by Tom Cain
Even so, they could still make a damn nuisance of themselves. Give a handful of insurgents a bunch of AK-47s, throw in some rocket-propelled grenades or a .50 calibre rifle, and give them a wall or a boulder to hide behind, or a gully to lie in, and they could, at the very least, pin you down for fifteen to twenty minutes.
Then the ‘Punisher’ arrived in Afghanistan. And that changed everything.
Punisher was the nickname that its first awestruck users had given to a device the US Army categorized as the XM-25 Individual Airburst Weapons System. Simply put, the XM-25 was a semi-automatic grenade launcher rifle. But that was like saying that, simply put, a Bugatti Veyron was a car. The truth was, the XM-25 was unlike any other hand-held weapon on earth. It simply removed the concept of cover from the battlefield. And as Morales and his buddies all agreed, it looked frigging cool while it did it, like some kind of mean, black sci-fi ray gun.
The way it worked was this: on top of the rifle there was what looked like a regular telescopic sight, but was actually a computerized fire-control system, accurate up to seven hundred metres. If the insurgents were hiding behind a wall, you just pointed the gun in that direction. The Punisher calculated precisely how far away the target was, and then transmitted that information down the barrel of the gun to a high-explosive 25 mm grenade. But of course, the wall wasn’t the actual target; the insurgents hiding behind it were. So you, the soldier, used a button by the trigger to add a metre or two to the range, and the grenade adjusted itself to that, too. Then you fired, aiming just above the wall, and the grenade shot away, went over the wall, and then exploded in the air behind it, blowing the enemy away. Use an armour-piercing round and you didn’t have to go over a wall or an enemy vehicle; you could go straight through it. Man, it was a beautiful thing to behold.
So far the Punisher was still in its field-trial phase of development. There hadn’t been more than a couple of dozen in the entire Afghanistan theatre of operations. But those guns had been game changers. There were four grenades in a Punisher’s magazine. Fire them all, and the fight just ended. Engagements that used to last twenty minutes were over in less than five. US casualties dropped to zero. Soldiers in the units that had been selected to test the XM-25 would beg to be allowed to use it, like kids fighting over a new toy. Today it was Morales’s turn and he hated to admit it, but damn he was excited.
Morales belonged to a platoon that had recently arrived at COP (Combat Outpost) Wanda, a brand-new installation near the village of Aranas. It was situated on a bluff, looking down the valley to the Waygal River. The only way in or out was by helicopter. All their supplies came in by air. The first day there, as Morales looked at the hills all around him, knowing that the insurgents were out there somewhere, just waiting to attack, he’d felt like he was living in a twenty-first-century version of Fort Apache. But today he had the Punisher. Today his motto was, ‘Bring it on.’
Morales woke shortly after 4.00 a.m. and took up his post at Observation Post Highpoint, a lookout a short way from the main body of the COP. Morales and the other men in his eight-man section had built Highpoint themselves. With their trenching tools they’d dug up what meagre quantities of dirt could be prised from the rocky terrain, and used them to fill, or in some cases part-fill, the collapsible steel and nylon HESCO containers that acted as their fortifications. The observation post’s location provided superb views across the Waygal Valley for miles around. But as Morales was about to discover, this long-range visibility came at a price. A ravine ran down the side of the hill and came within thirty metres of the HESCO barricades, passing so close that the HESCOs created a blind spot for the men behind them, who were unable to see down into the bottom of the ravine. Not that they were aware of that just yet.
Shortly after dawn, the observation post came under small-arms fire from an insurgent position behind an outcrop of boulders atop a ridge about three hundred metres away. This was no big deal. The insurgents always preferred to move at night and attack with the first light of day. Morales ordered his men to return suppressing fire. They didn’t have to take anyone out just yet. They just had to keep them in one place long enough for the Punisher to do its thing.
