by Damien Lewis
Fortunately, Mat had put his water bottles inside his sleeping bag for the night, where his body heat would prevent them from freezing solid. All of the SBS lads – Sam included – had done Arctic survival courses in Norway, and Mat knew that he didn’t have to remind them about such tricks. As for CIA Bob, he was so full of himself that Mat half hoped all his water had frozen solid. In which case, it’d be a great excuse to rip the piss out of him. Mat made a mental note to gather up all the batteries and the electrical gear and distribute them among the team – so that each man could keep it warm inside his sleeping bag at night. Such extreme cold would exhaust batteries in a matter of hours, and quickly render all their electronic gear unserviceable.
Eventually, Mat got up and shuffled over to join the hunched figures on sentry duty. His limbs ached like never before – doubtless the result of the previous day’s climb and a night spent comatose on the hard, unforgiving ground. Maybe he was getting too old for this lark, he thought, ruefully. Thirty was still a good age to be in Brit special forces, and it was possible to still be in the SBS at forty. But few made it much further, unless they were from the senior ranks. Around thirty was really decision time, Mat reflected. Either you stayed in and made a life career out of it, or got out and went into private military work. Sometimes – like when he was freezing his bollocks off at 12,000 feet – a cushy private security job on big bucks did seem appealing.
Mat sat down next to the two, frozen Team 6 sentries in their position overlooking the Naka Valley. They acknowledged each other with a silent nod. Then Mat gazed down below him and the sight that met his eyes all but took his breath away. The floor of the valley was completely obscured by a vast bank of rolling cloud and mist, which was tinged a fierce, fiery pink by the rays of the sun now groping their way over the ridgeline. After a few minutes’ silent contemplation Mat moved over to take a look at the opposite valley.
On that side of the ridgeline the whole of the valley bottom was visible in the dawn light. The river that snaked its way along the valley floor looked as if it were on fire, thick banks of steam rising wraith-like from its waters. Mat had seen something similar to this once, back home at Poole. In winter the River Frome remained warmer than the surrounding land and air, and so the water would throw off clouds of steam in the first light of day. The sight below him now was stunning, and strangely reminiscent of home. Feeling uplifted Mat turned and headed back to the OP.
‘Say, bro, I’ve been kinda noodling over those painted rocks seems like all night long,’ Sam said, as soon as he caught sight of Mat returning to the OP. ‘And I guess I got it figured: they’re minefields, bro. Back there at the fort one of the Delta boys mentioned it – that’s how the Afghans mark off their minefields.’
‘Holy fuck. You’re right, mate. It’s all coming back to me now. Painted rocks as markers … Which means we’ve spent the best part of the journey in here yomping through an effing minefield. Nice of the effing Green Slime to warn us about that in the briefings, wasn’t it, mate?’
‘Go figure. Well, at least we’ll know for the exfil, anyways.’
Neither Mat nor Sam were feeling very hungry, what with the nausea of AMS. They forced a few nuts and some chocolate down them, then went to take over the next sentry duty. Gradually, the mist cleared from the valley and they got sight of the forces camped out below them. The men had spent the night huddled around their campfire and were now readying what looked like a series of armed vehicle patrols. Mat and Sam watched carefully as the force split up. Half of the men – some fifteen fighters armed with AK47s and RPGs – headed off in the direction of a patch of thick forest towards the north-west. The other half set off into the north-eastern hills.
‘Stay here, mate,’ Mat whispered to Sam, as he belly-crawled away from their viewpoint. ‘I’m going to check on the other sentry position – see if we can work out what they’re up to down there.’
Keeping as low as he could, Mat scuttled over to the western edge of the OP. The sentry point was set in a defile between two massive rocks, and the sun never seemed to make it into the shadows down there. Consequently, as Mat squeezed himself into the deep crevice it was freezing cold. After a quarter of an hour or so, there was still no sign of the vehicle patrols, and so Mat extricated himself from the icy embrace of the rocks and headed back to the OP. As he did so, he felt the early-morning rumblings in his intestines that signalled a need to defecate, and quickly. As an added evil, AMS had the tendency to create massive amounts of wind in the sufferer.
