The Kill Zone

by Chris Ryan

  First they needed to attend to Farzad’s hand. Their grandfather had once taught them how to cauterise the wound of an injured goat, rather than let the precious animal die, and now they could think of no other way of stemming the frightening flow of blood from Farzad’s fist. They crouched by the fire together, Farzad with a wild look in his eyes, Adel gripping his wrist firmly.

  ‘Are you ready?’ the younger boy asked.

  Farzad nodded, biting his lip in preparation, before allowing Adel to thrust the bleeding stump into the red-hot embers.

  Farzad had expected to scream, but he didn’t. The pain was too searing for that. He was almost unable to breathe, but he kept the wound against the heat for five seconds.

  Ten seconds.

  He pulled it out, gasping breathlessly, then plunged his hand into a small pot of water by his side. If anything, it made the fierce, burning pain worse, but he still managed to master his desire to shriek with pain. When he removed it, he looked at his four-fingered hand with something approaching horror.

  Adel looked horrified too, and Farzad suddenly felt responsible for him. He put on a brave face.

  ‘We must do it now,’ he whispered.

  Adel nodded.

  They moved their grandmother first, each of them taking an ankle and dragging her towards the fire. When they were close, Farzad moved to the head end and together they flung her on to the pyre. The bulk of her body deadened the flames for a moment, but they soon returned – a bigger blaze than before as her clothes caught fire. Strange smells filled the cave. First, a dry, acrid smell as the old woman’s wispy hair curled and shrivelled into nothing. The clothes burned brighter as they soaked up the melting body fat from underneath; and now there was a new smell – a thick, greasy aroma like fatty mutton burning on a spit.

  ‘We need more wood,’ said Farzad, and he was right. Although the body was burning, it was not reducing in size. It would take longer to destroy the bodies than they thought. The wood supply was at the back of the cave. They selected small logs first, to get the fire roaring again. The mutton smell grew stronger, and now they fed the fire with larger logs.

  Their brows were sweating by the time they turned to their grandfather.

  His death was painful to them. While their grandmother continued to burn, they stood by his side and whispered prayers for the dead. But the prayers couldn’t last forever.

  ‘He would want us to be safe,’ Farzad said, and Adel nodded.

  They bent down and dragged him towards the fire. He was heavier than the old woman, but not so heavy that they couldn’t lift him and throw him on to the blazing remains of his wife.

  The skin peeled from his face, and the smell of burnt flesh filled their senses for a second time.

  All night they fed the fire. By dawn they had exhausted the wood supply. The bodies were like long, charred stumps, each a metre and a half long. It surprised them that even after all these hours, they had not yet reduced to embers. And so they poured water on the ashes and Adel took a shovel from the cave while Farzad carried the stumps to the mulberry tree. Adel dug a hole, and they placed the remains of their grandparents inside.

  ‘We must leave this place,’ Farzad said when it was done.

  Adel nodded a little uncertainly, and Farzad realised that he looked scared.

  ‘Remember what Grandfather said,’ he whispered. ‘It is our duty to prepare ourselves to fight. And it is my duty, Adel, to take care of you. I swear to the Prophet, may peace and blessings be upon him, that I won’t let anyone hurt you.’

  Farzad stood up, and walked over to where the AK-47 was still lying on the ground. He strapped it over his shoulder, returned to his brother and held out his good hand. Adel took it and stood up, but they kept their hands clasped firmly.

  ‘Brother,’ Farzad whispered.

  ‘Brother.’

  And without another word they turned and walked into the steel light of dawn, leaving the remains of their family, and of their former life, behind them.

  THIRTY YEARS LATER

  25 JUNE

  1

  Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

  03.00 hrs

  An enormous dome of light shone in the Afghan desert.

  It was visible from miles around, a pulsating hub surrounded by flat ground and sand. If anyone were brave enough to approach it by foot, they would soon hear the low rumble of armoured trucks getting ready to go out on patrol; they would be almost deafened by the sound of military aircraft taking off and landing. Come close enough and they might hear the sound of Coalition personnel shouting instructions at each other. It might still be night-time, but this place was alive with activity 24/7.

