Authors: Chris Ryan
Battleground (9 page)
‘A suitcase
bomb
,’ Amir whispered. And then, as if he was playing his trump card: ‘Nuclear!’ His smile looked like it was going to take over his whole face. ‘When I was just a child it was taken from the hated Soviets who occupied our land. They think it is lost. The whole world thinks it is lost. But the whole world is wrong! It has been hidden in many places since then.
Many
places. Always we have known the time will come when we will have need of it. That time is now upon us.’
bomb
,’ Amir whispered. And then, as if he was playing his trump card: ‘Nuclear!’ His smile looked like it was going to take over his whole face. ‘When I was just a child it was taken from the hated Soviets who occupied our land. They think it is lost. The whole world thinks it is lost. But the whole world is wrong! It has been hidden in many places since then.
Many
places. Always we have known the time will come when we will have need of it. That time is now upon us.’
He wasn’t whispering any more. Far from it: he was almost shouting. And as he came to the end of his little speech, he appeared to realize that he had said too much. The triumph dissolved from his face and he reverted to a scowl. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you will be quiet. Unless you want this day to be your last.’
They had been driving for about three hot, uncomfortable hours when the vehicle came to a sudden halt. ‘Do not move,’ Amir instructed. ‘Or it will end badly for you.’
They watched him open the door and get out. Sunlight streamed in. It made Ben squint, and by the time he had regained his vision, he felt himself being pulled roughly out of the truck by someone he didn’t recognize. He was thrown onto the dry, stony ground while Aarya was also dragged out. ‘Ow!’ he shouted, but nobody paid any attention. They just manhandled Aarya down too.
Ben looked around. They had arrived at a small settlement – little more than two mud-walled compounds on either side of a wide dirt track. In the distance, Ben saw they were almost surrounded by high, craggy mountains. Outside one of the compounds there was a tree with green leaves – they appeared almost fluorescent against the deep blue sky and the beige, sandy earth. Ben wondered for a moment how a tree could survive in such inhospitable surroundings. Each compound had a rickety wooden gate and the one nearest to Ben was open. Men in traditional dress were standing outside. Ben searched for Amir, but couldn’t find him.
They were hauled to their feet by armed men, then dragged through the gate and into the compound. Ben tried to work out the geography of the place. There was a main central courtyard with a stone well in the middle. Around the courtyard was a series of rooms, each with a wooden door. He couldn’t tell what was beyond the doors, but he assumed that this was where people lived, because around him he saw the signs of habitation: clothes drying in the sun, the remnants of a fire, even a little patch of land where vegetables were being grown. Some elderly men sat in the shade of a wall. Their beards were grey and their faces as brown and grooved as a walnut. They watched Ben and Aarya with curiosity, though they did nothing to stop the rough way they were being treated.
Before Ben could take anything else in, he and Aarya were led to one of these wooden doors. They were flung inside the room and the door was closed behind them. A scratching sound told Ben that it was being locked.
‘We have to do something,’ he hissed.
Aarya’s tears had stopped, but now she had a shell-shocked stare and looked like she was a million miles away. She didn’t reply.
‘Aarya, come on – we
have
to do something.’
have
to do something.’
‘Do something? What can we do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben replied. ‘Escape, I guess. Warn someone what’s going on. I don’t know what they’re going to do with that suitcase bomb, but let’s face it, I don’t think they’re saving it up for Bonfire Night.’
‘For what?’
‘Never mind.’
Ben turned his attention to the room. It looked lived in. Against the far wall there was a low bed with an old mosquito net hanging over it. An oil lamp lay on the sandy, dusty floor and there were clothes in piles around the bed. The only light came from a gap in the wall far too small for anyone to climb through. Ben peered through it. All he saw was an expanse of featureless desert, bleak and unwelcoming, with a wobbly haze of heat rising from the ground. He felt panic surfacing once more, and did what he could to suppress it. There was no time for that. They had to do what they could to get out of here.
‘Aarya,’ he whispered. ‘We need to search this place. Find anything we can to help us.’
