Crossfire (3 page)

0805 hrs

The sun had risen enough to chuck out a bit of
heat, but not enough to coax me out of the oversized
fleece I had on over my body armour. I ran
my tongue over my furred-up teeth and gave my
greasy, stubbled face a rub.

Dom and Pete sat among steel ammo boxes,
day sacks and general wagon shit the other side
of the idling Warrior. Pete fucked about on his
Mac laptop, editing the bulletin Dom had made
during the attack. He wasn't one of those bunker
journos who gave their action-packed report
from the safety of a Green Zone balcony. And
that was my big problem. I spent every waking
hour either pulling him down or away from
someone or something that could kill him.

Paul, one of the recce platoon, was top cover
with a Minimi; he had to stand between us with
his head and shoulders sticking out through the
open mortar hatch. Sand and all sorts showered
down each time he moved.

I brushed some desert off my fleece. It got cold
out here at night and I was a bit of a lizard. I liked
to keep warm, even if it meant wearing something
Pete described as the colour of shite after a
bad vindaloo. I hadn't got it from an outdoors
store; I always ended up throwing my kit away
every few weeks because it got so minging, so I'd
treated myself to a trip to Oxfam. Three and a
half quid as opposed to thirty; a bargain whatever
the colour.

Last night had produced an insurgent body
count of eighteen, at a cost of two wounded
Kingsmen. Now a Challenger and our three
recce-platoon Warriors had been tasked with
setting up a vehicle checkpoint on the eastern
road out of town to see what got caught in the
net.

Looking out of the open rear door, I could see
the wadi the guys had run through during last
night's attack. It was littered with carrier-bags,
dog shit, drinks cans, water-bottles; all kinds of
trash that wouldn't be washed downstream until
next year when the rains came.

A pack of scabby old dogs were kept at bay by
the heat blasting from the grilles of the
Challenger's massive turbo-charged diesel
engine. Like the Warriors', its hull and tracks
were caked with mud and dust. No call for spit
and polish here: they were fighting a war. The
bar armour surrounding the lower hull and
tracks looked like a series of buckled
and scorched farm gates. That was because it was
doing its job, deflecting RPGs.

Now it was light, I couldn't see too much flame
from the blazing oil wells, just thick black pillars
of smoke on the horizon. It was going to be a
long time before this place was stable enough for
the conglomerates to come and start sucking out
black gold.

The Challenger pointed its big fuck-off barrel
at the town like it was giving the locals the finger.
Come and have a go, if you think you're hard enough
.
It wouldn't take a genius to get the message.

A helmet jutted from its turret. Tank crews
wore dark green covers to blend in with their
vehicles; light desert camouflage would make a
perfect target for a sniper or any half-decent shot
who'd bothered to zero his weapon.

The Kingsmen had five VCPs covering all the
roads in and out of town. After last night's attack
they dominated the area. At first light they'd
started searching and questioning every male of
fighting age. Notionally that was fourteen to
sixty. The reality was that if you could lift a
weapon you could fire it, so the guys had
massaged the age bands. Terrorists, insurgents,
whatever the government had decided to call
them this week, to the Kingsmen it was
academic. Out here on the ground, politics meant
nothing. Even kids and old men were firing AKs
and RPGs at them, and they were firing back.

There was never any doubt who was in
command. I could hear Rhett right now, out on
the VCP, giving shit to the platoon.

It was easy to tell the guys at the sharp end
from the rest of the army, even though they wore
the same uniform. They were in shit state. Their
boots were hammered and fell apart before they
ever got a clean. Their uniforms were dirty and
ragged, their camouflaged helmet covers
and body armour so worn and ripped it was hard
to see the pattern.

The Challenger wasn't the only one with its
engine running. All three Warriors had theirs
idling so the big square boiling vessels inside
could heat water.

I pushed the button at the bottom of our BV
and made three brews.

'Here, mate.'

Pete took his white, no sugar. Fuck knows why,
but this lot called it a Shirley Temple. I passed the
mug to him round Paul's legs.

