Battle Lines

by Andy McNab

  ‘Yes, yes, oh fucking yes!’ said Doc.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ said Finny.

  Angus looked with his lips parted, as though witnessing a miracle.

  Dave just continued walking grimly. Six hundred metres more. And as Jamie Dermott said, it’s not over till it’s over.

  ‘Serendipity,’ commented Doc. ‘We arrive to help them at the same time as the rescue party.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Finn. ‘Might as well turn round and go back, eh?’

  ‘We could stroll on over to Red Sox,’ suggested Doc lazily.

  ‘Yeah, I enjoy stretching my legs,’ said Finn.

  Doc was gazing at the arriving Mastiff. ‘The rescue’ll have a medic on board,’ he said. ‘But I’m fucked if anyone else is going to treat McKinley’s leg after I came all this way to do it.’

  Dave said: ‘Lads, as we cross the last field, get out your First Field Dressing. Get it out and wave it. Just in case any moron takes us for Taliban.’

  ‘They won’t do that if they see our SA80s,’ said Angus.

  ‘We’ll play it safe,’ Dave insisted. ‘Just get your field dressings ready.’

  ‘Let’s hope we don’t need to get our SA80s out. Let’s hope we have a pleasant stroll all the way there,’ said Doc.

  A second later, gunfire cracked the air around them.

  It came from behind. Dave had a sensation, or more of an instinct, that a round had passed very close by. It was followed by a spray of further rounds. The men threw themselves on to their belt buckles, disentangled their rifles from their clothes and began to fire back.

  ‘And I thought we were home and dry!’ shouted Finny, firing back angrily.

  The battle was desultory. These were not the hardened insurgents Dave had watched in the cave last night, not unless the Taliban Slindon had broken away with a few mates.

  Dave rapidly narrowed the enemy firing position to a couple of compounds. A muzzle flash on the roof of one of them gave him their exact location. It was less than three hundred metres away. Walking along by the canal, the three of them had been an open target but the enemy had put their weapons on fully automatic and fired indiscriminately and missed, when a bit of quiet concentration and aim would have killed at least one them. If Dave were sergeant of the Taliban platoon, he’d be gripping his boys for that. But he was sure there was no sergeant out there and not much of a platoon. Someone had alerted local lads to their presence and they had come running with their AKs. They were untrained and inexperienced.

  The firing continued and then began to peter out. They were probably so unprepared that they’d used up their magazines. Or they had paused to greet reinforcements.

  With six hundred metres to go, Dave did not want a battle here and he did not want the enemy closing in on them. He wanted to keep moving forward to safety. They could jump in the canal and try to proceed, heads down. But they would make slow progress with Doc wading through water. A longer, but faster, route was a little to the north: an almost empty drainage ditch that led to a wooded area. Ironically, he was sure that this wood was visible through binoculars from PB Red Sox. It would give them good cover and after that they would have only a couple of hundred metres of open ground to run across to the relief, covered by British soldiers with HMGs. They just had to run fast enough. With a shoulder to lean on, Dave thought Doc could do it.

  He told the lads the plan and they ran, heads down, to the drainage channel. Even Doc managed a passable run.

  ‘So we didn’t fool them,’ said the medic breathlessly as Dave linked shoulders to help him down into the channel. ‘And I thought I was a master of disguise.’

  ‘Maybe we did too much laughing,’ Dave said. ‘Oh, fucking hell!’

  A round had come so close that he felt as though it had nudged him. He ducked right down into the ditch mud and pulled off his day sack. Sure enough, a round had whistled clean through it.

  Doc looked at the hole.

  ‘Must have been a lucky hit. Because they’re all over the place with their weapons,’ he said.

  ‘Unless some more experienced reinforcements have got there,’ said Dave. ‘Did you hear it? Sounded like a Dragunov.’

  ‘Fuck, let’s get moving,’ said Doc. ‘Mmmm, mud between the toes feels so good.’ Another round whistled too close to their heads.

  ‘My wife paid a lot for a mud treatment once,’ Dave told him, stumbling behind. ‘You’ve got yourself a bargain there, Doc.’

