Chapter Forty

DANNY JONES WAS on the Mastiff’s HMG watching the strange antics of the Taliban.

It had been a long, lonely night for the relief party. They had a T3 casualty hovering between life and death. They had to guard the exploded Mastiff and keep themselves safe too. A rescue party had set out from a nearby patrol base but there had been an explosion and they had not arrived and were feared dead. The rescue party had included their sergeant. They had been attacked twice, but they knew that the Taliban were busy elsewhere and they had been able to deal with the ambushes. But all the same, there had been enough attacks to stop them exploding or moving the Mastiff which blocked their path. Contact with PB Red Sox had been lost. Bastion was pinned down in a dust storm and could not help them. The FOB had been pinned down by the enemy. What a fucking night. The boss was in a foul temper. And now, weirdest of all, just as a rescue party from the FOB was arriving, the Taliban appeared to be fighting among themselves.

O’Sullivan the sharpshooter had been the first to notice the four men in dishdash strolling along by the side of the canal towards them, chatting and laughing. They looked like insurgents to O’Sullivan. Jonas had agreed that there was something very soldierly in the way they walked. They both would have liked to open fire but the insurgents were six hundred metres away and they were not visibly carrying weapons.

Then the men had started firing behind them. It wasn’t clear who had opened fire but the four insurgents got down in a drainage channel. They were having some sort of skirmish with a compound they had just passed.

‘I reckon our boys are inside that compound. I reckon we’ve taken it,’ said Jonas.

‘We’d know if ISAF had men out there,’ said O’Sullivan.

‘Not if they were the Jedi. On an operation.’

‘Special Forces? You reckon they’re after those four blokes?’

‘I reckon they’re not asking them in for a brew.’

‘Maybe it’s a sort of gang thing. Taliban on Taliban?’

‘Nah … not right in front of us.’

The four insurgents had disappeared from view in some trees now. No one else was watching them because attention had turned towards the rescue party, thundering up the track. At last. The boss was busy on the radio. Everyone was looking relieved.

Then the four men broke cover. They were running directly at the relief party across a field, all of them armed.

‘Fucking cheeky bastards!’ said Jonas. ‘Barefoot ragheads! Let’s get them!’

He didn’t even bother with the machine gun. Sledgehammer to crack a nut. He reached for his SA80 as O’Sullivan raised the sniper rifle and caught the men in his sights.

‘They’re not carrying AKs!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ve got SA80s.’

‘Stolen weapons!’ yelled Jonas, taking aim. ‘Get them!’

‘And one’s waving a First Field Dressing! Stoooooooooop!’ shouted O’Sullivan at the top of his voice. ‘Stoooooop! It’s Sarge! Look, he’s got a First Field Dressing!’

Everyone in the relief party, hot, dirty, sweating and exhausted, turned to stare at the sight of the four men in dishdash running across the field towards them.

O’Sullivan leaped down and into the blue lane which had been mine-cleared. He ran to the end of it by the exploded Mastiff, gesturing for the men to enter this way.

‘Here, here, Sarge, the blue lane’s here!’ he roared at the top of his voice.

Rifleman Colin Grove had only been in Afghanistan a week. Two weeks ago he was still at Catterick. The course had ended with a big bash for his eighteenth birthday and then he was off to Bastion. Before you could say rifle, he had met his new platoon and was being shipped off to FOB Nevada with them.

‘It’s not like this all the time,’ the lads in his platoon had assured him during last night’s firefight. ‘In fact, it’s never been like this before.’

During the night Grove had been through all the emotions a new soldier in the heat of battle experienced: fear, horror, delight, exhaustion. It had taken a while to understand that they really were fighting to save the FOB and themselves. No one could help them by air because of a dust storm. They were fighting for their lives.

The battle had gone on and on. It was like the whole of training at Catterick in one night. And then, when dawn came and the fighting had finally eased, no one had said: Have a brew and get yourself to bed. They had been ordered out of the gate towards the furthest patrol bases where two Mastiffs were stuck in the desert with a T3 casualty after an explosion.

They had driven through the gates and found themselves under fire again.

‘We have to keep fucking going!’ the platoon commander had said. ‘We’ve got to get to a casualty and then we’ve got to get to Patrol Base Boston Red Sox. Stupid fucking name.’

Colin Grove experienced Afghanistan from the ground for the first time in the back of a Mastiff through a thick fog of exhaustion. His sergeant sent him up on top to feed the belt through for the gimpy man and to get some fresh air since the lad looked white enough to puke. From up here, Grove saw the desert sizzle, watched the indifferent faces of the women working in the Green Zone and heard the call to prayer.

