Osama

FIVE

0715 hours.

The sun, low in the sky, streamed into the dirty interior of the Black Hawk. A thick, oily stench of aviation fuel clung to everything and the surfaces were covered in sand. Joe couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a mouthful of food that didn’t contain grit, or wiped his arse without it feeling like he was sandpapering it.

Joe sat next to Ricky on the dull, hard, black seats that lined the chopper. No attempts to disguise themselves as locals today. Kevlar helmets cut away around the ears. Body armour and multicam. Ops vests stashed with extra ammo and grenades. If – when – they caught up with the bomb-maker, they’d need to go in hard and fast. A Camelbak full of fresh water was strapped to each man’s back, with a little plastic tube emerging around his neck. Rehydration was almost as important as ammo in theatres like this. Stopping to drink from a bottle could mean wasting time they didn’t have.

Every man wore the Skye Precision gear common to the Regiment, the SEALs and Delta, the only differences being that the Yanks had their kneepads sewn into their trousers, whereas Joe and Ricky had had to fix theirs around the outside. The Yanks had Velcro patches with the stars and stripes fixed to their body armour; Joe and Ricky had Union Jacks with a difference. In common with some of the other old sweats in the Regiment, their badges were embroidered with Arabic lettering which translated, very precisely, as ‘Fuck Al-Qaeda’. The Yanks were all bigger than both Joe and Ricky, and they carried a bit more shite on them: there were more knives tucked into their rigs, and Joe saw that Hernandez had a pair of surgical scissors to snip Plasticuffs with.

He felt eyes on him. Why was Hernandez looking at him like that? He shook off the paranoia. He’d seen enough men go off on missions to realize that different people prepared themselves in different ways. There was seldom a party atmosphere while you were waiting to be inserted. When the loadie shouted ‘Five minutes in!’ above the noisy grind of the aircraft, and held up five fingers in the direction of the Americans but ignored Joe and Ricky, he told himself it was a US chopper and a US flight crew. Of course they were going to pay more attention to their countrymen than to the Brits. Joe had been on enough joint ops to realize it was always that way.

He closed his eyes and cleared his head. He wished he’d slept last night.

They started losing height, suddenly and sharply. Standard flight practice: keep high, out of the range of the type of rockets the Taliban were expected to have, then swoop down at a steep gradient when you’re almost at your insertion point. They didn’t touch down immediately, but skirted just a couple of metres above the desert. Joe knew why this was – their final insertion point was camouflaged by undulating ground and this manoeuvre would decrease the chance of their being spotted by Taliban scouts. But it was dangerous. The pilots’ vision would be compromised by dust from the downdraft, and the aircraft could easily lose that couple of metres of height. This was something only a special forces flight crew would attempt.

Final checks: weapons locked and loaded, ops vests tightly strapped. The Black Hawk finally touched down, and within seconds the eight men were exiting from the side, forming a semicircle around the back of the chopper and kneeling down in the firing position. Once more, Joe found himself surrounded by a cloud of dust which only started to settle as the chopper lifted up into the air.

The blur of brown-out all around faded and their location eased into view. They were in a patch of bare desert. The area around Bagram was a featureless dustbowl, a harsh environment even for the locals, and the earth was baked hard even this early on in the year, but with a fine, silty covering of dust that accepted footprints. Here and there, some hardy foliage was trying to force its way out of the cracks in the ground. To Joe’s left, two metres away, was the long, craggy branch of a mulberry tree. But there were no other trees in the vicinity. Either it had been blown here in a winter storm, dragged here by a wild animal, or a person had placed it here: a reminder that even deserted places were never deserted for long. The mountain ranges of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border were at Joe’s six o’clock. Ahead of him, the terrain sloped uphill. Gradient, one in five, peaking in the brow of the hill about half a klick on and 100 metres high, curling round to the south. To the north: horizon.

Joe’s earpiece crackled into life. Hernandez’s voice was clearer through the comms than in person, even though he was only five metres to Joe’s right. ‘Team Alpha in position,’ he said. Only when he had relayed this information back to their ops centre at Bagram did he raise his arm again and jab his forefinger north in the direction of the brow of the hill.

