Stinger

by Stinger (retail) (epub)

  I led the way over the next stretch. The tunnel ahead was in darkness; there was no reassuring circle of light from the next shaft. I moved on, my hand stretched out in front of me. After a few minutes my fingers encountered rock and I pulled out my torch. Ahead of me the tunnel was completely blocked by rubble.

  ‘What do we do?’ I said.

  ‘Move some of it and get past it if we can,’ Dexy said. ‘If not, we’ll have to go back.’

  I slid the bergen from my shoulders, glad at least of the relief from its weight, then began to pull at the rock. Dexy worked alongside me. ‘We’ll do it in shifts,’ he said. ‘We can’t all get at it at once anyway. Ten minutes on, twenty off, until we get through.’

  ‘What if a shell’s blown this in from above?’ Rami said.

  ‘Then we’ve got a shitload of rock to clear.’

  For half an hour we got nowhere. As fast as we pulled out each piece of rubble, more dropped down to replace it. Our faces were haggard in the light of the torch. ‘We’ll give it another ten minutes,’ Dexy said. ‘Then we’ll have to go back and find another way.’

  A couple of minutes later we pulled a large boulder clear. In the gap it had left behind, there was a faint chink of light. I scrambled up and began to widen the opening, then shone the torch up the blocked shaft. The rubble and boulders above us seemed to be jammed, but might give way at any moment.

  I reached further and further in, pulling out more and more rocks. Fine dust and earth dropped around me and twice there was a low rumbling sound as the rubble shifted. I held my breath, then crawled in still further and pushed at the rock in front of me. It rolled away and through the dust there was dim light ahead.

  I wormed my way through the narrow gap and slithered down the pile of rubble on the other side. Amica was next. As I helped her down I could feel the strength in her slim frame. She must have weighed no more than nine stone, yet she had been carrying a bergen almost as heavy as mine.

  Rami came next, and the other three began to push the bergens through. Then Dexy and Boon clambered through the hole, leaving Tank to bring up the rear. He had only worked his shoulders through when the rumbling began again. He threw himself forward, but when the noise died and the dust cloud cleared, he lay face down on the rubble mound, pinned by the right leg. It was wedged in the space between two smaller rocks, jammed underneath a large boulder.

  ‘That rock’s too big to shift,’ I said. ‘Even if we can, it might roll down on his head.’

  Dexy peered at it. ‘We might be able to shift one of those two smaller ones below it and pull him out that way.’

  I scraped at the soil with my fingers, then used the butt of my rifle, forcing it between the two rocks to try to force them apart. I could feel it dislodging some earth and a few small pebbles, and the gap between them widened by an inch or so.

  ‘If you can force your leg downwards, Tank, you should be able to pull it clear.’ I saw him wincing with the pain as he tried, but he was still held fast. I forced the butt of the Kalashnikov further in between the two rocks and used the barrel as a lever.

  ‘You’re wrecking your rifle,’ Dexy said.

  Tank raised his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. If you don’t get me out of here, he can have mine.’

  I felt the rock give a little more. I held it there, my arms shaking from the effort. ‘Now, Tank, push it down.’ I put all my strength into one final effort and forced the rocks a little further apart. Tank groaned with pain, but I heard his body slither down the rubble mound. Amica checked his ankle carefully and got him to put his weight on it a bit at a time. ‘It’s bruised, that’s all,’ she said.

  I pulled my rifle out of the rocks and peered at it. ‘It looks all right.’

  ‘The only way you’ll find out for sure is when you pull the trigger,’ Dexy said. ‘Either it’ll work or you’ll blow your own head off.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘You have it.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Come on. We’ve only an hour to sunset. If we don’t hit that target tonight, we’ve lost.’

  We moved on towards the next glimmer of light. I could hear the faint whisper of water somewhere in the distance ahead. Peering up the next shaft I saw that black clouds were covering the sky. The thought of being trapped in the tunnels as a cloudburst raised the river level left me fighting the urge to break into a run. When I was a kid, my brother had once locked me for hours in the coal shed. Here in this dark, cramped tunnel, I felt an echo of those long-buried childhood fears.

