by Chris Ryan
Another slug of water.
Another step forward.
He looked over his shoulder. Ricky was about thirty metres back. A safe distance. Beyond him, Joe realized he could no longer see the Americans. In a corner of his mind he wondered why they weren’t still advancing, but he didn’t have the headspace to worry about it for long.
He took another step.
And another.
Movement up ahead. It was the cat, hobbling across the chalk line. For a moment, Joe considered shooting it – if it trod on a pressure plate, they’d all be fucked – but the animal, almost as if it knew what Joe was thinking, changed direction and scampered off in the direction of the breeze ?blocks.
Joe’s blood was thumping through his veins. His right foot crunched down onto the chalk line.
Then his left foot.
Then his right again.
He almost missed it. Had the feral cat still been diverting his attention, he would have done. It was a footprint to his left, about twenty centimetres from the chalk line and facing towards it. And a second footprint, half a metre – a stride’s length – beyond that.
Joe stopped.
He stared at the ground.
Something wasn’t right.
He crouched down and touched the footprint. The indentations of the sole had made a regular, symmetrical pattern in the dust, not unlike his own prints. He recognized it as a military boot.
But if it was a military boot, why had it not been walking along the chalk line?
All of a sudden, Joe felt as though somebody had slowed time down to a crawl. He looked over his shoulder to see Ricky, still thirty metres back. His mate had his head inclined, clearly wondering why Joe was crouched down on the ground.
And he was taking a step forward.
‘Don’t move!’
Joe shouted so loud, his voice cracked. Ricky looked puzzled, but he continued to put his foot down.
‘Ricky! Don’t fucking move!’
But it was too late.
As Ricky’s boot touched the earth, he clearly realized something was different. He looked down, but only for the fraction of a second that remained of his life.
Joe had a snapshot vision of a huge geyser of dust and rock spurting ten metres up into the air, accompanied by the ear-splitting retort of at least five charges exploding in quick succession. A tremor rippled across the ground, so violent that it knocked Joe onto his side. He rolled to his front, his eyes clenched shut, before throwing his forearms over the back of his neck and waiting for the debris to fall.
It was like a hailstorm. Rubble hammered down on the back of his helmet; stones pelted his back and his legs. He found himself tensing his body, ready for a piece of shrapnel to fall and tear into his tissue, for his ribs to crack, his legs to be mashed. His ears rang with the explosion, and with the sound of debris hitting the ground all around him, like rain on a metal roof.
And then, ten seconds after the initial detonation, a sudden and profound silence.
He looked up. At first he could see nothing but the cloud of light brown dust all around. Still settling, it reduced his visibility to less than a metre. But after twenty seconds his view cleared.
There was no sign of Ricky. Not of his body at least. Joe could see nothing but his helmet. It was lying at his ten o’clock, approximately eight metres from his position. The strap was broken and the helmet was half filled with rubble.
Joe closed his eyes. Opened them again. They smarted from the dust, and his brain felt just as clouded. He tried to clear his mind. He had probably only missed by inches the same pressure plate Ricky had trodden on.
He looked to his right, squinting through the heat haze and the dust cloud. Was he imagining it, or could he see, twenty metres away and almost parallel to the path he had been following, a line of displaced earth? Was that the original chalk line? Had they been following a dummy line, laid by whoever had left the footprint in the dust?
Joe was too shocked even to curse. He was taking in short, jagged inhalations of breath, trying to master the fear rising in his gut. He had to get off this chalk line. It was booby-trapped, that much was obvious. But now he had no way of knowing where to step. He looked back the way he’d come. Fifty metres, he reckoned, to get to the point where it would be safe.
Fifty metres, and there could be triggers, wires or pressure plates anywhere.
He started to crawl. Slowly. Gingerly. Every few centimetres he gently brushed the earth with his fingertips. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. He’d recognize the small, circular pressure plate of an old anti-personnel mine, but the art and science of IEDs had come on since the Russians left their calling cards all round the country. There were countless ways to hide a detonator. They could even be remote, and if some Taliban cunt saw an enemy soldier crawling in the vicinity . . .
