War Torn (35 page)

Jamie was watching the contractors.

‘What the hell are they doing?’ he asked Dave. They had built a wooden pier and were now bending over this and its accompanying paraphernalia.

‘Could be preliminary passive seismic measurements,’ said Dave knowledgeably.

‘So they’re measuring earthquakes?’

‘If it’s a seismometer they’re supposed to make some sort of noise, like an explosion, so they can measure the sound that comes back. Maybe it’s a gravimeter . . . I dunno, Jamie.’

Watched over by machine guns and surrounded by WMIKs, Vectors, soldiers, poker and dirty jokes, it soon became clear that Emily was agitated. She and Martyn frequently raised their voices. On one occasion she marched up to Weeks.

‘Mr Weeks,’ she said angrily. ‘Would you please ask your men to be quiet!’

The boss passed on the instruction, along with a warning about the nature of the jokes. There was silence for a while. Then the talk and laughter started again.

Emily, her large face red with the exertion of working in the sun, confronted Weeks again.

‘Mr Weeks!’ she said. ‘Not only are your men creating unnecessary noise but so are your machines.’

‘What machines, Professor?’ asked the boss. ‘You told us to switch everything off and we did.’

Martyn appeared at Emily’s side.

‘They say their machines aren’t on!’ Emily told him.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Emily means your radios.’

‘You want us to switch off our radios?’ said Boss Weeks. ‘We can’t possibly do that.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Emily said irritably. ‘No wonder our equipment isn’t performing! It’s picking up your frequencies.’

‘But in the, er, er, event of a-a-a-attack we’d be powerless to communicate!’

‘In the event of attack there would be far too much noise for us to continue working anyway!’ Emily evidently regarded enemy attacks as nothing more than an inconvenience. ‘So you would be welcome to turn the radios back on.’

‘I’m s-sorry, but no,’ said the boss.

‘But if you keep your radios on then you will invalidate all of our work!’

‘No.’

‘Mr Weeks, I insist.’

‘It’s Second Lieutenant Weeks, actually,’ he told her.

‘I have little respect for military rankings or protocol,’ she said. ‘And I realize that every time you come out with us you are hoping to fire your guns and shower any passing Afghan with bullets but I have no interest in your war games and I must ask you to cooperate.’

‘I can’t switch off the radios,’ said Weeks.

‘But you will invalidate our work!’

‘I’m s-s-sorry. But it would be too dangerous to switch off.’

‘Then our work here today must be at an end.’

‘All right. Back at the base we can agree with the OC how to deal with this problem in future,’ Weeks concurred.

‘If only they had sent a more senior officer, he might have been able to make a decision here and now!’

‘No, er, er, officer, however senior, would agree to switch off the radios.’

Dave and CSM Kila were watching.

‘I didn’t know he had it in him,’ said Kila.

‘He’s come a long way. Still can’t give a good set of orders, though.’

Kila said: ‘Think we ought to give him a bit of support?’

‘He’s coping. And if he can cope with her he can cope with anything the Taliban throws at us.’

‘I am here making a major contribution to the development of Afghanistan, Officer,’ Emily was saying. ‘I understood you were here for the same purpose. Now I find another perfect example of how the needs of those engaged in the peaceful activity of reconstruction have been ignored yet again in favour of war, war.’

‘The radios are needed for your p-p-protection.’ Weeks’s face was beetroot red. ‘There’s nothing warmongering about maintaining radio contact.’

‘I’m sorry to say that since I have been at the base my views have been confirmed that the British Army is a warmongering force. The best that can be said is that it keeps some very aggressive young men off the streets of the UK.’

The lads who were listening looked at each other.

‘Does she mean us?’ they muttered.

‘Unfortunately,’ continued Emily, ‘the poor Afghans are on the receiving end of this aggression.’

She instructed the waiting engineers to return with the gravimeter while Martyn shrugged helplessly at Weeks. The boss ordered the men to pack up.

‘Congratulations, sir,’ Dave said.

‘Fucking well done, sir,’ agreed Kila. The boss blinked in surprise, since Kila had never called him sir as if he meant it. ‘That was one hell of a handbagging.’

Weeks was still red-faced. He did not reply. He was thinking that
if standing up to Emily won him this much respect, he wished Asma had been here to see it.

As the convoy prepared to leave, Martyn Robertson climbed into the front of the Vector with Weeks.

‘There’s no way I’m travelling at the back with Enemy, she’ll be moaning all the way.’

Their route took them across the empty dustbowl of the desert, around the strange shapes of the Early Rocks which jutted eerily from the flat landscape. Gordon Weeks studied their distant outlines.

‘I’d sure like to visit that place,’ Martyn said. ‘It’s a weird formation. Natural although it looks manmade.’

‘Reminds me of Stonehenge,’ Weeks said.

‘Those rocks are so big they’d make Stonehenge look like it was made out of pebbles. You can’t tell the size of them when there’s nothing near to compare them with.’

