by Chris Ryan
'You do not like me, I think,' Ismail said.
Anderson looked away.
'You do not trust me, perhaps.'
'You're an informant,' Anderson growled. 'You're doublecrossing someone. I just hope it isn't us.'
Ismail smiled a patient smile. 'I think perhaps you do not know how life is in Afghanistan.'
'Bollocks to that,' Anderson replied, vigorously. 'I spent six months this year in the Stan and three months the year before that. I've had every Taliban fucker in this godforsaken country throw everything they've got at me and I've lost count of the number of mates who've had their brains blown out of the back of their heads. So don't tell me I don't know anything about Afghanistan, my friend.'
An uncomfortable silence followed Anderson's outburst - a silence only broken when Ismail spoke. His voice was measured, reasonable.
'I did not mean,' he said, calmly, 'that you know nothing of Afghanistan as a theatre of war. Your ability in that field is beyond question and I thank you for the sacrifices you have made on my country's behalf. I meant that perhaps you do not know what life is like for we ordinary citizens. I despise the Taliban as much as you - they killed my parents, after all. But I would not be running the risk I run simply out of revenge. We are a poor country and many people struggle even to buy food. I do what I do so that I am able to feed my young son - your British government pays me enough for the information to make it worthwhile. Tell me, my friend, do you have children?'
Anderson nodded, curtly.
'And is there anything you would not do to put food in their mouths?'
Ismail's direct question was not met with an answer. Instead, Anderson redirected his gaze out of the window. The young Afghan did not press the issue, but it was clear to all of them that he had given Anderson something to think about.
The snow started to fall more thickly, dancing in the beams of the headlights and flying towards the car like a million tiny bullets. Drew was forced to reduce his speed to little more than a crawl as he peered through the windscreen, his face screwed up in concentration as he negotiated his way through the blizzard. The area south of Kandahar was not mountainous, like other parts of Afghanistan; but there was a steady upwards incline as they drove up out of the geographical bowl in which the city was situated. It was difficult to see clearly through the blizzard, but when Will did manage to get a view of the landscape, he saw it was a gently undulating terrain. There were a few trees, but they were sparse. More striking were the remnants of Afghanistan's past battles that lay abandoned by the side of the road. He counted the hulking shells of Russian T-55 tanks, anything of any use already stripped out of them. There were burned out armoured cars, discarded oil drums - the debris of a country that had been at war for as long as it could remember.
Every now and then they felt the wheels spin ineffectually on the icy road and towards mid-afternoon, despite Drew's skill behind the wheel, they felt themselves skidding towards the side of the road. They jolted around inside the truck as Drew calmly drove into the skid and brought the vehicle to a halt. It was clear that the going was getting tough, so they attached the snow chains that Sami had provided. They drove off again and the chains crunched noisily under them, but the truck held the road much better. As the afternoon wore on, the snow stopped falling and they were able to see around them a bit more clearly. When they stopped to replenish the truck with diesel from one of the tanks that Sami had supplied, the others stood guard around the vehicle, pointing their guns up into the hills, which they all knew from experience of this treacherous country could be hiding unknown dangers.
Everywhere was covered in a blanket of fresh snow and Will felt as if they were the only people for miles around in that spectacular winter landscape. As if to shatter the illusion, Ismail spoke.
'The Taliban are very strong in this region,' he said, quietly. 'It feels like there is nobody around, but there are many villages around here, cut off by the snow. When the Taliban were thrown from power, they took refuge in places like this. They are not afraid to kill the villagers to get what they want, so now they run these places with the same reign of terror as they ran all of Afghanistan only a few years ago. I myself have seen them hang the body of a father in front of his children. I pray my own son does not have to witness such a thing.'
He stared out of the window into the landscape beyond, leaving the unit to imagine that grizzly scene. Will found it turned his stomach, but something deep inside him refused to be entirely horrified by what Ismail had described. At least parents were supposed to die before their children. He looked over at Anderson, who was staring thoughtfully at the floor. Was he thinking about his own kids? Will wondered. Was he wondering if he would be eating Christmas lunch with them in just over a week's time? Despite the snow all around, Christmas seemed a million miles away in this benighted country.
And with the thought of Christmas, the image of Laura and Anna, his family, lying dead on the floor of that department store so many thousands of miles away, flashed into his head. In a brief surge that lasted only a few seconds, he relived all the pain that had been with him ever since. Somewhere, he thought to himself, out in the bleak, uninviting landscape around him, was the key to his revenge. He found himself gritting his teeth, almost looking forward to the business ahead.
