The patrol ditched all vehicles bar the one carrying the aid supplies and moved through the dusty streets on foot, passing the two dark craters where the IEDs had exploded a few weeks before. Connor tried not to look, but inevitably caught himself staring until Nat poked him with the butt of his weapon.
“Walk on by, Connor. There’s always gonna be a hole you nearly left your arse in.”
Connor glanced over his shoulder. “My arse? I do believe you were the one on your back, mate.”
Beside Nat, Marc sniggered. Nat treated him to a jab too. “Eyes where they should be, both of you.”
For Connor, that meant forward, trusting the men around him to guide the way. A few hundred metres on, a Marine up front stopped the patrol. Nat left Connor with Marc and went to investigate. Connor chewed his thumbnail and craned his neck to see what was going on.
“What do you think it is?”
“Could be anything,” Marc said. “An active device, debris from an old one. Or they might have seen someone they want to talk to. Don’t panic just yet. Chances are it’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t the waiting around bother you? Wouldn’t you rather check for yourself?”
“Can’t be everywhere, mate. Besides, Nat will see everything I could. Anything else is fate.”
Connor found himself once again struck by the strength of the trust that bonded soldiers together, and it turned out Marc was right on all counts. Nat reappeared a few minutes later with a handful of jagged steel nails. “There’s an elder up there reckons he’s spent the last six months sweeping these off the road outside the hardware shop.”
Marc peered at the nails, which had been crudely bent in half. “I’ve been digging these fuckers out of Marines since we got here.”
“I don’t get it,” Connor said. “Surely you’d find all sorts of things like this outside a hardware shop?”
Nat shook his head. “Not when it closed down a year ago, stock cleared out, done, gone. The old bloke reckons he finds fresh piles every morning, and we pretty much know where they’re ending up.”
It suddenly clicked for Connor. “The IEDs?”
“Yup,” Marc said. “Most of them are constructed as pipe bombs and stuffed with shit like this to inflict as much damage as possible.”
Connor suppressed a shudder. “Do you think the IEDs and the rockets are coming from the same cell of insurgents?”
“Actually, I don’t think so,” Nat said. “IEDs can be put together using stuff readily available. The rockets we’ve seen are more hi-tech, and they’re being fired from specialist launchers. If the IED crew had access to kit like that, they wouldn’t be laying devices as crude as the ones we’ve seen.”
That logic seemed a little thin to Connor. Surely the insurgents would rig as many bombs as they could get their hands on, no matter the lack of sophistication? Still, Nat knew best. “Are you going to investigate the hardware shop?”
Nat shrugged. “I reckon so. We need to put a lid on these IEDs as much as the rockets, perhaps more so. So far, the rockets haven’t slotted anyone.”
So far. Connor felt the darkness lacing Nat’s tone as clearly as he remembered the broken bodies of the dead Marines. “Which cell is most likely to be Behrouz?”
Marc trod on his foot.
“Shut the fuck up,” Nat growled. “That shit stays in the briefing room.”
He turned away before Connor could apologise, and the patrol moved on. Connor fell into line, cursing his own stupidity. He’d forgotten that Charlie-3’s hunt for the mysterious Behrouz wasn’t common knowledge.
The patrol reached the market. The supply vehicle pulled up and the men driving it jumped out.
“Circle the square,” Nat said. “Check anyone who tries to come in—man, woman, child, I don’t give a fuck. No one in without a search.”
“What about the people already in the square?” Connor asked.
“That’s what vigilance is for. Pay attention this time, yeah?” Nat stomped away and opened the back of the supply truck.
Marc nudged Connor. “Don’t mind him. He’s antsy about he-who-shall-remain-nameless. A Red Crescent nurse got nabbed near the border last night. If it turns out it’s what’s-his-name behind it, Nat’ll take that shit personally.”
“But you’ve only been here a few weeks.” Connor tried not to stare as Nat hauled heavy boxes out of the truck, muscles rippling beneath his sweat-sheened skin. “Surely you didn’t think you’d find him so fast?”
