Authors: Barney Campbell
He sealed the bluey and dropped down into the turret to plug in the boiling vessel. ‘All right, Dusty, how do you want it?’
‘Oh cheers, sir, thought you’d never ask. Usual please, tea Julie Andrews.’
‘What?’
‘Julie Andrews. You know,
Sound of Music
. White nun.’
‘Oh, I see – white no sugar.’
‘Exactly, boss.’
‘What’s black with no sugar? Black nun?’
‘Yeah – tea Whoopi Goldberg. Do they teach you nothing at university?’
Tom made the brews and they sat on the turret breathing in the steam from the tops of their flasks. They were shivering, partly from the cool night air and partly because of the ticking clock, and their teeth chattered in curt machine-gun bursts. Tom drained his brew, jumped off the turret and trotted over to Staff Sergeant Grant next to Brennan’s wagon. As the SQMS, Grant was based in Bastion and so could post the letter. ‘Evening, SQMS; sorry to interrupt. You couldn’t bung this in the post, could you?’
‘Course sir, no dramas.’ He looked at the address. ‘Miss Cassandra Foskett. Interesting. What is she – out of ten, I mean? Any less than a four, mind, and I’m not going to send it, for your own good.’
Tom blushed and hoped it wouldn’t show in the moonlight. ‘She’s just a friend.’
‘Come on, sir; I ain’t falling for that. No fella’s
just friends
with any girl. You’re having a laugh.’
‘OK, hands up, guilty. Maybe she is more than a friend. As for the out of ten, I dunno, probably a two or a three. Face like a bulldog chewing a wasp. Only joking. Truthfully? I reckon a nine, possibly more. Way out of my league anyway. But you’ve got to dream, haven’t you? But if you could get it to the post I’d be grateful.’
‘Of course, sir, I promise. I’ll do it first thing you lot bugger off. And, sir,’ he said as Tom started to walk back to his wagon, ‘best of luck for the move. I’ll be thinking about you guys. Stay safe.’
Tom heard Grant’s concern not in the words themselves but in the soft manner they were spoken. ‘Thanks, SQMS, we will. We’ll be good.’
Not long left now: twenty to midnight. Tom scrambled up the Scimitar’s
bar armour
and into the turret. He carefully fastened his headphones and then put his helmet on top, did up his chinstrap and enjoyed the satisfying
pop
that said the button had securely hit its housing. He reached forward with his foot to nudge Davenport on the shoulder to wake him up. They tested the intercom. All good to go. He looked around him at the compact grid of wagons and the silhouettes of the gunners and commanders of each vehicle through the haze generated by the engines.
Ten minutes. Frenchie came up on the net for a final radio check, and in sequence all callsigns gave it. They had done this two hours ago in any case; it was more out of form than necessity.
Tom’s watch struck out the final few seconds, its luminous tick like a drumbeat. It hit midnight, and as if on cue Frenchie came up again. ‘Hello, all Tomahawk Callsigns, this is Tomahawk Zero Alpha.
H-Hour
. In order of march, move out. Best speed. Out.’
Henry’s four wagons started to roll, and then Scott
followed on. SHQ moved next, in the middle of the column. As the final SHQ wagon left, Jesmond, the lead car of 3 Troop, moved, and Tom said over the intercom, ‘Right, Dav, we’re on.’ Davenport put the wagon up through the gears and then they were moving, wordlessly sliding through Bastion. They passed soldiers at the side of the road, who threw them thumbs up and shouted good luck.
On Tom’s left he noticed in the artillery camp the dark bulk of a
GMLRS
rocket system pointing into the sky, framed against the stars, and just as he was about to point it out to Dusty a plume of fire scorched from it into the night. Another and then a third followed in quick succession. Three phosphorus fireworks searing through the night and bathing their skin in white. Tom could see Dusty’s freckles. Frenchie came up on the net. ‘Fire mission for a contact in Sangin. Pity the folk who are going to end up beneath those thunderbolts. Out.’ Tom kept watching, his neck straining up as the bright smoke trails lingered way above them, memorials to the targets of the missiles, who would be dead long before they disappeared. Space-age weapons used at midnight to kill men who didn’t even have electricity in their homes.