He took it without looking up and settled it on
the steel floor beside him, pausing only to blow
sand off his keyboard.

The Kingsmen thought Pete was weird for not
taking sugar. 'He worried about his figure or
something?'

Dom took sugar, but as far as they were concerned
he was still from a completely different
planet, not because he was a Pole but because he
drank only three brews a day.

To make up the shortfall, I threw Pete a Yorkie
bar from the ration packs. He glanced at the
wrapper and gave a little chuckle. Where it
normally read 'It's Not For Girls', the army ration
pack version had 'It's Not For Civvies'. Now that
he'd been let in on the joke, it never ceased to
amuse him.

Paul's brew was next. Like the whole of recce
platoon he took it NATO standard: white, two
sugars. Me too. Not because I liked it that way
any more but so I could join the others taking the
piss out of Pete for being a girl.

I tugged at his trousers and a leather-gloved
hand whisked the plastic mug on to the roof.

'Cheers, la'.' Pete's accent would always be
more Bermondsey than Scouse, but he needed to
level the score.

Paul muttered something back and Pete
laughed. The banter had been ricocheting
between them for the last two days.

Paul's tone changed suddenly. 'I got movement
. . . in the wadi . . . three fifty.
They're
carrying
. . .'

Radios crackled and another Warrior from
a VCP south of us opened up with its cannon.

I watched through the rear doors as the ground
round the bodies erupted in clouds of dust. The
small figures scattered.

Dom grabbed Pete's camera and almost fell
out of the wagon. He was nearest the door and
Pete still had his iBook on his lap.

Paul got a lead on one of the runners. He
kicked off a short burst and the empty cases
cascaded on to Pete's head as he hunched over
his screen.

Then Rhett yelled, 'Check fire, check fire!'

Paul froze.

'It's kids!'

The radio net went ballistic as everyone was told
to stop firing.

Rhett paced angrily as the net commanded a
call sign to go and check if any of them had been
hit. 'Little shites!'

Then he shouted into the camera, a finger
jabbing at the lens with every word as Dom kept
it stable on his shoulder. 'The little bastards
shove a black sock over a water-bottle, put it on
the end of a stick and play RPGs. It might be the
only game they know, but it's going to get them
killed. Or one of my guys, while he's trying to
work out what the fuck's being aimed at him. It
pisses me off. Why don't their parents grip the
little shites?'

He stormed away to give someone else a
bollocking. Our driver walked past the open rear
door with an SA80 in one hand and a big wheel
wrench in the other. Our Warrior had had two
wheels blown off a fortnight ago by an improvised
explosive device dug into the side of the
road. Now the nuts on one always seemed to be
coming loose, and the driver liked to tighten
them at every opportunity.

''Ere, Paul . . .' Pete gestured towards the
driver '. . . you Scousers, you're always at it –
your mate's nicking the wheels off your own
fucking wagon . . .'

The mouthful he was about to get back was
interrupted as the net reported no bodies in the
contact area.

'Thank fuck for that.' In helmet, padded gloves
and body armour, Paul was the next best thing to
the Terminator. His ballistic glasses looked like
untinted Oakleys. Like the leather gloves, they
were worn to protect against fragmentation from
RPGs and upblast from IEDs. The original issue
had been ski goggles, but nobody wanted to
wear them. Maybe it was the curvature or the
Perspex, but they gave a weird perspective when
you took aim. These ballistic gigs gave superior
vision and far more protection.

His Osprey body armour had two big plates
front and rear, and a big collar that came right up
to his ears to protect against upblast. I particularly
liked the bat-wings – Kevlar pads extending
from the shoulder to the elbow to give extra protection
when he stuck his top half out of the
mortar hatch, ready to back the three lads with
his Minimi 5.56 machine-gun if things kicked off.

I just wished Pete, Dom and I had the same
protection, instead of the blue baby armour the
media always minced about in. The theory was
that we stood out from the military, but through
the iron sights of an AK we'd be the only blue
things in the desert.

A contact kicked off in the distance, probably
at a VCP on the other side of town. Tracer rounds
bounced into the sky.