  The noise of rushing water grew louder and louder as we worked our way along. The ground was now permanently wet underfoot and we splashed through a series of ever deeper pools, trapped between mounds of earth and rubble.

  As we clambered over another rockfall, I sank waist-deep into icy water. There was another dim circle of light from a shaft above me, but in the distance ahead I could now see the mouth of the tunnel, and beyond it dark water and white foam.

  I waded forwards, my teeth chattering. Dexy motioned for me to wait in the shadows as he scouted the entrance. Then he waved us on.

  The tunnel opened into a steep gorge. Long ago the ancestors of the Taliban had constructed a channel to divert part of the river into the mouth of the tunnel by laying huge blocks of stone across the riverbed. They were so massive that a hundred men could not have moved them.

  Some were still held in place by other, smaller blocks, forming a ramp of stone like a flat-topped pyramid, stretching a full hundred yards up the riverbed. But even that massive feat of engineering had not been enough to hold back the force of the river indefinitely. Parts of the ramp had been carried away, leaving gaps like missing teeth.

  In flood, the river would still fill the irrigation tunnel at least as far as the point where the rockfall blocked it, but now it was no more than waist deep. My teeth were rattling and my legs were going numb. I looked at the sky. ‘We can’t wait for dark. We have to get out of this water at least.’

  Dexy nodded and inched his way out, craning his neck to scan the clifftops above us. The walls of the ravine looked black and sheer, and glistened with spray thrown up by the rapids.

  Still deep in the gorge, we picked our way among the jumble of boulders at the water’s edge, tracking the river eastwards until we reached a break, a fault line in the rock, marked by a band of harder stone. It formed a narrow ledge like a natural, if perilous, footpath running diagonally up the wall of the canyon.

  Roped together, feeling for a grip on the slippery rock at each step, we inched our way upwards and huddled together on a ledge fifty yards below the lip of the ravine. Dexy checked his GPS, gave a frown and then checked it again. He gave a low whistle. ‘We’ve covered eight miles underground,’ he said. ‘We’re only a couple from the target. We might just do this.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Tank said, ‘but all we’ve done so far is the easy bit.’ I tried to rub some warmth back into my legs. I was weary to the bone with the effort of carrying the bergen so far, and for so long and on so little food, but I was anxious to be moving again, both to keep warm and to keep from thinking about what lay ahead.

  Almost an hour of daylight still remained. We sat close together for warmth, holding our rifles, our eyes fixed on the edge of the ravine. I could hear no sound but the roar and crash of the river, and sense no movement but the faint line of the rays of the cloud-covered sun inching higher up the canyon walls.

  Just before sunset, I swallowed a handful of nuts and dried fruit, and a square or two of chocolate. Dexy and the other guys ate only a mouthful of their rations. ‘We should save as much as we can,’ he said. ‘Keep it for a real emergency.’

  I almost laughed.

  The canyon was now in darkness, but a faint red glow still illuminated the clouds as the sun touched the horizon. We shuffled even closer together, leaning in to hear Dexy as he gave the final briefing. ‘The Taliban will be on full alert. We don’t have enough men, enough explosives or enough ammunition,’ he said. ‘But someho
w we’re going to get this job done. We’ve some idea of what’s waiting for us, but without close recces of the target we’re going in at least half-blind.

  ‘We’re just going to have to walk up to the front door and kick it down. I’ll go lead scout, Tank is number two, Boon at five, Rami at six. You two in the middle.’ He nodded to me and Amica. ‘Your first job is to get your bergens to the caves.’

  He handed an earpiece and throat mike to each of us. ‘We’re all on the same net. I’ll lead out and Tank will run liaison between you and me. Don’t move until we tell you to. If it’s Tank approaching, you’ll hear this.’ He picked up two pebbles and tapped them together in his hand. ‘If you hear anything else, shoot. If you hear shots from elsewhere, take up firing positions and wait for orders from one of us.

