Last Light

by Alex Scarrow

  Andy was surprised at how bold they were. Surely the people out there had to be aware that a relief force would be combing the area looking for Carter’s patrol? The battalion HQ was only thirty minutes away, they’d be sending someone, surely?

  Or perhaps they know something we don’t?

  The comms system installed in Lieutenant Carter’s Rover had taken several hits from gunfire as the vehicle had swerved across the road towards the pink building. And now they had no reliable means of getting in touch with the battalion.

  The only other way they had of contacting the battalion HQ was, believe it or not, via mobile phone. Out in the wilderness, it was down to luck. But in a place like Al-Bayji, the coverage was pretty thorough.

  In the last hour, once it became apparent that there was no imminent threat of being overrun, and that for now, they could hold the compound, Lieutenant Carter had set about trying to get a call through to somebody, anybody, at battalion HQ. Eventually he managed to get through to a Quartermaster Sergeant, a buddy of Bolton’s, and through him to Major Henmarsh.

  Carter had made the call well away from where any of the lads in his platoon could hear, but for some reason, he had allowed Andy to be within earshot. Andy had heard the news, and it wasn’t good.

  The battalion had abandoned their permanent camp south-west of the town and pulled back to K2, the region’s main airstrip, where they were holding a defensive perimeter as a steady stream of Hercules C130s were landing and evacuating the British army from this region of Iraq, one company at a time.

  Carter had said that the Major was looking into putting together a relief effort of some sort to bail them out, but from the grim look on the young man’s face, Andy guessed the officer had been told this was going to be a very long shot.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Andy.

  ‘Why the hell are they leaving?’

  Andy shook his head. ‘This situation must have got worse.’

  A lot worse if the British army was pulling out.

  ‘I just don’t get it. Surely they’d be sending more troops here to help calm this thing down.’ Lieutenant Carter wiped dust, sweat and grime from his face with his shemagh. ‘Things have just gone crazy.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling there’s much more going on than we know about,’ Andy said quietly. ‘We know it started with a series of explosions in Saudi designed, by someone, to provoke widespread rage.’

  ‘Someone? You mean like Al-Qaeda?’

  Andy shrugged, ‘Possibly, they’re the obvious candidates. This does feel . . . orchestrated, doesn’t it?’

  Carter nodded absent-mindedly, distracted with more immediate concerns.

  ‘Listen,’ he said after a while, ‘I’m not sure they can spare the men to come after us. It sounded like they were stretched thin and getting a lot of contacts around K2.’ He bit his lip again, and then added, ‘We might have to make our own way out of this mess.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ replied Andy.

  ‘But don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell my men. Okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Carter squatted down on his haunches and leant against the pink wall, burying his face in his hands.

  ‘Shit, I don’t know what to do,’ he muttered.

  Andy looked around and noticed some of the platoon looking uncertainly at the officer from their stations around the compound wall. He kneeled down beside him.

  ‘Your men are watching you,’ he whispered quietly.

  The young officer immediately straightened up and sucked in a deep breath. ‘You’re right,’ he replied with a nod and a grim smile. ‘I’ll work something out.’

  Andy nodded, ‘Sure.’ He wanted to give the lad a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but with those squaddies intently studying their CO, he knew they probably shouldn’t witness that. No matter how screwed up the young Lieutenant thought the situation was, as far as the lads were concerned, this had to look like a momentary operational glitch, that things were in hand and a remedy already on its way. Lieutenant Carter had to look upbeat.

  Andy didn’t envy him having to brass it out like that. He stood up and made his way across the compound to where Mike, Erich and Ustov sat in the shade of the parked vehicles and, a few yards away, Farid and the two young drivers sat, watched over by a soldier.

  Mike nodded in the direction of the Lieutenant. ‘What’s the news then?’

  ‘We’re not the only ones with problems.’

  ‘And what the fuck is that meaning?’ asked Erich.

