Recoil

13

Davy knelt at my side, weapon in the shoulder. I lifted an AK from the sand, pressed the release lever behind its mag and pushed the mag forward until it came away from the weapon. Then I frisked the body lying a metre or so from it. There was another mag jammed in the waistband of his jeans, and one in his back pocket. I tucked in my football shirt and threw them all down the front.

The body was covered with blood and sand, and it was still tacky. I tried to avoid it as best I could. We’d talked about the AIDS thing ever since the scare first hit the papers three or four years earlier, but none of us knew much about it. Was it transferred through blood, gay sex or kissing Rock Hudson? He had died of it last year and all his acting partners were flapping big-time after sharing so much mouth action on screen.

I moved on. AIDS was one thing, but running out of ammo was far more life-threatening.

The next guy had been wearing a canvas ammunition vest. Six more mags.

The one after was on his back, eyes wide open. And he was whimpering.

‘We got a live one!’

Standish shouted back, from the gap in the wall, ‘Leave him and move on.’

‘Sam, it’s a kid. He’s in shit state.’

Standish repeated his order, but Sam had the last word from the parapet. ‘Bring him in.’

I looked down. The little fucker couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. Moonlight glistened in the dark liquid pooling beneath him. Lumps of rubble lay all around him. I picked up the bundle of skin and bones, leaving my AK for Davy to bring into the compound. Fuck the AIDS – I might be dead by morning anyway.

Sam was already on the back of our truck, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves from the trauma pack. ‘Dear God.’ He laid his hand on the boy’s head. ‘Sssh, hey, OK . . . You’re going to be fine.’

I went to his other side. The kid’s clothes were in shreds and it was easy to see the huge slit down his left thigh. It looked like a sausage that had split in a frying-pan. Most of his flesh was peppered with fragments of broken stone. His hair and face were caked with blood, sweat and sand.

We didn’t have any fluids to get into him. There was nothing we could do but plug up the holes and try to stop him losing any more blood. He was going to be in a lot of pain and he’d probably get badly infected, but if we could stabilize him and get him to a hospital, all that would be sorted out later on.

Sam had his hands on either side of the gash, squashing it back together. Pressure was the only thing that would stop the blood.

I ripped open a dressing with my teeth and unwrapped the cotton tape that was supposed to keep it in place. The moment you applied pressure it always behaved more like a ligature. There was no way the fucking things would do what it said on the tin. I handed the dressing to Sam, who jammed it into the oozing cavity carved by the wound.

The child screamed.

Sam murmured soothingly, ‘Sssh, we’ve got to pack you out.’ As if he understood a word.

A second field dressing followed the first, then a third packed down on top. I handed Sam a four-inch crêpe bandage and he began to bind up the dressings, applying constant pressure all the way down the wound.

He took a second bandage from my outstretched hand. ‘What have we done? What have we done?’

I thought he was talking to me, and looked up. He wasn’t. His gaze was pointing at the sky. ‘Dear God, forgive us . . .’