Joe and Ricky stood up. Their role was well defined. You could have all the intel in the world, but until real men with real eyes had scoped the place out, you never quite knew what was waiting. They bent low as they ran uphill, knowing that the Americans had them covered. They ran fifteen metres apart – that way, if they did get into contact, they weren’t bunched up as a single target – and it took approximately three minutes to cover the ground.

Fifteen metres from the top of the hill they hit the dirt. Joe looked to his right and caught Ricky’s eye. They both nodded at the same time and started to crawl, edging closer to the brow and keeping low. Stand here on the summit and you’d be observable for miles around.

The terrain beyond the downhill slope of the hill was an open plain. A deep wadi – one of the dried-up river beds that characterized this part of the world – ran from the bottom of the hill, across the wide expanse of open ground and into the heart of Nawaz, two kilometres away. The town itself was a sprawling hotchpotch of compounds around the edges and low concrete buildings surrounding a tall, thin minaret in the centre, all wavering in the heat haze. A road ran into it from the north-east, and even with his naked eye Joe could make out the metallic glint of three vehicles heading into the town. Their plan was to approach Nawaz using this wadi with high, craggy sides as cover, knowing that it would take them within 100 metres of their target’s suspected hideout.

Joe edged forward another couple of metres, keeping his body pressed flat against the ground, and moving slowly. His pixellated digicam would help him blend into the scenery from a distance; but it was movement, more than anything else, that caused people to be seen. Before leaving camp, he had carefully removed his wristwatch. Rule number one of daytime surveillance: remove anything reflective.

Now he carefully took a small, handheld scope from his ops vest. It was coated with non-reflective black paint to prevent sunlight glinting off it; the lens was hooded for the same reason. Joe draped a camo-net over the end of the lens to make triple sure that the sun didn’t reflect off it, then put it to his eye and started to scan.

It was immediately obvious that they would not be able to approach Nawaz from this direction.

There was no sign of activity within the wadi itself, but the open ground surrounding it was crawling with militia. Joe counted six motorbikes – the Taliban grunt’s vehicle of choice – as well as four open-topped Land Rovers each carrying a minimum of three armed men. They were all moving, none of them following any particular pattern – just exerting their presence.

An insect landed on Joe’s left eyelid. He didn’t move to swat it. And when he spoke into his comms, he barely moved his lips. ‘We’ve got company.’

A pause. Twenty seconds. Then a crackle in the earpiece. ‘Roger that,’ came the voice of Hernandez. ‘Get back down here, both of you.’

Joe and Ricky edged backwards, then slid ten metres down the hill on their backs before standing and running back to the unit. They were still in a circular formation, each of them kneeling and with their guns pointing out into the desert. Joe approached Hernandez directly. ‘It’s a no-go,’ he said. ‘The wadi that leads into the town is fine, but the open ground around it is crawling. They’ll spot us when we go over the hill, no question.’

The American considered it for a moment. ‘OK, listen up. We’re going to re-route. Cut round, enter the town from the south.’ A bead of sweat was running down his face. It collected on his upper lip just where the scar was. ‘We move in pairs—’

‘Hang on,’ Ricky interrupted.

Hernandez stopped talking and looked at Ricky as though he’d only just noticed he was there. ‘You got a problem with that?’

‘You’ve seen the mapping, brudder. The area south of Nawaz is shit?ful of legacy mines and IEDs. That’s why we’re supposed to be heading in from the west…’

Hernandez took a step closer. ‘Well, here’s the thing, brother. You want to go back up there, get your head full of holes, you be my guest.’

‘I’m not walking into a fucking minefield.’

‘You’ll walk where I damn well tell you to walk.’

An ominous pause. In an uncomfortable instant, Joe realized there were three Colts pointing at him and Ricky.

It was Hernandez who broke the silence. ‘As you’ve studied the maps so damn carefully,’ he said, ‘you’ll know that bomb disposal teams have marked safe passage through the area. You’ll see the chalk lines on the fucking ground. Even you Brits aren’t so dumb you can’t follow the white line.’

Joe breathed deeply. It was true that he’d seen pathways through the minefield marked on the mapping. ‘He’s right, Ricky,’ he murmured.

‘What is it, friend?’ Hernandez interrupted. ‘Lost your nerve?’

