by McNab, Andy
‘Did you know any marines?’
‘Course I did. Marines, Paras and . . .’ John McCall dropped his voice. ‘SF.’
There was always something in the knowing way his dad talked about Special Forces which made Angus sure his dad had been in the SAS. He knew that John McCall had fought with distinction in the Falklands, although the medals themselves had been stolen many years ago.
His parents were divorced and since early childhood he’d spent every Saturday afternoon with his father. From the moment that John McCall turned the sign around in his newsagent’s so that the door read ‘OPEN’ from the inside and ‘CLOSED’ from the outside, Saturdays were war stories, war films, war games. And whenever his dad talked about the SAS, Angus knew that he would apply for Selection himself one day. Even though he was sure he could never be good enough to get in.
‘So!’ said John McCall resuming his normal tone. ‘Was the journey to the base OK?’
‘Had a contact.’
If he’d told his mum that, she would have panicked. But he could hear the shrug in his dad’s voice. ‘Oh, well, start as you mean to go on.’
‘Now we’re two men down in my section.’
‘Two men down already? What’s the matter with them?’
‘One lost a leg, the other had burns.’
‘Dear oh fucking dear. They didn’t last five minutes, did they? Where are they now?’
‘I had to carry my mate who lost a leg to the helicopter. They were flown to Bastion. Soon as they’re stable they’ll be back to Selly Oak.’
‘Helicopter!’ scoffed John McCall. His accent was still strong although he had left Scotland years ago. ‘A helicopter! Sitting there waiting, was it? On the TV they’re always saying you boys haven’t got enough helis. Turns out they’re on hand twenty-four seven. Fuck me, warfare’s changed.’
Angus felt himself deflate. Of course his dad was right. All that fear and excitement he’d felt during today’s contact had been sheer cowardice. Because there was always air support waiting to bail you out.
‘I was scared,’ he admitted. ‘Until a Harrier came in to sort them out.’
‘There you are! You knew a big machine would come and save you! Och, you lads have got it good. I mean . . .’
But now the line was breaking up. There had been a two-second delay which meant the men kept talking over each other. Angus lapsed into silence. He wasn’t sure he should have told his father anything about the contact over the satellite phone. John McCall’s voice came and went in his ear.
‘I have to finish now, Dad,’ he shouted. ‘I have to ring Mum on this card.’
But his father didn’t hear.
‘Air support . . . Harrier . . . Goose Green . . . weather conditions . . .’
Angus finally hung up.
‘All right, mate?’ Corporal Curtis from 3 Section was next in line for the phone.
‘Yeah.’ From the day Angus had joined up, conversations with his father had left him feeling flat. He’d thought his father would be ecstatic at his enlistment but he’d received the news quietly. Then, during the passing-out parade at Catterick, Angus had stumbled over his own big feet. It was something he’d never forgive himself for. He’d immediately, anxiously, looked into the crowd, to the place where he knew his divorced parents were sitting together in hostile silence. He’d been in time to catch the look of contempt on his father’s face.
That night, the base came under attack again. 1 Platoon advance party knew where to go and what to do this time. As the rest of the company floundered they slid easily into their positions while the new arrivals dithered.
The contact was brief. It consisted of one badly aimed grenade, which almost missed the base completely, and ten minutes of light arms fire.
‘You were a fat lot of fucking useless tossers,’ Finn said to the newcomers.
‘Better sharpen up a bit,’ Jamie added.
It was a while before they had a chance to do so. There were few contacts on patrols through the town or the desert. Attacks on the base were minimal. Each day a small party of contractors, escorted by 3 Platoon, left and came back reporting no threats. And there were no sightings of Emily around the civilian area.
‘Because she doesn’t exist,’ Sol said. ‘That’s why.’
‘Ever thought the marines were winding you up?’ Jamie said.
Lunch had been sausage, egg and chips, Finn’s favourite. He pushed his empty plate away and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m absolutely sure that Emily is in those isoboxes. She just doesn’t come out much.’
‘Well, why doesn’t she come to the cookhouse with the others?’
The civilians were becoming a familiar sight in the cookhouse. They generally sat together in one corner with their food and their cans of beer. Their boss, Martyn Robertson, and a few of the others mixed with the soldiers. But most looked as if they’d prefer to have their own cookhouse in their own quarter of the camp.
‘Miss Emily work very hard, she mostly take her meals in isobox,’ said a cook, who happened to overhear them. ‘I take her meal over now.’
Mal, Angus and Finn looked enviously at the lad. He was small and brown-skinned.
‘I go now. You go if you want.’ He held out a tray.
‘Go where?’
‘You ask questions! You take Miss Emily lunch and you find out answer!’
The lad handed Finn the tray.
‘Thank you!’ said Finn, balancing it expertly on the tips of his fingers. ‘Miss Emily, here I come . . .’
