by Andy McNab
Sean ducked his head, and Copper’s swing from the left went wide, exposing his side. It wasn’t much, but it was enough, and Sean was in. He drove his right fist hard into Copper’s ribs. Copper gasped and the steady rain of blows faltered. For the first time he moved his arms to protect himself, instead of just attacking, but he had worn himself out and he was slow. All Sean had done so far was protect his skull, and he was still fresh. So he pressed home with his attack, hammering in with another heavy crunch to the ribs. Copper woke up just enough to change what he was doing, but his shot went wide again, a right jab that just scraped Sean’s forehead. Sean stepped in, thumped a hammer blow to Copper’s stomach, then another. He kept himself coiled up, then launched an uppercut to Copper’s jaw. It connected. Copper went down hard.
The sergeant blew his whistle and Sean heard something he had never expected to hear. Lads around him actually applauding and cheering his name.
‘Hark-er! Hark-er!’
The corporals were attending to Copper, who was struggling to sit up.
Adams took hold of Sean’s wrist and held it out to Copper. ‘Shake, Mulroy.’
Copper looked up, dazed. The sergeant shrugged, and picked up one of his gloved hands. He bumped it against Sean’s. ‘There. No hard feelings.’
Yeah, like fuck, Sean thought as Adams led him over to his corner.
‘Thought he was going to kill you,’ the sergeant said, removing Sean’s first glove. ‘But when you finally switched on to what was happening, you did seriously well.’
‘I was just trying to stay alive.’
‘Of course.’ He began to unlace Sean’s other glove. ‘But whether you realize it or not, you read the situation and you only attacked when you saw an opportunity. You took the fight back to your attacker, and you turned what he was doing against him.’
Sean said nothing.
‘God help me, I see a soldier in you,’ said the sergeant. He rapped Sean gently on the forehead with his knuckles. ‘Potential for one, anyway.’
The second glove was off. All Sean wanted to do was sit and ignore just how sore everything felt.
He looked over at Copper, who was finally sitting up, bruised face bowed, resting his arms on his knees. ‘OK to talk to him?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
The corporals had got Copper’s gloves off and had moved on to the next pair scheduled to fight. Sean went over and crouched down in front of his opponent.
Copper looked at him with dazed, puzzled eyes. ‘Fuck me, Seany.’ His face was serious. ‘Where did that come from? I figured smashing you up would be easy.’
‘I’m joining up.’ Sean looked him straight in the eye as he spoke. ‘And you can tell the Guyz that if anyone, anyone, even thinks of laying a finger on my mum – I’ll do to them what I just did to you.’ He tapped Copper gently on the head, the way Adams had done to him, and grinned. ‘Bro.’
Chapter 7
The Warrior roared and shook as it thrust its way over rutted heathland. Sweat trickled down Sean’s face beneath his helmet, and the webbing of his battle kit cut into his body with every lurch. The only consolation was that the seven other soldiers he was crammed in with, all fully kitted up in light greens and browns – the multi-terrain pattern of No. 8 Temperate Combat Dress – would be feeling the same.
The Warrior wasn’t built for finesse. It looked like a small tank, hurtling forward on its tracks at speeds that stopped just short of shaking its human cargo to bits. The driver, Tommy Penfold, seemed convinced that he was the very image of an action hero and was obviously doing his best to find every pothole and rut in their way.
Sean loved the machine. It looked angry from every angle. Its heavy armour was surrounded on all sides by protective grilles, like an animal carrying its own cage – one that was going to break out at any moment to chew you up into small, gristly pieces. It had the fire-power to do it too, and that didn’t just include the heavily armed and seriously well-trained bastards inside. On the outside, it was armed with a 30mm autocannon, a 7.62mm chain gun, and anti-tank rockets.
