by Paul A. Rice
His sleep was fitful and far from empty.
Noises, harsh noises, filled his dreaming mind: steel dragons, cackling laughter and screams...
‘Screams, who’s screaming...screaming?’
Jerking awake, listening to the silence.
What silence? The noise was overwhelming. A steel jackhammer, wielded by a giant maniac, was beating a staccato rhythm against the side of his cell. No, it was down the corridor from his cell – outside. The noise was horrific, pulsating waves of shrieking sound entered his ears, their intrusion buffeting what few senses remained in the mush of his half-awake mind.
Screams, shouts, curses and jackhammers.
McGuire shuffled into the sitting position, pulling himself upright in front of the bench, heart beating louder than the giant’s blows. His head was ringing and old mother sphincter was just about to break into a terminal fit. He clenched his muscles against the horrible loose feeling in his guts and tried to get his pureed brain working.
‘A rescue, they are coming for me!’
Yes.
Reaching up, he grasped the hood and began to ease the hateful thing over his face. Then the noise stopped, stopped with the abruptness of an unwound Grandfather clock, stopping when the old man died. ‘Tick-tock-t…’
All noise ceased, time froze. So did his breath.
He waited in frozen, breath-holding fear.
He heard the sound of running feet, the noise filtering into the room, boots running. They were running up the corridor towards his cell, towards him! Then the old woman in his guts stopped, just like the clock. Dropped dead and unleashed her torrent. The flush of escaping fluids only serving to make his fear more palpable – he jerked the hood back down and cowered against the bench, his steel saviour, his protector, with tears running down his face and shit running down his legs.
Murmured voices came from outside the door, keys rattled, hinges complained. A moment of silence before heavy footsteps came thumping across that cold and dirty floor.
He cowered against the bench, crying out: ‘No, please no!’
Iron fingers lifted him to his feet. The chains clanked alarmingly.
A curse, in English...‘Fuck!’
More keys rattling.
‘Get those damn clamps off his legs, Mike. Hurry up!’
Then he was free, stumbling backwards to be saved by those iron hands. They pushed his head down, grabbing his wrist, jerking him forwards.
‘Follow me!’ It was a different voice, Australian, gruff and uncaring. ‘Come on, McGuire. Don’t just stand there, hold my hand and follow me – run or die, you prick!’
Jerking forwards, gripping the man’s large hand, McGuire did as he was ordered, he ran on frozen legs, pins-and-needles firing in waves of static down his thighs as his guide pushed ahead without seeming to care. The rest was nothing but a blur, daylight searing under the lip of the hood. Running whilst bent over – stumbling. Panting like the rabid dog, and twice as thirsty – being inexorably dragged forwards by his iron-fisted rescuer.
Fear and a sudden wave of terrible doubt washed over him.
‘He is a rescuer, they have come to help, right?’
No choice but to follow, dragged by the wrists, stumbling and moaning, blood, snot and tears slicking across his face and dripping down his chin. The hood was now nothing more than a cloth oven. It boiled his head.
He heard people shouting. ‘Move it, come on you guys! That’s it, watch out – fuck, they’re here!’ The sound of gunfire filled his being. Deliberate shots, loud, single explosions. Then the other type, a ripping steel cacophony, an awful clattering melee of automatic fire, such horrendous noise, such madness!
The last coherent sensation he had was one of being lifted clean off the ground and thrown, his equilibrium went haywire in the strobe-like surroundings of the hood, darkness and light flashed in crazy patterns. He felt himself flying through the air. His tensing muscles were unnecessary. The leathery springiness of a car seat saved him from the pain of the anticipated, concrete landing.
Car doors slammed around him, an engine roared and he was thrown against the rear of the seat. Tyres squealed – he felt the vehicle tilting over to the left, then accelerating hard, diesel engine bouncing against the rev-limiter. The first voice from the cell spoke again, the English one, its tone familiar, but...
‘Left-left-left, that’s it, straight through there! Go, go – Go!’
