Chapter Thirty-nine

THE FOUR SOLDIERS took a lot longer to move than the Taliban and they were already running late enough to jeopardize the mission. After the call to prayer, the populace would be up and moving, although there was still an hour before dawn.

The lads wanted to whisper together about the night.

‘Shit! I felt the fucking bat’s wings almost touch my face,’ Angus was saying. ‘I moved, I couldn’t help it!’

‘What were they putting on that fire? Smoke nearly choked me,’ said Finn.

‘Yeah! The smoke! Shit!’

Doc was noticeably silent.

‘How’s the knee?’ Dave asked him. ‘Want me to bind it before we go?’

‘I told you, binding won’t help. At least it’s had a good rest.’

‘I wish I could’ve watched those blokes. Were they animal-herders or something?’ Angus said.

‘They were Taliban,’ said Dave.

All the men stared at him.

‘What?’

‘Insurgents. All fully armed.’

Angus turned bright red. ‘We could have shot the fucking lot of them when they went to sleep!’

‘There were twelve men there. They’re still alive but so are we. Now let’s get moving; it’ll soon be light.’

They swung their day sacks on to their backs. Dave sent Finny ahead and he and Angus helped Doc down the steep slope. Dave heard rocks slide and fall beneath their feet. But he had already decided. With the dawn coming, silence was less of a priority now than speed.

At the bottom of the slope they swung left. Counting on his belief that the dogs hunting them had already left the area, he told Finn to cross the first canal so that they were inside the worked fields where there were no landmines. Then, instead of wading through deep water, they could move fast along the bank towards the relief. It was high-risk because they passed near clusters of compounds.

As they crossed the water they found its temperature had dropped further since last night. Or maybe they were all still bone cold from the cave. The canal’s freezing fingers grasped them around the knees, thighs, groins and chests and then they were out, shaking it off like dogs.

Finny set a fast pace, Dave behind him, then Doc and finally Angus, carrying Doc’s day sack. Doc kept up by doing a small skip on his twisted knee. It was just a matter of time before he slowed down. Dave knew it was ridiculous to rush Doc to get as far as possible before he tired. He would just tire earlier. It was like driving faster to the petrol station when you were running out of fuel. He tried twice to get Finny to walk at a slower pace but Finny seemed unable to make any more concessions to the medic’s knee.

When he looked back Dave could see something which worried him. Boot prints. The locals would not need dogs to scent them out. They would simply have to look at the ground to know that soldiers had passed this way recently.

It wasn’t dawn but the possibility of dawn was present. You could feel the air beginning to reorganize itself to make room for the sunlight which would soon flood the place and heat the world rapidly through twenty degrees. They passed two compounds at such speed that by the time the dogs detected them and began to bark, they were gone. Dave hoped the dogs were chained up.

He had decided they must remove their boots when they rounded a corner and Finny stopped. Mid-pace. Dave nearly plunged past him into the body of a skinny Afghan boy who was staring in alarm at Finn. At the appearance of a second soldier his eyes widened still further.

Behind him was a herd of goats. Now there were four soldiers and the goats were staring at them all with as much disbelief as the boy.

With immense effort, Dave smiled. He knew it was a crooked and insincere grin and he did not blame the boy for looking terrified instead of smiling back. Even the goats looked terrified. Maybe they guessed that Dave was calculating the consequences of killing their herder.

Finn smiled too, equally ghoulishly. The boy stared from one face to the next. Dave reached into his webbing and managed to fish out a brightly wrapped candy. The boy looked at it. Dave tried to make his smile less like a dog baring its teeth and more like a warm, fatherly hello. He stretched out his hand with the sweet but, when the boy reached for it, at the last minute Dave pulled it back and pointed to his own face. He held a finger up to his lips. He shook his head and put his hand over his mouth. He whispered: ‘No talk!’

The boy nodded as if he understood.

‘No talk!’ he echoed obediently. Was this one of the children who learned English in school? Or was he just a good parrot?

Dave gave the boy the sweet and Finn found more candy and did the same. The boy was smiling now. He was a scrawny lad of maybe ten or twelve years old, so small that when he smiled his teeth wiped out the rest of his face.

‘No talk!’ he said every time Finn gave him a sweet, putting his finger to his lips.

‘OK, we’ve bought him off for now. Let’s go. By the time he tells his mates, we’ll be away from here,’ said Dave. But the boy did not want to let them pass.

