reaction that it caused was far more than a bulb lighting up. The detonator in the mine triggered, causing a much larger explosion in the main body of the mine. The whole explosive component of the mine was aimed upwards, and a large molten mass of metal erupted towards the sky. It was designed to penetrate inside a tank, and rattle around until it was spent, but it hit the right-hand wheel and the right side of the main engine block of the Land Rover, both of which were propelled upward with horrendous and unstoppable force.

  Inside the WMIK, the blast ripped Private Mitchell’s feet off at the ankles, sending his boots high into the air with his now amputated feet still in them. At the same time, white-hot molten metal ricocheted off components of the engine, diverting back into the main cabin of the Land Rover. The jagged fragments peppered both occupants of the front seats, with devastating effects.

  Several shards of debris ripped into Private Mitchell’s thighs, some of them tunnelling through the flesh from his knees to his hips. Another fragment shredded his right testicle before bouncing off his pelvis and embedding itself in his rectum, while others drove themselves deep into his lower abdomen. The energy in the shards that hit his body armour was dissipated, but the few that hit his face ripped their way through the soft tissues.

  To Private Mitchell’s right, Lance Corporal Ruffles was not so lucky, if what had just happened to his friend could be considered lucky. He’d not done his body armour up when the convoy had left the FOB, figuring that he could just shove the Velcro together if they ran into a problem. The shrapnel flying through the air was utterly indiscriminate and gave him no warning before finding the gaps between the body armour, ripping into the soft tissue behind them.

  Fifty feet behind the lead WMIK, Sergeant Hawkins’s chest tightened as he saw the vehicle with Private Mitchell and the rest of his fire team erupt into flames.

  ‘Fuck, contact, contact!’ he shouted just in case any of the rest of the patrol hadn’t heard or felt the explosion. Hands shaking, he struggled with the passenger door. They’d stopped wearing seatbelts a while ago, once they realised that getting out of a vehicle quickly was more likely to keep them alive than wearing a seatbelt. Flinging the door open, Hawkins looked back and could see the rest of the patrol moving their vehicles into a semblance of an all-round defensive posture, which was about all they could do on the narrow road. Soldiers scrambled to man the guns on the back and the front of the WMIKs. All the vehicles were hampered by a mud wall on one side and a ditch on the other which meant that they could only go forwards or backward.

  Hawkins was sure that the explosion had been caused by an improvised explosive device and not a legacy mine. They’d been down this road many times in the last few weeks without any problems. The locals used it as well which was normally a good indicator of whether it was still mined. The main question that he wanted an answer to was whether it was a pressure plate IED or a command wire IED triggered by someone watching them. The first one was bad enough but the second one almost certainly meant that they’d driven straight into an ambush.

  As his feet hit the floor, he slid his right hand down the SA80 rifle he was carrying, and with his thumb, snapped the safety catch off. The first thing they’d all done as they left the base was make ready, so he knew that the weapon had one in the chamber and was ready to go. Hawkins ran towards the burning Land Rover and could see two soldiers struggling to escape from the back. When he got to the vehicle, he slammed the palm of his hand against the catch on the door, ignoring the sharp pain as the metal dug into the meat of his hand. Grabbing the tailgate, he yanked it towards him and opened up the back of the Land Rover. The soldiers inside half climbed and half fell out of the back and onto the dusty ground. There was no time to see if they were wounded or not, although one of them had blood streaming down his face.

  Hawkins ran to the driver’s side of the Land Rover, his hand shielding his face from the fierce flames that were now pouring out of the front. His question about whether this was an ambush was answered by the sharp crack of gunfire coming from a line of small trees behind the farmer’s hut. Rounds zinged past him, punching into the mud wall behind with small dust explosions marking where they had landed, while the occasional round ricocheted off a vehicle with a metallic scream.