Mal and Angus leaped up to join him.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Finn said.
Mal’s expression was deadly serious. ‘We’ll need to form a cordon.’
‘I’m the second i/c of your section and you’re staying here. That’s an order, McCall.’ Finn swept out, tray held aloft.
The boss came into the cookhouse in time to see Finn waltzing away with the tray. Jamie noticed him smile rapidly at the dark-skinned woman from Intelligence, who was sitting alone. The woman did not smile back.
‘Where’s Finn going with that tray?’ Weeks asked as he sat down.
Jamie grinned. ‘Undercover.’
The boss looked concerned.
‘I hope he’s not going to make a nuisance of himself.’
Finn still had not reappeared when the others went back to their base duties.
‘We’re out on patrol at 1500 hours,’ Sol said. ‘And there’s going to be big trouble if Finny’s not back.’
‘He’s probably just helping Emily sync her iPod,’ Jamie said. But neither of them was now so sure that Emily the sex grenade was just a joke.
Finn did reappear by the vehicles at precisely 1445, adjusting his clothes and grinning broadly. He winked at Angus and some of the other lads.
‘Whoops, I seem to have forgotten something!’ He bent ostentatiously to tie his bootlaces.
Sol put his hands on his hips.
Finn straightened, beaming and stretching lazily. ‘She just wouldn’t let me go! Fuck me, I could use a cigarette . . .’
‘Shut up and get into the wagon, you lazy bastard,’ Dave said.
Once the convoy was under way, Finn’s PRR went into meltdown.
‘Sorry, lads,’ Finn said. ‘Can’t say too much. Ongoing mission . . .’
‘Is she hot?’
‘Rocket-propelled, mate. So hot she’s on fire.’
‘In your dreams, Finny.’ Jamie shook his head.
‘You were right about one thing, Jamie. She’s no grenade. She’s heavy fucking artillery.’
‘Lance Corporal Finn,’ Dave snapped, ‘if you don’t can this crap and start looking pretty fucking sharp you’re going to experience some heavy fucking artillery from me.’
PRR went silent.
Chapter Seven
DAVE’S HEAD FELT LIKE A WAR ZONE. HE KNEW HE’D FAILED TO follow his own instructions and drink enough water today. He’d spent the morning shovelling admin shit and drawing up rotas. By lunchtime
the names and numbers looked like he was squinting at them through a heat haze, the ops room was an oven and he was dripping with sweat just leaning against the wall under a large piece of paper on which someone had written: Living The Dream??? And now here was Finn boasting about having sex with one of the civilians. However bad your headache, Billy Finn was guaranteed to make it worse.
Dave had to stay alert.
The Helmand River snaked through the centre of the Green Zone like an artery. They drove past orchards crisscrossed by irrigation ditches, collections of houses that were almost villages, lonely compounds with goats outside them, small towns walled like fortresses, fields, woodland, high crops, jungle.
The two women interpreters had wrung information out of the detainees about a Taliban stronghold. The detainees couldn’t or wouldn’t pinpoint the compound, but they’d said enough to confirm the outgoing Officer Commanding’s suspicions.
So now the convoy was putting his theory to the test. Dave wasn’t pleased that they’d been sent with less than a full platoon. He’d told CSM Kila he didn’t feel at all happy about crossing this part of the Green Zone with so few men. Kila had agreed but Major Willingham had refused to revise his plans.
‘Don’t get out,’ Kila said. ‘You’ve not got the manpower. Whatever happens, just keep going.’
‘Why can’t we take more men and do a proper foot patrol?’
‘Too busy guarding the FOB and protecting Topaz fucking Zero and his mates.’
Topaz Zero was Martyn Robertson’s call sign. Whenever Kila referred to him, he swore. So did most of the officers. Dave had even overheard Major Willingham muttering incantations under his breath which might have included the words Topaz fucking Zero.
‘He should care a bit more about men’s lives and a bit less about his precious fucking oil,’ Kila said.
Everyone on board the vehicles was bad-tempered. Sitting in a scalding hot metal box for two hours was no one’s idea of fun, and they knew the chances of getting out in that two hours were slim. They took it in turns to go on top with Jamie, who’d replaced Steve Buckle on the GPMG.
The attack was sudden and intense. There were trees on either side of them, and poppy fields beyond. The poppies were taller than a man. They grew so thickly that, even from the air, Dave knew it was virtually impossible to catch sight of anyone moving through the crop. Muzzle flashes sparked up from all sides. The men on top of the vehicles returned rapid fire without any sense of the precise location of their targets.
Dave watched tracer rounds whiz past from his seat at the front of the lead Vector. He longed to debus and give the choggies a proper fire fight. Speeding through like this felt too much like running away. But the boss followed orders and kept the convoy going.
