War Torn (9 page)

The river carved its way through the foliage ahead of them. The water gleamed in the sunlight. The landscape opened up on either side of it, filling their perspective with light and space. Then they returned once more to the dense, sunken world of interwoven shadows and raking gunfire.

Someone yelled into their mic: ‘Oh, fuck it,
no!
’

It sounded like Sol Kasanita. Sol almost never swore.

‘
Man down . . .
’

Man down. The words Dave dreaded. The words that echoed in his worst nightmares.

‘
Sol
?’

He couldn’t hide his anguish. Sol Kasanita, built like a rock, solid as a rock, dependable as rock. For an instant Dave stared into a gaping hole where that rock should be.

Laughter rang in his ear.

‘It’s all right, Sarge!’ Jamie said.

‘He was just getting his head down!’

Mal’s voice. And more laughter in the background.

‘Stop fucking about and get someone else up on top!’ Dave roared, embarrassed by his sudden rush of emotion. ‘What’s going on with you bunch of dickheads? On second thoughts, don’t tell me. Just get on with your jobs. And if I ever hear anyone fucking about with Man Down again I’ll personally remove their balls.’

He could see a network of compounds in the distance. The detainees had said that fighters from Iran, Pakistan and the Gulf all trained somewhere close by. But there were also civilians: women, children, old people.

The open, arid desert was visible again now. The firing finally petered out as they reached the edge of the Green Zone. Dave kept his eyes fixed on the track ahead of him. The intensity of this attack certainly supported the OC’s theory about the location of the Taliban stronghold. He’d want a strike op next.

A few hundred metres ahead, a goat strolled out from a cluster of trees.

The driver kept on going. And so did the goat. It ambled along the track towards them.

‘Go firm,’ Dave said. ‘I don’t fancy goat in my rations.’

The driver stopped.

‘What’s up?’ asked the lads in the back.

‘Goat hitchhiking,’ Dave said into the mic. An old man ran out of the trees further along the track, waving a stick and shouting.

The goat, which had been impervious to the roaring line of Vectors, started at the sight of the stick or the old boy’s spindly legs and cantered towards Dave’s wagon, head back and eyes rolling.

Suddenly there was a massive fireball in front of them instead of a goat. The windscreen filled with dust. There was a second ear-splitting explosion. The Vector rocked and then vibrated like a dog shaking water from its coat.

‘
What the fuck . . .?
’

A chorus of voices in his ears.

But in the front of the Vector there was silence. Dave and his driver contemplated their near escape. Two lives down, Dave thought. The first time, Steve took the hit. Now the goat. How many can I have left?

‘Fucking hell,’ the driver said eventually.

‘Big one,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah . . . but I don’t get it. A goat couldn’t set off an anti-tank mine.’

‘Anti-personnel stacked onto an anti-tank, I reckon. Or two.’ Dave’s throat was thick with dust. ‘Apparently the Taliban like to do a bit of stacking.’

‘Good thing you told me to stop,’ the driver said.

‘I thought I was being kind to a dumb animal.’

Their eyes scanned the track, gouged and pitted from the explosion.

‘No sign of the old geezer with the knobbly knees and the stick,’ Dave said.

‘He’ll be hiding in those trees somewhere.’

‘He won’t have been close enough to the blast to get hurt.’ But Dave wasn’t completely sure about that.

The boss came on the radio and Dave described what had happened.

‘Where’s the old man?’

Dave rolled his eyes at the driver. ‘He was a good two hundred metres away.’ He didn’t want to stop and look for him.

‘We’ll have to make sure he’s not hurt,’ the boss said.

‘They planted the IED, not us.’ Dave didn’t bother to hide his irritation. ‘Maybe his grandson put it there and forgot to tell him. Or maybe he planted it himself and hadn’t told the goat . . .’

But he already knew the boss well enough to guess what would come next.

‘He’s a local farmer and, um, probably has nothing to do with the, er, insurgents. He may not even speak their language. He could be a casualty and we, um, have a duty of care to him if he’s, er, hurt.’

Dave sighed. You could count on Boss Weeks to take the moral high ground.

‘Right,’ he said unenthusiastically. ‘Dismount 1 and 2 Sections. Sol Kasanita, you bring 1 Section up here to me, Baker bring 2 Section. Corporal Curtis and 3 Section stay here and cover.’

He could hear the men moving reluctantly. It had been a long, hot drive and sausages at the cookhouse in Sin City seemed like a much better idea.

‘Move!’ Dave barked. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

‘Bit of a problem here, Sarge.’ Sol sounded embarrassed.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Finn won’t let me go.’

Dave thought of the exploding goat. He was going to explode himself if his men kept on like this.

‘Listen, lads . . .!’

‘He can’t walk,’ Finn explained cheerfully. ‘He’s going to get into trouble out there.’

‘I can manage,’ Sol said.

‘You fucking can’t,’ said Finn.

‘Did you say he can’t walk?’ Dave repeated slowly.

‘Fell down from the top,’ Sol admitted. His voice was miserable.

‘Twisted his ankle,’ Jamie said.

‘Maybe broken it,’ Finn added.

‘It is not fucking broken!’ yelled Sol and there was a momentary silence as everyone remembered again that Sol never swore.