Five metres gone.
Ten metres.
He stopped. He looked at his right hand. It was shaking. He clenched it, and immediately remembered how Ricky had done the same thing. He gulped in more air, trying to steady himself. Up ahead, he scanned for the Americans. No sign.
Fifteen metres.
Twenty.
There was something blocking his way, two metres ahead, about the size of a bowling ball. He had thought it was a rock, but now he was up close he realized it was something else: an indistinguishable chunk of human flesh, swaddled in scorched clothing. He moved it out of the way. Ricky’s warm, sticky blood glued itself to Joe’s palm.
He continued to crawl.
Thirty metres.
Thirty-five.
How long had he been edging through the dirt? Ten minutes? A little more? He had to fight the urge not to stand up and run. Go slowly, he told himself. Go carefully.
He’d crawled forty metres when his fingers, still brushing away at the dusty ground, touched something hot. His hand flew away from it and his heart started to race even faster. At the same time he could hear shouting in the distance behind him. English, but harshly accented.
‘Hey, Amer-ee-can motherfucker! You go bang bang, Amer-ee-can motherfucker!’
He looked back. A group of kids – maybe ten of them, none older than thirteen, he estimated – had congregated by the breeze blocks. Where had they come from? The village was two klicks away, but there was nothing to stop them alerting the adult militia on the other side of the hill. One of them was waving a rifle in the air; his neighbour was pointing at Joe, clearly urging his friend to take a shot. The others were all jeering and laughing, obviously wanting Joe to give them a show by pressing on the wrong piece of ground.
He turned his attention back to the metal, blowing on it to get rid of the sand. But his breath did not uncover the pressure plate of an anti-personnel mine. It was one end of the bulbous, gun-metal-grey body of a shell of some description, embedded in the earth so that only a couple of inches were showing. And there was no way of telling the mechanism by which it was to be detonated.
Joe lightly traced a circle round the shell, his thick, calloused fingers sensitive like feathers. He needed every ounce of self-control to stop his hand trembling, but it didn’t take him more than a few seconds to find the trip wires.
There were four of them, attached to the shell and running at ninety degrees to each other. Joe realized he’d been crawling parallel to one of them, no more than ten centimetres to its left. And if he was going to cross the trip wire, he would have to get up from his crawling position and step over it.
Easier said than done.
He became aware of two sounds at once. The first was the hum of a helicopter up ahead. He couldn’t see it yet, but he knew it was arriving. The Yanks must have called in a pick-up. Where the hell were they? Why weren’t they giving him fire support?
The second sound was gunfire.
It came from the crowd of kids, and it had the unmistakable bark of a Kalashnikov.
Joe cursed under his breath and rolled onto his back. He could only see one kid with a gun. H
e had raised it in the air above his head to fire a burst. No doubt he’d seen adult insurgents do the same thing any number of times in his young life. Now, though, he was lowering it and, egged on by his mates, preparing to fire in Joe’s direction.
Joe estimated the distance at between 400 and 500 metres. He was at the edge of the Kalashnikov’s effective range, but he wouldn’t bet his boots on the kid missing him . . .
The rounds from the second burst landed over an area of about ten square metres, twenty metres from Joe’s position. Unable to control the recoil of the rifle, the kid had staggered backwards and turned to grin at his mates. More shouting from their direction; the boy raised the Kalashnikov again.
Joe had to do something. He hadn’t signed up to nail kids, but these were insurgents in the making. He pulled a white-phosphorus grenade from his ops vest. He squeezed the detonation lever and pulled the pin with his teeth. Then he tensed his stomach muscles, forced himself into a half-sitting position, and hurled the grenade with all his strength. A thick curtain of white smoke would give him chance to swastika it out of there.