They went up a steep incline, rounded a corner and the party they had come to help was suddenly right in front of them. There were two Mastiffs and the furthest was wrecked and standing in water. There were blue lines sprayed all around the scene. Grove knew what that meant.

The gunner was looking the other way when Grove saw the insurgents. Everyone was looking the other way: staring at the men around the fallen Mastiff who were looking with relief at the rescue party. Nobody seemed to have noticed that four ragheads were attempting to ambush them. And they were probably just the advance. God only knew how many were behind them; you could see them swarming back there in the trees.

The insurgents must be either very brave or very stupid. They risked annihilation by running across an open field but they had rightly calculated that, at the arrival of the rescue, everyone’s attention would be elsewhere.

Colin Grove raised his rifle and took aim. He had been playing Call of Duty 4 a lot but he had never expected to have a battle experience exactly like it. And now it was actually happening. Four ragheads lining up in front of him. He could shoot them all. He decided to start with the biggest one, a brute of a man, barefoot and running with one arm around a comrade like a nancy boy coward. Another bloke was waving something green, probably some kind of Muslim attack emblem. After the big guy, that one would be next.

Grove took aim and fired and saw, with satisfaction, the big man run for one more pace, stumble and then slump towards the ground. He heard: ‘Stoooooooooop!’ He didn’t want to, but he lowered his rifle.

Doc Holliday knew Angus had been hit. He heard the noise of the round entering his body, a sound he had never heard before, a small thud and a hiss, as if someone had opened a valve. He felt Angus’s hold on him loosen and then, instead of supporting him, Angus suddenly became a weight. He was dragging on Doc’s shoulder. Doc felt him go and feared he would go down with him. He tried to put his arm under Angus’s and pull him back but he wasn’t strong enough. Angus flopped to the ground.

It was Finny, behind, who guessed what had happened. Because he could see that their pursuers had halted at the edge of the woods rather than expose themselves to the heavy weapons on the Mastiffs. Finny had opened fire before they could. He was even sure he had slotted one. He had kept on throwing a continual stream of rounds at them and they had backed off a bit, enough for Finny to be sure that the round which hit Angus had not come from behind. Which meant Angus had been shot from in front by one of their own men.

Finny remembered Dave’s instructions and pulled out a First Field Dressing. He waved it above his head shouting: ‘Wankers! Blue on blue! Don’t fire!’

He looked across to the Mastiff and saw Patrick O’Sullivan and some of the other lads from 2 and 3 Sections wading across the canal towards them, shouting over their shoulders. And there was Danny Jones on the HMG screaming at the wagons which had just arrived, waving his hands. And there was another bloke standing on top of the next Mastiff with his hands on his head in horror.

Dave and Doc stumbled to a halt and knelt by Angus, who had fallen forward, face down into the cotton crop. The back of his neck, above his Osprey, was hanging open like a shirt, revealing a tangle of blood and bone and tubes.

‘Shit!’ said Dave. He supported the lolling head and gently pulled the body over. At the front of Angus’s neck was a small wound, like a tiny red flower, although it was growing in size as they looked at it.

There was no doubt in Dave’s mind that Angus was dead. He knew it was true. But he didn’t want to believe it.

‘Angry! Speak!’ he shouted. But Angry did not move.

The Taliban fighters in the trees behind them opened fire again and this time were hit by a return volley not just from Finny but from the soldiers beyond the canal.

Doc leaned over to examine the body. Dave could hear a lot of shouting. He could hear the words blue on blue, over and over again as if people were yelling them from up and down the convoy and the words were echoing around the Green Zone.

‘Shit,’ said Doc. ‘Shit. His spinal cord’s completely banjoed …’

He put his fingers on Angus’s pulse.

‘Can’t you do something?’ Dave heard his own voice; it was shocked, furious.

‘There’s no pulse. How could there be a fucking pulse when his neck’s been pulverized?’

Dave wanted to shake Angus. He wanted to shake him alive again.

‘Let’s try to resuscitate!’ Finny shouted. ‘Fuck it, we must be able to do something.’

Doc’s voice was calm and quiet. ‘No point, mate.’

‘They’ll have called MERT!’ yelled Finny. ‘When MERT get here they’ll sort him out.’

Other men from their platoon were clustering around them now. Gayle and Fife were covering while the others loaded Angus on to a stretcher, shouting, jostling, gabbling into radios. Doc, Dave and Finny stood up, dazed.

‘You fucking wankers!’ Finny roared at the men buzzing around the Mastiffs. ‘You opened fire on us! You could see we were running away from the Taliban, we had SA80s, Dave was waving a British First Field Dressing, and you fucking, fucking idiots shot Angus McCall! You killed him! You killed Angry!’