Squatting down behind a large rock, Mat pulled out a plastic freezer bag from his pocket and proceeded to try to perform the difficult task of crapping into it. It wasn’t an altogether successful attempt, especially as the farting made it a somewhat explosive effort. It was made all the worse by the knowledge that they had no water to spare for washing. When Mat got back to the OP he proceeded to rub his hands vigorously together in the rough, gritty soil. Somewhere he’d learned that in the absence of soap and water, dry grit would act as an abrasive and a cleaner. As he was trying to ‘wash’ his hands in the sand, Mat caught sight of CIA Bob watching him. The little CIA spook was staring at him as if he had gone completely nuts.
‘What? What is it?’ Mat asked, irritably. ‘Look, I’ve just been having a dump, all right? I’m trying to clean me hands. And unless you got any better ideas, this is the best I can come up with.’
‘Buddy, by “dump” I presume you mean you were tryin’ to use the bathroom, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, question is, buddy, how d’you manage to do it on your hands? You got no toilet paper or something? I mean, I know you Brit soldiers ain’t always the best equipped. But if Her Majesty ain’t up to providing y’all with some loo roll, sure Uncle Sam can loan you some.’
‘Dumb Yank,’ Mat murmured. ‘Well, if you don’t know, mate, it’s standard procedure on a covert op like this one to dump into bags, OK? That goes for spooks like you too, mate. Don’t they teach you nowt in CIA training?’
‘They teach us a lot of things, buddy. But they sure as hell don’t teach us ’bout crapping into plastic bags. Guess the Agency don’t see it as bein’ too high a priority, you know. So what’s all the bags of crap for, buddy? Don’t tell me – it’s some kinda Brit secret weapon. You know, like Her Majesty can’t afford any hand grenades, so you chuck bags of crap at the enemy instead. Is that it?’
‘I’ll be chucking a bag of shite at you soon, mate,’ Mat muttered. ‘If you want to know, you carry all the bags of crap out with you. Otherwise, in no time this place’ll be stinking to high heaven, which’ll be a dead giveaway, won’t it?’
‘Listen, I ain’t no soldier, right? But I figure there ain’t no need up here. You been over to that sentry point between the two rocks, right? You seen how cold it is in there. If we dig a latrine where the sun don’t shine, our crap’ll stay frozen all day and all night long too. Ain’t no one gonna smell nothing from a heap of frozen shi-ite, is there, buddy?’
‘Smart-arse,’ Mat said, with a grin.
‘If any of you guys’ve got a spade, I’ll go dig the latrine myself. I got a feeling like I gotta go bathroom myself right now.’
CIA Bob disappeared into the rocky terrain with one of the Team 6 lad’s folding spades. But barely a minute had passed before he came rushing back again, looking decidedly agitated.
‘What’s up, mate?’ Mat asked, as soon as he caught sight of him.
‘Just seen an enemy patrol,’ CIA Bob hissed. ‘Workin’ their way down the ridgeline right this way, three hundred yards from us at present. Lucky I was havin’ a crap at the time, so they didn’t see me.’
‘Take it you shat yourself, then?’ Mat said.
‘What kinda dumb-assed question is that?’ CIA Bob hissed again.
‘Right, get the lads together, mate,’ Mat said, nodding at Sam. ‘Looks like we’re about to be pinged.’
‘You got it, bro,’ Sam whispered back at him.
‘Ho
w many enemy?’ Mat asked, turning back to CIA Bob.
‘I only saw the one, an’ I wasn’t waitin’ for the rest, buddy.’
‘Weapons?’
‘AK47 looked like.’
‘Uniform or Arab civvies?’
‘Kinda mixture of the two.’
‘Right, lads, looks like shit’s about to hit the fan,’ Mat announced, as the SBS soldiers gathered around. ‘We’ve no idea how many of the fookers there are. But you know the form – get in position covering your arcs of fire and be ready to rumble. If it does kick off, fire on my signal and let’s mallet the fookers. As soon as there’s a chance to break out of here, I’ll pop some smoke and we’re gone. On my lead be ready to move. Grab bags only, and load ’em up with as much ammo as you can carry. You all know the E&E procedure: it’s a fighting withdrawal to the ERV. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ the rest of the lads replied.