  No Afghan locals would dare come near it without an invitation, though. Not Camp Bastion.

  Jack Harker hurried through the British base. Two hours before dawn and he was already sweating. The mercury was reading twenty-five degrees. Come noon it would be double that and everyone on the base would be guzzling water. One clear piss a day was the aim, according to the medics, but that was a fucking joke. Jack hadn’t managed a clear piss in five months.

  Bastion was huge. Four miles long, two miles wide, it was home to 4,000 troops and was getting bigger by the day. Its hospital was as advanced as anything back home, its infrastructure as complex. Feeding, cleaning and caring for that volume of personnel was a massive operation in itself. Jack hurried past the Pizza Hut in the centre of the camp – a taste of home that was meant to make them feel better about the fact that they were stuck out in this shithole of a country surrounded by heavily armed militants. It was closed now, but some of the lads were sitting outside, smoking and taking advantage of the relative cool. They were having an argument about something – animated, but good-natured.

  On his way to RV with his unit, Jack passed all the machinery of war. Marines were carefully servicing their beige Jackal patrol vehicles. Good bits of kit these – drive a Jackal over one of the Taliban’s IEDs and you might just live to tell the tale. Until they made the IEDs bigger, of course, and that was just a matter of time. He passed engineers tinkering with one of the Yanks’ unmanned aerial vehicles, armed with a full complement of Hellfire missiles. Half these UAVs were controlled from the Nevada desert, but that didn’t make them any less deadly. In the distance there was the noise of an aircraft coming in to land – a C-17 transporter by the deafening sound of the four jet engines screaming in reverse. Jack could hear it, but he couldn’t see it because most landings were made under the cloak of darkness with the aircraft’s lights switched off. Better for the pilots to guide their planes down using night vision than to let the enemy’s rockets do the job for them.

  Regular green army boys were everywhere, their skin tanned and their eyes a bit wild, preparing to go out on patrol, none of them knowing if they were about to earn themselves a free ride through Wootton Bassett. Only two days ago they’d repatriated an eighteen-year-old kid who’d caught the shrapnel from a Taliban RPG near Lashkar Gah. Half his face had been ripped off by the blast, one eyeball had been burnt out of the socket and his right arm had spun away like a boomerang that was never coming back. Word around the base was that it had taken two shots of morphine to stop the poor bastard screaming; but with massive trauma like that he was never going to make it. It took forty-five minutes for the casevac team to get there and by then he was already a statistic. It is with sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm . . .

  And a few days before that, an American soldier had been captured by the Taliban. A politician’s worst nightmare, and a soldier’s too – but for different reasons. The Taliban were good fighters. Disciplined. Resourceful. And totally barbaric if they got their hands on you. Fuck only knew what sort of state that poor sod was in now.

  Jack had to hand it to the Taliban. Sustained contact, day in day out, had made him familiar with an enemy as fearsome and cunning as any he had ever known. And these contacts weren’t just a brief exchange of fire. They were the real deal, the sort of thin
g no amount of training on a wet moor in England could prepare you for – hours of sniper fire, RPGs and mortars. And although our troops knew they could call in fast air if the shit really hit the fan, everyone realised that a war like this was won or lost on the ground. It didn’t matter what kind of air assets you had at your disposal, with the Taliban fighters dispersed among the civilian population it was always going to come down to men with guns. Jack had seen the Taliban walk away from a battle laughing. Nothing fazed those fuckers. Of course, it was partly that they were on their own turf. It couldn’t be more different for the Coalition forces. Six-month tours, then back home for another six and for all they knew they’d be on a Tristar back to the Stan for another six months after that. No wonder they looked fucked.

  Jack’s unit was standing in a little group in the open air well away from most of the regular activity, not far from a REME workshop and outside a small network of Portakabins that made up part of the Regiment’s operations compound. Thick Hesco walls surrounded the compound itself; from the outside you could see nothing but the tall signalling masts and the top of ISO containers that contained anything and everything from small arms to Regiment quad bikes. Yellow light glowed from the windows of the Portakabins, and inside there were plenty of guys moving around. The Ruperts had been on edge for twenty-four hours and Jack knew why.