Marc’s rueful grin turned dark. “Don’t be so sure. We’re very good at what we do. Trouble is, the resources we’ve got here are fucking woeful. No kit, no decent intelligence. It’s taken us weeks to get hold of a recent map. Wouldn’t surprise me if we ran out of bloody bullets.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“Nope, but you can fudge it enough so it gets heard. I’m getting a little tired of watching my mates get killed for some fuckwit politician’s ignorance.”
It was Marc’s turn to storm away. Connor steeled himself, then joined Nat at the truck. “Need a hand?”
“If you like.”
Connor grabbed a box and carried it to the stack Nat had made close to a group of children playing with a skipping rope. A young boy spotted him and nudged his friends. Connor opened a box, letting them see the colouring books, and waited for them to approach, but they didn’t. They scurried off to a stall at the back of the market.
Connor glanced over his shoulder at Nat, worried he’d already blown it.
Nat’s grin surprised him. “Look,” he said. “They’re coming back. Just had to check with their mummas that they were allowed to talk to us or, more accurately, you. They’ve seen the ‘press’ mark on your helmet.”
A flock of children descended on Connor, engulfing him before he could answer, and climbing up his legs to get to the boxes. “Hey, hey. Wait a minute. There’s enough for everyone.”
It was a struggle to make himself heard, but eventually, after most children within range had snatched a colouring set, the young boy who’d first caught his eye reappeared at his side. “You don’t talk like a white man.”
“Not all white men talk the same,” Connor said mildly. “In fact, no one speaks exactly the same, do they? Do you speak like your grandmother?”
The boy looked nonplussed. “Are you American?”
“No, I’m from England. Where are you from?”
“Tikrit.”
Connor pictured Iraq. Tikrit was Saddam’s named city in the north of the country, just above Baghdad. “You’re a long way from home.”
“We don’t have a home. The Americans bombed it.” The boy drew a weathered apple from his pocket and took a bite. Despite his threadbare clothes, his nails were spotlessly clean. “We came here to be safe.”
“And are you? Safe? Do you like it here?”
The boy shrugged. “I liked it better when we first came. Now the monsters are everywhere.”
Déjà vu struck Connor. The boy’s bleak statement wasn’t quite the same as the teenage girl’s ominous warning about the demons under the river, but it was enough to make him look round, searching for Nat.
He didn’t have to look far. Nat had moved while Connor had been absorbed with the boy, ditching his machine gun and belt kit. He was now on the ground, drawing in one of the colouring books to an audience of little girls who weren’t much more than toddlers.
“What’s your name?” Connor asked the young boy.
“Anah,” the boy said. “What’s yours?”
“Connor, and this is my friend, Nat. Hey, Nat? Anah says there are monsters everywhere around here.”
“Yeah?” Nat set his pencil down and beckoned Anah closer. “What kind of monsters have you seen?”
Anah glared at Nat with the suspicion Connor was growing used to from the locals. “Your kind.”
“Yeah? Any others?”
Nat’s smile was the gentlest Connor had ever seen from him, but it had no effect on Anah. The boy skipped a
way without elaborating, leaving just the gaggle of tiny girls in his place. Connor considered them sadly. The Iraqi children had eyes far older than their years and they seemed to see right through him. “Er, did you all get a colouring book?”
The smallest girl stepped forward. For a moment Connor thought she was going to climb up his leg, but she bypassed him and toddled precariously to Nat, thwacking him with the battered doll she carried. “Up.”
Nat frowned at Connor. “What was that?”
“I think she wants you to pick her up.”
“Not a good idea.” Nat quickly glanced around. “See that man on your six?”
Connor computed the jargon and looked behind him as subtly as he could manage. “Old dude with the green turban?”
“Yep. He’s watching us, along with every other bloke you can see, and about a dozen you can’t, waiting for us to put a foot wrong. I pick this kid up, we’re probably both dead.”
“They’ll shoot you while you’re holding her?”