‘Fuck you.’ Ricky looked in contempt at the others. ‘You can tell your homeys to point their rifles at the bad guys, Hernandez,’ he hissed, before turning back to Joe. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If we’re going, let’s go.’

0742 hours.

The desert was already a furnace, and Joe’s clothes clung to him. He took a pull of warm water from his Camelbak and surveyed his position. To his nine o’clock was the incline of the hill, a little gentler now that he and Ricky had covered 500 metres east from their insertion point. At their three o’clock, open, empty ground and the mountains in the distance. At six o’clock, two of the Yanks 400 metres back, indistinct in the heat haze. And at twelve o’clock, a fucking wasteland.

There were three derelict breeze-block buildings approximately 500 metres ahead. They delineated the edge of the town – about 200 metres beyond them were more buildings, though it was clear that this area was seldom visited. There was no sign of any human activity; just a thin, lame cat that limped towards them from the direction of the breeze-block huts, and stopped, 100 metres from their position, when it saw Joe and Ricky. It stood still for five seconds, before limping away in the opposite direction.

‘How many lives do you reckon Tiddles has used up?’ Ricky murmured.

More than nine, Joe thought to himself. The 500 metres of ground between them and the breeze-block hut was like a junk yard. The burned-out shells of cars littered the whole place. With his scope, Joe could make out the ravaged corpse of some unidentifiable animal, the size of a large dog, but headless. And, a few metres to its left, what looked like the remnants of a kite, knotted and tangled round a twisted chunk of metal, drooping in the windless air.

Five metres from where they were standing, the hard-baked earth was stained white. A straight line – it was only a couple of inches wide – extended twenty metres in the direction of the shacks, before veering left at forty-five degrees and straightening up again after another five metres.

‘Follow the yellow brick road?’ Ricky said.

‘I don’t like it,’ Joe replied, his voice low. ‘Maybe we should skirt round the whole area.’

Ricky shook his head. ‘We don’t know how far the frickin’ things extend. The Russkis mined this place to hell, you know. If the Yanks’ minesweepers have done the hard work, we should follow their line.’

Ricky was right. Thank fuck it hadn’t rained for six weeks, and the chalk line was still mostly intact, although it was scuffed out in places. The chalk lines marking safe passage through a minefield weren’t just good for soldiers. Local people and enemy militia used them too.

‘I’ll go first,’ Joe said.

‘Hey, brudder…’

‘Forget it, Ricky. We’re good now, OK?’

Ricky grinned. ‘OK.’ If he suspected that Joe didn’t want him taking the lead for any other reason, he didn’t show it.

‘Keep a twenty-five-metre distance,’ Joe said. Ricky didn’t have to ask why: that was the buffer he had to keep to stay out of the kill zone, should Joe end up stepping on a pressure plate.

‘Roger that, brudder. See you on the other side.’

They clapped palms, then Joe stepped onto the white line.

He wouldn’t have walked more carefully if he’d been treading a high wire. He took each footstep very slowly, placing his toes down first and feeling for anything unusual before allowing himself to release his whole weight on to his foot and take the next step. The dry earth crunched slightly beneath him, sounding almost as though there was a dusting of snow. No fucking chance. It was already pushing forty degrees and the sky was an intense blue. Sweat continued to ooze from Joe’s pores, and he had only gone ten metres before he had to stop and wipe the salt from his eyes so that he could see the way ahead.

Fifteen metres.

Twenty.

He reached the apex of the line where it angled off, forcing him to change direction. He allowed himself another sip of water to ease the burning dryness in his mouth and throat. All his attention was on the line ahead and it was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw Ricky starting out on it.

The shell of a Toyota on its side – it still had a few tiny patches of peeling red paint here and there – lay ten metres to his right. Joe’s skin prickled as he passed the shattered glass that lay all around, and spotted the rough hessian bag twisted around the remains of the front seat that had perhaps once belonged to the driver. He looked up to see that he hadn’t covered more than a tenth of the distance to the breeze-block huts.

Another slug of water.

Another step forward.

He looked over his shoulder. Ricky was about thirty metres back. A safe distance. Beyond him, Joe realized he could no longer see the Americans. In a corner of his mind he wondered why they weren’t still advancing, but he didn’t have the headspace to worry about it for long.

