by Chris Ryan
In the darkness, a second seemed like an hour and Ben tried not to think about what else they might be sharing this cave with. He closed his eyes – it made no difference, after all – and took some deep breaths. He was exhausted, but he knew he couldn’t give in to it now.
His clothes had become sweaty in the scramble up to the caves. Now, the moisture was pulling all the heat from his body. He started to shiver, and he felt Aarya doing the same.
Not long now, he told himself. Not long now and we can make a run for it . . .
‘They’re coming . . .’ Aarya whispered.
Ben strained his ears. Sure enough, he heard noises. Voices. Muffled and distant. Ben could barely make them out, but they sounded angry. And they were getting louder.
He held his breath. Find the cloth, he said to himself. Whatever you do, find the cloth . . .
Lights.
Ben cursed under his breath. He hadn’t counted on them having torches. At the mouth to the small cave, beams of light flashed in, then out again.
Don’t come in, Ben thought. Don’t come in . . .
A shout. The torchlight receded.
‘What did they say?’ Ben asked.
‘I think they’ve found it,’ Aarya whispered so quietly that she was almost inaudible.
A hubbub of voices. And then one, louder than the others. Ben recognized it of course. Amir. He was shouting angrily, giving instructions.
‘What’s he saying?’ Ben hissed at Aarya. ‘Tell me what he’s saying.’
Aarya’s breath shook as she spoke. ‘He said, “Find them,”’ she told him. ‘They’re splitting up, Ben. They’re going deeper into the caves.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Your plan’s working.’
Ben took another deep breath. The first part of his plan might be working, he thought to himself. Now, though, they had to escape. And that was going to be the difficult bit . . .
Chapter Thirteen
On the opposite side of Sangin, the fire support unit looked out over the town and the desert hills beyond.
Major James Black looked through a high-powered, handheld military telescope. Behind him were five armoured vehicles, each laden with heavy weaponry manned by the fifteen men that made up his unit. In the distance he could clearly see the opening to a network of caves. He looked at the young soldier standing next to him. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Positive, sir. He ran into the cave and hasn’t come out since.’
‘And he was carrying a weapon.’
‘Roger that, sir. Looked like an AK-forty-seven.’ He grinned. ‘Bit difficult to see from this distance though.’
‘Cut the funnies, soldier,’ Major Black instructed. ‘If I order a strike on those caves and we find out there are civilians in there, all hell’s going to break loose. I’ll ask you one more time. Are you sure you can give a positive ID on an enemy combatant entering that cave system?’
Chastened, the soldier nodded. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘Positive ID, sir.’
Black lifted the telescope to his eye again. The mouth of the cave seemed to wobble with the heat haze. As he looked, his mind ticked over. He was trained to make life or death decisions like this, but that didn’t mean it got any easier. If there were enemy hiding up in that cave system, it was his duty to call in an airstrike. But what if his soldier was wrong? What if the person he had seen was not an insurgent or a terrorist, but an ordinary, law-abiding citizen? What if his AK-47 wasn’t an AK-47, but a pitchfork?
A voice behind him. ‘Awaiting your order, sir.’
Black sniffed. It was decision time. In the distance, the cave continued to shimmer in the heat.
And then, suddenly, movement.
He kept perfectly still. A figure had appeared at the mouth of the cave. Major Black adjusted the focus on his telescope, zooming in digitally onto the figure. And as he did so, a flicker of a smile played on his lips. The man in his sights was armed, all right. The soldier had been correct – he bore a rifle and it was being held ready to use. There was also something on his back – a bergen of some description, only slightly bigger and more cylindrical in shape. Major Black didn’t know what it was, but that didn’t matter. He’d seen all he needed to see.
He turned to the radio operator standing behind him. ‘You have the coordinates for the cave?’
‘Yes, sir. American bomber turning and burning, awaiting your order.’
‘Good. One five-hundred-pound bomb, two millisecond delay. Let’s deal with these guys before they have a chance to kill any British soldiers, shall we?’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the crisp, efficient reply.