  Seconds later, he heard the returning fire from his own patrol and the guns on the WMIKs opened up. Hawkins also heard the ‘whump’ of a grenade launcher from over his shoulder and knew that at least he had decent covering fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the simple hut explode into a million pieces, and a small part of his mind wondered if the local who’d been in it a few minutes earlier had survived, whether he was the one who had pressed the button on the command wire, or whether he was just the world’s unluckiest poppy farmer.

  Sergeant Hawkins grabbed the handle of the driver’s door and flung it open. He reached inside and grabbed the soldier inside — Mitchell he thought his name was — and pulled him out of the vehicle. As Mitchell fell out, Hawkins saw that where his feet should be were two shredded blackened stumps and that he was bleeding badly from several wounds to his lower abdomen and face. Ignoring the bloody triangular flap hanging off Mitchell’s cheek, he hoisted the wounded soldier over his shoulder as best as he could and started to stumble back towards the rest of the patrol.

  On his way back, two of Hawkins’s platoon ran past him towards the lead WMIK which was now burning furiously, thick black smoke pouring from the wounds in the front of the vehicle. Hawkins reached the nearest vehicle and heaved Private Mitchell into the front before turning to run back to the burning vehicle. He stopped as he saw the two soldiers that had gone past him were moving as fast as they could, dragging an unconscious casualty between them. It was the passenger — Ruffles — one of the most liked soldiers in the whole FOB.

  Hawkins dropped to his knee, exhausted, and tried to take stock of the situation. He could hear crackling in his headset as the platoon radio operator fed a sit rep back to the FOB. The enemy fire had dissipated, with the Taliban no doubt melting away through the irrigation canals. About the only positive that he could take from this whole sorry mess was that the platoon’s response had been swift and brutal. If it wasn’t for the casualties, he’d be tempted to ‘close and prosecute’ — army terminology for follow and kill the fuckers.

  He got to his feet, and after slipping the safety catch on his rifle back on, whirled the index finger of his left hand in the air to let the rest of the patrol know that it was time to go. He hadn’t even managed to get a single shot off, he reflected as he climbed into what was now the lead WMIK. Hawkins pressed the PTT button on his radio.

  ‘Right boys,’ he said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here. And keep an eye in case the fuckers have doubled around on us.’

  23

  Lizzie lay back on the canvas cot and sighed deeply. She looked across at Adams on the cot next to her, his nose still stuck in the book that he was reading. On the other side of the tent, Ronald was curled up in one of th
e canvas chairs, fast asleep. Lizzie waited for a minute and then sighed again, more theatrically this time.

  ‘What?’ Adams said, not even looking up from his book.

  ‘What d’you mean, what?’ she replied. ‘I didn’t say anything.’ Adams turned down the corner of the page that he was reading and turned to face her.

  ‘What are you sighing about, Lizzie?’ he asked with a smile.

  ‘Oh, I was just wondering,’ Lizzie replied. ‘Do you think he’s single?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who’d you think?’ she said. ‘The bloody cleaner?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Adams replied. ‘You’re such a lady. I can’t believe that you’ve not been snapped up. I really can’t.’

  ‘Oh, sod off Adams,’ Lizzie said. ‘Don’t be such a twat.’ She rolled onto her front and looked at him with a mischievous expression. ‘The pilot. Daniels.’

  ‘I think he’s called Davies, Lizzie,’ Adams said. ‘You might want to get his name right before you claw him into bed.’

  ‘But he flies a helicopter,’ she laughed. ‘He must be good with his hands.’ She rolled onto her back and put her hands behind her head. ‘I like the idea of clawing him into bed, though,’ she laughed. ‘That would be fun.’

  ‘Lizzie,’ Adams said. ‘I love you like a sister, but please don’t involve me in your sexual fantasies.’ He picked up his book and unfurled the page that he’d marked.

  ‘Too late for that, Adams,’ Lizzie said under her breath, still smiling. ‘Way too late for that. So, do you think he’s single then or not? Come on, help me out here.’

  With a frustrated sigh, Adams put his book down on the table between them.

  ‘Do you want me to find out for you?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, go on then. But be subtle, for God’s sake,’ she answered.