  Now he had mentioned Jenny he had to make a mental effort to wheel her out of his mind again, as if she was a very heavy weight on a barrow.

  Up ahead, Finny shouted: ‘Now they’re fucking sharpshooting! That’s a Dragunov!’

  ‘Keep down and keep going!’ roared Dave. He remembered the motorcyclist in a long turban and glasses who had eyed him and perhaps targeted him. But that was in another part of the province, miles away near FOB Carlsbad. This could not be the same sniper.

  ‘Sarge, I want to stop right here and slot them!’ Angus pleaded.

  ‘No! Move!’

  As they reached the woods, firing from the enemy stopped. Dave guessed it wasn’t because the insurgents were having a brew. It was because they knew four men were fleeing and they wanted to catch up with them, or at least get close enough for some clear shots. He turned back briefly and saw the landscape was empty now. No old men, no goats, no camels, no women, no children, just muzzle flashes. Even the civilians could do that Afghan evaporation act.

  He was running hard, an arm under Doc’s arm, half supporting him, half pulling him along.

  He turned back once more. Through the trees he glimpsed about five figures, their robes streaming behind them, weapons waving. They were running out of the compound and across the field towards the soldiers, trampling crops underfoot, kicking aside foliage. Dave was in time to see the first soar over a drainage channel like a steeplechaser.

  The woods ended suddenly and the four soldiers catapulted out of them. From PB Red Sox this had looked like a deep, shady forest but once they were inside it had turned out to be no more than a thin line of trees. The shadow had been welcome but they were almost instantly out of it and running for their lives across a flat field of growing cotton, the ground still soggy from the night’s irrigation.

  ‘They’re closing on us!’ Dave yelled at Angry and Finny. ‘Get your dressings out, wave them, and go! Go, go, go, you two!’

  They were at the end of a long night’s epic journey. The two younger soldiers had earned the right to run forward to the safety of the Mastiffs and save themselves, at least.

  But they disobeyed orders. Without speaking, or even looking at each other, Finny fell back until he was behind Dave and Doc. He ran backwards, scanning the treeline, covering the others, waiting to return the enemy’s first shot.

  Angus drew alongside Doc and took his other arm. Doc had been doing a strange, balletic hop and jump but now Dave and Angry were able to lift the medic and keep running. Between them, Doc mimed running. But his feet were not touching the ground.

  Dave was the only one who had managed to get out his field dressing. He waved it now with the same hand which held his rifle. He hoped that would be enough to tell any soldier stupid enough not to have identified their SA80s that they were British. Breathless, their mouths coated, their nostrils full of fine soil, their feet bare, they ran towards the British soldiers.

  ‘We’re nearly there!’

  Into Dave’s head, unbidden again, came Jamie Dermott’s words. And with a heavy heart he knew it wasn’t over yet.

  Chapter Forty

  DANNY JONES WAS on the Mastiff’s HMG watching the strange antics of the Taliban.

  It had been a long, lonely night for the relief party. They had a T3 casualty hovering between life and death. They had to guard the exploded Mastiff and keep themselves safe too. A rescue party had set out from a nearby patrol base but there had been an explosion and they had not arrived and were feared dead. The rescue party had included their sergea
nt. They had been attacked twice, but they knew that the Taliban were busy elsewhere and they had been able to deal with the ambushes. But all the same, there had been enough attacks to stop them exploding or moving the Mastiff which blocked their path. Contact with PB Red Sox had been lost. Bastion was pinned down in a dust storm and could not help them. The FOB had been pinned down by the enemy. What a fucking night. The boss was in a foul temper. And now, weirdest of all, just as a rescue party from the FOB was arriving, the Taliban appeared to be fighting among themselves.

  O’Sullivan the sharpshooter had been the first to notice the four men in dishdash strolling along by the side of the canal towards them, chatting and laughing. They looked like insurgents to O’Sullivan. Jonas had agreed that there was something very soldierly in the way they walked. They both would have liked to open fire but the insurgents were six hundred metres away and they were not visibly carrying weapons.

