Rain (8 page)

After much protesting from her, Tom paid the bill and they walked down to the river and the Albert Bridge. She might as well accompany him to Clapham Junction, she thought, and they walked along together, settling back into
small talk. The tide was right out, and the river was stripped to its bones as though there was a drought. She liked the river when it was like this, it was as though its smaller channel and dirty gravel littered with detritus was like a confessional, before the tide rushed upstream and the city put her make-up back on.

It reminded Tom of pictures he had seen of the Helmand River, streaking its way across the desert. The sun hit the water, shattering into a hundred glints, and he thought they might be what muzzle flashes would look like. As they crossed the bridge he turned to her and said, ‘Cass, I’ll let you go here. Don’t come to the station, please. It’ll be dreadful, like some recreation of
Brief Encounter
. Please let’s say goodbye here.’

‘What, as if it’s any less of a cliché saying goodbye on a bridge?’

He grinned. ‘Oh come on, we’re over it, aren’t we? OK, let’s make sure.’ He held her hand, and they walked twenty metres into Battersea Park. Tom stopped next to a bollard and held her elbow with his right hand and her waist with his left. He could feel goosebumps on her arm. ‘Thank you so, so much for coming to see me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I have no idea what you must have cancelled to come or how much you wanted to pretend you didn’t get the text.’

She bit her lip.

Tom laughed. ‘Ha! I can still read you like a book. No, really, Cass, thanks so much. It means more than you can ever know.’ He squeezed her waist. ‘Better go. Take care. I’ll write and tell you how it all goes. Fingers crossed I’ll break my ankle coming off the plane and be back in a few days.’

She didn’t know why she let herself, but she was crying. Tom looked hurt, and she saw his eyes decide to close the conversation.

He stroked her cheek. ‘Look what I’ve done to you. You must go.’ He kissed her gently on the forehead with dry lips and said, ‘Goodbye, flower girl.’ He smiled, turned and walked away through the park.

‘Tommy.’ He looked back. ‘Take care,’ she croaked. He smiled again. This time she turned, and walked back over the bridge.

That night the clock ticked erratically, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, as the squadron prepared to leave. There was too little time to do anything meaningful, and too much time to go and sit miserably by the buses outside the gym. The officers were in the mess skimming newspapers or spread out on the sofas throwing a tennis ball around. In the soldiers’ block some played computer games, some made last-minute adjustments to their kit.

On the patch some of the soldiers shared a last supper with their families; others sat watching television. Brennan had put his children to bed and was working out how he could say goodbye to the dog. He opened the door to the garden and kicked a ball out into the dark. The dog ran out, and when it came back in, having discovered the ball in a flower bed, found its master had gone, the chain still jangling on the door. Outside, Brennan pecked his wife on the cheek, businesslike, just as they always did before he went away. ‘Fucking hell, Ads Brennan –’ she spoke sadly ‘– this is separation number seven for us. You’d better come back OK. Or else.’

‘I will, love; I’ve got to. Everyone’s going to be looking to me this time. See you when I see you. Ha! If you saw that eighteen-year-old again you’d run a mile.’

‘Too bloody right. Come back safe, eh?’ She kissed him again. ‘Now go on. See you when I see you.’

Brennan got into his car and drove to Trueman’s house, who was upstairs until the last, reading stories to his two girls even after they had finally gone to sleep. Brennan’s car horn tooted outside. He closed the book, kissed the girls, drew their duvets up to their shoulders, closed the door gently and tiptoed to his bedroom, to his wife, who always went to bed early when he deployed anywhere. He crept over and kissed her on the side of the head while she pretended to sleep. He left the room and ghosted down the stairs and out of the house like he had never been there. The journey with Brennan was silent. This happened all through the estate that night, houses sleeping and preparing to wake up to six months without a father against a guilty symphony of softly shut doors.