Nat shrugged. “They might. I’ve seen kids younger than her with bombs strapped to their backs.”
“Where was this? What happened to them?”
“Not now.” Nat crouched down to the girl’s level. “Where’s your mum, little one?” The girl pointed. “Good,” Nat said. “Can you run and tell her we have bottled water on the truck for whoever wants it?”
The flock of girls darted off, calling for their mothers who had been watching over them from a short distance away. Before long, Connor found himself surrounded by women, young and old, grabbing at the water packs Nat pulled out of the truck in much the same way that the children had gone for the colouring books. Marc ditched his weapon and joined them, taking over from Nat. He struck up a conversation with a woman who carried a baby on each hip while Nat sat back on some stone steps, drawing stick men on the ground with a piece of chalk he’d produced from nowhere.
That left Connor with the baying crowd, and it was a while before they dispersed.
When most of them had gone, Connor wandered back to Nat. “A few of the old dears reckon the hardware shop has become a hangout for the teenagers who can’t go to school anymore. They hear odd noises from it at night and it’s started to smell strange.”
Nat nodded. “Good work. We didn’t get fuck all.”
“We’re not as pretty as him,” Marc said. “Nice one, mate. Cheers.”
Connor waited for them to elaborate. It didn’t happen, so he left them to it and drifted back to the mess left behind by the aid drop. He glanced at his watch. Jesus. They’d been in the square for more than two hours. With the help of a few nearby Marines, he picked up the empty aid boxes and threw them in the truck.
With that done, he went looking for Nat and Marc. He found them rearming themselves. “Are we heading in now?”
“You are,” Nat said. “We just radioed command. The others are on their way so that we can smack down this hardware shop.”
Annoyance flashed through Connor. Nice. So he was good enough to chat up the local women for them, but not to see the mission through? “I’ll go back and get on with the ironing, then, yeah?”
Marc smirked. Nat glared at him, then at Connor. “You want to grab a gun and kick down some doors? No fucking chance.”
An image of a teenaged James blocking the doorway to the TV room in their stepfather’s house flashed into Connor’s mind. “You think I’m going to let you go in there and get your arse pasted later? No fucking chance. Go read a damn book.”
And just like then, Connor couldn’t think of a valid argument, and so he left Nat and Marc to whatever ninja mission they were planning, and stomped back to the Mastiff. Not long after, as the Mastiff’s engine rumbled to life, Wedge, Chris, and Bobs appeared in the Jackal, with Echo-4 close behind.
They rumbled by. Connor tracked their progress in the rear-view mirror. He watched them until the Jackal disappeared around a corner and the radio crackled with the confirmation that they’d reached Nat and Marc, and the small band of Marines who’d be serving as backup. He turned to the Marine driving the Mastiff. “Do you take down a lot of doors?”
The Marine shrugged. “Not as many as we used to. The politicians didn’t like how it looked on the news.”
“Is it risky?”
“Depends who’s inside—” The Marine paused to yell at the gunner on the vehicle in front. “Oi, dick-splash! Don’t fucking gob on my windshield, you filthy git. Fuck’s sake. Sorry, what were you saying?”
“Never mind.” Connor looked out the window as the convoy began to roll forward. He didn’t need the risks spelled out. He saw them every day, however much Nat tried to shield him. Four rockets had hit the palace compound last night, one close enough to destroy an IED-resistant Buffalo vehicle, which were in perilous short supply. There had been no serious casualties, but Nat’s prophecy was proving chillingly accurate—the insurgents were getting braver, and it was only a matter of time before the palace became as unsafe as the rest of the city.
Connor’s thoughts remained bleak as the convoy returned to the palace. The Marines invited him to join them for lunch, but he declined, and sloped off with his laptop and found a deserted room with a heavy door. His next article flowed out of him the way he often dreamed of when he found himself up all night, chained to a blank document and a looming deadline. This time, he left alone the soldiers he’d met and painted the city as he saw it.
It wasn’t a pleasant read. He scanned the last paragraph as an explosion outside shook the palace.