More shooting from behind, there were some loud, metallic, thumping noises on the door by his head. Someone in his car started firing; the noise was so loud that McGuire screamed in anguish. The last thing he heard was the sound of a metallic clinking noise. Then something hot, red-hot, hit the back of his neck.
The pain seared into him. McGuire shrieked: ‘I’m hit! I’m hit!’
In utter fear, he collapsed into the black pit of unconsciousness.
***
Kenneth Robinson glanced across at the driver. ‘We can slow down now, Mikey,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost ‘em. Anyway, Noman’s boys will sort them out if they try and follow us...Did you see him? He was like a Tasmanian Devil! He must have dropped five of ‘em at least!’
‘Yeah, he was outstanding!’ Mike grunted, sliding a sideways glance towards Ken. ‘What are we gonna tell his family?’ he asked, softly.
Ken sat in silence; the recent memory of his deputy rushing without fear towards the heavily-armed kidnappers was still fresh in his mind. His blood still dripped and Ken still smelled it. Noman had gone down in a blaze of glory, not senseless by any means. They hadn’t been told about the extra guards, Noman had seen them first and simply did what anyone would have done, anyone with balls the size of melons – he’d attacked the group of gun-toting kidnappers without a second thought, allowing Ken and Mike to gain access to the building.
Noman’s actions had saved them, but he’d been killed in the process. His bullet-riddled body, now cold and lifeless, lay on the back seat of the white Toyota shadowing them through the packed streets of Karachi.
Ken had no idea what he was going to do. ‘I dunno,’ he said, blowing out a stream of anger-filled breath. ‘I guess the company will have to fork out some cash for Noman’s family – bollocks, what a waste of a good man!’ He looked at the unconscious form of John McGuire.
The man lay across the back seat of the Land Cruiser, a pool of blood and snot soaking through his hood. Ken decided to leave it there as the sight of the man’s face would most likely drive him over the edge.
Noman’s last words were still ringing in his ears.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Ken. I...oh, my son, my boy, oh...’
He died soon after, no more words, no more Noman.
Ken shook the image from his mind. ‘We should make this prick pay Noman’s family – look at him, the waste of space,’ he said, nodding at McGuire’s quivering form, ‘one empty shell-case to the head and he passes out! And he’s crapped himself, too, the dickhead!’ He stared out of the side window to watch the madness of Karachi’s traffic.
Mike nodded. ‘We should get out of here for good, Tommy says he can get us flights anytime we want,’ he said, manoeuvring expertly around a stuttering motorcycle, which carried a family of seven.
Ken reached for his smokes. ‘Yeah, that sounds like a plan to me, I’m up to the gills with these retards,’ he said, nodding at the back seat. He and Mike had known each other for several years now and they’d been through a lot of situations together, both good and bad. Today was definitely leaning toward the latter. Ken knew there were better jobs out there, and better people to work for. ‘Yeah, get me outta here,’ he said, sarcastically. ‘I’m a fucking mercenary!’
Mike laughed, floored the accelerator and burst through the junction, just as a red traffic light illuminated. An array of screeching tyres and blaring horns erupted behind their racing vehicle.
‘Mikey, you’re a twat!’ Ken murmured, grabbing hold of the handle above his side window.
‘And you, Kenny, so
und just like my old Mum…’ the Australian retorted, grinning as he swung the vehicle into yet another tyre-smoking manoeuvre.
More horns.
Ken held on tight. He knew that the ride ahead was likely to be a bumpy one, and not just in the next five minutes, either. He had his mind set on going back to Afghanistan. If Tommy was able get them out of here this week, well...who knows what the future would bring? Ken knew that whatever the outcome, it was likely to be a wild ride. He was right about that, he just didn’t know how right.
2
The Storm
Four years later.
Ken left the office and walked out into the early morning sunlight, standing on the steps for a moment to watch the dust blowing across the airfield. It was the leading edge of a much bigger storm, one that had been brewing for a couple of days now. In the distance he saw the redness of the sand as it flirted with the sky above. Ken had been caught in the open on more than one occasion and it was never good. He stared across the base and watched as the dawn began to unfold into the day, yet another day in this godforsaken, shit-hole of a place – Kandahar airfield, or KAF, as it was known to all who lived there.
