No Survivors

7

War in the desert was supposed to be all about heat, sweat, and choking clouds of dust. But that was when the sun was up. This was a winter’s night. Carver felt deep-frozen, colder than he had ever been, and the chattering of his teeth drowned out the scrabble of steel against dirt from the spades of the men digging down into the earth.

From where Carver stood, the holes were simply patches of blackness in the blue-gray expanse of the starlit desert.

There were seven of them, the size and depth of open graves awaiting their coffins. Or maybe this was what a goldfield looked like when the first prospectors arrived and started burrowing down for their fortunes. Carver and his men were prospecting, too, searching for the fiber-optic cable, buried somewhere beneath their feet, that kept the Iraqi dictator in touch with his troops.

Carver’s team from the Special Boat Service had been allotted two hours on the ground to break that link. There were fifteen minutes left. And still no sign of any cable.

Carver shook his head in helpless frustration. There was just time to dig one more hole. He was trying to work out where to put it when there was an explosion of deafening white noise, hissing, and crackling in his ear. He could just make out a voice, almost buried beneath the distortion: “We’ve got company, boss. Couple of companies of mechanized infantry, heading directly at us.”

“Do you think they’ve seen us?” Carver asked.

He was already on the run toward the perimeter, needing to see for himself, but the ground seemed to have softened, sucking at his feet like quicksand. His progress was way too slow. He wasn’t going to get there in time. Meanwhile the noise in his ear was getting louder. He wanted to tear off his headphones, but now the lookout’s voice was bursting into life again. “They’ve got mortars. Here we go…”

The desert silence was broken by a series of distant percussive crumps, followed by whooshes, like fireworks streaking into the sky. A few seconds later, magnesium parachute flares burst over the landing zone, scorching Carver’s eyes and leaving the fifty-foot-long Chinooks as exposed in their burning white light as a pair of naked lovers surprised by an angry husband.

Now there were mortar rounds falling all across the landing zone and cannon fire cracking through the night air. Carver could hear a new voice now, one of the chopper pilots, his voice tightening as adrenaline flooded his nervous system: “We’re like coconuts in a shy here. I’m starting up the rotors. You’d better get your men aboard sharpish.”

Carver started issuing orders. He was shouting into his intercom, but he must not have made himself heard because the men weren’t moving and even though the chopper rotors were turning at top speed, they didn’t seem able to lift off the ground, and suddenly the whole landing zone was filled with Iraqis. He couldn’t work out how they’d got there so fast, or why they were speaking Russian at him. He thought he recognized their faces, but they kept blurring out of focus. He pulled the trigger on his submachine gun, but no bullets came out, even though the magazine was full.

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The Chinooks were meant to take off with all his men aboard. Then the explosives would blow and cut the cable, turning an imminent fiasco into a last-minute triumph. But that wasn’t happening at all, because now his men had all disappeared and he was alone with the Russians, and they were taking him through a door into a room where there was a log fire burning in an open grate. And he didn’t have his combat gear on anymore, in fact he was stark naked except for a black nylon belt strapped around his waist.

There was a man in front of him, sitting in a chair, and next to him there was a woman, an incredibly beautiful woman in a silver dress. Carver cried out to the woman to help him, but she couldn’t hear him, either. And that was wrong, too, because she was supposed to love him. But she didn’t love him at all. In fact she was laughing at him, and all the men around her were laughing at him, too, and now the woman was looking at him with a new face, twisted, ugly, and hate-filled, and she was screaming, “Hurt him! Hurt him! I want him to suffer!”

The laughter was getting even louder and one of the men was pointing a small black box at Carver, holding a finger above a single white button. And suddenly Carver was filled with a fear that tore at his guts and dropped him to his knees, begging for mercy, though his pleas came out as wordless whimpers because he knew what was coming now-the same thing that always came at the moment that the man with the box pressed the button.

Then the finger moved down. And the agony began again.