Lashkar Gah might have been the provincial capital of Helmand, but it couldn’t be more different from the thriving metropolis of Kabul. With less than a tenth the population of the Afghan capital, Ginger wasn’t even sure that it qualified as a city. As he’d looked down on it from the plane, it had looked like nothing more than a handful of dirty pebbles nestling on the green ribbon of arable land created by the Helmand River.
A garden city once, perhaps, with parkland along the riverbank and wide, open streets that had been laid out, grid-like, by the Americans in the 1950s when they arrived to instigate their magnificent Helmand irrigation project. Half a century later, after Soviet occupation, civil war, Taliban rule and a decade-long drought, it was tired and shabby. Progress had stalled and, according to the guys Ginger had asked who’d been there, the general consensus was that it was moving backwards.
Lashkar Gah airport was certainly nothing to write home about. Ginger hated flying, but he hated landing even more and touching down on the short gravel runway in the small twin-prop Louis Berger plane was noisy, bumpy and hardly reassuring. Ginger only dared breathe again once they’d come to a final standstill on a small area of hardstanding at the very end of the strip. Still, he knew he’d been lucky to get a spot on the flight. Louis Berger was a construction company working on the road link to Lash, and they were the only people, apart from the military, that flew in and out of the city regularly. And unlike the UNHAS flights that served the rest of the country, you were allowed to carry your weapon on board the plane.
The heat hit him like a sledgehammer when he disembarked, beating down on his head and reflecting up from the tarmac relentlessly. The cold sweat brought on by the landing that had his shirt clinging to his chest dried instantaneously, but his armpits felt clammy as he hefted his bergan onto his shoulder. There was no bus waiting to take them to an air-conditioned terminal, just a hundred-metre walk to where a collection of vehicles was parked, and where a solitary Louis Berger mechanic leaned on the bonnet of his Land Cruiser, chatting with the pilot on his ground-to-air radio.
Parked up next to him was a Land Rover with a faded Well Diggers decal on the side. As he got closer, he could identify Lars Vinke’s taut profile through the side window. Vinke didn’t bother getting out of the vehicle as Ginger approached, but said something to his driver, who got out and took Ginger’s bag.
‘Good flight?’ he asked, as Ginger climbed into the back seat, relieved to be out of the heat.
‘Contradiction in terms,’ said Ginger. ‘Always happy to be back on the ground.’
Vinke turned round in his seat to look at him. ‘I thought you spent years in the Parachute Regiment?’
Ginger grinned. His fear of flying had been legendary in B Company. ‘That’s right, I was. And I was always the first one to jump!’
Vinke didn’t seem to find it funny. Something told Ginger that working with the Dutchman was going to be hard graft. He just had to hope that not all of the Well Diggers team had a broomstick up their arse. As they drove off the airfield, the twin-prop was already manoeuvring itself into position to go back down the runway – clearly nothing worth hanging around for here.
From the ground, Lash was even less prepossessing than it had been from the air. As they drove through the edge of town, Ginger’s eyes darted from one side of the road to the other, drinking in every detail. To succeed at his mission, he would need to know this ground like the back of his hand, and this was where it started. The buildings were run-down and patches of land that might once have been gardens were now just bare earth. Hungry-eyed kids played amid filthy litter, sticking out a hand for baksheesh whenever an adult passed by. Teenage boys ignored the rest of the traffic on whiny-engined scooters, while older men in even older cars made liberal use of their horns. The market stalls they passed were reasonably stocked with seasonal produce, but Ginger guessed that for half the year at least the goods on offer would be sparse. The glances he got when they were stopped in traffic were dark and hostile – the area’s long history with foreign interlopers meant that even those purporting to do good were viewed with suspicion, and Ginger sensed a mood that was anything but friendly.
However, he was here now.
He hoped it hadn’t been a mistake.
‘Man, that’s one hell of a list. Lars isn’t going to agree to half of it,’ said Tomas Bakker, Well Diggers’ softly spoken chief engineer. His hair was as red as Ginger’s own, but in contrast to Ginger’s short back and sides, Bakker’s hair curled long over his collar and he sported an impressive beard. Ginger also had a beard, but it had been something of a struggle and still looked a little wispy in places.
