One Dog at a Time (4 page)

The animal sounded like it was going berserk. We reached the front side of the building and quickly scanned the surrounding area. Nothing but bits of rubble lay in all directions.

The dog was shut in what was left of the ruined building. It was battering its body against the very old wooden door like something out of a horror movie.

‘How are we going to get it out?’ Hutch whispered, rather unnecessarily.

By now the whole of Now Zad probably knew something was up. Noise at night always sounds louder and carries further, especially when you are trying to rescue an angry Afghan fighting dog.

‘Guess we just let it out?’ I said.

I couldn’t see his face as we were in the darkest part of the shadows but I knew Hutch well enough to know that he was probably not happy with the thought of an angry bear-sized dog running loose while we stood there. But then, come to think of it, neither was I.

‘Ready?’

I didn’t wait for the reply.

I kicked the door as hard as I could. The old lock was no
match
for the force of a solid kick and with a splintering crack the door swung inwards to be replaced by a dark shape of snarling angriness.

‘Run.’

I didn’t have to say it as Hutch was way ahead of me.

We ran round the side of the building, totally forgetting we had automatic weapons and grenades on us. It was only when we came to a halt and caught our breath that we realised the dog hadn’t chased us. We slowly regained our composure in the shadows. Even in the dark I knew that Hutch was giving me one of his trademark ironic looks. It sounded like the dog was still in the building. I nudged Hutch and we crept back around to have a look.

We couldn’t see what was restraining it, but whatever it was it had left the dog mobile enough to attack us if we got close. Presumably the wire I had seen tied to its back legs and neck earlier that day was still in place. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no way we could get into the room to actually untie it.

No plan survives first contact, we are told time and time again. And this one, it would seem, was no exception. Luckily, I had a contingency for something like this. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the sausage I had lifted from our primitive galley before we came out.

‘Plan B,’ I said to Hutch, who just nodded. I realised he was poised to run again. He had a point; we didn’t actually know if the dog would be able to break its bindings as it thrashed around furiously.

I threw the sausage at the ground, landing it precisely underneath the monster dog’s head. He stopped struggling at once and sniffed the air. After a few seconds of searching the dust with his nose he gathered the sausage up in one go. I don’t think he even chewed it.

I pushed Hutch backwards as we moved back along the edge of the wall.

‘Now we wait, I guess?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘How long do you think?’

I had no idea really. I had asked the doctor back in the compound for enough Valium to knock out an adult person and then some. He had guessed straight away what it was for. The Taliban had left us alone today so the incident with the dog and the ANP had been the talk of the compound. The sausage was the only way I could get the dog to digest the Valium.

We sat chatting in whispers about everything and anything while we waited for the dog to grow sleepy. The radio headset kept me up to date with the goings on in the compound, although thankfully for once it was fairly quiet. Every now and then one of the sangars would give the prearranged code word that they could still see me through their night sight. Each time I gave them the thumbs up back in the dark.

Finally after what seemed like ages, but was probably no more than an hour, there was no sound coming from beast dog. It was actually spookily quiet.

We moved back around to the door this time to see the dog lying down across the threshold of the doorway on all fours. The big snarling head had been transformed into a tranquil face that actually seemed quite approachable. The dog’s eyes were still open though and it was breathing in a regular low-sounding humph. When I reached forward and it didn’t attempt to go for me, I patted its head with my gloved hand. It seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. I had brought some more non-drugged sausages with me and fed them to him one at a time. He chewed them, more slowly this time.

I sat like this for nearly thirty minutes as Hutch struggled to cut the wire with the Leatherman. The ANP had done a good job. The wire was twisted on itself at least four times and wound around the dog’s middle, its neck and hind legs to ensure it wouldn’t be going anywhere. I had no idea how
they
would have got in the room to untie it when the time came to travel to the dogfight.

We’d been there for the best part of 30 minutes when finally Hutch cut through the remaining piece of wire.

‘That was an epic,’ he said, as he stood up.

I patted the dog’s head one last time and moved back out of the building and into the open ground. We then watched as the dog pushed itself to its feet, wobbly at first but growing in steadiness as it moved in the opposite direction back to join the pack that we knew prowled the perimeter of this camp during the cold of the night.

We didn’t need to say it but we both knew that the dog could’ve gone for us at any time while we were cutting the wire.

But he hadn’t.

We safely made it to the base of the wall. Hutch climbed the ladder first while I held it. But when I followed him up, climbing until I was balanced on the top of the final rung, I found I still couldn’t reach the top of the wall. The bottom of the ladder must have sunk in the mud. I looked around for handholds in the wall above me but there were none. I then grabbed the rope with one hand to find nobody had hold of it at the other end.