He took another step.

And another.

Movement up ahead. It was the cat, hobbling across the chalk line. For a moment, Joe considered shooting it – if it trod on a pressure plate, they’d all be fucked – but the animal, almost as if it knew what Joe was thinking, changed direction and scampered off in the direction of the breeze ?blocks.

Joe’s blood was thumping through his veins. His right foot crunched down onto the chalk line.

Then his left foot.

Then his right again.

He almost missed it. Had the feral cat still been diverting his attention, he would have done. It was a footprint to his left, about twenty centimetres from the chalk line and facing towards it. And a second footprint, half a metre – a stride’s length – beyond that.

Joe stopped.

He stared at the ground.

Something wasn’t right.

He crouched down and touched the footprint. The indentations of the sole had made a regular, symmetrical pattern in the dust, not unlike his own prints. He recognized it as a military boot.

But if it was a military boot, why had it not been walking along the chalk line?

All of a sudden, Joe felt as though somebody had slowed time down to a crawl. He looked over his shoulder to see Ricky, still thirty metres back. His mate had his head inclined, clearly wondering why Joe was crouched down on the ground.

And he was taking a step forward.

‘Don’t move!’

Joe shouted so loud, his voice cracked. Ricky looked puzzled, but he continued to put his foot down.

‘Ricky! Don’t fucking move!’

But it was too late.

As Ricky’s boot touched the earth, he clearly realized something was different. He looked down, but only for the fraction of a second that remained of his life.

Joe had a snapshot vision of a huge geyser of dust and rock spurting ten metres up into the air, accompanied by the ear-splitting retort of at least five charges exploding in quick succession. A tremor rippled across the ground, so violent that it knocked Joe onto his side. He rolled to his front, his eyes clenched shut, before throwing his forearms over the back of his neck and waiting for the debris to fall.

It was like a hailstorm. Rubble hammered down on the back of his helmet; stones pelted his back and his legs. He found himself tensing his body, ready for a piece of shrapnel to fall and tear into his tissue, for his ribs to crack, his legs to be mashed. His ears rang with the explosion, and with the sound of debris hitting the ground all around him, like rain on a metal roof.

And then, ten seconds after the initial detonation, a sudden and profound silence.

He looked up. At first he could see nothing but the cloud of light brown dust all around. Still settling, it reduced his visibility to less than a metre. But after twenty seconds his view cleared.

There was no sign of Ricky. Not of his body at least. Joe could see nothing but his helmet. It was lying at his ten o’clock, approximately eight metres from his position. The strap was broken and the helmet was half filled with rubble.

Joe closed his eyes. Opened them again. They smarted from the dust, and his brain felt just as clouded. He tried to clear his mind. He had probably only missed by inches the same pressure plate Ricky had trodden on.

He looked to his right, squinting through the heat haze and the dust cloud. Was he imagining it, or could he see, twenty metres away and almost parallel to the path he had been following, a line of displaced earth? Was that the original chalk line? Had they been following a dummy line, laid by whoever had left the footprint in the dust?

Joe was too shocked even to curse. He was taking in short, jagged inhalations of breath, trying to master the fear rising in his gut. He had to get off this chalk line. It was booby-trapped, that much was obvious. But now he had no way of knowing where to step. He looked back the way he’d come. Fifty metres, he reckoned, to get to the point where it would be safe.

Fifty metres, and there could be triggers, wires or pressure plates anywhere.

He started to crawl. Slowly. Gingerly. Every few centimetres he gently brushed the earth with his fingertips. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. He’d recognize the small, circular pressure plate of an old anti-personnel mine, but the art and science of IEDs had come on since the Russians left their calling cards all round the country. There were countless ways to hide a detonator. They could even be remote, and if some Taliban cunt saw an enemy soldier crawling in the vicinity…

Five metres gone.

Ten metres.

He stopped. He looked at his right hand. It was shaking. He clenched it, and immediately remembered how Ricky had done the same thing. He gulped in more air, trying to steady himself. Up ahead, he scanned for the Americans. No sign.

Fifteen metres.

Twenty.