But it was hot inside and it wasn’t padded. The sweat mingled with the camo paint that clogged up Sean’s skin. He felt like a chicken roasting in an atmosphere of engine fumes, dust and sweat, and his bones rattled with every bump and dip of the vehicle. He was only carrying battle kit, enough to get him through twenty-four hours of fighting, rather than a full Bergen, which would keep him going for about three days, but it wasn’t designed for sitting down in. No position seemed comfortable.
And Sean had never been happier.
It was a muggy August day outside – almost a year since he had finished the community part of his sentence. He had been allowed to work for some basic qualifications while that was going on. He had bagged a first-aid certificate, and a few others on field craft and drill, and he had nailed the army’s fitness requirements. He could never have imagined that Gaz’s death, which had driven him into the gym that day, would change the course of his life so totally. Hard work had got him a life, pay, mates. For the first time ever he had plans that extended beyond the next time he could get a car, get wasted, get laid – ideally all on the same evening.
After his parole Sean had done his six-month Combat Infantryman’s Course at Catterick, in Yorkshire, his first time beyond the M25. Then he had been posted with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, part of the 1st Armoured Infantry Brigade, based in Tidworth, on Salisbury Plain. The Fusiliers used the Warriors, and that was what had sold the regiment to him.
The time he had spent inside felt like years ago – a different life led by a different person.
He looked across at the soldier opposite him. Toni Clark. She winked at him from beneath the rim of her helmet and he smiled back. Like him, she had the tactical recognition flash of the Fusiliers on her sleeves: a square divided into two triangles, blood red on top and mustard yellow underneath.
She was a tall, well-built West Indian woman in her mid-twenties, and the moment Sean set eyes on her he had fallen in love . . . with the 2-litre 1992 Ford Escort Cosworth that she drove and spent most of her pay on. Sean was the one member of the platoon who understood half of her technical talk, and once she realized that he really was interested in the car and not just a kid trying to get into her knickers, they had bonded.
Not that he would mind getting into her knickers, if the right time came up and they were a long, long way away from the army. It had been drilled into him, and into everyone, many times during training. Relationships between soldiers were Not Allowed.
You go into combat on the understanding that your fellow soldiers will support you equally and without bias. They need to know and trust that this will be the case in return. You will assist each other exclusively on the basis of need, not on who you happen to be shagging.
Right now, shagging was the last thing on Sean’s mind.
He gripped his SA80 automatic rifle. He had got to know it well in the past year. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie, with its stubby barrel, its curved magazine behind the pistol grip, the blunt stock with all the workings crammed into it, and the ACOG – the Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight – clamped to the top, looking like a small weapon itself. Sean could strip and snap one back together again blindfolded. And he would be the first to admit that holding and firing one – loosing off NATO standard 5.56mm ammunition at over 600 rounds per minute – was nothing short of awesome.
The Warrior thundered to a halt and a voice barked through each soldier’s earpiece via the PRR – the Personal Role Radio mounted in a khaki pack on every soldier’s left shoulder which kept them wired into each other.
‘Move!’
The rear door hissed open on its pistons. Curtis West and Ravi Mitra were first out, and Sean was on his feet, spilling out of the back with the others. As his boots hit the ground, he snapped his weapon up to his shoulder, scanning the ground ahead and around. Soldiers never focused on just what lay in front. They made sure they we
re aware of attack from all quarters and ready to respond.
Dust from the Warrior settled around them; they looked like ghosts fading under the sun. Sean dropped to the ground, one knee up, the other in the dirt, staring through the ACOG with both eyes open. It had taken him a while to get used to this – taking in the ACOG’s enhanced view and the natural sight of his own eye at the same time – but now it was second nature. Closing one eye meant shutting yourself off from everything apart from what you saw through the small aperture, and that was suicide. By keeping both eyes open, a soldier stayed aware of everything around him. He got the full field of vision from both eyes, with a magnified circle showing whatever was right in front of the ACOG.
