Trial Under Fire

by Zoe Sharp

  The muscle in his cheek gave the smallest twitch, hardly visible, but which for him indicated major irritation.

  “I hardly think that the Chiefs of Staff will take into account a desire for gender equality driven by petty political correctness, at the expense of this country’s preparedness for combat.”

  “So, because I may not be allowed to actually stand in the trenches, you think I should give up on the whole idea? There’s more to an army career than just being a squaddie.”

  He tilted his head slightly, regarded me with cool detachment. “But you’ve just based your entire argument, such as it was, on your ability to shoot. If you want to achieve success in the military channels that are open to you, Charlotte, you’d have to excel at those very administrative tasks to which you have just referred with such disdain.”

  “If that’s the case, what does it matter if I do the job in the army or in civvy street?”

  “Because at least, as a civilian, you won’t be required to sign a binding contract for a minimum period of four years’ service.”

  I rose, a buzzing in my ears now, a tightness in my hands. “So, what it boils down to is, you don’t think I can hack it.”

  He glanced at the empty chair as if to emphasise my lack of self-control.

  “Quite frankly, no. I don’t believe you can,” he said with lethal calm, and picked up his copy of the Financial Times as though that was the end of the matter.

  He let me get halfway to the door. “Oh, and Charlotte?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do please let your mother know when you’re likely to be home on leave, won’t you? Then she can ensure your room will be ready.”

  I didn’t respond to that, although I did manage not to slam the door off its frame as I went out. And the following morning, I walked into the nearest army recruiting office determined to prove him wrong.

  3

  In military parlance, TAB stands for Tactical Advance to Battle. To a squaddie on the ground, it means hoofing it as fast as your hairy little legs will carry you.

  Right now, my patrol was tabbing it towards the location of the downed helo with as much speed as we could manage, at night, over terrain that was hostile both in terms of topography and demographic.

  Truth be told, we were ill-equipped to conduct a rescue mission under fire. The ten-man patrol was doing little more than a wide perimeter sweep from our Forward Operating Base in the Nawa-I-Barakzayi district of Helmand province. We were travelling at night to try to catch some sign of the Taliban who’d been making regular attacks on two other FOBs in the vicinity.

  Creatures of habit, they tended to use the tried and tested strategy of an attack at last light, knowing they had the advantage of familiarity with every escape route or trail in the surrounding area—including any that we might use.

  The terrain was severe enough that our vehicles had been shaking themselves to pieces if we tried to push on. And they disintegrated twice as fast if we tried to push on in the dark, when it was so much harder to avoid the larger rocks and treacherous ravines. Seen through the eerie green cast of our night-vision gear, it looked like the surface of the moon, only not quite so hospitable. It had reached the stage where the lads were having to carry out repairs to the suspension and steering of our Land Rovers after every recce.

  Hence this exploratory night foot patrol, with a purely watch-and-learn remit. A small group, travelling relatively light, with just enough armament to cover our retreat, should we need to make one.

  But not enough to secure an advance, or to extract casualties under fire.

  Still, improvisation was the name of the game, and Captain MacLeod was the kind of officer who’d gone out of his way to forge a decent relationship with those under his command. As I stumbled along in the dark, trying not to clog my lungs with the fine dust that coated everything, I think we all had enough confidence to follow him anywhere.

  Unlike his boss, our OC, who seemed to go out of his way to keep any female soldiers so far out of the firing line we may as well never have left the recruit training camp in Guildford.

  We didn’t need to ask how much farther it was to our objective. Not only could I see the burning Lynx in the distance, but now I could smell it with every breath, too.

  The Westland Lynx is constructed using a high percentage of magnesium alloy components. A material that’s great for its light weight, low density, and durability at high operating temperatures, it forms a major part of the transmission and main rotor gearbox casings. The downside is, it burns. And when it burns, it stinks of ammonia.

  Combined with the greasy Avgas smoke, it must have been noticeable for miles around. Afghanistan is not exactly troubled by light pollution. So that meant if we were locked in on the giant distress flare, so was everybody else in the vicinity.

  And I doubted many of them were friendly.

  Already, we could hear the crisp smack of NATO rounds going down, against the deeper rattle of AK fire. The air was filled with the zip and sizzle that high-velocity rounds make as they pass way too close for comfort.

  We slowed our approach, covering our flanks as MacLeod and his sergeant worked out a rough plan. Sergeant Clarke was a thickset guy whose parents had come over from Jamaica in the 1960s, when he was still a babe in arms. He’d grown up with a Home Counties accent, but with enough beer inside him, his party piece was to spout fluent Yardie.

  I hunched over the Bowman CNR, trying to patch in to whatever frequency the covert team were using.

  “Any luck, Charlie?”

  “Negative, sir. I had them, but I’ve lost them again. I think maybe their comms have given out.”

  “Bugger it. Keep trying anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Bowman had not long come into service and the bugs in the system were legendary, to the point where most squaddies swore it stood for Better Off With Map And Nokia. Still, we were all equipped with our Personal Role Radio, or PRR, which had an operating range of around 500 metres.