The river carved its way through the foliage ahead of them. The water gleamed in the sunlight. The landscape opened up on either side of it, filling their perspective with light and space. Then they returned once more to the dense, sunken world of interwoven shadows and raking gunfire.
Someone yelled into their mic: ‘Oh, fuck it, no!’
It sounded like Sol Kasanita. Sol almost never swore.
‘Man down . . .’
Man down. The words Dave dreaded. The words that echoed in his worst nightmares.
‘Sol?’
He couldn’t hide his anguish. Sol Kasanita, built like a rock, solid as a rock, dependable as rock. For an instant Dave stared into a gaping hole where that rock should be.
Laughter rang in his ear.
‘It’s all right, Sarge!’ Jamie said.
‘He was just getting his head down!’
Mal’s voice. And more laughter in the background.
‘Stop fucking about and get someone else up on top!’ Dave roared, embarrassed by his sudden rush of emotion. ‘What’s going on with you bunch of dickheads? On second thoughts, don’t tell me. Just get on with your jobs. And if I ever hear anyone fucking about with Man Down again I’ll personally remove their balls.’
He could see a network of compounds in the distance. The detainees had said that fighters from Iran, Pakistan and the Gulf all trained somewhere close by. But there were also civilians: women, children, old people.
The open, arid desert was visible again now. The firing finally petered out as they reached the edge of the Green Zone. Dave kept his eyes fixed on the track ahead of him. The intensity of this attack certainly supported the OC’s theory about the location of the Taliban stronghold. He’d want a strike op next.
A few hundred metres ahead, a goat strolled out from a cluster of trees.
The driver kept on going. And so did the goat. It ambled along the track towards them.
‘Go firm,’ Dave said. ‘I don’t fancy goat in my rations.’
The driver stopped.
‘What’s up?’ asked the lads in the back.
‘Goat hitchhiking,’ Dave said into the mic. An old man ran out of the trees further along the track, waving a stick and shouting.
The goat, which had been impervious to the roaring line of Vectors, started at the sight of the stick or the old boy’s spindly legs and cantered towards Dave’s wagon, head back and eyes rolling.
Suddenly there was a massive fireball in front of them instead of a goat. The windscreen filled with dust. There was a second ear-splitting explosion. The Vector rocked and then vibrated like a dog shaking water from its coat.
‘What the fuck . . .?’
A chorus of voices in his ears.
But in the front of the Vector there was silence. Dave and his driver contemplated their near escape. Two lives down, Dave thought. The first time, Steve took the hit. Now the goat. How many can I have left?
‘Fucking hell,’ the driver said eventually.
‘Big one,’ Dave said.
‘Yeah . . . but I don’t get it. A goat couldn’t set off an anti-tank mine.’
‘Anti-personnel stacked onto an anti-tank, I reckon. Or two.’ Dave’s throat was thick with dust. ‘Apparently the Taliban like to do a bit of stacking.’
‘Good thing you told me to stop,’ the driver said.
‘I thought I was being kind to a dumb animal.’
Their eyes scanned the track, gouged and pitted from the explosion.
‘No sign of the old geezer with the knobbly knees and the stick,’ Dave said.
‘He’ll be hiding in those trees somewhere.’
‘He won’t have been close enough to the blast to get hurt.’ But Dave wasn’t completely sure about that.
The boss came on the radio and Dave described what had happened.
‘Where’s the old man?’
Dave rolled his eyes at the driver. ‘He was a good two hundred metres away.’ He didn’t want to stop and look for him.
‘We’ll have to make sure he’s not hurt,’ the boss said.
‘They planted the IED, not us.’ Dave didn’t bother to hide his irritation. ‘Maybe his grandson put it there and forgot to tell him. Or maybe he planted it himself and hadn’t told the goat . . .’
But he already knew the boss well enough to guess what would come next.
‘He’s a local farmer and, um, probably has nothing to do with the, er, insurgents. He may not even speak their language. He could be a casualty and we, um, have a duty of care to him if he’s, er, hurt.’
Dave sighed. You could count on Boss Weeks to take the moral high ground.
‘Right,’ he said unenthusiastically. ‘Dismount 1 and 2 Sections. Sol Kasanita, you bring 1 Section up here to me, Baker bring 2 Section. Corporal Curtis and 3 Section stay here and cover.’
He could hear the men moving reluctantly. It had been a long, hot drive and sausages at the cookhouse in Sin City seemed like a much better idea.
‘Move!’ Dave barked. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
‘Bit of a problem here, Sarge.’ Sol sounded embarrassed.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Finn won’t let me go.’
Dave thought of the exploding goat. He was
going to explode himself if his men kept on like this.
‘Listen, lads . . .!’
‘He can’t walk,’ Finn explained cheerfully. ‘He’s going to get into trouble out there.’