There was something blocking his way, two metres ahead, about the size of a bowling ball. He had thought it was a rock, but now he was up close he realized it was something else: an indistinguishable chunk of human flesh, swaddled in scorched clothing. He moved it out of the way. Ricky’s warm, sticky blood glued itself to Joe’s palm.

He continued to crawl.

Thirty metres.

Thirty-five.

How long had he been edging through the dirt? Ten minutes? A little more? He had to fight the urge not to stand up and run. Go slowly, he told himself. Go carefully.

He’d crawled forty metres when his fingers, still brushing away at the dusty ground, touched something hot. His hand flew away from it and his heart started to race even faster. At the same time he could hear shouting in the distance behind him. English, but harshly accented.

‘Hey, Amer-ee-can motherfucker! You go bang bang, Amer-ee-can motherfucker!’

He looked back. A group of kids – maybe ten of them, none older than thirteen, he estimated – had congregated by the breeze blocks. Where had they come from? The village was two klicks away, but there was nothing to stop them alerting the adult militia on the other side of the hill. One of them was waving a rifle in the air; his neighbour was pointing at Joe, clearly urging his friend to take a shot. The others were all jeering and laughing, obviously wanting Joe to give them a show by pressing on the wrong piece of ground.

He turned his attention back to the metal, blowing on it to get rid of the sand. But his breath did not uncover the pressure plate of an anti-personnel mine. It was one end of the bulbous, gun-metal-grey body of a shell of some description, embedded in the earth so that only a couple of inches were showing. And there was no way of telling the mechanism by which it was to be detonated.

Joe lightly traced a circle round the shell, his thick, calloused fingers sensitive like feathers. He needed every ounce of self-control to stop his hand trembling, but it didn’t take him more than a few seconds to find the trip wires.

There were four of them, attached to the shell and running at ninety degrees to each other. Joe realized he’d been crawling parallel to one of them, no more than ten centimetres to its left. And if he was going to cross the trip wire, he would have to get up from his crawling position and step over it.

Easier said than done.

He became aware of two sounds at once. The first was the hum of a helicopter up ahead. He couldn’t see it yet, but he knew it was arriving. The Yanks must have called in a pick-up. Where the hell were they? Why weren’t they giving him fire support?

The second sound was gunfire.

It came from the crowd of kids, and it had the unmistakable bark of a Kalashnikov.

Joe cursed under his breath and rolled onto his back. He could only see one kid with a gun. He had raised it in the air above his head to fire a burst. No doubt he’d seen adult insurgents do the same thing any number of times in his young life. Now, though, he was lowering it and, egged on by his mates, preparing to fire in Joe’s direction.

Joe estimated the distance at between 400 and 500 metres. He was at the edge of the Kalashnikov’s effective range, but he wouldn’t bet his boots on the kid missing him…

The rounds from the second burst landed over an area of about ten square metres, twenty metres from Joe’s position. Unable to control the recoil of the rifle, the kid had staggered backwards and turned to grin at his mates. More shouting from their direction; the boy raised the Kalashnikov again.

Joe had to do something. He hadn’t signed up to nail kids, but these were insurgents in the making. He pulled a white-phosphorus grenade from his ops vest. He squeezed the detonation lever and pulled the pin with his teeth. Then he tensed his stomach muscles, forced himself into a half-sitting position, and hurled the grenade with all his strength. A thick curtain of white smoke would give him chance to swastika it out of there.

But the explosion that followed was ten times louder than he expected. The ground shook; the air rang; the earth between Joe and the kids erupted, and the bang echoed across the desert, shredding Joe’s nerves. There was a cloud of smoke all right, but a whole lot more than he’d have expected from a white-phos grenade. He could only assume that the canister had hit another pressure plate.

‘Run,’ he hissed at himself. ‘Fucking run!’

Pushing himself to his feet, he stepped over the trip wire. Distance to the drop-off point, half a klick. If he wanted to extract with that chopper, he needed to get there fast.

He sprinted. He knew he was risking his life, that he still had ten to fifteen metres of the minefield to clear, but he couldn’t let the Yanks extract without him. People other than the kids would have heard the explosions; people better armed and with greater skill; people Joe didn’t want to get into contact with all by himself, especially now that the smoke from the grenade was dissipating. Each time his foot hit the ground, he expected to feel the telltale spring of a pressure plate, to hear the blast that was going to kill him.

