Rain

by Barney Campbell

  ‘Yep. Head shot. Pink mist.’

  ‘Good lad.’ Brennan looked at Tom and said cheerily, ‘All right, sir? Barrel of laughs this, ain’t it?’

  Tom broke into a huge smile. He got up and ran back over to his wagon. By now Trueman and Thompson had joined up with them, and he briefed his three crew commanders in the lee of his wagon. Still in the background was the contact.

  ‘Right, lads. Our ticket out of here. Higher want us on that ridge. We get there, and we can pummel the Talibs from the high ground so the infantry can sweep through. We’ll go as four wagons, hell for leather, and get there asap. Jessie, me, Thommo, Freddie. As per. Jessie, you happy?’

  Jessie put his head up over the front deck and scanned the ground. ‘Yeah, boss, I reckon. I’ll keep us on fields, but we’ll have to do a bit of time on that track to break out into the open and get up on the ridge. You all right with me just going for it?’

  All four then poked their heads up like nervous rabbits sniffing the air outside their warren. Tom looked at the ground in front of them. They could mostly stay on the fields, but they were going to be channelled for a bit of it. ‘Yeah, sod it. We can’t waste time with barma in this contact. And there haven’t been any IEDs since Fade Out. I reckon they never thought we’d bother to come up this far.’

  ‘Hell, boss, if you’re happy I’m happy.’ Jessie smiled. ‘Risk it for a biscuit, yeah?’

  Tom looked at Trueman, who winked at him and nodded. The plan was good.

  They got up and went back into their turrets. When they were all in, Jessie looked back at Tom. Tom held his thumb out and then turned to Thompson and Trueman. Even as the final Talib was killed inside Fast Pace they started out for the ridge.

  Jessie traced his way over the fields for four hundred metres until a ditch meant they had to break off onto the track. Tom winced as he realized they would be channelled more than he had thought. Jessie’s wagon hesitated ahead of him but then turned onto the path and started up it. The sand was deep, and his tracks laid down two ruts that were easy for Davenport to follow. As long as they stayed in the ruts they would be all right. Tom could imagine the tension inside the lead wagon as it crossed the unknown ground.

  Just when Jessie was about to break back out into a field there was a sharp crack and his wagon disappeared in a huge plume of dust. ‘Contact IED, contact IED!’ came Jessie over the net, shouting so loud that the radio almost cut out.

  Fuck. Tom’s heart dropped away, but when the dust settled the wagon was still there, apparently intact. Over the radio Jessie came again: ‘Hello, Tomahawk Three Zero, Three Two. Contact IED but we’re OK, OK. No casualties.’ He sounded delirious, almost joyful. ‘I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened. We’ve hit something but I don’t think it went off properly. Over.’

  For Tom everything started to move as though he was always meant to be here. Dusty’s wide eyes looked at him. ‘What are we going to do, boss? We’re fucked here in the open.’ Even as he said it he traversed the gun left so that it was pointing towards the north.

  ‘I need to get up to Three Two to see the damage.’

  ‘No, boss, don’t go. Stay here, stay here.’

  ‘No, I need to see it to work out how we’re going to get the hell out of here. I need to get forward.’ Before Dusty could stop him, Tom lifted himself out of the turret, picked up his rifle, stepped down on to the front deck, patted Davenport on the helmet as he was wriggling out of the driver’s compartment to take a piss and then jumped down onto the track. He was pleased to be in the open and to feel his ears free of the sweaty headset. He ran down the path to Jessie’s wagon, staying carefully in the track marks, and hopped on board, climbing up the back of the wagon. Jessie and GV looked shaken in the turret. ‘You OK, boys? You OK? Are you sure you’re OK? You promise me no injuries? You promise me you’ve checked all over?’

  ‘Yeah. We’re fine, boss, we’re fine. I dunno what happened,’ replied Jessie, pale even beneath the dust that stuck to his face.

  Tom walked forward on to the deck and looked down into the crater to the front right of the wagon. The Scimitar’s track had had two teeth ripped off, but the crater was small, only about a foot deep. In it Tom could see the top of a yellow container. ‘Fucking hell! Your lucky day, lads. It’s only partially blown.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Right. Here’s the plan. You stay here; I’m going back to Three Zero and get on the net. There’s no way we can continue to the ridge without the REST sweeping this track. We’ll be here for a while yet. I reckon this is our battle over.’