The officers dragged themselves out of the mess, going out to the buses and trying to put on a cheery face in front of the soldiers, counting kit and rifle bundles and double-checking that everyone had their passports. Under the sickly orange lights slowly the group grew, now away from the small cells of their families and coalescing into a larger unit. The commanding officer was there with the
RSM
, both wearing civilian clothes as they were to remain in the UK for a couple of weeks before bringing
RHQ
out. Tom watched the CO, in a scruffy pair of cords and a tatty old shirt, chat easily with the boys, who looked at him like a god as he bantered with them. The RSM came over to him. ‘Evening, Mr Chamberlain! On a scale of dreadful to dreadful, how dreadful are we feeling then?’

‘Um, yep, pretty bad, RSM, actually.’

‘Don’t worry, sir; when you get on the plane everything clicks. If it doesn’t, well –’ he came closer as if imparting a secret ‘– just bung a couple of knitting needles up yer nose,
a pair of boxers on your head and pretend you’ve gone mad. Got it?’

Tom grinned. ‘Yep. Thanks, RSM. See you in a couple of weeks.’

‘Safe journey, sir. Look after the boys for me, will you?’

‘I promise.’

A few wives and girlfriends had come to the buses to see them off. Through the crowd of tearful hugs and last-minute photographs Frenchie’s wife was there with their sleeping daughter and young son Alex, who was posing for photographs with some of the soldiers and trying to hide in the great pile of bergens and black grips. Frenchie scooped him up and said, ‘Right, young man; time for you to stop making a nuisance of yourself.’ His voice lowered to a confidential whisper. ‘Look after your mother and your sister. Be a brave boy. Keep the house safe.’ Alex nodded. Frenchie hugged him to his chest one final time, wishing he could keep him there for hours, and whispered, ‘Goodbye, my darling boy.’ He handed him over to his wife, pecked her lips and drew back with an apologetic smile.

Frenchie stood at the door of the first bus, and Jason at the door of the second, counting and ticking off every man as they filed on. At last all the boys were on. Frenchie stepped on board and sat at the front, next to Tom, who was staring blankly out the window. Midnight on the dot. Frenchie tapped the driver, ‘Right, chum, no time like the present. Let’s go.’

The buses moved off past the guardroom, where the sentry smacked his rifle hard with his hand, saluting his friends. Through the town they swept. Streetlights threw an eerie light over the buses as they passed bars and nightclubs filled with those who had no idea of the blood tribute that was
passing them. Only in the corners of their eyes did they register the buses bearing boys who would have killed to be in those same bars and to have woken up the next day with a hangover, pondering how to fill a weekend. Only the occasional traffic light, delaying their progress for a few tantalizing seconds, seemed to acknowledge them, winking at them like evil eyes. As they left the town and slipped anonymously onto the motorway Tom felt as though they were the country’s shame, not its pride; the nation’s best sent off without fanfare in the dead of night to hurtle wide awake into long-nurtured nightmares.

‘Tell that fucking idiot to stop arsing around that IED, unless he wants his feet blown through his face,’ said Tom in exasperation to Solly, his interpreter.

‘Yes, Mr Tom, but I think he’s trying to show his friends how brave he is,’ said Solly, before shouting over to the Afghan militiaman, who was being egged on by his friends to see how close he could dance to an IED. The Afghan ignored him. Tom sighed and gritted his teeth as his rucksack bit into shoulders still getting used to the weight he was carrying: radio, spare radio batteries, five litres of water, ten magazines, a belt of link for the
GPMG
, schmoolies – all on top of the suffocating plates of his body armour. He went into the compound through the blue-and-orange-painted corrugated-iron gate to find Trueman, who was positioning Ellis and Miller with the GPMG on the roof of one of the compound outbuildings.

‘What do you reckon, Sergeant? These maniacs are going to top themselves.’