Dave and Finny, on either side of Doc, followed Angus’s body as it was carried across the cotton towards the track.

‘Stupid, stupid tossers! Who don’t use their brains before they fire. You fucking killed my mate.’

Finny’s voice was cracking he was throwing it so hard across the cotton, across the desert, across the world to a small newsagent’s in Kent where Angus’s father would soon be up, counting newspapers, laying them out for his customers, his hands grubby with newsprint, unaware that tomorrow his own son would feature in those newspapers.

‘You stupid, stupid fucking bastards!’ roared Finny.

‘That’s enough,’ Dave told him.

‘They shot Angus. They shot Angus McCall.’

The big man was dead. It was unthinkable. It was impossible that someone whose voice could fill whole NAAFIs, who occupied so much space in this world, could just disappear from it.

They walked up the blue lane as MERT arrived. The helicopter landed on the track behind the line of Mastiffs.

Finny ran up to the stretcher before the lads carried it away. He was crying.

‘Fuck it, Angry McCall,’ he shouted at Angus’s body, tears streaming down his face. ‘You were big and often stupid but you were so fucking brave and a fucking good mate and you were always doing the wrong thing for the right reason. I was lying in a cave worrying about what you were going to do to someone all fucking night and now I don’t have to worry any more and I wish I did! How could you get yourself shot now after all we went through? I know what you want me to do. You want me to kill the geezer who did it? Don’t you? Don’t you, Angry?’

Dave and Doc joined him by the body. Dave, for reasons he didn’t understand, took Angus’s hand. Another dead hand. It felt like the last one. Rubbery, inhuman.

‘Angus. You were a good soldier, the best. Goodbye, mate.’

He would have said more but he felt his throat constrict. It was the wrong ending to one helluva night’s soldiering.

He looked up and saw Aaron Baker standing right by him, his face twisted in pain.

‘Shit, Sarge, shit,’ was all he said.

‘Who shot him?’ roared Finny, looking around him. ‘Who killed my mate?’

Jason Swift was there, his face tired and pale. ‘Stop, Billy Finn, or I’ll have to take that rifle off you.’

Finny stared at him. ‘Take my rifle? Off me? There’s some bugger around here should have the rifle taken off him. Because he killed my mate …’

‘Stop, Finny,’ said Dave, finding his voice again. ‘That won’t do any good. Angus is dead. We’ve got to deal with the living now.’

‘We’re not going to let someone get away with this?’

‘We’ve got RMP to fill in forms and ask questions.’

They were forced to stand aside for a stretcher. On it was Gerry McKinley.

‘Oh shiiiiit,’ said Finn.

‘There goes my patient,’ murmured Doc. He signalled for the stretcher-bearers to pause. He pulled back the bloodstained sheet which was covering McKinley’s lower leg, looked at the mess, and pulled it back again, rolling his eyes.

‘Tell me this man’s still alive,’ said Dave faintly.

‘Yeah. Well, he was a few minutes ago,’ said one of the bearers. On another corner of the stretcher was Andy Kirk, McKinley’s best mate, his face hollow.

‘We’ve just about kept him alive. He’s had so much fucking morphine that …’ They did not hear the end of his sentence. The bearers were already running towards the Chinook.

‘Finny, I want you on that helicopter, too,’ said Dave.

‘Good idea,’ agreed Doc.

‘No, Sarge!’ yelled Finny.

‘Please. Go with Angus’s body. He’d appreciate that.’

Finny considered for a moment and then ran after the stretcher.

‘We came a fucking long way to help McKinley,’ said Doc, ‘and MERT gets here first.’

Danny Jones shrugged. ‘Well, it’s only two kilometres,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why it took you so long.’

Dave and Doc looked at each other.

‘Oh. Yeah. It’s only two kilometres,’ said Doc. ‘What took us so long?’

Dave said: ‘You should get on the Chinook, too, Doc.’

‘I’m not going on any fucking Chinook,’ growled Doc. ‘I want to get back to Red Sox and make sure the boys are OK.’

Dave said: ‘I didn’t get you through last night alive to have you arguing with me now.’

Doc threw him a filthy look and then, to Dave’s surprise, gave him a bear hug.

‘You are the best, Dave Henley,’ he said. ‘If anyone tries to give you shit over what happened out there, they’ll have me to answer to.’

He turned and limped towards the Chinook.

Dave looked around for Chalfont-Prick. But the idiot was busy talking to another officer in the rescue party. Dave turned to the nearest platoon commander, someone else’s commander. ‘Sir, as soon as we can move forward, we should urgently head towards PB Red Sox. They’ve got few men and they’ve been under very heavy fire. Just outside the PB there’s a wrecked Mastiff with a T4 in it.’