But it didn’t come.

He cleared the minefield in five seconds. Behind him, the noise of more gunfire, but he knew he was fully out of range now. All he could do was leg it back to the chopper.

Even weighed down by his gear, he’d never run so fast. No point shouting at the others that he was coming, he realized – they’d never hear him over the noise of the chopper, and his energy was better expended on moving quickly.

He bolted round the curve at the base of the hill. A hundred metres. Two hundred. The chopper came into sight. It was kicking up the dust, and even in the daylight he could see a faint glow where the particles of sand were sparking against the rotors. The Americans were there, but they were little more than shadows in the cloud that surrounded the aircraft. It was 250 metres away. A hundred and fifty. The figures had disappeared inside the Black Hawk.

He could see the outline of the tail rising. Overhead, a second Black Hawk screamed across the sky: Team Bravo, extracting.

Fifty metres. A change in the quality of the noise coming from the chopper’s engines. Higher-pitched. It was preparing to lift.

Joe stopped just short of the dust cloud, twenty metres from the aircraft, and skirted round so that he was facing its front. He grabbed his firefly beacon from his vest and turned it on. To start with there was no visible light, but he ripped off its infra-red filter so that now a strong white light flashed from the beacon. All he could do now was hold it up above his head and pray that the pilot could see it through the dust.

But the dust cloud was getting bigger. Two seconds later it had engulfed Joe. He could see nothing but the silhouette of the Black Hawk every second as the firefly lit it up. He could see it rising. Five metres in the air. Ten metres.

And then, the sound of the rotors powering down. The dust subsided a little. The chopper returned to the ground.

Joe sprinted round to the side of the aircraft, where he could just make out the sight of the American loadie, headphones on, urgently ushering him in. He jumped inside and could feel the Black Hawk rising almost immediately.

Joe’s face was a filthy mixture of sweat and dirt, but it was not so black as his mood. He strode directly up to Hernandez, who was sitting impassively with his back against the wall of the chopper, surrounded by his men. He grabbed the SEAL by the front of his body armour and yanked him to his feet.

‘Where the fuck were you?’ he roared, his voice dry, hoarse and full of fury, before swinging the unit leader round and hurling him to the floor. He started to bear down on the guy, but instantly he felt hands pulling him back. A solid blow behind his knee forced him to the ground; next thing he knew, Hernandez was standing above him, weapon at the ready, his scarred and pockmarked face a picture of distaste.

‘We heard two explosions, pal. We thought you were both KIA.’

‘And you didn’t come to check?’

Silence.

The Black Hawk swerved in the air. Hernandez had no reply. He just jutted his weapon in the direction of the opposite side of the aircraft. Joe knew what to do. He took his place, and as the chopper returned to Bagram he felt the heat of the Americans’ unfriendly glares on him, and the gaping absence of the friend he’d left in pieces on the ground.

0923 hours.

The Regiment hangar was a blur of activity. American military commanders were in and out, trying to get the low-down on what had happened out there. None of them were getting anything but the shortest shrift from Fletcher, who, for all his faults, was doing the only thing the guys would have expected of him: making sure that Ricky’s next of kin knew he wasn’t coming home. That they couldn’t even find any bits to stick in a box so the family had something to plant was information that could wait for now. Let it sink in that the poor bastard was dead first.

Joe sat in the R & R quadrant of the hangar, away from it all. His helmet was by his side, next to a full bottle of sterilized water that he hadn’t touched even though his throat was desert-dry; his filthy face was in his hands. Five minutes ago he had been vaguely aware of some broad-shouldered American rupert with a lapel full of badges on his khaki uniform and couple of intelligence officers by his side. They were looking in his direction and talking to Fletcher. The OC had obviously told them where to get off, because they hadn’t bugged him; but they hadn’t left either, and were now hanging around by the main doors.

The TV on the wall behind him was murmuring quietly. BBC News 24 drifted in and out of Joe’s consciousness.

‘The White House press secretary has backtracked on claims that Osama bin Laden was armed when he was shot dead by American special forces…’

This information barely registered. Joe was reliving for the hundredth time the explosion that killed Ricky.