‘Wait one, sir. Dusty, you set? Good lad. Any cunt tries any funny business, brass him up. Right, you got me now.’ Trueman jumped off the ladder back into the compound, took off his helmet and lit a cigarette. His bandana was dark with sweat. ‘Sorry sir, what are these crazies doing? Dancing on an IED? Yep, sounds like them all right. Where are they?’

They walked through the compound, straw on the ground, chickens squawking and running around a tethered goat, its ribs sticking through its hide. The men of the family whose
compound it was were huddled in a corner, sulking at the militia, sometimes chattering in low hurried tones to each other. The boys sat in the shade of a wall, trying to escape the heat of the sun and pouring water down their throats. Already Livesey from
SHQ
had been casevaced back to Bastion with heatstroke after only two days on the ground, and Brennan had warned that the next time it happened he’d let whoever had collapsed just lie and die there without treatment as punishment for not looking after himself. As they approached the gate Trueman put his helmet back on, and they walked out to see the Afghan now urinating around the IED.

‘Solly, what the fuck?’ said Tom.

‘I’m sorry, boss; he just won’t listen. Think they’ve all been smoking weed as well.’ Solly, a cheery angular Kabuli, working as an interpreter to fund his plans to go to university in India, looked apologetic. Tom nodded. He liked Solly, who had a lot more in common with 3 Troop than he seemed to with the militiamen.

Trueman finished his cigarette, threw it on the sand and rolled his eyes at Tom. ‘Well, I suppose that’s one way to tackle an IED. Not seen it in no manual though.’

‘I need to get where Frank Spencer is to mark the grid for the
10-liner
. I could do without him dancing around me while I’m trying to do it.’

That was the reason for them being in the compound. C Squadron, a week after arrival in Bastion, had moved by helicopter up to Loy Kabir, base of Battle Group North East, in the far north of Helmand Province. They had almost immediately been sent to the town of Shah Kalay, ten miles to the east of Loy Kabir, partly in order to give the squadron something to do, as due to complications with vehicle upgrades their
CVR
(T)s were going to be stuck in the workshops at
Bastion for a couple of weeks, partly because it was a good chance for them to get out on the ground, and partly to assure the local militia that
ISAF
was interested in helping them out.

There was another reason. The governor of Loy Kabir, a wily old ex-Taliban defector called Gumal who had swapped sides in 2006, was originally from Shah Kalay, and as its richest son – he had immense wealth compared to most of his countrymen, mostly created through foul means rather than fair – he was paying the militia out of his own pocket. He professed to be doing this out of love for his home, ever keen to show his new American and British masters that he was making a personal contribution to the war against the Taliban. In reality though, the Shah Kalay militia were his security against his immediate murder whenever the Westerners left. If he could provide a two hundred-strong army to any future overlord, then he’d likely avoid assassination, at least for the time being, buying him time for, in the worst case, an escape to the West.

Gumal was pretty sure he would be OK; he was well versed in the rituals of dropping – and sometimes killing – old friends and earnestly promising unwavering fealty to new ones. He had worked with CIA agents against the Russians in the 1980s, had been the Taliban’s most zealous governor in Helmand during the 90s, had personally executed a French charity worker kidnapped in the area in 2006, and then jumped on the ISAF bandwagon three months later. He was a natural survivor – garrulous, gregarious, with an engaging glint in his eye – and an almost mythical figure in the area. There were rumours that he personally gouged the eyes out of any Taliban prisoners brought to his house for questioning and kept in his labyrinthine basement a harem of seven boys, one for every day of the week. The dinners he hosted
were many and extraordinary in their largesse. Every month he would invite the entire battle group staff to his house for a five-hour extravaganza of food, music, speeches and cases of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

Gumal’s militia, given legitimacy by his wangling them permission to wear the uniform of the Afghan National Police, had fallen into the arrogance and cruelty that corrupts any group of personal favourites. The Taliban in Shah Kalay, a quiet cell not much bothered by ISAF whose only military activity hitherto had been to provide food and accommodation to any foreign or out-of-area fighters coming to the district, had recently roused themselves into action, and there had been a spike in the number of attacks and IED emplacements, and so it was that Gumal had prevailed upon the battle group to send a sub-unit to the town in order to bolster the crumbling image and confidence of his militiamen.

