Battleground

Chapter Twenty-one

Dr Bel Kelland had never been so scared.

She was surrounded by soldiers — eight of them, forming a protective semicircle around her as she cowered against the back wall of the compound. Their rifles were pointing forwards, but there was no light in the compound for them to see by; just the dusky glow of the still-burning Apache on the other side of the wall.

‘Preserve your ammo!’ one of the soldiers had called. ‘Reduce your rate of fire!’

Private Mears had sidled back to where Bel was crouched. His face was bleeding and he had a harsh look.

‘Why did he say that?’ she asked him. Her voice was hoarse and dry — it sounded like someone else’s.

‘We don’t know when we’re going to get more air support,’ he said. ‘We’re firing towards the entrance of the compound to stop the enemy from trying to enter, but if our rate of fire is too high, we’ll run out of ammo. And trust me, we don’t want to do that.’

As if to highlight what Mears had just said, one of the soldiers fired a single shot. It didn’t seem like much to fend off an advancing enemy as it pinged into the Afghan night.

‘They’ve got to send someone soon,’ Bel breathed. She wasn’t sure if Mears heard what she said, because he didn’t reply.

Time passed, punctuated only by the occasional firing of a round, which did nothing for Bel’s shredded nerves. She had no idea what time it was when the sound of rotary blades drifted towards them. Half an hour later? An hour? Measurements like that had no meaning. The moment she heard the chopper, however, she felt a surge of hope.

‘Apache!’ Mears shouted. ‘Apache approaching!’

The flying machine appeared seemingly from nowhere, the thunder of its engines vibrating in Bel’s ears. For a few seconds it hovered directly over the compound, its searchlights scouring the area like some kind of UFO in the darkness, then it moved on. Outside the front wall of the compound, the Apache dipped its nose slightly. Bel found herself holding her breath.

The chopper started to fire — loud, chugging rounds coming in short, clinical bursts. The Apache turned ninety degrees so it was now facing away from the compound. It continued to pepper the surrounding ground with gunfire, and with each deafening burst, Bel felt just that little bit safer.

But not for long.

The ground-to-air rocket came from very close to the walls of the base. It looked to Bel almost as if it was moving in slow motion. As the rocket soared into the air, she almost couldn’t bear to watch, couldn’t bear a repeat performance, to see a second Apache crash and burn.

‘No!’ she gasped, clutching her dirty hair in panic.

It was almost a fluke that the chopper wasn’t downed. The rocket sailed through the rotating blades, emerging unscathed on the other side and exploding in the air. Nuggets of shrapnel rained down on the Apache, which immediately rose higher into the air. It looked wobbly, and Bel heard one of the soldiers shout: ‘The bird’s been hit by shrapnel!’

Bel turned to Mears. ‘Is that bad?’ she breathed.

‘Yeah,’ Mears replied, sweat pouring from his moonlit face. ‘Yeah, you could say that’s bad.’

‘It’s not… it’s not going to crash, is it?’

Mears’s face looked unbelievably grim. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m not a pilot. But I can tell you one thing — they’re not going to risk another rocket strike like that. Not in the dark.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’ Bel’s voice was cracking up now as she tried to hold back tears of terror.

Mears’s reply didn’t give her much comfort.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, returning his gun to the firing position and settling down once more to cover the entrance to the compound. ‘I just don’t know…’

‘Do you know where you’re going?’

The two-vehicle SAS unit had left the boundary wall of the town of Angoor and was now trundling through the desert. The trucks they had requisitioned were by no means comfortable: their suspension was shot and the ground underneath them was uneven and stony. It made for a bone-shaking ride.

‘Toby has a GPS unit in his bergen,’ Ricki replied. ‘He’ll be using that to navigate.’ The unit leader didn’t look at Ben as he spoke, but kept his eyes on the road ahead.

They travelled slowly. From the reflection in the rear-view mirror, Ben saw that Matt, who was driving, had a look of intense concentration on his face, examining the road ahead with fierce intensity. Ben remembered Amir, speeding off on his motorbike with Aarya and the bomb. He hadn’t shown any desire to go slowly, and Ben felt sure he wasn’t creeping through the desert now.

‘Shouldn’t we, er… shouldn’t we hurry up?’ he asked, a bit diffidently.

Ricki looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. ‘That all depends, Ben,’ he said quietly, ‘on whether you want to make it to the dam in one piece.’

Ben felt himself blushing and he was glad it was dark. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I mean,’ said Ricki, ‘just what I say. Of all the areas around Helmand Province, the bit near the Kajaki dam is the most heavily mined. Normally we’d be even slower, because we’d be sweeping for mines. As it is, we’re driving slowly so that Matt can keep in the tracks of the truck ahead.’

Ben blinked. It was the same strategy that Amir had told him about, and he felt stupid for not recognizing what they were doing. Then the reality of what Toby and Jack were risking struck him. ‘But whose tracks are they following?’ he asked.

Ricki faced forward again. ‘No one’s,’ he said grimly.

‘But what if they…?’

He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t need to. It was perfectly clear what would happen if Toby and Jack hit a landmine.

They trundled on in silence.