The commander looked at him uneasily. Dave realized that with the Afghan cloth still wound around his head, dishdash stretched over Osprey, no boots on his feet and a hellish night behind him, he might not look like an army recruitment ad.

‘Are you all right?’ the commander asked. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t go to Bastion too?’

A man approached with a small golden cross on his uniform.

‘Can I help anyone?’ he asked, looking directly at Dave.

Dave recognized him. Here was a man he always ignored but who had his uses. ‘I’m OK, thanks, padre,’ he said. ‘But I may need your help when we get to PB Red Sox. I have to see how my men did last night. Then I’ve got to break some very bad news to them.’

When the gates opened at PB Boston Red Sox and the convoy rolled into the courtyard, Dave had a strange feeling that he’d come home, even though he had actually spent less than twelve hours in the fucking shithole.

His heart thumped as he counted men. Lancer Reed sat on the ground by the compound door, his back against the wall, smoking. He would already know about the death of Lancer Dawson. And, thank God, there were the lads standing near him. Sol, Mal, Binns and Bacon. They were holding their weapons in a way that suggested they had abandoned their firing positions for the arrival of the convoy.

When they saw him, smiles split their faces. Dave could not smile yet. Because he could see only five men. Then he looked over to the tower and there was Tiny Hemmings. Good. Six men, thank God, but there should be seven. Who was missing? Shit. Someone dead. Someone injured. Who was left after Reed, Sol, Mal, Binman, Bacon and Tiny? Dave’s brain was too tired to work that one out.

He leaped out of the Mastiff the moment it stopped, the padre right behind him. He went straight to Sol.

‘Any down?’ he said.

‘No, Sarge.’

Relief. It started in your head but worked its way through your body, softening your blood vessels, weakening your skeleton so that sometimes it was hard to stand up. At that moment, he saw Slindon firing from the compound wall. The seventh man.

‘Oh Sarge, we had one fucking awful night!’ said Streaky. ‘First your crash and we knew Dawson was dead and then we nearly ran out of ammo and we had them swarming all over the Mastiff out there like a bunch of flies and we was so short that we couldn’t do much about it except I did a bit of sharpshooting and got two of them and Binman got one and we was scared, so scared, man, that they was going to come swarming all over this compound next and Tiny got shot in the arm but Mal bandaged it and it’s only on the edge, like, the very edge of his arm and—’

Sol was still grinning from ear to ear.

‘Enough, Streaky,’ he said. ‘We’re all here. That’s the main thing. And Dave and the boys made it …’

Sol Kasanita. The optimist. The believer in a merciful, bountiful God, whom he worshipped daily and especially on Sundays. He stopped speaking suddenly when he saw Dave’s face. Instantly Dave’s expression was mirrored by Sol. Eyes sad. Mouth drooping.

‘Oh shit, Sarge. Where’re the others? I thought maybe they’d gone to the FOB or Bastion or …’

His voice trailed away. The men’s eyes slipped from Dave for the first time to the man who stood behind him. Sober-faced, quiet. The padre. Bearer of bad news; bringer of comfort. Their faces dropped. Dave swallowed.

‘Lads. I’m really sorry. Prepare yourselves. I have to tell you that …’ His throat closed and wouldn’t release the words. He had to fight with all the fibres and muscle and flesh there for his voice to escape. The words finally came out strangled. But they were clear enough for the boys to understand.

‘I’m sorry that I have to tell you Angus McCall is dead.’

He looked from eye to eye, face to face, as the men received the news. Over the last twelve hours each of them had certainly become acquainted with both terror and hopelessness. But each remained young, strong, bright-eyed. The death of Angus was another blow and it would cut some of them deeply. But they would weather it and recover. Their lives would continue, gathering years, passing milestones. And as the years went by they would have reunions, noticing the small changes in each other, the extra kilos, the grey hairs, the joys and disappointments etched on one another’s faces. Jamie Dermott and Angus McCall would not be at the reunions. Their faces in fading photos would start to look young and empty of the many experiences life would bring those who were left. They would always remain the Jamie and the Angus whom 1 Section had known here in Afghanistan.

There was a moment of disbelief. Then Mal’s face became a mask, a caricature of horror. He swayed and leaned on Sol, who stared back at Dave. Slindon’s mouth hung open. Binns put his hands to his head as if warding off a blow. Bacon looked at the ground, chewing his lip.

Quietly, like a voice speaking from far away across the desert, haunting as the call to prayer, the padre recited the old words they knew so well:

‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.’