Trial Under Fire

by Zoe Sharp

  19

  By the time Brookes and I had scrambled back to where we’d left Posh we were both coated in sweat and grime. My hair clung sodden to the back of my neck, gritty with the dust that was our constant companion. I could feel trickles of clammy moisture dribbling down my spine. I would have sold my soul for a cool shower and some clean underwear.

  Posh was already mounted up by the time we reached him. He had his assault rifle slung casually across the front of his saddle, keeping the business end pointing in the direction of Zameer’s son, Ramin. The boy had lost the subdued and terrified look he’d worn when first captured and had turned sullen, but with his hands bound in front of him and the reins firmly tied to Posh’s own horse, there wasn’t much he could do.

  “Where’s the old man?” I asked, carefully not using Zameer’s name in front of his son.

  “Oh, he’s been all taken care of, don’t you worry,” Posh said easily.

  Brookes paused in the process of untying his horse and stared up at him, shading his eyes against the sun. “‘Taken care of’? What the fuck does that mean?”

  Posh stared back, a challenge met and matched. “It means he’s been taken care of, so shift your arse, corporal. High time we weren’t here.”

  His gaze switched to me, as if to check I wasn’t going to voice objections, too.

  Part of my brain was refusing to process the possibility that they’d taken the old man away and executed him in cold blood. I tried to keep uppermost the thought that Zameer had delivered four of our number into the hands of Al-Ghazi’s men, knowing exactly what the likely outcome of that would be.

  When I said nothing, Posh added, “We’ve had word that Al-Ghazi is on his way. He already knows he’s lost one lot of prisoners, and now he’s coming for the others.”

  I’d left the bulky Bowman radio set behind with Posh when Brookes and I took up our position on the other side of the mountain. But I knew the smaller PRRs did not have the range to transmit that information back to Posh from Scary’s team. Still, I felt the need to ask:

  “How do you know this?”

  “From the guards holding the engineers. You’d be amazed what bits of kit they’ve managed to lay their hands on—not least of which is a decent radio transmitter. Apparently they wanted to make sure we were long gone before Al-Ghazi arrived asking questions.”

  “Can we get to our extraction point without crossing paths with him?” I asked, keeping my tone level. There were plenty of other questions I could have asked, but those would keep. For now.

  Posh raised an eyebrow and waited a moment, as if expecting something I wasn’t prepared to add. I kept my mouth shut, turning away to tighten the girth strap holding Mones’ saddle before heaving myself aboard.

  “It would help if we knew which route they were going to take,” he said at last. “It’s not like there are many roads in this place, particularly not if you’re on four legs instead of four wheels.”

  “If they’re using local villagers as guides, surely they’ll stick to the established trails?” I offered.

  “So we hope. As it is, we’re expecting them to come down the valley from the north—the same way our blokes went in.”

  “How are Zameer’s men going to explain to Al-Ghazi that they just let us take the engineers?”

  “Not our problem,” Posh said. “As long as they don’t point after us with a cry of ‘they went thataway,’ they can make up any story they like, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Or as long as they don’t run into our lot on the way,” Brookes said, frowning.

  Posh shook his head. “That’s why our blokes headed out up the valley to the south. Means we have to take the long way round to reach our evac point, but better that than get into an altercation we don’t have the manpower or the firepower to stand a chance of winning.”

  Posh had already got a GPS fix on our location, and now he took a quick compass bearing for a heading that would converge with Scary and his team. He transmitted a brief message to them using the Bowman, trusting that it would be received.

  We set off at a shambling trot. Even that was faster than was prudent on the rocky ground, which dropped away sharply. Ramin’s horse, without his hands on the reins to steady him, slipped and slithered. Ramin’s face was grim as he gripped tight to the saddle.

  As the ground levelled out, I rode up alongside Posh and jerked my thumb back towards our prisoner.

  “Why is he still with us?”

  “Because we need him.”

  “What for?”

  He flashed me an annoying smile. “Because we do.”

  “But—”

  “Let it go, Charlie. Just take my word for it, all right?”

  I wanted to ask if they were planning to ‘take care’ of him, also, but the words wouldn’t come. I nodded, and twitched the reins to turn Mones away from him, circling back to Brookes at the rear. His face reflected my own concerns but neither of us spoke.

  Neither of us was happy about what might happen next, but at the same time we were only too aware of the stories. That those who argued too vehemently about human rights’ abuses in the field had a nasty habit of not making it back in one piece.

  If they made it back at all.

  20

  We rode on for over an hour with no signs of pursuit, but at the same time no sign of Scary, Tate and the others. Posh handed back the Bowman CNR and I sent out frequent, minimal messages en route, but either they weren’t close enough to respond or weren’t there at all. Or, the Bowman wasn’t working as it should.

  I tried not to think too hard about that possibility.

  We’d been weaving through the mountains, skirting the steeper sections while maintaining a rough compass heading. The dust felt like a layer of carpet across the back of my throat. I took constant sips of lukewarm water from my canteen and tried not to fantasise about swigging something long and fruity, and cold enough to make condensation form on the outside of the glass.