It was a clear night. The moon lit those parts of the desert not illuminated by the vehicles’ headlamps and the sky was alight with stars. So much beauty, and so much danger. Ben dragged his eyes away from the canopy overhead and concentrated on their path through the desert, and still he could not get the image of Amir speeding along on his motorbike out of his head. ‘Why don’t we call for a helicopter?’ he asked suddenly.

Ricki smiled. ‘It isn’t as simple as that, Ben,’ he said. ‘It’s not like calling a cab, you know. Choppers are thin on the ground. Even if there’s air support available, it can take an hour to arrive at the best of times, more if they have to scoop up extra personnel. The army has emergency procedures in place for all sorts of scenarios. I’m afraid this isn’t one of them.’

Yet again, Ben felt a bit stupid. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just—’

‘You haven’t got anything to be sorry for,’ Ricki interrupted him. ‘There aren’t many people who would do what you’ve done today.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And it’s not over yet, Ben.’

Half an hour passed.

With every second, Ben half expected to hear the sickening boom of a landmine.

Forty-five minutes. Silence in the truck: just the noise of the wheels crunching over the sandy, stony earth. They started to climb, up and over undulating hills. Ricki pointed through the windscreen. ‘Not far now,’ he said. ‘The British base is at the top of the dam. We’re travelling up towards it—’

He was interrupted. The truck came to a sudden, juddering halt.

Ben didn’t know whether he saw it first, or heard it; whether the red flash and sudden spray of metal burst into his senses before the deep boom of the explosion. All he knew was that one moment the truck ahead was there, and the next it wasn’t. He heard shrapnel raining down on top of his own vehicle; the windscreen shattered as something thumped against it. ‘Get down!’ Ricki shouted, and Ben quickly lay on the back seat, covering his head with his arms.

Suddenly the noise of the shrapnel on the roof stopped and they were surrounded by a thick, awful silence. Ben pushed himself up again just as a smell hit his nose. It was acrid and unpleasant. The smell of burning, of explosives. And of something else too. When he was younger, he had caught his hair in a candle. A few strands had fizzled and burned and the odour was horrible. It was that odour that he could smell now.

The SAS men were cursing under their breath. Ben looked through the window in shocked silence, but Ricki and Matt were already out of the truck. They ran towards the flaming shell of their mates’ vehicle, holding their arms up to their faces to protect them from the heat of the fire. He watched, wide-eyed, as they ran around the inferno, shouting at each other and looking for a way into that devastated hunk of metal.

Looking for signs of life.

But it was clear, after a minute of searching, that there were no survivors.

Ben felt sick. He started to scramble out of the truck, to see what he could do to help, but at that moment Ricki and Matt started returning, so he took his place and waited for them to climb back into the vehicle. Their faces, glowing from the fire of the wreckage up ahead, were bleak as they took their seats.

‘They’re gone,’ Ricki said. His face was dark and angry, his voice quiet. ‘Nothing we can do.’ Suddenly, out of the blue, he slammed his fist against the dashboard. The whole truck shook with his anger. Ben didn’t know what to say.

Ricki turned to him, his eyes flashing. When he spoke, he sounded even more businesslike, more professional, and it was clear to Ben that he was hiding other emotions: shock, sorrow, anger. ‘We have to keep going,’ he said. ‘We can’t stop just because we’re two men down.’

‘Right,’ Ben replied, his voice thick with emotion.

‘We can’t leave you here, Ben,’ Ricki continued. ‘You’re going to have to stick with us. But you know the dangers. We won’t now be following in Toby and Jack’s tracks. If we hit a mine…’ The three of them looked out at the wreckage of the vehicle up ahead.

‘I know,’ Ben said quietly. There was a bitter taste in his mouth and his skin tingled with nerves.

Ricki nodded curtly, then turned to Matt. ‘All right, mate,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Matt nudged the truck into motion. They slowly drove around the wreckage, avoiding the hunks of metal that now littered the desert floor. As they passed the burning vehicle, Ben couldn’t help twisting his head to look at it. There was no sign of the dead SAS men and he tried not to think about what state their bodies must be in now…

The wreckage slipped into the background. Matt accelerated — as there was nobody to follow, there was no need to travel slowly. The truck bumped and juddered up the hill as Ben felt a weird combination of numbness and fear: disbelief at what had just happened, and terror that history might be about to repeat itself. It seemed like madness, what they were doing. But they had no choice. He knew that.

Over the brow of the hill and up another one. In the distance he thought he saw lights.

‘What’s that?’ he asked. His voice sounded very tense.

‘British base,’ Ricki replied. ‘It’s where we’re headed.’

Ben couldn’t tell how far away it was. Half a mile? A mile? As they sped up and down the undulating hills, the lights dipped out of sight and then reappeared. They didn’t seem to be getting closer at anything like the rate Ben would have wished. Nightmarish thoughts turned over in his mind. They were about to hit a mine. This vehicle was about to be shredded like the one they had just passed. They weren’t going to make it…

You can’t think like that, Ben, a little voice in his head told him. Keep thinking those thoughts and you’ll go mad…

And so he tried to put all thoughts of landmines and burning vehicles from his mind, to concentrate on the only thing that was important: Amir and the bomb. Had he passed this way? Were they gaining on him? Were they, as the truck thundered bravely through the desert, any closer to stopping this bomb?

Ben had to believe they were. He set his jaw, faced fully forward and steeled himself for the struggle to come.