by Chris Ryan
‘Yeah, looks like it.’ The Para nodded at Joe. Joe glowered back.
The hangar housed the Regiment’s operations base at Bagram. A third guard standing outside and armed with an M16 slid open the huge metal doors that remained closed as a matter of course, to reveal the cavernous space bustling with activity. The hangar itself was about eighty by forty metres. There were windows along both sides, but these had been covered up against curious eyes with sheets of plastic tarpaulin. The space was lit by twelve portable floodlights aimed up at the flat metal ceiling to stop them dazzling the people inside, of whom there were thirty or so. The combination of the metal walls and the powerful lights could easily turn the hangar, big as it was, into an oven in this climate and so, evenly spaced along both walls, were six air-conditioning units. Out of sight, on the other side of the far wall, Joe knew there was a large petrol-operated generator, which added to the general noise.
The hangar was divided into four quadrants. Closest to Joe and on his left was a bank of computer screens. A mess of wires on the floor trailed through the wall towards the signalling area and the Genny, and a handful of the guys, as well as two female ’terps, were leaning over the screens examining maps and other imagery. Joe counted seven men and one woman he didn’t recognize. They were standing in a group by themselves and watched Joe and the others with interest as they entered. To the right was a weapons store: crates of hardware piled high, manned by a grizzled member of L Detachment. He nodded at Joe and JJ to indicate that they should dump their own crate just next to him.
In the far-left quadrant was an R & R zone: a television mounted on the wall, a few old sofas and a kettle for anybody wanting to make a brew. This area was deserted. No rest. No recuperation. Not out here. The fourth quadrant in the far right-hand corner of the hangar was blocked off by a series of large screens. This was the briefing area – the place where Joe and the unit had first been informed about the nature of their operation. Now a tall, gangly rupert with a lean face and a two-day-old beard was walking out of it. Major Dom Fletcher, OC E Squadron, looked and sounded like the prince of public-school twats. To hear him talk, nobody would guess he’d come up through the ranks, or that his rough London accent and squaddie turn of phrase had miraculously disappeared the day he got his commission. Overnight, Dom had become Dominic. But the guys had learned the hard way not to test his patience, and just called him ‘boss’. Fletcher wasn’t beyond issuing an RTU for anyone who took the piss. He nodded in Joe and JJ’s direction, jabbed his thumb towards the briefing area and turned on his heel to walk back into it.
‘You know,’ said JJ, ‘what I really love about this place is the warm welcomes. I could murder a Mr Kipling . . .’
Joe glanced behind him. Ricky was walking alone, about ten metres back. His eyes were fixed on the floor.
The briefing area was nothing to look at. Twenty or thirty plastic stackable brown chairs in rows; a long table at the front; a whiteboard with clips on the top to hold mapping sheets. Fletcher stood next to it, his arms folded, his face unreadable. Within thirty seconds all eight members of the unit were there.
‘Sit down,’ Fletcher said. It wasn’t a polite offer. Joe took a seat in the back row, the others all sat forward of him.
Fletcher spoke sufficiently loudly that they could hear him over the noise of the hangar, but not so loudly that anybody outside of the briefing room could eavesdrop. ‘You’ve all seen the news?’
‘We stopped off at a Travelodge just outside Abbottabad,’ JJ cut in. ‘Jerked off over Kirsty Young on the telly while she told us all about it.’
‘JJ, shut up. Target Geronimo was KIA and extracted at 0110 local time. The Americans dumped him in the Indian Ocean just before dawn. “Burial at sea” is the phrase they’re using. The President made the announcement this morning. We’ve got CIA swarming round the base with fucking hard-ons. They’ll assist with the debriefs later. My guess is they’ll want to know why you came home without the Doctor in tow. Which is a pretty good fucking question.’
‘The Doctor wasn’t there,’ Jacko growled.
‘Right,’ Fletcher said. ‘Now remind me, are you a specialist unit under the command of E Squadron, or a bunch of fucking Girl Guides?’
A pause. Fletcher looked at each member of the unit in turn. A question was coming. Joe could sense it.
‘Anyone care to tell me why the CO took a call from our American cousins asking if we were aware of anyone breaching SOPs during the raid?’
