Rain

by Barney Campbell

  He had no idea whether the rounds were on target, but it felt good to send some back. His ears rang with the beat of his rifle and his nostrils filled with cordite. Still the rounds came as they continued their now painfully slow waddle. One of the yellow bolts passed between GV’s legs, and Tom felt a round whistle past his nose. And then the hammering of a .50 cal came from Trueman’s wagon in the rear of the column. Dusty on the gimpy also started to engage, unfurling a carpet of fire to cover them.

  It took an age, but with Trueman’s .50 still belting out a staccato beat Tom and GV reached the cover of the Mastiff and escaped the glare of its headlights. They reached the back, where the padre was kneeling inside with open arms to drag Acton aboard. With surprising strength he pulled him in and laid him down on the seats, and Tom, standing on the tailgate, turned to GV. ‘You can’t go back in this fire. Get aboard.’

  He tried to yank him onto the wagon, but GV turned to him, his bright honest eyes gleaming with adrenaline. ‘No, boss. No room on wagon, innit. Yam-Yam gotta lie down. I’m too big to fit in, innit.’ He turned to run back towards Three Two.

  Tom called after him, ‘No, GV! Come back!’ But to no avail. GV raced down the track and passed once again into the open killing ground of the ambush. ‘Dusty, Dusty, give GV some cover!’ Immediately Dusty opened up again, burst after burst flying into the dark. Tom looked back up the track, willing him to make it. A beam of tracer slewed into GV’s head, and he went down like a rabbit, his great lumbering form reduced to a rubber-limbed doll. ‘GV!’ Tom screamed, and the world collapsed in on him; this was now an unmitigated disaster. A chill swept over him; were any of them going to escape this ambush?

  Just as he gulped down his fear and his muscles tensed to begin the lonely sprint over to GV’s corpse, Tom saw GV rise again from the ground, totter and then continue his run all the way to the back of Three Two, where he was dragged in by friendly hands. Jessie’s wagon immediately started moving. Tom got in his own Mastiff and clambered over the padre, whose fingers were now deep inside Acton’s ribcage and who was up to his elbows in blood. Tom grabbed the net off Dusty. ‘Hello, Three Two, this is Three Zero. Tell me about the Golf Alpha callsign. What’s wrong with him? Over.’

  Jessie’s voice came back, drunk with joyful shock, his VP going out of the window, ‘Yeah, boss, it’s OK. It’s OK. GV’s just been hit on the helmet. Bounced clean off.’ He started laughing. ‘But he’s all right, he’s all right; the big ox is up again. Not even a scratch. He says he hasn’t even got a headache, but he’s sure as fuck going to go spastic on the next Talib he meets! Over.’

  Rounds slammed into the Mastiff’s side, flat thuds that reverberated around the cab. Tom yanked Dusty down from his hatch, screamed forward to Davenport to follow Jessie and said to Dusty, ‘Stardust, get on the GMG. I need to be in the cab talking to Zero.’

  ‘No probs, boss.’ Dusty sank back down into the Mastiff’s body with the gimpy, unloaded it, rested it on the floor, swerved around Tom and got back on the GMG in the main turret. Tom could hear Trueman’s .50 behind him laying down a valediction to the ambush site.

  ‘Hello, Minuteman Nine One, this is Tomahawk Three Zero Alpha. Has my Three Two callsign updated you on our situation and plan? Over.’

  Immediately the reply came back from Jules Dennis, friendly, understanding: ‘Roger. Tomahawk Three Zero understood. Your Three Two has briefed me up. We’re crashing out the QRF down Canterbury now, with the doc callsign. Going to make best speed to you. When you RV the doc will jump aboard and you’ll continue north to Newcastle. Roger so far over.’

  Tom felt a surge of optimism. Maybe they could win this race. ‘Tomahawk Three Zero roger so far over.’

  ‘Minuteman Nine One, the MERT is on its way from Bastion to the HLS at my location. We’re going to need a MIST for them. We’ve got Mike and the India, but we need the Sierra and the Tango. Please send. Over.’

  ‘Tomahawk Three Zero roger. Wait Out.’

  He put the headset down and looked at Acton. He was hanging in there but only just. His eyes were flickering open and he was trying to speak. His lips were moving, first quickly, then slowly. The padre remained with his fingers inserted resolutely inside his ribcage.