The Warrior had come to rest behind a small clump of bent trees. The sky was clouding over and a cool breeze blew, bringing a taste of rain with it. Sean had no doubt that it would hit them before the night was out. That was something else he’d learned: air smelled different according to the weather. Back in London’s fumes of fast food and exhaust and warm pavements, he’d never noticed.
The voice of Corporal Josh Heaton came through on the PRR.
‘Intel reports insurgents are located in the cottage at the edge of the village, five hundred metres beyond the other side of the trees. Move!’
Sean was up on his feet, weapon lowered but still in the shoulder so that he could bring it to bear quickly if they were attacked. Ahead of him was Heaton, taking point. Behind him came Toni Clark and Johnny Bright. They moved together down to the left of the trees, and the village below came into view. It looked empty, not a soul about; the buildings were battered and abandoned. They followed a small rise in the ground until they were about two hundred metres from the cottage – a small stone building, two up, two down, with an overgrown garden. Sean felt adrenaline racing through his body like high-octane fuel, scorching away any tiredness and fusing him to the moment.
Heaton came through again.
‘Stenders and Clarky, take position by rock at eleven o’clock. Shitey and me will drop down at the end of the rise. That gives us two firing positions with good cover. We pin the bastards down while US takes Kama Sutra and Chewie through the front door.’
Shitey was Bright, for reasons obvious to anyone who ever had to share an enclosed space with him. US was Lance Corporal Marshall. Kama Sutra was Ravi Mitra, and Chewie was Curtis West, nicknamed for his phenomenal ability to grow facial hair, which he tried to tame with a moustache and sideburns like a seventies porn king.
And Stenders was Sean. He had got the nickname because someone at Catterick, who had never been further south than Leeds in his life, thought he talked like a character from EastEnders. As far as Sean was concerned, the only people who talked like characters from EastEnders were characters from EastEnders, but it had stuck.
Heaton’s battle order made strategic sense, but there was one drawback that Sean could see immediately.
‘So we’re at the back again,’ he murmured to Clark. The corporal had a tendency to put them together, somewhere where the action wasn’t. There were various reasons Sean could think of for that. For him – well, OK, he was the youngest in the platoon. For Clark – the only possibilities he could think of weren’t good ones, and he didn’t like them.
But if Clark was having the same thoughts, she just shrugged them off. ‘We’re the ones with the UGL,’ she said with a smile, tapping the underslung grenade launcher bolted to her own SA80. ‘So the money’s on us surviving over those two bastards.’
Footsteps came up alongside, followed by the dark silhouette of Bright. ‘Corp loves me more, mate, that’s just all there is to it,’ he said softly as he padded past. He made surprisingly little sound for a bloke who was six foot tall and, unlike Sean, had the bulk to go with it.
‘Nah, he’s just using you as a human shield,’ Sean answered in kind. ‘Me and your mum’ll have a good long shag in your memory.’ He grinned as he got the finger by way of reply.
Sean and Clark hurried over to the rock, rifles at the ready and scanning all the way. They dropped to the ground in its shadow, giving the enemy as small a target as possible, and brought their weapons to bear on the building. Sean focused on the target through the ACOG with the same unblinking stare which, in another life, he would have given a car that he intended to take. Now all they had to do was wait.
As it started to rain, the order came through on the PRR to attack.
Sean and Clark opened fire.
The SA80 bucked in Sean’s hands as it spat out three-round bursts. He held it firm, adjusting his aim every time he pulled the trigger. To his side, Clark did the same, and further on Heaton and Bright joined in, providing covering fire, drawing the attention of the insurgents in the building away from the rest of the section, who would come in from behind.
The attackers, led by Marshall, were a blur of movement by the garden wall. They chucked a couple of flash-bang grenades through the windows on either side of the entrance, and kicked down the front door. Bright bursts of light flashed inside the building, punctuated by sharp bursts from their own weapons.
‘First floor clear . . .’ A disembodied commentary came through on the PRR.
With their own people inside the building, Clark and Sean had to be more selective in their fire. They eased off, scanning windows and doors through the ACOGs for any signs of the enemy emerging, ready to open fire again at a moment’s notice.
