by Zoe Sharp
11
“What the hell’s taking them so long?” I demanded. I hadn’t looked at my watch, but it seemed like hours had passed. Sweat glued my combats to my back and I could feel the sharp outline of every rock and pebble on the ground beneath me. My mouth was so dry I could hardly work up a spit.
Ginger threw me a sideways glance, although he had a rivulet of sweat running down the side of his face.
“Patience, eh? Like I said, these people have very set ideas in the way they go about things. You can’t rush ’em if you expect to get anything out of ’em.”
“Yeah, but you would have thought, if the chief’s nephew is so ill, they might hurry things along a bit.”
“Depends how good your corporal is at his job, I guess, doesn’t it?”
I still had the sergeant’s admonishment in my head about getting too close to any of my comrades for comfort, so I said cautiously, “I’d trust him.”
Ginger grunted. “Well, for all we know, he’s sorting the kid out as we speak then, eh?”
“Hm. That doesn’t mean I have to like how long it’s taking, though.”
“Aye, well, can’t say I like it much, either.”
“Hey. If you two have finished bitching and moaning,” Sporty cut in over his PRR, “it looks like we’ve got company.”
“Where?” Ginger squirmed on his belly.
“Southeast. That dust is either being kicked up by horses, or the Afghanis have acquired a shitload of cattle from somewhere, and they’re stampeding.”
I started to shift, too, but Ginger grabbed my arm before I’d done more than catch the briefest glimpse of the approaching dust cloud.
“Stay on target,” he snapped. “Your job is to cover the team.”
I swung my sights back to the rooftop, and felt immediate guilt at having to report: “I’ve got movement on the roof.”
“Be specific!”
“One guy. Local dress. Armed with an AK, but doesn’t look like he’s prepping to defend from attack—he’s too relaxed. Now he’s waving his arms. Signalling, maybe?”
Ginger swore under his breath. He clicked the pressel of his PRR. “Team Bravo, Team Bravo. Sit-rep needed, over.”
“Team Echo,” Scary’s voice acknowledged over the short-range net. “Wait one, over.”
“Team Bravo. Sorry mate, but urgent sit-rep needed, over.”
The sergeant didn’t question that urgency. Instead, after a moment’s pause he simply asked, “Approximate ETA?”
“Approaching at speed. As yet no visual confirmation.”
“OK, keep us posted.”
“How’s the kid?”
“Brookes reckons it looks like scarlet fever and is putting an IV line into the boy to rehydrate him. He’s been sick for long enough to make it serious.”
“Well, tell him to get a shift on, will you? And can you find out if the chief’s expecting more visitors?”
“Will do. Wait one,” Scary said again, and the net went quiet.
Meanwhile, the approaching dust cloud had thickened. It had gained the soundtrack of pounding hoof beats and shouting men that carried on the still air. The man I’d spotted on the rooftop was joined by a second, both of them staring keenly in the direction of the advancing men. The pair looked more excited than worried by the imminent new arrivals.
As the group reached the outskirts of the village, there had still been no word from Team Bravo on the chief’s reaction. Ginger tried raising them again. No response.
“Team Bravo, Team Bravo, please acknowledge my last transmission, over.”
Silence.
I flicked my aim away from the rooftop, down into the dirt street outside the house. The horsemen poured into the space, filling it with shaggy mounts that skittered and shied. The men were all armed, dressed in the same mixture of loose shalwar kameez clothing as the villagers, which made it hard to identify who was who, or where their allegiances might lie. I risked voicing the question to Ginger.
“Who knows. If we’re lucky, they’re another local tribe—one who’s prepared to help us.”
“And if we’re not?”
“Then they’re fuckin’ Tali.”
My body temperature went from overheated to freezing in less than the time it took him to say it. I gave a shiver, hairs suddenly upright on my exposed forearms. I’d been in firefights with insurgents before, of course I had. No way to avoid it during my tour to date. But I’d never been in the position of knowing a team of friendlies was in imminent danger of abduction, with all the resultant horrors, and felt so helpless to do anything about it.
“Team Bravo—”
This time it was Sporty who interrupted him. “Hey. Main door, ground level. They’re coming out.”
Sure enough, I saw Brookes appear in the doorway. He faltered a little when he saw the horsemen milling in the street, and then lurched as he was thrust from behind. Tate stumbled out after him, as if he’d shoved and been shoved in his turn.
Scary and Posh followed them. The two Special Forces guys didn’t look more relaxed than the other two, exactly, but possibly less tense. Or they were better at hiding it. All of them had been relieved of their comms and weapons. The village men who’d been part of the welcome committee were now surrounding them, guns levelled. The smiles had disappeared.
I murmured, “Ah…shit.”
“Switch to the alternate frequency,” Ginger ordered. As I complied I felt rather than saw his gaze swing to me. “Do you have a clear shot?”
I’d curled my finger inside the trigger guard almost on a reflex before the meaning of the question hit. I swallowed. “On who?”
“On the chief.”
“Whoa! Hold off on that, mate,” Sporty protested. “No telling what these mad bastards will do if we take out their boss man.”