Major Black handed the telescope back to the soldier, then returned to the cover of the armoured vehicles.
‘Two minutes to impact,’ the radio controller announced in a loud voice. ‘Two minutes to impact!’
Ben and Aarya started to retrace their steps, hand in hand. Ben used his free hand to follow the cave wall back to the opening, counting his paces as he went. The exit was exactly where he expected it to be. He carefully peered out.
‘Can you see them?’ Aarya asked.
Ben looked to his left. Further into the cave system he thought he saw the flash of a torch. But then nothing. Darkness. He looked to his right. The main entrance was in the distance, glowing like a solitary eye.
‘Come on,’ he whispered. Together they pushed forward towards the light.
Ben’s skin tingled with tension. He walked carefully, silently. Make a noise and it could all be over. All sorts of doubts pinged around his mind. What if they had seen through his plan? What if the terrorists hadn’t carried further on into the cave at all? What if they were watching them from the sides at that very moment? Up ahead, silhouetted against the mouth of the cave, he saw a figure. It was impossible to see his face, but Ben recognized the cylindrical shape on his back well enough. Amir was also carrying his rifle and was pacing up and down. Ben thought he seemed nervous.
They were close now. Fifteen metres, maximum. Ben tapped Aarya on the shoulder and pointed towards the side of the cave, where they huddled down against the wall.
‘We need to move quickly,’ Ben whispered. ‘The others could come back any minute.’
‘What are we going to do?’
Ben frowned. ‘We have to use the element of surprise,’ he said. ‘That’s all we’ve got. We need to get as close as possible, then jump him from both sides. If we do it quietly, and get our timing right, we might get him onto the ground before he has a chance to—’
‘To what, Ben?’
‘To use his gun.’ They fell silent for a moment. ‘You wait here,’ Ben continued. ‘I’ll go to the other side of the cave. On my signal we’ll move forward. When we get close, wait for me to give you the nod, then we’ll just charge him as quickly as we can. He can’t move fast with that thing on his back, so we should manage it.’
‘And what then?’
‘We take his gun.’
Aarya’s eyes widened. ‘But, Ben, surely you would not . . .’
‘Of course not, Aarya. But I’d rather the gun was in my possession than his, wouldn’t you? At least we’ll be able to make a run for it and warn someone what’s going on.’
Aarya nodded mutely.
‘All right, then,’ Ben said. ‘Remember. Watch for my sign.’
Crouching low, he left Aarya and tiptoed over to the other side of the cave. Then he looked back, held up his arm and emphatically pointed towards the exit.
The two of them crept forward. Every tiny crunch underfoot was magnified in Ben’s hearing a thousand-fold. He could feel his blood pumping in his veins.
Amir grew closer. If he turned now, and looked in the right direction, he would be able to see one of them. But he had his back to the cave mouth and was looking out over the desert. The sun, shining overhead, cast a short shadow. Ben looked down at it: his eyes were drawn to the cylindrical outline of the suitcase bomb, and the long, wicked shape of the man’s rifle. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and pre
pared to give Aarya the signal.
He raised his arm.
And then, slowly, he lowered it. There was a noise. It was distant at first, just a low hum like a lazy bee on a sunny day. It clearly alarmed Amir, however. Their captor looked up into the sky, then quickly shook his head left and right. With a sick feeling, Ben realized he was looking for somewhere to run.
The buzzing sound grew louder.
And louder.
Instinctively, Ben knew what it was.
‘A plane,’ he whispered. Heading in their direction. It had frightened Amir, and he wasn’t the kind of man to be scared by shadows. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he muttered. And then, louder, more urgently: ‘We have to get out of here! Aarya! RUN!’
There was no place for caution. Not any more. Ben pushed himself up to his full height and started sprinting towards the cave mouth. The sound wasn’t a buzz any more. It was a roar, filling their ears like an angry lion. He sprinted as fast as he could, aware of Aarya running across just metres behind him. Bursting through into the sunlight, the thunder of the approaching aircraft jolted through him. He bore left, down the hill and away from the cave mouth. As he ran he looked over his shoulder, checking that Aarya was still with him.
