Stinger

by Stinger (retail) (epub)

  The name of the Taliban leader had the desired effect.

  ‘He will not be pleased that we are being hampered in our work by his own soldiers,’ I added.

  Salan’s expression veered between anger and doubt. Finally he turned on his heel and barked an order at his men. They climbed back into the truck and drove off without another word.

  Dexy watched them go. ‘Nice going, Sean. You should have made him apologise.’

  ‘Where the hell were your boys?’

  ‘Look around you.’

  I did as he said. In the shadows cast by the buildings and the stacks of equipment around the compound, I picked out the still darker shapes of prone figures with guns trained on the truck as it paused at the gates and then drove off.

  ‘They’d only have sparked up if things had turned really ugly,’ Dexy said. He frowned as he looked over my shoulder. The fake fuel bladder was now in full view. The ruptured one that had been screening it lay deflated, the last of its fuel trickling into the earth. ‘We can’t risk unloading the gear in full view of those goons on the gate. We’ll have to do it tonight and get the patrol up to Konarlan tomorrow. We can’t afford any more delays.’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘We’d have been tight for time before sunset anyway.’

  Later that afternoon, making enough noise to attract the attention of the Taliban guards on the gate, we loaded a few decoy boxes of supplies. Then we left the loading doors open and the heli unattended while we went to eat and rest.

  From the shadows of the building I saw one of the soldiers stroll across the compound and nose around the helicopter. He clambered inside and peered into a couple of packing cases. Then, losing interest, he sauntered back to the gate and squatted down in the shade.

  Just before sunset we refuelled the heli from one of the remaining bladders, using that as an excuse to reposition it with the loading door hidden from the gate.

  We waited until one the next morning before making our next move. The city was still and silent, apart from the barks and snarls of scavenging dogs and the flickering of tracer from a distant gun battle in the hills to the north.

  The body of the helicopter shielded the stack of fuel bladders from the view of the guards dozing in the shadows by the gate, but Boon and Tank kept watch on them while we began to load the equipment. I rammed my combat knife through the tough rubber hide of the bladder, driving it in with the heel of my hand, and forcing it upwards to extend the cut for four or five feet.

  The exposed packs of gel shone grey in the moonlight. Working in complete silence, we lifted out a couple of dozen and stacked them to one side. I had partly covered the lens of my torch with insulating tape, leaving only a narrow lozenge of light, but even so I got into the space we had created inside the bladder before switching it on.

  I cut through the second rubber skin facing me. As I moved forward, the bladder closed around me and the smell of rubber and the fetid odour of explosives filled my nostrils. I froze for a moment, suppressing a memory. Then I reached inside the second bladder and my hand closed around cold metal. I began to pull out the equipment, one piece at a time, passing it behind me to Dexy. It was moved from hand to hand along a chain to the helicopter where Jeff supervised its loading into cases, crates and sacks.

  As soon as the last piece was loaded we began emptying the bladder of the packs of gel, forming another human chain to move them to a ruined building at the back of the compound, where we passed the packs of gel down into the cellar, which was already half full of rubble. When the last one was in place, we pushed dust and fine debris down from the floor above. It formed a thin layer, shielding the packs from casual glance, but a permanent burial would have to await daylight. The slight noise we had made set my heart thumping, but there was no movement and no challenge from the guards at the gate.

  I poured a few gallons of aviation fuel into and over the empty fuel bladder, hiding any lingering smell of explosives, and we left it where it lay. As the rest of us hid in the shadow of the heli, Dexy moved soundlessly towards the gate. Ten minutes passed before Boon and Tank returned with him, moving like ghosts, flitting from each dark pool of shadow to the next.

  Boon and Tank stayed with the heli, mounting guard. The rest of us stole back to the accommodation block.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning I found Dexy on the satphone to base. He broke the connection shortly after I appeared. ‘They’re getting very sweaty back there,’ he said. ‘Intercepted comms show another terrorist team is already inside the US.’

  ‘With Stingers?’