  ‘Close to the target, Boon and Rami will take out the guard posts on the cliffs and then give us cover. Tank and I will go in to set the charges. They’ll be expecting us to exfiltrate eastwards, the shortest route to the border through the mountains. We won’t. We’ll retrace our steps instead.’ He tried for a smile. ‘We might even lie up in the irrigation tunnel again through daylight tomorrow.’ He pulled out his map. ‘First RV there – memorise the co-ordinates. That will be good for exactly five minutes, beginning one hour after we start the assault. The Emergency RV will be back here, open until daybreak tomorrow. The war RV will be here.’ He again jabbed his finger at the map, marking a notch in the ridgeline on the south wall of the valley a few miles downstream. ‘That will hold until midnight tomorrow night. After that anyone separated from the group will make their own E & E to the border. Any questions?’ We all shook our heads.

  ‘Then that’s it. From here on in, if we’re challenged, we shoot first and talk afterwards. There is no way we’re going to bluff our way past any guards this close to the target, especially with the Taliban scouring the area for us.’

  Dexy glanced at Rami. ‘I’m making Tank number two. If anything happens to me, Tank leads.’

  ‘I outrank him,’ Rami said.

  ‘This isn’t about rank, it’s about who can get the job done, and Tank’s a trained demolitionist, like me.’ He didn’t wait for Rami to argue the point any further. ‘That’s it, let’s go.’

  He shouldered his bergen and moved off up the ledge into the darkness. We waited just under a lip of the ravine for ten minutes, listening, watching and scenting the air. Then, making no sound, Tank and Dexy melted into the shadows.

  The moon and stars were hidden by cloud, but enough dim light filtered through to show us the track winding its way towards the darkness of the ravine. The river boiled through it and spray hung in the gorge.

  The clifftops high above us looked black and featureless, but I knew that somewhere up there someone would be watching. The track clung to a ledge on the north side, sometimes a couple of hundred yards wide, sometimes narrowing to no more than a few feet.

  We moved in short stages as Dexy and Tank scouted ahead and then called the rest of us up. Every step took us further into the ravine. The walls seemed to close further around us and the cold struck an ever deeper chill in my bones.

  For the moment adrenalin kept my tiredness at bay. I tried to mimic the Special Forces, moving without sound and flitting from one patch of shadow to another, but I was hampered by the bergen. My movements were clumsy, and from time to time my feet scuffed against sand and rock.

  The noise of the river grew louder, seeming to bounce off the rock walls all around me. In the darkness ahead I saw a grey-white column reaching from the clifftops to the foot of the ravine and felt a fine spray on my face.

  We paused by the waterfall as Dexy scouted ahead, then began to file through the gap behind it. There was thunder in my ears and spray drenched me to the skin. The rock was wet and slippery, and I was almost paralysed by the fear of plummeting down on to the rocks far below.

  Somehow I kept my feet moving, inching my way forward, searching with my fingers for whatever grip I could find. The distance was no more than ten or fifteen metres, but it took forever to emerge into the blackness of the ravine.

  We began to move on again. I lost track of how long we had been advancing, pausing, and then advancing again, but the track of the moon behind the clouds showed it had been hours since we had set out.

  We paused again in a pool of shadow, and this time there was a very long interval before the signal to move on.

  I tried to penetrate the darkness ahead, seeking the first sign of danger – a movement, a silhouette against the sky or the glint of moonlight on a weapon – that might save our lives. I thought of Jeff again, his life bubbling away through the hole in his chest. His premonition had come true. I pushed the image away.

  At last we heard the faint chink of pebbles. We began to move forward again, inching along the track. As I drew level with Tank, he laid a hand on my arm and put his finger to his lips. He pointed towards the skyline above and slightly ahead of us.

  There were black shapes against the sky, the twin barrels of an anti-aircraft gun. He bent his head to breathe in my ear. ‘Get low and crawl, as close to the cliff face as you can make it. There’s a guard post on the track directly ahead of you. Don’t worry; we’ve taken care of it. Wait there.’ He disappeared into the darkness.

  I flattened myself to the ground and began to worm my way across the bare rock. Sharp edges of stones pressed into my body and caught in the folds of my clothing. Each time I stopped, freed myself, and moved on. I dared not look up.