Mat settled down behind his Diemaco and laid out half a dozen 40mm grenades on the ground in front of him. He slotted a 40mm round into his grenade launcher, and it slid home with a reassuring clunk. If the enemy were about to hit the OP, he was determined to give them a warm welcome. His mind was racing now, trying to work out how the enemy might have discovered them. All he could think was that the enemy vehicle patrols had picked up their trail and tracked them to the OP. It was a pretty dire situation: fifteen miles of enemy terrain lay between them and the nearest friendly forces, they were surrounded by hostiles and at this altitude they had no hope of calling in an extraction chopper. Welcome to Afghanistan, Mat thought to himself, grimly.
Suddenly, he detected a voice yabbering away up on the ridgeline. From the few words that he understood he knew the language had to be Arabic. If they were about to be ambushed, the enemy sure were making one hell of a lot of noise about it. The soldier came into view, moving slowly down the ridgeline towards them, all the time speaking into an enormous radio handset that he had glued to his ear. The radio was of an ancient Soviet vintage and it all but obscured the soldier’s head. Mat signalled to the rest of his team that they should hold their fire. Nothing about the way the enemy soldier was behaving suggested that he had detected their presence. The radio handset was so large it reminded Mat of a scene from a cartoon. He had visions of a string looping across the rocks to link up with another, equally vast, handset on the other side of the valley.
‘Pssst … Buddy! I ain’t never used one of these things before,’ CIA Bob whispered across to Mat, as he tried to bring his own Diemaco to bear on the enemy figure. ‘What do I do if he points his gun at me?’
‘Nice time to tell me, Spooky,’ Mat hissed back. ‘You pull the trigger and try to bloody shoot him, mate, that’s what.’
‘Tee-hee … Well … OK, then,’ CIA Bob chortled. ‘Come an’ get it, Talibutthole.’
‘Bloody CIA Bob,’ Mat muttered under his breath, as he kept the enemy soldier in his sights. ‘Bloody little midget with a big bushy beard. ’Bout as much use as an ashtray on a bleedin’ motorbike, that’s what you are, mate. If it all goes noisy, don’t you go getting us all killed now, Spooky. And whatever else you do, don’t go pointing that gun anywhere in my direction.’
For fifteen minutes or so, the enemy soldier remained where he was carrying out a long and animated conversation on the radio. Mat figured that he had to be oblivious to the fact that a unit of heavily armed British special forces were ready to blow him to pieces. He was itching to ask CIA Bob what the enemy soldier was talking about. But before he got the chance to do so, the enemy figure moved off down the ridgeline, passing by some fifteen yards from their position. Mat felt sure that he was going to spot them, but his concentration still seemed focused on the giant radio handset. In normal circumstances, Mat would have captured or killed the enemy soldier, just in case. But it was impossible to do so with the guy permanently talking on the radio.
Mat followed the lone operator in his gun sight as he proceeded down the ridgeline and linked up with the rest of his unit, about half a mile further on. Together, they disappeared into the trees to the west of them. Some twenty minutes after the enemy had disappeared Mat stood his men down from their ambush positions. They gathered around for a hurried ‘Chinese parliament’ a group discussion to take stock of what had just happened.
‘I reckon he saw us and was bluffing and they’ll be back later with a larger force,’ Mat announced. He said this partly in order to see what the others were thinking.
‘Bullshit – the guy never even realised we were here, bro,’ Sam replied. ‘He was kinda glued to the radio set, and that was where his world ended. He coulda stepped right over you, bro, and still not noticed.’
‘Say, that was the largest radio piece I ever seen in all my born days,’ CIA Bob added. ‘You reckon it was steam-powered or somethin’? Has to be some reason to build ’em that goddam big.’
‘You must’ve had a handle on what he was saying,’ Mat said to CIA Bob. ‘Any clues there, mate?’
‘Heap of crap from what I could make out. First, he was trying to locate his buddies cos he’d lost them on the hillside and was tryin’ to rejoin them. You probably guessed that much, anyways. Then there was a lot of stuff about Ramadan comin’ up – that’s the big Muslim festival a bit like Christmas but lasts one hundred times as long or seems to –’
‘I know what bloody Ramadan is, mate,’ Mat interjected.
