The firefight started again in earnest. Tony was out of the OP and on his feet, but crouching. He knew Jock would have picked up the contact on the radio and would be thinking about how they could help. He had pressed the red distress (he hated that word) button on his satphone—immediately his deputy and SHQ would be aware that they had a situation. His phone would bleep a location signal until it ran out of batteries. He had a whole day’s worth spare in his bergen—which he had purposely left under his poncho.
With enough ammunition to make a considerable difference at Rorke’s Drift, he zigzagged his way toward 21 Charlie’s location. Toward Ted Groves, where the cry had come from. Always alert, always looking.
He stopped dead, going down on one knee. Off to his left, some hundred metres away, he picked out 21 Alpha: Trooper Sandy manoeuvring his way carefully, but quickly, toward the last known location of 21 Charlie as he said he would.
He pressed the pressel on his radio.
“21 Alpha, I have you visual. Sitrep?”
Trooper Sandy stopped and looked in his direction. He put his spare hand up to his forehead. Tony thought he was probably shielding his eyes from the early sun.
And then the reality of what they were up against hit Captain Tony James like a fully stocked fridge.
A single high-velocity crack was the soundtrack to Trooper Sandy wheeling backward, arms and legs flailing uncontrollably as his body lifted and spun.
Thump!
The hollow sound filled Tony’s ears, scrambled his thought processes, and made him shrink within himself, the gravity of what he had just seen dulling all of his senses. He was numb. Just for a second. What seemed like a long second.
His radio crackled into life.
“Hello, 20 Alpha, this is 21 Bravo.” Steve Bliss, three o’clock. “I have you visual. Is that 21 Alpha down?”
The enveloping darkness that was so close to taking hold of him evaporated. He turned his head around, scanned left and right, and caught Trooper Steve Bliss’s silhouette about fifty metres behind him.
Tony metaphorically shook himself. He realised he had involuntarily fallen to the ground and into a prone, almost foetal position. Self-protecting. Shameful?
He’d been in contact twice before, but he was never as exposed as this. Always within the comfort of a much larger military grouping. He’d been awarded the Military Cross for taking out a group of Taliban in Helmand almost single-handedly, during a company-level attack on an enemy strongpoint. He had been alert, alive throughout that experience. And he had held his infantry platoon together during a second firefight a couple of weeks later, seeing off a Taliban assault whilst they were out patrolling. In both cases they were never far from the protection of armoured vehicles. If he needed air support, he could call for it in minutes. And there was always a doctor on hand should they have to deal with any casualties.
Here, just now, he was on his own. Away from the joined-upness of an infantry battalion, its close air support, its helicopters. Its doctors. A single SRR team miles away from nothing more than half a troop of help. And miles again from the safety of the Saudi border. 21 Alpha was down, possibly dead. He’d seen that with his own eyes. 21 Charlie had called the initial contact and then, that scream . . . Where was 21 Charlie?
He was on his haunches now. “Roger, 21 Bravo. Wait. 21 Charlie, Sitrep? Over.” Nothing. He knew Ted was down as well. After that scream.
They had to get out of there. But he couldn’t think about extraction without establishing what had happened to Alpha and Charlie. Sandy and Ted. He had to do something.
“21 Bravo—stay firm and provide cover. Keep watching your back.”
Just then an odd flash of colour, possibly blue or black, flickered in the distance to his right and was caught in his peripheral vision. He shrugged it off and moved quickly behind a man-size rock to his left. He raised his weapon to his shoulder and looked through the times-five optical sight toward Sandy’s location.
Trooper Sandy was lying on the ground in an uncomfortably twisted position. His weapon was in his hand, but there was no movement. He looked for entry or exit wounds. It was difficult to tell at this distance, but he thought he could pick out a dark patch where Sandy’s body met the ground. Could be shadow—a quick check to where the sun was. Nope. It wasn’t shadow.
He tried his radio again. “21 Alpha and Charlie. Sitrep?”