  Just as he spoke, a treeline erupted to the north and gunfire screamed towards them, bouncing off the turret. GV and Jessie dropped inside and immediately traversed towards the contact as Tom lay over the turret hatches, trying to stay as low as possible. He felt ridiculous, almost comically vulnerable. He reached down and hit Jessie on the helmet. ‘Right, Jessie, I’m going back. You cover me!’

  ‘No, boss, no! Stay until GV starts firing.’ Tom sweated as GV seemed to take forever to find a target. He looked to his left and saw all three other wagons searching with their turrets, trying to sniff out where to aim. And then Dusty started firing. Good lad. Davenport was firing his rifle from behind the wagon.

  Inside the turret beneath him GV shouted, ‘I’m on, I’m on,’ and Tom saw Jessie flick the selector switch to fire.

  ‘Loaded fire. Firing now!’ Tom’s ears exploded as the gun spat a shell into the trees. Jessie looked up. ‘Go, sir, Go! Go! We’ll cover you. Get out of here!’

  Tom jumped off the turret and crouched behind the Scimitar. He checked his rifle magazine, yanked his helmet strap tight and took three big breaths to prepare for the run back to Three Zero. Jessie and GV were now firing steadily, and Tom’s head pounded with each shot. For a moment he seemed to step outside himself; he saw himself there, brain racing behind a calm face, eyes set, unblinking. A thrill leaped through him. This was awesome. He snapped back and looked down the track.

  Davenport was firing his rifle with careful, aimed shots. He stopped, looked over at Tom and screamed, ‘Come on, sir; I’ll cover you.’

  The seconds stretched into minutes; everything became slow motion. The world assumed an order and clarity that Tom hadn’t felt before; everything he did, every muscle he moved, felt predetermined.

  He shouted, ‘I’m coming!’ even though over the noise of the firing no one could hear him. He left the shelter of the Scimitar and set off down the track, his legs propelling him like wings. He glided along, borne by the adrenaline that swamped his head and soaked every sinew. He started to laugh, a child’s laugh at the sheer sense of movement, like a five-year-old running down a hill delighting in his speed and his defiance of the bumps and clumps of grass that tried to trip him.

  Closer and closer the wagon got. Davenport, now firing bursts into the trees, shouted, ‘Come on, sir! Come on!’

  Tom was almost there now, but then in front of him the ground opened up as though a zip had been drawn along it as a crease of bullets stitched a line. Instinctively he veered off the track rut that he had so far religiously kept to. The bullets stopped, but he was now outside his safe lane. He was still laughing. He was now just five metres from the Scimitar and felt as though he could almost touch Davenport. Just five more steps. And then bang.

  There was a flash beneath him, a white, pure light, and he wanted to touch this light but felt sad that it vanished almost as soon as it had appeared. Where had it come from? A cloud of dust was thrown up at his feet and enveloped him, and a warm wind brushed his face. He liked this cloud – it felt like a blanket – but now he was out of the dust, and he seemed to have risen above the Scimitar, as though he was a bird. He thought how funny it was that he was flying away from the battle, how easy it had been all along to fly home. He would go home, and now here he was; he had left Afghan and was running up the path, and his father was at the gate, crouching and holding his arms out, like he had when Tom was learning to walk. ‘Come on,
Tommy! Come on, Tommy! You can do it!’ Tom smiled. To his father’s left he could see Constance, smiling over a basket of flowers that she had just picked. The sun bounced off the flowers and threw a rainbow over her face. He giggled. He left the path and swerved into a field, and was running through wildflowers, laughing with the joy of limbs moving faster than ever seemed possible. His tongue flicked his teeth and for some reason they felt sore and jagged.