It took a few hours to dawn on me that the aid drop I’d witnessed today meant nothing in the grand scheme of a mission that’s doomed to fail. Fifty men left the palace this afternoon. Sixteen of them are still out there, chasing down a bomb factory that’s probably killed their friends. They may return whole, they may not, but even if they destroy the cell laying the latest round of IEDs, nothing will really change. The city will still be choking slowly under the weight of a battle neither side can win.
Q remarked that closing down the IED factory would likely buy the British troops on the ground little more than a week or two of grace, and that the senseless killing would go on long after politics had called coalition forces home.
It occurred to me too that a colouring book handed out by friendly white men was no substitute for a child’s right to an education. UNICEF says it will rebuild the schools here when the war is over, but with no end in sight right now, a whole generation of Iraqi children stand to be left by the wayside. Can the Western world really live with that?
Connor honestly had no idea. Another blast boomed somewhere beyond the dark room he’d commandeered as a hideaway. He thought of Charlie-3 and Echo-4 kicking in the door to the hardware shop and anxiety rippled in his gut. What if the shop was packed with explosives, rigged to detonate for any soul entering without invitation? Nat led from the front when he could; Connor pictured him charging into the shop first, and shuddered. He’d been told his colourful imagination made him the writer he was, even as a journalist where hard facts were the bones of every article he penned, but as the explosions seemed to grow louder with every boom, for once he wished it would fuck right off.
Eleven
Nat chucked the last bag of evidence into the Jackal—batteries, mobile phones, detonator wires. Handwritten maps and plans, found in the pockets of the three men they’d rounded up from the cellar beneath the hardware shop, and bags of the jagged nails that had led them there in the first place.
He tagged the bag and shut the door on it with a heavy sigh. As had become usual in recent weeks, a routine patrol had turned into a task that took far longer than expected, and he was tired . . . and hungry, even for the slop they called rations out here.
“This isn’t food, Nat. It’s fucking purgatory.” Nat allowed himself a small smirk. Connor was a trooper and seldom complained about the harsh conditions of life at the palace, but his barely concealed disgust at mealtimes was a source of constant amusement for Nat and the te
am. And, in fairness, Connor took the ribbing well. In another life, he’d have made a hell of a soldier.
Nat’s good humour faded as quickly as it had come on. A stab of guilt twisted his gut as he pictured the anger in Connor’s face when he’d dismissed him from the hardware-shop raid. Connor had immersed himself in their world without hesitation, taking all the bullshit that came with it—the restrictions imposed on him by Nat and the MOD, the endless hours left to his own devices while the rest of the team were out in the field. Nat had meant the aid patrol to be a break from that—alongside some gentle intelligence gathering—a glimpse of what could be done when they used compassion instead of fear and intimidation, but the reality of their mission had gotten in the way.
“Are we going, or what?” Wedge appeared at Nat’s shoulder. “The extraction crew are ready to leave.”
Nat turned to face the Camp Bucca team who’d arrived to take the men from the hardware shop away. Six vehicles, thirty personnel, and as many guns, all to retrieve three young men and escort them to the detention centre, which Nat was fairly sure was becoming more and more like Guantanamo Bay with every week that passed. He caught the hollow stare of the last detainee as a hood was slipped over his head, and the guilt in his belly turned sinister, laced with a long-neglected conviction that nothing about this deployment was right.
“Put up or shut up, Natty boy. Let the history books judge the politics. I’d rather have a wank and get on with my life.”
“Nat?”
“All right, all right.” Nat silenced Pogo, took the cigarette Wedge held out, and signalled to the Camp Bucca commander that they could move off. “Everyone ready?”
“Yup. Squared away. Marc’s already kipping in the back. Want me to man the HMG?”
That suited Nat. Assigning Wedge to the Jackal’s main gun would keep him out of Nat’s face. Nat loved the bloke like a brother, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk about tits and porn. “Fine. I’ll drive. Get Chris up front, Bobs on the LMG.”
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