Tom was taken back to when he was a boy, to when he watched footage of the first Gulf War, with Scud missile launches and rockets from aircraft carriers. He wasn’t shivering any more. He was grinning. Finally he had come into his inheritance.
At dawn Tom took off his goggles, slugged some water, swilled it around his mouth and spat it out over the side of the wagon, filthy from the packed dust which clung to his gums and his swollen tongue. He took a photo of himself on his digital camera and examined it. He had huge panda eyes where his goggles had been, and the rest of his face was caked in the dust that had been thrown up by the column through the night. Everything on the wagon was covered by it. It was in his rifle, it was in his pistol, and when he snapped the elastic on his helmet a cloud of dust jumped up. He could feel it in his crotch, and it clogged up his fingernails and matted his hair. Every pore was stuffed with it, and he couldn’t blink properly; his tear ducts had been blocked up even behind the goggles.
They were in a temporary halt, as 1 Troop barma’d the exit to a wadi that they had been driving up for a couple of hours. Tom rasped over the
IC
, ‘Dav, use this – get some kip. I’ll kick you when we’re on again. Dusty, I’ll stag on. Get your head down.’ But Dusty was already out, slumped in the turret, mouth open, head resting on the sight.
Tom looked back to the wagons behind him and gave a thumbs up to Jesmond and Trueman in their turrets. He felt the kind of giddiness that only comes on after extreme lack of sleep, and he stuffed a chocolate bar from the side bin down his mouth, hoping for a tiny sugar hit. The chewed chocolate became clogged by the dust in his mouth and moved down his throat in a viscous lump, dragging sand
and mucus down with it. His legs ached – he had been standing all night – and so he sat on the turret hatch and stretched them out in front of him, enjoying the creak of his muscles and the blood flowing back into starved capillaries. He moved his legs apart and then together and wondered what they would look like as stumps, what they would look like jagged and bloody after an IED strike. He had never before thought about how big legs were, how much blood they must contain.
He took his binoculars out and looked ahead of him. All the wagons in front had just one figure standing out of them; clearly everyone else was sleeping. The net was silent save for the occasional sitrep from Henry, whose wagons were inching along behind his four-man barma team, the gunners from his four cars, who were moving with brisk and purposeful steps up the shallow exit of the wadi, now and again stopping to examine the ground where a Vallon had picked up a reading.
One of the barma team called to the others to halt. He had obviously found something. The other three crouched down on their knees as he drew a paintbrush from his body armour, lay down on his front and brushed away at the dust. After a minute or so he picked up a small item, probably a coin or a wheel nut, hauled himself onto his knees again and dismissively tossed it aside. He gave a final cursory wave of his Vallon over the area and then stood up. The others all rose from their crouches and they continued their funny, deft ballet. Tom found it strange not being able to hear them and oddly lonely in his turret, cut off from the rest of the column by an eerie silence. The radio was quiet too. Here they were, a tooled-up violent caravan, all isolated from each other in a strange archipelago. He could see every wagon but talk to nobody.
After twenty minutes the exit had been cleared, and slowly every turret came to life again. Drivers were kicked awake, and water was thrown on sleepy faces. It only turned the dust into a cloying mud. The column started to move again, the sickly pale sun to their east shallow in a milky sky. Tom could feel its heat increase by the minute, and the desert sand lost its night-time greyness and paled into a white glare. The column rolled on. The horizontal light from the sun created shafts of rainbow prisms in the glinting, shifting dust, and Tom was surprised by his shadow imprinted on the haze of dust around him. He lost himself for a moment and looked more closely at the shadow, permanent against the ever-changing dust cloud. He waved his arm in the air, and the shadow copied it. He did it again and again, thinking of Cassie always being in front of him but then slipping away into the shadows. He drifted until his trance was broken by Dusty over the IC: ‘You OK, boss?’
‘Sorry, yeah, Dusty, I’m OK. Just remembering something, that’s all.’
‘No worries, sir; this lack of sleep fucks you up. For a minute there I thought you’d lost it. Here, have some gum.’
Tom brought himself back to the move; already it felt endless. They would be visible for miles and miles around; a pound to a pinch of salt the Taliban to their north could see the plume and were preparing to fight them. Forty minutes later they had their first
dicker
appear. To their left a pickup truck drove to the top of a low rise and parked, a silent sentinel. Frenchie called a halt, and as one turrets traversed as the car commanders used their sights to get a closer look at a figure in a dark purple robe, looking at them through binoculars. Quite obviously he was reporting on their progress.