‘Say hello to my leetle frien,’ Morales joked as he pressed the control that charged up the XM-25 and made it ready for use. Like his men, he had focused all his attention on the hostile position on the ridge. He had no idea that a dozen insurgents had made their way up the ravine during the night; not until the first grenade exploded inside the observation post, killing two of his men and wounding a third. Another grenade took out a fourth soldier. Morales himself was not targeted by the blasts. He and his remaining three troops were left for the Afghan fighters, inheritors of a guerrilla warfare tradition that dated back to the days of Alexander the Great and beyond, who scrambled over the HESCOs like pirates boarding a ship, armed with rifles, pistols and razor-sharp knives.
Morales had no means of protecting himself. The XM-25 was a fantastic weapon so long as its grenades exploded far enough away not to harm the soldier who had launched them. But at this kind of hand-to-hand range it was pointless: just a high-tech way of committing suicide. So Chico Morales never even fired a single round before he died, his throat sliced open by a curved steel blade. But in his last few seconds two thoughts crossed his mind. The first was that the insurgents had attacked in a way he’d never seen before: like trained professional soldiers. The second was that he could have sworn he heard someone shouting orders to them. And those orders had been given in English.
One of the insurgents stood over Morales’s body, even as the last few spurts of blood from his carotid artery were soaking into the earth around his corpse. He reached down and prised the XM-25 from Morales’s fingers.
‘Cheers, mate,’ the insurgent said. ‘I’ll be having that.’
Tuesday, 28 June
34
* * *
Carn Drum Farm
BRYN GRYFFUD AND Dave Smethurst left at four in the morning, driving the camper van; Uschi Kremer had already left in a separate vehicle late the previous night.
The remaining members of the Forces of Gaia had all woken early to see Gryffud and Smethurst off. Some of them went straight back to bed, others were gripped by a combination of anticipation, tension, anxiety and downright fear as the seconds ticked by. They brewed coffee, paced around the farmhouse kitchen, or made futile attempts to get some rest. All but one, though, stayed within Carn Drum farmhouse.
The exception was one of the two remaining women, Deirdre Bull. The closer the time came to the moment when the group would finally engage in direct action against the forces destroying the environment, the more troubled she became. Neither she nor any of the other members of the group had been told what the precise target would be – this, they had been told, was for their own protection as well as operational security – but she knew they were engaged on an act of destruction. And it made little sense to Deirdre to fight one act of ecological vandalism with another. When she’d gone to Brynmor Gryffud to voice her concerns, he had assured her that the good they were going to do in the long run far, far outweighed any short-term cost.
‘Gaia understands,’ he had assured her, knowing that Deirdre had an essentially religious view of the environmentalist cause. But Deirdre was still not entirely convinced. She had needed to get away, to be by herself, so that she could feel a sense of communion with the earth goddess and come to terms with what was going on. So around forty minutes after the camper van had set off on its journey south, just as dawn was breaking, she put on her green wellies and her cagoule – decorated with vivid, two-tone pink spots against a white background. Then she slipped out of the back door of the commune and, following a path that ended just a few metres from the house, headed off alone into the hills.
After she had walked for a few hundred metres Deirdre turned around to look back at the farmhouse down below her on the floor of the valley. The sun had begun to rise over the hills to the east and it was st
eadily spreading across the valley, replacing the soft-grey darkness with dazzling bright colour. Deirdre frowned as she saw two large, black vehicles heading at high speed along the drive that led to the house. From where she was standing they looked like vans of some kind, but as they got closer to the farm she could see that they were in fact four-by-fours. As a matter of principle, Deirdre knew as little as she could about any form of motorized transport. But the sheer intensity of her disapproval of these large, cumbersome, gas-guzzling vehicles, which so profoundly offended her socialist as well as environmentalist instincts, meant that she had absorbed some information about various makes and models. These, she suspected, might be Range Rovers – the worst of the lot, to her way of thinking.