  ‘Padre, doc’s on his way down. I need to get his signs and his treatment for the MIST. What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’ve been around enough hospital wards in my time to know a thing or two about wounds. I think I’ve got the external bleed, but he’s really badly hurt internally. One of his arteries is pouring blood somewhere into his trunk and I have no idea where. I don’t know if he’s going to make it, Thomas. How long have we got to go?’

  ‘About fifteen minutes till we meet the doc.’

  The padre paused, and his voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Then it’s touch and go.’

  Tom pressed two fingers gently against Acton’s neck, and counted over ten seconds the faint pulse trying to throb blood into his brain. They were very far apart. Three beats per ten seconds. Pulse rate of eighteen. He leaned closer to him, put his ear over his mouth and counted his breaths over another ten seconds. Deep inside his lungs he could hear a frothy wheezing. Two breaths over ten seconds. Breathing rate twelve. Not as bad as the pulse. He looked over the whole body and saw the FFDs on his legs, the hemcon the padre was holding in place in his side and the letter M scrawled in blood on his forehead, after Ellis had whacked him with morphine. At least he was out of pain.

  ‘Hello, Minuteman Nine One. Tomahawk Three Zero reference that MIST serial Sierra: pulse eighteen, breathing twelve. Unconscious. We think he’s got a severe internal bleed in his torso. His lungs sound very bad, frothy and bubbly. Roger so far? Over.’

  ‘Minuteman Nine One roger.’

  ‘Tomahawk Three Zero serial Tango: two FFDs on either leg, hemcon in his torso wound, one times morphine. End of MIST. Over.’

  ‘Minuteman Nine Zero roger. That’s understood. Over.’

  Then another callsign butted in. ‘Minuteman Nine One, this is Minuteman Eight Two.’

  It was the doc.

  ‘Understood all that. Tomahawk Three Zero just keep that bleeding plugged. I’m on my way south with saline for your Alpha Charlie casualty. Over.’

  Yes. Tom felt the whole battle group’s weight kick in behind him. Maybe they could save Acton after all.

  Tom looked at him more closely. His breathing remained torturous and slow. The convulsions had stopped in the warm Mastiff, and Tom noticed his chest, with barely a hair on it, was heavily tattooed. A dirty film of blood lay dried over his skin. He mopped Acton’s brow and stroked his hair. ‘There you go, Yam-Yam. There you go. We’re going to get you home.’ He looked at his watch. Twenty past five. Christmas Day in a few hours. He thought about the news that Mrs Acton was about to get. Christ! He didn’t even know if Yam-Yam was married or had any children. Ever since Acton had arrived he had always meant to interview him, to find out more about him, but had never got round to it. Did he even have a family? Any siblings? He must have a mother. He felt ashamed that he hadn’t bothered to find out.

  His eyes welled up and, not wanting to show any weakness in front of the padre, he opened the hatch that Dusty had been firing out of at the ambush and stuck his head out into the sharp, biting air. He drew it deeply into his lungs. The wagons drove at a frantic pace through the snow. He looked down inside the wagon at the wound, with the padre’s fingers stuffed inside it. The skin around it was black and scorched by the heat of the shrapnel as it had passed into him. Where was that piece of shrapnel? There was no exit wound. It could be lodged anywhere – in his heart, in his lungs. In his spine? He looked up again out of the wagon, and there, in the distance, he saw headlights coming towards them. The QRF. The doc. Through the IC he shouted, ‘Dav, foot down, foot down. The doc’s here.’

  And then they were there, and he was kicking open the back doors and the doc came aboard carrying two bags of saline and with another medic. The wagon was now ridiculously crowded. ‘Padre
, get forward to the front cab!’ The padre squirmed his egg-like form forward to free up space as the medics went about their work immediately and wordlessly, and then they were on the move again. Only ten minutes now till Newcastle.

  Over the radio came Jules. ‘Hello, Tomahawk Three Zero, Minuteman Nine One. Understood you have the Eight One callsign. MERT inbound and eight minutes out of Newcastle. Best speed over.’

  ‘Tomahawk Three Zero roger. QRF RV seamless. Doc now on the casualty. We’ll get him to the MERT, don’t worry. Out.’ He turned to the doc. ‘Doc, what do you reckon?’

  The doctor looked up, his face spattered with Acton’s blood. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Tom; I just don’t know.’ Acton started spasming, and the doc muttered, ‘Bollocks. He’s arresting.’ Every jolt of Acton’s torso seemed to rock the wagon as much as any pothole in the track. The doc gave Acton CPR, inflating his broken lungs with his own breath. Tom saw Acton’s chest slowly reinflate. Twice the doc did it. Then a third time. And a fourth. No response. And then a tiny choke, a tiny splutter. Finally the chest started moving by itself, slowly, painfully slowly. The doc looked exultant. ‘I think I got it! I think I got it!’