Nothing.
He’d shut up now. Action was required, not words.
With care, he slid to the ground, gently pushed the barrel of his weapon around the bottom of the right side of the rock, and followed it with his eyes, looking directly above the sights, both eyes open. He nudged around a bit further. And a bit further still. He felt his heart pounding, bouncing between his ears.
He scanned right, looking across a short horizon, a landscape of rock and sand piercing a cloudless dark blue sky. On any other day, at any other time, it would be a heck of a view. Nothing. He stayed there for a few moments and looked again. Still nothing. Was the right all clear? He pulled back and then gently raised himself into a squat position. He left his weapon below the outline of the rock and, helmetless—he’d left that under his poncho—raised himself ever so slowly up over the left side of the rock, the side closest to Sandy. He had to get a view in the direction of 21 Charlie’s—Ted’s—original location. Nothing. He scanned left until he was met with Sandy’s fallen body. And then back again.
Still nothing. It was as though the firefight had happened at a different time. In a different place. Now all was calm. Was it over? He would carefully make his way to Sandy and then to 21 Charlie. Find out what was happening.
“Chk . . . ,” the click of his radio just before receiving a transmission. He pulled back. “20 Bravo. We have your predicament and location. Packing up here. Let me know what’s happening when you can.” No response was expected. Just a helpful, welcoming call from Jock. Well done, Jock.
He started again, in slow motion, exposing himself almost a centimetre at a time.
Then he was up, crouching, moving slowly but purposefully toward Sandy. Left then right, right then left. From small rock to small rock, ducking behind cover where and when he could.
Ten metres, twenty metres. Soon he’d be able to see what state Sandy was in through his rifle sight. Check for vitals.
And then.
Crack! A single-syllable noise. The most deadly sound. Not as loud as, say, a grenade. But with so much more penetration.
Captain Tony James didn’t hear the delayed thump as the round hit him. It got lost as the wind was forced out of his lungs as he hit the ground. He had no idea where or how badly he had been hit. All he knew was that from the moment the round struck him, his body was no longer his. It had become one with, and belonged to, the slug of metal that was travelling faster than the speed of sound. A projectile with as much momentum as a Ford Fiesta. He was a passenger at that point. An unwitting occupant. With no seatbelt.
He knew he was spinning, and he knew that he couldn’t control the spin. He knew he was falling, and he had no idea how he would land. There was no pain. There was just floppiness, lack of control. He thought he had lost grip of his weapon. He hadn’t had the time to put the strap over his shoulder when he had left the OP. He was impotent, like a bone thrown in the air for a dog to fetch.
And now he was static. There was dust in the air, and it got up his nose. Into his eyes. His mind was racing, trying to get a grip of what had just happened. Trying to do something that might save him from further attack. It was primeval, but ever so slightly controlled by his training and experience.
Crack, crack! Thump, thump! Not near him, but overhead.
21 Bravo. Steve Bliss. In contact? He didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing.
He moved his arms. Yup, he could do that.
He tried to bring one leg upward in order to crawl somewhere. Fuck, no. That hurt. Somewhere south. Somewhere below his pelvis.
There was more gunfire and the
n, “20 Alpha, are you OK?”
He lifted his head, looking for his weapon. It was a metre to his left. Covered in sand. That might jam, he thought. His training kicking in again.
He reached for his pressel. “I’m down. Leg wound, I think. Sandy is down . . .” He was fighting for breath now. He knew shock wasn’t far off, and with it would come debilitation.
“Get out now! That’s an order.”
Crack, thump! Crack, thump!
Silence for a few seconds.
“21 Bravo. Roger. I’ll get to Jock and we’ll come and get you.” Silence. And then a very regretful, “Out.”
Tony tried to move his right leg again, but the pain overwhelmed him. He wanted to cry out. To scream like he had when, after a fall from his moped on his honeymoon, the Greek doctors had set the other leg. Without an anaesthetic. Bone against bone. Intolerable pain.