  The landscape of Helmand around us had a magnificent brutality about it. The largest of Afghanistan’s provinces, it was stripped and sparse except around the winding course of the Helmand River, which began in the Bābā Range of the Hindu Kush mountains on the border with Pakistan. It eventually emptied into Lake Hamun in the Sīstān swamp of neighbouring Iran, more than 700 miles later.

  I didn’t like staying so close to the river as we scribed a huge semicircle to eventually head northwest again for our extraction point. The fertile river valley was where the bulk of the inhabitants of Helmand lived and worked. It made chances of a contact with the enemy too high. Especially when we were split into two groups like this.

  I tried the Bowman again. This time I got a broken-up, patchy response. I nudged Mones forward into a messy canter and caught up with Posh. He slowed as I came alongside him, and I sent our call-sign again. The return transmission was still garbled, but at least it was there.

  Fifteen minutes later, we made our rendezvous.

  Posh nodded to the rest of his team, and Brookes and I grinned at Tate, but that was as much of a reunion as we had time for.

  Scary wheeled his horse away and would have ridden on had Brookes not called him back.

  “I need to give these guys a quick check over,” he said, nodding to the engineers.

  Scary’s gaze flicked across the men. “They’ve made it this far with no problems.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’ll make it all the way,” Brookes said. “Come on, just a quick break. We’ll lose more than that if one of them faints and falls off his horse.”

  Scary hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Ten minutes.”

  I climbed off Mones, suppressing a groan at my raw seat bones, and went to help the engineers dismount. They struggled to do so with any fluidity, grunting as their boots hit the ground and the shock of the landing jarred up into their body.

  Close to, the three men looked weary but far from the exhausted state I’d expected. They were unshaven, but that pr
oved nothing. They might have been bearded before they were taken, and they didn’t have the hollowed-out gaze of men who’d been held long enough to forget who they were. In fact, some of them were even tanned, which did not point to a long period of captivity, if it pointed to captivity at all.

  Corporal Brookes had grabbed his medical kit and was shining a penlight into their eyes, checking blood pressure, asking about untreated wounds, bouts of sickness or diarrhoea. Generally, though, I thought they all looked in remarkably good nick after their experience.

  Posh was still looming over our prisoner, Ramin. Ginger and Sporty had naturally moved to vantage points to keep watch. I pulled water canteens from the spare horses and offered them round.

  The first of the engineers was a slim black guy of indeterminate age, although his beard was flecked through with grey. When I handed him water he took it before doing a double-take, eyes tracking me up and down, as if seeking confirmation that I was indeed female. He wouldn’t have got much from my dusty fatigues and boots, and I wore my hair short, so maybe that was the reason for his frown.

  “How are you doing?” I asked, just to put him out of his misery if nothing else.

  “Ah, OK, I guess.”

  “You’re American?”

  “Canadian.”

  “Sorry. You must get that a lot.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “It’s an easy mistake to make.”

  “Is that what the Afghanis did—mistook you for Yanks?”

  “No, they knew exactly who we were and why we were there,” the engineer said.

  “Which was?”

  He glanced at me sharply, as if that was information I should already have known if I’d any right to.

  “We were working on the Grishk Dam. It was built back at the end of World War Two and even if the old turbines were still functioning, they’re way outdated. We were sent to look at ways of upgrading them to provide power for this whole area.”

  “Seems like a bit of a risky proposition, given the current situation here.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t make the policy, I just have to try to make it work.”

  “You would have thought that would be something the locals would welcome, not try to sabotage.”

  He gave another shrug and his lips twisted wryly. “See, now you’re just being logical.”

  “When did they grab you?”

  “Few weeks ago? It gets kinda hard to tell.” He rubbed a hand over his scalp. “One day runs into another.”

  “Did they…?” My voice trailed off, unsure how to ask the question.

  “Interrogate us? Torture us?” He shook his head. “No, these were not fundamentalists. I got the impression they were just doing a job—minding us like they would their goats or sheep. Not what you might call friendly, but not cruel either. Never even kept us chained up most of the time.” He waved a hand to indicate the surrounding landscape. “After all, even if we escaped—on foot, alone out there—where were we gonna go?”

  “Minding you for whom? Were they waiting for Al-Ghazi?”

  The engineer frowned. “Who’s that?”

  “Right, that’s enough lounging about. We need to keep moving,” Scary’s voice cut across the conversation. “Anybody needs to take a piss, do it now, because we’re not stopping again until nightfall.” He glared at me. “You managed to get a response from HQ yet?”

  “No, sergeant, not as yet.”

  “Well, you better keep trying then, hadn’t you?”

  The sharp tone surprised as much as it angered me. I opened my mouth then took in his scowling features and shut it again, restricting myself to a muttered, “Yes, sergeant.”

  The engineer handed over the water canteen with eyebrows raised.

  “OK, I take it back about the Afghanis not being friendly,” he murmured. “Compared to your guy over there, they were a real barrel of laughs.”