  Then the men had started firing behind them. It wasn’t clear who had opened fire but the four insurgents got down in a drainage channel. They were having some sort of skirmish with a compound they had just passed.

  ‘I reckon our boys are inside that compound. I reckon we’ve taken it,’ said Jonas.

  ‘We’d know if ISAF had men out there,’ said O’Sullivan.

  ‘Not if they were the Jedi. On an operation.’

  ‘Special Forces? You reckon they’re after those four blokes?’

  ‘I reckon they’re not asking them in for a brew.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a sort of gang thing. Taliban on Taliban?’

  ‘Nah … not right in front of us.’

  The four insurgents had disappeared from view in some trees now. No one else was watching them because attention had turned towards the rescue party, thundering up the track. At last. The boss was busy on the radio. Everyone was looking relieved.

  Then the four men broke cover. They were running directly at the relief party across a field, all of them armed.

  ‘Fucking cheeky bastards!’ said Jonas. ‘Barefoot ragheads! Let’s get them!’

  He didn’t even bother with the machine gun. Sledgehammer to crack a nut. He reached for his SA80 as O’Sullivan raised the sniper rifle and caught the men in his sights.

  ‘They’re not carrying AKs!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ve got SA80s.’

  ‘Stolen weapons!’ yelled Jonas, taking aim. ‘Get them!’

  ‘And one’s waving a First Field Dressing! Stoooooooooop!’ shouted O’Sullivan at the top of his voice. ‘Stoooooop! It’s Sarge! Look, he’s got a First Field Dressing!’

  Everyone in the relief party, hot, dirty, sweating and exhausted, turned to stare at the sight of the four men in dishdash running across the field towards them.

  O’Sullivan leaped down and into the blue lane which had been mine-cleared. He ran to the end of it by the exploded Mastiff, gesturing for the men to enter this way.

  ‘Here, here, Sarge, the blue lane’s here!’ he roared at the top of his voice.

  Rifleman Colin Grove had only been in Afghanistan a week. Two weeks ago he was still at Catterick. The course had ended with a big bash for his eighteenth birthday and then he was off to Bastion. Before you could say rifle, he had met his new platoon and was being shipped off to FOB Nevada with them.

  ‘It’s not like this all the time,’ the lads in his platoon had assured him during last night’s firefight. ‘In fact, it’s never been like this before.’

  During the night Grove had been through all the emotions a new soldier in the heat of battle experienced: fear, horror, delight, exhaustion. It had taken a while to understand that they really were fighting to save the FOB and themselves. No one could help them by air because of a dust storm. They were fighting for their lives.

  The battle had gone on and on. It was like the whole of training at Catterick in one night. And then, when dawn came and the fighting had finally eased, no one had said: Have a brew and get yourself to bed. They had been ordered out of the gate towards the furthest patrol bases where two Mastiffs were stuck in the desert with a T3 casualty after an explosion.

  They had driven through the gates and found themselves under fire again.

  ‘We have to keep fucking going!’ the platoon commander had said. ‘We’ve got to get to a casualty and then we’ve got to get to Patrol Base Boston Red Sox. Stupid fucking name.’

  Colin Grove experienced Afghanistan from the ground for the first time in the back of a Mastiff through a thick fog of exhaustion. His sergeant sent him up on top to feed the belt through for the gimpy man and to get some fresh air since the lad looked white enough to puke. From up here, Grove saw the desert sizzle, watched the indifferent faces of the women working in the Green Zone and heard the call to prayer.

  They went up a steep incline, rounded a corner and the party they had come to help was suddenly right in front of them. There were two Mastiffs and the furthest was wrecked and standing in water. There were blue lines sprayed all around the scene. Grove knew what that meant.

  The gunner was looking the other way when Grove saw the insurgents. Everyone was looking the other way: staring at the men around the fallen Mastiff who were looking with relief at the rescue party. Nobody seemed to have noticed that four ragheads were attempting to ambush them. And they were probably just the advance. God only knew how many were behind them; you could see them swarming back there in the trees.