'Road block.' Drew said the words calmly, but Will instantly shook off his reverie as the truck came to a halt. On either side of them was a hilly mound with low bushes covered in snow. He leaned over and looked through the windscreen. Sure enough, a couple of hundred metres down the road, they saw a large vehicle parked to one side. Two men were standing in the middle of the road just next to it. From this distance it was impossible to see if they were armed, but Will felt sure they would be.
'ISAF?' he asked, tersely.
'I think it is unlikely,' Ismail replied. 'There are too few of them and I am not aware of any NATO bases in this region.'
'It's an ambush,' Anderson said, quietly. 'Look. Footprints.'
He pointed up into the hillock along one side of the road, a scant fifteen metres away. Just as Anderson had said, there was a trail of prints in the snow leading up to a little line of bushes, small enough to go unnoticed, but large enough to hide a man. Will looked to see if he could find anyone there. At first, he saw nothing; but as he squinted his eyes, something moved. It was only a tiny movement, but enough to shake a little shower of snow from one of the bushes on to the ground beneath. He looked more carefully. Sure enough, he could make out the outline of a man's head. He even thought he could see the black metal of a gun barrel pointing out through the bush.
'There's someone there,' he announced.
'Both sides,' Kennedy said. 'I've clocked one on our right too. Looks like someone's preparing for a surprise party - and I bet they've forgotten to bring any cake.'
They needed to move quickly and decisively. 'Drive up,' Will said, calmly. 'When they come to the window, nail them.' He looked at Anderson. 'We'll de-bus as soon as that happens. Fragmentation grenades at the ambushers, then take them out.'
Ismail started breathing heavily. 'You're going to kill them?'
'Not if they kill us first,' Will stated, flatly.
'But what if -?'
'Shut up, Ismail,' he ordered. 'They haven't set up this ambush for fun. They have the advantage and if we don't take the fight to them, we'll be corpses on the side of the road within a minute.'
Ismail fell silent.
'Their main target's going to be our vehicle, so we need to get the hell out of here. When I say the word, me and Anderson are going to jump out the back and hit the ambushers with grenades. When we do that, jump out and take cover at the side of the road. We'll take it from there.
Can you do that, Ismail?'
The frightened Afghan nodded mutely.
In the front, Drew and Kennedy had taken the Sigs from their holsters and laid them on their laps. Will readied his weapon, while Anderson fished two fragmentation grenades from his rucksa
ck and handed one over.
'Let's try and finish this with the same number of holes in our bodies as when we started,' Kennedy drawled.
No one laughed.
'Go!'Will told Drew.
The truck moved slowly forwards. Ismail's heavy breathing became more panicked as they approached the roadblock, but Will tried to put that sound from his mind as he concentrated on the matter in hand. His awareness had become crystalline and precise; a strange sense of calm had descended over him. The calm before the storm.
The roadblock was ten metres away now and the truck slowed down while the two men approached the front windows, one on either side. Will shifted to the back of the truck, ready to jump out as soon as he heard the crack of the weapons, but he managed to steal a glance at the two of them. There was no way these men were soldiers: they were walking with a louche, arrogant gait and one of them had his weapon - an AK-47 - resting over his right shoulder. They wore warm, heavy Afghan clothing, and their bearded faces were locked in an unpleasant sneer. One of them, as he approached, seemed to look over to where the ambushers were hidden; he nodded, imperceptibly.
The man who had approached the driver's window tapped on the glass, indicating to Drew that he should wind it down.
This was it. In a matter of seconds it would be over.
Drew and Kennedy wound down their windows. Immediately the man on Drew's side started to speak, his voice an incomprehensible babble of harsh, guttural Pashto.
He didn't get the chance to say much.
Almost as one, Drew and Kennedy raised their guns, pointed them directly at the faces of the two men, and fired. Will heard them thump to the ground. 'Now!' he hissed and instantly he and Anderson opened the back doors of the truck and jumped out. They pulled the pins from their fragmentation grenades and hurled them in the direction of the two ambushers, before jumping to the low bushes at the side of the road to get some natural cover. Ismail followed, scampering away from the truck with his arms held protectively over his head and Will was aware of Drew and Kennedy de-bussing too.
He and Anderson engaged their rifles and pointed them in the direction of their targets. The grenades exploded with a deafening crack and seconds later the two men staggered from the bushes where they were hiding. Even from a distance, Will could see that his man was horrifically wounded from the shrapnel in his face. He mercilessly aimed the Diemaco at the guy's head and fired a single shot. The ambusher fell backwards into the bushes, blood from his head spraying over the virgin snow.
Will heard the crack of Anderson's rifle and turned just in time to see the second ambusher collapse to the ground.