‘The White House has attributed mistakes and contradictions to “the fog of war”…’

He was only alive himself by chance…

‘Osama bin Laden’s twelve-year-old daughter has told Pakistani investigators that her father was captured alive and shot dead in front of family members…’

Family members. The words caused a leaden feeling in his stomach.

‘Will someone turn this fucking television off??’ Joe heard his own voice, but it didn’t seem to come from him. There was a click, however, and the commentary fell silent. Joe looked up to see Fletcher standing over him.

‘You should get some water down you.’

‘What are you?’ Joe retorted. ‘Florence fucking Nightingale?’

‘I’m your OC, and if you talk to me like that again I’ll fuck you up and have you on the next boat back to Hereford.’

Joe looked away.

An awkward pause.

‘Ricky was a good lad,’ Fletcher said, his voice subdued. ‘I’m sorry you had to see him go.’

Joe closed his eyes. The OC was right. Ricky was a good lad. A good lad who shouldn’t even have been on ops, and Joe had known it.

‘You want to tell me what happened out there?’

‘We re-routed through a minefield. American sweepers had got there first. Someone had fucked with their chalk lines. Laid new ones. Led us straight to the IEDs.’

‘The Yanks say you insisted on taking that route.’

Joe gave him a contemptuous look. ‘They’re talking out of their arses.’

‘How did you get out?’

Joe looked to the other end of the hangar. The three Americans were still loitering by the door, casting glances in his direction and clearly speaking about him.

‘No thanks to the Yanks,’ he said. ‘Cunts tried to extract as soon as Ricky went up. Left me to it.’

Fletcher wasn’t one to hide the displeasure in his face, and he failed to do so now.

‘Joint debrief,’ he stated. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this.’

Joe shook his head. ‘Forget it.’

‘No can do, Joe. You know that…’

‘I said, forget it.’

‘And I said, no can do. I’m ordering you to—’

‘I want out, boss.’

A pause.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘What do you think this is? A fucking poker game?’

Yeah, Joe thought to himself. And the Yanks have all the aces.

‘Get yourself cleaned up,’ said Fletcher. ‘I want you back here in an hour.’

Joe was barely listening. Two brushes with death in as many days. His best mate blown to pieces in an Afghan minefield.

‘I quit,’ he said.

‘Bullshit. Our numbers are too low for you to start throwing your toys out of your pram, Joe.’

‘I said, I quit.’

‘Then I’ll recommend that the adjutant defers you. Six months. And another six months after that. If you want to go AWOL, that’s your choice. Now clean yourself up and get your arse back in here.’

Such powerful anger rose in Joe’s gut that for a minute he thought he might give Fletcher his own reason to head home: a broken limb, or worse. It descended on him like a fog, and the effort it took to stop himself exploding in a barrage of violence against his own OC was so profound that it seemed to make his whole body shake.

He stood up, his eyes burning.

‘Get out of my way,’ he whispered. His voice trembled.

Fletcher didn’t move. ‘You need to calm down, Mansfield.’ His voice was as low as Joe’s. He was clearly aware – as was Joe himself – that their argument was being observed.

The OC couldn’t have said anything worse. Joe pushed past him and, ignoring the sharp looks from the twenty-odd support personnel in the hangar, he stormed towards the exit.

And there he stopped.

The broad-shouldered American commander was standing in his way. He was fully bald, highly tanned and wore a superior expression that only made the rage inside Joe burn more fiercely. ‘Say, Sergeant Mansfield, maybe it’s time for you and me to have a little summit.’

‘Maybe it’s time,’ Joe breathed, ‘for you to get out of my way.’

Joe noticed a couple of Yanks immediately drawing close to their boss, flanking him on either side. Joe sized up the fucking cavalry. They were a metre behind their boss and were both thickset, with crewcuts and aviator shades on their foreheads.

‘Same goes for Dumb and Dumber,’ Joe added.

The American commander’s face gave no sign of irritation or offence. His voice, though, was threatening. ‘Let’s get this straight, soldier. This is an American air base…’

The Yanks flanking him started grinning in a stupid, arrogant way, clearly enjoying the show. The two intelligence officers Joe had seen on his way in had also joined the little party. Standing a couple of metres apart from Joe, they glanced at each other in amusement.