‘Greedy little bastard wants more sweets, fuck him!’ said Finn.

‘I’ve got a few,’ Doc volunteered.

The goats had lost interest now but the boy’s eyes were bright. And he didn’t want sweets. He had been staring at the men, their uniforms and their weapons, but his eyes always returned to one place. Their boots.

He put his finger to his lips. ‘No tell!’ he said, pointing at Doc’s feet, which were the smallest.

Dave said: ‘He’s after your boots, Doc.’

Angus said: ‘What is it about greedy little kids which makes me want to slot them?’

‘They remind you too much of you,’ suggested Finn.

Doc said: ‘This little guy’s got a great future in the fucking souk. He wants my boots and he’s bargaining for them.’

‘Bargaining? More like ransoming,’ muttered Dave. But the medic was already unlacing the boots. Since it was hard for him to bend over, Angus helped him, murmuring murderously under his breath about Afghans and their children.

‘We should all take our boots off anyway,’ said Dave.

Finny and Angry stared at him.

‘What? Our boots? Take them off?’

‘We’re leaving prints.’

Doc Holliday stepped out of his boots and placed them on the ground in front of the delighted goatherd.

‘No tell,’ said Dave. And he tried to demonstrate ‘No show’ too. Smiling, the boy kicked off his plastic sandals and stepped into them. They were far too big and the laces hung from them but he could not contain his delight. He laughed with excitement.

‘Glad you like them, mate,’ said Doc, taking off his socks and stuffing them into his webbing. Angus watched, grimacing with disgust.

‘Stink bombs,’ explained the medic. ‘Very useful weapon.’

Grinning broadly, his pockets stuffed with sweets, the boy swaggered off in his too-big boots. He looked ridiculous. He could only walk by turning his toes out at a ludicrous angle. He attempted to march like a soldier, laughing with delight, his goats maaing and following him. All that was left of him was his plastic flip-flops and one empty sweet wrapper. Dave swooped on the wrapper and stuffed it in his webbing.

‘How long before he forgets “No show” and “No tell” when someone sees him, finds out where he got the boots, phones our friends from the cave last night and they get on to our trail?’ asked Doc.

‘Not long, so we have to get moving. Doc, can you wear his flip-flops?’

‘No fucking way.’

‘OK, lads, boots off now. If you can’t carry them or they get in the way of your weapon, they go in the canal. Finny, you get the kid’s flip-flops on. At least they won’t be able to follow our trail by sight.’

‘You don’t think four blokes with helmets, camouflage and weapons is a bit of a giveaway?’ asked Doc. No one replied. They were all taking off their boots miserably.

‘I can’t be arsed to carry them. I’ll never get my rifle out if I do,’ said Finny. He held them over the canal. ‘I’m going to miss you, my friends.’ He shut his eyes as he dropped them into the water.

They set off again, but more slowly.

‘I hate these fucking sandals,’ Finn told Dave.

‘Yeah, but they’re leaving great flip-flop prints,’ Dave whispered back.

Daylight was arriving too quickly. At first the dawn had been just a finger of light in the east but now rays and heat were spreading out across the landscape as if the sun was hurrying the soldiers along.

They were about to reach a more populated area when Finny stopped and gestured for Dave to join him before they stepped out of the leafy woods. Ahead lay a jigsaw of compounds. The nearest had been bombed out, so that only part of two walls still stood. Within its empty shell was a woman with her back to them. Her head was covered, but carelessly, as if she didn’t really expect to encounter anyone. She was stretching up to throw clothes across a washing line. She seemed to be alone, an impression reinforced by the way she was humming tunelessly to herself.

Finn looked at Dave. Neither man needed to say a word.

Dave turned to Angus and Doc and whispered: ‘This only takes two. Cover us.’

Dave grabbed his plasticuffs and a trusty First Field Dressing. If he was trapped on a desert island with only one thing, he hoped it would be a British First Field Dressing. It had a thousand uses and right now it was going to stop a woman humming.

They ran from the woods to the woman, their bare feet soundless. She did not turn around. In fact, she was such an easy target that Dave felt guilty, as if he was stealing a baby. Finn grabbed her from behind, holding his hand over her mouth. She jumped spectacularly but Finn held her fast while Dave bound her. For a moment he saw her eyes, huge, terrified, violated.