The airfield was massive, its perimeter covering a least a couple of square miles. From the air the place looked like an intoxicated spider had been busy. A giant web of makeshift buildings, shipping containers, portacabins, and hundreds upon hundreds of tents in all shapes and sizes littered the place. Huge hangars, sprawling fuel stations, busy kitchens and prefabricated shopping areas lay spread in organised chaos. A maze of dusty roads and endless gravel tracks tethered the whole lot together in a crazy weave. All of it was covered in dust.
Every few minutes overworked helicopters whirled across the airbase, the thudding ‘Wocka-Wocka’ of their spinning rotors easily being drowned out by the incoming thunder of the cargo planes that took off and landed morning, noon and night. It was, however, the explosive howl of the fighter jets that completely dominated the endless noise war. They always took off in pairs, the wingman about fifteen seconds behind his leader, the ground vibrating as they hurtled into the dirty sky with a deafening scream. One of Ken’s American friends had once said: ‘You know what that noise is, buddy? That noise is the sound of freedom, my friend – the sound of freedom!’ The irony of that particular comment still made Ken think, even to this day. With a wry smile, he climbed into his vehicle and inserted the ignition key.
It was already hot at this early hour, endless streams of traffic had picked up their daily momentum and begun to bustle across the base. Heavily-laden military transport trucks, open-topped Land Rovers bristling with machine guns, dozens of American Humvees and convoys of light armoured vehicles scurried amongst the ubiquitous herd of Toyotas, their movements only adding to the dust that rose into the tepid air.
‘Where in God’s name do all these bloody people go every day?’ Ken muttered. He shrugged at the thought and looked at the sky again, letting the Land Cruiser meander through the dust, glancing up through its cracked windscreen as he headed for the bunker. The brown haze had already started to hang above the base like a filthy net-curtain. Half of him did actually hope for a storm, but a proper storm, one with a lot of rain in it. ‘Yeah, a good downpour to wash some of this crap away – that would be great!’ The thought was an appealing one.
Rumbling to a halt besides a half-buried shipping container, he killed the engine and stepped out of the dirty blue Toyota into the heat. Walking over to the container, he waved nonchalantly at the sentry who watched him from the guard tower over to his left. The American infantryman raised his hand in a lazy return salute. They were used to seeing Ken as he was there two or three times a day, every day. Anyway, the sentries were more interested in what was happening on the outside of the wire where the insurgents still caused havoc whenever the fancy took them.
There was a rocket or mortar attack almost every other day, but it was a numbers game and the base was so large that a person would have to be pretty unlucky to be hit. Ken figured it would be one of those ‘shit happens’ moments if he did get hit and didn’t let the thought stop him from going about his daily business. As he started to go down the stairs, Ken paused and shot another look into the horizon behind the airbase, into the far distance where he saw the dust rising again. The storm still brewed and he felt it thickening the air, the sensation pressing down on his mind,
‘Yep, this is gonna be another big one, that’s for sure!’ he thought. The sensation stayed with him as he walked down the stairs to the bunker and reached for his keys – the last really big storm had been during his first year working in this lousy place.
‘That was bloody years ago and I’m still here, I must be out of my tiny little mind!’ He grinned ruefully at the thought as he fumbled with the Chubb padlock.
Once unlocked, he pulled the heavy steel door open, took one last glance at the threatening sky, and then stooped his six foot, broad-shouldered frame into the bunker. It was a long, steel affair that they’d made from an old shipping container, he and Mike placing the steel box into a large hole they had excavated in the unyielding Afghan earth.
There were racks and shelves all around the inside of the container, each one stacked neatly with boxes of crystals and cables. There were also a variety of cameras and lenses, plus a collection of other specialist equipment that his company, K&M Electricals, dealt in. It had taken him and Mike two years of hard work to build up the business and now they were starting to reap the rewards.