  Andy felt he had to support Carter and throw some sort of a positive spin on things, but it felt crap lying to them. ‘It means it might take them a little while to get round to helping us out. But they will.’

  Mike offered a wry smile. ‘Sure.’

  Andy’s mobile phone began to ring. He looked down at it with some surprise and checked the number of the incoming call.

  ‘It’s the wife,’ he muttered with a bemused look, which triggered a snort of laughter from both Mike and Erich, whilst Ustov simply looked confused.

  ‘I told you honey, never call me at work,’ quipped Mike.

  Andy smiled and then answered the call. ‘Jenny?’

  ‘Andy?’ she replied. The signal was astonishingly clear. ‘Oh God. Are you all right over there?’

  Andy was tempted to reply with some dry humourless sarcasm; after all, the last time they’d spoken, as he’d packed his bags preparing to leave for this particular job five days ago, it had been somewhat less than cordial.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I was worried. They’re saying on the news that the whole of the Middle East is in a right mess.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Jenny? What do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know, it seems like things are happening everywhere. There’ve been bombs and explosions in . . . in central Asia somewhere. ’

  ‘Georgia, near the Tengiz fields?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. They mentioned that place on the news . . . Tengiz. They’re talking about oil shortages, Andy. Just like . . . you know, just like—’

  ‘Yes,’ he finished for her, ‘I know.’

  ‘And then this morning there was one of those huge oil-tankers blown up in—’

  ‘The Straits of Hormuz?’

  ‘Yes. You heard about it? Apparently it’s blocked off the Straits to all the ships that had oil and could have delivered it.’

  Andy felt something ice-cold run down his spine. ‘Yes . . . yes, I heard that from somewhere.’

  The Tengiz refineries hit, Hormuz blocked, pan-Arabian unrest triggered by an attack on something like the Ka’bah - all these events within twenty-four hours of each other. Exactly as described.

  ‘Andy, I’m scared. The trains aren’t running. They’ve stopped the trains, and there’s going to be some big announcement made by the Prime Minister. The radio, the TV . . . they’re all talking about problems right across the world.’

  The only edge Jenny and the kids had right now over most of the other people around them was the few hours’ advance warning he could give her. She had to sort herself out right now.

  ‘Jenny, listen to me. If they announce the sort of measures I think they might at lunchtime, the shops will be stripped bare within hours. It’s going to be fucking bedlam. You’ve got to get the kids home, and go and buy in as much food—’

  ‘I can’t! I’m stuck up in Manchester.’

  Damn! He remembered she’d arranged some bloody job interview up there. Part of her whole screw-you-I-can-do-just-fine-on-my-own strategy.

  ‘Is there no way you can get home?’ he asked.

  ‘No. No trains, no coaches. It looks like they’ve stopped everything.’

  ‘Then get Leona to make her way down from Norwich, pick up Jake, take him home and buy in as much as she can!’

  A pause.

  ‘Jenny,’ continued Andy, ‘she won’t listen to me. I spoke to her yesterday. I think she thinks I’m just being an over-anxious wimp or something. She’ll li
sten to you. After all, you were always the big sceptic.’

  He heard laboured breathing on the end of the phone; Jenny was crying. ‘Yes, yes okay. Oh God, this is serious isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I think it will be. But listen, you need to do this now. Do you understand? Don’t take “no” for an answer from her.’

  She can be so bloody wilful and stubborn.

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ she replied, her voice faltering.

  ‘And then you’ve got to find a way to get down to London to be with them,’ Andy added.

  ‘I know . . . I know.’

  ‘Any way you can, and as quickly as possible.’

  Jenny didn’t respond, but he could hear her there, on the end of the line.

  ‘Andy,’ she said eventually, ‘this is really it, isn’t it - you know . . . what you’ve been—’

  ‘Please, Jenny. Just get our kids safely home,’ he replied.