Frenchie came up on the net. ‘
Charlie Charlie One
callsigns, as you can see we have our first dicker. They know
we’re coming. Let’s hustle up; expect contact.’ Tom felt his stomach drop away. ‘As much as we’d all love to give the good news to our friend on the hill, I’m afraid we can’t do anything. We’ll have to move on. One Zero, your ball. Out.’ The column started moving again.
Dusty muttered, ‘For fuck’s sake. Why can’t we just waste that dickhead? One shot, all I need. Fucking rules of fucking engagement.’
For the next four hours the journey continued its slow rumble in a now familiar pattern of driving for a couple of kilometres and then halting to clear a VP or to crest a rise and observe the area in front. They were still in the open desert, so Henry was enjoying the luxury of being able to pick a completely virgin route. Just on the horizon, though, Tom could see the low cluster of compounds that formed the town. Inevitably the Taliban were expecting them; the one thing they wouldn’t be anticipating though was for the column to steam straight through the middle of it. It was the kind of trick that could be pulled just once.
Frenchie had cleared it with the CO two nights before, who thought it a good plan. Over the secure telephone link from Bastion to FOB Newcastle he had said, ‘Well, Frenchie, it’s ballsy, but if anyone can do it C Squadron can. Just don’t cock it up. Bravura looks good when it succeeds, but when it goes wrong you look like a muppet. So, don’t cock it up. Got it?’
Even Frenchie, whose self-confidence and faith in his own and his men’s ability usually won through any moments of doubt, was chastened by this, and a sudden stop in his throat held him before he answered, ‘Got it, Colonel. Don’t worry. We’ll do it.’
Slowly, inexorably, the column kept its course. For half an hour at midday they had a
Lynx
fly over them. The
FAC
in
the back of Frenchie’s Sultan talked to it, and the pilot overflew the town and gave live feed of what he was seeing. So far activity was perfectly normal: on both the east and west of the huge sprawl people were going about their daily business. Farmers were in fields, couples rode on motorbikes and children played outside compounds. Frenchie relayed all this to the squadron and Tom was reassured, but he just wanted to get to Newcastle by dusk. He was starting to feel a little peaky and wasn’t sure whether it was lack of sleep or something worse. He hoped against hope that it wasn’t the chicken and withdrew into himself, and the banter in the turret dried up.
The Lynx was then called away to another task, and they were on their own again. Out on one flank, about two kilometres away, a motorbike tracked their progress, betrayed by the plume of dust thrown up by its rear wheel.
At least the desert’s neutral
, thought Tom.
Closer and closer they came to the compounds. The Taliban would be expecting them to commit to the eastern or western bypass route at any point now and must be surprised that still they kept on heading for the centre. Tom drank some more water; he was getting a low throbbing headache. The sun, now at the height of its parabola, beat upon the back of his neck. The water, cold earlier, was now horribly warm and seemed to scour and burn his throat. With just five hundred metres left before the town, Frenchie came up again. ‘Charlie Charlie One, Zero Alpha. This is it. Eyes peeled. Be prepared to engage enemy if fired upon. One Zero acknowledge over.’
Henry replied, ‘One Zero roger. I’ll thread a route through with my One Two callsign. Hope it’s to your liking. One Zero out.’ And so the column plunged straight into the cluster, the open desert now giving way to another archipelago
of compounds, all fifty or a hundred metres apart, separated by rough tracks and ploughed fields, Henry’s troop twisting and turning through the maze.
Progress was surprisingly rapid. For four miles they jinked their way through faster almost than they had raced through the desert. Far from the village emptying of all activity, the wagons seemed to be the biggest draw in town, and the boys exploited this to the full, throwing from their turrets sweets and pencils at every opportunity. If there was a halt due to the lead wagons trying to work out how best to skirt around an obstacle, children would come up to the vehicles and the crews would lift them on board and have their photos taken with them, letting the children wear their helmets and putting on their little hats. Three Troop’s biggest draw was Trueman, who always had about twenty children clustered around his wagon. He entertained them by pulling faces and then pretending to be a monster chasing them away. Tom entered into the spirit of things only half-heartedly. He was now feeling really queasy, and could only raise a wan smile when Dusty started larking around with the kids. He was relieved when the wagons started rolling again.