  ‘Not yet. But “no variation from the attack schedule will be countenanced for any reason”.’ He shook his head. ‘Wherever that Rupert went to school it wasn’t Peckham, that’s for sure.’ He paused. ‘Right, you’ll take the equipment and the first group to the LUP this afternoon.’

  ‘Who leads it – you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Dave. I’m coming up with the rest of the guys tomorrow. You need to make a rolling drop at the landing zone just after sunset. The timing’s critical; too early and they’ll be inserting in daylight, too late and you’ll be in danger of being shot down for breaking curfew. You return to Kabul at first light tomorrow for the rest of us.’

  The hours dragged by. We waited until we heard the muezzin calling the faithful to mid-afternoon prayer, then I fired up the helicopter. Under cover of the noise of the engines and the dust cloud raised by the whirling rotors, Dexy and Rami ran to the ruined building at the back of the compound and used an axe to smash through the single beam that held up the ceiling over our hidden packs of gel. I saw the cloud of dust as the ground floor collapsed, concealing the evidence under a thick layer of rubble.

  I taxied to the far side of the compound and paddled the rudders to bring the heli around, then raised the collective, winding up the engines. The heli lifted a little and as the rotors began to take the weight, I glanced behind me into the cab. Dave’s face was set, but the expressions of one or two of the guys betrayed their anxiety. In their natural element, on the ground, they felt capable of dealing with anything an enemy could throw at them. In the air they were vulnerable, not in control of their own destiny, forced to trust their lives to a pilot who was not one of them.

  At full power the Hydra could climb a hundred feet every two seconds. In one minute we would be beyond the range of any trigger-happy Taliban with an AK47. We would not be out of Stinger range, however, and I had to push away the thought of what a missile would do among the mounds of explosives and ammunition in the cab.

  We flew east towards the mountains, tracking the course of the river far below us. The shadow the helicopter cast on the ground stretched as the sun sank behind us and I watched the line of the sunset rising up the mountains until only the snowcapped peaks were still tinged with red light. Then they too were cast into shadow. The glow of the setting sun still lit the sky far behind us, but ahead was only darkness, the dense velvet black of the land and the twilight sky pierced by the first glimmering stars of evening.

  I flipped the intercom switch. ‘Take the controls and hold us steady while I put these on.’

  ‘Okay, I have it,’ Jeff said, ‘Let’s hope the Taliban don’t choose this moment to take a shot at us.’

  I changed the illumination of the instrument panels to infrared, then pulled the night-vision goggles down over my eyes and switched on the battery pack. The grey-black world disappeared, replaced by a vivid green. I counted slowly to twenty, giving my eyes time to adjust, then focused the goggles one eye at a time, fixing my gaze on the beacon of the evening star. I adjusted them until the twin images merged into a single sharp-edged one.

  The thin scattering of stars I had seen by normal vision became a milky, opalescent belt covering the heavens. The twisting course of the river below us shone like a ribbon of light and the goggles even picked up the faint light of glow-worms speckling the ground along its banks.

  ‘Taking control,’ I said.

&nbs
p; Jeff handed back, then pulled on his own goggles.

  I thumbed the intercom switch again. ‘Four minutes to target.’

  I heard a shuffle from the back as the guys prepared themselves.

  I eased the cyclic forward and the valley walls rose around us as the heli began to descend. We passed close to a village and flew on into the gathering darkness.

  ‘One thousand feet.’ Jeff’s hand was clamped around the flare-release lever, ready to dump burning phosphorus and magnesium into the path of any missiles launched against us. ‘Five hundred… four hundred… three hundred…’

  Now we were well within range of any Kalashnikov pointing in our direction. I saw the small huddle of lights that marked Konarlan away to our right, and paddled the rudder to come around the shoulder of the hill into the narrow valley. Rocks and boulders loomed like green icebergs as we dropped closer to the valley floor.

