Ultimatum

Sixty-seven

21.20

The key is to stay conscious. If you shut your eyes, even if it’s just for one moment, then that’s it. You’re dead. That’s why the medics keep talking to you while they wait for help. Because they know it’s the only way they’re going to keep you alive.

But when there’s no one there to talk to you, it’s hard. Jesus, it’s hard.

I had no idea how long I’d been lying there for. An hour. Two hours. Maybe even more. I’d tried crawling out of my hiding place but had managed barely a few feet on my belly before what little energy I had left simply slipped away. Now I was half in, half out of the tangle of bushes, lying on my side on the gravel curled up in a foetal position, surrounded by the blood that was dripping steadily from my wounds and wondering how long I had left. I could see the lights on in the old lady’s flat, no more than twenty yards away, yet it might as well have been twenty miles for all the good it would do me. I was stuck there, alone in the freezing cold, and it was taking all my resolve to keep myself fighting through the minutes, waiting for someone to turn up in the car park and see me.

I had a vague recollection of a car containing two men turning up some time earlier. Of them getting out and walking round to the front of the house, missing my neighbour’s corpse completely, before comin g back. At least I thought they must have come back, because the car was no longer there, and neither were they.

Lying there now, I was reminded of a time just after I’d arrived on my first tour of Afghanistan. Our platoon had been stationed in an old brick fort five miles away from the Forward Operating Base in Southern Helmand, and one day we’d gone out on patrol and walked straight into a 360-degree ambush. Surrounded on all sides by dozens of Taliban fighters, and hopelessly outnumbered, we’d taken refuge in an irrigation ditch. As we engaged the enemy at close quarters, the radio operator tried to call in air support, only to discover that the radio had been hit by enemy gunfire and was totally useless. So there we were, trapped in no-man’s-land, with no hope of rescue, fighting for our lives, as the bullets and the RPGs whizzed around us, and I remember thinking at the time that if I had to die, I’d want it to be here, surrounded by my friends and fighting. The adrenalin was incredible. Like nothing you can imagine.

And then the platoon commander, a good guy with a calm head called Mike Travers, got hit by a Taliban bullet. He was only ten feet away when he went down into the knee-deep, sludgy water clutching his shoulder, his face screwed up in pain. As some of the guys went to help him, he’d shouted for them to get back to the fight, which was typical of him. He didn’t want to be fussed over. But within a few minutes he’d gone very pale and, as the medic stripped off his body armour and examined the wound, things took a serious turn for the worse. The bullet had severed a major artery, and without a rapid blood transfusion there was no way he’d survive. The medic patched him up as best he could, but the commander kept bleeding, his blood turning the muddy water red as it dripped steadily out of him.

We had to make a decision. Stay put until either we got the radio working or FOB realized we were missing and sent reinforcements, or fight our way back to base, carrying the commander as we went. The sergeant, who was now in charge, chose the latter, and I’ll always remember those brutal twenty-five minutes as we made our way along the irrigation ditches, before finally breaking cover a hundred yards from the base and running along completely open ground, firing as we went, faint and exhausted in the murderous forty-five-degree heat, knowing that at any moment any one of us could be the next casualty. Two of our number had volunteered to carry the commander over that open ground, knowing that as the slowest group they’d make the biggest and easiest targets. One of those men was Cecil. The other was me. He had the front. I had the back. And we’d done it. As Cecil had pointed out afterwards, if the Taliban had been as good shots as we were we’d have been peppered with more holes than a cheese grater, but the fact was they weren’t, and because we’d had the guts and the determination, we’d made it against all the odds.

The commander didn’t make it, though. He died in the helicopter en route to Camp Bastion, having completely bled out.

I was going to bleed out too now unless help came, and it was a supreme irony that one of the men who’d put me in this position was Cecil, my fellow soldier and friend.

The war had fucked him up.

But then, I thought ruefully, it had fucked me up too.

Ten or so feet away the body of my neighbour, Rupert, lay motionless next to his car, a long dirty blood smear running down its paintwork where he’d slid down it after Cain had shot him. An innocent man, nothing to do with any of this, caught up in somebody else’s war. He was lying on his side facing me, eyes closed, a peaceful, almost bored expression on his face.

You never think it’s going to happen to you. Death. If you did, you’d make a crap soldier. And I would never have got involved in half the things I’d done — especially those I’d been involved in today — if I’d thought I was going to end up like this, dying alone in the cold.

I didn’t want to die. The thought came almost as a shock. I wanted to live. To watch my daughter grow up. To find a woman who’d love me for what I was: a flawed guy, but a decent one, I was sure. To settle down and have a steady job and a steady income. I no longer even wanted revenge against the people who’d murdered my cousin in the Stanhope Hotel.

I just wanted to be like everyone else.

My eyelids felt like lead weights. If I just closed them for a moment, maybe I’d be able to reserve my energy. Just a moment.

They began to flicker, then close ever so slowly, curtains shutting out the harshness of the outside world.

The sound of tyres on gravel followed almost immediately by the harsh glare of headlights startled me, and as I forced open my eyes, I saw a car come into the car park and pull up a few yards away.

I tried to call out but no words came. I tried to lift my arm but that didn’t work either, and I wondered grimly if it was already too late.