Anxiety warred with relief, a whole tumble of emotions that bounced off each other as they rolled around inside. Besides, visible centred in the crosshairs of my scope, the chief himself looked unsettled by events, if not quite full-on angry. I got the impression he was just as surprised by what was happening, but was simply hiding it better.
I noticed he glanced at one of the younger men several times, and although his crinkled face bore no expression, I sensed censure coming off him in waves. I recognised the focus of his disapproval as one of the two men who’d been on the roof. The ones who’d waved to the approaching force with such enthusiasm. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Well, certainly a few hundred rounds in this case.
In the street below us, the four members of Team Bravo stood motionless as the new group of riders jostled around them. One of the riders got too close and his horse swung its hindquarters into Posh—by accident or design, I couldn’t tell. He simply braced his shoulder without budging an inch. The horse darted aside. Even so, I reckoned the show was calculated to intimidate rather than injure…for now, at least.
At some unheard signal, the riders swirled back, smooth as an organised equestrian display team, leaving the four men standing in the centre of a clear circle. I felt my stomach clench. The space around them was suddenly more frightening than when they were being crowded.
One of the riders nudged his horse forward a little in front of them, shouting as he weaved back and forth. He was a short, thickset man who held weapon and reins in one hand, and gestured wildly with the other while he spoke. It was impossible to tell if he was arguing in favour of clemency or execution.
The village chief, I noted, stood quiet and said nothing in their defence. I thought of Scary’s last transmission, that Brookes had diagnosed his nephew and begun treatment. What was the point of trying to win over hearts and minds, when you were stabbed in the back in the attempt?
The horses our lads had ridden to the village were led out again, and this seemed to provoke the man doing the talking all the more. His gestures became wilder, his finger stabbing in accusation from horses to men.
“I’m guessing they’ve recognised one or two of those
ponies,” Ginger said, “and they can put two and two together about how we got hold of ’em.”
Sporty swore under his breath, and when he spoke his voice was bitter. “Like we said before—she should have taken out the pickup driver and left us the truck undamaged.”
I swallowed back words in my own defence. Instead, it was Ginger who muttered, “Yeah, ’cause they’d never be likely to recognise their own bloody truck…”
12
When the men we assumed were Taliban forces left the village, taking the four prisoners with them, Sporty, Ginger and I were not far behind.
It wasn’t hard to track them when their horses kicked up a trail in the dirt we could have followed in the dark. Even so, we kept far enough back that we hoped our presence would pass unnoticed. It was a fine balance between not losing them, and not getting ourselves caught in the process.
My first thought had been to get on the Bowman and call in air support—any kind of support—to try to get our guys back. Ginger and Sporty’s response to that suggestion was a short, sharp negative. No time, for one thing, not to mention that they didn’t have much faith in the ability of the helo gunship jockeys not to kill friend along with foe. The unspoken reason, I gathered, was that it was their own mess and they wanted to be the ones to clean it up.
The Taliban loaded our guys back onto their horses, wrists tied and reins firmly in the hands of another rider. Disarmed and heavily outnumbered, there wasn’t much they could do but, literally, sit tight and go along for the ride. Even so, they’d been roughed up before the journey began, just to knock any bravado out of them.
It had been bloody hard to watch it happen. Doubly difficult when I was doing so through the scope of a sniper’s rifle, with the means to bring down instant death on the perpetrators by the slightest squeeze of my right forefinger. Perhaps it was the knowledge of just how easy it would be that stayed my hand. Not to mention that Ginger would have skinned me.
And I knew the retribution that would follow such an action on my part would have been far worse. So I held off, and tried not to let the beatings sicken me. Both Tate and Brookes looked shell-shocked by it all. They’d been warned, but the brutal reality of capture had only just started to truly penetrate. It made what was still to come all the more frightening.
Now, the plan was to get them back before anything worse happened.
Having twenty or so horses churn up the ground before us, there wasn’t any necessity to ride single file in an attempt to disguise our number. We rode three abreast where the terrain allowed, keeping our pace down so as not to tire the horses too badly, or risk a fall. We were outnumbered enough, without further depleting manpower through injury.
Ginger rode in the centre, and spent the first twenty minutes or so turned away from me, conversing with Sporty in tones too low to hear.
Eventually, I nudged my horse on ahead and then pulled him sideways in front of the pair, blocking their path and bringing their mounts to a sudden halt.
“OK, enough,” I said. “One of you needs to talk to me.”
“What’s up? You fed up with not being the centre of attention?” Sporty demanded.
I sighed. “Look, I know I’m only a regular squaddie, but I don’t have to take my boots and socks off to count to ten, you know.”
“I’ll take your word on that. So what?”
“So don’t treat me like I’m dumb. What’s going on?”
They eyed me in silence for a moment, while their horses fidgeted and twitched their ears against the flies.
“You’re better off not knowing,” Ginger said at last. “Trust me.”
“Bollocks to that. Whatever plan you had went sideways as soon as our lads were taken. If you expect me to play any kind of intelligent role in getting them back, you’re going to have to bring me up to speed—on the basics, if nothing else.”
The two men exchanged a glance, then Ginger said, “You have to admit she’s got a point.”
