by Zoe Sharp
Children huddled around the women’s legs. The men laid into them without mercy, adults and children alike. The sheer effort they were putting into the blows, the power and the force of them, spoke to passion or venom.
My stomach lurched at the sight of it. I tasted bile in my throat, swallowed it down. It left a greasy slither behind my ribcage.
“What the hell are they doing?”
Scary leaned in close and spoke directly into my ear. His voice was soft enough to make me flinch.
“When the Tali first came to power they enforced a particularly hard-line version of sharia law. Corporal—and capital—punishment was commonplace for the slightest infraction. So, behold the justice system in action, Afghan style.”
“But what are the women and kids supposed to have actually done?”
He shrugged. “Beyond being the property of men they think are traitors? Who knows.”
“Aye,” Ginger said. “The Tali don’t think much of you lot. Chattels, you know.”
I didn’t respond to that, eyes scanning the buildings, people, and vehicles nearby. Al-Ghazi’s men had arrived by truck rather than on horseback. There were two old Toyota Land Cruisers and a six-wheel Russian ZIL-131 truck pulled up in the open area in front of the house where Brookes had gone to treat the young boy who was another of Zameer’s nephews. What would happen to him now, I wondered?
There were armed men everywhere. Another concentration of them clustered in the street. Then one moved and I caught a glimpse of something bundled at his feet. Not quite trusting my eyes, or my imagination, I quickly folded out the L115’s bipod legs, settled it, and uncapped the scope.
As I put my eye to it, the scene came into sharp focus. A man was on the ground, but it was now clear that I could see his body only from the waist up. At first I’d feared what I was looking at might be only part of a man, dismembered. My belief that people die neat and tidy and in one piece, culled from watching too many TV detective shows, had not survived my first close encounter with a roadside explosive device out here.
But as I watched, I realised the man wasn’t on the ground.
He was in it.
His legs and lower torso, including his hands and forearms, were buried in the trampled earth. His clothing was torn, his face bloodied. It took me a moment or two to realise who it must be.
“But that’s…Zameer,” I said dumbly. I looked to Scary, almost reproachful. “You didn’t kill him.”
“No, more fool me, I didn’t.”
“Should’a slotted him while you had the chance,” Sporty commented dryly. “At least you would’ve made it quick, eh?”
There were a lot of questions I could have asked—should have asked—but the time for that might come later. “What are they going to do to him?”
“Stone him to death—or make his family and friends do it for them,” Scary said, nothing in his voice. “Probably tomorrow, or the next day—if the heat and dehydration doesn’t do the job for them.”
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked, glancing at their set faces. “How do we do this?”
“How do we do what?” Sporty demanded.
I resisted the urge to grind my teeth. “How do we get him out of there?”
“We don’t,” Scary said flatly.
“You mean you’re not even going to attempt to do anything? You have to be kidding me!”
“Charlie, there are seven of us, plus three civilians and one prisoner, against probably thirty-five or forty experienced Tali fighters. We’re weapons light and time poor. What the fuck do you suggest we do?”
“Suggest?” I repeated, trying to keep both outrage and volume from my voice. “I don’t know. You’re the experts. But I sure as hell know what I suggest we don’t do, which is to leave him at the mercy of those bastards!”
“’Course not,” Ginger said. He flicked me a quick assessing look I failed to interpret fully. “That’s where you come in.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You’ve already proved you can hit a target at around seven hundred metres, and the suppressor means they won’t be able to pinpoint a single shot.”
“Wait a minute. You surely don’t expect—?”
“Yeah,” Scary repeated, and the grim smile on his face made me realise he’d laid a neat trap for me, and I’d walked straight into it. “You don’t want to leave Zameer to be tortured to a slow and painful death at the hands of Al-Ghazi, so here’s something you can do about it. Kill him.”
23
“One round straight through his mouth and you take out the brain stem,” Ginger said. “He’ll never know what hit him.”
“Surely, there’s got to be another way.”
“If you can suggest one, I’m all ears.” Scary’s gaze settled on me. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed before that his eyes were so dark they were almost black. Like his soul? I shook my head a little, trying to rattle out such fanciful imaginings.
“If he was one of your own men, would this still be your best solution?” I demanded. Nobody spoke. “No, I thought not.”
“If it was me facing the same thing, I’d be praying one of you had the guts to pull the trigger and have done with it,” Ginger said bluntly. “Better than the alternative, eh?”
“It’s still nowhere near as good as being rescued, is it?”
“We don’t have the resources,” Scary said, more weary than exasperated.
“What about Al-Ghazi?”
“What about him?”
“If we took him out instead, would the others kill Zameer anyway or fall back?”
“Depends,” Scary said. “If they thought Zameer was in any way to blame, then they’d probably wipe out the whole village. If not…I don’t know. Irrelevant, in any event.”
Something in me couldn’t resist goading him. “I thought Al-Ghazi was your ‘high-value target’? I thought half the reason for this bloody mission in the first place was to grab him. Surely it’s better if you eliminate him rather than simply let him go?”