  CHAPTER 18

  11.18 a.m. local time Al-Bayji, Iraq

  Sergeant Bolton joined Private Tajican standing on the stack of pallets and keeping a watch on events outside in the street.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked the Fijian.

  ‘Movement, Sergeant. Something going on.’

  Bolton looked up at the soldier who dwarfed him both in height and width. Tajican pointed towards some activity down at the far end of the boulevard. ‘There, sir.’

  He squinted against the dazzling mid-morning sunlight; even though the normally blue sky was veiled by a coating of featureless white cloud, the diffuse light leaking from behind made it hard not to screw up his eyes. A crowd of men were gathered around a truck parked in the entrance to a side-street, they were doing something with it, but it was hard to make out exactly what.

  ‘What are you buggers up to?’ Sergeant Bolton murmured to himself.

  ‘No good?’

  Bolton grinned and nodded. ‘S’right lad, up to no bloody good.’ He spoke quietly into his throat mic on the command channel. ‘Lieutenant? I think we might need to get ready for another contact.’

  Across the compound, Carter stirred to life, walking swiftly across the dirt, doing his best to look relaxed and in control. He weaved through the vehicles parked in the middle of the compound over to where Bolton and Tajican were standing on the pallets stacked against the wall.

  ‘What is it, Sergeant?’

  Bolton ducked down behind the wall and turned to face his CO. ‘Well, sir, looks to me like they’re rigging something up on a truck.’

  ‘More specifically?’

  Bolton shot a glance at the big Fijian. ‘I think they’re loading some ordnance, some sort of improvised explosive device.’

  Tajican looked at the Sergeant and then nodded in agreement, ‘Reckon so, chief, an IED.’

  Carter sighed. He climbed up on to the stack to join them, studied the activity for a few seconds, before ducking down and turning to the two men.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? They’ll drive the bloody thing over here, probably park by the gate and then set it off.’

  Sergeant Bolton nodded. ‘Yup.’

  ‘So, we’ve got to stop it getting over here. What have we got in the platoon that’s meaty enough to disable it?’

  ‘The Minimi might have done it,’ replied Bolton. ‘We’ve got a couple of SA80s with grenade launchers . . . USGs.’

  ‘Have we got anyone good enough with their aim to drop a grenade into the back of that truck?’

  ‘Lance Corporal Westley, the Geordie lad, he’s pretty fit with it, but not at this range, sir. We’ll need it to be closer. Maybe we can catch it on the approach.’

  ‘Wait till it’s a moving target? That’s a pretty crap idea, Sergeant.’

  ‘Or we can try sending some of our boys out to nobble it before they get going, sir?’

  Lieutenant Carter thought about it for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘No, they’d be dead before they got fifty yards - they’ve got guns on every damned roof.’

  The options weren’t great, or varied. He balled his fists and tapped them together a few times as he weighed one against the other.

  ‘Okay, let’s go with your first crappy idea, Sergeant. We’ll put every gun we have on it, and the two USGs too if . . . when, it starts heading towards us. Maybe we’ll get lucky and something will hit the explosives they’ve loaded in the back.’

  Carter took another peek over the wall. It looked like they’d just about finished loading whatever it was, and some activity was going on amongst the crowd towards the front of the truck.

  Looking for a volunteer to drive, eh? That was something they seemed to have an endless supply of over here in this land of martyrs; young men ready to die.

  Andy watched Mike as he got up and wandered over to the three Iraqis huddled anxiously together in the shadow of one of the Land Cruisers, a soldier a few yards away watching them. Mike squatted down in front of them, studying them silently for a moment as he held the AK47 loosely - not aimed, but not exactly swung away either.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Farid shrugged, ‘I’m not understand.’

  ‘It’s simple, why the hell are you in here, and not out there with your buddies? I mean, if you’re such a good little brother like you said, and you think our shitty western ways stink, why aren’t you out there with them, taking pot-shots at us?’

  ‘I am a Muslim, is wrong for me to take your life, even though you are an infidel - even though you are nothing.’

