It was only another fifty kilometres to Najibullahkhan Kalay, the village where Bakker was apparently being held, but the journey took longer than Mac would have expected, even allowing for an afternoon prayer stop. The road was rough and several times they were delayed by agricultural vehicles blocking their way.
Naturally, the governor’s militia were having none of this and would stream out of their Hiluxes, brandishing their AKs and shouting loudly to intimidate whatever poor unfortunate was the cause of the problem. More than once, they simply bulldozed a smaller vehicle off the road. Logan’s Surf was towards the back of the convoy, and they would watch the proceedings without getting involved. The less attention they drew to themselves the better, as far as Mac was concerned, and it was his opinion that they would be better served if the militia commander reined in his men and proceeded through the area with more caution. After all, these were to all intents and purposes Feda Khaliq’s men, and this wasn’t a part of Helmand that he controlled.
Logan was talking with Pasoon, the guide supplied by the governor, in the front. Periodically, Baz translated some of what they said, but Mac spent most of the drive drinking in the alien landscape. The road followed the river course as the Helmand wound south before swinging towards the west through Nimroz Province and crossing the border into Iran, and it formed a green corridor through the surrounding desert. The basin through which it flowed was a patchwork of small fields, and as soon as they were south of Garmser it became abundantly clear that one crop dominated.
Poppies.
The west knew all about the Afghan poppy fields, from which Helmand alone supplied more than ninety per cent of the world’s heroin. But where Mac had been expecting fields of red, the flowers of the opium poppy were not only more deadly than garden poppies at home, but also, he was surprised to discover, more delicately beautiful. Huge drifts of lilac and white petals fluttered in the breeze, a sea of soft pastels where it was easy to imagine lying down and falling into a dreamless stupor. Morpheus, god of sleep, couldn’t have imagined a bed more lovely, and his name had been hijacked for the seedpods’ sticky brown resin – morphine, the precursor of heroin. The precursor of misery and death.
Mile after mile after endless mile. Pink and purple brush strokes, broken here and there to skirt around small villages or rocky outcrops, and beyond the strip of fields, the blank canvas of the desert stretched away to the horizon on either side. An alternate sea of sand, rock and grit in a single shade of ochre.
‘Mac? Hey, dozy…’
Logan’s voice snapped him out of his private world.
‘How much further?’ he said. It was late afternoon and they’d been on the road for several hours.
‘We’re getting close,’ said Logan. ‘Here’s the plan. We won’t go into the village when we arrive. The main road bypasses the settlement completely, so they’ll have no idea we’re in the vicinity. Pasoon believes Bakker is being held in a compound on the eastern edge of Najibullahkhan Kalay. It’s a tiny place, just a handful of houses, and we don’t want to give ourselves away before we need to. We’ll lager up off the road a few klicks north until 0300. Then we hit.’
‘Lager up?’ Baz had been listening with wide-eyed interest.
Logan explained. ‘We’ll find a wadi or some rocks, a lying-up point where we can circle the vehicles without being seen from the road.’
Mac had his own questions. ‘Pasoon believes? I thought we were working on solid intel.’
‘No intel is solid, especially down here,’ said Logan. ‘But Pasoon grew up a couple of villages away, and he still has contacts. He’s putting his life in danger by bringing us here.’
Or putting our lives in danger if we’ve been wrong to trust him, thought Mac. He couldn’t help but have a bad feeling about this whole little jaunt.
‘So why’s he doing it?’
‘The Taliban aren’t popular down here. They killed men from Pasoon’s village, and this bunch aren’t even proper Talibs. They use it as a label of convenience to do whatever they want. The local community wants shot of them. Also, money. He’ll be well paid for his services.’
Logan took over from the driver and drove the Surf up to the front of the convoy so he and Pasoon could scout the way to a good resting spot.
An hour later, the guide pointed to a dusty track that turned off the road to the left. A wooden bridge took them across a canal and a hundred metres beyond that the road passed a tumbledown building and petered out. Logan carried on driving across the uneven ground, the Surf throwing up a dust cloud in its wake. Mac turned to look out of the back window. The Hiluxes behind them churned up even more.
‘Talk about advertising your presence.’