“And if they grab her?” Sporty argued. “She won’t last five minutes, mate.”
“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But how long do you think Tate or Brookes will last when they start roasting their balls over an open fire?”
Ginger raised an eyebrow in silent question to Sporty. Sporty shrugged, which seemed to be an answer in itself.
Ginger blew out a long breath and kicked his horse forward, forcing mine to back off. I twitched my reins and we fell into step alongside.
“OK,” he said, “I’m risking the boss ripping me a new one for telling you any of this, but I s’pose you’ve got a right to know.” He paused as if collecting his thoughts. “There was a group of civilian engineers, supposed to be advising on some big electricity generation project further up the Helmand River at the Grishk Dam. The coalition reckon bringing power and irrigation to the farmers will win ’em lots of brownie points with the locals.”
“Give her the short version will you, mate?” Sporty said as he manoeuvred his mount onto the other side.
Ginger twisted in his saddle. “For fuck’s sake. D’you want to tell it, or what?”
Despite everything, I almost smiled at the matching scowls on their faces. “So, how long have you two been married, exactly?”
“Too bloody long,” Ginger muttered. “Anyway, to cut a long story short,” he added pointedly, “the engineers got themselves kidnapped, held for ransom, but what the Taliban really wanted out of ’em was info on the infrastructure plan.”
“What were they doing that’s so important?”
Ginger shook his head. “That’s above my pay grade, eh—and yours. And it’s pretty fuckin’ irrelevant, too. What isn’t irrelevant is that we got word the Al’Qaeda high command have decided to send one of their top interrogators across the border from Pakistan to torture the engineers for what they know. Guy known as Al-Ghazi—means a warrior who fought for Islam, but we don’t think it’s his real name. He’s a proper sadistic wee fucker, by all accounts.”
“So your job was to get in there and spirit the engineers away before Al-Ghazi could get his hands on them?” I guessed.
Ginger flicked me a smile. “Not only that, but to see if we could grab Al-Ghazi himself while we were about it.”
“Hm, and how’s that working out for you so far?” I asked. “Were you blown, or was the whole thing a setup from the start?”
Ginger grimaced. “Either way, it’s been a clusterfuck right from the beginning. No proper planning time, half-arsed intel…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head as if too disgusted to say more.
“To be honest, we probably should have given it up when they hit us on the way in,” Sporty admitted. “We don’t know for sure if this Al-Ghazi bloke is even going to be there.”
“Well let’s hope for our lads’ sakes that he isn’t,” Ginger said. “Though, if that’s the case, you have to wonder why they bothered taking the prisoners away from the village. Why not just kill ’em right there?”
“Yeah, thanks for putting the thought of something worse in my head,” I said sourly. “I hadn’t got past being grateful they were still alive.”
Ginger gave me a lopsided grin. “Aye, if Al-Ghazi is on his way, your guys are about to face something that will make having their balls roasted seem like a gentle massage with warm towels, eh?”
13
For the second time in twenty-four hours, I found myself lying on hard stony ground, watching a distant tableau that was overlaid by the reticle of a sniper’s scope.
The worrying thing was that it was starting to seem normal.
I had a sudden vision of the same overlay but this time the scene was of my parents sitting at the wrought-iron table on the terrace at home. Of centring my sights first on my father’s open copy of the Financial Times and imagining a small ripped hole appearing in the centre of the front page. Then on the Royal Doulton teapot and watching it shatter in my mother’s hands.
I blinked, shook my head and the image faded, to be replaced by an encampm
ent in the Afghan wilderness, a campfire surrounded by misshapen tents. At each side were two stretched out lines, staked in at the ends, to which were tethered their horses.
The sun went down an hour before, dropping like a stone through brief amber into the blue tones of twilight and then darkness. Through the night sights clipped to my day scope, the campfire glowed hot and bright against a ghostly green background. I tried to keep my focus away from the flames so any activity near the tents was more easily visible, but the way they were spread around the camp, it wasn’t easy. We needed more eyes on the target.
We needed more of everything.
It didn’t help that they’d split the prisoners between two of the tents on differing sides of the camp. The sergeant—Scary—and Tate in one, and Posh and Brookes in another. I’d no idea why they chose those pairings, except perhaps it was obvious who the Special Forces lads were, and they wanted to keep them apart.
“Why couldn’t they have put them all in one place?” I muttered, as I tracked yet again across the camp, shutting my eyes briefly past the scorch of the fire.
“Makes sense,” Ginger said quietly from alongside me. “Divide and conquer. Less likely to do something stupid if they don’t know where their pals are and they might be at risk.”
“I’d do the same thing,” Sporty admitted. “Put each of ’em on their own if I had enough men to keep an eye on ’em that way.”
Half a dozen of the Taliban fighters had ridden out at last light. We didn’t have the manpower to follow them, so it wasn’t a hard decision to stick with the group holding the prisoners instead. We didn’t know how long they’d be gone, or what their purpose was. But it didn’t take imagination to work out it wasn’t anything good. It made sense that, with the enemy forces depleted, we were never going to get as good or timely an opportunity to mount a rescue.
“So, how are we going to do this?”