‘Half? You should be that lucky!’ The logistics manager, Jagvir Nagpal, was an Afghan Sikh and Lashkar Gah local. It was his job to recruit men and source equipment for each of their projects. He was a short man with a bulging paunch and engaging, intelligent eyes. He gave a low-pitched laugh as he tossed Ginger’s list back onto the table. ‘What do you Brits say – he’s going to have kittens?’
Ginger nodded, his lips pursed. Their responses were not entirely unexpected. Vinke had been uncommunicative on the ride in from the airport and had handed him over to Bakker and Nagpal as fast as possible. Nagpal, however, had spent the last week schooling him in what Well Diggers did and how they went about it, so Ginger could come up with new security protocols to ensure all personnel were kept as safe as humanly possible, whether out in the field, at the organisation’s office in the Helmand and Arghendab Valley Authority building downtown, and in the two houses they rented for the western staff to live in.
Currently, in Ginger’s opinion, none of these places were secure from attack, and in a province with the highest levels of insurgency, kidnap and organised narco crime, he would have his work cut out. He started by making a plan for each of the buildings, including the establishment of safe rooms, which none of them currently had. The next job was to draw up operational protocols for transit within Lashkar Gah and for field trips out to the various sites at which Well Diggers was working. Now, he was sharing his shopping list with Bakker and Nagpal to see if they had anything to add. Removing things from the list wasn’t an option as far as he was concerned – it was the bare minimum that he would need to do the job.
‘Lars is running this division on a shoestring,’ said Bakker. ‘If he wants any of this stuff, he’ll have to go to Anholts in Kabul and ask for extra money.’
Nagpal shook his head. ‘The chief won’t like that.’
Bakker nodded in agreement. ‘For a start, I reckon kidnap and ransom insurance is simply out of Well Diggers’ league. We’re a small operation, tiny budget. There’s huge pressure for as much of that as possible to go into the work, rather than our expenses. Listen to me, Chris…’
‘Ginger,’ said Ginger, unconsciously putting a hand up to his hair.
‘Okay, Ginger,’ continued Bakker. ‘Lars is a peacenik. He won’t like having to spend on weapons and men. So, my advice is to put twice as much on the list as you want. He’ll haggle with you, throw half the stuff off. Then you’ve got what you need.’
Ginger smiled ruefully. ‘You might have a point.’ Even saving lives required playing politics.
‘Also,’ said Nagpal, ‘Lars will have an opinion on everything and will never take your advice on anything.’
‘Seriously?’ said Ginger.
Bakker shot the Sikh what Ginger interpreted as a warning glance, but he didn’t comment.
Nagpal, looking admonished, picked up the list again. ‘Let’s start with the men you’re asking for.’
‘We need twenty-four-hour protection on the two houses. Three rotating shifts of two men is the bare minimum. Then, this building’ – they were sitting in the Well Diggers office on the third floor of the HAVA building – ‘has no security to speak of. I propose putting a three-man team on the main door throughout office hours. When it comes to moving around town, an armed guard in every vehicle, and out of town, full escorts – two extra vehicles with a minimum of four armed men in each.’
‘Right,’ said Nagpal. ‘I can arrange a meeting with the head of the governor’s militia – we’ll be able to hire any number of guards from him, for the buildings and for our transportation. And we can use the police for field trips. That way we’ll be keeping the two main narco factions on side.’ He jabbed a finger at the next item on the list. ‘But I don’t think Vinke will pay for you to have a number two.’
Ginger’s proposal was to hire an ex British Gurkha sergeant to act as his assistant for training and running the guard details.
‘And weapons for all these bodies?’ said Bakker. ‘They’ll cost plenty.’
‘The militiamen and police have their own,’ said Nagpal, ‘but we’ll need to provide ammo for training and operations.’
‘You can source that?’ said Ginger.
‘Sure,’ said Nagpal, rubbing his thumb against his index and middle finger, ‘as long as Vinke comes up with the baksheesh.’
Ginger frowned. ‘He’s going to have to – or he’ll end up with more blood on his hands.’