She wasn’t.
She had stumbled and fallen. She was pushing herself up even now in a desperate attempt to leave the cave.
‘AARYA!’ he shouted, stumbling at the same time and falling heavily to the stony earth.
The plane was directly above them now. His ears were numb from the noise. Instinctively he curled up into a little ball, cradling his head in his hands.
‘AARYA!’ he yelled. ‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
On the high ground above the town, the fire support group waited for the bomber to arrive. In the distance they could already hear its thunder.
‘Thirty seconds!’ shouted the radio operator.
Major Black watched the cave through the viewfinder of his telescope. The enemy combatant was still there, that strange, cylindrical bergen still strapped to his back. Suddenly the man looked up into the sky, aware of the approaching plane.
He looked left and right.
And then he ran.
Black cursed. The approaching plane was deafening his ears now, and he was about to lower the telescope. Just then, however, he saw something else. Two more figures, running out of the cave. He frowned. They didn’t look like locals. More to the point, they didn’t look like combatants. They wore western clothes – a rarity in this part of Helmand Province – and there was no sign of weaponry.
He threw the telescope to the ground, spun round and held his hands up to his mouth. ‘Abort mission!’ he yelled. ‘ABORT! ABORT!’
But above the roar of the jet engines, nobody could hear him.
He ran towards the radio operator, who looked at him in utter astonishment. ‘ABORT!’ Black screamed again.
The radio operator’s eyes widened as he realized what his superior was saying. He repeated Black’s instruction into his receiver: ‘Abort! Abort!’ Even as he spoke, however, he looked out towards the cave.
The aircraft had curled upwards, climbing vertically into the sky. It was what was happening on the ground, though, that mattered. A small dot was falling through the air, directly above the cave mouth. To the eyes of Major Black and the radio operator it looked like it was falling in slow motion, but they both knew that was a trick of the mind. They both knew it took almost no time for a 500-pound bomb to hit the earth from that height.
Black saw the explosion: a flash of red. A fraction of a second later he heard it: a great thump echoing across the desert. A huge cloud of dust mushroomed up into the sky, obscuring everything. Black lurched forward and grabbed the telescope. It took a couple of seconds to focus it, but even when the view was sharp, he was none the wiser. The cave mouth was hidden. The whole area was a scene of blasted dirt and devastation.
He scanned left and right. He scanned down the hill. He continued to alter the focus, desperately trying to take in the whole scene. Desperately trying to see some sign of movement.
Desperately trying to make out the figures he had seen running from the cave.
He saw nothing. Just the rubble, settling on the ground.
No sign of movement.
No sign of life.
He let the telescope fall from his eye and turned to look, with a haunted expression, at the radio operator.
Neither man spoke.
A million unwanted thoughts rebounded in Major Black’s mind.
What had happened?
What had they just done?
Who had they just killed?
Chapter Fourteen
‘AARYA!’ Ben yelled. ‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
And then he hugged the earth.
He had never known a noise like it – almost as though he himself was part of the explosion. There was heat too: the air around him became furnace-like. It burned, singeing his skin and his hair. The earth shook. Not a slight tremor, but a sickening shudder as though someone had picked up the ground and thrown it about.
Ben stayed crouched on the earth, head in hands. The air around him was solid with dust. He tried to breathe in. Bad move: his lungs rejected the filthy air, forcing him to cough, splutter and spit. The noise of the blast ebbed, echoing away across the desert, but his ears were still full of sound: tiny stones, a hailstorm of them, raining down on him. They pelted his back, hard and fast. Nearby, Ben was conscious of a much bigger piece of rubble thumping down onto the ground. A few inches closer and he’d have been pulverized. He tucked his head down further and steeled his body against the showering debris.