At that moment a shabby, dusty car, driven by a man but full of women passengers, their brightly coloured headwear flapping from the open windows, cut across the desert. As it neared the rocks the massive outlines towered over the car as if it was a tiny toy.

‘Pilgrims,’ explained Martyn. ‘The place is some kind of holy shrine, that’s why we aren’t allowed to go there.’

Weeks made a mental note to ask Asma about the Early Rocks.

After this landmark the desert was featureless, apart from the occasional town or village, until the straight lines of FOB Senzhiri were visible in the distance. Usually they could expect some enemy fire if they approached to the east past a small, hilly zone but today they continued unhindered.

It was strange, thought Weeks, the way no one took a potshot at them when the civilian wagon was in the convoy. Without the civilians, they were guaranteed at least some token firing.

Martyn was evidently thinking the same thing.

‘They sure leave us alone these days,’ he said. ‘Must have finally understood that there’s nothing to gain from getting in our way.’

Weeks was silent. He feared Martyn was wrong.

JEAN AND ASMA LAY ON THEIR COTS IN BODY ARMOUR AND HELMETS
listening to almost incessant firing. They shared a room in one of the safer areas of the base. Reinforced with concrete, it nestled inside thick Afghan mud walls.

Jean said: ‘I’m sure the enemy waits for the contractors to leave the base before they start this.’

‘But only a couple of the contractors went out today,’ Asma said. ‘Martyn’s still here because he’s coming to the
shura.
’

‘Well, the Taliban don’t know how many are in the civvies’ Vector.’

At that moment their beds were shaken by a particularly loud explosion. Small, powdery pieces of wall scattered over them.

‘Toenail time,’ said Jean.

Asma nodded and reached for her makeup bag. They always painted their toenails during intense fire on the grounds that military morticians probably wouldn’t bother with toenails before their corpses were carried through Wootton Bassett.

Jean was pulling off her boots.

‘Not much chance we’ll get out for the
shura
now.’

‘It’ll be all over by then.’ Asma chucked a tiny bright red bottle over to Jean’s bed and shook a similar pink one herself.

‘Is your mate Gordon Weeks coming again?’ asked Jean.

‘No,’ said Asma. ‘We’ve got a different platoon today.’

‘Shame. That rifleman from 1 Platoon who stood by the door last time is really nice.’

‘There’ll probably be another nice rifleman today for you to smile at.’

‘Well I like that one. Got chatting to him about skiing in the cookhouse. It’s amazing how thinking about snow can make you feel cooler in these temperatures.’

Asma was placing a piece of foam between her toes. ‘That’s an achievement. You chatting with a rifleman. Considering how they all hate monkeys.’ Now she had begun to follow the line of her nails slowly and carefully with the tiny brush.

‘Well, when he’d got over that one he was all right. His name’s Jamie. I worked for one season in Val d’Isère and he used to go every year with his family and it turns out we were there at the same time.’

Asma looked up from her toes at Jean for a moment and raised her eyebrows comically.

‘Skiing with his family every year? And he’s a
rifleman
?’

Jean pulled a face. ‘And he’s
married.
’ She opened the red bottle. ‘But he’s all right.’

They both concentrated on their nails, pausing only briefly when another explosion shook their cots.

‘Do you think Iain Kila’s all right too?’ asked Asma.

‘Yuck!’ Jean stopped painting and sank inside her body armour like a tortoise. ‘Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck.’

‘He likes you,’ Asma said.

‘He’s scary. Imagine him in a narrow alley on a dark night when he’s had a few.’

‘All these big hard men are softies underneath. They just need a good woman to help them show their feelings.’

Jean guffawed. ‘And the last good woman was called Trudi.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘Nope. Her name’s tattooed on his arm.’

Asma changed feet. ‘Well, at least he’s got an Underslung Grenade Launcher tattooed on his other arm.’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘How cool is that?’

‘You are kidding!’

‘Yes,’ giggled Asma. ‘But he’s the sort who would.’

Jean giggled too.

‘I think you like him,’ said Asma.

‘I do not.’

‘You’re always talking to him.’

‘That’s because every other soldier avoids me. Apart from Jamie. They all think I’m trying to arrest them.’

Asma had finished her toenails. She screwed the brush back into the bottle and then tipped the contents of her makeup bag onto her cot. She bent over, sifting through everything, so that tiny bottles fell against one another with soft clinking noises. She said: ‘Well, you did make a big fuss about that guy they shot in the ditch.’

Jean was only starting on her second foot now. ‘The OC’s promised he’ll investigate and write a report. I know they want to sweep it under the carpet but I’m not going to let them. The fact is, they filled a wounded man with bullets.’

‘Course he was wounded. They shot him.’

‘It’s uncivilized,’ insisted Jean. ‘Soldiers storm compounds and see people living cheek by jowl with their animals and wandering around in flipflops. So they decide the Afghans are a bunch of savages. They should look at their own behaviour sometimes.’

‘Keep going with that one and you’ll drop a popular sergeant in the shit.’