Scary shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. He’s an identified and identifiable player. Take him out and who knows who might rise up to take his place. If it’s somebody we have no intel on, we could be taking one step forwards and two back.”
“Better the devil you know, is that it?” I asked sourly.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but I’m a realist.”
He started to shuffle backwards, away from the scene below. I wasn’t about to let him off that easily.
“If you were planning on snatching Al-Ghazi, somebody else would have had to take his place anyway, wouldn’t they?”
He paused, only for a moment. “Yeah, but that would have been more than compensated for by whatever info we managed to squeeze out of him.”
“He must be important, this guy. After all, you were prepared to risk everything—even going on with half your men dead or injured—to get your hands on him. You sure you want to give up on that now, when he’s right there?”
Scary threw me a warning glare that said he knew exactly what I was trying to do, and what he thought of the attempt. It wasn’t complimentary. I didn’t care.
Reckless now, I ploughed on. “What’s lost by exploring the possibilities?”
“Time we may not have,” Scary snapped.
“Which one is Al-Ghazi, for a start?”
It was Ginger who spoke. “He’s inside Zameer’s place.”
“OK, so if you were going to extract him from there, how would you go about it? Hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“For someone who hates being patronised,” Scary bit out, “you do a fucking good job of it yourself.”
I grinned at him. “Yeah, irritating, isn’t it?”
There was a long pause, then Ginger said diffidently, “At least we’ve been inside the house ourselves, so we know the layout—ground floor, anyway.”
“And we might get some info out of matey-boy back there, too,” Sporty said, jerking his head in the direction of
the still-bound-and-gagged Ramin.
“Oh, don’t you fucking start—!”
Scary’s growl was cut short, tense. My eyes swivelled back to the scope, skimming across the scene below. There was movement in the doorway of Zameer’s house that made me stop scanning abruptly. I tracked instead as a man stepped out, tugging a boy by one arm.
The kid must have been six or seven. He didn’t look good. His skin was pale with a waxy tint and there were dark circles under his eyes. His neck seemed too slender to support his head, and his hair was unevenly flattened and tufted by restless friction, like he’d just been taken from his bed.
I lifted my head. “Is that—?”
“Zameer’s nephew—another of his nephews—yes,” Scary said tightly. “The one Brookes treated last time we were here.”
“What’s he going to do to the kid?”
“Kill him in front of Zameer? Make him pull the trigger? Hand him the first rock? How the fuck should I know?”
I could hear the frustration as well as the anger in Scary’s voice, and this time it wasn’t directed towards me.
He glanced at Sporty. “Bring Ramin up—quietly. Let’s see what he can tell us once he’s seen what they’re about.”
Sporty nodded and slithered away hardly making a sound. Thirty seconds later he was back, forcing Ramin down low alongside us. The gag was gone, although his hands were still tied. Sporty held a combat knife almost casually at his throat, just in case he thought about doing something brave, or stupid.
“Ask him—” Scary began, then stopped. “Shit, where’s Tate?”
“I…speak English,” Ramin said with obvious reluctance.
“Kept that quiet, didn’t you?” Scary muttered. He pointed. “You see what Al-Ghazi is planning on doing to your father? And your little cousin?”
Ramin’s sharply indrawn breath answered for him.
“If we try to stop Al-Ghazi, will your people help us, or try to kill us?”
“I will help you.”
“Not quite the answer I was looking for,” Scary muttered, “but it’s a start.”
“Most cover to the northwest. We can get to within fifty metres before we have to make a break,” Sporty put in.
“Tate can spot for her, and we’ll take the medic, eh?” Ginger said, his mind already bouncing ahead. At Scary’s nod, he and Sporty eased backwards and disappeared down the slope, taking Ramin with them.
He didn’t want to leave his vantage point, as if he couldn’t bear to tear his eyes away from the unfolding events, and what was about to happen to his father. Al-Ghazi had now pulled the boy out into the street. When the youngster stumbled and almost fell, I felt my breath hitch at what might come next.
But Al-Ghazi bent and lifted the boy easily into his arms, settling him on one hip with all the ease of a natural father. I could see them talking intently, their heads bent close together. Whatever the man said must have reassured the youngster, because his struggles ceased and he wrapped his arms around the man’s neck, hanging on.
When they reached the open area where Zameer was half-buried in the dirt, Al-Ghazi twisted so that the boy could look down on his uncle. Zameer began to thrash in the dirt, trying to get loose. He was not successful.
“You may still have to take out Zameer, if they start on him,” Scary said. “Trust me, it’ll be an act of mercy.”
“And if Al-Ghazi makes a move on the boy before you’re in position?”
Scary’s face hardened. “Then kill the fucker,” he said. “Think you can do that?”
I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t see the hesitation. He looked about to ask again when Tate scrambled up next to us and his attention was diverted into instructions that Tate should spot for me.
“What, from here?”
“No,” Scary said. “I want you to move back to that far ridge.”
Tate’s eyes followed the finger pointed in the direction of another mountainside, eyebrows climbing. “Jeez, that’s got to be another three or four hundred metres.”
His estimate was probably about right. We were already close to five hundred metres from the village. I knew the extra distance would test me in all kinds of ways, but Scary brushed aside Tate’s protest. “She’s proved she can shoot at that range.”