  The insurgents must be either very brave or very stupid. They risked annihilation by running across an open field but they had rightly calculated that, at the arrival of the rescue, everyone’s attention would be elsewhere.

  Colin Grove raised his rifle and took aim. He had been playing Call of Duty 4 a lot but he had never expected to have a battle experience exactly like it. And now it was actually happening. Four ragheads lining up in front of him. He could shoot them all. He decided to start with the biggest one, a brute of a man, barefoot and running with one arm around a comrade like a nancy boy coward. Another bloke was waving something green, probably some kind of Muslim attack emblem. After the big guy, that one would be next.

  Grove took aim and fired and saw, with satisfaction, the big man run for one more pace, stumble and then slump towards the ground. He heard: ‘Stoooooooooop!’ He didn’t want to, but he lowered his rifle.

  Doc Holliday knew Angus had been hit. He heard the noise of the round entering his body, a sound he had never heard before, a small thud and a hiss, as if someone had opened a valve. He felt Angus’s hold on him loosen and then, instead of supporting him, Angus suddenly became a weight. He was dragging on Doc’s shoulder. Doc felt him go and feared he would go down with him. He tried to put his arm under Angus’s and pull him back but he wasn’t strong enough. Angus flopped to the ground.

  It was Finny, behind, who guessed what had happened. Because he could see that their pursuers had halted at the edge of the woods rather than expose themselves to the heavy weapons on the Mastiffs. Finny had opened fire before they could. He was even sure he had slotted one. He had kept on throwing a continual stream of rounds at them and they had backed off a bit, enough for Finny to be sure that the round which hit Angus had not come from behind. Which meant Angus had been shot from in front by one of their own men.

  Finny remembered Dave’s instructions and pulled out a First Field Dressing. He waved it above his head shouting: ‘Wankers! Blue on blue! Don’t fire!’

  He looked across to the Mastiff and saw Patrick O’Sullivan and some of the other lads from 2 and 3 Sections wading across the canal towards them, shouting over their shoulders. And there was Danny Jones on the HMG screaming at the wagons which had just arrived, waving his hands. And there was another bloke standing on top of the next Mastiff with his hands on his head in horror.

  Dave and Doc stumbled to a halt and knelt by Angus, who had fallen forward, face down into the cotton crop. The back of his neck, above his Osprey, was hanging open like a shirt, revealing a tangle of blood and bone and tubes.

  ‘Shit!’ said Dave.
He supported the lolling head and gently pulled the body over. At the front of Angus’s neck was a small wound, like a tiny red flower, although it was growing in size as they looked at it.

  There was no doubt in Dave’s mind that Angus was dead. He knew it was true. But he didn’t want to believe it.

  ‘Angry! Speak!’ he shouted. But Angry did not move.

  The Taliban fighters in the trees behind them opened fire again and this time were hit by a return volley not just from Finny but from the soldiers beyond the canal.

  Doc leaned over to examine the body. Dave could hear a lot of shouting. He could hear the words blue on blue, over and over again as if people were yelling them from up and down the convoy and the words were echoing around the Green Zone.

  ‘Shit,’ said Doc. ‘Shit. His spinal cord’s completely banjoed …’

  He put his fingers on Angus’s pulse.

  ‘Can’t you do something?’ Dave heard his own voice; it was shocked, furious.

  ‘There’s no pulse. How could there be a fucking pulse when his neck’s been pulverized?’

  Dave wanted to shake Angus. He wanted to shake him alive again.

  ‘Let’s try to resuscitate!’ Finny shouted. ‘Fuck it, we must be able to do something.’

  Doc’s voice was calm and quiet. ‘No point, mate.’

  ‘They’ll have called MERT!’ yelled Finny. ‘When MERT get here they’ll sort him out.’

  Other men from their platoon were clustering around them now. Gayle and Fife were covering while the others loaded Angus on to a stretcher, shouting, jostling, gabbling into radios. Doc, Dave and Finny stood up, dazed.