Silence. Joe found himself staring not at Fletcher, but at the back of Ricky’s head. Once more the OC directed his gaze at each of them. Was it Joe’s imagination, or did he linger on him slightly longer than the others?
Thirty seconds passed. They seemed a lot longer. Finally Fletcher inclined his head, plainly aware that nobody was going to give him an answer.
‘Stand down,’ he said. ‘Get yourself cleaned up. Eat. Full debrief at 2030.’ He looked in turn at each member of the unit once again. ‘Now’, he said quietly, ‘would be a good time for you all to decide what you’re going tell me. And more to the point, what you’re going to tell the Yanks.’ The OC walked from the briefing area and out of sight before any of them could even stand up.
JJ was sitting in the front row. He turned round to look at the others. ‘What the fuck was all that about?’
Nobody replied. They started to file out of the briefing area; all except Joe and Ricky, who remained in their seats.
For a moment Ricky didn’t look back. ‘Thanks, brudder,’ he said quietly.
‘We need to sort our story out,’ Joe said under his breath. ‘Right now.’
Ricky looked around and nodded.
‘Not here,’ Joe said. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
They left the Regiment hangar and headed towards the centre of the base. It was teeming with American troops, hanging out in pairs or threes, all wearing their standard uniform of camo, aviator shades and Berettas hanging from their belts in non-standard-issue leather holsters. To a man they had crewcuts, some of them with elaborate razor-cut patterns on the sides of their heads. Then there were the air base staff – contractors, mostly, wearing blue overalls, baseball caps, cigarettes glued to their lower lips and facial hair that marked them out as non-military personnel. Very few locals. There were plenty working on the site, Joe knew, but they were mostly doing just that: scrubbing toilets, cleaning floors. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d overheard the words ‘bin Laden’. There was a mood of self-congratulation around the place.
They’d been walking in silence for ten minutes – past the packed Burger King and Subway concessions that would have made the whole place feel like a Midwestern mall if it hadn’t been for the twenty-ton MRAPs filled with troops coming back from, or going out on, patrol – when they came to another hangar. This one had its doors flung wide open, and it contained a US Air Force Boeing E-3 Sentry. The engines were turning over, and perhaps fifteen engineers swarmed around the aircraft. The noise was sufficiently loud to drown out Joe’s and Ricky’s voices. They headed round to the side of the hangar.
Joe spoke first. ‘We saw the enemy target heading to the security gates. I nailed him, you nailed Romeo and Juliet. When the gates opened, you approached and took out the dude trying to leave. We extracted to the opposite side of the path and held our positions till the Yanks left. We singing from the same hymn sheet?’
Ricky nodded.
‘Look, mucker.’ Joe looked round, checking that nobody could overhear them. ‘You’ve got to sort yourself out. You haven’t been . . .’
‘What?’
‘You haven’t been yourself. Not for a long time. Maybe it’s getting to you.’
‘Maybe what’s getting to me?’ Ricky stuck out his chin, oozing defensiveness.
‘This.’ Joe gestured all around him. ‘Nobody would blame you. It’s intense. I’m telling you, mucker, they’re going to be spending more on shrinks for the craphats than they are on prosthetics for the amputees.’
He paused. ‘And not just the craphats.’
‘What you trying to say, Joe?’
Joe noticed that Ricky was clenching his teeth. He could sense his mate’s tension. The noise of the E-3’s engines suddenly grew quieter. Neither man spoke.
Until finally, Ricky said: ‘I’m Hank frickin’ Marvin. Let’s get some scran.’ He turned to his friend. ‘I’m fine, brudder. Really. I fucked up back there. Hands up. It won’t happen again.’
Joe nodded. If Ricky said he was fine, that was good enough for him. ‘OK, mucker. If you say so.’
Ricky grinned suddenly. ‘So did you see the big BL? I couldn’t see fuck all from where I was . . .’
‘Nah,’ Joe said, shaking his head. He might be giving Ricky the benefit of the doubt, but something told him his mate didn’t need anything else to fuck with his head. ‘Thought for a minute that Malinois was going to come and sniff my bollocks, though. Could have been interesting.’
‘You should have let him,’ Ricky said. ‘Better-looking than some of the dogs in Hereford.’
The two men headed off to find some food.
0350 hours.