Dave said: ‘Try to find a more heroic way to die, Sol. OK, you stay there. I’ll have Finn with the rest of 1 Section. Get moving. Come on, 2 Section, where are you?’

He got out and the men joined him. He didn’t press the mic button; he didn’t want the boss to hear what he was about to say next.

‘All we’re doing is keeping the boss happy now, lads. Just go up the track looking for a wounded civilian, then through the trees, and we’ll work our way back herringbone. Don’t take too much time or trouble over it. Finn leads with 1 Section, Baker follows with 2 Section and, as Sol’s out, I’ll go behind.’

Finn’s watchfulness was so acute that it was almost a sixth sense. When he was around, it was hard to make anyone else point man.

‘What are we looking for, Sarge?’ Jamie asked.

‘An old geezer. Dead or wounded. He’s got a beard . . .’ He turned to the driver. ‘He did have a beard, didn’t he?’

‘They’ve all got fucking beards.’

‘OK, beard and knobbly knees. Last seen holding a stick. The boss is worried that he may have gone the same way as his goat.’

‘I’ll look for the beard, you look for the knees,’ Jamie told Angus.

‘Get your sling clip undone, for Chrissake, Bilaal,’ Dave said to Mal. ‘And two hands on your weapon!’

‘Oh, yeah, sorry, Sarge.’

Mal wasn’t thick or lazy. Far from it. The sling clip would limit his firing arc and Mal knew that but he just wasn’t thinking. Not enough about soldiering, anyway. He thought about women all day and all night. He was probably standing there fantasizing about Emily the sex grenade right now. But if you could just get him to concentrate, he was good.

They moved forward up the track, along the line of trees, up to the site of the explosion. They stared in silence at the scorched earth and shredded foliage.

‘There but for the grace of God . . .’

‘Could be a few bits of barbecued goat . . .’ Jamie prodded the ground with his foot.

‘Let’s hope it’s not barbecued beard.’ Dave led them to the place where the old man had emerged onto the track. They peered between the trees. The soil was sandy, the canopy thick with tangled leaves.

Finn plunged in and the others followed.

‘OK, swing left and back to the vehicles,’ Dave said. ‘If he’s lying wounded, we should find him.’

It felt like another world in here. Cooler. The shade from the overhead leaves was green.

Just ahead of Dave and to his right, Angus suddenly stopped. Dave stopped too. It took a moment for him to realize why. Their stillness made the woods seem unnaturally quiet. The trees came to an abrupt end. Ahead of them, walking casually across an open field, along the top of one of the drainage ditches, were four insurgents.

Their weapons were slung carelessly over their shoulders. Their sergeant really should have bollocked them big-time. Two were
carrying belts of ammo. They must have been firing at us a few minutes ago, and now the contact’s over here they are, walking home in pairs, talking and laughing. Just like us after a contact, Dave thought, experiencing a strange sense of fellowship with the enemy even as he raised his weapon to kill them.

He muttered into the mic but did not look around for the others. He took the safety off and watched the insurgents drop, one by one, into the ditch. It was so easy and so quick that he was hardly aware of the sound of his own rifle. He thought someone else, a bit further up the herringbone, had fired too, although he wasn’t sure.

He reported back quickly and then silently moved forward, telling Angus, Jamie and Mal, who were nearest, to come too while the others covered from the woods.

The field felt uncomfortably exposed. Dave became aware that something was nagging at him. Angus McCall had seen the enemy first but instead of taking immediate action, he’d frozen. It was the shock and rigidity in McCall’s imposing frame which had alerted Dave to the enemy presence. It should have been the sight of Angus raising his weapon. He made a mental note to deal with the problem later.

‘Four enemy dead, now searching,’ he muttered into his mic.

The men were lying in the drainage ditch, their hair tangled with the undergrowth, their bodies crumpled.

‘You take the two at the back,’ Dave instructed Angus.

He jumped down into the ditch. The water was thigh-high and smelled rancid. Some of it splashed onto his face. It soaked rapidly through his clothes.

One of his dead men was still holding a weapon; the other had dropped his on the bank. Dave took both AK47s and pushed them right out of reach. Jamie swept them up.

Angus scrambled down to the other two bodies further along the channel.

‘Got an evidence bag?’

‘No,’ Angus said miserably. ‘Didn’t think I’d need it.’

Dave groaned. ‘Got anything at all to put stuff in?’

‘Well . . . my Camelbak, I s’pose.’

Dave was just about to yell at him when Mal dragged a couple of evidence bags from his belt kit. ‘Here’s some.’

Dave pulled at the first body. He was surprised by how light it was. This man was a lot thinner than any British soldier, Dave thought, as he pressed his knee into the bony back and turned the corpse over.

‘Clear.’

Jamie Dermott: cool, efficient, focused. Dave liked to work with a man he could rely on.

He began a systematic search from the head down. When he reached the feet he found they were bare. He looked in the water and the bank for shoes. There were none. He felt the man’s feet. Still warm. And the soles were hard and leathery as sandals. These were habitually bare feet. The man had been barefoot with an AK47.

He turned the body over. Man? He was scarcely more than a boy.