  The previous day, a four-man SBS unit had been heading north by Jackal up the Sangin valley. They were good lads. Jack knew a couple of them well – as part of Boat Troop he’d been on ops with them. No waterborne insertion here in Helmand, of course, where it was drier than a nun’s box, but with the general shortage of personnel most of the UK special forces found themselves out here no matter what their particular field of expertise. The SBS unit had come under attack and the boys had been forced to separate, leaving the Jackal in situ along with all the gear they were carrying. And that amounted to a hell of a lot of ordnance: a gimpy, with ten 200-round belts; a .50-cal and an L96 sniper rifle. But that wasn’t what the powers that be were cacking themselves about. Three Stinger missiles, complete with launchers, had also gone missing. These shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles could be used to bring down assets at altitudes between 200 metres and four klicks. They were particularly deadly against low-flying aircraft and definitely not the sort of thing you’d want to fall into the wrong hands.

  But that was just where they’d fallen. One of the SBS boys had taken an enemy round in the head. RIP. The others managed to retreat to the nearest FOB, but their Taliban attackers had confiscated the gear before anyone could get down there to deny them. It was all meant to be hush-hush, but now that half the UK special forces in Helmand were out on the ground trying to locate the Stingers, news of the shakyboats’ little boo-boo had spread like crabs around a brothel – ending up on the Prime Minister’s daily briefing back in London. The MoD bods were shitting themselves that the Yanks would find out the missiles had gone walkabout, and their nervousness had been passed down the line. Heads were on the block, and for the men on the ground, that meant one thing: no fuck-ups acceptable.

  As Jack joined the guys, one of his men turned to look at him.

  ‘You’re fucking late,’ he said in a dour Scottish accent. ‘What kept you? Getting your dick wet with that intelligence officer I saw you with last night?’

  Jack winced. ‘You got to be fucking joking. Just because I’ve been out here a while, Red, doesn’t mean I’ve dropped my standards.’

  The other man shrugged. ‘No need to look at the mantelpiece when you’re stoking the fire . . .’

  ‘I wouldn’t stoke her with yours, mucker.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get the fucking chance.’

  Red Hamilton was just about the toughest guy Jack had ever known – and he’d known him since they’d passed selection and worked closely together during their continuation training more than twenty years ago. His real name was Tom, but everyone called him Red because of his thick shock of flame-orange hair. Red had decided that his nickname was better than any of the alternatives, and it would be a brave or stupid man that tried to use one of those. Now and then, back at Hereford, some pissed-up civvy would have a go, asking Red if the hair under his boxers was the same colour as that on his head. They usually regretted it.

  Jack smiled at his friend, then turned his attention to the rest of his eight-man unit. ‘All right, fellas,’ he announced. ‘Let’s get loaded before the Ruperts can tell us how to do our jobs another fucking ten times over.’

  Laughter from the guys. They knew what he meant. Some MoD goon had briefed the unit at 13.00 hrs the day before. Jack couldn’t even remember his name, but he knew his type well enough. He was the kind that walked around Bastion like a dog with two dicks, loving that he was braving such a hostile environment – and ignoring the fact that the British base was probably the safest piece of sand this side of Blackpool. Put that tosser out on the ground, though, and there’d be an extra set of brown underwear for the laundry to deal with when he got back. If he got back.

  The guy clearly got his kicks from standing up, with SAS top brass and a couple of his MoD colleagues behind him, handing out orders to Jack’s unit.

  It hadn’t taken him long to rub them up the wrong way. His first sentence had done it.

  ‘I’m absolutely certain there’s no need to remind you,’ he’d said with a smug smile and a plum in his voice, ‘that everything you hear in this briefing is confidential and subject to the Official Secrets Act.’