And then, all around them was silence. The sort of silence you only experience when there are dead people about.
Silence or not, they needed to check that their targets were indeed dead - leaving a wounded hostile behind you was a sure way to end up with a bullet in the back.
Will strode towards the man he'd nailed. As he did so, he heard two bangs as Drew and Kennedy administered head shots from their pistols to the fallen enemy.
It was the third bang that they didn't expect.
Will felt the shock of a high-calibre bullet whiz past him. It slammed into the open door at the back of the truck, instantly destroying the metal as though somebody had crumpled a piece of paper in their hand.
'Hit the ground!'Will yelled and the five of them dived into the thick, powdery snow.
'Where is he?' he heard Anderson yell and Will scoured the hillside to see where this surprise enemy fire was coming from.
Suddenly, from his right, there came a barrage of muffled fire. It was Kennedy. He let off five silent shots from his suppressed Diemaco and somewhere up the hill there was a yell of pain. A figure tumbled forwards from behind a mound of snow.
One final shot from Kennedy was all it took to dispatch him.
Silence again.
Will was breathing heavily, hardly noticing the chill of the snow. They lay there for a good minute, carefully scanning the hillside as they searched for any more hidden ambushes.
Nothing.
'Get back to the truck!' Will called. They pushed themselves up and stepped backwards to the vehicle, firing the occasional shot to give them cover. From the corner of his eye, Will was aware of the corpse collapsed by the passenger door. His head had been completely shot open, the warm blood still oozing from his shattered skull melting the snow around him. Good, Will thought to himself. That was one ambusher they didn't have to worry about. They'd have to leave the guys that Will and Anderson had nailed. There could be other ambushers up there and they couldn't risk examining the bodies. They just had to get out of there as quickly as possible.
He was just by the truck, a couple of metres from Drew, when he heard a voice. From behind the ambushers' vehicle another Afghan had appeared. His hands were stretched in the air in a gesture of surrender and he walked nervously towards them.
Instinctively, Drew had raised his firearm and had it aimed firmly at the surrendering enemy. The Afghan stopped and a tense silence descended. Drew looked over at Will, his eyes questioning.
He was waiting for an order and Will only had a split second in which to give it.
He looked at the Afghan. Then he looked back at Drew and nodded.
Instantly, Drew pulled the trigger. The Afghan crumpled to the ground. 'Get in the truck, everyone,' Will instructed.
They all took their places - all except Ismail, who insisted on sitting on the floor of the vehicle. 'Are they gone?' he whimpered.
'Stay down!' Will told him in a tone of voice that he knew would do nothing for Ismail's state of mind - but he didn't have time to mollycoddle anyone now. The door on his side of the truck had been all but destroyed. He pulled the other one shut as Drew moved the vehicle away. They would just have to drive with the back blown open.
As the truck speeded up, he pointed his rifle out the back; passing the ambushers' vehicle, he aimed precisely and then shot into two of the tyres. They blasted into a mass of shredded rubber. Will felt a surge of grim satisfaction - if any of those bastards were nearby, they wouldn't be following very easily, if at all.
Ismail was hyperventilating now, looking up at Will and Anderson with a strange mixture of awe and fear. Will felt a surge of momentary sympathy - they might be used to situations like this, but Ismail sure as hell wasn't.
'You can get up now,' he told the shivering Afghan.
Ismail pushed himself up almost reluctantly and took a seat on one of the benches along the side of the truck. His eyes darted around from man to man, then widened when Kennedy looked at them over his shoulder: his face was spattered with the blood of the man he had shot at close range.
'You all right?' Kennedy grunted.
Ismail nodded.
'You did well,' Will told him.
'I did nothing,' Ismail replied. 'I am not—' he struggled to find the right word, '- I am not suitable for this kind of situation.'
'Well you'd better get used to it,' Will told him, bluntly, 'because chances are it's going to get harder than that.'
He stared at Ismail, who did his best to stare back. But after a while the Afghan lowered his gaze back down to the floor.
No one said anything and the truck trundled on down the icy road.
*
A dusty red light from a small fire illuminated the hut, but only just. Seated in a wooden chair by the fire was a tall, bearded man. His face was scarred, from the lower lip up to his cheek, and no hair grew where the ancient wound had marked his face.
Two other bearded men stood a little distance away from him. One of them spoke. 'We should just kill her now, Jamal,' he said. 'It is clear that the woman will not tell us what we want to know.'
Jamal stroked his scarred lip with a long, slender finger. He remembered the day the wound had been inflicted. His slight sneer flickered across his damaged lips as he recalled the face of the man who did it. 'I do not agree,' he said, quietly.