He felt that now. At first it had been a throb. Now it was pain as you’d expect if your leg had been ripped open by a bullet.
There was nothing he could do. Against the strength of a rising sun, the darkness started to close in. He knew his body was shutting down. A combination, he guessed, of a gaping wound and an accompanying outpouring of blood. The body was a remarkable machine. It knew when enough was enough. When it couldn’t cope with what it was faced with. When the injury needed its attention more than the body’s owner did. It was taking control. He was losing it.
As oblivion approached and light became dark, Tony knew there were only two possible outcomes of his current predicament. Death or, worse still, a period of time in an orange jumpsuit—followed by death. There weren’t enough words to describe how much he loved his wife and their young girl. But, at this point, the first of those two options seemed infinitely more preferable.
He started to pray.
SIS Headquarters, Vauxhall, London
Sam was struggling to maintain her interest in the computer screens. On her left she had the latest newsreel shot by the US NBC news. It showed hundreds of migrants clambering out of overburdened fishing boats and rubber dinghies on the shores of Lesbos, Greece. There were so many refugees arriving at the moment that the five analysts were struggling to keep up with the footage. And they only saw what they saw. God knows how many of the poor folk didn’t make it onto camera.
The weather was worsening in the eastern Mediterranean, and the journey from Turkey to Greece, across the often choppy waters of the Aegean Sea, was becoming more and more hazardous. The informed view was that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, were rushing to make the crossing whilst the weather held.
Sam and the team would have other opportunities—more images of some of the people they had missed. Not all, but a good number. SIS had facilities to take photos at the various choke points. They had surprisingly good access to a lot of cross-border CCTV images along the whole journey: Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany. Over the past month she had been able to follow a particular family from Kos all the way to Dortmund, Germany. What was heart-breaking was that Sam’s family of five had morphed into a family of four somewhere in Serbia—a little girl of about two, lost along the way.
That family had no terrorist connection as far as she knew. They had just kept cropping up as she looked through the photos from various locations. The mum with her long, pale blue, lacy dress, grubby at the hem. Dad with the stock-in-trade short black beard, Nike jacket, and Giants baseball cap. And the kids dragging what few toys they had behind them.
Another wave of tiredness crept up on her. It was two thirty in the afternoon, and it already felt like a long day. She didn’t like Thursdays. She had left her flat in Colliers Wood at about seven thirty that morning and made her way straight to her weekly psychiatrist’s appointment a few blocks from the Headquarters. She usually took the tube: Northern then Victoria Line. It wasn’t quite door to-door, but it was pretty close. She made up for the luxury of using the Underground to travel by dedicating her lunchtimes to exercise in the basement gym. She usually ran on one of the machines, normally between six and ten kilometres. She wasn’t into upper body work, even though she knew it would be good to balance her phys.
In her defence, Sam had taken Jane’s advice and joined her at weekly yoga classes after work on a Monday. It was an hour of all sorts of core body strengthening. And a good deal of chanting. She certainly felt much more relaxed following the yoga session than she ever did coming out of the psychiatrist’s office.
This morning she had almost stormed out. Doctor Latimer was a monster. She didn’t know where he’d learned his trade, but he had a real knack of finding the nerve. And then not letting go. What was doubly infuriating was that he was so nice with it.
“Can we talk about Chris?”
No, we bloody well can’t talk about Chris. Chrissake. Why, oh why, did they all want to unearth things that she just wanted to keep buried? Chris was dead. That was that. If it hadn’t been for the skilful hands of an army doctor who had managed to stick her insides back through the hole made by the mortar round, she would have been dead as well. It was four years ago now. History.
Come on, Latimer, let’s get with the programme! There was so much more to talk about. Since Afghanistan she had been through the mill in Sierra Leone and almost copped it again there. It had been dangerous, exciting, fun. And it was raw; it was almost now. She could talk about that. For days.
Yes—let’s talk about that.