Aarya looked at him as if he was mad. ‘We
can’t
get out of here,’ she said waspishly.
can’t
get out of here,’ she said waspishly.
Ben barely heard her. He was already rummaging through the piles of clothes looking for something – anything – that they could use. He found a battery-operated torch, but it didn’t work, and opening it up he saw that the batteries had long since started leaking a foul brown liquid. Under the bed there was a small cardboard box containing a few books, an old black and white photograph and a cigarette lighter.
Ben took the lighter, then turned his attention to the oil lamp. It was a chance . . .
He hurried over to the lamp. ‘What are you doing?’ Aarya asked, but Ben was concentrating too hard to answer. The lamp was ornate, with a brass bottom and a long glass bulb. Ben fiddled gently with it until he managed to take it apart. To his satisfaction he saw a healthy reservoir of oil in the bottom. Taking care not to spill any, he put it carefully on the ground, then returned to the pile of clothes. He found an old set of robes and tore off a strip of material before going back to the lamp and soaking the cloth with the fuel until it was all absorbed. He put the oil-soaked rag in one pocket and the lighter in another.
‘What will you do with that?’ Aarya asked.
Ben narrowed his eyes and crouched down to the floor, where he scooped up a large handful of dust. That too went in his pocket with the lighter. Only then did he turn to Aarya and answer her question.
‘Listen carefully,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea . . .’
Chapter Eight
Bel Kelland stood near the landing zone at Camp Bastion, one hand cupped over her eyes to protect them from the billowing cloud of dust kicked up by the two rotary blades of a Chinook. It was unbearably hot – more so because of the body armour and helmet that she had been given to wear; but for a moment she forgot how uncomfortable she was and watched the chopper land.
She had expected it to arrive five hours ago, but each time the helicopter had set off back towards base, it had been called out on some emergency to a different part of the province. It had only finally appeared in the sky minutes ago, like some huge black insect against the intense blue.
The Chinook touched down in a swirl of sand and noise. Its tailgate opened like the mouth of a great iron beast; almost immediately several soldiers ran off, carrying with them a stretcher bed. Lying in the bed was a wounded man. Was he dead? Bel wondered. Probably not. He was being moved quickly: she guessed that meant he had a chance.
All the soldiers being spewed out of the Chinook looked exhausted and dirty, weighed down by their packs and their weapons. As soon as they were all off, Bel heard a voice. ‘OK!’ it shouted above the noise. ‘Let’s load up. Dr Kelland, are you ready?’
Bel looked over her shoulder. Privates Mears and Aitken – the two young soldiers who had been assigned to accompany her – also carried heavy bergens and standard issue SA80 rifles. They were thin and young, but looked a lot less battle-weary than the new arrivals.
Bel nodded at them. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ she shouted, before following them up into the belly of the chopper.
It took another ten minutes for the beast to be fully loaded. Ten minutes for Bel to think how nervous she was. Camp Bastion might have been strange and forbidding, but now that she was about to leave, she realized how safe it really was. As soon as the Chinook rose up into the sky, she would be at the mercy of any enemy insurgents who felt like taking pot shots at them.
Private Mears seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘We’ll be flying high,’ he shouted at her. ‘Out of range of most of the enemy’s weapons.’
Bel nodded curtly. At the tailgate she saw a soldier taking his position with what looked like a machine gun. The engines of the Chinook suddenly changed pitch and Bel felt her stomach lurch as it lifted up from the ground, swooped away from Bastion and – very sharply, very quickly – gained height. She found herself gripping the edge of her seat.
Suddenly, from the rear of the chopper, she saw what looked like a firework explode in the air. ‘Oh my God!’ she shouted. ‘What was that?’ She looked around, unable to understand why nobody else seemed concerned.
‘It’s OK, Dr Kelland,’ Mears yelled over the noise of the engines. ‘They’re just countermeasure flares.’
‘What?’
‘
Countermeasure flares
,’ he bellowed back. ‘We fire them from the back of the Chinook as we go. They confuse any heat-seeking missiles that are fired in our direction.’