‘Hey, take it easy, I was just explainin’ … Then he was going off on some story about a lost goat which they wanted to catch and kill for the Ramadan feast – by which time, buddy, I lost interest, tell you the truth. They’re just the little guys, far as the AQT set-up round here goes. And they sure as hell weren’t out lookin’ for us, I got no doubts about that.’
‘Well, that’s a bloody relief,’ said Mat. ‘Means we can stay put, instead of hauling all this kit over to another OP.’
After the surprise visit by the enemy patrol, the men went back to their sentry positions. By mid-morning things started to liven up down in the Naka Valley. On the flat stretch of ground several hundred young men and boys had gathered together. They were dressed in white djellabas – long, flowing robes – and the ubiquitous white turbans. Under instruction from half a dozen older men they began carrying out running, jumping, press-ups, sit-ups and other exercises. There was nothing overtly sinister in these PT-type exercises, and no weapons were involved. But Mat figured that this had to be what the US intelligence boys had picked up on – in which case it had to be some sort of unarmed combat training school for terrorist recruits. Mat shot off several dozen rolls of film using his massive telephoto lens, and took notes of the numbers and ages of the trainees.
As the heat built into the afternoon the training came to a halt and the valley became deserted again. Mat wondered whether the terrorist recruits were all in the classrooms now, learning how to make chemical bombs so as to nuke London or something. It was a frightening prospect. He used the down time to transfer his digital stills on to CIA Bob’s Psion, so that they could compile and file their first intel report. In the briefings back at Bagram they had been told that the massive bombardment of the Naka Valley was scheduled for five days from now, which gave them time to research and prepare the targets to be hit. By the time they settled down for their second night in the OP there had been no further significant enemy activity in the valley.
But sometime in the early hours Mat felt himself being shaken awake.
‘Hey, buddy, break out your NVGs,’ Sam whispered. ‘I got a treat in store for you.’
Somewhere above them in the brilliant starlit sky there was the indistinct drone of an aircraft. As Mat donned his goggles, Sam pointed over towards the far side of the valley. As he searched in that direction, Mat picked up a giant tunnel of infrared light beaming down from the sky. It was only visible with the aid of the NVGs. In the eerie green glow of the goggles Mat could follow the infrared searchlight as it illuminated whole swathes of the mountainside. The aircraft operating the searc
hlight was flying a grid pattern. Mat watched the invisible beam probing among the crags for what he presumed were cave entrances where the enemy might be hiding.
‘Holy fuck,’ he said, under his breath. ‘That’s some Maglite they’re using up there.’
‘That, bro, is a Spectre gunship searching for the enemy,’ Sam replied, proudly. The Spectre is a US Airforce C-130 Hercules aircraft transformed into an armoured aerial gun platform, with an unparalleled search and destroy capability. ‘You see it, bro, you know, lighting up the whole hillside with infrared? It’s checkin’ for any signs of the enemy. Awesome, ain’t it, bro?’
‘Yeah … awesome …’ Mat replied. ‘I just hope they don’t clock our position and decide to hose us down by mistake.’
Mat had heard too many stories of friendly-fire incidents involving US aircraft during past conflicts in the Gulf and elsewhere. After half an hour or so the Spectre flew off in the direction of the Shah-i-Khot valley, to the east of them. It hadn’t engaged any targets, which suggested that its search of the Naka Valley had been a fruitless one.
After an otherwise uneventful night Mat shook himself awake at the start of their third day in the OP. As he did so, he spotted CIA Bob rooting around in his tiny rucksack and pulling out some rations.
‘Where the bloody hell’s he keep getting it from, mate?’ Mat whispered to Sam, in amazement. ‘I mean, we’re all rationing ourselves. I dunno how he does it, but, what are we, three days into the OP, and that tiny little rucksack of his is still full of chocolates, biscuits and the like.’
‘Jesus … I’ve no idea, bro,’ Sam replied, stifling a yawn. ‘Reckon Spooky there must’ve been up half the night stealing yours.’
‘Reckon you’ve got a point there, mate,’ Mat said with mock suspicion, turning to inspect his bergen. ‘Wouldn’t put it past him. He’s got the neck of a giraffe, Spooky has. My sack keeps bloody well shrinking, yet he just keeps on pulling stuff out of his. It’s like the bloody Tardis, that little bag of his.’