Thus C Squadron had come, cramming into
Mastiff
troop carriers for the journey over, arriving at dusk on the Thursday and securing the huge compound the militia used as their HQ. At dawn on Friday Frenchie sent out four troops to the four corners of the town, with SHQ and the
REME
section guarding the compound. Three Troop had been given the south and were due back that evening. They were to go with the militia to the positions of known IEDs, mark them and note their locations, not step on any themselves, and get a feel for the atmospherics in the town.

The militiaman was still jumping up and down around the IED. His colleagues, who now weren’t bothering even to half-heartedly conceal their dope-smoking, were doubled up with laughter. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, and Tom and Trueman had raised their eyebrows
at each other when they had met him that morning. He wore jet-black, very finely drawn mascara, and when he shook their hands his skin was soft and delicate. He walked in the most exaggeratedly feminine way and was constantly being stroked on the face by the other militiamen. He wore a garland of wild flowers around his neck and had a perfect red rose sticking out of the muzzle of his AK-47. The rifle itself was filthy, and when its magazine had fallen off Tom noticed that it only held two rounds. He was pretty sure it was the same with the rest of them.

Leaving the militia compound and heading south as the last traces of dawn streaked overhead, they had made an incongruous party. Three Troop walked in column ten metres distant from each other, meticulously scanning left and right, all the while with an eye on the dry earth beneath their feet for any
ground sign
of IEDs. Lance Corporal Gatunakaniviu – known as GV as the boys could never get to grips with his Fijian name – walked at their head with the Vallon, sweeping it from side to side just like he had done two years ago on his previous tour. Now and again one of the boys would halt, get down on one knee and look through his rifle sight at something on the horizon. All this nervous professionalism was undone, however, by the bizarre behaviour of the militia, who minced along ahead of GV’s Vallon, holding hands and singing. This caused much amusement among the boys, especially when Tom’s increasingly livid efforts to control them through Solly were ignored.

They continued like this for a kilometre south, with Tom sending in sitreps over the radio when he could get a word in edgeways. With the whole squadron out on the ground for the first time, the net was constantly busy. It was the first time SHQ had wielded four limbs, the first time on the
ground for four keen young troop leaders all competing for Frenchie’s approval. With myriad other frictions caused by slack voice procedure,
comms
blind spots and operating in an unfamiliar area, Tom couldn’t hear what anyone was saying around him, as his left ear was so busy trying to distil the huge amounts of mostly useless information from the radio. It sounded as though the other Troops were having similarly shambolic experiences.

At ten o’clock they arrived at the site and the militia barged their way into the nearby compound that was now their temporary base. Tom had been so overwhelmed with the morning’s assault upon his senses that he hadn’t even smiled, let alone apologized, to the family as they walked in, treating them like ciphers in a computer game as opposed to humans. Trueman, for whom the learning curve was less steep, was much better with them, immediately establishing a bond with the children and offering cigarettes to the men. They accepted them readily enough, if without thanks, but looked at the militiamen with mute acceptance and hate in their eyes.

Now though Tom was feeling better, standing outside the compound with Trueman, Jesmond and Solly as they watched the boy continue to prod and gesticulate at the area around the IED.

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ Trueman piped up. ‘I’ll get rid of that twat for you.’ He marched over and, in front of all the militiamen, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him back from the IED. There were actually two devices, each marked with a little pyramid of white-painted stones. The boy squirmed, and Trueman flung him bodily into the crowd of the militia, where he hung back, embarrassed. Trueman strutted back over to Tom. ‘Right, sir, that’s my part done. Yours is a bit harder. Didn’t get too close to them myself, but it looks like they’re marked OK.’ He saw Tom
gulp and tried to cheer him up. ‘Don’t worry, sir; if that bummer can dance around them for ten minutes and be fine then you’ll be all right. And besides, this is what you lot get your pop-star wages for, ain’t it?’