As she watched, puzzled, yet somehow mesmerized by what she was seeing, one of the cars drove past the main house into the farmyard behind it. The other pulled up right in front of the farmhouse itself. Men got out of the vehicles, all dressed in black, their faces invisible behind balaclavas. They fanned out, surrounding both the front and back doors like malevolent wraiths. Each of the men was carrying something, held out in front of him, though Deirdre could not see what it was. She had a horrifying suspicion, however; one that she could not name, but that was tightening her belly and constricting her throat until she could scarcely breathe.
A man walked out of the front door of the farmhouse. From the shock of blond hair Deirdre recognized Tobyn Jansen, her favourite of all the male members of the group. She adored him for his commitment to the cause, his apparently effortless ability to make her laugh, and – though this she found hardest to admit, even to herself – his strongly muscled, golden-haired forearms.
Jansen stood in the open air for a moment, facing the four men who were lined up in a half-circle around him. He seemed to be saying something, though she could not hear what. His gestures, though, conveyed their own meaning: at first conciliatory, then increasingly indignant, and then desperate as Jansen seemed to plead with the men, then threw his hands up in a desperate but futile gesture of self-protection.
Deirdre saw a series of bright flashes. Tobyn Jansen staggered back before falling to the ground, and it was almost at the instant that the back of his head hit the foot of the farmhouse front door that the sound of gunfire reached Deirdre Bull’s ears. And then she started screaming.
35
* * *
RONNIE BRADDOCK WAS a former paratrooper. He’d done his time in Iraq as a soldier, then again as a private contractor, bodyguarding administrators and businessmen for an American corporation that was less a commercial business than a private army. Now he was running his own crew, and after that Afghan job it was good to be working on home ground for once, instead of some fly-ridden shit-hole filled with stinking ragheads. The assignment had turned out to be easier than expected, too.
Braddock’s lads had come to the farmhouse pumped up, expecting opposition. They’d been told the occupants were members of a terrorist group. That suggested they’d be violent, determined, even willing to die for their cause. In the event, though, the five that they encountered inside the house were almost disappointingly easy to dispose of. They were unarmed, and unable to defend themselves. Even the men failed to put up a fight.
‘Eco-warriors, my fucking arse,’ said one of the attackers, disdainfully kicking a corpse.
‘There’s one missing,’ said Braddock. He didn’t like to see anyone losing concentration, just because it had all been a stroll so far. ‘We were told four men and two women. Well, we took four men down all right. But only one woman. Where’s the other?’
‘Maybe we were given the wrong numbers.’
‘Is that what you want to tell Razzaq? “There was only one woman, so we thought you’d got it wrong?” Fuck off.’
‘What do you want to do, then?’
Braddock snapped out his orders: ‘Take the lads who were in your car. Search the house, top to bottom, every bloody inch of it. Attics, cellars, cupboards, the lot. You know what to do if you find her. The rest of us are going for a little drive. This lot were nature lovers …’ He made it sound like some kind of perversion. ‘Maybe she went outside.’
‘Out there? You’ll never find her. She could be fucking anywhere.’
‘Bollocks. We’re not exactly talking special forces, are we? What we’re talking about is some useless, hysterical bitch who’s wandering round in circles, pissing herself with fear. If she’s out there, she’s as good as dead already.’
36
* * *
UP ON THE hillside, Deirdre Bull had managed to crawl through the heather to a low outcrop of rock, behind which she was now hiding, barely able to think straight for the shock of what she had witnessed. As the men went into the farmhouse and further bursts of gunfire echoed around the empty landscape every instinct told her to run, to put as much distance between herself and the danger as possible, as fast as she could go. But fear seemed to render her immobile. She kept imagining eyes, glaring through the farmhouse windows, scanning the landscape, waiting for any sign of movement. It took her several minutes just to remember that she had her mobile phone with her, stuffed into a pocket of her cagoule. But did she dare use it? Her brain told her that no one could possibly hear her. Her fear would not allow her to believe it.
She’d not taken a single further step when four men came out of the house and got into the Range Rover by the front door.
The big black car started moving. At first Deirdre was relieved. That surely meant they were going to drive away the way they had come. But then she realized that they were taking a different course, heading towards the path. And then they were on it, driving directly towards her.