  Mike screwed his face up in disgust. ‘Oh we’re nothing are we? We’ve sacrificed several thousand young American lives so you savages can have a democracy; a chance to fucking well vote.’

  ‘And we will replace with Shari’ah as soon as you Americans gone,’ replied Farid defiantly. ‘Your ways are not ours.’

  Andy could see the exchange between the two men was going to escalate quickly, particularly given how strung out they all were. He pulled himself up to his feet and walked over, uneasily, wondering how he was going to calm him down.

  ‘Mike,’ he interrupted quietly. ‘Take it easy. I don’t think he means “nothing” in the same way we’d mean it. It’s a language thing.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he smiled dryly. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I just hand over this gun to him, or one of his little buddies? You heard him . . . we’re nothing to him, just vermin. You think that’s a good idea? Think your little old friend here will stand shoulder to shoulder with you?’

  ‘Look,’ Andy replied, ‘this isn’t helping anyone, Mike. Like it or not, Farid and these two boys are in this mess alongside us. They’re here because they’re just as big a target as we are. Think about it! They’re LECs - locally employed civilians. If the insurgents out there get hold of them, they’ll be made an example of. You can bet on that.’

  Mike looked at him. ‘You trust them?’

  Andy shrugged. He wasn’t sure what answer he could honestly give; trust them or not, they were all in the same boat right now.

  CHAPTER 19

  8.21 a.m. GMT UEA, Norwich

  Leona smiled.

  Two nights in a row now.

  It was definitely looking very promising. She had half-expected Dan to make up some excuse yesterday, about not being able to get together again last night. Most lads his age were like that.

  Break the glass, grab the goodies and run.

  But it seemed not Dan. She hated leaving him this morning, dashing out whilst he was still stretched out and dozy in his messy bed. Staying over at his place hadn’t exactly been planned, and now she had to scurry over to her rooms on campus to get her books before today’s first lecture. It was only halfway back up the Watton Road entrance to the UEA grounds that she remembered she had left her phone switched off.

  It rang as soon as she switched it on.

  ‘Leona?’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘For crying out loud, Mum and me have been trying to get hold of you all morning. Are you all right?’

 
‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Listen, your mum and I have talked. We both want you to go get Jake and go home.’

  ‘You mean because of those riots?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded tired and stressed.

  Leona ground her teeth with frustration.

  Not now. Please, not now.

  ‘Dad, I’m right in the middle of some really important assignments, ’ she replied.

  And I’ve finally landed Daniel, don’t let’s forget that.

  ‘Leona, I’m not going to argue with you, love.’

  Love. Leona rolled her eyes. God that was irritating, Dad only called her that when he was about to blow off steam, like some flipping primeval volcano; annoying actually, rather than intimidating.

  ‘Look Dad, I’m not—’

  ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN!’ his voice barked furiously.

  Leona recoiled. The phone nearly slipped out of her hand on to the ground.

  ‘YOU WILL do as Mum said. Leave now, pick up Jake, go home, and get as much tinned food as you can.’

  Leona was stunned into silence. Now, all of a sudden, sensing things had become serious.

  ‘Are we going to have riots over here?’ she asked. ‘I heard something on the radio yesterday about—’

  ‘Yeah, it may happen. Food shortages, power shortages, all sorts.’

  His voice sounded stretched and thin, and worried - frightened even. She had heard that sort of fear in his voice once before, years ago.

  ‘Dad, did you get my email?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My email. I sent it on Friday?’

  ‘What? Yeah . . . yeah I got it, but what’s—’

  ‘I saw one of those men on TV, Dad. One of those men I saw in New York.’

  There was a pause, although she could hear a lot of noise in the background. Voices shouting and banging like someone hitting a nail with a hammer.

  ‘I’m not sure we should talk about this, Leona. Not over the phone.’

  ‘Why?’

  Another long pause.

  ‘Leona, please just get your brother, and go home. Buy as much food and water as you can.’