But the explosion that followed was ten times louder than he expected. The ground shook; the air rang; the earth between Joe and the kids erupted, and the bang echoed across the desert, shredding Joe’s nerves. There was a cloud of smoke all right, but a whole lot more than he’d have expected from a white-phos grenade. He could only assume that the canister had hit another pressure plate.
‘Run,’ he hissed at himself. ‘Fucking run!’
Pushing himself to his feet, he stepped over the trip wire. Distance to the drop-off point, half a klick. If he wanted to extract with that chopper, he needed to get there fast.
He sprinted. He knew he was risking his life, that he still had ten to fifteen metres of the minefield to clear, but he couldn’t let the Yanks extract without him. People other than the kids would have heard the explosions; people better armed and with greater skill; people Joe didn’t want to get into contact with all by himself, especially now that the smoke from the grenade was dissipating. Each time his foot hit the ground, he expected to feel the telltale spring of a pressure plate, to hear the blast that was going to kill him.
But it didn’t come.
He cleared the minefield in five seconds. Behind him, the noise of more gunfire, but he knew he was fully out of range now. All he could do was leg it back to the chopper.
Even weighed down by his gear, he’d never run so fast. No point shouting at the others that he was coming, he realized – they’d never hear him over the noise of the chopper, and his energy was better expended on moving quickly.
He bolted round the curve at the base of the hill. A hundred metres. Two hundred. The chopper came into sight. It was kicking up the dust, and even in the daylight he could see a faint glow where the particles of sand were sparking against the rotors. The Americans were there, but they were little more than shadows in the cloud that surrounded the aircraft. It was 250 metres away. A hundred and fifty. The figures had disappeared inside the Black Hawk.
He could see the outline of the tail rising. Overhead, a second Black Hawk screamed across the sky: Team Bravo, extracting.
Fifty metres. A change in the quality of the noise coming from the chopper’s engines. Higher-pitched. It was preparing to lift.
Joe stopped just short of the dust cloud, twenty metres from the aircraft, and skirted round so that he was facing its front. He grabbed his firefly beacon from his vest and turned it on. To start with there was no visible light, but he ripped off its infra-red filter so that now a strong white light flashed from the beacon. All he could do now was hold it up above his head and pray that the pilot could see it through the dust.
But the dust cloud was getting bigger. Two seconds later it had engulfed Joe. He could see nothing but the silhouette of the Black Hawk every second as the firefly lit it up. He could see it rising. Five metres in the air. Ten metres.
And then, the sound of the rotors powering down. The dust subsided a little. The chopper returned to the ground.
Joe sprinted round to the side of the aircraft, where he could just make out the sight of the American loadie, headphones on, urgently ushering him in. He jumped inside and could feel the Black Hawk rising almost immediately.
Joe’s face was a filthy mixture of sweat and dirt, but it was not so black as his mood. He strode directly up to Hernandez, who was sitting impassively with his back against the wall of the chopper, surrounded by his men. He grabbed the SEAL by the front of his body armour and yanked him to his feet.
‘Where the fuck were you?’ he roared, his voice dry, hoarse and full of fury, before swinging the unit leader round and hurling him to the floor. He started to bear down on the guy, but instantly he felt hands pulling him back. A solid blow behind his knee forced him to the ground; next thing he knew, Hernandez was standing above him, weapon at the ready, his scarred and pockmarked face a picture of distaste.
‘We heard two explosions, pal. We thought you were both KIA.’
‘And you didn’t come to check?’
Silence.
The Black Hawk swerved in the air. Hernandez had no reply. He just jutted his weapon in the direction of the opposite side of the aircraft. Joe knew what to do. He took his place, and as the chopper returned to Bagram he felt the heat of the Americans’ unfriendly glares on him, and the gaping absence of the friend he’d left in pieces on the ground.
0923 hours.