‘Pen – hurry up, they are coming.’

‘Who’s coming?’ I said in a loud whisper as I tried to balance on the top rung of the ladder.

‘The Afghan sentry,’ came the urgent reply.

‘Damn.’

Our compound was also home to a detachment of the Afghan National Army. We hadn’t seen them much; they kept themselves to themselves. But they did have a duty to patrol the rear gate every now and again, a minor detail I had forgotten. I wanted to avoid explaining to the Afghans why we were climbing up a wall in their part of the compound in the middle of the night if at all possible.

I reached down to grab my commando dagger from the
front
loops of my body armour. I carried the dagger, mainly for symbolic reasons, and I hadn’t ever expected to use it in action until now. With a stabbing motion I drove it into the hardened mud like an ice axe. It held and I launched myself upwards, pulling on the dagger as my feet kicked uselessly against the smooth wall. Tantalisingly I was almost at the top.

That was the good news. The bad news was that I was supporting not just my body weight but also the weight of my gear. Something was going to give, whether it was my fingers or the crumbling mud of the wall around the dagger.

‘Grab my hand, for God’s sake,’ I half-screamed at the two marines standing uselessly just centimetres above me.

To my relief I looked up to see the straining face of Pete as he wrapped both his hands around my right wrist and pulled hard. As I inched upwards, I also noticed the puzzled face of an ANA sentry looking down at me.

Hutch stood off in the shadows giggling as I was pulled, rag-doll-like, over the top of the wall and on to the safety of the roof of the rear building.

‘Some lookout you are, Pete,’ I said as I regained my breath and stood up. ‘Thought you said they were coming. Not that they were already here.’

The ANA said something that we couldn’t understand.

I just patted the confused guard on the shoulder and headed towards the end of the roof and the other ladder that led back down to our compound.

A few minutes later and I was safely inside my mosquito net. I fell asleep with a smile on my face, not even for a second realising the impact the night’s events would have on my future life.

CHAPTER THREE

The Dogs of Now Zad

WE HAD ONLY
been in Now Zad for just over a week but already it felt like a lifetime.

Our relentless routine, which consisted mainly of being rotated on sentry duty around the sangars and staring at the same panoramic Afghan backdrop for hours on end, was broken up only by the occasional short patrol to check out the alleyways and buildings in the immediate vicinity of the compound.

If truth be known the main highlight of the day for the lads was zipping themselves up in what they called their ‘time accelerators’ – their sleeping bags. Not that a full night’s sleep was ever forthcoming given the demands of the sentry roster.

Most ordinary people would find it hard to understand, but incoming Taliban mortars and small-arms fire were often the only excitement of our otherwise dull days.

The eight-man Gurkha detachment that had accompanied us when we arrived in Now Zad specialised in engineering work. Although we had marines who could undertake that job, they had been tasked elsewhere. The Gurkhas were extremely hard-working and as soon as they had arrived under the command of their corporal, who spoke to us in broken English, they had worked relentlessly in making the DC more secure and liveable. It normally takes
a
lot to impress a Royal Marine when it comes to the army (Royal Marines are actually part of the Royal Navy and therefore not part of the army). But the Gurkha detachment commanded our immediate respect.

The Afghan architects who had designed our mud-walled compound belonged to another age, a time long before the British had ever ventured this far into Afghanistan. They had seen the need for only one entrance to our remote compound, which they had built along the eastern wall.

As a result, it didn’t take a genius to work out how we got in and out of the compound during our patrols, especially as the Taliban had called the place home themselves until only a few years ago. The current gate was also directly opposite what the soldiers of the Air Borne Brigade who occupied the compound before us had come to know as RPG alley. The hastily repaired holes in the wall either side of the gate bore testimony to the RPG rounds that had been launched at them during their stay. Luckily for us, the alley had not lived up to its name so far during our time in Now Zad.

So within a few days of our arrival the OC had decided that a second entrance should be opened up along another section of the outer compound wall. A new gate would at least keep the Taliban guessing for a while, he figured.

The Gurkhas had been only too happy to oblige.

The Gurkha corporal had quickly calculated the size of the hole that needed to be blown in the wall and then taped explosive charges to short wooden planks that his team nailed to the designated spots on the wall. Those who were not on duty watched from a safe distance as the Gurkha in charge of the detonation team calmly lit the fuse with a windproof match then walked away, seemingly without a care in the world.