“Even so—”
“Stay here and they’ll blast the pair of you before she’s got a second shot off. Move back, and we’re planning to keep them too occupied to set up a decent response, even if they could get close enough.”
Tate threw me a dirty look, and I knew he was remembering the fact I could have shot the guards around the campfire after he and the others were taken prisoner, but had not done so. “Yeah, she can. Question is, will she?”
“Cut that out,” Sporty told him. “It’s part of your job to make sure she does, mate.”
Tate’s hands tightened reflexively around his assault rifle and for a moment I wondered how exactly he intended to carry out that order.
It took us sixteen minutes to reach a suitable sniper’s nest, on the crest of the far ridge with large enough rocks around us to shelter behind and conceal our silhouette. There was a downward slope at our backs to cover a withdrawal that I could only hope wouldn’t turn into an all-out retreat.
It took another two minutes for my pulse to stabilise enough that I thought I stood a chance of hitting anything I aimed at.
Tate called for a sit-rep. I recognised Ginger’s voice over my headset.
“Too many X-rays,” he said. “If we’re going to do this quietly, we gotta take him inside the house.”
“Roger that,” Scary acknowledged. “Charlie, do you have eyes on the target?”
“He’s still in the open, and still holding the boy.”
“Roger that. If we have to abort, do you have a clear shot?”
Through the scope, I could see Al-Ghazi plainly. But he had his left side facing me, and the boy was on his right hip. As he shifted his feet, I caught occasional glimpses of the kid’s face directly behind his head.
The L115 was loaded with .338 Lapua Magnum rounds that left the muzzle at a velocity in excess of nine hundred metres a second. The gun had an effective range of fifteen hundred metres. Passing through a human skull, even at somewhere over eight hundred metres distance, would not significantly slow the projectile.
Certainly nowhere near enough to stop it going straight through another, smaller, head, so close to the first.
“Negative,” I said. “I have no clear shot.”
Below, in the village, the crowd was moving, bunching together, almost being herded towards the open area and Zameer. It didn’t take a genius to work out the show was about to begin. Al-Ghazi showed no signs of heading back to the house, and I guessed he wouldn’t now until it was all over.
Until it was all too late.
Scary’s voice came over the net sharp with tension. “If you want to do anything about this, Charlie, you’re out of time.”
“Christ,” I muttered, twitching my sights between the old man buried up to his chest, and the man with the boy on his hip.
“What are you waiting for? Take the shot. Take the fucking shot!”
24
“What are you waiting for? Take the shot. Take the fucking shot!” It was Sporty’s voice I could hear.
“She’s not up to it,” Tate muttered. “I told you she wouldn’t be.”
“Shut up, for fuck’s sake. Charlie, listen to me. Can you confirm you have eyes on the target?”
I lifted my face from the adjustable cheek piece on the stock of the rifle and blinked away sweat caused partly by the heat, and partly by a mix of adrenaline and fear. I could still feel the impression of the pad against my skin. I’d been leaning into it so hard all my teeth felt pushed out of line.
I was bedded-in behind the gun, and calculated that I was approximately eight hundred and seventy metres from my target. With the sun over my left shoulder, in good cover, there was little chance anyone in the village would see or hear
the first shot.
It wasn’t that which stayed my hand.
The Schmidt and Bender scope was good for up to two thousand metres. At this distance the man who was my intended target showed up pin-sharp and gin-clear. Maybe that was the problem.
He stood holding the child, with a group of his men clustered loosely around him. They were laughing, at ease and unsuspecting. I could tell from the body language that they respected him as much as they feared him. Something about the way they followed his lead, listened attentively when he spoke, nodding and smiling with anticipated approval.
He seemed close enough that I could see the weave of his clothing, the stubble on his face, a lattice of burn scars on the side of his neck. He was human and breathing, no longer an abstract series of equations involving range, elevation, and windage.
Scary’s voice was low and quiet in my ear. “I repeat: can you confirm you have eyes on the target?”
I swallowed. The fine desert dust coated my teeth.
“Affirmative.”
“He’s just a target, Charlie. Don’t think of him as anything but that. Remember what he’s done, what he’s about to do, and not what he’s doing right now, OK?”
“OK.”
“You are clear to engage. If it helps, I’ll make it a fucking order.”
I muttered, “Have that,” and nestled my face onto the cheek pad again, flexed my right hand around the pistol grip. The fact the grip was intended for a larger hand, that the shoulder pad had been hastily modified to take my smaller frame into account rammed it home to me, now more than ever, that this was not my weapon. Not my task. That I was not supposed to be here, and there would be hell to pay when the top brass found out.
I took a breath, shut my eyes a moment and breathed out, long and slow, willing my heart rate to steady along with my nerves. I tuned out Tate alongside me. He was cursing more loudly now, vibrating with tension and anger.
When I opened my eyes again, Al-Ghazi was still exactly where he had been in my sight picture. He’d turned slightly sideways, though, so I could see more of the boy. There was just a chance any shot I fired at the man might not also kill the child.