The Regiment hangar was a blur of activity. American military commanders were in and out, trying to get the low-down on what had happened out there. None of them were getting anything but the shortest shrift from Fletcher, who, for all his faults, was doing the only thing the guys would have expected of him: making sure that Ricky’s next of kin knew he wasn’t coming home. That they couldn’t even find any bits to stick in a box so the family had something to plant was information that could wait for now. Let it sink in that the poor bastard was dead first.
Joe sat in the R & R quadrant of the hangar, away from it all. His helmet was by his side, next to a full bottle of sterilized water that he hadn’t touched even though his throat was desert-dry; his filthy face was in his hands. Five minutes ago he had been vaguely aware of some broad-shouldered American rupert with a lapel full of badges on his khaki uniform and couple of intelligence officers by his side. They were looking in his direction and talking to Fletcher. The OC had obviously told them where to get off, because they hadn’t bugged him; but they hadn’t left either, and were now hanging around by the main doors.
The TV on the wall behind him was murmuring quietly. BBC News 24 drifted in and out of Joe’s consciousness.
‘The White House press secretary has backtracked on claims that Osama bin Laden was armed when he was shot dead by American special forces . . .’
This information barely registered. Joe was reliving for the hundredth time the explosion that killed Ricky.
‘The White House has attributed mistakes and contradictions to “the fog of war” . . .’
He was only alive himself by chance . . .
‘Osama bin Laden’s twelve-year-old daughter has told Pakistani investigators that her father was captured alive and shot dead in front of family members . . .’
Family members. The words caused a leaden feeling in his stomach.
‘Will someone turn this fucking television off??’ Joe heard his own voice, but it didn’t seem to come from him. There was a click, however, and the commentary fell silent. Joe looked up to see Fletcher standing over him.
‘You should get some water down you.’
‘What are you?’ Joe retorted. ‘Florence fucking Nightingale?’
‘I’m your OC, and if you talk to me like that again I’ll fuck you up and have you on the next boat back to Hereford.’
Joe looked away.
An awkward pause.
‘Ricky was a good lad,’ Fletcher said, his voice subdued. ‘I’m sorry you had to see him go.’
Joe closed his eyes. The OC was right. Ricky was a good lad. A good lad who shouldn’t even have been on ops, and Joe had known it.
‘You want to tell me what happened out there?’
‘We re-routed through a minefield. American sweepers had got there first. Someone had fucked with their chalk lines. Laid new ones. Led us straight to the IEDs.’
‘The Yanks say you insisted on taking that route.’
Joe gave him a contemptuous look. ‘They’re talking out of their arses.’
‘How did you get out?’
Joe looked to the other end of the hangar. The three Americans were still loitering by the door, casting glances in his direction and clearly speaking about him.
‘No thanks to the Yanks,’ he said. ‘Cunts tried to extract as soon as Ricky went up. Left me to it.’
Fletcher wasn’t one to hide the displeasure in his face, and he failed to do so now.
‘Joint debrief,’ he stated. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this.’
Joe shook his head. ‘Forget it.’
‘No can do, Joe. You know that . . .’
‘I said, forget it.’
‘And I said, no can do. I’m ordering you to—’
‘I want out, boss.’
A pause.
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘What do you think this is? A fucking poker game?’
Yeah, Joe thought to himself. And the Yanks have all the aces.
‘Get yourself cleaned up,’ said Fletcher. ‘I want you back here in an hour.’
Joe was barely listening. Two brushes with death in as many days. His best mate blown to pieces in an Afghan minefield.
‘I quit,’ he said.
‘Bullshit. Our numbers are too low for you to start throwing your toys out of your pram, Joe.’
‘I said, I quit.’
‘Then I’ll recommend that the adjutant defers you. Six months. And another six months after that. If you want to go AWOL, that’s your choice. Now clean yourself up and get your arse back in here.’
Such powerful anger rose in Joe’s gut that for a minute he thought he might give Fletcher his own reason to head home: a broken limb, or worse. It descended on him like a fog, and the effort it took to stop himself exploding in a barrage of violence against his own OC was so profound that it seemed to make his whole body shake.