  He’d looked around the canvas tent in which the eight of them sat sweating in the blazing midday heat, and was met by an octet of stony faces. Clearly sensing that his patronising warning had been badly received, he’d tried to make up ground, to be all chummy. ‘Like you guys don’t know that . . .’

  They’d carried on giving him the Madame Tussaud’s treatment, so he quickly directed their attention to a map displayed on a board in front of them. It was a highly detailed satellite image of Helmand Province, the kind that any soldier out here – special forces or green army – was well used to studying. Most often, these images showed the built-up areas around the green zone – the fertile ground running along either side of the riverbeds, or wadis, that characterised the region. Most people in Helmand lived in or near these green zones, generally in the many high-walled compounds that surrounded the town centres. On military maps, these compounds were meticulously numbered. The maps would be updated frequently and the numbers changed in case any of them fell into enemy hands. This map, however, the one they were all looking at, did not show compounds. It showed sand and rock. And in the middle, just where this asshole’s well-manicured fingertip was pointing . . .

  ‘A cave system,’ the MoD man had announced.

  ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ Red muttered. ‘And just remind me – which way is north? Up or down?’

  The rest of the guys had laughed, and a hint of panic entered the MoD man’s eyes – like a teacher who knew he’d just lost control of the classroom. It took a sharp look from Major Harry Palgrave, squadron OC, for the unit to fall silent again. The MoD man had squared his shoulders and continued the briefing.

  ‘Your instructions are these. At 03.30 hrs, a Black Hawk will transport you to an LZ one klick from the mouth of the cave system.’

  But Red had butted in again. ‘What the fuck for? We’re after the Stingers, right? If you’re so goddamn sure they’re in this cave system, why not call in fast air? Give them the Tora Bora treatment. There’s no risk of civilian casua—’

  ‘You’re not after the Stingers,’ the goon interrupted. ‘We have information that there’s an AQT poppy-processing centre located somewhere in there. Find it. Secure it. Any personnel you encounter are to be eliminated.’

  He paused, as though he expected his last statement to cause a stir. It didn’t.

  ‘When we have confirmation from you that the location is secure, we’ll be sending in a civilian observer by Chinook. You’ll take further orders on the ground from them.�
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  The goon had looked around the tent to see if anyone had anything to add. Major Palgrave stood up. ‘Operation call sign Delta Five One. You’ve got the rest of the day to familiarise yourself with the terrain. RV in the ops room in fifteen minutes. We’ll brief you further in there. Any questions?’

  Jack had put his hand up and looked towards the MoD goon. ‘I didn’t think it was an official secret that they grew poppies in Helmand,’ he said.

  The goon just gave him a smug glare. Jack shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d—’

  ‘All right, Harker, that’s enough. Get on with it.’ Palgrave had been brisk.

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  He’d spent the remainder of the afternoon with the ops officer, Matt Cooper, who was chewing, as always, on a stick of gum. Back in the day, Jack had spent a lot of time on ops with Cooper in Iraq, and as a young trooper in the latter days over the water in Northern Ireland, and he was never without a stick of gum. The tenser the situation, the faster he would chew.

  They had spent hours together poring over maps and fine-tuning their strategy for the following morning. ‘Who is this observer they’re sending in?’ Jack had asked.

  ‘Some Whitehall type. Flying in from Kandahar tonight.’

  ‘The Firm?’

  ‘Could be. We haven’t been told.’ Cooper raised one eyebrow. ‘Fuckers are playing it close to their chest. You know what they’re like.’

  Yeah. Jack knew. ‘It’s a lot of work to nail a few poppy dealers.’

  Cooper didn’t have an answer for that; he just chewed a bit faster. They both knew that poppy farmers were two a penny in Helmand. Coalition policy was pretty much to let them be – start taking away their only means of making a living and they’d be turning to the Taliban quicker than you could say fatwa.

  And what was all the secrecy with this visitor? Jack had scowled. He didn’t like the idea of playing host to stragglers, especially when he didn’t know who they were. No point bitching about it, though. He just needed to make sure he was prepared, so he turned back to the maps.