‘Sorry,’ he said gently. But now two men had touched her body. Would she be regarded as unclean by her family, by the locals? She put up no resistance and he took her headscarf and covered her eyes with it and then slipped the plasticuffs on her wrists and ankles. She was so small and thin that he could carry her single-handedly to the woods. He could feel her heart thumping, as if it was a fish which had leaped out of her body and into his hands.

Finn stayed behind briefly to strip the clothes off the line and the bushes where the woman had laid them to dry. Then he followed Dave back to the others, stooping once to pick up the sandal which had fallen off the woman’s foot.

Dave placed the woman carefully in the shrubs where she would be found but not too soon. She did not struggle or move. He wished she had. Her complete submission made him feel uncomfortable. Maybe she thought they would shoot her.

‘Each of you, get a dishdash on!’ he ordered the lads.

The men pulled the damp, flowing garments on over their Osprey. Finn silently passed Angus the woman’s sandals and Angus put them on and minced a few paces in them, pulling a face.

‘Too fucking small! The dishdash’s too fucking small as well, I can’t breathe.’

‘You won’t be breathing ever again unless you wear it.’

Dave wound a garment around his head into a loose approximation of an Afghan hat and Doc did the same. The other two went bareheaded. Their rifles inside their clothes, they proceeded. The whole operation had taken less than ten minutes, perhaps only five, but in that time the sun had taken control of the sky. It was spilling light everywhere, not the grey light of dawn but the cauldron of light which was heating the world.

‘How much further, Sarge?’ whispered Angus. He was throwing anxious glances at Doc’s knee. The medic’s limp was more pronounced. He was slowing down. His face was growing white with pain and he was starting to sweat.

Dave wasn’t sure of the answer. He just knew they were going in the right direction, his navigation from the canals confirmed by the direction of the sun. As they progressed they saw men in the fields or sighted a distant group of women with washing or an old man crouched by a sluice gate.

‘I feel like a girly in this dishdash,’ moaned Angus. ‘And the sandals are, like, made for an elf.’

‘They’re a right pain,’ agreed Finny.

‘Yeah, but you’re leaving good footprints,’ Doc reminded them.

‘Don’t walk army style now there are people around,’ Dave told them quietly. ‘We’re blokes on our way somewhere and we’re laughing and joking. They need to hear our voices but not what we’re saying.’

They fell into pairs. Finny and Angus joined the other two but said nothing. Doc and Dave tried to look as though they were chatting. Dave put an arm around Doc in a friendly Afghan male sort of a way, only this friendly Afghan male was easing the weight of his friend’s knee.

‘You had that knee problem long, Doc?’ asked Dave, for want of something to say.

‘Yeah, I snapped a ligament when I was operational in Sierra Leone with Special Forces,’ replied the medic nonchalantly. Finn and Angus stared at him. No one had ever heard him refer to his SAS days and some people said that Doc’s past was a myth. ‘Had a load of operations but it never righted itself. I have to say that it didn’t even hurt this much when I first did it. Come on, laugh, someone, there are washerwomen over there.’

‘Ha ha ha ha,’ said Dave obligingly, but not, he feared, convincingly.

‘Good,’ said the medic. ‘Good enough to pass selection. That’s one of the things they test: your laugh. I mean, after you’ve been holed up on a river bank with nothing to eat for three days.’

‘Ha ha ha ha,’ said Dave.

‘Better!’ said Doc. ‘Ever thought of applying for Special Forces?’

‘No.’

‘Angus wants to. His old man was in SF,’ said Finny. Angus’s dad had pretended to be in the SAS but he had been an army cook, and Finny knew it.

‘Fuck off,’ said Angry.

‘You’d get through selection,’ said Doc.

‘Who?’ asked Dave.

‘You. Especially you, but actually all three of you could be Special Forces if you wanted. Even a troop from Hereford couldn’t have done a better job here than you guys have. And I just want to say thanks to you all.’

There was an embarrassed silence. No one ever talked this way, especially not Doc. Not ever. Dave began to wonder if he had some kind of a fever. But when Doc continued he could tell the medic was speaking from the heart. The way, thought Dave, only really brave men can.

‘I would have died last night if it hadn’t been for you. And a lot of blokes would have killed me when I asked because I was jeopardizing your lives, no question. But you carried me instead. Thanks, boys. Thanks to all of you. Now laugh, someone, quick.’