‘It’ll settle in a moment,’ said Logan. ‘And we’ll be out of sight from the road in a couple of minutes. Then we can find an LUP and hunker down for a few hours. Najibullahkhan Kalay is about ten clicks to the south, so we’ll keep going until we’re due east of the village. Pasoon thinks there’s a dry wadi somewhere round here that will give us good cover.’
Once they were a safe distance from the highway, Logan called the convoy to a halt. He had a quick word with Commander Ibrahimzai, then linked his BGAN to his laptop and fired it up. Mac had heard of BGAN but had never seen one, and Logan quickly explained that the comms device worked in conjunction with the Inmarsat satellite system to give him internet access no matter where he was in the world. This allowed him to access Google Earth on his laptop, and a minute later he and Mac were scouring the landscape for a suitable lying-up position.
‘There,’ said Mac, pointing to a craggy feature a few kilometres to the south of their current position, and due east of the village. ‘That wadi looks like it might work.’
Logan fed the latitude and longitude into the GPS in the Surf, and they jolted across the stony terrain for another half-hour. Occasionally Mac got glimpses of the road in the distance, but there was very little traffic other than agricultural vehicles and the odd jingle truck. Most of the time all he could see was desert and boulders. But at least they were in front of the convoy and not eating someone else’s dust.
The wadi came into view, steep-sided and deep enough to give them cover, but they had to drive along the edge of it for a couple of kilometres before they found a suitable access point down onto the dry riverbed. Logan called a halt at the top and sent two of the militiamen down on foot to check they would have no company round the next bend or two. Once they had the all-clear, the procession of vehicles rolled down the slope into the gully. With the sun low in the sky, the banks of the wadi cast deep shadows, allowing them to park up where the windows and doors would be less likely to cause reflections. Of course, it didn’t seem any cooler in the shade, but Mac knew that as night fell the temperature would become a fraction more comfortable.
Logan and the commander organised a sentry roster – three men at a time, one on the lip of the wadi and one at each end of their encampment. The rest of the crew made a priority of checking, dry cleaning and double checking all the weapons. Ginger counted out five full magazines for each man with an AK, which they loaded into their green canvas Chicom chest rigs. Unlike the Well Diggers contingent, the militiamen sported no body armour and had little protective gear of any kind. Two of them were sorting out RPGs and spare rockets, while another two had armed themselves with PK machine guns. Using Baz to interpret, Ginger arranged for one of the PKMs to stay with him at the final rendezvous guarding the vehicles, along with both the RPG guys and one rifleman, while the rest of the team hit the compound. He organised the PKM and one of the RPGs as a fire support group, covering the village, with the rifleman and the second RPG covering their rear.
Mac was sitting on the rim of the Surf’s open boot, wiping down his own AK, when Baz wandered across to him.
‘Quite a little scalping party you’ve put together,’ she said. ‘D’you really think you’ll need all this firepower?’
Mac laid the weapon down in the base of the boot, allowing Baz to stand between his knees and rest her head on his chest.
‘Better to have more than we need than too little.’
‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ she said, nervous fingers twisting into the hair at the back of his neck.
Mac always felt jittery before heading into the critical phase of an op, and it was something he considered essential. The one time he thought he knew it all and wasn’t nervous was the one time when disaster had struck and lives were lost. Lives that he was responsible for. Now he knew better than to take luck for granted.
‘I’ll be careful. And you make sure you stay well back until we give the signal that it’s safe.’
This was part of the deal he’d struck with Baz. She wasn’t to come charging in after them with her camera, but once the action was over and they were on the way out, she could get some shots of the hostage rescue. He knew it was important to her, and being in on the scoop could make a big difference to her career.
‘Of course.’
‘Promise?’
‘Yes, Jesus, Mac – I promise.’
Mac heard footsteps crunching towards them and looked round. It was Logan.
‘Time for some shut-eye, kids,’ he said. ‘We’re going in pre-dawn, just before the first prayer call, when the baby Talibs are all tucked up sleeping. That means scouting out the compound a couple of hours before that to see how many guards they have and what their patrol routine is. If your weapon’s ready, have some chow and then get some sleep.’
‘The peace before the storm,’ said Mac.
Logan nodded. ‘Shit’s about to get real.’
Mac wondered how many ops like this Logan had been involved in, and with whom.