But, no. It nearly always came back to Camp Bastion and that fateful day in November, four years ago. The blast, the noise, the dust.
The death.
She didn’t want to come to terms with it. She’d had enough of it. Enough of it percolating through her dreams, keeping her awake at night, flashing like a strobe during her downtimes—wearing her patience. Making her irritable.
She had tried to move on. The Ebola affair, linking up with Henry Middleton in Liberia, and the pair of them travelling into Sierra Leone and tracking down the terrorist cell—by mistake, she kept reminding herself—had brought welcome relief to the lowest point in her life. And Henry was a sweetheart. They had faced death and come out the other side. Together.
She had tried to love him.
Before taking up the post in SIS, Sam had travelled to New York to stay with Henry for a week. By the end of her trip they both knew it wasn’t right. For her, he was too nice, however bizarre that sounded—it certainly sounded bizarre to her. He was great to be with, but she couldn’t connect—and she guessed that prevented him from doing the same. Maybe Chris’s memory was still too strong. Or maybe she was just messed up. That was probably closer to the truth.
Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t get out of the psychiatrist sessions. Not until Latimer had given David Jennings, Jane’s boss, the all-clear. One of the caveats of her taking the analyst’s job was that, weekly, she continued to see a shrink—and that David was given full access to the doctor’s reports. She knew she was seen as a risk. And she knew that David had been brave to offer her a job on the team. So it was job plus shrink, or no job at all.
Her wistfulness was interrupted. Frank was faffing about with the remote control to the TV that was on the wall behind them. It broadcast Sky News continuously. He was gaping up at the screen, his mouth slightly open. The volume now raised.
“Not again,” he said to himself.
Sam swivelled around in her chair and leaned back so she didn’t have to strain her neck to see the screen. Which idiot put it that high up on the wall?
She looked, took some of it in, and then her mind went blank. Totally. All she could do was watch the pictures and let the unrecognisable words enter into her head via her ears. In a few seconds of news broadcast she had turned from reasonably high-flying SIS analyst to a person-shaped machine capable of some functions, but not all of them. Reason currently wasn’t on the list of functioning facets.
“It’s shocking that we seem to have lost another passenger aircraft on a routine flight. The Fly Europe 737 wa
s halfway between Rome and Munich when it came down in the Alps.” The image was a jittery mobile phone clip taken from the centre of an alpine village, black smoke rising from the seat of fire on a nearby hillside. Wooden chocolate-box chalets put the size of the devastation into some sort of context. They were dwarfed by the smoke and flames.
“It’s not clear if the plane hit any buildings, but, as you can see from the footage, there is habitation very close to the crash site.”
Sam was now fully tuned out. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she reached into her pocket and dug out her mobile. She quickly glanced down, swiped her thumb to unlock her phone, and then searched her mail. She was looking for Uncle Pete’s itinerary.
She really didn’t need to look. She remembered everything. That was her training. She looked at something—she remembered it. Now she was checking for checking’s sake. To confirm her only surviving relative’s—certainly the only one she spoke to—Peter Green’s, travel itinerary. Checking that today he was catching a flight from Rome to Munich. He’d done the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. Now he wanted to see the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang castle at Neuschwanstein. He had e-mailed her yesterday. Rome to Frankfurt with Fly Europe. “Cheap and cheerful,” he had reported in his e-mail.
She opened her mailbox.
There it was. Flight number, times, hotel details. Everything. It all matched with the ensuing madness on the screen.
Horrified to the point of numbness, she looked back up at the screen again. She heard, “no survivors” and “no indication yet of terrorist activity.” And then it was all noise and the same short video footage being played over and over again. A blur to her. A repetitive nightmare.
She felt sick. The same sort of sickness she had felt when her mother died unexpectedly. Not throwing-up sick. Just really, really queasy.
And then the sickly feeling, which had started in the pit of her stomach, rose quickly upward. By the time it reached her head it had turned to anger. No, that wasn’t strong enough. It was rage.
Fuelling the Fire Page 5