With only a quarter of a mile before the lead wagon broke clean from the cluster there was another halt. Corporal Ealham, who had led all of the way from Bastion, halted five metres into a ploughed field which lay between a little conurbation of compounds. Farmers were in the field, and one of them looked angry. Ealham came up on the net. ‘Hello, One Zero, One Two. I’m just going to reverse and take a route around this field. I don’t think this fella’s too pleased about me driving through it. Apologies. I’ll get back on track. Over.’
‘One Zero roger. Agreed. No dramas. Just get out of there and we’ll go around. Out.’
The wagon was with its tracks parallel to the deep-ploughed furrows in the field, meaning that to its left and to their right were walls of soil. Ealham, exhausted after bearing so much responsibility for so long, looked over the side of the wagon and judged the depth of the furrows. He knew they should just reverse out but somehow found himself saying over the IC to his driver, ‘Right, Mikey, let’s get out of here. Neutral turn to the right.’
The driver, also drained by the stress of the move north, the lead man of the entire squadron, automatically and with no appreciation for his surroundings immediately yanked back the right drive stick to perform a neutral turn.
Behind them Henry could hear the splintering of metal on metal as the track was driven straight into the deep furrow, tearing it away from the wheels. ‘The fucking twat,’ he swore. ‘He’s
thrown his fucking track
.’ He ripped off his
ANR
and in a fit of rage jumped down on to the ground and ran over to the wagon, whose occupants were peering over the side of the turret in horror at what they’d just done. Henry lost it, all the angst and fear of the past hours boiling over. ‘Corporal Ealham, what the fuck have you just done?’
Ealham looked horrified, his dull, exhausted eyes slowly realizing what a mistake he had made. ‘Boss, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I’ve just done that. I can’t believe it. My bad, my bad. I just got too tired.’
Henry looked into his eyes, saw an almost dead glaze and knew he shouldn’t have kept him on point for so long; he should have changed around the order of march ages ago to rotate the burden of responsibility. But Ealham had never ever, neither on exercise nor on ops, made this kind of mistake before and took huge pride in being lead callsign. Henry softened his voice. ‘OK, OK. I know, Eals, I know. It’s going to be OK. We’ll get that track fixed back on again and then
be on our way. I’ll get on to Zero Alpha and we’ll get one of the Samsons up here.’
He jogged back to his wagon to get on the radio. He had an uneasy feeling. Everything had been going so well up to this point. Putting the track back on should take all of half an hour, but somehow he didn’t think it was going to be that simple. As he clambered with seasoned agility onto his own wagon he remembered Frenchie’s dictum that the moment one thing went wrong, everything else followed.
Frenchie heard the news and ordered one of the Samsons forward to bring some REME expertise to bear. He said to the FAC, ‘This is either going to be cured in two shakes or we’re going to be here till hell freezes over. And I reckon it’s the latter.’ Sure enough, when Staff Sergeant Prideaux reported back, all was not looking good at all. The force of the turn had not just taken the track off the wheels but also sheared off the
rear idler
. What could have been a half-hour job was now, at best, a five-hour one.
‘Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck,’ cursed Frenchie. This was not good. If this had happened in the desert, then fine. No one was going to attack them in the open. But here, in the midst of the cluster, anyone could get up close to the vehicles, strung out as they were over a kilometre.
The Taliban obviously hadn’t yet realized what had happened, and children were still coming up to the wagons. Frenchie ordered everyone to redouble their ambassadorial efforts. He needed to come up with a plan to protect them all; in the meantime they would continue to use the children as de facto human shields. He knew he was up against it. The moment the Taliban realized their predicament they could lock them into the area by laying IEDs to their north and south, blocking their exit routes. Frenchie had to secure the route out; that was imperative. He also had to secure the
recovery zone while the REME boys struggled in the open with the track and idler. He briefed the squadron over the net. ‘Charlie Charlie One, this is Zero Alpha. Here’s the plan. We have to secure our exit route as soon as possible. To that end, Four Zero, I want you to leapfrog from the rear, push north past the stricken wagon and secure the edge of the cluster. Four Zero roger so far over.’