There was still firing from inside as the soldiers went from room to room, clearing each one out as they went. Sean tried to picture it in his mind from the overheard snatches.
‘Take the stairs . . .’
‘Grenades stand by . . .’
And then –
‘Shit! There’s a hostage in here!’
Sean and Clark looked at each other.
‘Oh, crap . . .’ she murmured.
‘You should have been prepared for that eventuality!’ a furious Heaton bellowed over the PRR. ‘US, I will have your balls if—’
‘Hold fire! Hold fire—’
The PRR went ominously silent.
‘US,’ Heaton growled, ‘speak to me now or so help me—’
Marshall’s voice, when he came back on, sounded very tired. ‘Hostage is confirmed dead.’
‘Shit! Right, everyone cease fire!’
Sean groaned, and dropped his head to rest on the ground.
Chapter 8
In the distance, as the ringing of the gunshots died away, Sean heard clapping and ironic cheers. He pushed back his helmet and looked up at the ridge a quarter of a mile away. Two more Warriors were parked up there, with the rest of the platoon silhouetted against the skyline.
A fresh voice spoke in the PRR – the kind of voice Sean would have immediately labelled ‘posh twat’. . . until he met its owner. Second Lieutenant Mike Franklin might have been public school educated, but he had earned his platoon’s respect by being on the same page, and by sheer bloody hard work.
‘Exercise over. Stand down. Corporal Heaton’s section, stay where you are. Penfold, bring the Warrior over. We’re coming down to join you.’
Through the trees, Sean heard the Warrior’s engine roar into life. He and Clark stood up, flicking the rifles’ fire selector switches to safety. They had all been firing blanks for the exercise, but even a blank discharge could cause severe injury. Together they headed down to the edge of the training village.
Imber had once been a real village, Sean understood – houses, shops, church and people. Then the Second World War happened and the locals had been turfed out to make way for the US Army to train. After the war ended the village was still considered a useful training ground, and the residents had never come back.
At the cottage, Corporal Heaton was busy tearing a strip off West, Mitra and Marshall, the three who had gone in. The hostage, very alive again now that the exercise was over, was leaning against the wall with his back to Sean and Clark, arms folded, nodding and putting in the occasional word. He wore green fatigue
s and a shabby, shag-order army surplus combat blouse.
Heaton glanced over the hostage’s shoulder as Sean and Clark approached. He nodded briefly at Sean, without missing a single beat of the bollocking. Clark might as well have been invisible or someplace else for all the attention he paid her. She and Sean glanced at each other, and she made a show of adjusting her helmet. Only Sean could see that her thumb and forefinger were curled into an O, and she was moving it back and forth. He grinned.
The Warrior lurched through the trees and skidded to a halt under Private Penfold’s unskilful guiding hand.
The hostage looked round. ‘Christ, is that how he always drives?’ he asked.
And Sean clocked his face properly. His mouth dropped open and a word blurted out before he could stop it. ‘Sergeant!’
Sergeant Phil Adams gazed casually back, not registering any surprise. ‘Well, bugger me, it’s Sean Harker. Worst traumatic flashback I ever had.’
Heaton looked from one to the other. ‘You know each other?’ His expression suddenly changed. ‘And – uh – Sergeant?’
Sean reckoned Heaton had known the hostage was a volunteer, but not that he was also a guy who outranked him. Minus his helmet, you could see that he was a slim, usually scowling twenty-one-year-old. He was from the same part of the world as Sean, and that was all Sean knew about him. Sean wondered if he had a gang background too. Maybe he still clung onto the old politics and couldn’t bring himself to be chummy with one of the Littern Guyz.
Now, Heaton was looking at Sean with slightly narrowed eyes, like Sean had kept a deep secret from him.
‘All the way back to the Why-Oh-Whys, Corporal.’ Adams straightened up and began to unbutton the combat blouse.