  Sergeant Clarke recce’d forwards with two of the lads, soon reporting that the Lynx had gone down hard into a natural bowl intersected by another ravine. The survivors had apparently found minimal cover, but were pinned down.

  The enemy had the high ground on the north side, where they had uninterrupted fields of fire in both directions along the ravine, and a clear view of the south slope to prevent any attempt at a retreat. In any case, falling back that way involved a hundred-metre dash up a steep incline covered with scrubby vegetation and rocks not big enough to hide a rat behind. It was a recipe for getting shot in the back.

  The only thing in the downed team’s favour was the burning Lynx, and even that was a double-edged sword. The Taliban fighters were well aware that it could go up in a big way at any moment, and without knowing what explosives or ammo might be aboard, they didn’t want to risk being caught close inside the blast radius. Advancing on the men down in the bowl would bring them well within that zone. Of course, the pinned-down survivors were far too close, also, but they didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

  MacLeod ordered half a dozen of our lads into position along the south lip of the ravine, making the best use of available cover, and spread out to imitate a larger force.

  “Charlie, I want you and Corporal Brookes watching our rear,” he said. “The last thing we need is another group of the bastards creeping up on us.”

  Brookes frowned. “If there are wounded, sir, I will have to leave station to deal with them.”

  MacLeod gave him a tense smile. “I’m well aware of that, corporal. Why do you think I’ve teamed you with the best shot in the unit?”

  He flashed me a grin. “Good point, sir.”

  MacLeod waited until he’d gone and then paused next to where I knelt, arranging myself in the dirt behind the optical sight of my SA80.

  “You OK there, Charlie?”

  Just for a second, I wondered if he’d asked purely because I was female, then dismissed the t
hought. He would have checked regardless. I was—quite literally in this case—tail-end Charlie. If Brookes was called to a man down, the safety of the entire patrol lay in my hands.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Good lad,” he murmured, as if to emphasise there was no special treatment involved, and he disappeared into the night.

  4

  Anybody who’s ever been in a firefight will know just how chaotic it is. Not least because the adrenaline is rampaging through your system and all your senses seem to be running at maximum revs, even though I was four months into my tour in Afghanistan at that point. This was not my first time under fire by any stretch.

  I took a couple of long, deep breaths, willed my heart to slow its pounding to a steadier rhythm. I knew I would never hit anything if I allowed my sight picture to be shunted all over the place by the beat of my own pulse.

  As soon as our lads opened up from concealment on the south side of the ravine, the firing intensified. I shut it out of my mind, tried not to pay attention to the battle being fought behind me. I kept one eye on the image overlaid by the illuminated reticle inside the scope, and the other open in the darkness, now strobe-lit by muzzle flash.

  It was unusual for the Taliban to mount a conventional military assault, or even to hold their ground when they faced a possible pitched battle with coalition forces. Guerrilla hit-and-run tactics had served them well when their countrymen were kicking the arse of the Russians during the 1980s. And they hadn’t done too badly at kicking ours back in the mid-1800s, either.

  So, either the crew of the Lynx was of importance, or the insurgents were waiting for something to happen…

  When I caught another flash high to my left—southeast of our position—at first I took it for more weapons fire. I tracked right and left, hunting for another burst, but nothing came.

  A padded knee hit the dirt near my shoulder.

  “You see that, Charlie?” Corporal Brookes demanded. He had to lean in and yell in my ear to be heard over the crackle of the guns. “What d’you reckon?”

  I lifted my head. “Didn’t see enough of it to make a guess,” I said. “Small arms, maybe? If it was another RPG, it would have hit us by now.”

  “Now there’s a cheery thought. If you—”

  “There!” I interrupted him. “There it is again. It’s a vehicle—headlights, look. Coming fast, if the way they’re jolting around is anything to go by.”

  “The mad buggers. They’ll rip the axles out of that thing.”

  “Well, let’s hope they do it sooner rather than later, then.”

  I dropped my face back to the scope, saw with more clarity an old Toyota pick-up truck, the rear bed crammed with Taliban fighters. They sat packed in so close their knees interlocked together, bristling with the usual AKs, but also PK machine guns, and old bolt-action Lee-Enfields.

  I’d learned to make a fairly accurate estimate of distance using the mil-dots on the SA80’s reticle against the size of a known object, like the ubiquitous Toyota pick-up. By my reckoning, they were already a little over 800 metres away, and closing as fast the terrain would allow.

  Brookes was saying something but I’d tuned him out as I tried to relax behind the gun, to melt into the dirt beneath me. I tracked the pick-up as it bucked and rocked over the ground. Vague calculations ran through my mind as I tried to predict where the jolting front headlights would land next, rather than where they were now.

  I tried to concentrate on a point directly between the lights, where I knew the front grille of the Toyota would be, and the vulnerable radiator behind that. I could see it clearly inside my head, a target maybe half a metre square. And I told myself it was easy as I squeezed the trigger.

  The truck reared up at the moment I fired, so it might almost have been reacting viscerally to the shot, but I knew I’d missed. They had gained another twenty or so metres by now, still coming, still closing.