  The IED was a large one, intended to destroy one of the Scimitars. It had been dug in early that morning while it was twilight, just as Tom had been waking up. The pressure plate had been set on the left edge of the track, and Jesmond’s wagon had missed it by a foot. It was a wonder that there was anything left of Tom at all. The explosion had ripped his legs off, the left one just below the hip, the right just above the knee. His rifle was flung up into his face to shatter his nose, while the blast had torn away his left cheek and some of his forehead to leave it a fleshy, bony pulp. His white left eye flashed huge against the scarlet mush, unenclosed now by its socket. His left arm was taken clean off at the shoulder, though his right one remained on, without even a bruise. His ribcage was kept intact by his body armour, but there was so much grit and dust shot through his abdomen that a thousand dark comets streaked incipient infection through him. His left buttock was taken off, and while he had kept his genitals, a jagged gash ran from them up to his navel. He was lifted four metres in the air, and his torso landed just a metre away from Davenport. One of his legs cartwheeled onto the front deck of the Scimitar, the other one remained by some strange inertia in the crater that the IED had punched into the earth.

  Davenport was blown back by the blast, hurled against the Scimitar’s tracks, the impact breaking three ribs and slicing his right bicep. Dazed, ears ringing, when he got up he saw Tom. When he saw that both Tom’s legs were gone and with them the tourniquets in his trouser pockets, Davenport reached for his own and with a speed and calmness that he never thought he had yanked them both tight over Tom’s spraying stumps until the flow of blood stopped to a trickle. He hadn’t realized it would be so easy; the tourniquets worked just like they had said they would in the lessons at Bastion. The maw at the boss’s shoulder was going to be harder to deal with, although the blood vessels there appeared to have been almost cauterized by the blast.

  Dusty must have sent a sitrep on the radio, as Davenport soon saw Trueman’s wagon race up the track, having leapfrogged Thompson’s in the order of march, and screech to a halt behind theirs, dust flying forward off it as it braked. Davenport wondered if there were more IEDs in the area but realized that as long as they stayed in the track marks they should be all right. He just wanted to get the boss out. He looked at his own sleeve and with more curiosity than alarm noticed that it was soaked in blood from his own wound. But it was not as red as his trousers or his face, both of which had been spattered with Tom’s arterial bleed as he had put the tourniquets on.

  Davenport saw Trueman leap off his wagon and scramble over. Freddie stood over Tom for a tiny moment, his face collapsing at the sight before him, before reaching down, squeezing Davenport’s shoulder and then kneeling by Tom. He looked at him as though pondering how to pick him up, like a father who doesn’t know quite how to pick up a newborn baby from its mother’s chest, and then with one huge heave he swooped him up, cradling him and putting him gently on the front deck of his own wagon. He jumped onto Dusty’s turret.

  For Trueman every minute of his long career had led to this moment. Rounds tearing the air around him, he dipped his head into the turret and spoke to Dusty in a calm, measured voice. ‘Right, Dusty, you stay here. I’ll give you Ellis to drive you. I’m taking the boss and Dav to an HLS to get them the fuck out of here. You and Jessie’s wagon hold this track. When we’ve got the boss away we’ll set about getting you guys back. Fucking pump that wood full of shit. Nothing survives in there, OK?’

  ‘No probs, Sarge. How’s the boss looking?’ Dusty yelled back. Trueman was silent; his eyes said everything. Dusty nodded, slammed six rounds into the feed tray and screaming and swearing with every shot ploughed round after round into the wood until the turret was full of cordite and the tears he never realized he was crying mixed with sweat and black powder.

  Trueman stepped from Dusty’s back on to his own wagon and screamed to Ellis, ‘Ell, Three Zero needs a driver. Get the fuck out and drive for Dusty. I’ll be back for you once I’ve taken the boss back.’

  Ellis gulped, looked out of the turret, saw the boss and Davenport on the front deck and felt a round wing past his head. White with fear, he gathered himself and cross-decked, picking his way over the two casualties and then on to the front wagon and finally slithering into Davenport’s empty driver’s compartment. He put on the ANR and over the intercom screamed, ‘Fuck fuck fuck! Dusty! You there?’

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  ‘Then keep going spastic! Fuck them up!’

  ‘What do you think I’m fucking doing!’ screamed back Dusty as rounds poured out of the Rarden, covering Trueman’s casevac wagon, which was now picking its tortuous way back down the track towards the HLS, Trueman peering out and keeping the driver in the ruts, wincing at every bump, which he knew must be loosening Tom’s tourniquets.