Ken’s job today was to install some of his fish-eyed cameras onto the Predator Drones for the Americans. The cameras were the latest, most technically-advanced pieces of equipment that only a handful of people worldwide had access to. If the clients were happy with the results of today’s test, then the deal was going to pay handsomely in the very near future.
He set to the task and opened a box before removing one of the bubble-wrapped cameras. Carefully laying out all the associated parts in a neat row, Ken placed the instruction booklet on the end of the shelf and turned the black camera-mount over in his large hands – some of the wiring confused him, and supposing he might need Mike’s advice after all, he fished out his mobile phone and pushed the speed dial. The slight clicking noise in his ear told the story of an unavailable signal; it was normality in this place and one they all simply became used to working around. He turned back to the camera and tried to figure out what the diagram meant. As he worked, Ken thought of their business and of how much he and Mike had achieved...
They’d met each other whilst doing security work in Iraq and had hit it off immediately, sharing the same sense of humour and a burning intolerance of fools. Both of them had been career soldiers, who at the end of their time in the military, gradually began to find it difficult to make ends meet in civvy-street. And so, like many others before them, they’d ended up working in the security industry. Both of them had spent time serving in the Special Forces of their respective armies: Ken doing years of footslogging, whilst Mike had been heavily involved with electronic warfare.
Eventually, after the disaster in Pakistan, they had ended up working in southern Afghanistan; it was a contract that proved to be their final venture in the security industry. For it was whilst they were down there – in the death trap of Helmand Province – that the two men had decided to do something for themselves.
Mike was a wizard with all things electronic and mechanical; he’d studied for some degree or another, too. Ken didn’t know what field, exactly, all he did know was that Mike only had to raise an eyebrow in the direction of a malfunctioning machine, and the bloody thing just seemed to fix itself. Ken knew how to sell and how to do the figures, so between them they had gradually built up a reliable supply-chain of specialised, electronic equipment. It wasn’t long before their reputation spread and they had wangled their way onto the airbase. They’d been through a lot together and had busted their arses to get this going. Then, before they knew it, things had started to become very sweet in
deed; in fact, they were so busy these days that Ken had even started turning some work away.
Returning to the present, he tried ringing Mike again, there was still no signal. It was the poor network in this bloody place, plus the military guys used a lot of jamming and other electrical equipment, which took to playing havoc with the phones. In disgust, Ken dumped the Nokia on the shelf and turned back to the table to gather some more of the cameras and tools he would need later in the day.
With an increase in its velocity, the outside wind seemed to take on a more menacing intent; he looked up in surprise as the heavy door to the container rattled alarmingly. Remembering he had left the window open in the Land Cruiser, Ken placed his tools back on the shelf and ran outside, bounding up the steps, desert boots clattering on the steel as he rushed into the swirling dust. Reaching the Toyota, he turned the ignition on and activated the electric window. When it had ground upwards to a halt, he pocketed the keys, slammed the door shut and then turned to face the storm.
To his amazement he saw that a large cloud of red dust had already started to cover the far corner of the base. He raised a hand to shield his eyes and tried to see how far away the storm was coming from. Sometimes they were just a few hundred yards deep and passed within minutes – he hoped that would be the case this time. However, by the looks of things, this storm was anything but that, his disbelieving gaze saw that the cloud of dust appeared to be at least a mile long and several hundred feet high.
‘Jesus, that’s massive,’ he said, shaking his head in astonishment.
The speed with which the storm was approaching was unbelievable. Ken only had time to see a stray satellite dish being hurled skywards before he turned on his heels and sprinted for cover. With his vision blurring in the vibration of the storm’s power, eyes blinking against the swirling dust, he raced down the steps to the bunker. Just as he was dragging the door open there was a sudden flash of lightning, the unexpected strobe of white light flickered several times, vividly illuminating his surroundings. As he staggered and looked up from the stairwell, his eyes were filled with the horrifying sight of the storm – it was right on top of him! A wall of debris loomed above, he felt his ears popping and another flash of brilliant light filled his vision.