Tom smiled weakly and headed out to the pyramids. He had to step as close as he dared to the devices, use the GPS to get the ten-figure reading that would pinpoint to the nearest metre each location, write that down and then step away and compile the 10-liner. Simple. The small stone pyramids were only twenty metres from him but seemed miles away. Tom wished for some of the militia’s hashish to slow his frantic heart. Blood was pulsing in his ears, and he could feel the artery in his neck swell to his heart’s drumbeat. He edged closer. The radio crackled in his left ear, and he turned the volume to silent. He didn’t want any distractions. Now he was four metres away, and he peered even more fixedly. His eyes were straining. This was it, his first time looking into the face of one of the devices that had killed so many. It felt as though he was approaching the edge of a cliff but despite every urge to step back he couldn’t; he had to look closer.

Inch by inch he moved, now in a low shuffling crouch up to the first pyramid. Just ten centimetres from it a bit of earth had been scratched away, and Tom could clearly see part of a crumpled white plastic bag buried in the ground, the waterproof covering for the pressure plate of an IED. He had no idea where the main charge was buried. He could well have been standing right on top of it. He got about a metre away, almost forgetting to breathe, and then held out his wrist-mounted GPS straight in front of him over the pressure plate. He looked at its face and wrote down the grid reference with a white hand in a notebook balanced on his thigh.

With a desiccated throat he didn’t bother to get up from his crouch but shimmied the three metres to the second one.
This time any vestige of colour in him drained away. Nearly the whole main charge had been exposed, and was lying there like a half-buried corpse. That meant that the pressure plate could be anywhere around him. He stayed there for ages.
How did that boy dance around it and not hit it?
Almost for want of something to do, and terrified to move, he did the same trick with the GPS and then, grid written down, took a deep breath and squirmed back, knowing he should search the earth with his fingertips or his bayonet but just wanting away as quickly as possible. The crunch of the grains of sand and gravel under his boots sounded like rocks falling down a mountain, and the sinews in his neck were taut as he braced himself for the explosion that had to come. Finally though, somehow, he found himself three metres away and straightened up. As he did so, he got a head rush and felt as though he was about to faint. He walked back to Trueman, who was looking at him astonished, another cigarette burning in his mouth with an inch of unflicked ash at its end.

‘Fucking hell, sir. I thought you were going to mark their location, not try to shag ’em. Why in fuck’s name did you get so close? Me and Jessie were going to come and drag you out, but the only reason we didn’t was that you looked so in the zone that if we surprised you, you’d probably have jumped onto it or something.’

Tom was amazed at how coolly he replied; his whole body was tingling. ‘Well, Sergeant Trueman, always got to give the
ATO
the best possible information.’

‘Aye, sir, but remember you ain’t a fucking ATO, so don’t go behaving like one.’ He smiled as the tension left him. ‘Fuck me, Jessie; we got real ice blood here!’

This made Tom swell with pride, but he didn’t want to show any emotion in front of them, so he kept his distance and replied with a formal, ‘Well anyway, enough of that.
Right, Sergeant Trueman, I’m going to send a sitrep to Zero.’ He went inside the compound, took his helmet off and wiped his hand over his crew cut, sending a spray of sweat off it. He wriggled his rucksack off, sat next to it with his back against a wall and took a drink of water, pouring a few glugs over his forehead. It didn’t work; the water was so hot it just felt clammy and made his saturated shirt feel as though he’d just sweated into it some more. He checked his map, checked his GPS, wrote up the two 10-liners, rehearsed them in a whisper, went through in his head what he was going to say to Zero and mopped his brow with his sweat rag. At last a lull on the net came.