For thirty seconds it continued. Thirty seconds of intense, painful battering. By the time the rubble had all fallen back to the ground, Ben felt as if he had taken a hundred brutal kicks to the back. He tried to straighten himself up, wincing with the pain. And then he opened his eyes.
For a moment he thought he had gone blind. He was surrounded by a sandy mist so thick he couldn’t see his hand in front of him. Then his eyes smarted and started to sting and water, so he shut them again. Realizing he was still holding his breath, he pulled his T-shirt up over his nose, then gingerly breathed in. The air stank of dust and cordite, but he managed to get some oxygen into his lungs before trying to look into the cloud of dust again.
It was a little less thick now, but Ben’s visibility was still no more than a metre. He staggered, totally disorientated, not knowing which way was which. ‘Aarya!’ He shouted her name, then dissolved into a fit of hacking coughs that bent him double.
Stay where you are, he told himself once the coughing had subsided. Wait till you can see where you’re going. Wait till . . .
He blinked, then rubbed the gritty moisture away from his eyes. The cloud was thinning faster now and he could see something emerging in the distance. It looked ghostly, like a dream, bathed in the sandy tones of the dust cloud. The entrance to the cave. At least, what used to be the entrance to the cave. Now it was just a thick, tumbledown wall of boulders. Half the mountain looked like it had been blown away.
Ben stared at the destruction in disbelief. And as he stared, two thoughts went through his head. Firstly, nobody who was still in the cave at the time the bomb hit was ever going to get out, even if they were still alive. And secondly, he had not seen Aarya leave the cave mouth.
A twisting sensation in his stomach. Ben felt like retching. He ran to the wall of rubble that blocked off the cave and started climbing over it, looking for a way in or out. Nothing. It was absolute devastation. He started shouting Aarya’s name, his voice hoarse and ragged. Mustering all his strength, he tried to pull heavy rocks out of the way, noticing as he did so that the backs of his hands were cut and bleeding from the rain of rubble. He couldn’t budge a single stone.
‘Aarya! Aarya, are you there?’
No response. Just the distant hum of the aircraft and the sudden boom of another battle raging many mile
s away.
‘Aarya! Aarya!’
But the more Ben shouted, the more he realized that it was useless. If Aarya was still here, she couldn’t hear him. And that meant only one thing.
Ben found himself gasping as a weird mixture of grief and panic raced through him. He jumped down from the boulders and started searching the area, looking for some sign of his friend, or indeed his enemy. Amir had been well ahead of them, the suitcase bomb strapped to his back. The very fact that Ben had not been blown to smithereens meant the bomb had to be intact. Unable to see Amir anywhere, he deduced that the terrorist had escaped with his treasured weapon.
Ben stopped. He felt himself being ripped apart with indecision. He wanted to stay and look for Aarya, but he didn’t know where to look. He wanted to chase Amir, but he didn’t know where he had gone or what he could do even if he found him. Clutching his head in his hands, he tried to clear his brain. To decide on the right thing to do.
More than anything, he realized, he needed help. But how could he find help, stuck here on a blasted hillside in the middle of the Afghan desert, unable to speak the language and with the sun beating down like a brutal weapon?
Another boom in the distance. The whole area was a battleground, riddled with enemies being hunted by the British Army.
The army.
Suddenly Ben saw things more clearly in his mind’s eye. That’s what he needed to do. Find some soldiers. Tell them what was happening. Amir. The bomb. Everything. They would be able to find him. And what if he had Aarya with him? Then they’d find her too. She had to be still alive. Ben refused to believe anything different, despite the bleak evidence to the contrary.
Now that he had decided what to do, he didn’t hesitate. He just started to run, ignoring the agonizing pains down his back as he hurried down the hill, retracing his steps into the green zone.
‘AARYA! GET OUT OF THERE! GET OUT—’
Aarya heard Ben’s voice, but only just above the roar of the jet engines overhead. She didn’t need any urging to get out of that cave, though. Having stumbled, she pushed herself to her feet and ran faster than she had ever run before.