  At last the column rolled into sight of Newcastle. When they were two hundred metres away a great black shadow studded with lights swooped overhead, barely fifty metres off the ground, and Tom shouted to the wagon, ‘It’s the MERT; the MERT’s here!’ The dark shape of the Chinook braked over the HLS and spiralled down to a soft landing.

  The wagon came through the gate and into camp, Tom opened the doors and Brennan was there with a stretcher party. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Chamberlain, we got him.’ He patted Tom on the back as Acton was carried out of the Mastiff and put onto a stretcher.

  The boys set off at a run up the low hill to the HLS, the doc next to them carrying the saline bag. Tom jogged behind and noticed tiny drips of Acton’s blood spill from his chest onto the shuffling boots of the stretcher bearers. The doc yelled, ‘Faster, boys, faster; he’s arresting again.’ On the stretcher Acton started his second cardiac arrest as his heart cried out for more blood, his writhing and juddering slowing their dash through the camp.

  Soon they felt the warm blast of the exhausts as they neared the heli. They ran on board into the dark womb of the MERT; the doc shouted some information to the emergency physician on board, then they were off again, and the bird rocketed back into the sky, lights flashing in concert with the stars above it as it lifted way up into the clear night and back to Bastion.

  Tom stood there dazed as the doc, Brennan and the stretcher party left him alone for a couple of minutes to gather his thoughts. Enveloped by the sudden silence, he walked back down the hill to the 3 Troop Mastiffs and found the boys gathered around his wagon. Blood was everywhere: on the floor, on the walls. Spent cases from the gimpy studded the floor, the tank park floodlights picking out their brass against the dark red.

  Tom reached the group. He wished he had had more time to compose himself, but now would have to do. He felt fierce and proud. ‘Fellas, Yam-Yam’s on the heli; he’s with the docs now. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.’ They looked down at the ground. No one spoke so he continued: ‘I just want to say that I am incredibly proud of every one of you. I can’t believe we managed to turn that around. Every man of you stepped up. And you,’ he turned to GV, ‘you absolute fucking madman. You ever do that again I’m going to court-martial you. You gave me a heart attack, you great ox. Come here.’ He went forward and gave GV a bear hug. ‘How’s the head?’

  ‘OK, boss. Just glancing blow, innit. Had worse on rugby pitch. Fuckin’ Taliban chippy cunts. Can’t even shoot straight.’ Tom hugged him even closer and then remembered himself and awkwardly pulled away from the embrace. He couldn’t believe he was doing this; he would never have acted this way with the men even a month beforehand. He tried to correct himself. ‘Anyway, Sergeant Trueman, we’d better get these wagons squared away again.’ Trueman and the rest of them laughed at his self-consciousness; it was a running joke by now how he tried in vain to be formal with them.

  ‘Yes, sir. Fellas, start getting these fucking wagons cleaned up. I want a full clean-up, full ammo resupply. And Dusty, get Yam-Yam’s blood out of your wagon, will you. It’s minging in there. And boss,’ he said to Tom, ‘I think the padre has something for you.’

  The padre sat inside the wagon, his clothes drenched in Acton’s blood, his eyes smiling behind his glasses. One of the lenses was shattered. He held out his hip flask and said softly, ‘Thomas, if anyone does, you deserve a drink.’ Tom took it and drank gratefully.

  They cleaned up the wagons all thinking about Acton. The adrenaline of the contact and the race to the HLS wore off quickly, and they filed dismally into the scoff tent. They sat apart from the others, and no one spoke during supper. They went to the troop tent, Tom, the padre and Trueman with them, and waited anxiously for news. A few of the boys flicked through magazines; some just sat staring ahead at the dirty white walls of the tent. Dusty hummed to himself, foot tapping on the ground, and Davenport twirled a pen around his fingers, clicking his teeth. Even Trueman was subdued. Tom found he had no words that could ease the wait. Outside they could hear the patter of footsteps as soldiers moved around camp, but nobody came to the tent. And then, at nine, some footsteps did come closer, and they collectively breathed in as the flaps of the tent opened and Frenchie and the doc came in.