  I was at the limit of the effective range of the SA80, but ever since the army had discovered the ability I had with a long gun, they’d encouraged me to put down thousands of rounds in training, to enter Skill-at-Arms meetings and the competitions held at Bisley.

  And if I left it much longer, the men advancing would have us well within the range of their battered AK47s. The Lee-Enfields some of them carried dated back before the Second World War. Old, true, but in the hands of an experienced fighter they could be deadly at a greater distance.

  “You’re never aiming for that truck are you?” Brookes said. “’Cos you’ll be bloody lucky to—”

  I ignored him, fired again, a two-round burst this time as the front of the truck came down, and immediately saw from the steam hissing out into the beam of the headlights that I’d scored a hit. The driver jerked the wheel in reaction, almost overturning the vehicle. It wrenched to a stop and I caught movement as the occupants bailed out into cover, expecting my next shots to be aimed at them.

  “You jammy fucker!” Brookes said, just as Captain MacLeod reappeared alongside us.

  “Corporal Brookes, give us a heads-up as soon as that truck gets within—”

  “Don’t think they’re going to get any closer, sir,” Brookes said. He jerked his head in my direction. “Seems like they ran into car trouble.”

  As soon as their reinforcements evaporated, the Taliban pulled back, and we were able to venture down into the ravine.

  The heat from the burning Lynx was intense. I could feel my eyebrows trying to shrink back into my forehead. I realised, too, that what I could smell was not entirely mechanical. Not everyone had got out of the helo when it came down, and clearly the survivors did not have chance to retrieve the bodies before the aircraft began to burn. It made my stomach heave.

  Corporal Brookes was already treating the wounded. Nobody who survived the initial crash had escaped uninjured. The pilot and co-pilot had died either on impact, or in the fire that quickly followed. One of the four-man team on board was unconscious and unresponsive. Another two had broken limbs—one a compound fracture. The final team member had hit the ground OK, but had subsequently taken a round in the gut as they made cover.

  He’d kept firing, though, as had the two other conscious men, but I could see by their haggard faces in the light from the blaze what it had cost them.

  I saw something else, too. None of the team wore rank or regimental insignia. It went with the unlit helos, and the apparent determination of the enemy not only to bring them down, but to finish them off once they’d done so.

  Now the fear of the firefight was over, and the adrenaline hangover started to kick in, the man who’d been gut-shot discovered just how much pain he was in. He was dripping in sweat, his exposed skin glistening with far more than mere heat. He was well-spoken, a far-back accent that made the obscenities that tumbled from his mouth seem somehow more shocking but less heartfelt. I pegged him for an officer, missing pips on his shoulders notwithstanding.

  Corporal Brookes shot him full of morphine and arranged him sitting with his back against a rock, propped with his knees bent up to his chest to keep what compression was possible on his abdomen.

  I relayed a message in a set format, known as a nine-liner, to HQ, giving, among other things, the location and security of the evac site, category condition of the wounded, the fact they were all stretcher cases, and that we’d mark the HLZ with flares. After all, with the Lynx likely to burn until dawn, a few smaller fires in the vicinity were not going to make a vast amount of difference.

  Brookes improvised stretchers for the two Cat-A wounded—the officer and the unconscious man. The two Cat-Bs had to manage using a squaddie as a support crutch, and more or less hopping on their good leg. We didn’t have the manpower available for anything more. Even MacLeod hooked his shoulder under that of the guy with the compound fracture—now heavily splinted—and did his bit. I was at one side of the bivouac sheet being used for the officer, at the foot end.

  We staggered up the shifting side of the ravine with grimly gritte
d teeth, trying to ignore the muffled yells of the wounded man.

  And as soon as we crested the top, the man opposite me, a Geordie lad called Baz, dropped his side of the sheet and grabbed for his rifle.

  The officer roared in pain. I was about to bollock Baz when I realised what had prompted his reaction.

  In front of us, barely visible against the terrain into which they blended, I could see half a dozen rifle muzzles with dark figures behind them. And they were all aiming straight at us.

  5

  For a second that seemed to expand into infinity, we stared into the dangerous end of six unknown soldiers. Baz had acted quickly, but hadn’t managed to do more than get a hand to his own weapon before common sense overcame training reflex and he, like the rest of us, froze.

  Then the officer on the stretcher recovered his breath enough to rasp, “Hell, sergeant…you boys have been a fucking long time.”

  The men rose out of concealment in what seemed to be one fluid movement. Four of them were dressed identically to the men we carried, in combat gear devoid of badges or name tabs. The first thought that ran through my head was Special Forces.

  The other two men were clearly flight crew. There was something just a little less predatory, a little less practised, about the way they handled the weapons they carried. Like they were used to delivering lead at a distance farther removed from brutal reality.

  One of the covert team came forwards—the one the officer had identified as a sergeant, although he wore no stripes to confirm the rank. His rifle still up in his shoulder and his eyes everywhere.

  “Boss,” he said, voice clipped and devoid of emotion. “You’re not looking too good.”

  “Fuck that, man. Where were you?”

  The man jerked his head towards the darkness surrounding us. “Our bird took shrapnel when you got hit. We were lucky, but we set down about four klicks southwest of here. Had to tab in.”