Joe lay in his low cot, still fully dressed in camo trousers and black T-shirt, but with his boots and ops waistcoat dumped on the floor beside him. It was dark inside the thin-walled Portakabin mounted on two skins of roughly rendered breeze ?blocks that served as digs for him, Ricky and JJ. The first thing they’d done when they’d moved in here was board up the windows against the possibility of mortar attack. Joe was knackered, but sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t the noise from outside. It wasn’t even the heavy breathing and occasional snores from Ricky and JJ. It was his head, reliving the debrief with the Yanks where he and Ricky had stuck to their story even though they could tell someone was smelling a rat.
He found himself remembering the cold, glazed look on Ricky’s face in the compound. Joe had lost count of the number of kids he’d seen take on that same thousand-yard stare after a particularly traumatic op, then learned that they’d handed in their badge and headed back to their parent unit in the hope of a quieter life. But these days there were no quiet lives in the military. Even the greenest of green-army soldiers found themselves stuck in a shit-filled Afghan ditch on six-month rotation with some Taliban fucker trying to put holes in them three times a day, or separate their legs from their torso. And as for Regiment ops, they’d grown increasingly dangerous at the same rate.
The first time he’d gone out on the ground on this tour, he’d come across what looked like a father kneeling at the roadside and weeping over his dead son. The kid was naked, his belly sliced open and his skin bloody and stained. Joe had approached, and only when he was five metres away did he realize there was more to the scene than he had noticed at first. There was a wire leading from the kid’s stomach wound to a switch in the weeping man’s hand. Only he wasn’t weeping any more. He had started muttering to himself. Joe had only needed a single shot to the head to take him out. And once he was kneeling by the two dead bodies, he followed the wire that led from the switch. He’d had to insert his hands into the still-warm innards of the boy’s stomach to pull out an old Russian mortar round that was hidden inside.
The memory of that child with the split-open stomach had haunted him of late. Maybe life in the Regiment was getting to him too.
His watch glowed a pale green in the dark: 0400. He hadn’t slept for days. Not properly. It was one of the things the medics had told them to look out for – but none of the guys took that shit seriously.
He swung his legs over the side of his cot and fumbled in the darkness for the bottle of water he knew was there somewhere. His fingers brushed against it and it toppled over. He heard the contents sloshing out and felt a sudden wave of anger. He thumped the side of the bed in frustration, and by the time he’d picked up the bottle again, it was only a third full. He downed what was left, threw the bottle back on the floor and stood up. No point lying here in the darkness. He pulled on his boots and headed out of the Portakabin into the camp outside.
The bunkhouse Joe shared with Ricky and JJ was one of twenty located behind the Regiment hangar and surrounded by yet more HESCO walls. He weaved his way among them until he found himself along the back end of the hangar itself, where the generator was sited, turning over noisily and stinking of petrol. Light was escaping from a back window where the tarpaulin had failed to cover the glass completely, and he knew that the hangar would be full of activity, even though it was only the small hours. He didn’t feel like company, so he kept to the shadows as he skirted round the edge of the hangar, not really knowing what he was doing or where he was going. Wandering without purpose.
It was a noise overhead that made him stop and press his back against the wall of the hangar.
He recognized immediately the distinctive sound of a Black Hawk, and it sent a series of images flashing through his head: the two body bags; the shower of shrapnel from the exploding chopper . . .
He snapped himself out of it and turned his attention back to the Black Hawk. It was flying low over the base – thirty metres max – and was heading in from the south over towards the LZ in front of the Regiment hangar. The outline of the helicopter immediately told him it was one of the stealth models he’d seen in Pakistan. No one had access to these machines but Delta and the SEALs. One or the other was about to touch down.
Joe kept close to the edge of the hangar, stopping at one of the front corners. Light was spilling from the front – the main door was open – and peering round he could see the elongated shadow of someone standing at the entrance.
The modified Black Hawk hovered above the LZ and starting losing height. The shadow moved forward and Joe saw the thin, tall form of Dom Fletcher walking towards the HESCO that separated the hangar from the landing zone. Someone inside the hangar slid the door shut and the sudden absence of light messed momentarily with Joe’s night vision. By the time he’d got it back a few seconds later, Fletcher had disappeared.