Now Deirdre Bull moved. She dashed from behind the rock and started scrambling straight up the hill, away from the path, which cut diagonally across the slope. She could hear the engine of the Range Rover now as it picked up pace. She knew without even turning around to look that she had been spotted. The chase was on.
Deirdre was thirty-four years old, reasonably fit, but no athlete. She was further hampered by wearing wellington boots. Her breath was becoming more laboured with every few strides that she took. Her feet, made clumsy by the loose-fitting rubber boots, were struggling to get a proper purchase on the hillside. Still she kept going upwards as fast as she could, fighting through the pain in her thighs, her calves and her gasping, protesting lungs. Her eyes were focused on the ground immediately around her. She did not dare look around, for fear of what she might see, or even up, for fear of how far she was from safety. So she was unaware that the escarpment up which she was struggling was actually the side of a long, narrow ridge that ran like a spur from a much larger hill.
Nor did she know that her struggles were the cause of great amusement in the Range Rover, whose driver and passengers were laughing uproariously as they drove up the path to a point directly beneath the fleeing woman. One of the men put on the voice of a TV sports commentator to describe her ascent, ‘Oh, I say,’ he pontificated. ‘She covered the last fifty metres in a shade under thirty seconds. That’s quite remarkable! But you have to ask, how long can the plucky little tree-hugger keep going before someone goes and puts her fucking lights out?’
Ronnie Braddock was not amused. ‘I’ll put your fucking lights out if you don’t shut the fuck up.’ He was sitting up front, next to the driver. ‘Stop the car,’ he ordered.
The engine died, and now there was only the sound of the wind rushing across the hillside. Braddock got out of the Range Rover and walked round the front of the car until he was crouching beside the bonnet on the driver’s side. He rested his left elbow on the bonnet so as to steady himself as he lined up his sleek, futuristic-looking Steyr AUG A1 sub-machine gun on the back of the fleeing figure some two hundred metres beyond and above him. It was a tricky shot, uphill, with a constantly varying crosswind. And then Deirdre Bull contrived to make it much easier.
One second she was fighting her way up an increasingly steep and treacherous slop
e, the next she was grasping at fresh air as she reached the top of the escarpment. Directly in front of her the ground fell away even more steeply, leaving her looking down on to a dizzying drop. She straightened up as she fought to stop herself falling down it. And for that brief moment her head and upper body were presented in perfect silhouette.
Braddock smiled beneath his black balaclava and fired off his first round. It missed. He swore under his breath, then smiled as he saw the woman turn round to look back in the direction that the shot had come from. His grin broadened and twisted across his face as he sensed the panic and terror with which she must now be overwhelmed. Twice more he pressed the trigger in quick succession, and this time he hit. The bullets tore into the upper left-hand corner of her torso, spinning her round. And then the woman stumbled over the edge of the escarpment and vanished from his sight.
It took the hunters a couple of minutes to make their way to the point where Deirdre Bull had fallen. Her body was clearly visible far below, the jaunty pink and white cagoule standing out from the grass and bare earth around her.
‘Right, that’s her done,’ said Ronnie Braddock. ‘Time we got the fuck out.’
37
* * *
Rosconway, Pembrokeshire, Wales
BRYNMOR GRYFFUD WAS at the wheel of the camper van. He drove steadily through the heart of rural Wales, staying well within the speed-limit at all times – with the underpowered Hiace weighed down by its deadly cargo he had little choice in the matter – and reaching the town of Pembroke by 6.00 a.m. From there he headed due west, taking the B4320 towards Angle, a seaside village that is a popular stopping-off point on the spectacular Pembrokeshire Coast Walk that runs around the far south-west corner of Wales. A couple of miles short of Angle Gryffud turned right down a lane towards the village of Rosconway, which had virtually all been demolished, or simply abandoned, when the refinery was built. Only the old parish church still stood intact, as a memento of what had once been a thriving little community. It was now shortly before six thirty.