‘…and on an American air base you—’

The commander didn’t finish his sentence.

There was nothing subtle about Joe’s attack. He just raised his knee hard into the American’s bollocks. The Yank doubled over in pain, at which point Joe shoved the heel of his right hand into his nose. The big man fell backwards. Blood spattered from his nose over the clothes of the two intelligence guys. His body clattered against the door of the hangar. It rattled and echoed, and anyone who hadn’t had their eyes on Joe sure as hell did now.

Joe looked at his palm. It was smeared with blood. For an instant, the gruesome image of the chunk of Ricky’s flesh he’d pushed out of the way in the minefield flashed into his mind. And then another vision: the dead body in the courtyard of the compound in Abbottabad, staring blindly at Joe as he hid in his OP of rubble.

And then hands – strong, forceful hands – pulling him back, away from the confrontation. The two Yanks shouting at him, telling him to cool it. One of them had allowed his shades to fall onto his face. Joe caught sight of himself and was shocked by the look on his face.

He struggled. He was screaming something, but he didn’t even know what. He realized that one of the men holding him back was JJ, whose expression was more alarmed than anything else. He wrestled himself free of his mate and the other two Regiment guys who were trying to hold him back just as the American, his face bloody and standing at a safe distance of about three metres, roared some kind of instruction that Joe barely heard.

More men. Yanks. Five of them swarmed round him and hustled him to the floor. He felt a crack in the bottom of his ribcage as one of them kicked him hard; the heel of a second boot was raised, ready to stamp into his face…

But then JJ and the others were there, pulling the Americans away. He saw his mate raising a fist, clearly ready to do one of the Yanks some damage, but a voice stopped him from doing it.

‘Enough!’

Fletcher’s voice rang across the hangar. Looking up, Joe saw him bearing down on the Americans, his eyes furious.

‘Get the hell out of my hangar!’ Fletcher was shouting. ‘Get the hell out!’

Commotion. Bustle. Joe felt himself being pulled up to his feet. He saw that the Americans had left, but now he was faced with the full fury of his OC. ‘What’s fucking wrong with you, Mansfield?’ Everyone else in the hangar had fallen silent.

‘I told you: I quit.’

‘And I told you it’s not an option.’

‘Then there’s going to be a load more Yanks with broken noses over the next few days.’

A pause.

‘Fine,’ said Fletcher. ‘You want to spend your days stacking shelves in Tesco’s and reading bedtime stories, be my fucking guest.’

Joe felt his cheek twitch, but he didn’t say anything.

Fletcher had turned his back on him and started pacing. Joe could see his shoulders rising as he took deep breaths to calm himself. When he turned and spoke again, his eyes still flashed, but his voice had calmed down a bit.

‘You’re on the next flight out of here,’ he said. ‘But it’s temporary. You even think about shaving that beard off, I’ll throw you to the fucking dogs. Do whatever you need to do to get your head sorted out.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my head,’ Joe murmured, but he knew he didn’t sound convincing.

Only now did Fletcher turn round to look at him. ‘That wasn’t a piece of friendly advice, Mansfield. That was an order. Follow it. Get back to your bunk while I sort this shit out, unless you want me to book a room at one of the Yanks’ facilities. I’m sure they’d love to entertain you for a couple of hours.’ He headed towards the exit, but stopped when he was almost at the doors, turned and called back: ‘Think about the rest of us when you’re down the Dog and fucking Duck, won’t you?’

The OC stormed out. Joe could feel the eyes of everybody in the hangar staring at him. He could also feel his hand shaking again. About ten metres to his left, he saw JJ approaching warily. He didn’t want to talk. Not to JJ, or anyone. He followed the OC’s lead and strode out of the hangar.

Thirty seconds later he found himself half walking, half running through the maze of bunkhouses, not knowing where he was heading for, his mind spinning.

And thirty seconds after that, he realized he was sitting on the ground, his head bowed and buried in his hands. He didn’t remember dropping down there, but that hardly mattered. It was all he could do to concentrate on breathing slowly and deeply. On getting air into his parched and dust-filled lungs.