The VCP set-up was simple. Two Warriors
parked about fifty metres apart, on opposite
sides of the road and angled at forty-five degrees
to it, forming a chicane. One had its 30mm
cannon facing out-of-town traffic, the other facing
traffic coming in. Every vehicle, even
donkeys and carts, was stopped by whichever
Warrior it came to first and fed through into the
safe area to be searched. The rest of the platoon
was spread out in fire positions as all-round
defence.

We'd had a big rush out of town to start with, as
the locals tried to leg it, but then it died down
when they realized no one was going to escape
with their hauls of weapons, explosives and drugs.

The problem was, no vehicles meant no locals
the insurgents had to worry about killing by mistake,
so we were an unprotected target. 'Open
season,' Pete muttered.

Dom climbed back in and the two of them got
back to work.

I sat down with my brew near the open doorway
and watched as a battered 4x4 crept into
the VCP.

Many of the vehicles I'd seen looked brand-new.
Some had Kuwait or Dubai numberplates. All
flew a white flag. This one was a Land Cruiser,
and its best days were behind it. Paul's feet
shifted as he shadowed it with his Minimi. I
watched as it moved into the safe ground. A
white pillowcase hung from its aerial.

Five males of fighting age got out with their
hands in the air. They knew the drill; they'd been
doing it for nearly four years now.

I stretched my legs along the seat. Pete tapped
away at the keyboard, preparing to send TVZ 24
the latest report from its star correspondent.

It was Poland's first twenty-four-hour news
channel. I'd watched a few of Dom's pieces. It
looked like Sky, News 24 or CNN with additional
gobbledegook; they were all the same format,
lots of primary colours, rousing music, girls with
big hair and white teeth. Their headquarters
were in Krakow, but TVZ 24 didn't only beam
out to Poland: plumbers and builders all over
Europe were regular viewers on satellite or cable.
Dom and Pete worked out of the Dublin office.
There were better tax breaks in the Republic than
in the UK.

It wasn't only the Poles who knew our hero.
Dominik Condratowicz was a bit of a celeb in
reporting circles, the golden boy of war
journalism with platinum-plated bollocks. He
was one of those people who believed he would
never get shot or damaged, the sort, Pete said,
who walked into nothing but good. He wore a
memory stick on a chain round his neck. Maybe
it was to ward off evil spirits.

He was tall and annoyingly good-looking,
even when a thick layer of dust had given him a
horror-film face. His
Top Gun
-style dark brown
hair, blindingly white teeth and firm jawline
were featured most weeks next to his wife's in
Poland's answer to
Hello!
. As far as I knew, he
lived in Dublin with Siobhan, his Irish wife, and
her son. He kept things close to his chest, did
Platinum Bollocks.

Pete was getting pissed off with the dust
billowing off Dom's jacket. 'Here, Dracula, you
going to take your fucking cloak off or what?'
Dom's mother was from Transylvania. When
he'd found out Pete obviously thought he'd died
and gone to heaven. He was laughing so much
he had to close his iBook to stop his own dust
getting on the keys.

Dom cocked an ear as Pete went back to his edit.
'Talking of creatures of the night . . .' His English
had an accent, but it was a whole lot better than
mine. This guy had education behind him.

An unmanned aerial vehicle – the battle
group's eyes – buzzed overhead in the brilliantly
clear sky. Like a large model plane with a huge
wingspan and a couple of cameras in the body,
the UAV was flown by remote control from one
of the Warriors.

Pete took the final bite of his Yorkie, pulled a
can of compressed air from his Bat-belt and gave
the laptop keys a few bursts. As he treated himself
to a blast down the front of his shirt, I spotted
a memory stick like Dom's round his neck. I
hadn't realized superstition was so rife in this
business.

Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq. They'd been
there, seen it, done it together, and Pete had
filmed Dom wearing the T-shirt. He never lost an
opportunity to remind Dom it was his
camerawork that had won them all their awards.
They'd picked up an Emmy last year for a documentary
on women's rights in Afghanistan –
almost non-existent under the Taliban, and not
much improved, apparently, under new
management.