  They could tell immediately that it was good news. The doc wore a broad grin and shook Tom’s hand. He didn’t know what to say and in a daze listened open-mouthed as the doc addressed them. ‘Well, 3 Troop, you did it. Acton’s going to make it. He’s going to be OK.’ Tom could see the tension lift from the boys’ shoulders as he went on: ‘That was a very, very close-run thing. The MERT went pell-mell back to Bastion, and they stabilized the bleed during the flight. And then he went straight into theatre at the other end. They found the shrapnel. Lodged in one of his ribs. Really badly cut up his lungs. He was bleeding badly internally, very badly. That’s why he was arresting.’

  Dusty interrupted: ‘You promise me, sir, you promise us? We’re not going to hear in an hour that he’s slipped away, are we?’

  The doc smiled, understanding and patient. ‘No, Corporal Miller, no. I’ve just spoken to the senior surgeon. He operated on him himself. Acton is going to be all right, I promise you. I promise you. No brain damage, no paralysis, nothing. He won’t be playing football any time soon but he’s going to be OK. Who was it that treated him when he was hit?’

  As if afraid to do so, Ellis and GV put up their hands, embarrassed.

  ‘Well done, you two. Really well done. Without you guys and –’ he glanced at Tom and the padre ‘– the work in the wagon on the way up, he wouldn’t have made it. That’s some work. Goes to show those lessons in the summer paid off, doesn’t it?’

  The doc and Frenchie left. Three Troop looked around at one another. Still Tom didn’t know what to say. He sat down, exhausted, but the boys started cheering and hugging each other. Davenport came over to Tom and sat next to him on the camp cot. ‘Nice one, sir, nice one.’

  Tom looked up, surprised. ‘Oh, thanks, Dav, thanks a lot. Well driven yourself.’

  ‘Nah, sir. That was all you. Happy Christmas!’

  Later that night Tom, Henry, Clive, Scott and Jason sat round an upturned cardboard box in their freezing tent drinking the contraband alcohol that had been sent to them. In defiance of regulations friends and family had posted out shampoo bottles full of whisky, mouthwash bottles full of vodka, sometimes even hidden miniatures inside hollowed-out books to evade the censor at Bastion. Sam had sent some of his thermonuclear sloe gin in a bottle of Ribena, merely one weapon in the arsenal of spirits in front of them. They hadn’t been together as a group since Bastion and were thrilled to be united again. After Christmas Day they’d be split up once more, Clive to take over Tom’s Mastiff role and Tom his Scimitars to prepare for the big op in the New Year.

  They w
ere listening to Tom’s – already embellished – account of that evening’s ambush when from outside the tent came a quiet ‘Knock knock?’ They froze. If they were caught drinking they’d be in a world of trouble. Ashen-faced, they sat like dummies as the flaps of the tent opened and Brennan’s head poked in.

  Clive shot up, flustered. ‘Good evening, Sergeant Major. This isn’t what it looks like.’ He looked down at the table. Covered in half-empty bottles it was exactly what it looked like. ‘I mean, we just decided to have one or two drinks. To celebrate Christmas, you know.’

  Brennan didn’t reply, just watched him dig himself deeper.

  ‘Well, I suppose it may have been slightly more than one or two. Maybe three. Possibly four. But we’re not drunk.’

  Brennan flashed his gold teeth. ‘Sir, stop flapping like a nun in a brothel. We thought we’d invite ourselves over with some good tidings of our own. Room for a few wee ones?’ He came into the tent followed by the other sergeants, laden with bottles themselves.

  Trueman was last. ‘Oi oi, here are the jolly boys! Evening, sirs.’ He picked up a bottle of gin from the table and eyed it contemptuously. ‘Fucking hell, sirs, you lot don’t half play it lame. It’s like an episode of Loose Women. Next thing you’ll be smoking Silk Cut. Well, here’s the good stuff.’ He plonked a litre of absinthe down on the table. ‘Merry Christmas one and all.’ They didn’t stop drinking until four in the morning, and then retreated to their camp beds to wake up three hours later feeling very sorry for themselves.

  The CO had designated Christmas a low ops day. In every base patrols stayed in camp and the boys across the AO tried to foster some sort of festive cheer. In Newcastle they had a carol service at midday. The padre gave another sermon, but this time Tom didn’t listen, concentrating on trying not to vomit from his hangover. He looked across during the singing and saw Trueman looking green as well. The rest of 3 Troop were struggling too. That morning when he and Trueman had gone to wake them up and say Happy Christmas he thought he had smelt alcohol in their tent. Even Frenchie looked the worse for wear; he must have been boozing with the CO.