They were very close to a small group of old men squatting near the canal, talking and chewing.

‘Ha ha ha ha,’ Dave tried.

‘Talk!’ Doc said.

They chatted about nothing, their voices low. They were acting for their lives. Dave, feeling his heart thud, tried to emulate the relaxed, unhurried gait of the Afghan men he had seen wandering in the Green Zone. Finny and Angry had got the idea and were having a conversation which was punctuated with loud laughter.

One of the old men called something out and Dave gave him a half-wave but did not break his stride or interrupt Doc, who was talking manically about his life in Hereford. Dave did allow himself a glance at the men. They looked very old. Too old, he hoped, to carry mobile phones they could use to ring their Taliban grandsons.

‘I hate walking in these stupid little sandals,’ said Angus. ‘I’m going to be fucking miserable if I don’t get a pair of boots on these feet soon.’

‘Not much further,’ Dave assured him. He could not resist glancing back at the old men. Shit! One was holding a phone to his ear and hollering into it, the way old codgers always did. The others were not watching the soldiers with any interest, so maybe the old man was just phoning his wife to tell her to get the coffee on.

‘This is the back of fucking beyond and everyone’s going to know everyone else. Four blokes no one recognizes are like the news headlines around here,’ said Finny.

‘There are often blokes around no one recognizes. The Taliban billet foreign fighters on the locals all the time,’ Dave told him.

And then they rounded a woody corner and a new vista opened out: the usual medieval jumble of mud compounds, goats, the odd camel, greenery. About six hundred metres away, the desert began. And on the lip of the Green Zone, between the green world and the bleak desert, was a track. On the track was a huge, incongruous monster of a twenty-first-century machine. It was lying crooked like a great, injured metal animal. A short way behind it was another Mastiff. A helmeted British soldier was visible up in its turret behind an HMG. Still further behind, distantly emerging from around the long ridge, was yet another Mastiff, with perhaps another behind that. It was a rescue party from the FOB.

‘Yes, yes, oh fucking yes!’ said Doc.

‘Thank Christ,’ said Finny.

Angus looked with his lips parted, as though witnessing a miracle.

Dave just continued walking grimly. Six hundred metres more. And as Jamie Dermott said, it’s not over till it’s over.

‘Serendipity,’ commented Doc. ‘We arrive to help them at the same time as the rescue party.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Finn. ‘Might as well turn round and go back, eh?’

‘We could stroll on over to Red Sox,’ suggested Doc lazily.

‘Yeah, I enjoy stretching my legs,’ said Finn.

Doc was gazing at the arriving Mastiff. ‘The rescue’ll have a medic on board,’ he said. ‘But I’m fucked if anyone else is going to treat McKinley’s leg after I came all this way to do it.’

Dave said: ‘Lads, as we cross the last field, get out your First Field Dressing. Get it out and wave it. Just in case any moron takes us for Taliban.’

‘They won’t do that if they see our SA80s,’ said Angus.

‘We’ll play it safe,’ Dave insisted. ‘Just get your field dressings ready.’

‘Let’s hope we don’t need to get our SA80s out. Let’s hope we have a pleasant stroll all the way there,’ said Doc.

A second later, gunfire cracked the air around them.

It came from behind. Dave had a sensation, or more of an instinct, that a round had passed very close by. It was followed by a spray of further rounds. The men threw themselves on to their belt buckles, disentangled their rifles from their clothes and began to fire back.

‘And I thought we were home and dry!’ shouted Finny, firing back angrily.

The battle was desultory. These were not the hardened insurgents Dave had watched in the cave last night, not unless the Taliban Slindon had broken away with a few mates.

Dave rapidly narrowed the enemy firing position to a couple of compounds. A muzzle flash on the roof of one of them gave him their exact location. It was less than three hundred metres away. Walking along by the canal, the three of them had been an open target but the enemy had put their weapons on fully automatic and fired indiscriminately and missed, when a bit of quiet concentration and aim would have killed at least one them. If Dave were sergeant of the Taliban platoon, he’d be gripping his boys for that. But he was sure there was no sergeant out there and not much of a platoon. Someone had alerted local lads to their presence and they had come running with their AKs. They were untrained and inexperienced.

The firing continued and then began to peter out. They were probably so unprepared that they’d used up their magazines. Or they had paused to greet reinforcements.