The resulting explosion took our breath away. The shock wave echoed around the compound. When the dust settled and the air cleared it revealed several Gurkhas congratulating themselves and a jagged gap in the three-foot-thick wall that you could now drive a wagon through.

The entrance had been completed by two enormous metal gates, hinged on to a pair of massive upright support posts driven into either side of the jagged hole in the wall. Four large brackets had been welded on to the gates to hold the solid steel bar that prevented the gates from opening. The bar felt like it weighed a ton and, ideally, it took two marines to lift it into place. On your own it was a real challenge.

The way the new metal-panelled gates creaked as they were opened and the bar clunked when it was dropped into place reminded me of a Hammer House of Horrors movie. You almost expected to see Count Dracula standing with his arms crossed waiting to come in when you opened the gate.

Although we had halved the odds of getting hit at patrol time, we had quickly created a new problem: Now Zad’s stray dogs were now able to breach our defences, through the one-foot gap that had been left between the desert floor and the bottom of the new gates. It was enough for a determined dog to squeeze through, and every now and again a few hungry pack members would venture into the compound to see what was on offer.

The large pack was hard to miss, especially during the dark hours as they roamed the town and perimeter of the compound. There were dozens of them, of all types of breed of dog. Some were long-haired, others short-haired. There were big mastiff-type hounds and smaller dogs that looked like a cross between a greyhound and a springer. All had one thing in common: they looked bedraggled and unfed. None wore collars so I assumed they were all strays.

The pack was generally quiet during the day; the heat saw to that. But as we slowly crept through the month of November and the sun dipped below the mountains to the west and the cool air flowed in from the north, the pack would form for its nightly manoeuvres.

From my post in the northern sangar I would watch as a pack of at least 50 dogs flowed along the base of the
compound
wall on the hunt for scraps of food. Through the night sights I would follow the white heat outlines as they snapped, licked, tussled, barked and sniffed each other as they went.

I figured the dropping temperature was what kept them moving. There were times when their constant howling and barking sounded as if they were pleading with the moon to shed some heat from its brilliant white glow.

The dogs knew our compound was the only source of food within their neighbourhood. The ‘burns pit’ for burning our rubbish was just outside the rear gate. Several times I watched amazed as the bravest – or maybe the hungriest – of the dogs scavenged through the smouldering remains looking for that one morsel of food that had not succumbed to the fire.

One night, amid the quiet and stillness of the deserted town, I found myself watching a young dog. He was a scrawny but agile youngster with long floppy ears. The way his long tail waved madly through the air as he trotted playfully along, you would never have known he was involved in a desperate life-or-death search for food. He seemed like a dog without a care in the world.

Watching the skinny dog bounce along jumping at his own shadow I suddenly thought of Beamer and the never-ending wag of his tail as he ran round and round in circles going nowhere in particular.

I knew the dogs were a health hazard – there was no doubting that – but I figured at night they were actually on our side. If the Taliban ever attempted to get close to the wall the pack would, I was sure, give the game away by immediately investigating the new smell on their patch.

I certainly didn’t relish the thought of the pack checking me out while I lay in a ditch trying to remain hidden.

When the dogs entered the compound by crawling under the gate they would always go for the rubbish bags that we stored by the rear gate prior to being dumped in the burns
pit
at first light. The early-morning sun would reveal torn empty ration pack wrappers and other rubbish scattered around the rear gate where the dogs and the occasional cat had discarded them.

I could handle picking up rubbish but clearing up the assorted piles of dog crap that was clearly evident among the torn bin bags was not what I had in mind as my first job of the day.

One morning as I headed out to clear up from the pack’s latest forage into the compound, I was shocked to find a dead dog lying by the bin bags. It looked like an old St Bernard-mix, and its coat was matted and dusty. I assumed it had died of old age; it didn’t have any obvious wounds. I couldn’t leave it lying in the midday sun to decompose but I couldn’t just pick it up either. So I’d tied a piece of old rope around its body and then dragged it out to the burns pit.

I tried not to feel sorry for it as I pulled it along the ground. It must have had a good innings to survive to the age it had out here. I wasn’t sure how the dog had managed to crawl under the gate – it looked too big. But as I got closer to the closed gate I noticed that an industrious dog had burrowed into the dust and dirt to make a small ditch. I realised I needed to solve the problem of the gate as soon as I could.

When I’d finished disposing of the old dog, I grabbed a shovel and cleared a trench that ran the length of the underside of the gate about a foot deep and half a foot wide. I then filled the trench with a collection of large rocks that lay outside the compound walls.