  Davenport lay next to Tom on the front deck trying to shield him from the tracers that kept darting out of the wood to skim over their heads. He didn’t feel scared and kept shouting to Tom over the noise of the engine, ‘Stay here, sir. Stay here, sir. We’re going to patch you up. We’re going to patch you up.’ He looked back up the track and saw the two front Scimitars firing pitiless salvos into the treeline. The long grass was now ablaze after dozens of HE shells had spat fire into it; smoke and dust kicked up by the Rardens shrouded the wagons in a fuzzy hue. Davenport leaned over Tom and felt for a pulse with two fingers jammed against his neck. It was terribly weak. He stroked Tom’s head, spitting on his hands and trying to wash away a bit of the blood from his face.

  Finally they were through the killing zone and reached the cover of the compounds, and after another three hundred metres arrived at a field behind Fast Pace mercifully away from the contact. A stretcher party prepared by Brennan lifted Tom off the wagon. One of the medics calmly asked Davenport to keep his knee pressed into Tom’s shoulder as he deftly unwound a drip and started putting needles into him. Another shouted his pulse and breathing rates to Trueman, who was sending the MIST up through battle group.

  Ten miles away this information was relayed over the roar of rotors to the MERT. This was their second call-out today and their second triple amputee in as many days. The doctor shouted to one of the nurses as he heard the report come over the radio, ‘This bloke sounds fucked. With that pulse and that bleed he’s not going to make it.’ The nurse, a girl of eighteen with freckles and dimples in her cheeks looked at him and nodded through sad eyes.

  Back on the ground Trueman kept looking into the sky and shouting, ‘Where is this fucking MERT? Where the fuck is it?’ while Davenport kept his knee pressed into Tom and shivered as he felt his kneecap scrape against what was left of the shoulder blade. He wiped Tom’s brow with his sweat rag; someone had passed him a bottle of water, and he dabbed at the skin on the broken forehead as the medic tried desperately to bring Tom back from the brink. The medic had punched a line into his sternum to give fluids direct into his bone marrow as vein after vein at Tom’s extremities shut down and closed off its flow.

  ‘There you go, sir, there you go. We’re going to get you home now,’ Davenport said over and over, hoping that Tom could hear him and at the same time not feel any pain. Tom was making gurgling noises from his mouth, and the caught, laboured breaths from his exhausted lungs had now steadied into near-imperceptible rises and falls of his chest far too many seconds apart from each other.

  Tom shook off his dream and woke up. He saw everyone around him and wondered why he was getting so much attention. What had happened? Aren’t we still in contact? Why are we back here and not on the track? He
looked up and fixed Davenport with his one-eyed gaze; Dav would know. ‘Where are we, Dav? Where are the boys? How are the boys?’

  ‘They’re all right, sir. We’re all OK, we’re all OK. We’re just going to get you back. You’ve had an accident but we’re going to make you better.’

  Tom grunted his thanks. He still didn’t understand why they were making this fuss. His head hurt; he must have banged it. Had he tripped running back down the track and hit it on the front of the Scimitar? He could see Trueman above him now, who then pulled the pin on a smoke grenade and threw it. Why is he doing that? He must be trying to mark an HLS or something. Ah yes. He could see the helicopter now. The rotors pulsed in his ears and made the blue smoke whirl around him and then dilute into the brown dust whipped up by the downdraught. Tom liked the breeze. The heli flared thirty metres away from them, as though it were a surfboard cresting a wave, before gently touching its belly on the ground.

  Again Davenport knelt over Tom and hugged him. Then Tom felt himself being lifted up and carried into the dark womb of the Chinook, where more people, wearing clean, undusty uniforms, crowded around and helped him. Davenport was with him on the heli as well; he must have been hurt too. With his right arm he pulled Davenport towards him; he couldn’t move his left one.

  ‘Are we going home, Dav?’

  ‘Yes, sir, we’re going home. You’re going home to your mum, sir.’

  A warm surge swept through Tom, and he just wanted to close his eyes and take a nap. He wanted to sleep in his own bed through, not a hospital one. He murmured quietly to Davenport, whose ear was now pressed against his lips to catch his faint whispers, ‘Take me home, Dav. Take me home. I want to go home.’ He squeezed his hand; Davenport squeezed it back.

  Tom was back in the garden. He reached out to his father, whose arms folded around him and whisked him up off the ground with a throaty great laugh. Constance ruffled his hair. He was home.