With six hundred metres to go, Dave did not want a battle here and he did not want the enemy closing in on them. He wanted to keep moving forward to safety. They could jump in the canal and try to proceed, heads down. But they would make slow progress with Doc wading through water. A longer, but faster, route was a little to the north: an almost empty drainage ditch that led to a wooded area. Ironically, he was sure that this wood was visible through binoculars from PB Red Sox. It would give them good cover and after that they would have only a couple of hundred metres of open ground to run across to the relief, covered by British soldiers with HMGs. They just had to run fast enough. With a shoulder to lean on, Dave thought Doc could do it.

He told the lads the plan and they ran, heads down, to the drainage channel. Even Doc managed a passable run.

‘So we didn’t fool them,’ said the medic breathlessly as Dave linked shoulders to help him down into the channel. ‘And I thought I was a master of disguise.’

‘Maybe we did too much laughing,’ Dave said. ‘Oh, fucking hell!’

A round had come so close that he felt as though it had nudged him. He ducked right down into the ditch mud and pulled off his day sack. Sure enough, a round had whistled clean through it.

Doc looked at the hole.

‘Must have been a lucky hit. Because they’re all over the place with their weapons,’ he said.

‘Unless some more experienced reinforcements have got there,’ said Dave. ‘Did you hear it? Sounded like a Dragunov.’

‘Fuck, let’s get moving,’ said Doc. ‘Mmmm, mud between the toes feels so good.’ Another round whistled too close to their heads.

‘My wife paid a lot for a mud treatment once,’ Dave told him, stumbling behind. ‘You’ve got yourself a bargain there, Doc.’

Now he had mentioned Jenny he had to make a mental effort to wheel her out of his mind again, as if she was a very heavy weight on a barrow.

Up ahead, Finny shouted: ‘Now they’re fucking sharpshooting! That’s a Dragunov!’

‘Keep down and keep going!’ roared Dave. He remembered the motorcyclist in a long turban and glasses who had eyed him and perhaps targeted him. But that was in another part of the province, miles away near FOB Carlsbad. This could not be the same sniper.

‘Sarge, I want to stop right here and slot them!’ Angus pleaded.

‘No! Move!’

As they reached the woods, firing from the enemy stopped. Dave guessed it wasn’t because the insurgents were having a brew. It was because they knew four men were fleeing and they wanted to catch up with them, or at least get close enough for some clear shots. He turned back briefly and saw the landscape was empty now. No old men, no goats, no camels, no women, no children, just muzzle flashes. Even the civilians could do that Afghan evaporation act.

He was running hard, an arm under Doc’s arm, half supporting him, half pulling him along.

He turned back once more. Through the trees he glimpsed about five figures, their robes streaming behind them, weapons waving. They were running out of the compound and across the field towards the soldiers, trampling crops underfoot, kicking aside foliage. Dave was in time to see the first soar over a drainage channel like a steeplechaser.

The woods ended suddenly and the four soldiers catapulted out of them. From PB Red Sox this had looked like a deep, shady forest but once they were inside it had turned out to be no more than a thin line of trees. The shadow had been welcome but they were almost instantly out of it and running for their lives across a flat field of growing cotton, the ground still soggy from the night’s irrigation.

‘They’re closing on us!’ Dave yelled at Angry and Finny. ‘Get your dressings out, wave them, and go! Go, go, go, you two!’

They were at the end of a long night’s epic journey. The two younger soldiers had earned the right to run forward to the safety of the Mastiffs and save themselves, at least.

But they disobeyed orders. Without speaking, or even looking at each other, Finny fell back until he was behind Dave and Doc. He ran backwards, scanning the treeline, covering the others, waiting to return the enemy’s first shot.

Angus drew alongside Doc and took his other arm. Doc had been doing a strange, balletic hop and jump but now Dave and Angry were able to lift the medic and keep running. Between them, Doc mimed running. But his feet were not touching the ground.

Dave was the only one who had managed to get out his field dressing. He waved it now with the same hand which held his rifle. He hoped that would be enough to tell any soldier stupid enough not to have identified their SA80s that they were British. Breathless, their mouths coated, their nostrils full of fine soil, their feet bare, they ran towards the British soldiers.

‘We’re nearly there!’

Into Dave’s head, unbidden again, came Jamie Dermott’s words. And with a heavy heart he knew it wasn’t over yet.