It wasn’t that much of a chore. I’d been getting frustrated not being able to do proper PT every day so I relished the opportunity for a workout. I arranged the rocks in the trench as close together as I could then I replaced the dirt I’d removed to cover them. By the time I’d done this I’d raised the level of the ground so that there was now no more than a six-inch space under the gate, too narrow for even the skinniest and most determined dog to force its way in.

My exertions had attracted several younger dogs to see what food was on offer and one of them had slipped through the open gate. When I had admired my handiwork it was hard to coax the stray back to the gate. The offer of an open bacon and beans meal pouch did the trick. The dog was young and was soon waiting patiently at the gate to go out as if I was taking him for a walk. As I opened the gate a few dogs were still hanging around in hope. I made a fuss of them as they rolled around in the dust and, once more, couldn’t help but think of Beamer and Fizz back home. These dogs were just like any other playful dogs the world over.

I placed the remainder of the food on the ground in small piles. The smell was too overwhelming for them and they soon broke off from my attentions, making a beeline for the free food. I took advantage of the distraction to slip back in and close the now dog-proof gate.

I felt bad locking them out but it was for their own good and anyway what else could I do? It didn’t help the dogs but at least my bin bags were safe.

The shouts, cheers and excited screams were getting louder by the second as I approached the end of the alleyway. I looked across to where Dave stood surveying the entrance to another alley opening to our left. He gave me a confused look and shook his head. He too had no idea what was going on around the corner.

Normally, no locals strayed this close to the compound, especially not in large numbers. There was nothing for them around here any more. What the hell are we going to find here, I wondered.

I was leading a short clearance patrol to make sure the Taliban were not sneaking up on the compound via the narrow alleyways. The late-afternoon sun was particularly hot and after only ten minutes of walking I was sweating profusely under my body armour. I was looking forward to getting back into our small sanctuary and cooling off when
I’d
heard the crowd noise but now all thoughts of rest were gone.

A telegraph pole that had probably once supplied one of the only phonelines in Now Zad had somehow fallen over and was leaning precariously against the mud wall ahead of me. I would have to duck under it to look around the corner if I didn’t want to make myself a prime target by standing in the middle of the alley. The only thing holding it in place was a length of telegraph wire. Any sudden movement and it looked as if it would fall further. I had no choice, however. I needed to see around the corner, so I ducked under the telegraph pole trying not to catch the radio antenna that protruded from my backpack as I crouched low.

Looking down the alleyway I saw a knot of around 15 Afghans formed in a circle in the largest of the alleys that approached our compound from the west. With their distinct dark green tatty camouflage uniforms I could see that most were ANA and the rest were made up of the ANP that shared our compound. They were wearing the light blue flowing robes that they wore only on ‘official business’.

They had obviously left the compound without permission as I hadn’t been warned in the patrol brief to look out for any friendlies. As we hadn’t been out that long they must have left only recently. They had clearly left their common sense back in the compound too, because none of them was carrying a weapon. Not the smartest of ideas in Now Zad.

I was motioning for Dave to join me when I suddenly heard frenzied barking coming from where the crowd was gathered. I looked back and saw the crowd of Afghans was now jeering and shouting louder than ever. Then, as the men moved around excitedly, I caught a glimpse of two very angry dogs inside the closed circle.

I realised immediately what I was witnessing. ‘Fucking hell,’ I muttered.

It had been bad enough seeing the ANP dog being restrained a week or so earlier.

I had never imagined they would hold a dogfight here in Now Zad as well.

I saw one dog hit the dirt alley floor with a sickening thud. Its larger opponent landed next to it. Its jaws were spread wide to attack the dog that attempted to pick itself up from the littered alley floor. Teeth clashed as both dogs went for each other’s throat, their one main weak point, as both dogs had bloodied stumps where their ears had once been.

It takes a lot to rattle me. I had learned a long time ago to walk away from a fight. But it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to witnessing animal cruelty. Animals can’t stand up for themselves. I had seen enough. I had come to Afghanistan to help people get back on their feet, not promote this kind of barbaric behaviour. After the episode with the ANP dog I was not about to take the diplomatic approach again.

Without a second thought I started moving in the direction of the screaming throng. I could now see that one of the dogs was definitely bigger than the other. The larger one was a huge dog as big as a mastiff, the other more like an Alsatian. Through the silhouettes of the Afghans stood huddled in the circle, I could make out that most of the spectators were using long, solid sticks to push and beat the dogs. The scene that was playing out in front of me was far worse than any I had viewed on the Internet.