Joe crossed the ten metres between the corner of the hangar and the opening in the HESCO wall. He could hear voices on the other side.
‘Yank friends of yours, boss?’
‘Shut the fuck up and keep your positions.’ Fletcher sounded distracted.
A pause.
‘Wanker,’ the first voice said. The OC had clearly left.
A second voice just grunted in agreement.
‘Fucking Yanks,’ the first voice continued. ‘Why’s Fletcher licking this lot’s arses, anyway?’
Joe moved, away from the opening and along the HESCO wall, coming to a halt after about fifteen metres. He didn’t want the OC to see him loitering there. Fletcher had already given him, Ricky and the others the third degree during their debrief, massaging the egos of the two American spooks who’d been in on the meet, and Joe had had it with his mock-Sandhurst bullshit. So he kept still in the shadows, waiting for a good moment to head back to his cot.
Twenty seconds passed. Fletcher appeared, striding back through the opening and towards the hangar. A line of soldiers followed, walking less quickly than the OC, some of them in pairs, others in single file. He counted them: twelve, not including Fletcher. When the OC slung open the door of the hangar again, the glow from inside lit them up. All the new arrivals except one had big, bushy beards. They were distinctively American. Some wore jeans, others 511 pants. They were all carrying helmets, plate hangers and rifles – M4s with torches and laser sights mounted. Joe instantly recognized the slow, confident swagger of special forces personnel, and as one of these newcomers looked over his shoulder to say something to a mate, he recognized something else as well.
His face.
The guy might have been fifteen metres away, but Joe’s eyes were sharp and he’d been trained to record the tiniest detail almost without knowing he was doing it. The soldier was the only one without a beard, and his upper lip jumped out at Joe: the tiny scar – the harelip, surgically repaired.
Instantly, Joe was back in
Abbottabad, hidden among the rubble, staring at the face of the SEAL manhandling Cairo away from the scene.
A second later the guy had turned his head again and was walking into the hangar. And after ten seconds the whole unit was inside, and somebody was sliding the metal door shut.
Darkness. Silence. The Black Hawk had powered down and it felt as though the whole camp had suddenly plunged itself into a moment of uncharacteristic stillness. Joe crept back to his bunkhouse. He didn’t expect to sleep.
0600 hours.
Ricky was scowling. JJ too. Joe didn’t blame them. The sun wasn’t even up when the summons had come: Fletcher needed them in the briefing area. Sharpish.
‘What the fuck does he want?’ JJ muttered, scratching at his beard. Joe’s own face was itching too. It might be early, but the temperature was already hot and he still hadn’t showered since they’d returned from Abbottabad. He knew he must stink, but everyone stank out here. He half wondered if he should tell the others that at least one of the guys who’d conducted the raid on Abbottabad had just popped in for a cosy little chat with Fletcher. Maybe if he’d been alone with Ricky, he would have. But he kept quiet as they headed to their RV.
Fletcher didn’t look like a man who’d been up in the small hours. His eyes were bright, his uniform fresh and now he was clean-shaven. When they entered, he was examining imagery at the computer screens, accompanied by three men Joe didn’t recognize. One of them was wearing standard Yankee multicam; the other two were in suits and did not have a military bearing. The moment Fletcher saw them, he jabbed his thumb in the direction of the briefing area before turning back to his screens. Joe and Ricky exchanged a look and followed his instruction.
Raz, who had partnered JJ back in Abbottabad, was already in the briefing room. He was sitting in the back row of seats, looking thoroughly pissed off. He was not the only man there. Standing silently against the walls were the twelve American SF men that Joe had seen arriving just a couple of hours ago. Joe got a better look at them. They were all wearing black and white shamags around their necks, and their shades were either propped up on their foreheads or hanging round their necks on black cord. Seven of them wore beards that were even more unkempt than Joe’s; none of them wore smiles. They all had skin that was baked leathery brown and, with the exception of three of them, had multicam baseball caps fitted backwards over their heads. The standard uniform of the American SF soldier. Joe picked out the man with the scarred lip. He wore neither a baseball cap nor a beard. He looked Latino, with slicked-back hair and pock-marked skin. He was staring straight ahead and, like all the others, he didn’t even acknowledge the arrival of the SAS men.