  ‘One minute,’ I said. The loading door slid open behind me. My eyes raked the darkness ahead of us, lining up our navigation points: a clump of dead trees, their white, bark-stripped trunks reflecting the starlight, a sharp bend in the river and a notch in the hills. Ahead I saw a smudge of green, a small sandy beach on the inside of a bend in the river.

  ‘This is it,’ I said. ‘We’re going in.’

  I heard Dave over the intercom. ‘Yes, this is right.’ Despite the tension, I smiled to myself. Special Forces never trusted anyone’s navigation but their own. He’d been using his GPS and his map to track our course all the way from Kabul.

  ‘Visual,’ Jeff said. ‘Height’s good, stand by.’

  I heard the guys in the cab scrambling to their feet and lining up near the loading door.

  ‘Forward twenty, height’s good.’

  The landing zone could scarcely have been tighter. The mountainside rose sheer to our left and the bank on the other side of the river was thickly forested. There were boulders and mounds of rock, dumped by the winter floods, above and below the bend in the river.

  ‘Down twenty.’

  The river still glowed green, but the forest and the black mountain to either side swallowed every other trace of light. I was descending blind into a black-walled cavern. I could feel sweat prickle on my brow and heard the accelerating thud of my heartbeat, but I forced myself to relax my grip on the controls, making fine, almost instinctive adjustments to the cyclic and collective as Jeff talked us down.

  ‘Forward twenty. Down ten. Stand by.’

  As we dropped lower, the downwash hit the beach. One moment we were hovering in clear air, the next we were in the heart of a sandstorm of our own creation. I could still see a faint glow from the surface of the river, but nothing forward, to either side or below. A touch too far to the right and we would be in the trees, to the left the rotors would strike the mountainside. ‘Get us down, Jeff. I can’t see a fucking thing.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We have to go for a landing, let’s get this thing down.’

  The sand cloud was so dense around us that the velocity of the whirling rotors struck sparks from the grains of sand. The rotors were thrashing the air inches from the rock face. It was so close I could almost have reached out a hand and touched it. I touched the right rudder and eased away from the black wall.

  Jeff found his voice again. ‘Right ten. That’s good. Down twenty… fifteen… ten… five… Go! Go! Go!’

  I kept the heli in the hover, the wheels a couple of feet above the ground. The guys were already spilling from the cab. Dave was first out; he and three others went into all-round defence, taking up firing positions at the edge of the beach as the others dumped out the equipment and jumped after it.

  ‘They’re clear. Let’s go,’ Jeff said.

  I pulled on the collective and he began counting off the ascending height as we pulled clear. As I paddled the right rudder to swing us around and head back down the valley, I glanced down. The dust storm sandbar now shone an unbroken green.

  Dave and the guys had already taken their equipment and melted into cover.

  I levelled at three hundred feet and we flew back to the south-west, skimming the river. I pulled a wide turn around Konarlan, circling to approach from the direction of Kabul, until I saw the lights of the compound ahead of us.

  We were walking across the compound towards the buildings when a Toyota came blasting up to the gate. At least twenty men were clinging to the back, using whatever precarious handholds they could find.

  They jumped down and formed a hostile circle around us, shouting and brandishing their Kalashnikovs. They parted as their commander strode through them, and to my relief I saw that it was not Salan but the barrel-chested figure of Agha Shah Azuin. His son Daru padded alongside him. Daru smiled, patted his pocket and tapped a finger to the side of his nose, but his father’s greeting was much less friendly.

  ‘I warned you before, Inglisi. Why have you broken curfew? Why were you flying after dark?’

  ‘You have every right to be angry,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. ‘We should have arrived well before sunset but we’ve had instrument and engine trouble on the way from Kabul. We had to set down for two hours, a hundred miles west of here. I was afraid we would not get here at all.’

  His piercing gaze never left my face. ‘Where exactly did you set down?’

  ‘I don’t know the name, but I can show you on the map.’

  I rummaged in the cockpit, produced a map, glanced at it and then stabbed my finger down. ‘There.’

  He took the map from me, holding it so I could no longer see it. ‘Describe the place.’