Countermeasure flares
,’ he bellowed back. ‘We fire them from the back of the Chinook as we go. They confuse any heat-seeking missiles that are fired in our direction.’
Bel blinked. ‘Right,’ she said, feeling herself going a bit green. ‘And does that happen a lot?’
Mears smiled at her. ‘Not when we fire countermeasure flares it doesn’t,’ he said.
They hadn’t been cruising for more than fifteen minutes when the Chinook started to lose height, again sharply and quickly – too quickly, Bel couldn’t help thinking. The soldiers didn’t look worried, though she noticed that the gunner at the back was still crouched in the firing position, ready to shoot at anyone who dared attack them from the ground.
And then, as suddenly as they had taken off, they landed, surrounded once more by dust and sand. The soldiers ran down the tailgate into the fierce, burning heat. Bel followed. Once she was a few metres away from the chopper, she stopped to take in her surroundings. They were just outside a high mud wall with rolls of wicked-looking barbed wire perched on top. In the distance she could see high, craggy peaks and over to her right there was an entrance gate made from huge, solid sheets of corrugated iron. The men from the Chinook were already disappearing through the gate and as Bel watched, she felt someone pull on her arm. It was Mears.
‘Come on!’ he shouted at her. ‘We can’t stay here. The landing zone could come under attack. Let’s get you into the safety of the base!’
That sounded to Bel like the most sensible thing anyone had said all day. She nodded at the soldier, then followed him at a fast run through the iron gates. They closed behind her just as the Chinook rose once more into the azure sky above.
Back at Camp Bastion, Major James Strickland had gone distinctly white. He held the satellite phone to his ear with one hand; with the other he wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow.
‘Disappeared?’ he said. ‘What do you mean he’s disappeared?’
‘Just that,’ replied the voice at the other end – an official from the Ministry of Defence in London. ‘The village is being scoured as we speak, but there’s no sign of him.’
Strickland closed his eyes. This was all they needed.
‘You need to inform the boy’s mother,’ the official continued. ‘Rotten job, I’m afraid, but as you’re the liaison officer—’
Strickland interrupted him. ‘For crying out loud,’ he said briskly, ‘I don’t mind telling her. But I can’t. Not now. She’s not at Bastion.’
‘Where is she?’
‘FOB Jackson, north of Sangin on the other side of the riverbank. She’s there for forty-eight hours. Maybe longer. I can try and get her back sooner, but frankly the choppers are flat out.’
A silence. When the official spoke again, his voice was grim. ‘Can you get word to her?’
‘Negative,’ Strickland replied. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘Why?’
‘If she thinks something’s happened to her son, she’ll go ballistic. We need our people to be thinking clearly and acting rationally. I can’t guarantee that she’ll do that, and I can’t risk her being a liability to our troops on the ground. I’ll give her the information about her son when she’s back in Bastion, not before.’
Another silence. And then, ‘Roger that.’
Strickland sniffed. He didn’t like it when non-military people used military language and there was something about this official, safely behind a desk in London, that brushed him up the wrong way. ‘What you need to do,’ he said, as if he was addressing a very junior soldier, ‘is make sure you find that kid.’
‘Don’t you worry about that, Major Strickland,’ the MOD official said rather primly. ‘You deal with things on your side of the fence, we’ll deal with things on our side. Is that clear?’
Strickland took a deep breath to hide his irritation. ‘Roger that,’ he said, with a little more meaning in his voice than he perhaps intended . . .
Night fell.
As Ben and Aarya’s prison grew dark, the girl quietly took a blanket from the bed. ‘What are you doing?’ Ben asked.
‘What I should have done this morning.’ A calmness had descended over her. She laid the blanket on the ground, then lowered herself to her knees and bent her head to the floor. Ben watched quietly as she started muttering to herself in prayer. A strange sense of peace filled the room; and even though Ben could not understand the words that came from Aarya’s mouth, he could tell they were said with quiet honesty.
When she had finished, she silently stood up again, folded the blanket and turned to Ben. ‘I am supposed to do that five times a day, unless there is good reason not to.’ She looked towards the door. ‘I think
they
are good reason.’
they
are good reason.’
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