  At last I saw a rounded shape rising out of the darkness in front of me, a drystone sangar, built into the mountain. Pressing myself even closer to the rock, I climbed over the low, rough wall, inched along and dropped down inside.

  My foot slipped on something soft and out of the corner of my eye I saw a body sprawled on the ground in the shadow of the low wall. Another lay opposite. Bloodstains marked the dirt around their heads, black as coal in the moonlight.

  I pressed myself against the cliff face and lay still, waiting. There was the faintest of noises as first Amica and then the others joined me. We heard the thin scrape of metal as Boon laid a mine in the track behind us, protecting our backs.

  Moments later I heard a chink of pebbles and Dexy appeared out of the darkness. He whispered to Boon, his fingers tracing a line up the hillside on the far side of the ravine. We were already caked with dirt and mud, but Boon scooped up a few more handfuls from the track, spat in it and rubbed it over his face and hands. Then he flattened himself and worked his way slowly across the track towards the edge of the gorge.

  I couldn’t see for a moment how he was going to get across there, but as I peered at the ravine I made out a straight line, blacker than the surrounding darkness, disappearing into the shadows. A single tree trunk had been laid across the gorge, roughly levelled along the top to make a bridge no more than six inches wide. Anyone trying to cross it would be clearly visible to the guard post above, and the drop from the trunk to the riverbed was at least a hundred feet.

  Boon disappeared over the side of the gorge. Then I caught a glimpse of him moving out along the trunk, swinging underneath it as he advanced hand over hand, using the shadow to hide himself. Only his fingers were visible, gripping the slippery wood as his hands bore not only his own weight but a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound bergen as well.

  I heard the faintest of noises behind me and then Rami, too, was gone, working his way up the other side of the ravine.

  Dexy was resting on his haunches. I saw the glitter of his eyes as he scanned the track ahead and behind us. The waterfall hid most sounds. We would have no more than a split second’s warning of anyone’s approach.

  The night darkened still further and I felt the first cold drops of rain on my skin. I thought of Boon and Rami scaling those treacherous paths in the pitch blackness, reaching upwards, feeling for holds on the slippery rock.

  The rain grew heavier. Dexy was smiling. ‘A lucky break,’ he said. ‘It’ll keep their heads do
wn.’

  The opposite wall of the ravine had disappeared behind a sheet of rain. It drummed against the cliff and streamed down the rock face, turning the grey dust into mud.

  There was a double click in my earpiece and a second one a moment later. ‘They’re in position,’ Dexy said.

  The minutes crawled by. I stared into the curtain of rain, then jumped, startled at Boon’s quiet voice over the net. ‘Two men down, the south doors open. Coming back now.’

  The seconds ticked by with no word from Rami. Then there was a faint, muffled report from the cliff above us. A moment later, Rami’s voice came up on the net. ‘North door open. Two men down.’

  I slid the safety catch off my rifle and waited, the tension gnawing at my stomach, sure that the shots had been heard, and that at any moment tracer would light up the sky.

  A pebble landed beside me. Rami appeared out of the darkness, rainwater streaming down his face. Then a dark shape slithered out of the ravine by the tree trunk, like a seal emerging from the sea. Boon.

  Without pausing, Dexy signalled me to follow and moved off up the track. After a few metres, it dog-legged to the right, disappearing around the rock face. I followed, inching my way around the corner, then paused and raised my eyes. The track ran straight for a couple of hundred metres more, to a point where the ravine walls came so close together that it shrank to little more than a ledge, chiselled from the cliff face above a sheer drop to the river.

  Peering into the rain, I could just discern the rounded shape of another sangar beyond the narrow ledge, guarding the approach from the east. Then the canyon veered away to the right and the track passed out of sight. Had we approached from that direction we could never have reached the target undetected. On the skyline at the far end of the ridge, the barrels of more anti-aircraft guns showed against the sky, jutting from the softer outline of another sangar.

  I lowered my gaze. The cliff face was pocked with countless small craters, but there was a dark shape one-third of the way up – the entrance to the cave.