  My mouth dried, but I fought to hold my expression unchanged as I struggled to remember the contours shown on the map. I kept it as vague as I could. ‘It was a place where the valley narrowed a little, on the left bank of the river a few miles beyond a village.’

  ‘You have not mentioned the ruins,’ he said.

  I hesitated, trying to second-guess him, but the expression on his face offered no clues. ‘I saw no ruins,’ I said at last.

  He held my gaze a moment longer, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is of no importance. You would be very wise not to fly after dark again.’ He went to the door of the helicopter and peered inside. ‘What load were you carrying that was so urgent?’

  I swallowed. ‘Just supplies and equipment.’

  ‘A very small load.’

  I forced a smile. ‘We bring up only what we need.’ I looked away from his insistent gaze.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  I had been expecting the question, but still had to suppress a nervous start. ‘In Kabul. They will be returning soon.’

  He was already turning away, losing interest in the conversation.

  ‘I’m sorry for the trouble we have caused you,’ I said.

  He walked over to the gates and spoke to the Taliban guards there. Neither Jeff nor I moved. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘I’ve just aged ten years in ten minutes. If he’d asked one more question I’d have been needing those toilet rolls of yours.’

  Jeff didn’t even try to force a smile. ‘I’m getting too old for this,’ he said. ‘When this is over, I’m definitely getting out.’

  In the temporary absence of his father, Daru seized his chance to sidle up to me.

  ‘Not now, Daru, not now,’ I said.

  ‘But, Inglisi, I have a great bargain for you.’ He patted his pocket again. ‘An emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg. It is a fabulous treasure, beyond price, but you can have it for fifty thousand Afghanis.’

  ‘No, Daru, I’m a poor man; such riches are beyond me.’

  ‘Forty thousand Afghanis then.’

  ‘Not at any price. I have no money.’

  He gave me a sceptical look. ‘You are from the West, aren’t you? Of course you have money.’

  I ignored him, shooting a glance towards his father who was still talking to the Taliban guards. ‘Daru, your village is many kilometres away. Why were you so near here tonight?’

 
‘There were rumours that the men who attacked Konarlan a week ago had returned.’ He shrugged. ‘It was the gossip of old men. They are not here. If they had been, I, Daru, son of Agha Shah Azuin, would have killed them myself.’

  ‘Sure you would,’ I said, ‘or sold them an emerald.’

  His father strode back to us, his long hair and beard streaming behind him.

  ‘Will you take tea with us?’ I said.

  Azuin shook his head. ‘Thank you, but there is work to be done.’ He glanced back towards the Taliban guards at the gate. ‘My allies are not pleased that you have broken their curfew. You should beware.’

  He started to say something else, then changed his mind and barked an order to his men. They clambered back on to the vehicle. Daru winked at us and loped away after his father.

  The warlord’s black vehicle swung out of the gates and away up the hill heading north-east, but a few moments later the Talibans’ red Landcruiser also started up. It took the opposite route. I watched the taillights and saw it stop in the village. I heard the murmur of voices and a few shouts, then the engine restarted and it drove on down the dusty road towards Kabul.

  ‘Are they going to check our story?’ Jeff said.

  ‘I doubt it. They don’t have to drive to Kabul to do that. The Talibans’ communications aren’t perfect but they must be good enough to put in a phone call.’

  ‘Then what are they doing?’

  ‘I don’t know, probably nothing to do with us.’ Just the same, I watched the red glow of the tail lights appearing and disappearing as the pickup climbed the pass at the far end of the valley. It halted at the lookout point at the top of the pass. The white headlights stabbed out of the darkness towards us as it turned round and manoeuvred to face back towards Konarlan, then the lights were extinguished. I waited a few more minutes, but it didn’t move again.

  * * *

  The Taliban guard on the compound had been doubled by the next morning, and when I walked down to the river to wash I noticed one of them following me at a distance. Alarmed, I splashed water on my face and then hurried back to the compound.