  21

  Our route might have seemed circuitous, but we crossed into the neighbouring valley without meeting anyone, man or beast. It was mid-afternoon but so far the sun showed no inclination to slacken its grip on the day. The heat had a physical weight. Even the horses began to droop under it, their coats darkening with sweat. The reins creamed it off their necks as lather.

  I kept trying the Bowman CNR at regular intervals, requesting our extraction, but I was wary about flattening the battery pack—the life expectancy was nowhere near what the specs claimed. There was still no response. If they could hear me, I couldn’t hear them.

  Scary left Ginger on point and rode back, nudging his horse into step alongside Mones.

  “Still nothing,” I said, anticipating his question. “I’ll let you know as soon as I make contact.”

  Scary nodded, and we jogged along in silence for maybe half a dozen strides, then he said, “Spit it out, Charlie. What’s on your mind?”

  “What happened to Zameer?”

  He glanced at me, his gaze assessing, and his tone was entirely neutral. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “It’s not so much ‘think’ as a mixture of hope and fear,” I said. “I hope you let him go back to his village, because I, for one, believed him when he said he had no choice in what he did.”

  “But?”

  “But, I fear you probably slit his throat and left him for the wolves.”

  We rode in silence for half a dozen strides, the horses’ heads nodding in time with each step, before he spoke again.

  “I see. And if I did, what would you do about that?”

  “Do? Nothing,” I said. “I can see how you’d justify it as an operational necessity, even if I didn’t agree with you.”

  “Why not?”

  I threw him a quick glance but there was no anger in his face, as there hadn’t been in his voice. It seemed that he genuinely wanted to know. Even so, I was wary.

  “Because anyone who studies military history realises that appealing to the hearts and minds of the local population is one of the most important factors, especially in a guerrilla war like Vietnam, or here in Afghanistan. Killing off a village elder because he pissed you off is not going to win you allies for the future.” My eyes drifted to Zameer’s son, still slumped on his horse with hands tied. “It breeds resentment and hatred in the next generation. Fires them up.”

  “They’ve got their radical clerics to fire them up,” Scary said. “If we cut them some slack, we’re seen as weak, and if we don’t, well, they’ve already been told we were the spawn of Satan anyway.”

  “According to Islam, I think you’ll find Satan is known as Iblis.”

  “Whatever. The point is, I’m not here to kill civilians, just as long as they don’t try to kill me or my team. If they do, then all bets are off.”

  I shrugged and said nothing. I hardly thought anything I could come up with at this point was likely to change his mind, and this was not the time or place to attempt it. Better to shut the hell up before I gave myself the kind of reputation I could well do without.

  Scary’s intense gaze stayed on me for a moment longer, one eyebrow raised as if he couldn’t quite believe I’d given in so easily. Then he peeled away and called a halt so Sporty and Ginger could recce forward.

  As soon as they’d dismounted and headed for the crest of the next hill, Scary moved across to where Posh was leading Ramin’s horse and tied a camo scarf across Ramin’s mouth. The youth glared at him from over the makeshift gag but did not put up a fight.

  “Why do that now?” Brookes asked.

  “Just a precaution,” Scary told him. “We’re getting close to the village. Ideally, I’d like to give it a wider berth, but if we want to get to our HLZ early enough to secure the area, we’re already cutting it fine.” He glanced at me. “Especially as we haven’t yet managed to raise HQ.”

  He made it sound like I was personally responsible for the Bowman’s failings. I stared him down without flinching. It seemed to amuse rather than annoy him.

  The Canadian engineer I’d talked to when w
e made our last stop for water moved his horse closer to Scary. “So, what happens if you don’t make contact before we’re due to be picked up?” he demanded.

  Whatever answer Scary might have given him, he never got to utter it. The unmistakable sound of automatic gunfire made us all duck, cursing, and reach for our own weapons. It took a second to realise the rounds were not being aimed at us. They were coming from over the hilltop, from the direction of the village.

  22

  A few minutes after Sporty and Ginger went up the hill, they radioed down for Scary to join them. The request, such as it was, was cryptic, but clearly Scary had worked with his guys long enough to read plenty between the lines. He paused, his eyes flicking in my direction as he gave them a murmured affirmative.

  “Charlie—with me.” He nodded to the L115 hooked onto my saddle. “And bring that with you.”

  He didn’t wait to find out if I followed, just turned on his heel and started up the steep hillside. I jumped down from Mones’ back, grabbed the rifle and scrambled to catch up.

  As soon as I was close enough to be heard at a whisper I demanded, “What’s happening?”

  “Al-Ghazi,” Scary said sourly. “Looks like he wasn’t convinced that the villagers played no part in our escape.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  He paused. “You sure you want to know?”

  I swallowed, nodded. He looked for a moment like he didn’t believe me. Not surprising really. I wasn’t sure I believed myself.

  We neared the ridge line, went low and crawled into position alongside the two other Spec Ops men.

  Below us, the village was too far away to see much detail with the naked eye, but even at this distance I could make out a number of men in the compound of the house where our guys had first met with Zameer. They had herded a group of villagers together and were beating them with long canes or sticks. I guessed the villagers were all women only because they wore the burqa. From the faint screams that drifted upwards, it provided no protection—cultural or otherwise.